Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  Until this moment, the woman to whom Jonathan’s mother was praying had been merely a brightly lit and inaccessible star in his religious firmament: a Galilean Jewess who, without personal merit, without having thought one thought or said one word or performed one action, had been privileged with a grace no other human would ever, will ever, receive—to be totally pleasing to God’s purest holiness from the very first instant of her personal existence. That had been the sum of Mary for Father Joseph. This had been all her dignity. She had never plucked the flowers of evil. She had been preserved. One of God’s favorites.

  Now, listening with David to that chant, he sensed with a speed that made understanding almost violent what being a mother and what being a child meant. He grasped the mysterious convivium, the mutual sharing and togetherness in human living of child and mother, their presence one to the other. And it dawned on him that that presence had no parallel elsewhere on the entire landscape of human living—neither lover to beloved, nor friend to friend, nor citizen to country, nor man to God.

  Now this one mother was singing in prayer to another mother with a faith and a confidence that no man could summon. He understood: as mothers who had lived within a filigree work of heartbeat to heartbeat, breath to breath, movement to movement, sleep to sleep, wakefulness to wakefulness, they both had been placed, not at the periphery, but at the luminous center of a child’s delicate beginnings in psychophysical life; and both had seen a child pass across the threshold of birth, quickening to consciousness, to recognition, to mentalism, to volition, to meaning.

  Jonathan’s mother finished the Salve Regina. For a moment there was silence. Then she improvised a last, spoken prayer. David and Jonathan heard her say: “You were his mother. You saw him die. You saw him live again. You understand. You could have died of pain on either occasion. Help me now.”

  Joseph felt helpless against the tears that came to his eyes.

  He was aroused by David’s voice speaking quietly. In the corner David was kneeling beside Jonathan. Jonathan had sat up and was leaning, not crouching now, with his back to the wall. Both hands were in David’s.

  Joseph turned away to leave the room. He had understood nothing, he felt. Anyway, it was confession time.

  Jonathan had the bleached and windswept look of one whose face has been torn by pain and weeping, the angelic calm and luminosity—almost joy—that Joseph had most often seen on the faces of the dying when, after rebellion and despair, they finally accepted the inevitable and turned fully to belief and hope.

  It was an enviable peace.

  The Virgin and the Girl-Fixer

  Suddenly the whole scene changed in that Exorcism room, like an eerie and expert theater experience where, in a few seconds, the main actors change costumes and roles and the scenery is switched on invisible wheels, back to front, upside down, inside out, producing a kaleidoscope of change that makes everyone blink in disbelief.

  At one moment, Father Gerald, the exorcist, was bending over the possessed, Richard/Rita,* who had sunk his teeth in his own instep. In the next instant, the glaze in Richard/Rita’s eyes broke, melting into a lurid gleam of mockery. Greenish. The teeth loosened their grip on the instep. The mouth opened, baring gums and throat, the tongue protruded, quivering on a stream of gray foam bubbles. The whole face was furrowed in irregular lines, as Richard/Rita broke into peals of laughter. Great buffeting gusts of mocking, jeering, Schadenfreude laughter. Laughter pouring from a belly of amused scorn and contemptuous hate.

  In a fraction of a second Gerald understood. The Girl-Fixer, invisible to his eyes, was on him, two claws clutching at his middle. His assistants heard the raucous laughter. They held their ears. But Gerald’s agony they could not know. All they saw were Gerald’s sudden, violent spasms backward and forward “as if his middle was caught in a vise”; then the screeching shredding of his cassock and clothes, leaving him naked from chest to ankles. After that, all details escaped them in the violent jerkings and writhings of his body.

  Gerald felt one claw was now totally sunk in his rectum. Another claw held his genitals, stretching his scrotum away from his penis, jerking at him brutally. Both claws were stiff, cutting like the jagged edge of a tin can, driving deeper and deeper, impaling him. He reeled away from the couch where Richard/Rita lay laughing, laughing, laughing, kicking the air and thumping the couch with clenched fists in deafening bursts of merriment.

  Gerald staggered zigzag across the room, bent like a jackknife, involuntary screams gushing from his throat. One claw rocked back and forth within him. Slivers of agony jabbed and pierced through his buttocks and belly and groin, as flesh and veins and mucous membrane and skin tore and ripped irregularly.

  A fetid smell wafted up to his nostrils and from behind his head. The voice of the Girl-Fixer beat at his eardrums unmercifully: “You’re my sow. I’m on you. Your boar. My snout is giving you the best blow-job in the Kingdom. Shoot, sow! Spread your legs, sow! Your boar is mounting your flesh, opening your little untouched hairs. My prick is taking your virginity. You’re no girl. But I’m still the fixer of every box!”

  Gerald staggered in spasms, stumbling over his feet, doubled up, flaying the air helplessly, leaving a thin trail of semen, blood, excrement, and screams, until he bumped heavily into the wall, and fell to the floor in a twisted bundle. Blood sprang from a thin, vertical split that opened from the middle of his forehead up into his hair.

  Richard/Rita froze into the blazing look again.

  The attack had lasted about three seconds. It was over before the others recovered themselves. Suddenly, Gerald’s screams and Richard/Rita’s laughter stilled, there was a moment without sound in the room, like the farthest edge of whispers. The raw silence after raucous, earsplitting noise.

  Then, a flurry of voices and activity. The doctor and the police captain lifted Gerald onto the stretcher that had ironically been brought for Richard/Rita. The four men quickly bound Richard/Rita down tightly to the iron frame of the couch. No one looked at those eyes. All felt the blazing glance on them, intent, triumphant, smug. “Like tying down a hot, steamy carcass,” one of them recalled afterwards.

  Richard/Rita’s two brothers, Bert and Jasper, eyes swollen red with tears, faces dirtied yellow with panic, carried the stretcher out. As the assistants left the house, they felt the stark contrast between the scene they had just witnessed and the outside world. In the garden by the pond the thrushes were warbling in the first wave of the dawn chorus Richard/Rita had loved so much and which had drawn him to live here in the first place. The sun was shining.

  Inside, Gerald’s priest assistant, Father John, still wearing his immaculate cassock, settled down in an easy chair to watch and pray. He was wordless. Just to be sure, he held the crucifix in one hand and the holy-water flask in the other.

  A year earlier, in the ordered life of the seminary, he had known nothing of all this. Had not even suspected its existence. Evil had been a definition on the white page of a theology manual. And the Devil, well, that had been really not more than a mysterious name for a gentleman thought of in terms of horns, a green face, hooves, and a forked tail. Now John had the bleached, drained look which only youth carries when strain and weariness veil its freshness, and it has neither age lines to show nor makeup to lose, only paled illusions to shield it. It was 6:20 A.M.

  There would now be a delay of four and a half weeks before Gerald could resume and successfully terminate the exorcism of Richard/Rita. The violent outcome of the first part of the exorcism would provoke many difficulties for Gerald. His own bishop entertained doubts about Gerald’s competency. The psychiatrists involved in Richard/Rita’s case decided that Gerald, a layman to psychology, was meddling dangerously with Richard/Rita’s mental health. Gerald’s own health was a continuing problem. And, as experience taught, even a partial failure to complete an exorcism meant that eventual completion of it would be doubly difficult.

  Yet—if at all possible—Gerald had to complete the exorcism of Richard/Ri
ta. For two main reasons. If Gerald were not personally to do so, there would be no guarantee that he himself would be immune from at least harassment—if not worse—by the evil spirit that possessed Richard/Rita. As it happened, Gerald did not survive very long after his successful termination of the exorcism. Apart from that, there was now a definite possibility that an attempt at exorcism by another person would fail.

  GERALD

  Gerald’s housekeeper, Hannah, showed me through the house into the garden and called out to the thin figure in shirt and jeans tending the flower beds at the far end of the garden. As I crossed the lawn, he waved to me; “Hi! Come over and chat, I want to finish this job before sunset.” It was about 5:30 P.M. The sun was beginning to cool, but its light was still gilding everything about me in warm yellow.

  “Out here among my tulips,” said Father Gerald to me with a wave of the trowel in his left hand, “I have great beauty. And peace, of course.” Still bending over his flowers, as he patted the earth: “Done much gardening, Malachi, in your time?” I said I had done a little. I asked if I might take notes of our conversation. He laughed lightly in assent. From the start, Father Gerald established an atmosphere of ease: I had been expected; I should take a welcome for granted.

  The last thing I had expected to find Gerald doing was tulip gardening. Sitting weakly in a deep armchair reading, perhaps. Or hobbling painfully on a stick to meet me with a wan smile. But enjoying life and tranquillity with obvious measures of physical well-being and quite evident inner happiness—this was almost a shock to me.

  There were three tulip beds. He was working the middle one. Beyond them, a row of yellow azaleas. Then the ground sloped down to rolling prairie fields and distant mountains. Somewhere in the sky a small airplane droned.

  His casualness was contagious. I asked: “What exactly do you like about your tulips, Gerald?” I was standing over him to one side.

  Without looking up, he went on working, answering me slowly and deliberately. “No claims. You see. They don’t clamor at you. They just are there. Beautifully. Just are.” The slight emphasis on that last word had a faint French roll to it. “As you apparently know”—this last with a boyish grin, teasing himself wryly more than he was teasing me—“I have had some dealings with beauty. And the beast. After that, you know beauty when you meet it.” He paused, glancing up at the twin mountain peaks away to the far left. But the sun was in my eyes and his features were blurred to me. Then, finishing his thought: “And the beast.”

  After a minute or two, Gerald straightened up with an unhurried gentleness, facing me for the first time, his arms by his sides, his back to the sun. Now, four months after he had completed the exorcism of Richard/Rita, in retirement on the edge of a Midwestern town, Gerald, according to medical reports, had about five or six more months to live. At the age of forty-eight he had incurable heart disease and had already survived two strokes.

  The man looking at me was slightly taller than myself. Thin-shouldered, blond, gray-eyed, he stood in an askew fashion, as if the center of his torso had been twisted out of shape—a memento not of the strokes, but of the Girl-Fixer; an ungentle reminder of his exorcism of Richard/Rita. A scar ran vertically up his forehead into his hairline. What struck me particularly was his face shining like a beacon—a light all over it, without any visible source. Then there was a dark, oblong patch on his forehead between the eyes. Like a nevus. Mutual friends, referring me to him, had told me about it. “Gerald’s Jesus patch” they had called it jokingly but affectionately. The new scar ran through the “patch.”

  Gerald, they had said, never looks into you, just at you. Not until now did I realize what they meant. Like when you look at a city on a map in order to find out where it is. It was your context that mattered to Gerald, where you were at. Only, I did not know then what he saw as context.

  “I know very little about you, except that I am supposed to trust you. Your name—Malachi Martin. Where you live—New York. You were a Jesuit once. Some books to your credit. You wanted to see me about Richard/Rita.” His tone was level and low. After a few moments and still looking at my eyes: “Nothing much else, beyond that you appear to have peace in you, but”—with a quick glance all over my face—“you strike me as not having paid all your dues.” He must have noticed some involuntary reaction in me, some unvoiced protest. “No. Not that. Those dues we hardly ever pay. I meant: you seem to have tasted beauty’s sweetness, but not its awesomeness.”

  He stopped and looked down at the tulips. “I garden regularly. It relaxes. Tulips—well, I love their colors, I suppose.” Another pause. The boyish grin again. “Let’s take some tulips in to Hannah for the dinner table.”

  He bent down again. There had been no tension between us, only briefly on my part, when he scrutinized me for the first time. And now the tension had disappeared. He had satisfied himself about some puzzle in me.

  “I do want to talk about Richard/Rita,” I said as he set to work again. “But my chief interest bears on you.” He worked on in silence for a few moments. An early-evening breeze bent the tulips. The sunlight had dimmed to a very light gray-blue.

  “You realize,” he said matter-of-factly as if to put to rest any tension I might still have, “you won’t get away with it this time. Not scot-free, anyway. I mean, if ever you paid your dues, you’ll pay them now—if you go ahead with your project.”

  “I have thought about all that.”

  “This is no mere fun and games, Malachi. You’re treading on their turf. Dangerously. From their point of view. If I can believe my friends, that is.” I began to notice his staccato style of speaking. “But I suppose. You’ve calculated all that. Eh? Still set on taking the risk. Risk there is. Anyway. You have your own protection. That much I can see.”

  “I spent two days with Richard/Rita, Gerald.”

  “All going well?” We both were avoiding the sharp-toothed pronouns, he, she, his, her, and the like.

  “As far as I can judge. Of course…” Since his exorcism, Richard/Rita had lived in an in-between land of his mind. There was disquieting indefiniteness about him.

  “Of course. I understand. But Richard/Rita is at least clean.”

  “What would you say was the principal benefit to you from the whole matter?”

  “Before it all happened, I never knew what love was. Or what masculine and feminine meant. Really did not. Besides, I got rid of some deep pride in myself.”

  It was now getting chilly. I was happy to stroll with Gerald into the house for dinner. We talked continuously. And, as we did, it became clear to me yet again that, while true cases of Exorcism take their toll, they are not simple horror tales for frightening readers and moviegoers. For all that evening we were delving deeper not into horror, but into the frame of love that makes it possible to expel horror. And the case of Richard/Rita was important beyond many another, exactly because it centered on our ability to identify love, and on the dire risk of confusing that love with what we can only see as its physical or even chemical components.

  It became clear that for Father Gerald the importance centered on the same point. Richard/Rita had carried the confusion to ghastly extremes. But for those who could come to know and understand his case, there is a lesson to be learned. I was trying to understand through Gerald and through his entire experience, so bizarre and violent, what that gentle lesson was.

  “Gerald, I want to get back later perhaps to what you meant by ‘clean’—you used the term when speaking of Richard/Rita before dinner. But just now, something else is on my mind.” We were sitting in his den after dinner. “Having read the transcript of the exorcism and talked extensively with Richard/Rita, my questions to you center around sexuality and love. For instance, why were you nicknamed the ‘Virgin’ in the seminary?” I had learned this from Gerald’s friends.

  “I was the only one who didn’t know the nickname for half my seminary days. As to their reason for it, it seems I gave the impression of not knowing anything about sex.”r />
  “Did you?”

  “Not really. I had seen diagrams and pictures, that sort of stuff. I could distinguish a passionate kiss from a friendly or affectionate one in the movies. But sex as such remained a hidden thing for me.”

  “But didn’t you have the normal feelings about twelve or thirteen or fourteen?”

  “I don’t know what you mean by ‘normal.’ I never had one of those nocturnal ejaculations. Never yet had one. When I started to grow hair on various places, it sort of wasn’t there one day, and the next day it was.”

  “Did you ever masturbate?”

  “Never. Not that I wanted to. I didn’t. Erections around the age of puberty and later just were taken by me as happening to me. It sounds funny”—he grinned boyishly—“but not as something about which I had to do something. Embarrassing. But then my father took me for a walk and gave me his set speech on sex which he gave to all my four brothers. It always began with the affirmation: ‘Look, Gerry, you have a penis. And it is used for two things neither of which it does very well: urinating and copulating.’ All of us knew the speech by heart. Then he explained clinically what copulation was.”

  I steered the conversation to the time just before Gerald had entered the seminary: had he gone out with girls or dated them or done anything more complicated than that? Apparently he used to take the sisters of his school friends to see a movie now and then, usually in a group. He went to some dances, but never really enjoyed them. He avoided them whenever he could. He was embarrassed by girls and by women in general.

  He was on his feet now. “Let’s take a turn in the garden. It will help oil the wheels.” We went outside. It was already night. A few clouds lazed across the stars. There was no moon. The garden was partially lit by the lights from the house. As we walked down toward the tulip beds we entered greater darkness. A few lights could be seen winking on the distant mountainside. There was very little sound. “Ever kiss a girl?”