Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  Peter ignored the question. Put the pressure on, his instinct told him. Now! Fast!

  “Jesus, Marianne. The name is…”

  “Jeebum! Jesusass! Jeebum! Jesusass! Jeebum!” She was howling again. Peter wanted desperately to cover his ears against the slivers of pain that pierced his brain.

  “Watch it!” he shouted to his assistants as he saw her two forefingers shoot into her nostrils and begin tearing at them. He jumped to her side again. “Pin her down!”

  Every pair of hands clamped down on her. They held on. Each one had his own memory of some wild animal: a tiger in a zoo cage, a hyena lowering at another hyena, a sow fighting the hands at a slaughterhouse. The sides of Marianne’s mouth were pulled back—it seemed the grimace stretched to her ears—baring teeth, gums, tongue. A grayish foam bubbled and seeped over her lower lip and down her chin. Her eyes were open but rolled up so far that they saw only white, red-streaked patches glistening wet. Two men pinned her arms to the bed; one leaned on her belly; another held her legs still.

  It seemed no human being could survive what Marianne was going through. The doctor closed his eyes as his own perspiration stung into them.

  “Hold on, for the love of God,” Peter said.

  The muffled “zheeeeeeeeeee” buzzing between her teeth died away to nothing. Her eyelids closed. “Stay put,” muttered the ex-policeman, “she’s still all tight.” The doctor lifted one of Marianne’s eyelids, then let it fall shut again.

  Peter had won. The Pretense had failed. But it was many hours after the start, and only the end of round one. He recited the second part of the Exorcism ritual, while his assistants stood back watching.

  As always before, the Breakpoint came at the precise moment Peter least expected it. It started with a sound difficult to describe. A horse whimpering. A dog whinnying. A man meowing. It was the very sound of pain. Of nature violated by unnature. Of deep agony. Of protest. Of helplessness. “Supposing a cadaver, after the death rattle and after the grimacing of the last breath was over, started to cry for help, what do you imagine it would sound like?” Peter asked later in an effort to describe this indescribable sound. “Or supposing when you were closing his dead eyelids with your thumb and forefinger” (he made the motion with spatular fingers) “and supposing you missed one eye, and it looked up at you still glassy and dead—you know how they look—and it filled with genuine tears. That’s the feeling. Something reaching out from the middle of all the worms and putrid flesh and stink and body water and silent immobility of death, saying: ‘I’m alive! Pull me out! For the love of Jesus, save me!’ That was Marianne when the Breakpoint began. The tug of war for her soul that nearly broke me in two.”

  Now, Peter felt, he could appeal directly to Marianne and aid her. He started to read the first part of another “teaser text” slowly.

  “Marianne. You were baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. You belong to Jesus. It was the sacrifice of his life that made it possible for you to belong to God. Whatever of beauty, of love, of kindness, of gentleness there was in you—all came from Jesus. He knows you, knows every fiber of your being, is more than a friend, nearer than your mother, more loving than any lover, more faithful to you than you yourself can be. Speak! Speak! Speak out! And tell me you are listening. Speak and tell me you want to be saved in the name of Jesus who saved you and in the name of God who created you. Speak!”

  Looking over the top of the book, he could see her hands relaxing and being placed at her sides by his assistants. The ear-to-ear grimace faded. Her eyes were open but still turned up so far that you felt she was looking into her own eye sockets. The whites of her eyes glistened. There was complete silence. The doctor took her pulse. “She’s as cold as ice.” “Okay, okay,” Peter answered the doctor, with a motion of his head, never taking his gaze off Marianne.

  Marianne’s whole body was limp now. It looked heavy, sodden with fatigue. A faint bluish coloration gave an eerie appearance to her hands, arms, feet, neck, and face. All was still. He heard breathing: his own, his assistants’. Marianne’s he could not hear.

  The doctor reported a faint pulse. “She’s very low, Peter,” he said. Peter held up his hand restraining further comment. The moments ticked by. Her father cleared his throat and brushed his eyes: “It’s over, Father?” Peter silenced him with a quick, almost rude shake of his head. He watched, waiting for the slightest change. “If it’s going to happen, it’s now,” he said half to himself, half-aloud; “Keep watching.”

  But with the intolerable strain of silence, he felt the muscles in his calves, back, and arms relaxing. His grip loosened on his book. His head began to straighten up. The younger priest unfolded his arms. A radio blared in a downstairs apartment. Gradually the silence took over as a welcome blanket wrapping itself around their ears and swaddling the entire room. It gave an uneasy feeling to find oneself getting lost in that silence after the shouting, the discordancy, and the lethal sound of the gurgling voice Marianne had used.

  The pain began to ease in Peter’s mind. Still gazing at Marianne’s face, he thought of Conor in Rome, of Zio—now Paul VI—in New York. And he thought of sleep. He glanced at his watch. It was 9:25 P.M. Mass at Yankee Stadium should almost be finished. This ordeal in the room should also be finished soon. Soon, hopefully, they could all go home and sleep…sleep…sleep.

  Sleep? Through the settling haze of his fatigue, the thought triggered Peter’s memory. Hadn’t Conor warned him that sleep, sleepiness, the desire to rest, sometimes came as a last trap, usually preceding a last onslaught of the Presence?

  But he was a few moments too late. As Conor’s phrase lit up like a red signal in his memory: “Moind the sleeperrr, lad. Moind the sleeperrr! Tis all up wid yah, if yeh fergit the sleeperrr!”, it was already upon him.

  It was sudden. And yet the Presence seemed as if it had been clutching at him for ages beforehand, already had a hold on the vitals of his being. His body shuddered as he whispered, “Jesus! Jesus!”

  The others heard only a groan from him and thought that he had tried to say something without having cleared his throat.

  “Okay, Father?” asked the doctor.

  Peter gestured wearily with his hand. This fight was all his. The others would be unknowing witnesses.

  The Presence was everywhere and nowhere. Peter fought off the instinct to step back or to look around or, most of all, to run far and fast. “Freeze yer moind,” had been Conor’s advice. “Freeze it in luv. Shtick there, lad.” But, Holy Jesus! how? The Presence was all over him, inside him, outside him. A total trap of cloying ropes he couldn’t see. He heard no word, saw no vision, smelled no odor. But his skin was no longer the protective shell of his mortality. His skin didn’t work! It was now a porous interface that let the invisible filth of the Presence ooze in. Worst of all was the silence of it. It was soundless. Suddenly he had been attacked and caught; and he knew his adversary was superior and ruthless, that it had invaded deep into the self he always hid from others and hoped only God did know and would never show him until he was strong enough to bear the sight.

  He could not discern where the struggle lay. His confusion of mind was like molasses oozing over spiders, paralyzing every effort at control and every natural movement. Sometimes it seemed his will was made of rubber twisted this way and that and cruelly snapping back at his mind like a wet towel smacking the face. Sometimes his mind was a sieve through which stinging particles tumbled, each one tabbed with a jeering name: Despair! Dirt! Smell! Puny! Mush! Misery! Mockery! Hate! Beast! Shame!…There was no end to them. At other times, he realized, his mind and will were only exits, sewage pipes; and his imagination was the recipient of what they vomited. Out through them were pouring the shapes of the real struggle that lay in another dimension of himself. Deep down? High up? Conscious? Unconscious? Subconscious? He did not know. But certainly somewhere in the depths of the self he was. All the hidden valleys of that self were red with his agony. Every high peak was a sharp
slope of tumbling confusion. Each plain and corner was crammed with pressure and weight and sorrow. His imagination was now a cesspool swelling with gobs of repulsive images and twisted fears.

  “I’m alone,” he thought, covering his face with his hands for an instant.

  “Yes! Alone! Alone! Alone! Alone!” came the answer in silent mockery.

  It seemed to be himself answering himself with a blasphemy as primal as the scream of the first man who murdered another man, and as actual as the grunt of the latest mugger on that same October night driving his knife deep into the back of his victim on Lenox Avenue.

  “Oh, God! Oh, Jesus!” Peter exclaimed within himself. “Oh, God! Oh, Jesus! I’m finished…”

  Then, as suddenly as it had come, and for no reason he could discern, the Presence receded from him; but it did not leave altogether. Peter felt as if extended claws pricked themselves loose out of his flesh and mind and folded back unwillingly.

  Without Peter’s knowing, a small gale of consternation—a pale copy of his own agony—buffeted his assistants all this time as they kept troubled watch over Marianne.

  Little patches of relief spotted Peter’s consciousness. His eyes focused again. Over rims of tears, he could now see her. She was a body of trembling. It seemed that everything beneath her skin and hair and clothes was moving in unnatural agitation, arhythmically, but that her exterior remained somehow still. Her mouth opened a fraction. The lips moved wordlessly.

  And then, for the third time in his life, Peter heard the Voice.

  It came from nowhere. It merely sounded; it was audible to Peter and all present, but it did not come from any discernible direction. It was everywhere in the room, but nowhere in particular. It was level in tone, slow in speed, without any trace of breathing or any pause. Not high-pitched. Not deep. Not throaty. Not tinny or nasal. Not male. Not female. Accentless. Controlled. Peter had once seen a film about a talking robot; when the robot uttered a word, each syllable, as it was pronounced, was followed by eddies of gurgling echoes of itself. The echoes muddied the next syllable; and so it went on for the syllables of each word in a sentence.

  The Voice was something like that, but in reverse: the eddying echoes of each syllable preceded the syllable itself. To the listener, it was excruciating to understand but impossible to blot out. It was distracting and dizzying. The effect was like a million voices stabbing the eardrum with nonsensical confusion and clamor, preechoing each syllable. You tried to pick out one voice, almost succeeded, then another piled on top of that; you tried to pick out another, but the first one came back at you. And so on, seeming scores of persistent voices exasperating you, confusing you, defeating you. Then the Voice pronounced the syllable; and your confusion was complete with frustration, for the syllable and the word were drowned in the general babel.

  Like most people, Peter had acquired the knack of “reading” voices. We all develop such an instinct and have our own classification of voices as pleasant or unpleasant, strained or peaceful, male or female, young or old, strong or weak, and so on. The Voice fitted into no category Peter could think of. “Unhuman I suppose you’d call it,” he said later. “But it was the same as in Hoboken and Jersey City. With the added touch, of course.”

  The “added touch” was his way of indicating the peculiar timbre of the Voice at each exorcism. In Hoboken as in Jersey City the timbre conveyed some violent and shocking emotion that aroused fear. But the timbre in the Voice that October night was different. “For all the world,” said Peter, “as if the Great Panjandrum himself was speaking, and all the little panjandrums pronounced each syllable before he did. His precursors, if you wish.”

  The timbre, the “added touch,” conveyed a single message: utter and undiluted superiority. It didn’t hit the emotions, but the mind, freezing it with a realization that there was no possibility and could never be any possibility of besting it; that its owner knew this, and that he knew you also knew; and that this superiority was neither sweetened by compassion nor softened by an ounce of love nor eased by a grain of condescension nor restrained by one whit of benignity toward one of lesser stature. “If sound can be evil, with no human good in it all,” said Peter, “that was it.” It brought him up to the thin edge of nothingness and face to face with the anus mundi, the ultimate in excretion of self-aggrandizing sin.

  Then the bedlam and confusion of the Voice died away as if into some middle distance.

  The four assistants lifted their heads, as Marianne’s own voice was heard speaking with heavy deliberateness, almost quietly, in comparison with the preceding uproar.

  “Nobody mortal has power in the Kingdom. Anybody can belong to it.” A short pause. “Many do.” Each word had come out polished, precise, weighty, and clear as a newly minted gold dollar tossed onto a bar counter.

  Time for the final assertion, thought Peter. His final shot. The trump card of every exorcism: the power of Jesus and his authority.

  “By the authority of the Church and in the name of Jesus, I command you to tell me what I shall call you.”

  Peter kept his voice level as he issued the challenge. All his hopes rested on the acceptance of that challenge. Rejected, the challenge could only result in further distortions of Marianne. At this stage, Peter knew she could not take much more. But there could be no turning back now. And to break off was total defeat. He could feel the nervousness in his assistants: all and everything in the room reflected the tension of the moment. Peter knew, and each one present knew, he had issued a final challenge.

  “You command!” Now Marianne sounded amused, as though Peter had told a joke. He kept reminding himself that this was not Marianne, but the spirit using her voice. Still his heart sank a little. “I am us,” he heard her say. “We are me. Isn’t is? Aren’t are? What we are called is beyond human mind.”

  We! Peter was riveted by that key word. Only those of the Kingdom used it. Peter knew instantly that he was almost there and he had no intention of allowing the Presence to identify again with Marianne, so he broke in brusquely.

  “There is no immunity for you and your kind in the universe of being.”

  The calculated and cold ruthlessness, a new note in Peter’s interruption, brought the ex-policeman up sharp. Years of experience had given him a sixth sense for lethal threat and attack, for hatred and open disgust. He had heard many a cop speaking to arrested murderers in that tone, and many a killer behind bars telling of his hatred in as controlled a way as Peter was using now. He looked at Peter’s face. It had changed. Something subtly merciless had lodged there.

  Peter continued: “You, all of you, are…”

  “You, you, you have no particular immunity, my friend.” Marianne’s emphasis was exact as she broke in. Nicely calculated. Just heavy enough to make one uneasy. Too light to betray any ripple of annoyance or fear.

  A vague uneasiness ran through Peter’s assistants; they moved spontaneously nearer him. The Presence was getting to them. For all his instructions to them before the exorcism began, he knew there was no way to prepare them for the shock, the fear, the onslaught.

  Marianne’s body was utterly still, her face pasty white, her lips barely open. After a pause, her voice continued with the merest edge of sharpness: “You may have polished your knee balls in a Confession Box”—this with a sneering inflection—“but you were not sorry, friend. Not always, anyway. So where is your repentance? And need I tell you, priest, without repentance, you have sins still? And you! You command the Kingdom?”

  In his memory Peter heard Conor’s caution: “What happened in pahst histhoree, happened. The recorrd shtands. Ferivir. Loike a shtone ’n a feeld, opin ’n’ maneefist. Fer awl teh see, me bhoy. Incloodin’ the Grate Panjandhr’m hissilf. No, don’t deny it. Wallow in humilitee.”

  “How shall we call you?” Peter persisted.

  “We?” Sarcastically, but calmly.

  “In the name of…”

  “Shut your miserable mouth…”—it was suddenly an animal growl
ing the words. “Close it! Shut it! Lock it! Fuck it!”

  “…Jesus. Tell us: how shall we call you?”

  Then a low, long cry came from Marianne’s lips. All in the room held their breath as the Voice gurgled and they made out the words with difficulty: “I will take my toll. I will take our pound of flesh. All 142 pounds of him! I will take him with me, with us, with me!” Complete silence. Then Marianne’s voice: “Smiler. I just smile.”

  Peter glanced at her face. The name was obvious, now he knew it. The twisted smile was back on her mouth. Now, he realized, he had to deal with the most ancient of man’s tempters and enemies: the hater who deceived you with a smile and a joke and a promise.

  The cleverness of it. How could you suspect or attack someone called Smiler? And if they just smile at anything you do, what can you do? The whole thing—God, heaven, earth, Jesus, holiness, good, evil—becomes a mere farce. And by the evil alchemy of that farce, everything becomes an ugly joke, a cosmic joke on little men who in their turns are only puny little jokes. And, and, and…the utter banality of all existence, the wish for nothing.

  He wrenched his mind away from this dead blanket of depression and concentrated again. This was the meeting point with Marianne.

  “You, Smiler, you will leave, you shall leave this creature of God…”

  “This annoying affair has gone on long enough.” The words had a smirking quality overlaid with pomposity. “Marianne has made her choice.” Peter’s inner reaction was: We are almost there. Marianne’s voice continued: “You understand better than these oafs do. After all…”

  “…because love is all there is needed…” Peter continued.

  “…her life is short, as is yours. She takes what she can, as you…”

  “Because love is all there is needed.” Peter repeated himself. But the monologue by Smiler went on uninterruptedly.

  “…take it with your arrogance.”

  “And you, Smiler, you rejected love.” There was a sudden break in the exchange. For a split second Peter waited. “We came from love,” he started again. But that was as far as he got.