Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

“You, Jerome and Hilda,” again looking at them with pride, “you will love his mystery of human unity; and, in time, like him, you will face death as he did, human, noble, and go back to nature, to be cemented into its eternal oneness where Jesus went with bowed head but triumphant.”

  By now the man in the black hat had moved in front of the little crowd of guests.

  Jonathan launched into the marriage ceremony proper. “Look now, Hilda and Jerome, all nature is going to pause for one brief instant to witness your vows.” A sweeping gesture took in all the scene, the crooked index finger jabbing oddly askew. “All things, the wind, the sun, the sea, the earth, all will stop in their ways…”

  Jonathan broke off. He seemed to be having difficulty in drawing his breath. He gulped. His face flushed with the effort to continue. Then he managed to take up again, dictating word for word to Hilda.

  “With all my heart, I do take you…”

  “With all my heart, I do take you,” Hilda echoed in clear, confident tones.

  “As my honored husband…”

  “As my honored husband…”

  “Within the mystery of nature…”

  “Within the mystery of nature…”

  “To have and to hold…”

  “To have and to hold…”

  “In life and in death…”

  “In life and in death…”

  “As God’s womb and pleasure…”

  “As God’s womb and pleasure…”

  “For the glory of our humanness…”

  “For the glory of our humanness…”

  “As Jesus before us…”

  “As Jesus before us…”

  “World of living and dead…”

  “World of living and dead…”

  “Amen.”

  “Amen.”

  Hilda slipped the ring onto Jerome’s finger. The guests stirred. Some had become unaccountably tense and could not take their eyes off Jonathan. Afterward, some remarked that it was as if a disfigurement had begun to show through in him.

  The man in the black hat, now in front of the dunes and apart from the crowd, still watched intently.

  Jerome looked at Jonathan and waited for the words of his vow to Hilda. Hilda’s eyes were on Jerome. All nature, indeed, had seemingly stopped for her. For the first time she felt at one with life, with the world, with her own body.

  Jonathan was again struggling with some impediment. His body was stiff. His chest swelled. At last he was able to fill his lungs, and he started to dictate Jerome’s words.

  “With this ring…”

  “With this ring…” Jerome took up the words.

  “I do take you…”

  “I do take you…”

  “As my dearly beloved wife…”

  “As my dearly beloved wife…”

  “As you have given me…”

  “As you have given me…”

  “The wonder and the mystery…”

  “The wonder and the mystery…”

  Jerome waited for the next line. But Jonathan was suddenly again almost purple with effort. His blue eyes were bulging now, showing large, terror-ridden whites. His hands, which had been folded across his chest solemnly, now were tensed by his sides, opening and shutting convulsively. He opened his mouth and rasped: “Of being one with nature…”

  “Of being one with nature…” Jerome repeated.

  “And—and—and…” Jonathan stammered.

  Hilda’s head turned in alarm. Jonathan’s voice was climbing on each syllable toward hysteria. It seemed that every other sound had died out, as everyone hung on Jonathan’s words.

  “And—of be-being one with Je-Jes-Jeeeesus”—Jonathan’s voice broke into a screeching crescendo that split the air. “JESUS!” The name was a curse cracking on every ear. His face twisted into an ugliness that froze Hilda with horror.

  In a flash Jonathan was on top of Hilda, his outstretched arms catching her under the arms. Now, in his onrush, he was carrying her out bodily into the water, groaning and muttering wildly to himself. He pushed her head down, keeping her face beneath the surface and straddling her body as she kicked and struggled.

  The lightning speed of Jonathan’s actions and their crazy incongruity had frozen everybody. For a split second they did not grasp what was happening. Then a woman screamed with the unmistakable, high-pitched warning of mortal danger.

  Within seconds half a dozen men ran and tore Jonathan’s hands away from Hilda, struck him across the neck, lifted him off her, and threw him full length on the beach. He lay there thrashing and kicking for a moment, then went still.

  Jerome and Hilda’s father lifted Hilda clear of the water; she was gasping for air and sobbing, her long dress trailing rivulets of sand and water. They laid her down on the high ground among the sand dunes, her head pillowed on her mother’s lap. Gradually she recovered her breath, crying uncontrollably. Jerome knelt by her, dazed, his mouth open, his face utterly white, incapable of any word.

  Down on the beach, Jonathan lay flat on the sand. He stirred and groaned, turning over on his side. Then, lifting himself up on one elbow, he clambered slowly and fitfully to his feet and swayed unsteadily. His back and side were caked with sand. The water still dripped from his long hair and his clothes. His eyes were bloodshot. His head was lowered. He blinked in the sunlight at the hard stares of the guests ranged around him. He was at bay.

  Nobody said anything at first. Then a sharp, metallic voice broke in. “If you will allow me, sir,” addressing Hilda’s father, “I am in charge here now, sir.” The authority and confidence in that voice attracted all eyes to the speaker. It was the strange man, his black hat off now, revealing a lean, not quite youthful face full of lines, beneath a full head of gray hair tousled by the wind. He removed his sunglasses and with a limp came closer to Jonathan, looking steadily at him. Then he said quietly: “You and I have an important appointment now, Father Jonathan.” He paused; then, with a fresh edge to his voice, “The sooner the better.” The black hat was on his head again. He stretched out his hand to Jonathan.

  No one spoke. No one objected. Perhaps all were relieved that someone was taking over.

  The man spoke again. “The sun will be high in a couple of hours. We have work to do that will not wait. Come!”

  Jonathan blinked for a moment. Then shakily he put the hand with the crooked finger into the other man’s open palm. They turned their backs on the sea. Hand in hand, Jonathan stumbling and swaying, the other man limping, they walked up over the dunes and across to the dirt road where the cars were parked, and stopped by a station wagon.

  They stood there for a moment. The guests could see the man talking to Jonathan. Jonathan, half-bent and leaning on the door handle of the station wagon, was listening, his head bowed. He nodded violently. Then they both got in.

  As the car moved off and the sound died away, someone spoke for the first time. “Who was that?”

  Hilda’s father, his eyes filled with tears, watched the station wagon as it disappeared down the road. “Father David,” he muttered. “Father David M. Everything is going to be all right now.” He shook his head, as if freeing his mind from an uncomfortable thought. “He was right all along.”

  FATHER DAVID

  At the time he led Jonathan stumbling away from the aborted seashore marriage in 1970, Father David M. (“Bones,” as his students liked to call him) was a forty-eight-year-old priest, member of an East Coast diocese, professor of anthropology at a major seminary, and official exorcist for his diocese. He had already conducted four exorcisms himself and he had been assistant at five others. The first had been in Paris, where he had been assistant to an older priest; the others had been in his home diocese.

  When David M. started his professional life as an anthropologist in 1956, he could not have dreamed that within ten years his knowledge of anthropology and his enthusiasm for prehistory would be the major reasons for his role as exorcist and later for his involvement in the bizarre case of Fa
ther Jonathan. Nor could he have dreamed even in that March of 1970, as the exorcism began, that it would lead him, first, to the most harrowing personal crisis of his life, and then to abandon anthropology as a study and a profession.

  When David was born in Coos, New Hampshire’s northernmost county, in 1922, the state, with a population of nearly half a million, was still a rustic farming community, very far removed from the sophisticated centers south in Boston and New York. Coos County in particular was still permeated with the Yankee traditions of hard work, thrift, sobriety; and it hearkened to the preaching of the evils of alcohol, the wisdom of paying cash for what you bought, of self-reliance, individual responsibility, and—as rock-bottom foundation of right living—the infallible, all-sufficient guidance and enlightenment of the Bible. Even today, when the central and southern tiers of the state have suffered from the malice of change, the land itself still carries for the mind the atmosphere of an ancient and undisturbed kingdom. In mountain, lake, cliff, and forest there is a repose as awesome as the naked weight of the Himalayas and the volcanic face of the Sinai Mountains.

  David M. was the only child born of affluent Yankee Roman Catholic parents on both sides. He spent his early years on his father’s farm, occasionally visiting the nearby town and, once in a while, traveling down to Portsmouth with his parents for a brief vacation.

  The most abiding images David has of the world in his youth are of lakes, mountains, forests, cliffs, rock formations, valleys shaded by trees and crags, and the great, still stretches of land that surrounded his home. His ears still retain the harmonies riding in the place names of his home ground—Ammonoosuc River, Saco River, Franconia range, Merrimack Valley, and the lingering magic of Lake Winnipesaukee, whose 20 miles of length were clad in foliage, and the names of whose 274 islands he once learned to repeat by heart.

  The Roman Catholicism of his parents was of a conservative kind and an intimate part of daily life. Both parents had been to college; his father had studied in Cambridge, England. Both had traveled in Europe. And their home was centered around the library and its large open fireplace, where they gathered after meals and where David spent long hours browsing through his parents’ books.

  Many of David’s relatives lived in the surrounding countryside. His playmates were normally his cousins. His earliest memories of any intellectual awakening he traces to the influence of an uncle who, having taught history in Boston for 37 years, finally retired to live on the farm with his brother and sister-in-law, David’s parents.

  Old Edward, as they called him, personified for David the stability and permanence of his home; and he deeply influenced David’s mental development. Edward spent most of his days reading. He stirred out of the house ritually twice a day; once, in the morning, to walk around the farm—rain, hail, or snow; a second time, after dinner, when he walked up and down in the shade of a little copse at the west end of the house, smoking his pipe and talking to himself.

  David remembers going with Old Edward again and again to view the Great Stone Face, “The Old Man of the Mountain,” high up on its perch above Franconia Notch. “No one knows how it came there, son,” Edward used to remark. “It just happened. Man emerging from raw nature.” It became a symbol in David’s mind, and a preview of how he later came to think of man’s origin.

  Whenever David and his Uncle Edward visited the Great Stone Face, the ritual was always the same. Once in view of the “Old Man,” they would sit down and eat lunch over a fire. Afterward, Edward would light his pipe and, staring at the pockmarked profile, start dawdling through the same conversational piece.

  “Now, lad! Who do you think made it?”

  “It just seems to come out of the earth and rock, sir,” would be David’s reply.

  Sometimes Edward would bring a work of his favorite author, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Having read an episode to David, he would discuss it with his nephew. The Scarlet Letter was his most frequent text.

  “Why did Arthur die on the scaffold, lad, and with a smile on his lips?” he would ask.

  After a while, David knew the expected answer: “Because, sir, he knew he had to pay for his sins.”

  And then: “Why did he sin, lad?”

  “Because of Adam’s Original Sin, sir,” would be David’s answer.

  Once David ventured a question himself. “Why did Hester put the scarlet letter back again in her dress pocket, if it was a bad letter, sir?” The answer came with unerring relish: “She wanted to be romantic, lad. Romantic. That’s what they called it.” It was David’s first introduction to romanticism, an issue that took very tangible and painful form for him later on. The evil spirit he exorcised in Jonathan had possessed Jonathan under the guise of pure romanticism.

  When David was fourteen, he was sent to a prep school in New England but his vacations were all spent on the family farm in Coos County. His uncle still lived there; and together they went on several trips to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Montreal.

  It was, however, a trip to Salem, Massachusetts—made at his own request—that became of prime importance in David’s mind. He was sixteen then. His uncle wanted to see the John Turner house, which had been immortalized by Hawthorne in The House of the Seven Gobles. But David had been delving into a copy of Cotton Mather’s Ecclesiastical History of New England that he had found in his father’s library; and he was more interested in people such as Elizabeth Knapp, Anne Hibbins, Ann Cole, and other “witches” and “warlocks” of seventeenth-century Salem. So when they had visited the Peabody Museum and the Turner house, they spent an hour and a half in the “witch house” where Judge Corwin had examined the 19 men and women condemned and executed for witchcraft in 1692.

  David realized later that his stay in and around the “witch house” had a special significance. As they moved around inside and outside the house, his uncle provided him with a running commentary on the 1692 trials.

  All the while, David had a striking but not uncomfortable sensation or instinct that “invisible eyes,” as he put it then to his uncle, or “spirits,” as he puts it now, were present to him and communicating in an odd way. They seemed to be asking something. It was as if one part of his mind listened and recorded his uncle’s commentary and the sights around him, while another part was preoccupied with other, intangible “words” and “sights.”

  Striking as the experience was at the time, it did not in any way obsess his thoughts in ensuing years. In fact, he never vividly recalled this Salem experience until 32 years later at Old Edward’s death and again during the exorcism of Father Jonathan.

  No one in David’s circle of family and friends was surprised when he decided to enter the seminary in 1940. His father would have preferred an Army career for him; his mother had nourished a secret hope of grandchildren. But David had made up his mind.

  After seven years, when he was ordained in 1947 at the age of twenty-five, the bishop asked whether he would be willing to go through some extra years of study. The diocese needed a professor of anthropology and ancient history. If he agreed, he would first earn a doctorate in theology: Roman authorities were chary of letting any young cleric loose in scientific fields without a special grounding in doctrine. It might not be easy or pleasant, because Rome did not think highly of American theologates. The whole program would take about seven more years of David’s life.

  In spite of the possible difficulties, David consented. The following autumn he started to follow theological courses in Rome; and then, in the autumn of 1950, he proceeded to the Sorbonne in Paris.

  Like many others of that time, he had heard much about a French Jesuit named Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, but he had never been exposed to his thought. In Paris he fell under the direct influence of the ideas which Teilhard had generated. For postwar Catholic intellectuals, Teilhard was something of a phenomenon; and from the mid-1950s and on he enjoyed the reputation of a twentieth-century Aquinas, and evoked the type of personal devotion that only a Bonaventure and a Ramon Llul had attract
ed in earlier centuries.

  French of the French, intellectual, ascetic, World War I hero, brilliant student, innovative teacher, mystic, discoverer of Pekin Man (Sinanthropos), pioneer excavator in Sinkiang, the Gobi Desert, Burma, Java, Kashmir, South Africa, Teilhard set out to make it intellectually possible for a Christian to accept the theories of Darwinian evolution and still retain his religious faith.

  All matter, said Teilhard, is and always has been transfused with “consciousness,” however primitive. Through billions of years and through all the forms of chemical substance, plant, animal, and finally human life, this “consciousness” had blossomed. It is still blossoming; and now, in this final stage of its development, it is about to burst forth in a final culmination: the Omega Point, when all humans and all matter will be elevated to a unity only dreamed by the visionaries and saints of the past. The key character of the Omega Point will be Jesus, asserted Teilhard. And so all will be gathered into all, and all will be one in the love and permanent being of achieved salvation.

  By 1950, when David arrived in Paris, Teilhard and his doctrines had become too much for the Roman authorities with their long memories. Teilhard’s critical eyes, his ready flow of language, his Gallic logic, his constant ability to answer inquisitorial questions with a flood of professional and technical details, his refusal to kowtow intellectually, and his very daring attempt to synthesize modern science with the ancient faith—all this frightened ecclesiastical minds. It was not only Teilhard’s aquiline nose that reminded the authorities of his eighteenth-century ancestor, Descartes, whose ideas they still considered anathema. It was as well, and chiefly, Teilhard’s attempt to rationalize the mysteries of Catholic belief, to “scientize” the Divine and make the truths of revelation totally explicable in terms of test tubes and fossil remains.

  Teilhard: dedicated to the “clear and distinct ideas” of Descartes, the father of all modern scientific reasoning; fired inwardly by the personal ideals of Ignatius, father not only of all Jesuits but of all the lone and the brave; lured onward by the mystical darkness of wisdom celebrated by his favorite author, John of the Cross, whose pains he shared but whose ecstasy ever escaped him; honed and refined in intellect by the best scientific training of his day; Teilhard was the custom-built answer, the ready-made darling for the bankrupt Catholic intellectuals of his century and for thousands of Protestants caught in the heel of the hunt by the vicious clamps of that merciless reason they had championed as man’s glory some four centuries previously. Teilhard was, at one and the same time, their trailblazer and their martyred hero. For the tired and besieged French and Belgians he produced shining shibboleths to cry and a new pride to wear. He fanned into a blaze the cold fire that slowly burned in the brains of innovation-hungry Dutch and Germans. He nourished the ever-latent emotionalism of Anglican divines, who by then were floating free of traditional shackles.