Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

But Yves neither was mystical nor was he paralyzed by religious scruples. He was undergoing what he now describes as the most agonizing whipping and thrashing of his inner self. It began one day when, as he tells it, from the moment that his hands were outstretched over the chalice and the bread, until after the Consecration, the “remote control” changed in force and in its “message.”

  “I fought every inch of the way,” Yves recounts today, “and I lost every inch of that fight.”

  Instead of the officially prescribed words of the Mass and the concepts expressed in those words, Yves now found different concepts and different words. It was always and only key words that were changed. Every time, for instance, the word “saving” or “salvation” was ritually prescribed, he could only think and say “winning” and “triumph.” “Saving” and “salvation” appeared to him like words scribbled on bits of torn paper and pinned to a wall out of his reach. To reach for them impotently was the source of intense agony and searing pain.

  Similarly with “love” (this now became “pride”), “died” and “death” (now “returned home to death” and “nothingness”), “sacrifice” (now “defiance”), “sins” (now “myths and fables”), “bread” and “wine” (now “desire” and “pleasure”). So it went.

  An additional agony ensued whenever a sign of the cross was called for by the ritual, when Yves would find only the index finger of his right hand capable of motion, and it could trace only a vertical line upward.

  Throughout, his memory and reflexes propelled him to act according to the ritual. The substitute words and thoughts poured in. He recognized immediately that the sense and intent of the whole ceremony was changed utterly by those new words and thoughts. He fought with will and mind to retain the ritual. But each time it was the same: as long as he fought, some hard lump seemed to start expanding within him—not in his body, not in his brain, but in his living consciousness. “It was like remembering last night’s nightmare and knowing that this reality was what frightened you then.” As the lump expanded, it began to reduce in a sinister fashion the area of his very self.

  At the excruciating limit of this inner pain, it began to have a physical and psychological ricochet: the blood roared in his ears and peculiar pains started—his hair, eyelashes, and toenails ached unbearably. Quick kaleidoscopic pictures of his entire life tumbled in front of his mind, always making him look ludicrous, smelly, contemptible, beyond help. He could hear himself beginning to form a scream, which, if it had emerged, would have been: “I’m drowning! I’m perishing! Save me!”

  It never emerged. He stopped fighting. All agony ceased. And a marvelous exhilaration—not unmixed with relief—flooded him. The ease was almost painful in its contrast with the pain that had preceded it.

  The final agony came one day when he started to pronounce the words of Consecration. Instead of “This is My Body” and “This is My Blood,” other words echoed in his own voice: “This is My Tombstone” and “This is My Sexuality.” As he pronounced these words while bending over the altar as prescribed by the ritual, all intent of authentic Consecration fled from him. His index finger bent into a hook shape, thrust itself into the wine, and then scratched a vertical red stain on the white wafer.

  At that moment, Yves could not straighten up. His ears were filled with two different sounds. He was sure he actually heard them: a jeering laugh that echoed and echoed and echoed; and a faint keening, a muted wail or cry of protest which eventually died away in the reverberations of that heinous laugh. Then, as from that “remote control,” he heard the syllables: “Jesus is now Jonathan,” and “Jonathan is now Yves,” and “Yves is now Jonathan and Jesus.” And finally, “All is gathered into Mr. Natural.”

  It was some time before Yves realized that only he had heard all those profanities. But whether they heard those words or not, it was Yves’ appearance after those painfully extended moments of inward battle that shocked the people who watched him. When he turned around finally to distribute communion, his face was terribly drawn, haggard, the color of chalk. His hair, cut short then, seemed to be standing on end. His eyes, normally so impressively clear and winning, were narrowed to slits; and he was muttering through clenched teeth. The whole impression was stark and lifeless.

  He finished the Mass in a violent state of inner tension. Only after some time spent alone was he once more flooded with that strange peace and exultation. Finally, when he had recovered himself alone in the vesting room, he emerged smiling, composed, looking as he had always looked.

  His yielding to the “control” at Mass had immediate and far-reaching effects. In baptizing infants, he changed the Latin words, which were unintelligible to the parents and bystanders. When he was supposed to say, “I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” he said, “I baptize you in the name of the Sky, the Earth, and Water.”

  But the most momentous change in his performance both of Baptism and the other Sacraments (Extreme Unction, Confession) affected those parts which spoke of “Satan” or the “Devil” or “evil spirits.”

  At Baptism, instead of saying (in Latin), “Depart, Unclean Spirit” or “To renounce Satan and all his works” or “Become a child of God,” he now said, “Depart, spirit of hate for the Angel of Light,” and “To renounce all exile of Prince Lucifer,” and “Become a member of the Kingdom.”

  In Confession, he stopped saying, “I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit”; instead, he said, “I confirm you in your natural wishes, in the name of Sky, Earth, and Water.” And when he administered the Sacrament of the Dying (“Extreme Unction” was its old name), he committed the dying person to the mercy and peace of “Sister Earth” and to the eternity of “Mother Nature.”

  Whenever he felt an initial repugnance to accepting what was “dictated” to him by the “remote control,” that frightful inner lump grew sensitive; and Yves became a being of pure pain. He quickly obeyed, and he was rewarded always by a wild exultation. The sun was brighter. The blue of the sky was deeper. The coffee he drank was never so good. The blood coursed vigorously in his veins. And his head never felt clearer.

  By the end of 1964, it became obvious to his colleagues there was something wrong with Yves that they could no longer explain by his artistic temperament, his French Canadian-Swedish ancestry, a mystical period of life, or religious scruples. It was all too peculiar. It frightened some. It repelled others. It angered still others. It left all with an eerie sense of something utterly alien in Yves. And to cap it all, Yves had begun to refer to himself as “Father Jonathan.”

  But it was always isolated things, and nobody ever put them all together into a definite pattern. When he turned around at Mass (as the priest did four or five times) to say “Dominus vobiscum” (“The Lord be with you”), one colleague swore he heard Yves say, “Dominus Lucis vobiscum” (“The Lord of Light be with you”). Others did not hear that single added word, but the faint glint in his eyes gave them a momentary shock. Once, as he touched the forehead of a baby he was baptizing, the baby went into violent hysteria and had to be rushed to the hospital for treatment.

  All such incidents taken individually were susceptible of perfectly rational explanations. But his visit to a boy dying of bone cancer was the final incident that led ultimately to his abandonment of his post.

  It was at the end of 1966. The boy, the fourteen-year-old red-haired son of Irish immigrant parents, was to be anointed: death was certain and imminent. Before the priest, Father Yves, arrived, the boy asked his mother to wash his face and hands and help him put on his favorite shirt and tie. He also asked his father to turn his bed toward the door, because, he said, there was a dark thing in the corner of the room.

  When Yves arrived, all went normally until Yves endeavored to straighten the bed, making the boy again face the “darkened” corner. The boy started to scream: “No! Father! No! Please! Mother!” Then as his mother ran in and Yves, having straightened the b
ed, stood over toward that particular corner, the boy started to weep uncontrollably.

  Yves does not remember all the boy said, but he does recall certain words and sentences: “darkness,” “they smile at each other,” “he hates Jesus,” “save me,” “I don’t want to go with them.”

  Finally the boy’s father apologetically requested Yves to leave and come back the next day. But his mother telephoned Yves’ superior, the pastor of the parish. The pastor came an hour later, anointed the boy, and waited for the end, which came quickly.

  The incident was the last straw. And now everything known and remarked about Yves for the previous three years was put together.

  The pastor and his senior assistant said nothing to Yves, but they spent about three months gathering information and watching Yves closely. In addition to the peculiarities mentioned already, they received a puzzling report they could not make head or tail of. A man answering Yves’ description periodically lived in a loft in Greenwich Village, New York. His appearances there always coincided with Yves’ vacations and the free days when he was away from his home parish.

  They found out that the loft was known as the Shrine of the New Being; that the man was called Father Jonathan; that he held services for all and sundry: said Mass, performed marriages, heard confessions, ordained men and women as priests of the Shrine, baptized infants and adults, went on call to homes and hospitals where the dying lay; and that he had one other specific rite, which he called the Bearing of the Light. Its initiated members were called the Light-Bearers. But no details about either members or their rites were available.

  Just at the moment that a full written report was ready and about to be sent to the bishop, Yves seemed to have been alerted—however late—to the intentions of his colleagues. For about two months his behavior, as far as anyone could judge, was absolutely normal. He never went to Greenwich Village. He worked hard.

  Then, in mid-June 1967, when all concerned were just about to dismiss the whole affair as exaggerated and irrelevant, Yves had his first terrible seizure. Predictably, perhaps, it was at Mass.

  When he had stretched his hands out, palms downward over the chalice, he suddenly started to weep and groan and sway. One hand clamped down roughly over the chalice. The other fell resoundingly on the white wafer of bread. The servers called the pastor. He, together with the two other assistants, could not physically dislodge Yves’ hands, or move the chalice, or stop Yves’ weeping and groaning. He and the chalice and the bread were rooted physically to their place as if by rivets. He became incontinent on the altar.

  By that time, the pastor had emptied the church and locked the doors. They were about to call a doctor when Yves suddenly let go of the chalice and the bread. He seemed to be flung backward, tumbling down the three steps of the altar and falling heavily to the marble floor of the sanctuary. He was unconscious when they reached him.

  He awoke about an hour later. When the pastor spoke with him, Yves disclosed to him that his mother had been epileptic, and he pleaded with the pastor not to put him to shame publicly. He would go away in order to rest, follow a doctor’s advice after a checkup, and all would be well.

  But now the pastor believed the worst. In his eyes, Father Yves must be possessed. The pastor’s conclusion was no more than a deep conviction based on his personal reactions. But even so, it was a serious matter, and it would not be dropped or postponed again until the pastor was sure one way or the other. A discreet inquiry revealed that Sybil, Yves’ mother, was not epileptic. In a long Sunday morning interview, the bishop was told the whole story, including the pastor’s worst fears. That was in June at the seminary, where the bishop was ordaining the new young priests.

  The bishop called in Father David M. for consultation.

  After his consultation with the bishop, Father David had an interview with Yves. He came away completely baffled. Not only did Yves cooperate fully with him, but whatever Yves said seemed to strike a sympathetic chord in David. The only two peculiarities he could not explain satisfactorily were Yves’ constant use of his new name, Jonathan, and the condition of Yves’ right index finger.

  The name David could accept. After all, only ten years before, David had started to call himself, or at least to sign letters to his intimate friends, as “Pierre” (after Teilhard de Chardin); and he had taken a lot of leg-pulling from his colleagues about that. And the name “Bones” had stuck to David chiefly because David, once he heard the name, deliberately used it several times during his lectures; he liked it.

  The finger was another matter. According to the doctor who had X-rayed it, no bone was broken and no nerve was shattered. The problem could in no way be traced to the supposed epileptic history of Yves’ mother. There was calcification in the finger; but the deformity could not be traced to a blow or injury; and no calcification could be found elsewhere in Yves’ body. He was found not to be arthritic.

  For the rest of it, David could not find much to be alarmed about. He had checked out Yves’ mother: she had, indeed, been subject to some sort of seizures, but the doctors who examined her always ruled out epilepsy. That much left David relieved. But he still came away baffled. He was convinced that he had missed something essential; and he felt foolish without knowing why. His discussion with Yves had covered both the doctrine Yves professed as a priest and Yves’ own spirituality. As far as David could make out, both doctrine and spirituality coincided more or less with his own.

  “If Yves is in error,” David told the bishop later, “then so am I. Now what do I do?”

  The bishop eyed David speculatively for a while. Then he said softly: “I suppose if all this paleontology and de Chardin’s teachings were to lead you to a point where you had to choose faith or de Chardin, you would choose faith, Father David.”

  It was a statement of fact, with an implied question. David glanced at the bishop, who was now looking out the window of his study with his back to David.

  The bishop continued. “Tell me, Father. Is evolution as much a fact as, say, the salvation of us all by Jesus?”

  David faced the question with its now distant echoes of the foreboding he had felt the day the bishop had named him to the post of exorcist. Today he says his first reaction to the question was surprise: “It’s as if I had neglected something final, and the time was coming when I would have to face it.” Deep in his mind, he realized, he had spontaneously said, “Yes.”

  To the bishop he answered by rising and saying something to the effect that it was like comparing apples and oranges. And the bishop apparently wanted only to put the question. He was far too old and wise a man always to expect precise answers.

  After this interview with his bishop, David was not at peace. He made up his mind to see Yves the following day.

  What he proposed to Yves was quite simple. After much thought, it seemed to David that they should conduct a ceremony in which they would say special prayers for the sick and against disease, and in which they would also go through the main parts of the Exorcism ritual. He, David, would conduct a simple exorcism. The idea, he told Yves, was to satisfy the bishop and the pastor.

  Yves saw no difficulty. He would like that, he said. Only Yves’ pastor would be present; no trouble was anticipated.

  They performed the exorcism in the private oratory of the seminary, all three men kneeling in the pews normally occupied by the seminarians. Yves answered in a low murmur all the questions put to him by David as exorcist. “Do you believe in God?” “Do you believe in Jesus Christ, Our Lord?” “Do you renounce the Devil and all his works and pomps?” and so on.

  Yves kissed the crucifix; and, jabbing his crooked index finger into the holy-water font, he blessed himself.

  David and the pastor rose to their feet at the end of the ceremony. Yves had not budged from his place where he knelt with his face in his hands. They both went out quietly, leaving him alone.

  “That’s that,” said David with a sigh of relief.

  “I did not hear one clear
word from him,” rejoined the pastor, “but I suppose I’d be as subdued as he was in the same circumstances.”

  In the oratory, Yves raised his face from his hands a few minutes later and looked around; he was alone; and he could not remember much. He remembered coming in with David and the pastor, kneeling down, and opening the ritual book. But that was all. For the 15 minutes of the exorcism ceremony he had completely blacked out. When he knelt down, it was as if a powerful sedative had been injected into him. He remembered nothing except a sudden compulsion forcing his lips to speak and his limbs to move.

  He waited a moment now, then looked toward the altar. All was normal on the altar; but between him and it a bulky, formless shadow hung in the air blotting out all sight of the crucifix over the altar and of the stained-glass windows behind the altar. Then, abruptly but calmly, like a man remembering a decision he had made or some instructions from a superior, Yves rose and left the oratory. A seminarian he met at the door caught sight of Yves’ face: it was glowing and laughing.

  That evening, as David sat in his study, he could not concentrate on the work in hand. He was supposed to finish a paper for a conference on de Chardin’s work at Choukoutien, China, where the Jesuit had unearthed the fossil of Sinanthropos. But David’s mind kept going back again and again to the bishop’s question: “Is evolution as much a fact as the salvation of us all by Jesus?” A foolish question, he told himself. No meaning to it at all. The bishop was of the old school. But still it kept bothering him.

  He looked up at the glass cases where all his beloved fossils and paleontological treasures were exhibited. His eyes traveled over a chipped skull casing, the collection of anklebones, the pieces of ancient rock in which flora and fauna fossils were embedded, and the series of reconstructed busts: Solo Man, Rhodesian Man, Neanderthal Man, Cro-Magnon Man. His mind was playing tricks with him: not only were the plaster busts looking at him, he thought, but these dead and broken human bones seemed to be speaking without sound.