Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  Moira remembers protesting with all the earnestness she could convey and trying to tell Richard that his “plan” sounded like the hardest and maddest thing in the world.

  “No!” Once again his tone had changed to a rough note. She caught a glint at the back of his eyes which recalled her dim memory of an Alsatian baring his teeth and growling at her long ago when she was three. Now she was afraid. He told her abrasively: “Only a few can get it.” He was smiling, but she did not like the smile. “That’s the name of the game,” he remarked some moments later.

  Moira thought that he was going to continue talking. But at that moment the kitchen was invaded by seven other young men, loud, laughing, joking, looking for breakfast, and loosening the spell of a situation that had become uncomfortable and eerie for her. Moira saw the veils closing over Richard’s eyes. He became once more the easy, good-natured, smiling companion she had seen entering the house the day before.

  Back home in Detroit a few days later, and into the school year, Richard continued to live in the memories of his vacation. Without knowing it, he was probing deep into one of the most mysterious elements of human personality: gender. In retrospect we can see how the peculiarities of his personal makeup were responsible in some degree for his later development. They do not, however, explain in any way the onset of possession.

  After one more year in high school, Richard went on to college. During his first year there, both his older brothers got married. His three sisters had already left home and were married. Although he spent a lot of time comparing himself to them, Richard never really knew them. He never engaged in any deep conversations with his sisters, and he did not get any clear feeling for their points of view where they differed from his.

  He majored in mathematics, taking English literature and French as extra credits. He corresponded regularly with Moira in Colorado, and with time a deep friendship sprang up between them. Sometimes he spent vacations with her and her family; sometimes Moira came to Detroit and spent time with Richard’s family. Moira was studying English literature and journalism at the University of Denver. She intended to enter the field of publishing.

  Toward the end of his second year, he had a conversation with his father, who was taken aback to find his son spouting what seemed to him to be very advanced and unorthodox ideas about sexuality. Richard had read all of D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, George Sand’s Indiana, and a host of other books his father had never heard of. He could quote anthropologists and social scientists in support of his views about matriarchy and woman’s superior power and status.

  His father consulted the rabbi of the local synagogue. And, during the following Easter vacation, Richard and his father went to see the rabbi. The rabbi found Richard quite sensible and his views reasonable. He pointed out to Richard and his father that the original Hebrew in the Bible does not say God created Eve, the first woman, from a rib of Adam. The word used at this place in the Bible means “one of two matching panels.” He further pointed out that this Bible account is essentially androgynous. “So man and woman are equal halves of the same entity,” concluded the rabbi, “but woman is most like God because she has the womb of creation in her.” It was all very confusing for Richard’s father. But Richard found in it a fresh impetus for his dreams of femaleness.

  Toward the end of his last year in college, Richard spoke to his father about a job in the insurance office. He had no particular desire to specialize in any subject. Medicine and law did not interest him. What Richard was really looking for was a situation in which he could achieve his dream.

  In early June 1961, at the age of twenty-one, Richard took up daily work at his father’s insurance office. He proved a very willing apprentice. He was conscientious, took instructions, worked long hours, willingly gave up weekends to work on difficult claims, and studied law at night. His father was very proud of his decision and his performance. His mother loved having one son still at home.

  In his free time Richard continued reading. He spent long hours walking by himself. Since he was out of college and no longer forced to take part in group activities, he began to elaborate his ideal.

  He had one constantly recurring dream day and night. Once and for all, he fancied, everybody knew he was woman and man all in one. It was public knowledge, he dreamed, and accepted joyfully and admiringly by everyone. He wore either male or female clothes, according to the ebb and flow of his sexuality. His skin was either smooth or hard, his voice metallic and masculine or husky and deep, his hair long or short, his mind logical and rationalizing or intuitive and feeling, his breasts round and full with marked nipples or flat and formless, his genitals male or female. But he was chiefly female and feminine—with a very marked peculiarity.

  In his dream he had, as a man, attracted a beautiful woman who possessed his own female face and body. She was he in female form. When they made love together, he was not merely a male entering a female. He was a female taking a male into her secret mystery. He not only had the male sense of arrival and expansion. He had the female sense of falling through the velvet veils of that mystery where wreaths of creation and shaping forms of arcane worlds wove around him with soft murmurs of love.

  Sometimes in his dreams, all this took place at home in Detroit, sometimes at the lakeside in the Colorado mountains, sometimes in exotic lands. But most often the entire scene was played out in a small house surrounded by trees and standing on the edge of water. Wherever he traveled for the company, Richard began to keep his eyes open: perhaps, he would find a house similar to the one in his dreams.

  His relationship with Moira now became something more than close friendship. Moira, in Richard’s eyes, was still the woman of his Colorado experience and he felt she could be part of his continuing dream of perfect man-woman love. And Moira was in love with Richard. It seemed perfect—on the outside. Gradually it became a mutual assumption that they were engaged and that they would eventually get married. In Moira’s mind this would take place when Richard got a promotion in his company. In Richard’s mind it could only take place when he found his dream house.

  In mid-1963, Richard’s company sent him to Tanglewood in eastern Illinois as a temporary substitute for a sick member of the local office. In Tanglewood, Richard found several advantages. His new boss liked him very much. It was a far cry from the urban ills of midtown Detroit. His new post was in effect a promotion. The Tanglewood office was just beginning to expand, and Richard could be in on the ground floor of the company’s ambitious programs.

  Chiefly, however, Richard found what he knew was the nearest approach to the house of his dreams. It was called Lake House: single-storied, standing on three acres of land, with sliding glass panels in the back giving on to a large pond. The original owners, back in the late nineteenth century, had covered the three acres with trees, chestnut, sycamore, pine, elm, birch, oak. On his first visit to inspect it, Richard heard the wind in the trees by the water’s edge. He knew this was his house. And it was for lease.

  By that autumn, he had moved into Lake House. With the recommendation of his new boss, he obtained a permanent transfer to Tanglewood. Then he wrote triumphantly to Moira asking her to marry him. She answered immediately by telegram.

  They were married in Tanglewood on June 21, 1964. They decided not to go away for their honeymoon, but to spend it at home in Lake House. By their own choice, also, they arrived there alone in the evening of that day. All seemed perfect. The weather had a gentle balm to it all day; the sun was warm, but a light wind sang in the trees keeping everything cool and clean. “Our house is clean, not pots-and-pans clean,” said Moira misquoting F. Scott Fitzgerald, “but windswept clean!”

  In all the years of their friendship and engagement, they had never gone beyond a very occasional kiss of passion. Again, as with many other aspects of their relationship, each had assumed that the other wished it that way. Their first evening and night together as married people was something Richard had lived again and again i
n his dreams. It proved a total disaster, however, and not because they both were virgins, but on account of Richard’s strange behavior and Moira’s reactions.

  They had taken hours in going to bed, strolling down by the water and through the trees, chatting on the porch, and gazing quietly at the night all around them.

  Eventually they were side by side. Moira’s mind and body, by that time, were totally attuned to Richard’s movements, the warmth of his body, the smell of it, the urgency he felt. She glanced at his face, her eyes full of invitation. Richard was lying on his back, his face turned toward the open glass panels. He seemed to be listening to the night sounds outside around the pond—the wind in the trees, the ruffling of the water, the owls hooting.

  Then he turned his head toward her: “Now, darling,” he said, strangely quiet, “now Lake House is full of them. I am all of me tonight.”

  Moira did not understand. She didn’t care. He was already kissing and caressing her, entering her. And, eyes closed, her hands all over him, she started for the first time to feel the urging climb of ecstasy in loving.

  Then she heard his voice—this time with a note of stridency—saying: “Open your eyes! Look at me!”

  The sight of his face froze every muscle in Moira’s body. It was like a flat, featureless surface without a line. There was no expression on it. His mouth was closed. His eyes were open, but, unblinking and still, they were mere sightless hollows glazed over with a dead patina.

  “You’re not seeing me, Richard,” she said weakly.

  But his body had become enormously heavy; she could breathe only with difficulty. She felt a sudden shooting contraction in her belly and groin. A sweat of pain broke out all over her body like a thin film. “Richard!” she tried to call out.

  Richard was not with her. From the moment he turned back from the window, he had seen no one but his female self. When he entered Moira, a storm was on him over which he had no control. It was carrying him, petrified by increasing longing and intensifying loathing at one and the same time, at a speed which ruled out any resistance on his part. Longing and loathing were becoming so intertwined that the more repulsion he felt, the more readily he gave in to longing. But this only brought on increased loathing, so that longing and loathing became one. And both were coming from inside himself. He was their source. The higher he went on that first level of ecstasy, the lower he went on that second level of disgust.

  All Richard could see was that beautiful face of his female self flung back in an effort to match his passion. At the same time he began to feel her hands on him as claws scraping his back and buttocks, first lightly, then with increasing pressure and tearing his skin. When she opened her eyes, their deep blue was swimming with feeling. Then they narrowed and glinted with a beige glow that reminded him of pigs’ eyes, but his fascination with all this only swelled.

  “You’re not seeing me, Richard!” he heard his female self saying. “Look at me! Look at me!”

  He groped with his body for her inner mystery, trying to explore every curve and cranny of her vagina. And, as he did, he felt in himself the rocking motion of something hard and angular. He heard the voice: “Let me take you, secret and all, mystery and all, Richard”—he could not know if it was his own voice or another’s—“I’m your fucker…your fucker. Let me!” The voice died away again to a heavy, labored breathing that rose and fell with increasing gusts. It seemed to be acquiring a voiced character, a sound produced in a spittle-filled throat, wheezing, grunting, blowing, inhaling.

  Now his longing and loathing were reaching a climax. There was no ejaculation. Rather he swelled and grew bigger and swelled with desire until he felt his middle opening up; and, with a loathing that held him hypnotized, he knew that an alien body was pouring fluid through him, hot, sticky, scorching. Loving and disgust became one. He started to thrash and flail.

  By this time, Moira was screaming with fear as his terrible weight pressed down on her. She began to choke on the scream. Suddenly, he was off her. Her voice trailed away.

  Richard was over by the far wall, a letter opener in his hand. He was standing with his back to her, tearing and gouging at the wall with wide sweeps of his hand, scraping paper and plaster on to the floor, while he hammered the wall with a clenched fist. A muffled groan rising and falling was all she heard from him.

  His back, buttocks, and legs were a field of criss-crossing welts, scrapes, and lesions oozing with little pinpoints of blood at various places.

  By now, Moira was afraid for her life. Without hesitation, she was out of bed and running through the door. She grabbed her coat and the car keys, flung the hall door open, and made for the car. “Moira!” she heard him shout brokenly. “Come back! Moira, don’t go. Help me! Come back!” But by then she was halfway down the drive. She found her parents asleep in their hotel room. She never returned to Lake House or to Richard. Two years later she obtained a divorce from him.

  Richard’s dream was shattered. But there was something else in its place. He knew now that he had something new in him, something alive, something alien to him, but now his familiar and cohabitant.

  He spent the two weeks of what would have been his honeymoon inside Lake House, rarely eating, refusing all callers, never answering the telephone. Gradually he returned to normal life. He was back at work in the office on the appointed day.

  Outside office hours and activity, unless he was traveling, Richard stayed at Lake House. He never received visitors. Even when his family came to see him, they stayed in one of Tanglewood’s hotels. Lake House was his refuge and his castle. On weekends he lay in bed in the morning waiting for sunrise. Regularly, as the first streaks of gray light appeared, the birds started to sing in the trees. First one here and there, then another one or two, then two or three together, until the house and garden were filled with the dawn chorus of thrushes, finches, robins, wrens, starlings.

  At night and at any time possible he listened to the wind singing in the trees. It still brought tears to his eyes. And always he strained to remember the voice behind the wind and to capture its message and the identity of the messenger. His outlook was still filled with the mystery and power of femaleness. And, he was sure, the wind spoke of this and the birds sang of it.

  Richard was now in the second stage of his development. His old idea of an androgynous self had melted. On his trips for the company business, he spent time regularly with prostitutes, and occasionally had relations with female clients and office personnel. He repelled any homosexual advances.

  He admitted to himself after a while that in all these sexual encounters it was not a genuinely male sexual desire that impelled him. It was rather a jealous curiosity about the female and the feminine. He was always watching on the sidelines. No woman ever came back to him a second time. And more than one prostitute remarked as she left him: “You’re freaky.”

  He once invited a woman to Lake House because he wished to have relations with her while listening to the wind. Everything went well for a while, but something frightened her, and she fled from him as precipitately as Moira had.

  It was frustrating for him. He could only speculate about the female ecstasy and experience. He noticed that some women, in having intercourse, moaned in a dying fashion, turning their heads as if to avoid blows or to catch a mouthful of air. And he wondered what sort of lovely death that could be under the knife of female pleasure and secret power, and what sort of enshrined mystery a woman possessed that enabled her to live and die all over again the next time. For that was how he thought of it.

  But, in the meantime, his own identity—sexual and otherwise—underwent an eclipse. For three years he never listened to or looked at another human being. He merely heard and saw them. He lost, therefore, any grasp on his own identity. He had no clear perception of who he was, what he was about, where he was going, where he came from. The pattern of his identity was in disarray: an essential piece had been withdrawn invisibly but with shocking results. All the earlier personal l
ines, geometrically clear and personally pleasing, had melted into a criss-crossed haze. The fine tones and delicate shades of taste and distaste, like and dislike, attraction and repulsion lost stability and definition. All were now clouds and swirls of the unknown and the unpredictable. The various gears of his inner mechanism in mind, will, memory, brain, heart, gut feelings were working at cross-purposes.

  He stood helplessly hip deep in the running streams of impulses where before a sharp instinct or a brilliant perception had teamed with a never-failing voice in his heart. The self he originally proposed to free and ennoble had become indeterminate; it was colored by any element injected into him. He was a cracked bell jangling to the blow of any hammer. He was a bag of emptiness blowing and puffing on insubstantial air. Living now in an inner uncertainty of selfhood that nothing could dispel, he had become the reality of his former nightmare: a nonperson for himself. What he had cherished as a dream of happiness had become in reality an empty void.

  And this was not all. He found out on one particular occasion that already within him there were impulses he could no longer govern, and that these impulses seemed to arise from his original ambition to enjoy both masculine and feminine qualities. On that occasion he recognized the big change in himself. It was around the middle of December 1968. He was on the road for his company. The weather was very bad: snow, sleet, strong winds, gale warnings. On his last evening in the city he was visiting, he was walking home from a late meeting with a client. It was around midnight. No one was out at that hour in such wintry weather. Richard walked because the wind, his wind, was blowing with a high-pitched sound—almost a warning, but still enticing.

  The way to his hotel led him past rows of detached houses. About half a mile from the hotel, he heard a moaning sound from some bushes and trees that stood in a deserted area between two houses. He stopped and looked around. There was no one in sight. Most of the nearby houses were dark, their owners probably asleep or absent. Richard followed the direction of the moaning. Behind the bushes he came across a spread-eagled form. It was a young black girl. She had been raped and stabbed. She was practically naked; her clothes had been torn off her. Between her legs and at her shoulder blood stained the snow in small, dark patches.