Hostage To The Devil

by Неизвестный

  Finally Jamsie's patience wore out, and his curiosity-certainly understandable in the fantastic circumstances-led him to his greatest mistake with Ponto. He yielded to an impulse one day and asked Ponto what he wanted. Ponto at that precise moment was swinging from the lamp in Jamsie's office.

  “Oh, just to be with you, Jamsie! I thought you'd never ask! Actually I want to be your friend. Did you ever know anyone as faithful and as attendant on you as I am?”

  Then he swung away into nothingness.

  Jamsie's innocent question opened floodgates. He now became the object of a continual barrage from Ponto that went on week after week. There would be no letup for years.

  Ponto would start talking the moment Jamsie left his apartment to drive to work. Most of his conversation was harmless and inane, sometimes unintentionally funny, more often ludicrous, and quite often with a twist to his remarks that caused Jamsie some inner disgust.

  For a long time Jamsie kept himself under control; but he lost his temper with Ponto for the first time when he sprinkled one of his conversations with jibes about Lydia and crude remarks about the female hyena! Jamsie fell into a frothing rage with Ponto, telling him in a series of profanities to leave his mother out of the conversation and to get out of his sight and hearing.

  “Okay, Jamsie. Okay!” Ponto said resignedly. “Okay. Have it your way. But we belong to each other.” He disappeared.

  The experience left Jamsie shaking with rage. But, after a couple of hours, restored to the normal world of his work, and being reasonable, he began to ask himself seriously if he were not imagining it all. He was sitting at his microphone waiting for a commercial to end and the signal from his engineer to take up his broadcast.

  As if to answer his inner thoughts, Ponto appeared and began plastering short words on the notice board the engineer used to pass silent messages to Jamsie when he was on the air. “FORGIVEN!” it read. “BACK SOON! CARRY ON, PAL!” In spite of himself, Jamsie saw the twisted humor of it all, although he doubted that Ponto was bright enough to be funny. Ponto was doing what came natural to him. Jamsie found himself grinning at the engineer, who, taken by surprise by this show of geniality on Jamsie's part, grinned back at him sheepishly.

  Ponto's conversations, except for some of the bits and scraps reported here and dictated to me by Jamsie, escape Jamsie's memory now. They were nearly always inconsequential and only sometimes annoying to the point of making Jamsie fall into a fit of anger. But, because he answered Ponto sometimes or made comments on Ponto's behavior—all this under his breath—the people at the station accepted the fact that Jamsie Z. “talks to himself a lot” and, as one put it, “is a little looney on certain points—but aren't we all?”

  In spite of everything, things went well for Jamsie's career. In fact, Jamsie's reporting was good and his ratings were high.

  In August 1959, news arrived that Lydia had died in her sleep.

  Jamsie returned to New York for a couple of days to wind up her affairs. Lydia had made a will by which Jamsie, the sole heir, received two possessions: the old icon and Lydia's handwritten memento of George Whitney's bid of 204 for U. S. Steel. Jamsie brought them both back to Los Angeles and placed them in a closet where Ponto had the habit of making himself comfortable. Ponto objected to the icon very strongly, but Jamsie was adamant.

  “Okay, pal. Okay. Okay,” Ponto said. “But some day we'll get rid of that useless garbage. Won't we, pal?”

  In the fall of 1960, Jamsie was offered and accepted a very good radio spot in San Francisco. He moved up from Los Angeles, and after he had settled into his new apartment, Jamsie arranged to drive over and meet his new station manager.

  “Jamsie, the hour of decision is approaching.” Ponto, of course, had come to San Francisco. He was balancing at the moment on the fire escape outside the apartment house and talking through the window. Jamsie said nothing.

  “Jamsie! Promise me! No sex and no booze! You hear? Jamsie! Promise your old Uncle Ponto. Come on, pal, promise!”

  Curiously Jamsie had never touched a woman since his days in Cleveland. Somehow, all desire had left him after that first experience of words escaping like lightning from his skull.

  “Actually,” Ponto tittered ridiculously, “I don't expect much trouble from you along that line. Hee! Hee!”

  Jamsie glared at him for a second, then continued with his preparations to go out.

  It was in what Ponto said next that Jamsie heard the strange note of urgency that sometimes overloaded Ponto's eunuch's voice.

  “Now we all have our place, you hear? And I can't appear as often as I like, and as often as I have in the past. I have my betters, too, y'know. You won't believe it, but I have.”

  On the way to the radio station, Ponto, riding in the back seat, seemed to be seized with a sort of hysteria. His speech started to come faster and faster and to be deteriorating. Finally he no longer made any sense at all. He prattled on about lasers and roast chicken and whisky and the moon. Jamsie only recollects phrases such as “Jupiter rotates every 9 hours and 55 minutes.” “Car necking, masturbation, and good grades.” “Hurrah for the Golden Gate but don't go near the water!” “Its cheer creak.” Jamsie drew up at the station, left his car, and started to make his way in. Ponto went along, prattling incoherently all the while. Jamsie rang the bell at the front gate, but no one answered. He wandered to the back. Still Ponto kept talking, his words utterly meaningless. Jamsie tried the back door. It was locked. He was about to return to the front when, without warning, there was silence. Ponto had disappeared. In retrospect, Jamsie is certain that any sudden disappearance of Ponto meant the approach of someone Ponto feared.

  “Are you looking for someone?” A balding man in his mid-fifties, tallish, thin, wearing rimless spectacles, had come out from a side door Jamsie had not noticed, and stood looking at him with his head cocked to one side.

  “I'm coming to work here,” Jamsie answered easily. “I'm looking for the station manager.”

  “You must be Jamsie Z.,” said the man. “I'm the station manager. Beedem's the name. Jay Beedem.”

  Jamsie shook hands and took in Beedem's features. He thought for a second he might have met Beedem before. He could not quite tie it down.

  “Come in and let's get acquainted.”

  As they sat across from one another in Beedem's office, Jamsie scrutinized his new boss, trying to place him. Beedem meanwhile put Jamsie a few questions and then proceeded to fill him in on his future work at the station. He was a precise man, obviously, and neat almost to a fault-shining bald head, carefully groomed side hair, immaculately clean and tasteful clothes, slightly foppish, good teeth, masculine hands with well-manicured nails. His face was roughly an oval shape not very lined for his age. But his eyes and mouth attracted Jamsie's particular attention.

  After about a quarter of an hour of conversation, Jamsie concluded that his boss's eyes were completely closed to him. Jay Beedem laughed, glanced, conveyed meanings, and questioned him with his eyes, but all this seemed to be as revealing as images skipping across a film screen. There is no feeling there, thought Jamsie to himself. No real feeling. At least, I can't see any. Each smile and laugh was only on Beedem's mouth. He did not seem really smiling or laughing.

  Jamsie really does not have any fully satisfying answers about Jay Beedem, even today. In retrospect, he will still say that the vague impression he had of having seen Beedem's face before he met him in the flesh came from the traits of that “funny-lookin” face“ reflected in Beedem's face. In fact, one important element of the exorcism, recorded on the tape, has to do with the strange face of Beedem and the ”look.“

  Ponto always kept in the background when Beedem was with Jamsie. And whenever Jamsie approached Beedem for a discussion or for help or encouragement, he left Beedem in the same sort of inner torment and turmoil that gripped him during his worst moments with Ponto. The keynote of that turmoil was panic, the panic of someone finding himself trapped or ambushed or betrayed.


  While it remains speculation, a very good case can be made for Jay Beedem being one of the perfectly possessed, a person who at some time in his career made one clear, definitive decision to accept possession, who never went back on that decision in any way, and who came under the total control of an evil spirit. It was on this very suspicion that, in the exorcism, Father Mark felt he must try to see if there was some link between Beedem and Ponto that was harmful to Jamsie.

  But when Jamsie left Beedem that first day, all the problems he still speculates about today were then in the future. Over the next days and weeks he settled easily into a daily routine. He loved San Francisco. He liked his new post. He got on well with his fellow workers; they respected his abilities and he never let them down professionally. He had pleasant relations with Cloyd, his producer, and with Lila Wood, the chief researcher on Cloyd's staff. With Jay Beedem his relations were correct and formal. But as time went on Beedem made no secret of his growing dislike and contempt for Jamsie's peculiarities.

  Their colleagues, who noticed the ill-feeling between the two men, put the whole thing down to a difference in temperament between them: they just did not get on well together. Everyone else easily forgave Jamsie's idiosyncrasies, for he had developed a broadcasting style all his own, “and it was good for business.” Jamsie was not slow to recognize that he had Ponto to thank for much of that.

  Uncle Ponto would gyrate around him in the studio saying irrelevant things only Jamsie could hear. He would produce statistics, figures, facts, and data which Jamsie would automatically incorporate into his patter of broadcasting, keeping up an incredible stream of banter. It was bright and amusing, a cheery-beery-bee kind of prattle full of various irrelevancies about this, that, and the other, all strung together with “but” and “whereas” and “lest I forget it” and “as the actress said to the bishop” and “let me tell you before you forget you ever heard me talk,” until after about three minutes he would throw in a punch line about a product he was advertising or a ball game he was reporting or some bit of national news the station wanted to highlight. This style became his signature, well known and valued, on the air. For the first few months in San Francisco, therefore, Jamsie secretly valued Ponto's presence.

  It was only after a protracted period that he saw the first sign of real trouble. On his way home one evening Ponto, on the back seat of the car, said: “Jamsie, let's get married.”

  Taking this as just a part of Ponto's usual nonsensical prattle—of which there was always quite a lot in those days—Jamsie thought Ponto would prattle on to something else if he kept quiet. But Ponto was serious, and he said so.

  “Jamsie! I'm serious. Let's get married.”

  Goose pimples started on Jamsie's arms and legs. For the first time, Jamsie began to be seriously afraid of Ponto. He drove on in silence, but his mind was full of a new apprehension.

  The next day in the station cafeteria Jamsie was joined at the table by Lila Wood, Cloyd's researcher. Ponto was somewhere among the coffee urns, gazing quietly at Jamsie. Lila, like others, had noticed Jamsie's deep depression that day. But, as she says, she also sensed the grain of fear running through him.

  Knowing better than to tackle Jamsie head-on, she said lightly as she rose after lunch: “Wanta share a steak tonight with a friend and me?”

  It was the first time in a long while that anyone had approached Jamsie so nonchalantly. He had become accustomed to people avoiding him socially. He looked at Lila in disbelief. But Lila knew how to deal with the situation. “Okay,” she said as she turned away smiling. “See you at 5:30.”

  Jamsie stared after her. Her voice, or something in her voice, affected him. As he said afterward, “It was like a short chord of beautiful harmony struck in between the squalling of 200 squabbling cats and ten jackhammers all going at the same time.”

  But his reverie lasted a short time. Ponto's voice broke in with a new sharpness. “I heard all that. Heard all of it. That smelly young bitch. Do you know her friend? You will. I do! A balding pig. That's him. Isn't man enough to get between her legs even.”

  For just a few moments Jamsie felt impervious to Ponto's corroding accents, and it was a very great relief. He just smiled at Ponto. Ponto's face twisted in anger; and, with a sort of a leap backward and upward, he disappeared.

  Immediately Jamsie felt a solid lump of agony within him. This was something new. It started somewhere around his middle. Then it moved to his spine. One spike of pain hit his coccyx, another pierced his testicles, a third prodded up through his spinal column; and from the nape of his neck it seemed to branch outward in two directions. One stream invaded his lungs. He grew short of breath and felt dizzy. Another stream reached upward into his skull and gripped his brain, as though contracting it. He remained sitting for a few minutes, his chin in his hand, waiting. It passed.

  As he stood up, he heard Ponto's voice. “You see, pal! You see! You already belong to me in great part. Watch it tonight!” Ponto was not visible, but the smell was there.

  That evening Jamsie went home with Lila. She had just prepared three steaks when her friend rang at the front door. Jamsie opened the door to a stoutish man, completely bald, whose blue eyes looked at him with an expression of good humor.

  “I'm Father Mark, Lila's friend. You must be Jamsie. She told me about you. Glad to see you.”

  As Jamsie found out, Lila had an ulterior motive for the invitation. Before the evening was out, Jamsie was talking freely to Mark. Mark' seemed to know all about Ponto's behavior. The only thing he did not know was Ponto's name; and when Jamsie told him, he gave a short little laugh and said: “Good God! I thought I'd heard them all. But-Ponto! God!”

  The two men made an appointment to meet the following evening. Mark even promised he would make some of his own special mushroom soup for which he was so well known among his friends.

  After that mushroom soup dinner at Mark's rectory, Jamsie told Mark his life story, omitting nothing. Mark listened in silence, puffing a long church warden's pipe that reeked of tar, and interrupting now and again with a question.

  It was past midnight when Jamsie finished. Mark put down his pipe, reflected a little while in silence, and looked at Jamsie speculatively. The silence was not uncomfortable for Jamsie. Then Mark spent the next hour telling Jamsie what he thought of the whole matter.

  Jamsie, according to Mark, was the object of an evil spirit's attentions. There were hundreds—and, for all Mark knew, perhaps millions and trillions—of different spirits. “You don't number spirits as you number human beings,” Mark told him. He explained that in his experience, which was considerable, it appeared that each kind of spirit had its own characteristics and techniques of approaching humans. However, a certain kind of spirit-not a very important one—always sought to become a “familiar” of some human being, man, woman, or child. Rarely—but it did happen—did a “familiar” spirit possess an animal.

  What was a “familiar”? Jamsie wanted to know. Mark explained that the key to the “familiarity” which such a spirit sought to obtain lay in this: the person in question consented to a total sharing of his or her consciousness and personal life with the spirit.

  Mark gave an example. Normally, when you are walking around, eating, working, washing yourself, talking, you are conscious of yourself as distinct from others. Now supposing you were conscious of yourself and of another self all the time, like Siamese twins but inside your own head and in your consciousness. And supposing that the two, so to speak, shared your consciousness. It's your self-consciousness, your awareness of yourself, and at the same time, it's the consciousness, the awareness of that other self. Both at the same time. No getting away from one another. “Its” thoughts use your mind, but they are not your thoughts, and you know that. “Its” imagination likewise. And “its” will also. And you are aware of all this constantly, for as long as you are conscious of yourself. That was the familiarity Mark was talking about.

  Jamsie was aghast. “My G
od,” he says now, “I had already gone down that road, at least part of the way. I didn't know what to do. I was lost!”

  Mark answered Jamsie's panic. He was not lost. He had never consented to full possession by the “familiar.” He had just been invaded. But he was going to be more and more pressured to accept full “familiarity.”

  What could happen? Jamsie wanted to know.

  “You can be worn down,” Mark said quietly. “You can be taken. Like any of us. You're up against a force more powerful than you can ever hope to be yourself.”

  Then Mark looked Jamsie straight in the eye and asked him directly if he wanted to undergo Exorcism.

  Strangely, Jamsie was speechless. Then slowly he asked in great concern: “Would that mean Ponto would never return?”

  Mark told Jamsie that, if the exorcism were successful, Ponto would be gone forever. He concentrated his attention on Jamsie's every move and reaction. He was only now beginning to be able to measure how far Ponto had extended his hold on Jamsie.

  “Well,” he said finally, with a great effort to appear relaxed, “what is it going to be? Do you think we should go as far as that?” He did not want to send Jamsie off half-crazed with fear.

  Jamsie was confused. Memories of his loneliness and his having been deserted by his parents crowded his mind. Was this Ponto affair as bad as Mark made it out to be? Couldn't he keep Ponto at a distance anyway, and still enjoy the exotic character of the whole affair? Besides, wouldn't he lose some of that verve as a broadcaster that was now his great asset?

  Mark chatted with Jamsie for a while about all this. He poured them both another drink. Jamsie was not ready to accept Exorcism. Mark had to wait for Jamsie.

  Very earnestly Mark gave Jamsie some practical advice. The whole point, he said, was to resist invasion. Enjoy—if that was the word, Mark said wryly—Ponto's antics and his stimulation, but resist invasion, Mark insisted. For instance, if Jamsie were to feel a strange grip on his mind, memory, and imagination, and he was not able to resist it, he should adopt a simple trick in order to offset such a “grip”: spell the name of Jesus out letter by letter, over and over. It was this stratagem that was to save Jamsie from suicide at the reservoir later on.