The Case Against Satan

by Ray Russell

  “You can?”

  “Certainly. If it is advanced that ancient exorcists who thought they were casting out demons were unwittingly practicing a kind of primitive psychotherapy—for that’s the way the argument goes—then why can’t the argument be turned inside out, with no strain on logic?”

  “Inside out?” asked Gregory. “How?”

  “Why couldn’t we say that today’s psychoanalysts, while believing they are curing their patients scientifically, are unwittingly practicing a kind of modern demon-exorcism and are in fact casting out the literal Devil from the bodies of their patients? They give their cure a different name, use a different ritual and a different vocabulary, and refuse to recognize Diabolus when they see him, yes, but this may be quite simply explained by going back to Baudelaire. Diabolus wants it that way. His cleverest wile is to convince us he does not exist.”

  Gregory had to smile: it was an ingenious idea.

  The Bishop went on. “Sir Thomas More, a Catholic martyr, and the Protestant, Martin Luther—whom I have as much business citing as I do Baudelaire and Kafka!—both held that ridicule was a potent weapon against Diabolus. Luther said he ‘cannot bear scorn.’ More said, ‘The Devil cannot endure to be mocked.’ Well, I’m afraid I quarrel with those gentlemen and go along with Baudelaire. I tell you Diabolus wishes us to mock him, wishes us to diminish his prestige and destroy his legend, wishes us—in order that he may go about his work unhampered—to think him dead. But reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated, Gregory. The mockers are the mocked. Diabolus is very much alive. He is in that girl. He has taken possession of her flesh and of her mind. You must stop him from taking possession of her soul.”

  “I?”

  “By performing Adjuratio Solemnis. Gregory, how long has it been since I ordained you? Twenty years? Twenty-one years?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Do you remember the ceremony?”

  “Well, not everything.”

  “I do,” said the Bishop. “I have to. It’s my job to confer orders upon candidates all the time. The major orders and the minor orders. There are quite a lot of them. Perhaps you’ve forgotten, but one of the minor orders is the Order of Exorcist. And when I conferred that order upon you, I said certain words.” His voice became richer. “‘You receive the power to place your hand upon those possessed, and through the imposition of your hands, the grace of the Holy Ghost and the words of exorcism, you shall drive evil spirits out of the bodies of those so possessed.’ Do you remember?”

  Gregory said, “Yes . . .”

  “‘Impress upon your mind,’ I said, ‘that you receive the right.’ You can help that girl, Gregory. Not doctors, not psychiatrists. You. You have the power.”

  “By—” Gregory was near to laughing. “By casting out the Devil?”

  The Bishop nodded. “I am taking a terrible risk, Gregory. Adjuratio Solemnis should be performed by an exemplary priest, a priest of unflinching faith, a servant of the Lord whose state of grace is beyond question. If I were to ask the Cardinal’s advice, I know what he would say. He would say: ‘Father Sargent? You are out of your mind, Conrad!’ But I am not asking his advice. I am assuming full responsibility for an act I know to be filled with danger even in the hands of a perfect priest. If anything goes wrong, if something terrible happens—and it could—I will be punished, punished severely, so severely that my spirit may break and never mend. For I am old, Gregory. An old man’s spirit is like an old man’s bones. And yet, for you, I will take the risk. Will you not?”

  Gregory frowned and shook his head. “No, no. Just on the practical level—exorcism is a full-time job that could take days, weeks. Who would say Mass?”

  “That’s an excuse, not a reason,” said the Bishop. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll have Father Stefanski from the next parish send over his assistant. He can spare the boy for a few days.”

  Gregory was still shaking his head. “I’ve forgotten everything I ever learned about exorcism.”

  “I’ll teach you again.”

  “I’ve never done it.”

  “You do it all the time,” said the Bishop. “Every time you bless something, every time you sprinkle holy water, you do it. In a small way, you use this power every day of your life. And now you must use it to the full.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You must.”

  “Drive out a medieval Devil I have trouble believing in?”

  “That,” said the Bishop, “is exactly why you must. It is the only thing that can dispel your doubt, the only thing that can save you.”

  “Save me from what?”

  The Bishop was not sure he knew precisely what; he had been improvising; fragments of insight had been drawn to his words like iron filings to a magnet while he talked. Now, as Gregory asked “Save me from what?” the Bishop was tempted to say, From the brandy bottle, perhaps. But he did not. He was about to say all manner of things, but was prevented. He was about to remark upon how it all fitted together—the saint for whom the parish was named, the feast that was soon to be celebrated, the replacement of Father Halloran. Why had Father Halloran been orphaned in childhood? Why was an orphanage post so long in coming for him? Why, when it did come, was Gregory chosen to take Father Halloran’s place in the parish of the afflicted child? It was all a large design, so large that the Bishop could see only a little corner of it. Perhaps Father Halloran had been maneuvered out of position because he was a priest of simple faith, a priest who had no need to test his faith, whereas Gregory . . .

  But the Bishop was prevented from saying any of these things by a dreadful scream and a crash from the parlor.

  They were in the parlor without being conscious of running or opening doors.

  Susan was standing in the center of the room, laughing. She stopped laughing and screamed, like an animal falling upon a spear. Then she laughed again.

  A holy picture—a rather bad, cheap picture of the Virgin—hung crazily from the wall, swinging erratically, its frame disjointed, its glass smashed. The object that had been thrown at it lay on the floor some distance from the picture, a distance testifying to the violence of the ricochet and the force of the thrower. It was a black-bound book, Gregory’s breviary. The cover was bent, the spine broken. Odd things go through one’s mind in crucial moments: Gregory, looking at the violated book, remembered for the first time in years that a standard seminary joke had been to call the breviary The Priest’s Wife.

  Susan yelled a series of obscenities at him. It took all the strength of both men to drag the screaming girl upstairs to a bedroom and lock her in.

  VII

  ADJURATIO SOLEMNIS

  “In Hell the Devils scream one to another; wound, flay, butcher, slaughter, murder without let or stay; thrust swiftly such a one upon the live coals, hurl such another into the furnaces or the boiling cauldrons. And the light women, these shall have in their arms a dragon most cruel, flaming with fire, or, if thou wilt, a devil in form of dragon who shall bind and enchain their feet and their legs with his serpent tail and shall clasp their whole body with his cruel talons, who shall put his beslabbered and reeking mouth upon theirs, breathing therein flames of fire and sulphur and poison and venom, who with his nose, glandered and hideous, shall breathe into theirs a breath most stinking and venomous. And, to come to an end, this dragon shall make them suffer a thousand agonies, a thousand colics and bitter twistings of the belly, and all the damned shall howl, and the devils with them: ‘See the wanton! see the strumpet! Let her be tortured indeed! To it, to it, ye devils! to it, ye demons! to it, ye hellish furies! See the harlot! see the trull! hurl ye upon this whore and wreak upon her all the torments ye can!’ . . .”

  It seemed unlikely to Gregory that Susan could have had access to a work as exotic as the early seventeenth century Merveilles de l’autre monde by the imaginative Abbé François Arnoux, Canon of Riez
, yet her idea of the eternal torments visited upon “the light women” had echoes of the Abbé’s vivid pages.

  The tortures of the damned: grinning gargoyles hoisting naked yowling victims on pitchforks, turning them on spits over fires, cramming them into fissures in the rock, impaling them on spiked wheels . . . a dozen medieval drawings flickered through Gregory’s mind—those crowded infernal scenes whose depiction in loving detail were once a staple of the compleat draughtsman’s repertory.

  And that, Gregory said to himself, is what I am expected to believe in.

  That burn on her arm, though—it was really there. He had seen it with his own eyes when he had helped drag the girl to the bedroom. She was branded like a head of cattle.

  The Bishop had suggested he call the girl’s father and ask him to let Susan stay in the rectory for a while. Gregory locked himself into his study and picked up the phone.

  But his first call was not to Garth.

  • • •

  “Your ear is all red,” Virginia Shannon informed her husband as he wandered into her kitchen in search of matches.

  “I’ve been on the phone for the past half hour,” he said between sucks on his pipe. The bowl of tobacco finally caught the flame and the smoke rose in aromatic arabesques. Shannon shook out the match and said, “It was your brother.”

  “Brian?”

  “No, Greg. What are you cooking in here? Smells good.”

  “A cherry upside-down cake for tonight.”

  “I thought we were dining out tonight.”

  “We are, but you’re always looking for something to munch on just before bedtime, so . . . Besides, the sitter can have some.”

  Shannon grunted. “Let’s hope she leaves a sliver for the head of the household.”

  “What did Greg want?”

  “Oh, just chinning. Shop talk. Checking out some stuff for an article he’s working up.” He sat down on a kitchen chair, resting one elbow on the table.

  “What about your own article, the one for the Psychiatric Quarterly? Is it finished?”

  “Will be. Some pencil corrections, then I’ll have a final draft typed up and mailed off.”

  “Did Greg say anything about his new parish?”

  “Not much. Says he likes it pretty well. Don’t throw out that coffee!”

  “It’s cold. It’s from breakfast.”

  “That’s fine.” He broke out some ice cubes from the refrigerator and plopped them into a tall glass, then poured the old coffee over them. “On the rocks. Just the thing in this weather.”

  She shuddered. “It’ll taste like poison.”

  “Nonsense. Put hair on your chest.”

  “No, thanks.” A faint frown drew her eyebrows together. “I’m glad—but surprised—Greg likes the new parish. From what I’ve heard, it’s rather small and, I don’t know, provincial.”

  “I didn’t say he likes it. I said he said he likes it. Seems to be keeping busy, at any rate. Doing a piece on the stigmata, he said. Said he’d heard about cases of hysteria in which the mind so completely took over control of the body that organic changes were brought about; wanted to hear more about it. Of course, without looking up data, I couldn’t tell him much, just top-of-the-head stuff. Told him there’ve been cases of hysterical blindness, hysterical paralysis, even hysterical pregnancy where the abdomen kept swelling for nine months with no child inside. He asked about hysterical wounds. I’ve never seen any myself—I don’t think—but I’ve read about a woman who developed welts across her back as if she’d been whipped, although nobody’d touched her. And then there’s always Theresa Neumann—”

  “The Bavarian woman who died recently?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her hands and feet bleed as if they’ve been pierced by nails?”

  “Every Friday, the day Christ was crucified, that’s the one. Some medical opinion attributes this to hysteria, of course, and I learned something interesting from Greg—he said the Church hasn’t officially pronounced the bleeding to be of a miraculous nature. Didn’t know that. Then he told me about another case he’s heard about: a girl who couldn’t bear to enter the church and who developed a cross-shaped burn on her skin when a rosary crucifix was pressed to it. Sounds like all the others—the pseudo-whipping, pseudo-pregnancy, and so on; but then he said . . . I think I need some sugar in this.”

  She passed him the bowl and a spoon.

  “Thanks . . . Yeah, much better. He said this girl’s eyes were closed at the time and she didn’t even know it was a crucifix and how do you go about explaining that one, Dr. Shannon! Your brother comes up with some doozies. Only explanation I could offer—without more evidence, without firsthand knowledge—was that the girl may have been tipped off by something . . . like hearing the rattle of the rosary beads . . . that sort of thing.”

  “Your pipe’s gone out again.”

  “I know. I’ll give it one more chance and then it’s back to cigarettes.”

  She struck a match and held it to his pipe while he puffed. As the smoke curled up and away again, she said, “You weren’t taken in by all that ‘article’ and ‘case I’ve heard about’ stuff, were you?”

  “Nope. That’s what they all say. ‘A friend of mine has a problem, Doctor.’ I wonder what’s been going on at St. Michael’s? . . .”

  • • •

  Garth felt his insides shift, felt them snarl with fear as he replaced the phone in its cradle. The black handgrip was slimy with the sweat of his fingers. He wiped his palms on his trousers. “We’d like to drop over and talk to you this evening, Mr. Garth—just the Bishop and I . . .”

  What did he want? And a bishop! Where did he drop from?

  Stupid. It had been stupid of him to go to a priest for help. First Halloran, who ran away. And now this new Sargent fellow, who drags a bishop into it. Maybe a psychiatrist would have been better, after all.

  No. They go too deep.

  He walked aimlessly into his bedroom and sat upon the bed, his hands and lips tight, his breathing audible. He looked in defeat and helplessness at the faded flowered wallpaper with its patina of dirt and the slightly cleaner cruciform patch above his bed, where once a god had hung.

  A man. Not a god. A crazy Jew.

  He looked at his wife’s face, flat and bland in an oval frame upon his dresser. He looked at Susan, a year old, laughing, on her stomach, naked. As naked as she had been to Father Halloran, fifteen years later. His insides writhed again and his ears filled with the thick dark thump of his heart.

  The doorbell rang, stiffening his limbs. What did they want? It rang again. He swallowed dryness, rose from the bed and walked to the front door.

  Before Gregory could introduce Garth and the Bishop, Garth said, “Where’s Susie?”

  “She’s still at the rectory,” said Gregory.

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “May we come in for a moment?”

  “Oh.” Garth backed away from the open door, remembering his manners. “Sure. Come on in.”

  Gregory introduced the two men. Garth, uncertain of the etiquette, failed to kneel, but the Bishop tactfully broke protocol and shook his hand. When they were seated, Garth asked again, “Is anything wrong?”

  “Nothing to worry about,” said Gregory. “Susan had another of her seizures, that’s all. But His Excellency happened to be on hand at the time and, between the two of us, we managed to calm her. She’s resting now.”

  “Did anything—bad—happen?”

  “Nothing bad.”

  “Mr. Garth,” said the Bishop, “Father Sargent and I would like to keep Susan with us for a little while and try to help her . . .”

  “How?” Garth asked quickly.

  “Why, by talking to her.”

  “Like a psychiatrist?”

  The Bishop caught the flash in his eyes and remembe
red what Gregory had told him about Garth’s low estimate of psychiatrists; how, with the smug pedantry of the uneducated, he dismissed them categorically as filthy-minded meddlers. And he replied, “No, not like a psychiatrist.”

  “Well,” said Garth, “that’s fine. I think it’s very nice of you to take an interest in her, sir. Your Excellency. How long you want to keep her over there?”

  “We’re not sure just how many days it will—”

  “Days!”

  “Yes, Mr. Garth.”

  “I thought you meant maybe a few hours. But days!” He got up and walked restlessly, shaking his head. “Gee, I don’t know . . .”

  “I can understand your reluctance, Mr. Garth,” said the Bishop. “But think of it in this light—if Susan were ordered by a doctor to a sanatorium, she would be gone for many days indeed, and she would be far from you. But this way, you will always know she is right here in the neighborhood, within walking distance, in the care of Father Sargent and myself.”

  “Well,” said Garth, “when you put it like that . . . Still, her over there with just the Father and you for days—do you know what happened when she was alone with Father Halloran for just a few minutes?”

  The Bishop nodded. “I know. Father Sargent and I can take care of ourselves, Mr. Garth.” Garth said nothing, so the Bishop added, “We need your consent.”