Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  “LOVE!!!” The word was fired out at him like a pistol shot. The assistants bent toward Marianne, expecting violence in the wake of that shriek. Peter straightened up, not in suspense, not as though expecting more. Conor had said never trade shouts but let outbursts run their course.

  But there was no more shouting. It was the violence of the loathing in Marianne’s voice that was physically painful to Peter, as it continued on studiously and quietly: “Yes…” A trailing pause, as if ruminating. Then: “Ah! Sixty-nine. Right? A handy image!”

  Peter winced at the tone and the mental picture. His memory was wilting his effort, and he prayed.

  But Marianne went on with unruffled mercilessness as if reciting from a technical report. “And first the tongue, its apex like a single wet pink eye with a white iris, goes exploring: sliding its dorsum over each groin, every epithelial cell registering the ripples of the musculus gracilis, following the tautened adductor longus, summoning saliva to glisten its course toward the darkling mountain, the mons veneris. Her saphena majora rustles and tickles with rushing blood.”

  A retort rushed to Peter’s mouth. He held it back.

  Marianne continued. “Then, at the os pubis it lingers, all its papillae hungry, tensile, wet. Filiform cries to fungiform, fungiform to circumvallatae, circumvallatae to foliatae; ‘On! Brothers! On!’

  The doctor whistled through his teeth and glanced at Peter. But Peter was dangerously abstracted from the scene. He could hear Mae’s sigh, that long-distant day in the sunshine, miles and decades apart from this evil encounter; he could see her lying on the slope of the sand dunes, felt one hand lying lightly on his belly. And then he had the wisping image of her lying in her coffin just before it was closed forever.

  Inexorably the recital went on. “Amid his moans and her heaving, the tickling in his sacrum (ah! Resurrection Bone! Those rabbis had a word for it!), through his thighs; the corpus cavernosum fills up with thick red-black blood. The tongue stabbing within, and she closing around it, holding it.

  Smiler was now using Marianne’s voice in a soft, matter-of-fact tone. There was a short pause of seconds. Then, with a burst of fierce contempt:

  “He is fucking her. And like the hyena with a dead deer”—the voice rose to a scream—“he starts with her anus, and she like a mother snake is swallowing her son. LOVE?????” A piercing, shattering scream. The voice fell to a sneer: “Cunni-cunni-cunni-cunni-cunni! Peter the Eater.” Then casually, as one asks the time of day: “Tell us, Peter. Are you sorry? Do you miss it?”

  Marianne’s father had his face buried in his hands; his shoulders heaved with sobbing. The ex-policeman and the banker stared red-faced at Peter. His young colleague leaned on the night table, his face ashen. The tirade, like a great, sprawling canvas, had thrown a mass of screaming colors and nonsensical patterns of thought and feelings over them all.

  The doctor reacted more quickly than the others: “Peter, can we pause?” He was apprehensive, seeing the bloodless color of Peter’s face and a distracted look in his eyes. Peter gave no answer.

  Smiler, the cosmic joker, smears and tears at everything, Peter was thinking to himself, as he ruminated and groped toward his next step. Smiler, who turns memories to dirt and chokes you with them. But then he’s not subtle. And he’s not clever. Peter thought: This is either a trap for us, or we have Smiler trapped. Which?

  He found himself reacting by instinct: “Silence! Smiler! Silence in the name of Jesus! I command you to desist, to leave her. Tell me that you will obey, that you will leave her. Speak!”

  The other men in the room glanced at Peter, surprised at the force in his voice. The verbal assault had left them raw, ashamed of something vague, with a feeling that they had been filthied. They had expected Peter to wilt, to have been crushed. They had been willing to lose hope.

  But now they took something from him. They sensed what he knew, saw it on his face, and almost heard him telling them: “I may be engaged in this to my own humiliation. But Smiler is equally engaged in it and there is no escape for him. Just hold on.”

  Smiler spoke, but as if Peter had never spoken. “Well! Here we have a thing never seen in the Kingdom”—the voice calm again—“a little drop of sea water pulls a little membrane around it and rots for a million years on an ancient, forgotten shore, and sprouts little hair-trigger nerves and puny little earthen mechanisms, and stands up on two spindly limbs one day, and says, ‘I am a man,’ and lifts its snout to skies above and says again, ‘I am so beautiful’…”

  “Silence! Desist!”

  “You ugly sod! You smelly little animal…”

  “And let the soul of Marianne be beautiful once more with the grace of…”

  “Beautiful?” For the first time, the voice was raised almost an octave higher. “Beautiful?” Now it was a shrill, high-pitched, and painful scream of questioning scorn. “You helpless, yelping, puking, licking, slavering, sweating, excreting little cur. You whipped mongrel. You constipated shit canister. You excuse for a being. You lump of urine and excrement and snot and mud born in a bed on bloody sheets, sticking your head out between a woman’s smelly legs and bawling when they slapped your arse and laughed at your little red balls”—the scream of high-decibel invective ceased suddenly, followed by three syllables pronounced calmly and with loathing contempt—“You creature!”

  “And so are you, too. You creature.” Peter surprised himself at his own self-possession: his adversary had made a mistake, and Peter knew it. Peter also surprised himself with the contempt he found himself putting in to his riposte.

  He continued: “Once nothing. Then beautiful. The most beautiful of all God made.” The bitter taunt in Peter’s voice turned every head but Marianne’s in his direction. He went on lashing and provoking. “Then ugly with pride. Then conquered. Then thrown from the heights like a dying torch.”

  A low roar issued from Marianne’s mouth.

  Peter went on unabashed; he had his adversary exactly where he wanted him: “And expelled, and disgraced, and condemned, and deprived forever, and defeated forever.”

  Marianne’s body quivered.

  “Hold her down!” he muttered to his assistants. Just in time. She was shaking violently. The roar was now the bellow of a pig with a knife gouging out its jugular in gobs of blood.

  Peter piled it on: “You, too, creature of God, but not saved by Jesus’ blood.”

  Again the long, howling wail.

  As its sound died away, Peter’s whole body was electrified with fear. At that instant the Presence launched its hate again. Like a physical thing, it attacked him. It sent stinging talons into his mind and will, stabbing deep at the root of his determination, at some inner sensitive, delicate part of him where all his pain and all his pleasure lived.

  This was the Clash that Conor had analyzed so well for Peter. This was the climax of his one-to-one struggle. Peter made the sign of the cross. He knew: now one of them had to yield; one would be victor. He had to hold. He had to refuse to despair. Refuse disbelief. Refuse damnation. Refuse fear. Refuse. Refuse. Refuse. Hold on. These came like automatic commands to him from his inmost self.

  His first desperate thrust was to switch his mind toward any lifeline—any beauty or truth he had known and experienced: the cry of seagulls off Dooahcarrig in Kerry; the rhythmic pattern of nimble feet at winter dances; Mae’s smile; the security of his father’s house; the calm summer evenings he had spent off the coast of Aran Island looking at the Connemara mountains behind Galway City, purple masses welling up in a shining gold vault of sky in haze.

  But as quick as any image arose, it dried like a drop of water in a flame. All his internal images of loyalty, authority, hope, legitimacy, concern, gentleness shriveled and faded. His imagination was burning with an overheated despair and his mind could not help him. Only his will locked both mind and imagination into an immobility that pained and agonized him.

  But then the Presence turned silently on his will in a slash of naked adversity. For
the others present, there was little to go on: no sound except Peter’s heavy breathing and the shuffling of their legs as they endeavored to keep their balance and hold Marianne down; no sensation beyond the straining of Marianne’s body against their hands.

  The attack on Peter was a fury beating like sharp hailstones on a tin roof, filling all his awareness with a ceaseless din of fears that paralyzed his will and mind. If only he could breathe more easily, he thought. Or if only he could pierce that contempt.

  Dimly he saw the candles sputtering on the night table and glinting on the crucified figure on the cross.

  “Rimimb’r, lad, his proide. That’s his weak heel. His proide! Git him on his proide!”

  With Conor’s voice in his memory, Peter blurted: “You have been vanquished, vanquished, Smiler, by one who did not fear to be lowly, to be killed. Depart! Smiler! Depart! You have been vanquished by a bloodied will. You cheat. Jesus is your master…”

  The others present heard him croaking the words as they held Marianne down on the bed. A babel set in: everyone was affected. The chest of drawers rocked noisily back and forth, its handles clanked discordantly. The door to the room swung and banged, swung and banged, swung and banged. Marianne’s body shirt split down the middle, exposing her breasts and middle. Her jeans tore at the seams. Her voice rose louder and louder in a series of slow, staccato screams. Great welts appeared across her torso, groin, legs, and face, as if an invisible horsewhip was thrashing her unmercifully. She struggled and kicked and heaved and spat. Now she was incontinent, urinating and excreting all over the bed, filling their nostrils with acrid odor.

  Peter kept murmuring: “He vanquished you. He vanquished you. He vanquished you…” But the pain in his will struggling against that will began to numb him; and his throat was dry. His eyes blurred over. His eardrums were splitting. He felt dirty beyond any human cleansing. He was slipping, slipping, slipping.

  “Jesus! Mary!…Conor,” he whispered as his knees buckled, “it’s all lost. I can’t hold. Jesus!…”

  Seven thousand miles away across ocean and continent, in Rome, the doctor nodded to the nurse as he stepped out of Father Conor’s room. He told the father superior there was no point in calling the ambulance. The damage was too massive this time. It would be a matter of mere hours.

  It was Conor’s third stroke. He had been fine all that evening. Then in the small hours of the morning, he had called his superior on the house phone from his room: “Fatherr, I’m goin’ teh cause yeh throubel agin.” When they reached Conor, they found him slumped over his desk, his right hand clutching a crucifix.

  “Father, it’s all right. It’s me. It’s all over.”

  Peter’s younger colleague helped Peter to his feet. Peter had fallen on his knees and bent over until his forehead touched the floor. By the bed, Peter saw the doctor was listening to Marianne’s heartbeat with a stethoscope. Her father was stroking her hand and talking to her through his tears: “It’s all right, my baby. It’s all right. You’re through. You’re safe, baby. It’s all right.”

  The bank manager had gone outside to talk with Marianne’s mother and brother. Marianne was quiet now, breathing regularly. The bed was a shambles. The ex-policeman opened the window, and the sounds of traffic entered the room. It was around 10:15 P.M.

  “I must phone Conor early,” Peter said to his colleague. Then, “I wonder what else happened today?” He looked over at Marianne again. “Zio’s visit can’t be all.”

  Father James looked at him dumbly, not catching the train of his thought. He would never understand exorcists, he felt.

  Then Peter continued: “Is it because love is one throughout the world, and hate is one throughout the world?” Peter addressed the seeming vague question to no one in particular.

  The younger priest turned away from the pain he saw on Peter’s face; it was more than he could take just now. “I will get you some coffee,” he said brusquely, feeling the hot tears at the back of his own eyes.

  But Peter was looking out the window at the night sky. His mind was far away, his senses almost asleep with fatigue.

  Down below Marianne’s window, the crowds were returning from Yankee Stadium. Zio at that moment was standing in a darkened gallery of the Vatican Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, gazing at Michelangelo’s Pietà: the dead Jesus in the arms of his mother. Television cameras carried his voice to millions that night: “We bless all of you, invoking upon you an abundance of heavenly blessings and graces.”

  Father Bones and Mister Natch

  The marriage was to take place at 8:00 A.M. on the Massepiq seashore, just around Dutchman’s Point, New England. It was already a bright and sunny March day at 7:30 A.M. as the first guests arrived. A landward breeze, like the breath of the sun from the East, blew clusters of white clouds across the blue morning sky and juggled the sea with ripples. The tide, almost fully in and about to ebb, was like a formless giant exhaling and inhaling. It sent wave after wave in an unbroken flow to the long shoreline. Each one broke there with a sharp tap on the sand, spread out a running tapestry of whitened water with a rustling whisper, and then was sucked rasping back over sand and pebbles.

  This music of the waters and the thin piping of the wind was a quiet but powerful rhythm that ebbed and flowed, uninterrupted by any other sound. As the guests came, they fell under its spell. It was the voice of a very ancient world that had always existed, always moved, and now seemed to be putting them, the intruders, on notice: “This is my world you have entered. But since this is the morning of man and woman, my children, I will pause a while. This is a new beginning.”

  It was, in fact, exactly the sort of morning that Father Jonathan had hoped for. Everything was natural. The only perfume was the air, crisp with a little chill, fresh with salt, exhilarating with light. The only sanctuary was the sharply shelving beach, with the sand dunes behind it, the sea in front of it, its roof the wide dome of the sky. The only altar was formed by the barefoot bride and bridegroom standing where the waters spread a constantly renewed carpet of foam and spindrift around their feet. The only music was the sounding sea and breeze. The only mystery was this beginning undertaken by two human beings in view of an unseen future.

  Father Jonathan arrived last. Punctually at eight he began the ceremony. Barefoot like the bride and the bridegroom, wearing a white sleeveless shirt over his denims and a gold-colored stole around his neck, he stood at the edge of the tide, the sea to his right and the land to his left. In front of him stood Hilda and Jerome, the boy and the girl to be married, both in their early twenties. She, in a white ankle-length dress gathered at her waist by a belt woven of long grasses, her hair parted in the middle, falling down on her shoulders. He, wearing a white shirt over blue shorts. Their faces were quiet and calm, swept clean of any trouble.

  Hilda and Jerome had their eyes fixed on Jonathan’s as he began to speak in a loud and exulting voice which, bell-like, carried to the ears of the 40 or so people standing some yards away at the edge of the sand dunes. “Here on the sand by the sea, here where all great human things have always begun, we stand to witness another great beginning. Hilda and Jerome are about to promise each other to each other in the greatest of all human beginnings.”

  A pleasant sense of anticipation ran through the listeners. Athletic, bronzed, graceful, deliberate in his movements, taller than either the boy or the girl in front of him, golden hair touching his shoulders, Jonathan was in complete, even dramatic command of the situation. His eyes had the peculiar blue sheen you cannot believe to be natural until you see it. A fire of blue seemed to burn in them, giving off a hypnotic brilliance. They lacked the warm sentiment of brown eyes; but a burnished patina prevented you from reading them, and this created their mystery.

  Only one thing marred Jonathan’s appearance. As he gestured grandly and raised his hand in an initial blessing, some of the guests noticed it: his right index finger was crooked. He could not straighten it. But it was a little thing swallowed up in
the golden-blue morning, in the blaze of Jonathan’s eyes, in the lilt of the moving sea.

  As Jonathan’s voice rang out, and nature kept up its endless rhythm in apparent unison, only one person seemed incongruous. He stood at the back and to one side of the guests, staring intently through Polaroid glasses at the boy and girl. Lanky, clad in sweater and slacks, with both hands thrust in his trousers pockets, he was the only one wearing a hat, a black hat.

  “Funny character. Wonder who he is?” Jerome’s father whispered to his wife. But the parents forgot about him momentarily, and no one else particularly noticed him as Father Jonathan’s sermon reached its climax before the actual vows.

  “…both are entering this mystery. And both are mirrors of nature’s fullness—its womb, its fertility, its nurturing milk, its powerful seed, its supreme ecstasy, its nestling sleep, its mystery of oneness, and the long mysteries of the immortality it alone confers—if we are one with nature and participants in its sacrament of life and of death. As the perfect man, Jesus, our model, was.”

  The man in the black hat stirred uneasily, leaning forward to catch every detail, all the while his eyes on the boy and the girl.

  Father Jonathan flung a smoldering gaze over the guests to his left. “Many have sought to rob him, our supreme example, of his human value for us.” His voice throbbed with deep emotion. “To cap his glorious life with a weak, milk-and-water ending. What is all this dreadful chicanery of his supposed resurrection but a cheat? If he died, he died. Completely. Really. What sort of sacrifice and therefore what sort of love for us was there if he died to live again? Thus to rob the sacrifice of its very sting and its true glory and to rob him and us of all true human nobility—is not this the cruel joke of the happy ending they have attached to his heroic death? He, the supreme hero? Making a Grimm’s fairy tale out of the greatest story ever told.