Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  With a growing horror he could not control, he now saw it in clear outline: a bare tree trunk, stripped of all its bark, severed to a quarter of its original height by some force—a lightning bolt, a random axe, some accident. It was a withered tree trunk with only two stubby arms. Blood stained the putty-white surface of those mute cross-pieces and its withered trunk.

  He was standing in front of a cross, he thought with a fierce horror and revulsion. There’s blood on it. My blood? Or whose blood? His blood? Whose blood? The questions were hysterical cries of fear in his brain.

  He started to shout. “Curse it! Curse him! Curse that blood! Curse that false Jesus!” The “remote control” was pouring the words into his brain, and he was echoing them with his lips. “Destroy it! Break those arms!” The instructions tumbled pell-mell.

  He stretched out his hands, gripped one arm of the tree, and began to pull while he shouted. “Curses on you! Curses on you! I am free of you! Lord of Light! Save me! Help!” The arm of the tree broke. He seized the other arm with both hands and started pulling and shouting. It gave without warning, and its release sent him flying backward, tumbling down the slope toward the river, his world now a careening tunnel of lights and blows and bumps, until he fell against a tree trunk and lost consciousness.

  The search party found him there a few hours later, just before sundown. He was semiconscious and weak, his two hands still holding a broken tree branch. They lifted him to a sitting position, his back resting against the tree that had broken his fall. He was facing the ridge. The sun was setting, but its last red-gold rays flowed thinly around the withered tree, its cross-arms now splintered stubs, its trunk stained with dark splotches.

  Jonathan did not notice it for a while until his vision focused. Gradually he became aware of tall figures around him, of voices speaking, of hands that were putting a flask of whisky to his lips, and of other hands tending to his bruises. He heard the sounds of branches being cut with axes. But his gaze fell on the tree. Alarm bells sounded in him. He began to struggle to his feet, his eyes fixed on that tree.

  The red light of the sun was rapidly fading to blue-black twilight, and the tree was dissolving into the ridge. One of the men in the search party saw Jonathan struggling to rise and noticed the fixity of his stare at the tree.

  “Don’t worry, Father,” he said, “it’s only a tree. A dead tree. It’s all right, I tell you. Take it easy, will you, Father! It’s only a tree, Father.” He exerted pressure on Jonathan and prevented him from standing up.

  Jonathan slumped back wearily and muttered: “Only a tree. Only a tree.” Then he blacked out. They placed him on the makeshift stretcher they had fashioned and set off for the campsite.

  The end was not far off for Jonathan; but he did not seem to realize it. After a few days’ rest at the base camp, the party journeyed to Manchester, New Hampshire. Jonathan was taken to his mother’s house.

  He was extremely weak, suffered bouts of dizziness, had pains all over his body. He found it difficult to sleep at night and could not concentrate on reading or painting. The family doctor prescribed a two-month rest.

  Jonathan spent the first few weeks in bed under sedation. He was tended by his mother and a day nurse. Gradually his strength returned. By October’s end he was up and around the house. In November he was strong enough to walk around the garden, and he started to read and paint again.

  His mother had been in touch with Father David at the seminary through her pastor. And the moment Jonathan (she also had to adopt his new name) was at all well, she telephoned David. He arrived one afternoon to see Jonathan.

  The meeting was a disturbing one for David, but for Jonathan it seemed to be an occasion of new strength, an eerie triumph bathed him even in his misery. He addressed David as “my son,” using a paternalistic tone of voice that affected David in an unexpected way. It was the first time in all his years as an adult that David had felt real fear.

  With this atmosphere as a brooding backdrop to their conversation, David and Jonathan chatted about Canada. The common report brought back by his companions had been that either Jonathan had been attacked by a wild animal, or that for some other reason he had panicked, taken to his heels, and knocked himself unconscious while running. After a few minutes with Jonathan, David was certain that something much more significant than a mere accident had happened, but Jonathan would not open up to him.

  After a while, Jonathan succeeded in shifting David’s queries away from Canada and the recent trip. He began talking instead about his new apostolate and of his plans for a New York “mission.” Then surprisingly, and in ways that seemed elusive to him, the conversation began returning to David himself. And once again David found that a whole part of his being was in total accord with all that Jonathan said. And again, in some other part of him, he felt a deep resistance.

  Finally Jonathan rounded on him at one moment: “Father David, my son, eventually you too will find the light, and come out into the open and preach the New Time and the New Being.”

  David’s conflict welled up full inside him, a welcoming chord for Jonathan’s portentous words, and a hard, gripping fright. Supposing he could not stop himself going all the way into exactly what Jonathan was doing—whatever that was. What then?

  David recalls vividly the slow and deep nausea that built up inside him as he sat in that sick room surrounded by a quiet countryside. It was disgust riven with fear. He had had a similar but not quite identical experience once before, descending into a mass grave in Africa, at the tomb of an ancient tribal chieftain. Over the piles of bones of people sacrificed to ensure a chieftain’s safe passage to eternal happiness, he had felt the touch of independent and sovereign evil, almost heard its voice in the fetid darkness saying silkily to him: “Come into my domain, David! You belong here!” And it kept coming into his mind that those long-buried men had never known anything about Jesus or Christianity. Some obscure conclusions had started to run around his head as he had stood in the tomb. But his nausea had not permitted him to examine them clearly.

  Now, trying to fathom the mystery, he looked at Jonathan. Who was possessed? Was either of them possessed? Was it all imagination? Jonathan, in spite of his illness, seemed erect, tall, the color back in his cheeks, his blue eyes gleaming, his long hair falling gracefully over his shoulders. All his strength and natural comeliness seemed restored. Facing him, David suddenly felt weak and puny and somehow dirty. A phrase of Jonathan’s sent his courage reeling further.

  “Not for nothing, my son, have I been named Jonathan. You are David. And in the Bible they were bound together in the divine work.”

  David turned away helplessly, fighting the floods of weakness and fear that engulfed him. He was seeking composure, but Jonathan’s voice pursued, triumphant, resounding.

  “What happens to me, happens to you, my son. Don’t you see? It is all foreordained. We have entered the Kingdom of the New Time and the New Being.”

  David felt at the end of his resistance. The nausea was increasing. He was enmeshed in a trap he had not suspected. He went to the door, opened it, and spoke over his shoulder in a weak voice:

  “Jonathan. Let’s agree on one thing. If you need help, I shall help. Is it a deal?” When there was no answer, he turned slowly around. “Jonathan! We have an appointment the day you—”

  He broke off. Jonathan was standing in the middle of the room, his eyes closed, his body swaying back and forth as if buffeted by a strong wind.

  “Jonathan! Jonathan! Are you all right?”

  “Father David,” the voice was almost a whisper and full of pain. “Father David, help me…not now…impossible now…too far…but at the moment…it’s a deal…if…”

  The rest was lost in a mumbling confusion. Jonathan turned away and then slumped down into an armchair. David noticed Jonathan’s right index finger was held in his left hand.

  The door opened. Jonathan’s mother entered quietly, unhurriedly. Her face was a mask. “Don’t worry, Father D
avid,” she murmured. “He will sleep now. And in the aftertime you can get back to him. Go and rest. You need it. You all need rest.”

  He chatted for a few minutes with her, then left. She would keep him posted on Jonathan’s movements.

  In the middle of December Jonathan left home again and went back to New York. For the next four months David followed Jonathan’s activities. He was always available but never conspicuous, visiting New York regularly, keeping informed of Jonathan’s whereabouts and activities. For the moment he could not intervene. That moment would come, he knew.

  He now was convinced that Jonathan had ceded full possession of himself to some evil spirit. He was half-convinced that he himself was affected by all this, but he did not understand exactly how. Not until the disastrous marriage ceremony by the sea was he to have the opportunity of helping Jonathan and of finding out exactly what had happened to himself.

  In mid-February, David heard quite by accident of the marriage ceremony Jonathan was going to perform at Dutchman’s Point. The bride’s father, a prominent broker, was an old acquaintance of David. He immediately telephoned the father and arranged to have lunch with him at his home in Manchester. David was received at first with great warmth as an old friend. But the conversation turned sour, as the reason for his visit became clear; David wanted the bride’s father either to postpone the marriage or to engage another clergyman.

  Father Jonathan was a good priest, sniffed Hilda’s father. Then, unpleasantly, he went on to grumble about the clergy in general, saying that at least Jonathan got the younger generation to say their prayers and to believe in God and take care of the environment—something “men of the cloth” did not ordinarily do. David argued, hinting at his basic fears and suspicions about Jonathan. But it was of no avail. The world was changing, he was told. What was all this sinister talk of evil and of the Devil? Father David did not believe, or did he, in all that nonsense anymore? David’s only answer was an expression of his deep apprehension for Jonathan and for his friend’s daughter.

  Then, if he was so afraid, the broker concluded as he rose from the table, why didn’t Father David come himself? He was thereby invited. He would see, the broker added, his daughter would be all right. For once Hilda was going to be gloriously happy. She wanted things this way. She was to be married only once.

  “I’ll be there,” answered David quietly. “Don’t worry. But you will have to answer for the result.”

  The broker stopped and looked at David, thought for a few seconds, then his face clouded over with anger. His words cut into David deeply. “Father David, I am a simple man as far as religion and religious matters go. Whatever happens in that area is the fault of all you clergy. You know”—he broke off, scrutinizing David’s face and figure—“sometimes I have a feeling that you people are the really lost ones. We lay people have some sort of protection. We were never in charge of religion, y’know.” They parted.

  MISTER NATCH AND THE SALEM CHORUS

  The exorcism of Father Jonathan began in the first week of April and ended only in the second week of May. Totally unforeseen by David, the exorcism of Jonathan proved to be relatively easy. It was David himself who was in jeopardy. His sanity, his religious belief, and his bodily life were in maximum danger. But thanks to David’s sufferings, we can form a better idea of the mechanics of possession—at least of one type of possession: how it starts, how it progresses, and where, in the final analysis, the free choice of the possessed comes into play.

  While the exorcism of Jonathan was recorded on tape, for the details of David’s four-week marathon struggle with himself we have to rely on the diary he kept so punctiliously during that time, together with what he told others of his experience, and my own conversations with him.

  When David and Jonathan left the marriage party on Massepiq beach, David drove directly to the seminary, where Jonathan and he stayed until the beginning of the exorcism.

  As they drove, Jonathan had one persistent question for David: what was the importance of starting before the sun was high in the sky?

  David was frank: he did not know exactly; he might never know; but, with only his instincts to go on, David was certain that the light of the noonday sun had somehow become for Jonathan a vehicle for an evil influence. “For you, Jonathan, it has become contaminated,” David said tersely.

  Jonathan wept at the implication of David’s words. The light and warmth of the sun itself, the most beautiful things in Jonathan’s world, had become evil for him. Still, following David’s instructions, Jonathan kept the blinds drawn in his room at the seminary. He went outside to take fresh air only in the evening and at night. He avoided the high noonday sun.

  The pre-exorcism preparations to which Father David had become accustomed in his work as an exorcist in the diocese were completed by the end of March. Some of these steps—medical checkup, examination by psychologists, family background—had been taken during Jonathan’s spectacular seizure the previous autumn. With cursory additions, the preparations were completed. It remained to choose a place, fix a day, and appoint assistants.

  David had an inner conviction that there would be little physical violence but much mental stress and a deep strain on his own spirit. He therefore asked a young psychiatrist friend and a middle-aged medical doctor to be his assistants. He had the services of his young priest assistant, Father Thomas, who was to succeed him in June as diocesan exorcist.

  The choice of the place of exorcism presented a problem. David favored the seminary oratory or a room in a remote wing of the seminary. Jonathan pleaded for the exorcism to take place in his mother’s house, where he had been born and reared. All his associations, his beginnings, and his high hopes dwelt in that house that his father had designed and built himself. Besides, it stood in its own plot of land and enjoyed a privacy unavailable at the seminary.

  The bishop, ever calm, decided for them. “Whatever must come out, had better come out privately and discreetly. I don’t want half my young seminarians getting nervous and running off half-cocked,” he said to David. He added something which David had not expected from this worldly man whose chief claim to fame was his financial wizardry: “No superstition, mind you. Father David”—this with an arching of the eyebrows—“but his father built the house and raised his family there. He also has an interest in the whole matter. His ties are to it, surely.”

  David reflected on the bishop’s last remark; it bore out what he had surmised in other possession cases: there was an intimate connection between definite locales and the exorcism of evil spirits.

  They all agreed that Jonathan should remain at the seminary under surveillance by David and his young assistant priest until the eve of April 1, the day chosen for the exorcism. As that day approached, Jonathan became more and more listless, ate little, and relied more heavily on sleeping pills in order to secure a good night’s rest.

  At 10:00 P.M. on March 31, David drove him to his mother’s house. They were joined there that night by the assistants—a precaution David took, again by instinct. At 4:00 A.M. the following morning, awakened by some noise, they found Jonathan fully dressed and searching in the drawers of the kitchen closet. Whether he was looking for a knife to use on himself or others, or whether—as he said—he was preparing some food, David could never be sure. Anyway, since all were awake, David asked Jonathan’s mother to make some breakfast. By 6:00 A.M. they were ready to begin.

  The arrangements were simple. The room had been cleared of furniture. Its terrazzo floor was bare of any carpet or rug. The window shutters were closed. Jonathan preferred to take a kneeling position, face sunk in his hands, at the small table on which David had placed his crucifix, the holy-water flask, the two candles, and the ritual book. The tape recorder was placed by the window. David wore cassock, surplice, and stole. He made no solemn entry. Standing at the opposite side of the table to Jonathan, his assistants gathered around them both, he got down right away to the business in hand. He recited the opening prayer
, put down his book, looked straight at Jonathan, and spoke.

  “Jonathan, before we go any further, I want to ask that you, in front of these witnesses, state quite clearly that you are here of your own accord, and that you wish me in the name of Jesus and with the authority of his Church to exorcise whatever evil spirits may possess you or hold any part of you, body and soul, in captivity. Answer me.” David looked at Jonathan’s bowed head. He could not see his face, only that golden hair, little strips of his forehead between the long, artistic fingers, and Jonathan’s graceful hands cupping his face.

  “Jonathan, please answer us,” he said after a silence. David held his breath in growing suspense.

  “I consent to be here”—Jonathan’s voice was deep and melodious—“wishing that whatever evil or error is present be exorcised.” David breathed easily again. But his uneasiness returned almost immediately, as Jonathan added: “Evil is subtle. Injustice is ancient. All wrongs must be righted. This is true Exorcism.”

  “We are talking, Jonathan, precisely and only of Satan, the Prince of Darkness, the Angel of Light,” David hastened to say with severity. He noticed that Jonathan stirred a little, as if listening intently. “We are proposing to discover that presence and to expel it by the power of Jesus. Do you consent?”

  “I consent.”

  A pause. Then when David was about to put his next question, Jonathan started again. “Poor Jesus! Poor, poor Jesus! Served so badly. Described so poorly. Disfigured so brashly. Poor Jesus! Poor, poor Jesus!”

  David stopped abruptly. Jonathan’s voice was still bell-like and silvery. David decided to take another tack.

  “Now, Jonathan, by the power invested in me by the Church of Jesus, and in the name of Jesus, I wish to put you a second question. Have you knowingly, consciously, within your living memory, ever conceded anything to, or agreed, or even trifled with the Evil One?”

  Jonathan’s voice came back, musical and calm. “To do that to Jesus would be a betrayal of myself, of my flock, of Jesus’ goodness, of the world, of life itself, of our eternal peace…”