Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  One evening, as he drove home in the dusk, he again sensed that curious presence for the fourth time in his life. The car radio was playing a medley of songs. Suddenly, as “California, Here I Come!” was being sung, the words seemed to plaster themselves all around the sky in front of him. He had already had a lot of crazy things like this in his life, and, while he could not ignore it, he could cope with it. As “California, Here I Come!” continued to plaster itself around him, Jamsie switched off the radio.

  Then something caught his eye in the rearview mirror. It was a face.

  As with so many of the strange things that kept happening to him, Jamsie felt neither fright nor surprise. He seemed to himself to have expected it, to have known it was there all along. The eyes of that face were looking at him and he knew—without knowing how—that he knew their owner.

  There were no more words floating or plastered around him now. Jamsie slowed down, waiting all the time in silence. But there was no sound and no movement from the back seat.

  He glanced again in the mirror: the large, bulbous eyes were still looking at him. He could not believe they were really red. Must be the reflection of the street lights, he thought. The face had a nose, ears, mouth, cheeks, a funny chin much too narrow for the rest of the face, a kind of high-domed forehead ending in a somewhat pointed head. The skin was dark as if from long exposure to sunlight. He could not make out if it was white or brown or black-skinned.

  But something more than the vividness of that face puzzled him—the absence of something. The face was certainly alive—the eyes glinted with meaning, even laughingly. The head moved silently now and then. But something was lacking, something he expected in a face, but which this face did not show.

  As he turned slowly into the driveway to his garage, he heard a voice, chiding and familiar, in tones he would expect a eunuch to have: “Oh! For Pete’s sake, Jamsie! Stop acting the fool. We’ve been together for years. Don’t tell me you don’t know me.”

  Jamsie realized that this too was somehow or other true: they had been together for a long time. Everything, even this, had the same curious familiarity about it.

  As the car came to a standstill in the garage, he heard the voice again: “Well, so long, Jamsie! See you tomorrow. Wait for your Uncle Ponto!”

  As Jamsie entered the house, he thought he smelled a strange odor. At the time he connected it in no way with Uncle Ponto. It was a momentary thing, and he forgot about it immediately.

  This happened on a Monday evening. He could not sleep that night. And, although he did not know it then, Ponto’s visits would multiply quickly until, for six years, he would be dealing with Uncle Ponto almost on a daily basis.

  The following Sunday Jamsie was driving the short distance to Pasadena when out the window to his right he saw Ponto craning his head down from the roof of the car looking in at him upside down through the window. Ponto was moving his left hand as though pitching a ball, and with each gesture he seemed to throw a word, a phrase, or a whole sentence into the sky where it remained for a while and then danced away over the horizon.

  “WELCOME TO JAMSIE MY FRIEND!” ran one message. “GREATEST BLOW-OUT FOR THE MIND!” was another. “PONTO! JAMSIE! PALS! REJOICE! PASADENA HERE WE COME!”

  And so it went. Accordingly as Ponto threw each message into the sky, he turned back and grinned at Jamsie. When Jamsie swerved dangerously because of the distraction, Ponto shook his finger in mock reproof and flung a “LET ME DRIVE YOU!” sign across the sky. Then he disappeared.

  This was the flamboyant beginning of Uncle Ponto’s attendance on Jamsie: Uncle Ponto, the spirit that was to harass him for years, finally press his claims to be Jamsie’s “familiar,” and twice drive him to the edge of suicide.

  Gradually Jamsie got to know Ponto’s general appearance. But he never saw him whole from head to foot at any one time. Ponto’s face, the back of his head, his hands, his feet, his eyes, all were parts of Ponto he saw from time to time. To Jamsie’s eye, somehow accustomed before the fact to all these bizarre happenings, Ponto was not misshapen, yet Jamsie knew that Ponto was hardly shaped like a normal human being. And then there was that funny lack in Ponto’s face. Something was lacking.

  His head was too large and too pointed, the eyelids, too heavy, the nose and mouth always contorted by an expression Jamsie could not identify with any emotion or attitude known to him. The skin was too light to be black, too dark to be white, too reddish to be sallow, too yellow to be sunburned. His hands were more like mechanical claws. His body—seen in parts—seemed to have the flexibility of a cat and to be thinner than his enormous, pointed head. His legs were bandy and disproportionate—one knee seemed higher than the other. Ponto’s feet were splayed, like a duck’s, and all the toes were of even length and the same size.

  Jamsie was sure Ponto was not human. Beyond that, he was sure of nothing except that Ponto was real—as real as any object or person around him. What Ponto did was real and concrete. So, for Jamsie, he had to be real. At the same time, Jamsie again and again found himself wondering why he was not frightened by Ponto. And occasionally he did ask himself if Ponto was a spirit or a being from another planet. But in the beginning each appearance of Ponto merely fired his curiosity.

  After a while Jamsie realized that he could anticipate an appearance of Ponto by the queer smell he had noticed the first night; and, when Ponto disappeared, the smell lingered on afterward for about an hour. It was not a bad smell, as of sewage or rotting food. It was just a very strong smell; it had a trace of musk in it, but laced with a certain pungency. Jamsie could only describe it as the way “red would smell, if you could smell red.”

  The smell always gave Jamsie a feeling of being alone with something overwhelming. In other words, the effect of the smell was not primarily in his nose but in Jamsie’s mind. It did not repel, did not attract, did not disgust, did not fascinate. It made him feel very small and insignificant. And this bothered Jamsie more than all the other odd things.

  As far as he could calculate, Ponto’s overall height was about 4% feet. Yet whenever Ponto appeared to him, he seemed to be the mirror image of something gargantuan hovering nearby, and in some confusing way the smell was tied closely to that sense of nearness of overwhelming size. If Jamsie felt any personal threat at that stage, it had to do with the effects of that smell.

  At the end of his “visits,” and just before he disappeared, Ponto took to giving Jamsie a questioning look out of the corner of his eye, as if to say: Aren’t you going to ask me about myself? Jamsie, naturally stubborn, resolved not to ask, not even to notice this gesture of Ponto—if he could bring that off.

  Ponto kept on appearing at the oddest places. Since his first, chiding words to Jamsie, and except for the words he flung, floated, and plastered all over Jamsie’s horizon, Ponto never said anything in these early visits. He appeared in the back of the car, sitting on the radiator in the living room, inside the elevator in the upper corner, swinging from one of the overpasses as Jamsie traveled on the freeway, in restaurants, on top of the cash registers, at Jamsie’s desk in the studio, on top of the engineer’s table in full view of Jamsie as he sat in the sound-room broadcasting.

  Ponto pushed swinging doors in the opposite direction to Jamsie. He placed money on the counter of the delicatessen to pay for Jamsie’s groceries, ripped the dry cleaner’s plastic bags, turned on faucets, turned off the ignition of his car, switched on the headlights, and in a thousand ways kept a regular—though, for the first few months of 1958, not a frequent—reminder of his presence in front of Jamsie.

  During the early months of 1958 Ponto never interfered with Jamsie’s work, he rarely appeared in his apartment, and he never bothered him at night. In fact, Jamsie found he could sleep all night undisturbed. He had a feeling Ponto was somewhere near watching him—or perhaps watching over him; he did not know which. After a while, the bizarre antics began wearing on Jamsie and whittling his patience and control very thin. Jamsie became convinced th
at he had seen Ponto somewhere else or had known somebody very like Ponto in previous years, though surely he would not have forgotten so odd a figure as that little fellow!

  Finally Jamsie’s patience wore out, and his curiosity—certainly understandable in the fantastic circumstances—led him to his greatest mistake with Ponto. He yielded to an impulse one day and asked Ponto what he wanted. Ponto at that precise moment was swinging from the lamp in Jamsie’s office.

  “Oh, just to be with you, Jamsie! I thought you’d never ask! Actually I want to be your friend. Did you ever know anyone as faithful and as attendant on you as I am?”

  Then he swung away into nothingness.

  Jamsie’s innocent question opened floodgates. He now became the object of a continual barrage from Ponto that went on week after week. There would be no letup for years.

  Ponto would start talking the moment Jamsie left his apartment to drive to work. Most of his conversation was harmless and inane, sometimes unintentionally funny, more often ludicrous, and quite often with a twist to his remarks that caused Jamsie some inner disgust.

  For a long time Jamsie kept himself under control; but he lost his temper with Ponto for the first time when he sprinkled one of his conversations with jibes about Lydia and crude remarks about the female hyena! Jamsie fell into a frothing rage with Ponto, telling him in a series of profanities to leave his mother out of the conversation and to get out of his sight and hearing.

  “Okay, Jamsie. Okay!” Ponto said resignedly. “Okay. Have it your way. But we belong to each other.” He disappeared.

  The experience left Jamsie shaking with rage. But, after a couple of hours, restored to the normal world of his work, and being reasonable, he began to ask himself seriously if he were not imagining it all. He was sitting at his microphone waiting for a commercial to end and the signal from his engineer to take up his broadcast.

  As if to answer his inner thoughts, Ponto appeared and began plastering short words on the notice board the engineer used to pass silent messages to Jamsie when he was on the air. “FORGIVEN!” it read. “BACK SOON! CARRY ON, PAL!” In spite of himself, Jamsie saw the twisted humor of it all, although he doubted that Ponto was bright enough to be funny. Ponto was doing what came natural to him. Jamsie found himself grinning at the engineer, who, taken by surprise by this show of geniality on Jamsie’s part, grinned back at him sheepishly.

  Ponto’s conversations, except for some of the bits and scraps reported here and dictated to me by Jamsie, escape Jamsie’s memory now. They were nearly always inconsequential and only sometimes annoying to the point of making Jamsie fall into a fit of anger. But, because he answered Ponto sometimes or made comments on Ponto’s behavior—all this under his breath—the people at the station accepted the fact that Jamsie Z. “talks to himself a lot” and, as one put it, “is a little looney on certain points—but aren’t we all?”

  In spite of everything, things went well for Jamsie’s career. In fact, Jamsie’s reporting was good and his ratings were high.

  In August 1959, news arrived that Lydia had died in her sleep. Jamsie returned to New York for a couple of days to wind up her affairs. Lydia had made a will by which Jamsie, the sole heir, received two possessions: the old icon and Lydia’s handwritten memento of George Whitney’s bid of 204 for U. S. Steel. Jamsie brought them both back to Los Angeles and placed them in a closet where Ponto had the habit of making himself comfortable. Ponto objected to the icon very strongly, but Jamsie was adamant.

  “Okay, pal. Okay. Okay,” Ponto said. “But some day we’ll get rid of that useless garbage. Won’t we, pal?”

  In the fall of 1960, Jamsie was offered and accepted a very good radio spot in San Francisco. He moved up from Los Angeles, and after he had settled into his new apartment, Jamsie arranged to drive over and meet his new station manager.

  “Jamsie, the hour of decision is approaching.” Ponto, of course, had come to San Francisco. He was balancing at the moment on the fire escape outside the apartment house and talking through the window. Jamsie said nothing.

  “Jamsie! Promise me! No sex and no booze! You hear? Jamsie! Promise your old Uncle Ponto. Come on, pal, promise!”

  Curiously Jamsie had never touched a woman since his days in Cleveland. Somehow, all desire had left him after that first experience of words escaping like lightning from his skull.

  “Actually,” Ponto tittered ridiculously. “I don’t expect much trouble from you along that line. Hee! Hee!”

  Jamsie glared at him for a second, then continued with his preparations to go out.

  It was in what Ponto said next that Jamsie heard the strange note of urgency that sometimes overloaded Ponto’s eunuch’s voice.

  “Now we all have our place, you hear? And I can’t appear as often as I like, and as often as I have in the past. I have my betters, too, y’know. You won’t believe it, but I have.”

  On the way to the radio station, Ponto, riding in the back seat, seemed to be seized with a sort of hysteria. His speech started to come faster and faster and to be deteriorating. Finally he no longer made any sense at all. He prattled on about lasers and roast chicken and whisky and the moon. Jamsie only recollects phrases such as “Jupiter rotates every 9 hours and 55 minutes.” “Car necking, masturbation, and good grades.” “Hurrah for the Golden Gate but don’t go near the water!” “Its cheer creak.”

  Jamsie drew up at the station, left his car, and started to make his way in. Ponto went along, prattling incoherently all the while. Jamsie rang the bell at the front gate, but no one answered. He wandered to the back. Still Ponto kept talking, his words utterly meaningless. Jamsie tried the back door. It was locked. He was about to return to the front when, without warning, there was silence. Ponto had disappeared. In retrospect, Jamsie is certain that any sudden disappearance of Ponto meant the approach of someone Ponto feared.

  “Are you looking for someone?” A balding man in his mid-fifties, tallish, thin, wearing rimless spectacles, had come out from a side door Jamsie had not noticed, and stood looking at him with his head cocked to one side.

  “I’m coming to work here,” Jamsie answered easily. “I’m looking for the station manager.”

  “You must be Jamsie Z.,” said the man. “I’m the station manager. Beedem’s the name. Jay Beedem.”

  Jamsie shook hands and took in Beedem’s features. He thought for a second he might have met Beedem before. He could not quite tie it down.

  “Come in and let’s get acquainted.”

  As they sat across from one another in Beedem’s office, Jamsie scrutinized his new boss, trying to place him. Beedem meanwhile put Jamsie a few questions and then proceeded to fill him in on his future work at the station. He was a precise man, obviously, and neat almost to a fault—shining bald head, carefully groomed side hair, immaculately clean and tasteful clothes, slightly foppish, good teeth, masculine hands with well-manicured nails. His face was roughly an oval shape not very lined for his age. But his eyes and mouth attracted Jamsie’s particular attention.

  After about a quarter of an hour of conversation, Jamsie concluded that his boss’s eyes were completely closed to him. Jay Beedem laughed, glanced, conveyed meanings, and questioned him with his eyes, but all this seemed to be as revealing as images skipping across a film screen. There is no feeling there, thought Jamsie to himself. No real feeling. At least, I can’t see any. Each smile and laugh was only on Beedem’s mouth. He did not seem really smiling or laughing.

  Jamsie really does not have any fully satisfying answers about Jay Beedem, even today. In retrospect, he will still say that the vague impression he had of having seen Beedem’s face before he met him in the flesh came from the traits of that “funny-lookin’ face” reflected in Beedem’s face. In fact, one important element of the exorcism, recorded on the tape, has to do with the strange face of Beedem and the “look.”

  Ponto always kept in the background when Beedem was with Jamsie. And whenever Jamsie approached Beedem for a discussion or f
or help or encouragement, he left Beedem in the same sort of inner torment and turmoil that gripped him during his worst moments with Ponto. The keynote of that turmoil was panic, the panic of someone finding himself trapped or ambushed or betrayed.

  While it remains speculation, a very good case can be made for Jay Beedem being one of the perfectly possessed, a person who at some time in his career made one clear, definitive decision to accept possession, who never went back on that decision in any way, and who came under the total control of an evil spirit. It was on this very suspicion that, in the exorcism, Father Mark felt he must try to see if there was some link between Beedem and Ponto that was harmful to Jamsie.

  But when Jamsie left Beedem that first day, all the problems he still speculates about today were then in the future. Over the next days and weeks he settled easily into a daily routine. He loved San Francisco. He liked his new post. He got on well with his fellow workers; they respected his abilities and he never let them down professionally. He had pleasant relations with Cloyd, his producer, and with Lila Wood, the chief researcher on Cloyd’s staff. With Jay Beedem his relations were correct and formal. But as time went on Beedem made no secret of his growing dislike and contempt for Jamsie’s peculiarities.

  Their colleagues, who noticed the ill-feeling between the two men, put the whole thing down to a difference in temperament between them: they just did not get on well together. Everyone else easily forgave Jamsie’s idiosyncrasies, for he had developed a broadcasting style all his own, “and it was good for business.” Jamsie was not slow to recognize that he had Ponto to thank for much of that.

  Uncle Ponto would gyrate around him in the studio saying irrelevant things only Jamsie could hear. He would produce statistics, figures, facts, and data which Jamsie would automatically incorporate into his patter of broadcasting, keeping up an incredible stream of banter. It was bright and amusing, a cheery-beery-bee kind of prattle full of various irrelevancies about this, that, and the other, all strung together with “but” and “whereas” and “lest I forget it” and “as the actress said to the bishop” and “let me tell you before you forget you ever heard me talk,” until after about three minutes he would throw in a punch line about a product he was advertising or a ball game he was reporting or some bit of national news the station wanted to highlight. This style became his signature, well known and valued, on the air. For the first few months in San Francisco, therefore, Jamsie secretly valued Ponto’s presence.