Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  Richard was fascinated. He watched her for a while. Then he lifted his head and listened to the wind, feeling its fingers brushing and striking his face. He crept forward, keeping his head down against the wind, then stopped and watched her more closely. The girl was still moaning; her head twitched now and then.

  Richard remembers very little else. He recalls tearing off his own clothes feverishly (he was afraid she might die before he finished what he wished to do). He talks almost tearfully now of feeling an irresistible desire to have relations with her then and there. He recalls the wind whistling music in his ears and then, marvelously, changing that music to words. He remembers catching the last glance of the girl who stared at him for one instant before her eyes went completely dead. He felt her body shudder.

  Then apparently he stood up in a frenzy of triumph—he had achieved the ultimate watch on woman, he felt. He was seized by a great giddiness as the wind whipped around him. And now, for the first time, he sensed clearly that all his thinking and willing and feeling and imagining led like so many strings back to some central point in him where they lay in the hand of another, who controlled them and him. He felt the security of being controlled and the promise of success: “You shall be as woman!”

  Afterward, when he reflected coolly on the incident, he realized that even in her death throes that woman had shown him the power of the feminine; his sexual relations with her had been a revelation for him. He knew that a decision had been made for him. He did not, as yet, guess from where that decision had come. But he did know what he had to do.

  In the new year Richard went to New York. In previous years he had read extensively about transsexuals and the new transsexualizing operation. He now put himself under the care and supervision of a doctor who assured him that within 16 to 20 months, if all went well with the tests and preparations, he could have the operation, remove all trace of his male inadequacy—this was how Richard looked at his genitals—and acquire the organs of a woman. In late 1970, after passing successfully through the psychiatric examinations, and the necessary changes in the chemistry of his body having been produced by repeated treatments, Richard underwent surgery and emerged successfully from his convalescence in a new state of almost delirious happiness. He returned to Lake House. His mother and father came to see him, as did his brothers and sisters. They had become reconciled to his new status as well as to his newly adopted name of Rita. His boss at the insurance office was persuaded by his father that Richard could do the same work even better than before. So two months later, Richard was back to a normal life of daily work. As Rita.

  The tempo of Richard/Rita’s inner existence now changed. He found his outlook running in two main streams. One was the expected femaleness resulting from the operation. He found greater delight in little details—of cloth, of a story, of colors, of people’s voices, in architecture. No longer did he look for large, sweeping lines in the world around him, nor did he feel inclined to argue logically or to engage in verbal polemics. He felt himself more vulnerable, more susceptible to praise and flattery, on the watch for compliments from men. He had a varied sexual life: he did not discriminate between old and young, ugly and beautiful. It was enough for him that he was desired and that they all found in him something that mystified them while holding them.

  The other stream in his outlook was pockmarked with some stinging deficiencies that distressed him continually. When he had intercourse, for instance, he felt a great deadness in himself: there was no after-feeling of warmth and togetherness and perpetuity. And often this lack was accompanied by an inner bitterness that drove him into rages. It became an obsession with him “to make love and feel life” in himself after he had done so, and to hear his partner express himself in similar terms. But nothing he did ever produced a ray of hope in this direction, until he met Paul.

  Paul, a Chicagoan, a former minister who had turned to banking and brokerage and become a millionaire in the process, was a very impressive character. Tall, good-looking, with salt-and-pepper hair, suave, well dressed, educated, a very good conversationalist, Paul had a brilliant smile. He and Richard/Rita liked each other from the first moment they met at a cocktail party. Richard eventually told Paul his life history. He was surprised by Paul’s matter-of-fact reaction. What amazed Richard/Rita more than that was Paul’s understanding of his difficulty in having intercourse and in its aftermath.

  “I think something can be done about all that, Rita,” he said. “But you will have to consummate a carefully arranged marriage.”

  “Marriage? But marriage is impossible—at least very difficult,” answered Richard.

  “Not the marriage I have in mind. You just need the right partner under the right circumstances. You don’t realize it, but you have been preparing for quite a while for this marriage. Leave it all to me.”

  Richard/Rita did not understand what Paul meant, until he participated in the Black Mass on June 21, 1971.

  The invitation he received from Paul was ostensibly for a midnight party. It was a sultry night without a patch of wind. When Richard/Rita arrived around 10:00 P.M., he was struck by the lavish surroundings. The house, dating from the previous century, stood in its own grounds. About 80 guests were drinking and eating a cold buffet around an open-air pool illuminated by tall, thick candles. Another 40 guests were dancing inside in the ballroom. The air was full of chattering, laughter, music, and celebrations. Paul immediately introduced Richard/Rita to a table at which two young women and their escorts sat. Merriment pervaded the group. Everybody was excited and happy.

  From his position, Richard/Rita could see both ends of the pool. At each end there was a long table covered with food, drinks, ice buckets, and flowers. Behind each table, a long, wall-high, embroidered red curtain hung from a pole. A butler in black evening clothes stood motionless by each curtain.

  Richard/Rita felt surprisingly at home. He joined in the laughter and talk around the table, and cheered as some of the more mellowed guests shoved each other fully clothed into the water.

  At 12:45 P.M., Richard/Rita suddenly noticed a hush. Nobody was speaking any longer. The stereo music had gone silent. Without his realizing it, about three-quarters of the guests had departed. The two couples who had been at his table had excused themselves shortly before, saying that they wanted to dance.

  The guests who remained had fallen silent. They stood in two groups at either end of the pool, facing each other across the water. Then, Richard/Rita noticed his tall host signaling to the two butlers. With a solemn movement, they pulled aside the curtains.

  When the curtains parted, Richard/Rita could see a low altar table at either end of the pool. Above each altar there hung an ornament in the shape of an inverted triangle. At its center there was an inverted crucifix, the head of the crucified resting on the angle of the apex of the triangle. From the interior of the house he now heard the low peals of an organ. And someone was burning incense there, so that the fumes drifted out lazily and lay across the air like slowly twisting blue serpents. Then the guests started to undress in an unconcerned fashion, each one dropping his or her clothes where they stood.

  As if on signal, both groups turned and started to come around the sides of the pool toward Richard/Rita. He started to get up when Paul’s hand fell on his shoulder gently but firmly: “Wait, Rita.” The naked guests filed around him and stood stock-still. Nobody had yet spoken a word. Then Paul took Richard/Rita’s arm so that he stood up. Twenty pairs of arms stretched out from all sides; and unhurriedly, calmly, they undressed Richard/Rita. His host, Paul, was nowhere to be seen at that moment.

  Then one guest, a young blond man in his late twenties, came forward. Around his neck he wore a narrow black stole. There was a ruby ring on the index finger of his left hand.

  “Rita,” he said evenly to Richard/Rita, “I am Father Samson, willing minister of our Lord Satan. Come! Let us adore.”

  His voice, the hands and fingers of the guests, the low organ music, the sultry night,
the light feeling in his body, the languid odor of the incense, all this fell into a pattern of softness which Richard/Rita felt all around him. He turned as gravely as the others and walked in procession around the pool, past the tall candlesticks, until they reached one of the altars.

  Now he had no further difficulty in understanding what they required of him. He waited passively and quietly.

  They easily lifted Richard/Rita and placed him on his back flat on the altar. Father Samson then appeared carrying a chalice. Someone placed a small folded cloth on Richard/Rita’s pubic hair. Samson stood the chalice on the cloth. Then Richard/Rita heard three voices chanting the opening words of the old Latin Mass: “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” to which they added the extra name: “et domini nostri Satanas.” Richard/Rita now understood. He felt a strange exultation.

  Father Samson had begun reading from a black-bound book held by another naked guest, a woman of about thirty-five. He gestured gravely as he proceeded. The others had grouped themselves around in two concentric circles: the inner circle, all males, had placed, each one, the left hand on some part of Richard/Rita’s body. Those in the outer circle, all females, had placed their hands on the hips of the males.

  Just before the consecration, a woman pricked a vein in Richard/Rita’s arm, letting some drops of his blood fall and mix with the wine in the chalice. Once Father Samson had uttered the words of the consecration (“This is my body…”), the guests paired off, lay down on the floor, each man lying between the legs of a woman. Father Samson parted Richard/Rita’s legs, mounted the altar, entered Richard/Rita fully, took the chalice, sipped it, held it to Richard/Rita’s lips so that he could sip it, and handed it to the nearest pair. While this pair was sipping the chalice. Father Samson started rhythmically to push and pull in Richard/Rita, saying as a refrain: “Say-tan!…Say-tan!…Say-tan!,” lengthening the first syllable as he drew partially out of Richard/Rita and hitting the second syllable with hard emphasis as he drove into Richard/Rita. As each pair handed on the chalice, they started to copulate following the rhythm of Father Samson, until all—men, women, and Father Samson—were chanting and copulating in unison. Richard/Rita was the only silent one.

  He lay, eyes closed, while Father Samson chanted on him. For the first time Richard/Rita felt a strange tingling starting at his buttocks, up through his spine, up the nape of his neck, around his skull, down into his shoulderblades, past his middle and abdomen, in around his vagina and down through his groin and calves, to the tips of his toes. For all the world it felt as if an electrifying fluid was being poured into him from Samson. Richard/Rita opened his eyes to look at Samson, but the light was too dim, and the blue trails of the incense were weaving through his vision.

  Richard/Rita could hear heavy breathing, but he could see no face, only the outline of a head. He murmured: “Father Samson…Lord Satan…Father Samson…Lord”—but he was interrupted by a harsh, grating sound of single words coming to him through the heavy breathing. “Girl-Fixer!…Girl-Fixer!…Girl-Fixer!” Richard/Rita no longer heard the chant of “Say-tan!” Now all seemed to be joining in “Girl-Fixer!…Girl-Fixer!…Girl-Fixer!” Father Samson’s index finger was now deep in Richard/Rita’s rectum, massaging, scooping, probing, pulling, pushing. Richard/Rita felt his own semen being loosened and flowing; and, inside him, he had a sharp sensation of very hot, sticky oil squirting around the wall of his vagina as he heaved and shook. “Have me! Girl-Fixer!…Father Satan…have me…smell me…fuck me…through…through…” Richard/Rita’s voice rose steeply into a loud scream. The organ notes thundered, filling the air. As each pair of the guests reached orgasm, they screamed and groaned in a jumble of half-words: “Sayt…fuck…take…Sayt…have…smell…cunt…prick…”

  The scene subsided slowly. As the waves of pain, pleasure, and exultation ebbed in Richard/Rita, he knew that he now had a shadow—or, at least, that is how he described it. It was not glued to his body, nor did it fall on the ground beside him wherever he went. It was like a twin spirit or soul of his own soul or spirit. And it possessed his own thoughts, memories, imaginations, desires, words.

  Richard/Rita again opened his eyes. Father Samson was gone. Paul, his host, unsmiling, grave, helped him off the altar and motioned him to stand, legs well apart. One by one each of the guests came forward on their knees. Bending the head and pronouncing the long word “Say-tan!,” they clamped their lips over his vagina and sucked. Then they backed away out of the pool area.

  When the last guest was gone, Paul handed Richard/Rita his clothes, helped him to dress, led him around the house to the front, where a limousine waited with its engine ticking. The chauffeur opened the door for Richard/Rita. “You belong now, Rita. Serve him well” was Paul’s parting phrase.

  As he lay in bed later, Richard/Rita could sense his shadow near him and with him. He felt secure. When sleep came, it was dreamless and deep.

  The aftermath was terrible. He now found that all his sexual activity—whether in fantasy or in fact—had become of the same texture as that repulsive level on which he had moved the night of his wedding to Moira. And it reduced all pleasantness, pleasure, beauty, joy, ecstasy, to sexual terms which today he characterizes as “animality.” It made him feel and think and live like an animal in heat, an animal which by a freak accident had been provided with a self-conscious mind and memory, but which would shortly lose those faculties and revert to being just animal.

  Richard/Rita is the only ex-possessed person I have known who still has a clear memory of what precise differences the culmination of possession made to his inner self—mind, memory, will, emotions, imagination.

  The entry point of continued possession, its bastion, was his imagination. In listening to him, one has to remember Richard’s specific problem: gender and sexuality were one and the same for him. Once possession was completed, it seemed to him that he had an invisible but tangibly felt shadow, a twin of himself but yet distinct from him, and that from that point onward self-control and direction in him were exercised by that twin.

  He points to the fluid or electrifying effect he received from Father Samson at the Black Mass. For it now appeared to Richard/Rita that in his conscious hours all his thoughts and willing and remembering and sensations (and, therefore, all he said and did in the view or hearing of others) came in a very different way. Now continuously his imagination—rather than his memory or his senses or his reasoning mind—received “imprints” or “messages”: images, pictures, diagrams. There was also some other force or influence he could not accurately name. But because it specifically, directly, and exclusively concerned his sexuality, he calls it the S-factor.

  Once his imagination received one of those “messages” or “imprints,” then the whole internal mechanism of thinking, willing, remembering, and feeling with his five senses came into play. The control thus exercised on him was absolute. If he smelt an odor, if he desired something, if he remembered anything, if he thought or reasoned, it was all made possible by a prior “imprint.” And consequently any words he spoke or actions he performed were made possible only by that source.

  The exercise of his sexuality—his desire and its consummation—was under the strictest control. The desire came without warning: it did not arise due to any exterior stimulus.

  To cap it all, there were other moments: hours of high possession when the control exercised over him acquired an intensity which blotted all else out. In “normal” time of possession, he was still self-aware, i.e., he saw and felt himself under the inescapable influence of those “imprints,” but it was he himself who thought, remembered, imagined, spoke, walked, acted. At the “high moments” of possession, it seemed to him that he no longer did any of those things. The very insides of his soul or spirit seemed to be drenched in another’s being.

  He himself felt reduced to a tiny pinpoint of identity, to be imprisoned in the most solitary of solitudes, while every fiber and sinew of his life was permeated with an alien tyranny, a brute autho
rity.

  And, as he is able to relate it now, only in that microscopic reduction of himself did he spontaneously revolt. There he had no memory of the past—only a memory that there had been a memory. Nor had he any anticipation of the future—only a consciousness that anticipation was impossible. Neither praying nor cursing, neither praise nor blasphemy was possible there. It was an undivided and infinitely sad present, an awareness of oneself surrounded by utter blackness and nothingness. The very self of Richard/Rita always refused (although it could do nothing about expelling) that constant shadow.

  Richard/Rita is emphatic on one point: the strict separation and distinction between the detectable and measurable area of his thoughts, emotions, memories, external actions, sensations, etc., on the one hand; and, on the other, the self he never ceased to be. All through his enigmatic experiences, that detectable and measurable area varied and changed under the influx of differing intensities, as masculine and feminine, male and female traits ebbed and flowed in him. Psychologists would, justifiably in their terms, describe it as rather extensive changes of personality. But the self—whether reduced to the pinpoint of possessed slavery or free within the general control of the central point in his imagination—that self never ceased to be the same.

  Asked about the suffering specific to possession, Richard/Rita says that the genuine pain of possession does not come from any physical distortion, deterioration, or ravages—these most of the time provide the possessed with a savagely twisted pleasure and thrill. But it lies instead in what he calls the “mirror of existence” of the possessed.