by Ray Russell
PENGUIN CLASSICS
THE CASE AGAINST SATAN
RAY RUSSELL was born in 1924 in Chicago, Illinois, and served in the U. S. Army in the South Pacific during World War II. After the war, he attended the Chicago Conservatory of Music and the Goodman Memorial Theatre and soon became executive editor of Playboy, where he played a vital role in turning the magazine into a showcase for imaginative fiction. At Playboy Russell published such writers as Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, and Charles Beaumont, while also editing many of the bestselling Playboy anthologies, including The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy and The Playboy Book of Horror and the Supernatural. His first novel, The Case Against Satan, was published in 1962, and his best known work, Sardonicus, was called “perhaps the finest example of the modern gothic ever written” by Stephen King. His work also included publications in The Paris Review and several screenplays, including Mr. Sardonicus, The Horror of It All, and X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Russell received the World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1991. He passed away in Los Angeles in 1999.
LAIRD BARRON is an award-winning writer of horror fiction. He has received three Shirley Jackson awards, for his collections The Imago Sequence and Other Stories and Occultation and Other Stories and for his novella Mysterium Tremendum. He has also been nominated for the Crawford Award, the Sturgeon Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the Locus Award. His other works include two novels, The Light Is the Darkness and The Croning, and a story collection, The Beautiful Thing That Awaits Us All. He currently lives in upstate New York.
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First published in the United States of America by Ivan Obolensky, Inc. 1962
This edition with a foreword by Laird Barron published in Penguin Books 2015
Copyright © 1962 by Ray Russell
Copyright renewed 1990 by Ray Russell
Foreword copyright © 2015 by Laird Barron
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ISBN 978-1-101-62713-6
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover art: Lola Dupré
Version_1
For Henry
Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword by LAIRD BARRON
THE CASE AGAINST SATAN
1. THE TWO SIDES OF MIDNIGHT
2. BLACK FIRE
3. HE ATE HIS CHILDREN ALL BUT THREE
4. BLOOD OF THE CELIBATE
5. CROSS OF PAIN
6. THE PRIEST’S WIFE HAS A BROKEN BACK
7. ADJURATIO SOLEMNIS
8. ENTER DIABOLUS
9. HELL IS MURKY
10. SEEK TO KNOW NO MORE
11. SLANDER’S WHISPER
12. THE TEARING OF THE TONGUE
13. HE WHO KNOCKS
14. THE BOMB UNDER THE BED
15. THE HAND OF GOD
A Footnote
Whether the insane man creates his
hallucinations or whether insanity is
precisely the power to perceive objective
existences of another order, whether
higher or lower, than humanity, no
open-minded person can possibly
pretend to say . . .
H. C. Goddard
Foreword
Diabolus Knocks
“For the last few hours, time had been moving on wings of lead, dragged down by the relentless gravitational field of horror.”
—RAY RUSSELL
I am unable to read a book such as Ray Russell’s The Case Against Satan without experiencing a flashback to adolescence. My father, a Marine and Vietnam veteran, was also a determined agnostic. My mother converted to fire-breathing Christian fundamentalism during her late twenties. Try to imagine the breadth and depth of the resulting schism in our household. For many years our family resided deep in the Alaska wilderness in a rustic cabin. The isolation and inescapable proximity of one another lent an aspect of Spartan harrowing to my parents’ frequent pitched battles on the topic of spiritual belief as it pertained to life philosophy, and child rearing in particular.
Both parents read avidly. Despite her rigid faith that frowned upon a multitude of artistic expressions, my mother never could bear to destroy the trunks jammed with moldering paperbacks. Science fiction, westerns, pulp fantasy, and romance were represented, to be sure. However, scattered among this fare were darker, more subversive gems, such as The Haunting of Hill House, Audrey Rose, and The Shining. I read these and many others, always in secret, and always aware of the dire punishment that awaited should I be discovered polluting my mind with the literature of corruption. Consequently, I became quite fond of horror, the more blasphemous the better.
Always popular to some degree, visceral tales of the supernatural and the occult have resurged of late. Demonic possession, a staple of 1960s and 1970s cinema and book racks, powers recent film and television hits such as The Conjuring, Oculus, and the American Horror Story franchise. The aftermath of an exorcism as documented by reality television is the subject of A Head Full of Ghosts, crime and suspense author Paul Tremblay’s new novel that received great attention when first acquired. There’s no question in my mind that Ray Russell’s The Case Against Satan is a primary source in the modern iteration of gothic horror. His novel preceded the new wave as well as canonical works of the occult such as Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby and, of course, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist.
Russell ventured into the dark heart of the matter fifty-two years ago. The Case Against Satan chiefly concerns a triangle of human souls, two fighting to preserve the third from eternal damnation. Like all great struggles, it doesn’t lack for bloodshed or tears. Within this black triangle of two priests versus a young woman who may or may not be inhabited by Satan himself, there is an undercurrent of stylistic flourish. Russell writes with an austere, yet calculatedly lush, deployment of description that reminds me of Ingmar Bergman’s visual cinematic brilliance, and most especially The Seventh Seal. The tenor of the philosophical clashes between the old guard, Bishop Crimmings, and his younger protégé, Father Sargent, and, in turn, their sparring with the “demon,” is reminiscent of Bergman’s knight crusader playing chess against Death. Bishop Crimmings remarks to Father Sargent, “with the years, we all become parodies of ourselves.” And in another instance, Russell describes the protestations of the “possessed” girl thusly: “She stopped laughing and screamed, like an animal falling upon a spear.” These lines embody a simple, incisive elegance that is indicative of the entire text.
That simplicity, that directness, is a potent technique. It enables the artist to best capture the essence of a subject that the mind’s eye has dif
ficulty encompassing. The lack of padding or ostentation brings one oh, so very much nearer the howling truth scholars and poets have tried to broach for ages.
The story is ever the thing and stories that resonate the most are personal. During the latter years of my youth, I traveled across the Alaska Range and pedaled steadily behind a team of huskies along the frozen Yukon. There were moments when the sun coagulated between the teeth of distant peaks and the brass shell of sky peeled back to reveal the stars welded to a deeper darkness, and the moon would heave, yellow as an old cracked skull bone of some massive space-faring thing. I would be reminded with the cold that seeped up through the soles of my boots and stole into my blood that I was minute and impermanent, that every work of civilization is a speck upon the face of a speck floating upon an infinite abyss.
I would sometimes recall my mother’s severe conception of Almighty God, how time and space are naught save for the benefit of man’s feeble capacity to comprehend. The universe, vast beyond mortal reckoning, is a fixed point to the Lord. He exists outside such boundaries. Within those inconceivably vast boundaries, Lucifer holds dominion. No matter the distance, the Prince of Darkness is never farther away than a whisper.
Russell understood that fear and curiosity drive us. The ritual of exorcism is a compelling subject, and one that looms correspondingly large in the imagination. His descriptions do not flinch from sexuality or the grim reality of corruption and abuse within the Church, the family cell, or, indeed, all too many a human heart. His urbane approach belies a brutal, and occasionally savage, demolition of the polite and politic façade that adorns the basic infrastructure of civilization. Russell pits science and modern philosophy against tradition and superstition in a resulting classic. It’s the kind of book, brim with impertinent, perhaps even impious, queries that surely ruffled feathers in its time. Incest, rape, “whiskey priests,” vulgarity and lasciviousness, and yea, the moral failings of the men who wear the collar are confronted in their turn. I’ve no doubt this book will ruffle a few more feathers in years to come.
Any discussion of The Case Against Satan must level at least a mention of its relative, published eight years later, William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. In both novels, a pair of Catholic priests join forces to rid a young girl of an inhabiting demon. The Case Against Satan is enigmatic and elides a strict pronouncement of verified supernatural intrusion while The Exorcist drinks deeply of occult horror with a lurid fervor. Blatty’s novel is bombastic and sensationalistic, much further reaching in scope and setting; its protagonist, Regan, is younger, and the demonic presence, although denied at first by the parent, is eventually confirmed as a narrative reality. Blatty’s action is dramatic, his language explicit.
The Exorcist reads much like an expansion of Russell’s short novel, a supernatural thriller built upon the framework of a more naturalistic and restrained story, a story pared to its essential inspiration, a real-life exorcism. In its stripped refinement, Russell’s cuts a bit closer to the bone. The point of The Exorcist is the confrontation and ultimate (albeit at terrible cost and to temporary effect) defeat of evil. The point of The Case Against Satan is the discovery of truth. In both cases, the participants meet with definitively mixed success.
Russell’s subjects are timeless—the tension between rationalism and faith, and between the aforementioned forces of good and evil. It is a tension ratcheted ever tighter by the verbal jousting of his protagonists, skeptic and true believer, respectively. Penitent and agnostic alike; Cro-Magnon, Neanderthal, and Homo sapiens—we have always longed for the numinous and the ineffable. From ancient petroglyphs to illuminated manuscripts to towering electric crucifixes, we have repeatedly and relentlessly demonstrated that longing.
We yearn for enlightenment regarding the elusive mysteries that attend death and what lies beyond its threshold. As long as we postulate the notion of an external force of malevolence, evil in the metaphysical sense, classic books squarely in the wheelhouse of the gothic and the occult, such as The Case Against Satan, will continue to enthrall modern audiences. To paraphrase the late Christopher Hitchens, religion was mankind’s first and therefore worst tool for understanding the world. Yet for all that, mankind measures knowledge by the thimble. Scientific progress has diminished religion’s absolute dominance over the hearts and minds of humanity, but inasmuch as traditions of millennia erode slowly and stubbornly, and inasmuch as the greater secrets of the universe remain a tantalizing mystery despite technological advances, holy texts and their teachings endure as sources of succor and fascination.
A tale well told regarding the struggle between good and evil will never go out of style. Good and evil are components of something larger than ourselves, an essential something we wish to understand yet likely never will in this existence and so resort to the wisdom of those who have taken a crack at it and come closest. Ray Russell is one who has assayed the challenge and, decades later, The Case Against Satan is our reward, a jigsaw puzzle that sketches the profiles of the divine and the infernal with a few pieces artfully left in his pocket.
LAIRD BARRON
I
THE TWO SIDES OF MIDNIGHT
Perhaps because God has become a nodding Santa Claus with twinkling eyes and a spun glass beard; or because television spot announcements coo us into worship; or because posters painted by airbrush smoothies and written by slogansmiths assure us that the family that prays together stays together; or because religion has become an unnatural thing of all light and no shadow, a pious bonbon so nice, so sweet, so soporifically bland that a Karl Marx can call it the opium of the people not without justice; or because dread, blood, awe, the sense of primal forces and the element of terror—without which there can be no great love, great art, great faith—have been slowly and systematically subtracted from religion; perhaps for all or some of these reasons but, more likely, for reasons we are not equipped to understand, a priest of the Roman Catholic Church was put on trial one harrowing weekend in the second half of the twentieth century.
His trial began with a series of minor incidents worthy of remark. It is remarkable, for instance, that the parlor lights of St. Michael’s rectory were blazing at the top of their wattage after midnight as the weekend began, for priests are forced by their profession to be early risers and early risers are generally early retirers.
It is still more remarkable that, for something more than an hour, two figures had been walking back and forth on the deserted sidewalk in front of the rectory, as if waiting for something or someone. A large man was one of these, a man burly of build and fiftyish of years; the other was a girl—pretty, pigtailed, in her teens, for her age precocious of figure.
As the door of the rectory finally opened, thrusting a yellow wedge of light into the darkness, these two made sure they were cloaked in shadow. A priest left the rectory. He walked half a block to a parked Buick, got into it, and was soon away. As the car turned the corner, the burly man and the teen-age girl stepped out of the shadows, and began walking up the path in the direction of the rectory door. The girl hung back; the man seized her arm roughly and yanked her along, hissing angry words, but she escaped his grasp and ran away. The man started to call her, but thought better of making noise at such an hour. Resignedly, he walked swiftly after the girl.
It was a Friday night in late September, and unseasonably warm.
Some would say it was Saturday morning, for midnight had come and gone, but Father Gregory Sargent had other ideas. He and his predecessor, Father James Halloran, had returned to the rectory a short time before. Father Sargent, lifting a decanter, had asked, “A drop of brandy, Father Halloran? It’s been a long day.”
“No thank you,” Father Halloran had replied.
“Do you mind if I . . .”
“Not if you wish.”
Father Sargent, pouring himself a small pony of the liquor, had smiled. “I sense disapproval in your voice, Father.”
“I’m sorry.”
“And I know why—because you think I’m breaking the rules. But I’m not, really. Let me explain. We’re required, of course, to abstain from such refreshments until at least after morning Mass. And because it’s just past midnight, it’s technically morning. That’s your thinking, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes . . .”
“Ah!” said Father Sargent triumphantly. “There’s the rub, you see. You’re working on Daylight Saving Time.”
“And you?”
It was an old set piece of Father Sargent’s. He always relished a short pause before springing the punch line. “God’s Time, of course! According to Him, you see, it won’t be tomorrow for another—” he consulted his wrist watch “—fifty-seven minutes. Therefore . . .” He lifted the glass to his lips and sipped the brandy.
Father Halloran tried, without too much success, to enter into the spirit. “Ingenious,” he said.
Gregory Sargent was all too aware that the pleasantry had—as his theatrical friends would say—bombed. He knew Father Halloran was a rather humorless man, in addition to being in the neighborhood of sixty and thus some fifteen years Gregory’s senior. Also, Father Halloran was tired, as was Gregory, for they had just returned from a final series of visits with certain parishioners, an act designed to ease Gregory into his new parish.
“It’s too bad,” said Gregory, “that you have to leave just before the parish’s big feast day.”
“Yes,” agreed Father Halloran. “I’ve always enjoyed St. Michael’s Day—the special Mass, the special music. But the orphanage needs someone to take charge immediately.”
“Are you sure you won’t stay the night? It’s terribly late.”
“No,” Father Halloran said. “If I start driving now I’ll be at the orphanage before dawn, in time to get my work started. You see, they’re expecting me in the morning, and I don’t want them to be disappointed in me at the very beginning. It has taken longer than I planned to finish up things here at St. Michael’s.”