Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  The mouth said, still softly: “They are all pushing you along the ragged edge. Want to get off it?”

  She remembers a few things. She said through her tears: “I don’t want them to help me. Just to leave me alone.”

  He sat with her for about one hour. The left hand remained visible in her memory. And the mouth. She remembers nothing else of him, except that there were instructions: “Don’t let any man touch you! You have a short time to reach your true self! Come and find me regularly!” And there was one peculiar instruction: “Seek those of the Kingdom. They will know you. You will know them.”

  It was from this time that her family and acquaintances noticed definite changes in Marianne. She disappeared from home for long mornings and afternoons, even when there were no lectures or lab work at college. She spoke rarely with her parents. Her meals at home grew less frequent. Her contemporaries at Hunter noticed that she became more introspective, more fearful of strangers, more reticent with those who knew her, and extremely shy.

  Her mother became worried. After much persuasion, she induced Marianne to see a psychiatrist. But after a couple of sessions, he dismissed her; he told her parents that, while she certainly needed more nourishment (she had been losing weight) and much love, he could detect nothing awry or dangerous in her psychology. She just wanted to be free; and this was, he said, the new generation. Anyway, he advised them, they should think of her age: rebellion and independence were normal for her age bracket.

  Her father was satisfied. But her mother felt some deep apprehension.

  “By the time they realized that I was in earnest about the change in me,” says Marianne, “I had already accepted the authority of the Man in my life. I had changed profoundly. I mean: my inner life-style altered under his influence.”

  Marianne always refers to this figure as “the Man”; but nowadays it is impossible for her to determine if he was hallucination, deliberate figment of her own, a real person, or merely a metaphor and symbol of her initial revolt. Indeed, in Marianne’s memory of the nine years between that first meeting with the Man and the exorcism of 1965, the Man keeps on appearing and reappearing in her recollections. But most of the time, especially the last four years, is nearly a total blank. Only a few searing experiences stand out starkly for her.

  Having finished at Hunter, Marianne decided to follow postgraduate courses in physics at New York University. Her isolation now became complete. After a little over one year at New York University, she dropped out, took an apartment in the East Village, and started working as a sales clerk in a store on Union Square. Her behavior, according to the conservative Catholic standards of her parents, was unorthodox. Marianne never went to church any longer. She lived sporadically with various men, did not take care of her external appearance, and spoke disparagingly—sometimes very rudely and with four-letter words—of all that her parents held dear. She did not allow them to bother her.

  For their part, her parents worried greatly; but, following the hopeful lead of the psychiatrist, they still thought that all this was a temporary phase of rebellion. They did worry in particular about her health: she shrank from 130 pounds to 95 pounds in a matter of months. But, in great anguish and confusion, her mother ceased leaving food packages at the door of Marianne’s apartment, when the first one was delivered back smelling and dripping. Marianne had mixed excrement and urine with the fruit and sandwiches.

  In her memory now, the next big step in her changing “inner life-style,” as she terms it, concerned formal religion and religious belief. She took that step consciously, with the Man by her side, and on two particular occasions.

  One occasion was on Palm Sunday. In the evening as she passed by a church, services were being conducted. Something about the lights in this particular church aroused her interest—“It was in the nature of a challenge,” she recalls. She entered and stood among the people at the back of the church. Suddenly she felt the same disgust and rejection then as she had experienced toward her parents and teachers. As she turned to go, the Man beside her turned also. He had been there but she hadn’t noticed him.

  “Had enough, my friend?” he said quietly, jocularly.

  She saw his smile in the half-darkness, and smiled back at him. He said: “The smile of the Kingdom is now yours.” Then, as they left: “If you don’t like it, you haven’t got to lump it, y’know.” They both smiled. That was all.

  The second occasion took place the next week, at Easter. An illuminated cross was set up on the General Building on Park Avenue. She was viewing this from the corner of 56th Street and Park Avenue, when she heard the Man nearby say: “Seems one-sided. Shouldn’t they turn it upside down also? Just in order to balance the odds? Same thing, really. Only in perfect balance.” The Man smiled.

  “For me,” comments Marianne now, “it was a perfect smile. You hadn’t to balance it up with a scowl. Perfect for me then.”

  At home that night, she found herself drawing inverted crosses side by side with upright crosses. But she could not bring herself to draw the crucified figure on either type of cross. Whenever she tried, “The pencil ran away into S-shapes and Z-shapes and X-shapes.” From that time on, there started in earnest what she recalls as a “new color and form in my inner life-style.” Her descriptions of it are confused and marked by expressions that one finds difficult to understand. But the overall meaning of what she says is chilling. The whole process was an acquisition of the “naked light” and her “marriage with nothingness,” expressions she learned from the Man.

  “I began to live exactly according to my belief. I mean, inside myself, my thoughts, feelings, memories, and all mental activity moved accordingly. I reacted to all things—people and things and happenings—as if they were one side of the real coin. And I rapidly found that all people have a powerful force in them—as humans. People, things, events, challenge us to respond. The way we respond gives the things we respond to a special quality. In a sense, we make them what they turn out to be for us.

  “Let me give you an example that will also tell you to what an extent I pursued my idea. Once outside the Public Library on 42nd Street, on a sunny afternoon, a well-dressed woman passed by on the arm of a man. I was sitting on the steps, and she smiled at me. I found myself smiling back at them and saying by my smile (because I felt like that inside me): ‘You like me. I like you. You hate me. I hate you. See! It is all the same!’ She must have realized the same things, because the smile sort of froze on her face; but she went on smiling—as I did.

  “Another day, I picked up a young man on Third Avenue. We went to his apartment and had intercourse. He was gentle; but when I was finished with him, he was a very frightened being. I guess I showed him a side of his character he never guessed existed. And I could see by his face that he was scared. I insisted he make coffee. Drinking it while still naked, I told him how much I hated him and how much he hated me really, and that the more he loved me and I, him, the more we hated each other. I can still see the blood draining from his face and the fear in the whites of his eyes. He was obviously afraid of some trouble. When he mumbled something about ‘Hyde’ and ‘Jekyll,’ I said: ‘Oh no, man! Put the two in one with no switching back and forth, and you have it down pat. Jekyll-Hyde. That’s perfect. See?”

  From now on, as she remembers it, Marianne’s development went in two quick stages. The first stage was very rapid. It consisted of a total independence. Except insofar as she needed them for survival or pleasure, she no longer bothered about anyone or anything. She had no more decisions to make about being morally good or evil; whether life was good or bad, worth quitting or worth continuing; whether she liked or disliked; whether she was liked or disliked; whether she met her obligations or shirked them.

  The second stage was more difficult and went by fits and starts. It began with a near-adoration of herself. It ended in her “marriage with nothingness” and the fullness of the “naked light.” It became clear during her exorcism a few years later that these were t
erms that described her total subjection to an evil spirit.

  She came to monitor her perceptions closely and scrupulously. At first she was fascinated by her perceptions; they came with a startling freshness, appearing to be utterly original in their source—her self. She became in her own eyes a genius with a single vision. She found the company of others exasperating and destructive. To talk with another softened the sharp edge of her perception; to do anything with another meant clothing herself in false clothes and not being wholly herself; to feel anything with anyone else meant she would feel only relatively, for she had to take account of them. Ideally, she believed, one should feel absolutely whatever one felt; whatever one thought one should think completely; whatever one desired one should desire totally. No concentration on self could be greater.

  Before she achieved absolute isolation, whenever she returned from a conversation or a meal with others, or even after listening to a lecture or working in the laboratory, it was very difficult for her to regain “the inner space and the single vision” she had possessed before such contacts. She was left with a “double vision”; she was blurred, confused, and confusing in herself. She had to spend days “doing her own thing”—walking in the park (this she now did almost every day), sitting in her apartment writing page after page, which she immediately tore up and which she never reread; sitting or standing still for hours—until at last she was fully absorbed in the self that had been hiding. Then quite suddenly all the clamor would fade out. In the presence of that inner self all was naked again. And absolute. And secure. No longer was she interrupted or disrupted by the “bad flow” from others.

  As she reached more and more permanent mastery of her isolation, she came to realize that the self she sought lay “beyond” and “beneath” and “behind” (to use her own expressions) the world of her psychophysical actions and reactions. Out of reach of the endless rhythm of responses, of recordings on her memory, of the fast-paced hip chatter of her companions, of blaring monologues by individuals. She became slowly more sensitive and expectant that she would find the self she sought, wrapped in semitransparent shadows. It was independent, she believed, of that distracting outer world, and of her inner psychic theater which was always at the mercy of that outer world and was so easily shattered by it. The restlessness of details had no place with the self. She came to believe that, if she could prevent the “bad flow” of others entering, she could achieve “perfection of personhood.”

  “One of my big realizations was that in any commerce with others—a conversation, working with them, even being in their presence while they talked and acted with others—there were two levels of ‘flow,’ of communication.”

  One, the “outer one,” was—as Marianne perceived it—the one with which she heard, saw, touched, tasted, smelled, remembered in images, conceptualized, and verbalized. All of its functions could be duplicated by a skillfully built machine, a computer, for instance. A lot of it could be found in highly intelligent animals. But in human beings you couldn’t have this “outer” level of communication without the second level.

  The second level of communication was, Marianne believed, a “flow” or “influence” from each person to another. And whenever two human beings communicated, they did so on both levels simultaneously. And they did so even if they didn’t know it or wouldn’t admit it.

  Marianne had very definite ideas on the source of that second level of communication. Her academic training and her avid reading had given a very sophisticated edge to her viewpoint:

  “The source was not the subconscious, not a sixth sense or telepathy or any of those gimmicky tags,” as she puts it. The source, she thought, was the self in each one. She said: “The self has a means of communication which does not need images or thoughts or logic or any particle of matter.” Psychologists and physiologists, she knew, identified the self with brain circuitry and synaptic joints and the mechanisms of sensation. This was like saying that the violin was the source of the violinist’s music. Religionists and spiritualists identified the self with “soul” or “spirit”—even with God, or a god. And both psychologists and religionists insisted you make choices. And so, in most people, that source and its “flow” were split into a kind of “black-and-white” condition. Most people were always choosing, responding, being responsible for their actions, saying yes or no, and thereby “fissioning the self’s lively unity.”

  Rarely did Marianne meet anyone whose “flow” entered and left her without attempting to split up the self she had found within her. She remembers that the Man’s “flow” was absolutely right, that he even helped her to reach “the place of semitransparent shadows.” At other times, in the subway, on the streets, at shop windows, she would receive helpful influence from passersby. But she never managed to find precisely from whom it came. Her daily life became a series of efforts to resist the “flow” from all but those who, like her ideal, had the “perfect flow” and the “perfect balance,” who had “nothingness within them.”

  She has vague memories of continuing to be instructed by the Man, of seeing him regularly, of listening to him talk, of obeying some dictates he gave. But one can glean nothing precise or detailed from Marianne about her instructions. Even an effort by her today to recollect such instructions of the Man produces sudden panics and fears that temporarily paralyze her mind. It is as if, today, remnants of the Man’s influence cling somewhere in the deep recesses of her inner being, and any effort to recall those days of her possession is like peeling the scab off a healing wound.

  The end of her striving came one day in Bryant Park. She had entered cautiously, feeling the “flow” of all present, ready to flee if any disturbance came her way. He was sitting languidly on a bench doing nothing in particular, staring vacantly into space.

  Sitting down at the other end of the bench, Marianne gazed vacantly on the passing scene. In the morning sunlight, beneath a sky cleansed by a light breeze, the traffic hummed with the busy purposefulness of other human beings about their day’s work. School children and office workers passed by on their different ways. The pigeons were feeding. It could not have been a more peaceful city scene.

  Then, in a quick instant, some tremendous pressure seemed to fall all around Marianne from head to toe like a net. She shivered. And then some invisible hand seemed to have pulled a tightening cord, so that the net slipped through every inch of her body and outer self, tightening and tightening. “As the net contracted in size passing through my outer person, it gathered and compressed every particle of my self.”

  Marianne no longer saw or felt any sensation of sunlight or wind. The outer world had become a flat and painted picture neither fresh nor hot nor cold. And the movements of people and animals and objects were angular tracings with no depth and no coherent sound. All meaning was drained from the scene.

  The only movement was within her. Bit by bit “the net, now like a sharp, all-surrounding hand, tightened, narrowing and narrowing all my consciousness.” At every moment, under that pressure, she was “opening up every secret part of my self, saying, ‘Yes,’ ‘Yes,’ ‘Yes,’ to a power that would not take ‘No’ for an answer.”

  And none who saw her, a young girl sprawled motionless on the bench in the sunlight, could guess that Marianne was becoming a casement of possession.

  Without any warning the pressure ceased. The net had been drawn tight. She was held invincibly, securely. And then she realized, like waking up from sleep, that some kind of mist or fog was lifting from her consciousness, allowing her a new sensation. She now knew that all along—all her life—she had been very near to “dusk, an accompanying darkness.” Even as she once more saw the grass, trees, men, women, children, animals, sun, sky, buildings, with their indifference and innocence in her regard, she saw also this dusk everywhere.

  The dusk crept into her, like a snake slithering easily and lazily into a favorite hole, bringing with it twilight rustlings of such “smoky transparencies,” such “opaque light,” and s
uch “brightest shadows” that a thrill ripped through her whole being.

  What entered her seemed to be “personal,” to have an individual identity but of such seductive repulsiveness that the thrill she felt stung her with a “pain-pleasure” she had never dreamed possible. She felt her “whole being going quiet, self-aware, dissolving all the cobwebs.” It was like falling in love with the open jaws of an alligator. Each splotch of its saliva, each hook of its teeth, each crevasse in its mouth “was animal, just animal, and personal.”

  All the while she kept on repeating “yes” silently as if answering a request for marriage or a demand for surrender. Time seemed to stand still, “as a bestiary of animal sounds and smells and presences” gradually flowed into her consciousness and mingled there with the sounds of children laughing, the tones of workmen nearby calling out jokes, or snatches of conversation from couples passing along the pathway. All the sounds that had enlivened the morning when she had entered Bryant Park now seeped with “a new odor of old and new corrupting things, of corruption.” The cool snap of the air and the sound of the traffic were marinated in a fluid of “grunts, snarls, hisses, bellowings, helpless bleatings.” The blue of the sky, the shining faces of the skyscrapers, the green of the grass, all the colors around her were, according to her memory, suffused in wreaths of black, browns, reds.