Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  “How do you mean a ‘part’ merely?”

  “That they are parts of a greater physical being.”

  “What being?”

  “The universe.”

  “The universe of matter?”

  “Yes.”

  “And of psychic forces?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that this was creator of humans?”

  “Yes.”

  “A personal creator?”

  “No.”

  “A physical creator?”

  “Yes also.”

  “A psychophysical creator?”

  “Yes. Indeed, yes.”

  “Why did you lead Carl in this way?”

  “Because he would lead others.”

  “Why lead others in this way?”

  “Because then they belong to the Kingdom.”

  “Why belong to the Kingdom?”

  Those looking at Carl begin to feel that he is about to explode in some way. The words are coming out of him with greater harshness. He draws a breath for almost every word, so that each word comes out on a blast of breath. His arms, legs, and torso are writhing more and more. The assistants hold him down, but cannot hold him still. Now with that last question, all see the explosion coming. It starts building with Carl’s response to Hearty’s last question.

  “Why, Priest? Why? You stand there with your bald head, your scorched testicles, your smelly clothes, your yellowing teeth, your stinking guts, and you ask us why? Why? Why? Why? Why?” The word comes out on the crest of ever-louder shouts.

  “WHY?” he finally shouts at the top of his voice, his head raised to stare at Hearty. “Why? Because we hate the Latter. We hate. Hate. Hate. We hate those stained with his blood. We hate and despise those that follow him. We want to divert all from him and we want all in the Kingdom where he cannot reach them. Where they cannot go with him. And we want you, Priest! Because we have Carl. He is ours. And no power can undo our hold on him. No power. No power!”

  Carl falls back, his eyes bulging, sweat pouring down his face and body.

  Hearty all this time remains utterly still. He yet has to maneuver the spirit into a direct clash.

  He now plays his trump card; he addresses himself to Carl.

  “Carl, in the name of Jesus who saved you and who will save you, I command you, listen to me.”

  Carl’s body begins to go cold. The assistants tell that to Hearty. He shakes his head and goes on.

  “Carl! We know you are prisoner. We know that. But a part of you is free and has never been touched. Speak to us. Communicate with us.

  Hearty is gambling on the same telepathic power in Carl that had called to him for help, to reach out now in some crucial sign of cooperation with good, a sign of his deepest will turned against evil.

  “Carl, I never told you all the years of my student days. I never told you. I am a receiver. I can receive. You can communicate with me now. Please. We need your cooperation. Just one clear effort and the whole thing is over. Please, Carl! Please!”

  Carl’s body is now quite calm, his head thrown back on the couch, his arms and legs limp, his body soaked with perspiration. Hearty looks at him, waiting, voiding his own mind, hoping and waiting.

  Then the message starts to come. It wisps across Hearty’s “screen,” at first in vague waves, then in clearer outline. It is an experience of emotions and emotional ideas each entwined with the other. It invades Hearty’s psyche, stealing into all the nooks and corners of his conscious being. It is unlike any message he could have imagined. He is undergoing the feelings and desolation of ideas that beset someone exiled to a baleful land, no warmth, no love, no togetherness, no home, no smile, only the automatic gyrating of controlled beings. Animals frozen by blinding light or tumbling into a private abyss where their free-fall scream never meets its own echo and from which their desires never escape to fulfillment.

  It is Carl’s message, his picture of what his bondage is like. He is faced with the suicide of those who die denying they want to live on, or were ever made to live by love. It is an instantaneous tale of sadness in living and utter misery in dying.

  Carl has done the trick. Translated into words he is saying to Hearty: “See! This is my exile from love, my slavery to a degrading psychism, and my final tumbling into the aloneness of Hell forever.”

  “Jesus can save you, Carl,” Hearty begins. “Jesus…”

  He gets no further. The “message” stops abruptly. Hearty shakes his head. A warning word from his assistant priest makes him focus his vision on Carl. Carl has opened his eyes and speaks in a gentle whisper to the two assistants holding him by the arms. Apparently he asks them in a normal voice to let him sit up and “watch the Father.” The two release his arms. “It sounded so normal,” one of the assistants said regretfully later.

  Carl fixes his eyes on Hearty, a slow grin of delight comes over his face. Hearty is no longer “opaque” to him. For the first time, he is looking into Hearty’s mind.

  In retrospect, it now seems to Hearty that Carl’s minimal freedom from constraint and his telepathic communication with Hearty, while he was not yet free of possession, provided an ideal avenue for a direct attack on Hearty.

  Carl is now to be used as a medium for the final Clash. Against Tortoise, Hearty now has no ally. He sees the purpose in Carl’s life. He knows. He braces himself.

  Hearty’s first, frightening realization is that his “censor” bond is gone: he cannot block at will, as always before this, any message from the outside or any perception by an outsider into his mind and inner condition. Now, for the first time in his life, he is an unwilling “receiver.” This he has not foreseen. He has thought that as long as his will was free his censor bond would be at his disposal. But his protection is gone. He is naked. And each part of his inner man is successively invaded, seized, and polluted. A malevolent intelligence is scanning the innards of his very self. That attack finally wells up and pours over him. Hearty is filled with a disgust and loathing he cannot control. He starts to retch.

  In the Clash of his will with the evil spirit, he is whipped with a ferocity he could never have imagined. Hearty’s torture comes from himself: he seems to be an onlooker watching his own punishment. According to the tape and the accounts of his assistants, this crisis of Hearty’s lasts from three to five minutes. To Hearty it is an age. As he looks into Carl’s eyes, he no longer sees their color, shape, or expression. Carl is in every sense the medium of evil. Hearty becomes a passive one, the “viewed.” He “stops seeing” for that time and “is only seen.”

  The keynote of that Clash is an “either/or.” From the beginning it is conveyed to Hearty subtly that, if he submits, if he renounces his opposition to the evil spirit, all will be well; the attack will cease. If not, he will be destroyed.

  Now, in one hurting glare of exposure, he sees his weaknesses laid bare: the tawdry logic he received in his philosophy training, the self-confident and ignorantly treated facts of theology, the self-indulgence and onetime hypocrisies of his piety, the useless pride in his priesthood—all is so much drivel and dross, a dump of human trash that withers under the fire of that gaze looking in at him and probing every darkest cranny of his weakness.

  “For as long as it lasted,” Hearty relates, “it was a brutal partial possession of me. All that remained finally free was my will. And even that…” Hearty always leaves this thought unfinished.

  The searching gaze continues like a filthy and malicious hand pawing each of his faculties contemptuously. Even his will is fingered and stripped of the motives he had always relied upon. His will is the last bastion. It holds. But now he sees all its apparent strength torn from it like so many cardboard coverings from an inner treasure: his sensuous enthusiasm for beautiful ceremony, his esteem of good people, his compassion for the sick and the helpless, his pride in being a priest and a man, his satisfaction in his Welsh culture, his reliance on the approval of parents, teachers, superiors, his bishop, the Pope, the consolatio
n of prayer and submission to law. All are torn brutally aside. And only his willing self holds at last. His soul as a willing being stands naked of all the supports and reasons of a lifetime, scrutinized by the unwavering gaze of high, unlovely, and unloving intelligence.

  “But this was all by the way,” Hearty explains in the offhand way survivors of terrible sufferings speak of certain indescribable moments. “The aim was to make my free choice impossible.”

  The only external sign of his experience is seen by his assistants in the way Hearty holds his crucifix between him and Carl: his two arms straight out in front of him, his eyes level with the crossbar of the crucifix, so that he is looking past the head and over the arms of the crucified. In the beginning of Hearty’s agony, the crucifix faces Carl. After about two minutes or so, Hearty turns the crucifix around so that the crucified faces Hearty himself. We can only guess that then his real crisis starts. It lasts only a moment, a never-ending moment in which he knows no time, and suffering seems eternal.

  For the onlookers, meanwhile, Carl never seems to change. He sits upon the couch, his eyes fixed on Hearty’s, his body immobile. “His eyes were like hollow blanks,” said one assistant. And several of them are reminded of ancient statues in which soulless eyes of antiquity turn upon the banality of life with a barren gaze.

  Hearty is reduced by that gaze to an effort of sheer survival, holding on fiercely to his will and resolve. The worst is just beginning. His mind, imagination, and memory are now out of his control. He thinks, he remembers, he imagines what the “others” want him to think, remember, and imagine. He is now treated to himself in a humiliating way. He sees his world as a globe dotted with lands and oceans, with cities and houses and people, covered with vegetation and sand and animals, the whole hanging in an atmosphere; and “above” it, somehow or other, “God” or “Jesus” or “Heaven,” with little tenuous lines running down to each human being. It is all now so laughable, so childish, so contemptible, so superstitious—this is conveyed to him like a cosmic joke turned on him with a cackle of superior intelligence.

  And in that sound he feels all meaning to his life is flowing away into derisive nothingness. What he had ambitioned to be, what he had become, the values he had lived by—all now seems an ugly, useless comedy of illusions. “I never meant anything, never came to anything, never was anything.” Hearty’s mind drummed with the words.

  And what now seems the core of that childish view is the way he always saw Earth as a collection of things, of separate and disparate little objects, men, animals, plants, stones. “Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!” are the echoes in his mind. “Wrong and childish from the beginning.” The sadness and chagrin at his weakness and childishness are about as great as he can bear, when that vision is swept away and a new series of images is presented to him in an aura not of ridicule, but of approbation and applause. The aura of untruth.

  It is the globe again, together with all the objects in it—men, women, animals, plants, cities, oceans. But now all exist in an organized system. Everything is interconnected. There is really no difference between one thing and anything else. From the mitochondria in cells that convert oxygen into energy up to the largest land masses, the most complicated systems of living societies. He is shown it all. And all, land, oceans, animals, humans, plants are one living organism clad in the shell of breathable atmosphere. Psychic forces bind it all together, like ethereal blood running in the veins of some unimagined giant. It is a self-creating, self-protecting, self-developing thing. A unique being. Earth as mother, as womb, as god, as tomb, as a whole unity protected by its own shell and its own strength, as all there is.

  Now and again that globe’s outlines swirl into the form of a snail or a tortoise clad in its own protective hard and furrowed shell. This sight swamps Hearty’s mind with intellectual satisfaction and clothes his imagination with images of harmony, freedom, truth.

  His memory is in abeyance. He is only in the present moment, and he can anticipate no future. It is irresistible for all his powers—except his embattled will. Naked and, as it were, standing alone in the shadow of its own unfulfilled desire, his willing self remains aloof—brooding, wavering, doubtful—but aloof, not yet committed.

  Only one element in that vision of human life keeps him from embracing it. It is its loveless character. Something inside him keeps crying out, “I need love. I won’t take less.” At the last central pinpoint of his free being Hearty stands and holds, rejecting the ultimatum, the “either/or” thrown at him.

  But immediately some physical strength starts giving way in him under a series of shooting pains that jab at the muscles in his arms and legs. The strain is unbearable. His fingers are loosening their grip on the crucifix. He ceases to hold it rigidly upright with the crucified facing him. It wavers and swings a little to the left, a little to the right. The light glances off the metal head of the crucified and off the small notice over it which carries the letters “INRI” (“Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews”).

  In Hearty’s world at that moment there is no such thing as an accident. The apparently accidental shining of the metal sparks a deep instinct in him. He begins to say, at first internally, then audibly: “Jesus…Jesus…Jesus…Jesus…Jesus…Jesus.”

  When his words become audible, he is already over the worst. A new force sweeps across his mind and imagination, blowing to nothingness the entire fabric of loveless belief thrust at him as his guarantee of peace. Hearty feels for an instant some crushing pain within him: in his success he has had to sacrifice something—he does not yet know what—some intimate joy of being human, some one personal desire or inclination, some indulgence in the comeliness of human beauty and symmetry, some happiness he otherwise would be able to have legitimately in his human living. Some deeply personal fiber of his will has been seared.

  The switch of Hearty’s concentration from himself to Carl is instantaneous and “murderous”—his own word—in its intent. He now wants to murder that which holds Carl. The assistants see his head lift and his eyes burn with some fire of anger and willfulness. “I honestly thought for an instant that he had gone mad,” the assistant priest relates frankly.

  Hearty’s first words after the Clash still sound vicious today on the tape.

  “Murderer! Be murdered now! In your turn!”

  Carl falls back on the couch. The assistants hold him, but Carl’s struggle is not physical now. In a weak and pathetic voice he says only: “Opaque…opaque…opaque…”

  “Evil Spirit,” Hearty continues, “you will go away from this creature, Carl. You will cease to possess his soul and body. In the name of Jesus you will cease. Now.”

  Then he turns to Carl in his remarks. “Carl, you have to pay the price. But Jesus is with you. Insofar as you are not under the control of evil, you will renounce step by step each of your former consents. Each one of them.”

  Carl shakes with terror. He has begun to perspire. He says nothing.

  “The vision, Carl! You will see it again. You will see it.”

  Carl’s eyes are fixed now on Hearty’s own. They bulge with fear and loathing.

  “You will see it. You will reject it!”

  “N-n-n-n-n-n-n-no!” Carl suddenly stutters. “No. Please! No…” The words on the tape trail away incoherently.

  “Renounce it, Carl,” Hearty says sharply, “even though you cannot say so in words.”

  Carl begins to babble and moan, then stops. Foam seeps out of his mouth.

  Hearty goes on mercilessly.

  “Carl! Your psychic powers! Carl! Renounce them, insofar as they are products of the Evil One. In the name of Jesus, Carl! Renounce them!”

  Carl is no longer looking at Hearty. He has turned his head to one side and keeps looking at the wall to his far left.

  “Turn his head around.” Hearty’s command is curt. The assistants do so. Carl’s head is boiling hot and bathed in sweat.

  “Now, Carl! For the final renunciation. Look at Tortoise, Carl!” The assistants f
eel from now on that they are listening to a verbal description of an invisible scene. Only Hearty and Carl seem to be in view of it; both are looking over toward the wall of the room.

  “Look at that Evil One, Carl! The Tortoise, your all, your friend, your master, your devil, your death, that Evil One is about to be destroyed for you by Jesus.”

  Hearty stops. The others see him turn his head aside, as if listening to some instructions; they see a wave of new light shine in his eyes. Then he looks steadily at Carl again.

  “You will see that Evil Spirit for what it is, Carl!”

  Hearty pauses abruptly as if he has been interrupted. Then: “No! Not in anybody’s name, anybody who merely lives and dies.” Another pause. Then: “Only one who lives and dies and lives again. Only in his name, Carl.”

  Carl’s eyes are now full of some scene which only he sees. He is not focusing on Hearty. And even though Hearty is looking straight at Carl, he is obviously watching something more than Carl. The assistants can only guess at its identity, but they are as sure as people watching a theater audience that Carl and Hearty are watching something they cannot see.

  At a certain point Hearty draws near the couch. Hearty speaks in a low, confident tone. He is praying:

  “Lord Jesus Christ, who said, ‘I and the Father are one,’ act now to purify your servant, Carl, and save him from the Pit and all those who fall into it in everlasting death.”

  Carl’s attitude has changed. He is relaxing. The tension is being wiped off his face. A faint smile of recognition creeps over his mouth and eyes.

  Hearty bends low over Carl and whispers in his ear: “Carl! Carl! Look at me, if you can.”

  There is a small wait. Then Carl turns his head and looks at Hearty. His eyes are warm. And even though they are bloodshot and tired, behind them Hearty can read Carl’s look, his personal regard.

  “Carl, repeat these words after me. As much, as quick as you can. Put your heart into them. It’s the last help before your final struggle.”

  Carl is looking at him steadily. Hearty says quickly, pausing after each phrase so that Carl can repeat it: