Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  By the time she was silent, they had recovered and had her pinned down again. She did not resist. The smile was back on her mouth, twisting her lips into a corkscrew shape. She was very cold to the touch. Her body was still, relaxed. The first words that came from her were calm:

  “Who are you? Do you come to disturb me? You do not belong to the Kingdom. Yet, you are protected. Who are you?”

  THE SMILER

  Father Peter looked up from the exorcism text. “Funny,” he thought, “I should be sweating.” His palms were dry, and his mouth. He glanced at the girl. Her eyes were closed, but her eyeballs were obviously moving beneath her lids as if she were caught in animated conversation. That smile still lay across her lips like a curled whip. Her head was now turned slightly to one side as if listening.

  “Marianne!” He said it in a half-whisper, not finding his voice easily. No answer. Silence for about ten seconds. Then, this time commandingly: “Marianne!”

  “Why curse your gentle heart”—Marianne’s words were spoken softly—“I am now of the Kingdom. Didn’t you know?” A pause. “So, please hump off.” Another pause. “With little Zio.” A little laugh. Then: “Betcha he doesn’t know how to hump, fella!”

  The edge of her teeth appeared like a white curve behind the lips. The crow’s-feet melted away from around her eyes. The whole expression hardened. “Unless…unless…unless you want to play socket to my hammerrrrrrr…” Her words had come out all slurred and on one breath but with no noticeable lip movement. Peter could hear the end of that lungful of air as the prolonged “r” died away like an echo into nothingness.

  The four assistants stirred and looked at each other. The bank manager, now perspiring freely, felt for the waxen pads in his ears to reassure himself they were still there. James, the younger priest, caught his breath and was about to speak when Marianne spoke again, this time in a husky voice.

  “Sorry, Peter.” She sounded just like a lover who had kissed a little too violently, was sorry, but might bite again if disappointed.

  “Marianne!” This time insistingly. The name acted like the pull of invisible wires. Her body became rigid. Her head was flat on the bed, face to the ceiling; the eyeballs turned up behind the eyelids were still; the skin, marbleized and utterly smooth, looked ten years younger. For all the world, this was a teenage student listening intently to her professor. Except for the smile.

  “Lechah venichretha verith.”* The Hebrew words came off her lips quite intelligibly to Peter. “A deal,” she continued, “just you, Peter, and me. Peter the Eater.”

  A window opened in Peter’s memory releasing a small sharp panic in him. It was like a bat zigzagging at him out of the night of memory. And like a grain of grit thrown in his eye and stinging him to tears. “Don’t worry. No one will know it. Only me.” Mae’s face and voice were back with him for an instant from that distant summer evening. They were so dear in his memory. But Marianne’s voice seaped the memory to ashes.

  “A deal, Peter! Let’s talk of the Un in the All-Holy. Aleph. Beth. Gimel. Daleth. Shin. Forget your Hebrew in all that hair and skin?” The tone was level, throaty, neither male nor female, grittily mocking. The grain of panic in Peter now became a boulder pushing him against the bars of his mind, as he sought refuge. He remembered the neat trap, and the words of old Conor: “Nivir discuss, me bhoy. Nick’s a pahst mahsther at it. He’ll have yeh bet in wan tick uv a lamb’s tail.”

  Peter made a new effort at mental control. His panic receded. “Marianne!”

  But the Pretense continued. “Tschah! Peter! What’s a little Hebrew between you and me?” The voice was less throaty now, appealing, even.

  “In the name of Jesus, I command you, Marianne, to answer.”

  “Why can’t we forget the past? You forget it. I forget it. So everybody’s happy, Peter.”

  “Marianne, you belong to the Most High…”

  “Forget it, Peter!” The hard note again. “Don’t be a bore. This is, is, is Marianne. The real Marianne…”

  “Marianne, we love you, and we know you. Jesus knows you. God knows you. Answer me in the name of Jesus who saved you.”

  “If you’re thinking of that little pimply girl with no breasts and heavy glasses and her silver cross and her calloused knees…”

  “Only love can save and heal, Marianne.” Peter knew that confrontation was being avoided, and the voice of Pretense went on.

  “…and her no-mother-yes-mother-no-father-yes-father-bless-me-father-for-I-have-sinned. Forget it, Peter.” The throaty tone had returned; but there was a silky snarl laced with contempt and, Peter felt, some tiny threat.

  A sound caught Peter’s ear. Marianne’s father was shaking and looking at the chest of drawers. For the last 17 hours, that chest of drawers had never stayed in exactly the same place. This had not been too disturbing. But now it rocked back and forth at irregular intervals; the brass handles rattled.

  “Throw some holy water on that thing,” Peter whispered to his colleague. He heard some short hissing sounds like drops of water falling on a red-hot stove.

  But—even as quickly as that—the initiative had been taken out of Peter’s hands. He had been distracted by her father’s reactions and his own whispered order.

  “Peter? You okay?” She had a mocking solicitude in her tones. The rattling had ceased. “About that Un. What’s the difference?”

  Peter clenched his teeth and decided to be assertive. “The All-Holy,” he said flatly, “is one.”

  “Ah! But to be complete, the All-Unholy goes with it.”

  “Dirt does not go with cleanliness.”

  “Without darkness, no light, Peter. No light.”

  “The All-Holy cannot go with the All-Unholy.”

  “Wrong, Peter pet, pet Peter.”

  Peter’s mental grip weakened for an instant, as he felt the claws of argument closing around his mind. Fatally his logic rose. Conor’s warning faded in a kind of cry to intellectual battle, and he blurted out: “Impossible—”

  “Now, we’re on the ball.” Her voice rose, cut in triumphantly. “I know your fuddy-duddy medieval Principle of Contradiction. Esse et non-esse non possunt identificari.* Even know the Latin! But that’s for now, Peter. See? Only for now. It can be different.”

  Peter forced himself away from argument.

  “Marianne!”

  “No, Peter…”

  “In the name…”

  “Of the All-Unholy and, if you wish, the All-Holy. No objection.” Then that terrible little laugh. “Some day soon, your esse and your non-esse will go together like…”

  “…of Jesus, Marianne…”

  “…a cock in a cunt, like a hand in a glove. Mine do…did…will…”

  Suddenly she vibrated in a high-pitched scream, shoulders, hips, thighs, feet, hands, all beating against the hands that held her down, like a woman driven to insanity with caresses but cut short of orgasm: “Will somebody fuck me, fuck the esse out of my ass, Peter. Put your esse in me and fuck me, fuck me.” She ended in a forlorn wail.

  Marianne’s uncle gasped for air, as if throttled by a blow across the throat. Peter’s eardrums ached from that scream. He almost felt the hot tears of her father, who was now crying quietly, biting his lips as he held his daughter down.

  Peter knew: the Pretense was wearing thin; something had to give. But they were not yet in sight of the Breakpoint.

  Suddenly Marianne went limp. The men relaxed their grip on her and stood back. A high color crept into her cheeks. The voice that came from her throat now was youngish, full of interest, calm, as though reciting a lesson, cascading with soft syllables. As she spoke, her head moved from side to side, eyes closed. The whip-smile was now a coy kitten playing around the corners of her mouth.

  “I have been on a simple quest. You see. No harm to anybody. Not even to myself. Only, I wanted to end all the painful choosing. Mummy and Daddy could not help me. Nor my teachers. Nor boyfriends. All of them were split with decisions. All of them t
ortured by their choices. Afraid. Yes. You see? They were afraid. Had fears. Like dogs yapping at their heels. Is this right? Is this happy? Is this possible? Is this impossible? Miles and miles of yapping mongrel questions. I knew if I found my real self, there would be no more need to respond to choices and therefore no more fear of error. No more guilt.”

  Peter understood there was no hope of arresting this flow of her speech. She was eluding him now by a stratagem of logical talk into which he could not enter without closing steel jaws around his mind. It would be all over. Fatally. The only way of “teasing” her out of this tricky stage of the Pretense was by an equally sustained flow of talk in direct contradiction to the sense of what she was saying.

  For long minutes and at various stages, Peter and Marianne responded as if chanting antiphonal psalms, one taking up where the other left off. But there was no sequence or logical connection between what each was saying. The only point on which he endeavored to match her was the manner of speaking. When she whispered, he whispered. When she shouted, he shouted. When she murmured, he murmured. When she interrupted, he interrupted her. When she was silent, he fell silent. If one could have visualized their struggle at this phase, it would have been like a surrealistic slow-motion Olympic wrestling match in which the contestants strove with each other’s shadow, while all colors and actions faded into blurry grayness, and scores were kept by a referee never seen or heard but felt as a sure and eerie presence.

  “Possible and impossible,” Marianne cooed, “make all human happenings impossible, posing suppurating distinctions and pat partisanships and perfunctory periods…”

  “If a man has any love for me,” Peter read, “he will be true to my word.” He was battering against the confusion, the numbing use of words that lulled the mind toward nothingness. “And then he shall love my Father; and we will both come to him and make our abode with him…”

  “…in between us and our other halves,” Marianne interrupted. “Saying to the Yin in me: Thou shalt not have thine Yang. Saying to the Yang in you: Thou shalt not have a Yin…”

  Peter cut Marianne off again. “The branch that does not live on in the vine can yield no fruit of itself.” The very simplicity of the words gave Peter new blood. His voice was calm. “No more than you…”

  “…making a male the creature of his dangling ganglions,” screamed Marianne violently, “and a female the bed of her clit and her clots and her…”

  “…if you do not live on in me,” Peter said at the top of his voice. “I am the vine; you, its branches; if a man lives on in me, and I, in him, then he…”

  “…tomby womb.” Marianne was now snarling the words in a hoarse yell. “He out. She in. And never the twain shall meet except in sweat and groans. Ugh! For out’s out…” Now Marianne blew out a great gust of air at the candles on the night table at the foot of the bed. The young priest shielded them with the cupped palms of his hands.

  Peter would not disengage. He went on, still knifing at the confusion, the verbal expression of the stink in the room, using the words that kept him free. “…will yield abundant fruit; separated from me, you have no power to…”

  “…and in’s in,” she broke across him. “This cut-and-dried business started long ago with all that crap of master and slave, creature and creator, god and man. The whole cotton-pickin’, mother-fuckin’…”

  “…anything,” Peter continued imperturbably with his text. “If a man does not live on in me, he can only…”

  “…winners-and-losers game.” She paused slightly for a moment, as if listening. “The fella in that white robe with that camp-following whore and her vaseline. And then for us…”

  She broke off. Her eyes opened and she sat up in bed. The ex-policeman and the bank manager, fearing violence, reached for her arms. But there was none. Father James thought of the old lithograph of Jesus and Mary Magdalen that hung in the rectory.

  “Yeah, my young eunuch. That’s him and her,” said Marianne, laughing and looking at James crookedly and conspiratorially.

  But Peter’s voice recalled the stunned James to reality.

  “…be like the branch that is cast off and withers away. Such a branch is…”

  “Mother Mary Maidenhead Virgilius announced that the impossible can’t be possible.” Marianne was lying back once more on the bed. “You’re telling us, we all chorused at her…”

  Peter caught the sardonic tone. His voice went hard as he cut her off.

  “…useless and cast into the fire, to burn there. I pray for those who are to find faith in me through their word; that they may be all one; that they too may be one in us, as thou, Father, art in me, and I…”

  “…withered boobs and remembering her fallen womb and her pasty complexion at curse time every month.” Marianne’s voice was once again rising to a falsetto. “If only you had known. Mother dear! The impossible isn’t…”

  Marianne was chuckling. Peter kept the hard note in his tone, as he took up where she had cut him off: “…in thee; so that the world may believe that it is thou who has sent me.”

  Still talking, Marianne now turned over on her side, relaxed. While she spoke, the doctor took her pulse as he was supposed to do every quarter of an hour, when her movements didn’t make this too difficult.

  “…possible unless the impossible is actual. Otherwise the impossible would be impossible. Must be really impossible, though. Really.” Her tone was confidential. “For the possible to be possible, I mean. Must have both. Must have…”

  Peter’s voice sank low and vibrant: “This is my commandment that you should love one another, as I have loved you. This is the greatest…”

  They all jerked to attention: Marianne’s body had become rigid as a plank of wood. She was still talking: “…both.” Now her words ran ahead of him. He looked up, listening and watching for any telltale sign that the Breakpoint was upon them. She continued feverishly.

  “The real is real because of the unreal. The clean, clean because of the unclean. The full, full because of the empty. The perfume, perfume because of the smelly. The holy, holy because of the unholy.” Then in an intense rush of words interspersed with grunts intent on hammering home contradictions, in an unholy pursuit of all that could confuse and confound human thought and open blankness in the mind: “Sweet sweet huh bitter. What is is huh what isn’t. Life life huh death.” Each grunt preceded an opposite and sounded as though Marianne were being punched in the stomach each time. “Pleasure pleasure huh pain. Hot hot huh cold.” Then in a chain of words pasted together in a scream: “Updownfatthinhighlowhardsoftlongshortlightdarknesstopbottominsidealleachallheachchchchchchchchch…” The piping voice died away on that long, coagulated mishmash as if choking on its breath. The effort had been so violent that Marianne seemed to be almost plucked off the bed, every part of her prone body straining upward.

  Peter resumed his reading evenly. “I have no longer much time for conversation with you. One is coming, who has power over the world, but no hold over me. Now is the time when the Prince of this world is to be cast out…” He paused in the middle of the sentence and looked at Marianne.

  She was still lying rigid, her legs apart, hands on her crotch. A low whispered growl started in her throat and parted her lips.

  Peter started to whisper: “Yes, if only I am lifted up from the earth, I will attract all men to myself.” He stopped, no longer hearing that growl.

  Marianne’s body relaxed. She rolled over jerkily on her other side. In a girlish voice, a seemingly instantaneous departure in a new direction: “Binaries, we need them, y’know? Yessir. Cybernetics has ’em. Before and after. Plus and minus. Odd and even. Negative and positive. Always to be with us. But just as far as that: with us. Not splitting us.”

  Peter would not be pulled aside or try to follow any sense of Marianne’s words. That same trap, that constant, easy invitation to defeat. He took up again: “He who rules this world has had sentence passed on him already. The spirit will bring honor to me beca
use it is from me…”

  “He who is not with me,” she took up, interrupting in a dreadfully mocking falsetto, “is against me, sez the Lord. No man can serve two masters, sez the Lord.” Lowering her tone: “Ever see two pricks in the ass and cunt of one broad and she pumping back and forth servicing two masters?” Her father turned his face away and leaned on the policeman’s shoulder.

  Again the falsetto: “Whom do men say I am? sez he. Black and white, sez he.” Now the falsetto rose to a howl that pierced the ears of Peter and the others, making them wince and grimace: “You’re in, sez he. You’re out, sez he. The Lord God of Ghosts. Sheep ’n’ goats, sez he. Doves and devils, sez he. Golden clouds and bloody brimstone. Driving a nail in the heart. Opening up a gaping wound in my oneness.” Then, raising her pelvis up and down rhythmically and shouting at the top of her voice: “Jeebum! Jeebum! Jeebum! Jeebum!”

  “…the Father belongs to me,” said Peter calmly, finishing his interrupted sentence.

  Marianne stopped as Peter said those words. Now he was standing by the window but facing into the room and watching Marianne on the bed. She whimpered piteously: “All I want is no more questions. No more challenges. No more choices. No more yesses and noes. Not even maybes. No thou-shalt-nots. In the Kingdom…” Then in a suddenly deep gurgle like a man who needs no air but speaks through gallons of water “…in the Kingdom in the Kingdom in the Kingdom…”

  Every instinct in Peter drummed at him to put pressure on her. He felt that the Pretense was almost over, that Marianne’s revolt against possession would break out now, and that the evil occupying her would be forced to fight openly to retain its hold.

  Peter moved quietly to Marianne’s side, still looking for the telltale signs on her face. If the Breakpoint were near, then all expression should be absent; and there should be queer and unnaturally crooked lines. Sure enough, the face was a frozen mask grained with stark lines. Silence.

  “Father, is she going to come out of it?” It was Marianne’s father.