Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  It was the “balance” she had always sought. “I have finally stepped into the locus of my self,” she reflected. It had always been there, of course. This was the wonder and the awe of it all. And the core of that wonder was “finding it to be nowhere, in a room with an empty chair that did not exist, bare walls that faded into nothingness,” and she herself “at last seen as a final illusion dissipated and annihilated into nothingful oneness.”

  She stood up to go, overjoyed with her newfound “thrill of balance.” But she was whiplashed back to clamorous and unwanted sense by music from a portable radio on the arm of a passerby. The snake resting inside her had suddenly coiled like a whip cord and was lashing out at the attempted entry of any singular beauty or grace. She felt herself falling and whirling, falling and whirling. It was as if inside her head a little flywheel had broken loose and was whipping itself into a high-pitched scream as it sped faster and faster. The ground came up and hit her across the forehead. But the real suffering was deep inside her. “Never did I know such sadness and pain,” she said.

  “When I walked away with the Man’s help, he said little. His words burned themselves into my memory: ‘Don’t fear. You have now married nothingness and are of the Kingdom.’ I understood it all without understanding anything at all with my intellect or reason. I said, ‘Yes! Yes! All of me belongs now.’

  “Nothing was ever the same again, until after I was exorcised.”

  It was not so much what Marianne had learned. It was rather what she had become. “I was not another person. I was the same. Only I was convinced I had become free by being totally independent and by what had entered me and taken up residence inside me.”

  Just to confirm herself in her conviction, “at one point about twelve months before the exorcism, I did go to a psychiatrist—really to find out how far I had traveled from the ordinary idea of being normal. As he spoke, I realized that all he said, the terminology and concepts he used, and the theories he relied on were such claptrap, all this was only halfway house to where I had arrived. He was treating me as if I were a sick human animal—concentrating on the animal part of me. But he did not know anything about spirit; and so I knew then he could not understand the spirit part of me, could not understand me. He smothered me in words and methods. Even tried some amateur hypnotic business. He finished up talking more about himself than me.

  “A second psychiatrist told me I needed to travel, to get away from it all—but this was at the end of a long session. Again, in this case, I found that nothing the therapist, a woman this time, nothing she did by way of accepted psychoanalytic methods (discussions, monologues on a couch, hypnosis, pharmacology, etc.) ever reached beyond the shallow level of my psychic acts and consciousness. I always saw the therapist as if she were stalking around me fascinated by images and surfaces and terminology; and I saw my psychic self, this partial, puny mechanism in me, responding to her. All along, the real me, my very self which doesn’t deal in images or words at all, was untouched. Its area was never entered by the therapist. No psychiatrist could fit in through the doorway because of the load of images and emotions and concepts he carried about with him. Only the naked I enters and lives there.”

  From now on, as far as any outside observer could have assessed, Marianne’s course was a deterioration. After the “marriage with nothingness” in Bryant Park, some fixed moorings seemed to have been severed.

  She encouraged all forms of sexual intercourse with men and women, but never found anyone willing “to go the whole hog.” Lesbians generally stayed at the surface, wishing to generate pleasure and satisfaction without the necessity of a male. Men with whom she had anal intercourse suddenly became appalled, and usually impotent, when she proceeded to act out anal intercourse “to its fullest extent,” as she said. In her view, they wanted merely a novel experience but were quite unwilling “to achieve complete bestiality.” They could only take “a little of the beast.” They missed “the deliciousness of beauty bestialized and of beast beautified.”

  The few neighborhood people who saw her with any frequency began to think she was peculiar. She rarely spoke. In shops she would point to what she wanted to buy or hand it to the shopkeeper with a grunt. She never looked them in the eye. All had a vague feeling of threat or danger, some indefinable sense of an unknown fire in her, as long as she stood near them.

  Her parents tried to see her several times, but could speak to her only through the locked door of her apartment. Her language to them was littered with obscenities.

  Once the neighbors heard dull thuds and crashes for four to five hours. Finally overcoming the reluctance of East Village apartment dwellers to interfere with anyone, they called the police. The door had to be forced. The smell in the room was stomach-curdling. And they could not understand the freezing temperature, while outside New York sweltered in the fetid humidity of high summer.

  The room was in chaos. On the floor around the bed and table, in the closets, bathroom, and kitchenette, there were thousands of torn sheets of paper covered with indecipherable scrawls. Marianne was lying across the bed, one leg bent beneath her, a little blood dropping from the corner of her mouth, her eyes open and sightless. She was breathing regularly.

  An ambulance called by someone arrived just when Marianne stirred and sat up. She took in the scene in one glance. Quickly her face changed; she spoke in a normal voice, and assured them that all was well. She had fallen, she said, from a chair while fixing the curtains. “Police don’t want trouble,’ she comments in recalling the incident. “And anyway, I radiated too much power and self-confidence. The only thing I wanted to do was to shout obscenities in their faces: ‘You missed it all! I’ve just been fucked by a big-bellied spider.’ But there was no point in saying that.” They left her alone.

  During all this time, Marianne always smelled bad, and she seemed to have constant cuts and bruises on her shins and the back of her hands. She never displayed any emotion except when confronted with a crucifix, or someone making the sign of the cross, the sound of church bells, the smell of incense from a church door, the sight of a nun or a priest, or the mention of the name of Jesus (even when spoken as an oath or used in jest). Her brother, George, who later went around her familiar haunts, was told by many that at such moments she seemed to shrink inside herself like somebody under a rain of blows, and through the gap in her dreadful, constant smile they would hear growled gurgles of resentment.

  Violence to others was rare. On one occasion a schoolgirl with a collection box for a local church cause, shook the box in her face asking for a contribution. Marianne screamed through her teeth, fell into a paroxysm of weeping, shielding her eyes with her hands and kicking violently at the girl’s shins. On the front of the box, she still recalls, there was a crucified figure together with the name of Jesus.

  On the other hand, she repelled threatening violence rather easily. In the dusk of one October evening, at the corner of Leroy Street, she was accosted by a mugger. She remembers clearly that he made his first move at her from behind. She turned her face deliberately to him, displaying the full extent of that twisted smile to him: “Yes, my brother?” He stopped as if he had run up against an invisible brick wall and stood staring; he seemed unexpectedly and painfully bruised. Then with a scared glance, he backed away from her and took to his heels.

  About May 1965 things were brought to a head. Marianne’s brother returned to New York for an extended visit. George was married by now and the father of two children. Visits back home were not easy to arrange. Their mother had kept him informed by letter of the rift between Marianne and her parents. But she had given no idea of the extent to which Marianne had changed.

  Now he heard the full story. He talked with Marianne’s most recent employers and the few people who came into contact with her—her landlord, the grocer, and a few others. He even went to the local police precinct. The news was bad right through. No one had a good word to say for his sister. George could not bring himself to believe th
e stories about the little Marianne he had been so close to. Some spoke disparagingly of her in a way that hurt him deeply. Others manifested a great fear and apprehension about her. One police sergeant went very far: “If I didn’t know otherwise, son, I would say you’re a bloody liar and not the brother of that one. This gal is bad, bad, bad news. And, besides, there’s something mucky about her. Doesn’t even look like a fine lad like you.”

  George finally decided to go and see his sister for himself. Their mother sat him down in the kitchen before he went. George recalls now that she warned him “what ails our baby is something bad, something real bad. It’s not the body. And it’s not her mind. She’s gone away with evil. That’s it. Evil.”

  George took most of this and much more of the same with a grain of salt: it was his superstitious and beloved mother speaking about her little baby. She gave him a crucifix and told him to leave it hidden in Marianne’s room. She said: “You’ll see, son. She won’t stand for it. You’ll see.” To humor her, George took the crucifix, put it in his pocket, promptly forgot about it, and went downtown to see Marianne.

  It was the first time George and Marianne had met in about eight years. And he was also the first of her immediate family she had consented to see in about six years. Marianne was visibly delighted to see him in her one-room apartment. But George, sitting and listening to her talking slowly in a soft, staccato voice, knew immediately that something was indeed wrong with his sister, that some very deep change had taken place in her.

  She was still recognizable to him as his sister—the mannerisms he had known in their earlier years were visibly there. And she still had the “family face” which he shared with her. But, as George told it, she seemed “to have seen something which constantly filled her mind even while talking to me. She was speaking for the benefit of somebody else’s ear, repeating what somebody else was telling her.” He had a funny feeling that made him look foolish to himself: she was not alone, and he knew it. But he could not get the sense of it all. He was not only puzzled by her behavior, but by its effect on him: she frightened him. George normally did not frighten easily. And he never had felt fear with any of his immediate family.

  He was slightly reassured when, several times during the conversation, he saw glimmers of the personality he had known in their young years when they were inseparable companions. But at those moments she seemed to be appealing for help or trying to overcome some obstacle he could not define and she could not tell him of. Then the wave of fear would come on him again. And he remembered his mother’s voice as she spoke to him earlier that day: “You’ll see. She won’t stand for it.” Partly out of curiosity, partly to satisfy his mother’s request, he decided to hide the crucifix in the room as his mother had asked him.

  When Marianne went to the bathroom, George placed the small crucifix under her mattress. No sooner had Marianne returned and sat on the edge of the bed than she turned white as chalk and fell rigidly to the floor, where she lay jerking her pelvis back and forth as though in great pain. In seconds the expression on her face had changed from dreamy to almost animal; she foamed at the mouth and bared her teeth in a grimace of pain and anger.

  George ran out and called her parents on a pay phone. They arrived about three-quarters of an hour later, bringing the family doctor with them. That night they took Marianne back to their home in upper Manhattan.

  There followed weeks of nightmare for her parents and George. They now had full access to her. She lay in what the doctor loosely described as a coma. She would, however, wake up irregularly, take a little nourishment, fall into paroxysms of growling and spitting, was always incontinent and had to be washed continually, and finally would lapse back into the strange comatose state.

  Sometimes they would find her wandering around the room in the middle of the night, stumbling over the furniture in the darkness, her face frozen into a horrible smile. Drugs and alcohol were ruled out as causes of her condition. Hospitalization was considered and rejected. Although she was undernourished, their doctor and a colleague of his could find nothing organically wrong and no trace of disease or injury.

  From the beginning, her father insisted that their parish priest come to their home where Marianne now lay, but each visit was catastrophic. It was as if she knew in advance the priest was coming. She had terrifying fits of rage and violence. She would awaken, endeavor to attack the priest, pour out a stream of obscenity, tear her own skin, try to jump out their fifteenth-story window, or start battering her head against the wall.

  There were constant disturbances. The door of her room would never stay either open or shut; it was continually banging to and fro. Pictures, statues, tables, windowpanes, crockery were regularly fragmented and crushed. It was, finally, all this, plus the unbearable and constant stench, that sent her mother and brother to Church authorities. No matter how she was washed and deodorized, and the room scoured and cleaned, it always smelled of sodden filth and a putrefaction unknown to them. All this, together with Marianne’s extreme violence when a rosary or a crucifix was put to her lips, convinced her family finally that her illness was more than physical or mental.

  When Peter arrived in New York in mid-August, he was given a short briefing. He insisted on two preliminary visits and examinations; during these, there was surprisingly no violence. First, he accompanied two doctors, chosen by him, on a visit to Marianne. She cooperated fully with them. On the second visit, he had an experienced psychiatrist with him. This expert prolonged his examinations for two or three weeks, taking copious notes, tape-recording conversations, discussing the case with colleagues, questioning her parents and friends. His conclusion was that he could not help her. He recommended another colleague of his. After a hypnosis session, more lengthy conversations with Marianne, and relying as well on the results of drug therapy, his colleague pronounced Marianne normal within the definition of any psychological test or understanding.

  It was the beginning of October before Peter felt he could be morally sure he had a genuine case of possession in Marianne, and that he could safely proceed with the exorcism. He planned to start it early on a Monday morning. Beforehand, he chose his assistants and then spent many hours schooling them as to how they should act, what to do, and what not to do during the ritual of Exorcism. Their chief function was to restrain Marianne physically. Peter had a younger priest as his chief assistant; he had to monitor Peter’s actions, warn him if mastery of the situation were slipping from him, correct any mistakes he might make, and—in Peter’s words—“poleaxe me and carry on in my place if I make the ultimate mistake.” All the assistants were given one absolute rule: never say anything in direct response to what Marianne might say.

  Late on the Sunday evening preceding his Monday morning appointment at Marianne’s home, as Peter sat chatting after dinner with some friends, he received a frantic call for help from George. Marianne’s condition was worse than ever before. She raged around the apartment, screaming Peter’s name. There had been a series of disturbances in the house that still continued unabated. And they were beginning to spread beyond the family’s apartment. Not only were the neighbors complaining; his parents had already been the victims of some freak accidents. The situation was getting out of hand.

  Peter left immediately, and arrived at the apartment some time past midnight. He set about preparing for immediate start of the exorcism. His assistants had already arrived. He did not approach Marianne’s room. Under his directions, they entered, stripped the bedclothes from the bed, placed Marianne on a blanket thrown on the mattress. She made no resistance, but lay on her back, her eyes closed, moaning and growling from time to time. They stripped the carpet from the floor, and removed all but two pieces of furniture. Peter needed a small night table for the candlesticks, the crucifix, and his prayer book. The tape recorder was placed in a chest of drawers. The windows were closed securely and the blinds drawn. It was after 3:30 A.M. before all was ready for the exorcism.

  The four assistants gather
ed around Marianne’s bed in the little room. The only light came from the candles on the night table. Around them wafted the stale stench that marked Marianne’s presence; even the little balls of cottonwool dipped in an ammonia solution which they had placed in their nostrils did not kill that smell. Occasionally, the honking of a car or the scream of a police siren sounded in their ears from the streets below. None of them felt at ease. The centerpiece of this scene, Marianne, lay motionless on the bed.

  When Peter entered wearing black cassock, white surplice, and purple stole, Marianne tried to turn away from where he stood at the foot of the bed, but two of his assistants held her down flat. There was no violence until he held up the crucifix, sprinkled her with holy water, and said in a quiet voice: “Marianne, creature of God, in the name of God who created you and of Jesus who saved you, I command you to hear my voice as the voice of Jesus’ Church and to obey my commands.”

  Not even he and certainly not his assistants were prepared for the explosion that followed.

  Catching them all unawares, Marianne jerked free, and sat bolt upright on the bed. Opening her mouth in a narrow slit, she emitted a long, wailing howl which seemed to go on without pause for breath and in full blast for almost a minute. Everyone was thrown back physically by the force of that cry. It was not piteous, nor was it of hurt or appeal. It was much more like what they imagined a wolf or a tiger would sound like “when caught and disemboweled slowly,” as the ex-policeman described it. It was an embodiment in sound of defiance and infinite pain. It confused and distressed them. Marianne’s father burst into tears, biting his lip to stifle his own voice; he wanted to answer her. “One moment it made you afraid,” said Peter’s young colleague in recalling the moment. “Another moment it made you cry. Then you were shocked. So it went. It confused.”