Hostage To The Devil

by Неизвестный

  “And those who don't belong to you—”

  “The Latter,” It comes as a snarl, but also, Hearty feels, with a certain note of craven fear. That fear impresses Hearty. Again he is distracted, and again he pays the price.

  “You too, cock-lover! Priest! You too will be afraid when you get what's corning to you.” The door of Hearty's mind is giving way. That force is battering at him. He falters a moment, then regains concentration in an immense effort. He goes on questioning.

  “The astral travels of Carl? Did you engineer that?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did you get him into such delusion?”

  “Once spirit is confused with psyche, we can let anybody see, hear, touch, taste, know, desire the impossible. He was ours. He is ours. He is of the Kingdom.”

  Carl is not moving, but his entire body lies once again in the crushed position. The pathos of his captivity makes Hearty wince. He prays quietly, “Jesus, give him strength.” Then he tries to continue his interrogation, but the voice interrupts, this time screaming in unbelievable despair.

  “We will not be expelled. We have our home in him. He belongs to us.” Hearty waits as the scream dies away in gurgles. Carl's own throat is visibly moving.

  “Are you the maker of the Non Self aura?” No.“

  “How did you use the Non Self aura in Carl's case?” “The aura is there for all who can perceive it. Only humans have learned to unsee it. If they saw it continually, they would die.” “How did you use it?” “We didn't.”

  Hearty now flings concise questions, most of which need only a yes or no as answer. His aim is to expose the evil spirit, to make it tell its own deceptions.

  “Did Carl see it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you make it clear for him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “He wanted it so!”

  “Did he ask you?”

  “We offered.”

  “Did he know who you were?”

  “He knew.”

  “Clearly?”

  “Clear enough.”

  “Did he bilocate?”

  “No.”

  “What happened?”

  “We gave him knowledge of distant places as if he was there.”

  “Had he a double, a psychic double?”

  “We gave him one.”

  “How?”

  “Gave him the knowledge a double would have.”

  “When did you start at Carl?”

  “In his youth.”

  “Did you give him his early vision?”

  “No.”

  “Did you interfere with it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “He wanted us to do so.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We know.”

  “By what sign?”

  “We know.”

  “What did he do that let you know?”

  “We know.”

  “In the name of Jesus, I command you: Tell me how you knew.”

  There is a long pause of about two minutes. Hearty waits patiently, all the while looking at Carl, keeping his mind on the question.

  Then the trap comes for him.

  “There is no word for it.”

  “Is there a thought for it?”

  “Yes.” Hearty, his concentration failing momentarily, caught up in his interrogation, does not see the trap opening in front of him. He asks simply:

  “What is that thought?”

  And immediately he and the assistants notice the change in Carl. The crushed and lifeless look is instantaneously gone. His body relaxes beneath the hands of the assistants. He draws in a long, deep breath and stretches himself like a man coming pleasantly out of a deep sleep. His eyes start to open. He moves his head gently from side to side. The color is back in his cheeks, his lips are smiling, and his eyes are quizzical with good humor.

  It all happens so unexpectedly that everyone is taken by surprise. The assistants who have been holding him in grim determination and fear up to this moment now feel embarrassed. Carl is not even offended. He seems to be amused but tolerant. “Hey, guys, can I sit up? It's okay. It's okay.” The voice is Carl's. His behavior is normal. Hearty is the only one who realizes what has happened. But too late! He is trapped. He is getting the “thought.” Before he feels the full force of that invasion in his mind, he sees the four assistants on their feet looking at him for some explanation or instruction. Carl has sat up on the couch, one leg thrown easily over the side. He also is looking at Hearty. All five wear the same quizzical expression: they seem to be surprised at Hearty's behavior.

  The assistant priest also has turned around to look at Hearty. He, too, has a questioning look. The look is an appeal to Hearty, but Hearty is helpless at that moment.

  His chief feeling is one of horror: horror at what he sees happening, horror at his own imprisonment in his mind. The “thought” is now clear to him in a way he never dreamed: he sees it concretely in his four assistants and in Carl. They are completely at ease, their only emotion is wonder that Hearty is not at ease. He wants to scream at them, to shout: “Watch out! Watch out! They have played on your desire for normal behavior. They are making it all normal for you.” But he cannot open his mouth or produce a sound.

  As his helplessness grows, he sees more and more clearly what is happening. No one wants to believe in evil, really, above all, not in an evil being, an evil spirit. Everyone wants to abolish the idea. To admit the existence of evil means a responsibility, and no one wants that responsibility. That is the opening through which Tortoise crawls, stilling all suspicions, making everything seem normal and natural. This is the “thought,” the unwariness of the ordinary human being which amounts to a disinclination to believe in evil. And, if you do not believe in evil, how can you believe in or ever know what good is?

  Inside in his mind, this realization begins to inflate like a rubber balloon, widening and swelling in its intensity, increasing his helplessness side by side with his new understanding.

  Now all looking at him are smiling, Carl included. All they see is Hearty's long, bony face, his lips split in what they take as a grimace of embarrassment. And the more effort he makes, the more he seems to grimace.

  Hearty's torture is at its peak, and his endurance almost ended, when the assistant priest notices one thing': Hearty is pressing the crucifix to the side of his head. The younger priest stops: something must be wrong. Something must be wrong. Otherwise, Hearty is striking a comic pose using the crucifix, and Hearty would never do that during an exorcism or at any other time. What can be wrong?

  Then, turning to the others, the assistant priest says: “Something's wrong with Hearty. Look!”

  It is Carl who answers, evenly and in apparent good humor. “Look yourself, Father. He's trying to crucify himself. A bald-headed Christ with spectacles.” And he bursts into a peal of laughter.

  The effect is like a gunshot. Everyone suddenly stops. An eerie note has been struck. Five heads turn around and five pairs of eyes stare at Carl incredulously.

  The assistant priest takes over. “In the name of the Church and of Jesus who founded it. . .”

  But he is interrupted. Carl begins to protest, apparently in good humor still. “Father, look!”

  “Hold him down!” the priest orders the four assistants. Then to Carl: “In the name of Jesus, I command you to desist.”

  This delay is all Hearty needs. The pressure relents; the “thought” deflates inside his mind. He is free again. He almost lost, but he has learned two things. He knows the ruse of normalcy that this spirit has used to work in Carl for his acceptance, step by step, year by year. He knows the “thought.” And, second, he knows for certain now that Carl's psychic powers, and his own, will be used as a weapon against him at the slightest opening. His careful preparation may at least be some defense.

  Carl is lying down again, wide awake, under the control of the assistants once more, his eyes na
rrowed to slits, his face a sheet of white anger.

  As Hearty gazes at Carl, his mind races back: somewhere he has touched a raw nerve. Somehow he has almost found the central weakness of the spirit that calls itself Tortoise. He has to pursue this line. His next question is peremptory.

  “Where were you leading Carl?”

  “To knowledge of the universe.” The words come out from between Carl's tightly clenched teeth.

  “What knowledge?”

  There is no answer at first. Then slowly and grudgingly the words come. “The knowledge that humans are just a part of the universe.”

  “How do you mean a 'part' merely?”

  “That they are parts of a greater physical being.”

  “What being?”

  “The universe.”

  “The universe of matter?”

  “Yes.”

  “And of psychic forces?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that this was creator of humans?”

  “Yes.”

  “A personal creator?”

  “No.”

  “A physical creator?”

  “Yes also.”

  “A psychophysical creator?”

  “Yes. Indeed, yes.”

  “Why did you lead Carl in this way?”

  “Because he would lead others.”

  “Why lead others in this way?”

  “Because then they belong to the Kingdom.”

  “Why belong to the Kingdom?”

  Those looking at Carl begin to feel that he is about to explode in some way. The words are coming out of him with greater harshness. He draws a breath for almost every word, so that each word comes out on a blast of breath. His arms, legs, and torso are writhing more and more. The assistants hold him down, but cannot hold him still. Now with that last question, all see the explosion coming. It starts building with Carl's response to Hearty's last question.

  “Why, Priest? Why? You stand there with your bald head, your scorched testicles, your smelly clothes, your yellowing teeth, your stinking guts, and you ask us why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” The word comes out on the crest of ever-louder shouts.

  “WHY?” he finally shouts at the top of his voice, his head raised to stare at Hearty. “Why? Because we hate the Latter. We hate. Hate. Hate. We hate those stained with his blood. We hate and despise those that follow him. We want to divert all from him and we want all in the Kingdom where he cannot reach them. Where they cannot go with him. And we want you, Priest! Because we have Carl. He is ours. And no power can undo our hold on him. No power. No power!”

  Carl falls back, his eyes bulging, sweat pouring down his face and body.

  Hearty all this time remains utterly still. He yet has to maneuver the spirit into a direct clash.

  He now plays his trump card; he addresses himself to Carl.

  “Carl, in the name of Jesus who saved you and who will save you, I command you, listen to me.”

  Carl's body begins to go cold. The assistants tell that to Hearty. He shakes his head and goes on.

  “Carl! We know you are prisoner. We know that. But a part of you is free and has never been touched. Speak to us. Communicate with us.

  Hearty is gambling on the same telepathic power in Carl that had called to him for help, to reach out now in some crucial sign of cooperation with good, a sign of his deepest will turned against evil.

  “Carl, I never told you all the years of my student days. I never told you. I am a receiver. I can receive. You can communicate with me now. Please. We need your cooperation. Just one clear effort and the whole thing is over. Please, Carl! Please!”

  Carl's body is now quite calm, his head thrown back on the couch, his arms and legs limp, his body soaked with perspiration. Hearty looks at him, waiting, voiding his own mind, hoping and waiting.

  Then the message starts to come. It wisps across Hearty's “screen,” at first in vague waves, then in clearer outline. It is an experience of emotions and emotional ideas each entwined with the other. It invades Hearty's psyche, stealing into all the nooks and corners of his conscious being. It is unlike any message he could have imagined. He is undergoing the feelings and desolation of ideas that beset someone exiled to a baleful land, no warmth, no love, no togetherness, no home, no smile, only the automatic gyrating of controlled beings. Animals frozen by blinding light or tumbling into a private abyss where their free-fall scream never meets its own echo and from which their desires never escape to fulfillment.

  It is Carl's message, his picture of what his bondage is like. He is faced with the suicide of those who die denying they want to live on, or were ever made to live by love. It is an instantaneous tale of sadness in living and utter misery in dying.

  Carl has done the trick. Translated into words he is saying to Hearty: “See! This is my exile from love, my slavery to a degrading psychism, and my final tumbling into the aloneness of Hell forever.”

  “Jesus can save you, Carl,” Hearty begins. “Jesus. . .”

  He gets no further. The “message” stops abruptly. Hearty shakes his head. A warning word from his assistant priest makes him focus his vision on Carl. Carl has opened his eyes and speaks in a gentle whisper to the two assistants holding him by the arms. Apparently he asks them in a normal voice to let him sit up and “watch the Father.” The two release his arms. “It sounded so normal,” one of the assistants said regretfully later.

  Carl fixes his eyes on Hearty, a slow grin of delight comes over his face. Hearty is no longer “opaque” to him. For the first time, he is looking into Hearty's mind.

  In retrospect, it now seems to Hearty that Carl's minimal freedom from constraint and his telepathic communication with Hearty, while he was not yet free of possession, provided an ideal avenue for a direct attack on Hearty.

  Carl is now to be used as a medium for the final Clash. Against Tortoise, Hearty now has no ally. He sees the purpose in Carl's life. He knows. He braces himself.

  Hearty's first, frightening realization is that his “censor” bond is gone: he cannot block at will, as always before this, any message from the outside or any perception by an outsider into his mind and inner condition. Now, for the first time in his life, he is an unwilling “receiver.” This he has not foreseen. He has thought that as long as his will was free his censor bond would be at his disposal. But his protection is gone. He is naked. And each part of his inner man is successively invaded, seized, and polluted. A malevolent intelligence is scanning the innards of his very self. That attack finally wells up and pours over him. Hearty is filled with a disgust and loathing he cannot control. He starts to retch.

  In the Clash of his will with the evil spirit, he is whipped with a ferocity he could never have imagined. Hearty's torture comes from himself: he seems to be an onlooker watching his own punishment. According to the tape and the accounts of his assistants, this crisis of Hearty's lasts from three to five minutes. To Hearty it is an age. As he looks into Carl's eyes, he no longer sees their color, shape, or expression. Carl is in every sense the medium of evil. Hearty becomes a passive one, the “viewed.” He “stops seeing” for that time and “is only seen.”

  The keynote of that Clash is an “either/or.” From the beginning it is conveyed to Hearty subtly that, if he submits, if he renounces his opposition to the evil spirit, all will be well; the attack will cease. If not, he will be destroyed.

  Now, in one hurting glare of exposure, he sees his weaknesses laid bare: the tawdry logic he received in his philosophy training, the self-confident and ignorantly treated facts of theology, the self-indulgence and onetime hypocrisies of his piety, the useless pride in his priesthood—all is so much drivel and dross, a dump of human trash that withers under the fire of that gaze looking in at him and probing every darkest cranny of his weakness.

  “For as long as it lasted,” Hearty relates, “it was a brutal partial possession of me. All that remained finally free was my will. And even that. . .” Hearty always leaves this thought unfinished.


  The searching gaze continues like a filthy and malicious hand pawing each of his faculties contemptuously. Even his will is fingered and stripped of the motives he had always relied upon. His will is the last bastion. It holds. But now he sees all its apparent strength torn from it like so many cardboard coverings from an inner treasure: his sensuous enthusiasm for beautiful ceremony, his esteem of good people, his compassion for the sick and the helpless, his pride in being a priest and a man, his satisfaction in his Welsh culture, his reliance on the approval of parents, teachers, superiors, his bishop, the Pope, the consolation of prayer and submission to law. All are torn brutally aside. And only his willing self holds at last. His soul as a willing being stands naked of all the supports and reasons of a lifetime, scrutinized by the unwavering gaze of high, unlovely, and unloving intelligence.

  “But this was all by the way,” Hearty explains in the offhand way survivors of terrible sufferings speak of certain indescribable moments. “The aim was to make my free choice impossible.”

  The only external sign of his experience is seen by his assistants in the way Hearty holds his crucifix between him and Carl: his two arms straight out in front of him, his eyes level with the crossbar of the crucifix, so that he is looking past the head and over the arms of the crucified. In the beginning of Hearty's agony, the crucifix faces Carl. After about two minutes or so, Hearty turns the crucifix around so that the crucified faces Hearty himself. We can only guess that then his real crisis starts. It lasts only a moment, a never-ending moment in which he knows no time, and suffering seems eternal.

  For the onlookers, meanwhile, Carl never seems to change. He sits upon the couch, his eyes fixed on Hearty's, his body immobile. “His eyes were like hollow blanks,” said one assistant. And several of them are reminded of ancient statues in which soulless eyes of antiquity turn upon the banality of life with a barren gaze.

  Hearty is reduced by that gaze to an effort of sheer survival, holding on fiercely to his will and resolve. The worst is just beginning. His mind, imagination, and memory are now out of his control. He thinks, he remembers, he imagines what the “others” want him to think, remember, and imagine. He is now treated to himself in a humiliating way. He sees his world as a globe dotted with lands and oceans, with cities and houses and people, covered with vegetation and sand and animals, the whole hanging in an atmosphere; and “above” it, somehow or other, “God” or “Jesus” or “Heaven,” with little tenuous lines running down to each human being. It is all now so laughable, so childish, so contemptible, so superstitious—this is conveyed to him like a cosmic joke turned on him with a cackle of superior intelligence.