Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  Then another flash of memory, another change, another bit of evil. Eleven years before, David had gone on a tour through the places where Jesus had lived and died. Immediately afterward, he had visited Rome and spent long days viewing its monuments, basilicas, and treasures. He followed the ceremonies in St. Peter’s Basilica. As he started home for America, one question dominated everything for him: What possible relationship could there be between Jesus’ obscure life on that stark, poverty-stricken, barren land, and the panoply and glory of papal Rome? Perhaps he understood only now, but he had come to a covert conclusion on that home journey: there was no real relationship. Now his memory kept on repeating with little bursts of pain: no relationship, no relationship, no relationship.

  Four years before, he had opened up an ancient tomb in northeastern Turkey. Inside, he and the other archeologists had found a buried chieftain surrounded by the bones of men and animals slaughtered for his funeral. The bones, the weapons, the utensils, the dust, and the pathos of it all had gripped him. These had been men like himself. They had had no knowledge of Jesus. How could they be judged for not knowing anything about Jesus and Christianity? Surely what David had thought of Jesus was too small a concept? Surely the truth was greater than any dogma? Than any concept of Jesus as man or as God, or any form that Jesus took? It had to be so. Otherwise, there was no sense in anything. Greater than Jesus. Greater than Jesus. Greater than Jesus. Another jarring echo ringing in his memory.

  There gradually emerged a fatal thread that stitched together all the echoing resentments, all the complaints of reason, all the arrogance of logic stripped to its own marrow. And the fabric of faith slipped away unnoticed as this new cloth draped his mind and soul. The thread was David’s acceptance of Teilhard de Chardin’s theories. Accepting them, he could no longer tolerate the break between the material nature of the world, on the one hand, and Jesus as savior, on the other hand. Materiality and divinity were one; the material world together with man’s consciousness and will, both emerging from sheer materiality as automatically as a hen from an egg; and Jesus’ divinity emerging from his human being as naturally as an oak tree from an acorn, as inevitably as water flowing downward.

  Jesus—so suddenly integral to the universe, so intimate with its being, so totally physical—was different from what religious dogma had said he was, greater than Christian belief had ever before understood. Jesus, each man, each woman, all were brothers to the boulders, sisters of the stars, “co-beings” with all animals and plants. All understanding became easy. It all came down to the atom; and it all came up from the atom as well. Everything fell into place.

  So much for Teilhard, David thought bitterly.

  With an anguish he could not assuage, David realized the consequences of all this only now in the lonely struggle and painful vigil for his soul. Any real reverence and awe had evaporated from his religious mentality. For the world around him he had only a sense of joyous kinship—mingled with a certain foreboding. For Jesus, only a satisfying feeling of triumph, just as for any ancient and beloved hero. For the Mass, an indulgent feeling akin to what he experienced when observing commemorative services on any July Fourth. The Crucifixion and the death of Jesus were glorious events in the past, ancient demonstrations of heroic love, not an ever-present source of personal forgiveness and not an unshakable hope for any future.

  Isolated with his thoughts and memories, David’s question for himself was not where or how things had gone wrong, but how to retrieve his strength in faith. As the years passed continually by his view like so many panels from right to left, David seemed to be close up to them, scrutinizing each detail.

  As the days passed, those panels in the panorama moved faster and faster, on and on, repeating over and over. He could still read the details. Each phrase sounded and receded as its corresponding panel came and went. No choice. Not elitist. Delusion. No relationship. Greater than Jesus. Brothers to the boulders.

  Sometime after midnight at the beginning of the third week at the Coos farm, David seemed suddenly to be drawing away from his close-up scrutiny of the changing panels, or they were withdrawing from him, receding into some background darkness he had not noticed before. He realized he had not been looking at panels passing horizontally in front of him from right to left. He had been close to a revolving sphere that was now drawing away from him. Distancing itself from him and still revolving, it depicted all the phases of his life continuously and without interruption around the smooth convex surface of that brightly lit ball.

  From its dreamy depths came the sounds of all his yesteryears—words, voices, languages, music, crying, laughing. The sphere had a mesmeric quality of a carousel giving off a creamy light. David seemed to be looking at himself out there.

  Yet a tiny voice kept whispering within him: Why me? Why am I attacked? Why me? Where is Jesus? What is Jesus? And all around that revolving sphere lay the unfathomable velvet of a night he had never known.

  Staring at the sphere, he knew that in some mysterious way he was staring at the self he had become. Of the room around him, the feel of the chair in which he sat, the rub of his clothes against his skin, of such things finally he was not even indirectly conscious.

  Now, without either pause or abruptness, the light from that revolving sphere started to grow dim. More and more of the blackness around it started to patch its panels with shadows, crow’s-feet of obscurity, little running lines of invisibility. The self he had been and known was being volatilized into blackness. David felt panic, but seemed to be incapable of doing anything about what was happening to him.

  Then he had the feeling that he was no longer looking out or up or at anything, but that he now was out there hanging in that blackness. Feeding his helplessness and panic was the conviction that he was the cause of this black void and that he needed it. Otherwise, it seemed to him, he would drop into nothingness.

  Then finally, all he had ever been or known of himself had disappeared. The self to which he was now reduced hung by an invisible thread—but only as long as he could maintain that blackness. David’s panic was marinated in a tide of sullenness rising in him, sullenness at being deprived of light, of salvation, of grace, of beauty, of motives for holiness, of knowledge about physical symmetry, and all perception of God’s eternity. His reaction to this sullenness: Why me?

  He was waiting, expecting, almost listening. Hours. Days. His waiting became so intense, so oppressive that he gradually realized he was not waiting of his own volition. The waiting was being evoked from him by someone or something outside him. Yet each time he tried to figure out or imagine who or what was evoking the waiting, his very effort at imagining clouded everything over. The only thing he could do was wait, be made to wait, to expect.

  And there set in on him a sadness he could not dispel. He no longer felt any confidence in himself or in anything he knew. For all seemed to be reduced to a situation without circumstances, a pattern without a background, a framework sodden with emptiness through which rushed gusts of an alien influence he could neither repel nor control. He was helpless. And eventually he would fall asleep, awakening only with the light of day streaming in through the bay window.

  In the morning he would know it was all real: he was isolated from all he had ever made his own and from all he had ever been. And he had to wait. But, obscurely and earnestly, he realized that whatever it was he awaited, could come to him only under these conditions.

  A conversation David had with Father Joseph at the end of the third week reveals the crux of David’s struggle and his state of mind toward the last phase of his four-week test. It was Father Joseph’s third visit. Each time, he had questioned David about the experience he was undergoing, and each time he himself had left the house overwhelmed by a sorrow and inner pain which he found intolerable. And David had warned him: “Don’t delve very deeply, Father. You can only get hurt. And come to see me in the mornings. In the afternoon I doze a little. Evenings and nights are too much for anybody but me.�
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  This time, stepping into David’s room from the sunlit corridor outside, Father Joseph took a moment to get used to the semidarkness. Little lines of sunlight ran around the edges of the shutters. In the far corner beside the fireplace, he saw David sitting at a small table, hunched over a page of writing. A single candle stood on the table; it was all the light David allowed himself.

  David stood up and pointed Joseph to an armchair when the priest entered. “Have a seat, Father.” Their eyes did not meet while he spoke.

  David had not shaved for a couple of days. He was gaunt and hollow-cheeked. There was very little color in his face. But it was the immobility of his features that first struck his visitor. His cheeks, forehead, nose, chin, and neck seemed to be frozen into motionlessness, as if too much inner determination and too much constant resistance had resulted in a total hardening of his appearance, a setting of his face into an expressionless shape.

  His eyes particularly held Father Joseph. They seemed to have grown larger, the lids, heavier, the whites, whiter, the pupils, darker than they had been. Obviously David had been crying a good deal. But at this moment his eyes were clear, steady in gaze, remote in look.

  There was no hint of a smile or of any pleasant emotion, but neither was there any unpleasantness. Nor fear. Nor pain. Nor were David’s eyes blank. They had an expression; but that expression was totally unknown to Joseph. He had never seen it before in anybody’s eyes. And he was at a loss to explain it or describe it. He was looking at the eyes of someone who had seen things of which he could have no inkling.

  He knew better than to indulge in pleasantries, even to ask David how he was. They both sat there in silence, both understanding what was in the other’s mind.

  From outside, some isolated sounds penetrated faintly into the room, a truck passing on the road, the twittering of some birds, a dog barking on a distant farm.

  “I don’t think the real attack has come yet, Father Joe,” David said slowly to his visitor, in whose mind this was, in fact, the uppermost question. Then he added as if to answer a query: “Yes, I will know, because the others will come at the same time.”

  They both waited. David’s visitor knew from previous conversations who “the others” were. David was convinced that his release from this trial could only come through the spirits of Salem Old Edward had mentioned on his deathbed. But somehow or other Old Edward was now associated in David’s mind with those spirits.

  Then David said: “It’s been bad but bearable up to this.” Father Joseph shot a discreet look at David: his eyes were hooded as he gazed down at the table. Joseph looked away in an embarrassment he himself could not understand. David’s voice was deep, very deep, and every word came out as if a special effort was needed to form it.

  “No,” David went on, answering another unspoken query of Joseph’s. “There is nothing you can do. Must fight it alone. Pray. That’s all. Pray. A lot. Pray for me.”

  There was another long silence. By now, Joseph knew that the silence between them was chockful of a conversation he could not pin down. He could not make out how it progressed or what it concerned exactly. Joseph was a simple man without any subtle ideas and with no complexities in spirit. His heart and instincts had not been smothered in any pseudointellectualism. He did realize that it was a conversation so subtle and intimate that it flew high above all words, in fact did not need words. It passed between them in another medium. But Joseph warily refused even to visualize that medium. He felt that too near an acquaintance with it would mean he would never be able to talk with words again. Words were beginning to be crude, vulgar lumps of sound, insensitive, uncouth, meaningless. David and Joseph were both walking at that moment beyond the thin edge dividing language from meaning, and meaning was now a cloud enveloping them both.

  Father Joseph waited until he felt from David that he should leave. Then he started to rise unhurriedly. David said: “Say a Mass for them. They need prayers. I failed them. Now I need them, their help, and their forgiveness.” Joseph looked at him questioningly, then stopped the words rushing to his lips. Joseph now believed that David had already been “visited.”

  For the next week, his fourth at the farm, David’s days and the greater portion of his nights were spent on the chair by the bay window. For the last day or so before the final struggle, a curious silence had fallen over him. It was not ominous or fear-filling. But it was so profound and so devoid of any movement in his thoughts, emotions, and memories that the doubt and uncertainty it provoked in him took on proportions of agonizing anticipation.

  Yet no amount of anticipation quite conveyed the anguished reality of his “visitors” and their “visit.”

  The first hint of their presence came about eleven o’clock one night. All that day a storm had raged around the farm. The storm had prevented Father Joseph from making his promised weekly visit. David had spent the time contemplating the sheeting rain and the lightning flashes from his window. Then, except for a distant rumble of thunder and an occasional, sudden, whipping shower, the storm was spent.

  David sensed the cloak of exhaustion that always fell quietly on the countryside after it had been thrashed and seared and smothered by wind, lightning, thunder, and rain. Usually the land shook off that cloak quickly and resumed its habitual night stance as a repository of energies hatching, breathing, coiling, exercising, pulsating, self-renewing, waiting for the sun and the light of the new day.

  He waited for the inevitable rustling and quickening in the fields outside the house. But tonight the silence of exhaustion seemed to prolong itself. A commanding hand had stopped the course of nature in order to make way for special visitors. And, in David’s consciousness, all these changes resided as mere overtones to his mood.

  The most acute and self-aware point in his being was still a pulse of expectancy, of waiting that grew deeper and deeper with the prolonged silence over the land. Once more David seemed to hang over that pitch-black void. Waiting seemed once more to be his very essence, the only reason for his continued existence. “As long as I can wait…” was his mood. Waiting, straining, to hear, to see.

  After perhaps an hour, he knew that somewhere near him there was a curious sound.

  At first, when he heard it, his attention did not pick it up. It was so faint, it might have been the sound and feel of the blood pumping in his own ears. But after a few seconds, he began to distinguish it. His body stiffened as the sound grew ever so slightly louder.

  He could not identify the sound. Within him, yet in some way connected with the faint sound, little wisps of memory touched his consciousness briefly, tantalizing him as they skipped by, leaving him all the tenser. He seemed to remember. Little splinks, jagged fragments of shattered mirrors reflecting some shadow life; but he could not make out exactly what was being recalled to him.

  He realized that the act of trying to remember was itself a blockage to remembering, the act of thinking a hindrance to knowing. At one point, the sound died away completely. He was suddenly alone. And he found himself falling back on the chair brusquely. He had been half out of it, apparently, in his craning forward to listen. His palms and forehead were wet. And his yearning to know seemed infinitely sad.

  Then the sound started again. David realized now it was coming from no particular direction. Not from outside the house. Not from inside it. Nor could he say it was coming from all directions at once. He felt foolishly that in some way or other it was a permanent sound that had always been there around him. He always had heard it. But he had never listened to it, or ever allowed himself even to acknowledge that he heard it.

  He turned his head right and left. He twisted around, listening to the interior of the room. And with a sudden violence he understood why the sound seemed to come from no direction. For the first time in his life, he knew what it was to hear a sound registering in his brain and mind without any of the normal exterior conditions of hearing—no sound waves, no exterior source of sound, no function of his eardrums. Beyond al
l doubts or caviling, he knew that it was real sound which could not be heard with the external ear.

  The physical strangeness of that new hearing had a mysterious warmth of reality. It was more real than any other sound he could ever hear in the physical world. It broke the silence of the night and his vigil more penetratingly than if a gunshot had exploded outside the window. Intensely pleasurable, because so secret. Deeply relieving, because it dismissed the silence around him in a fashion so intimate to him alone. Absorbing, because it came from no place, yet filled all his inner hearing. But cowing, because in some transcendent way it had no tenderness.

  That sound was a whole revelation. He now understood that there was a knowledge of material things and a way of having that knowledge—in this case, of sounds—which did not come through his senses. His fear and distrust battled with this realization whenever a stray sound—the cry of a bird in the night, the hooting of an owl—struck his hearing in the normal way. These new, fearful, wallowing sounds seemed to belong to the very substance of audible things and his hearing of them to be absolutely true hearing. The external sounds of the night—even the occasional shuffle of his own feet on the floor—seemed to belong to a fleeting world, artificial, not real at all, but constructed merely by external stimuli and by his own physical reactions.

  The babel of internal sounds was growing, and the “artificial” world of his normal life appeared to be like a flimsy trellis with wide gaps or a wall made of widely separated wires. A crude, blustering, overwhelming new reality was rushing in through the holes.