Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  As it turned out before the end of the exorcism, it was not Gerald who suffered the consequences of such tampering.

  “We do as we are bidden by the Daring One. Rita was our prey, our soul. Rita chose to be a box, to be a box, to be a box, to be a box. Even when the High One spoke, he chose to be a box, to be a box, to be a box.”

  Gerald, by some inner sense, felt that one single, personal strand of evil and resistance had faded or was fading from the scene; it felt as if a lesser intelligence was now coping with his questions.

  Richard/Rita began to struggle and gasp again. Gerald reflected for a moment. What next? Should he keep silent and let all things quiet down? Should he press forward and extract more information? He remembered the old Dominican saying with a shake of the head: “If you get a chance to squeeze them dry of words, do so. If you can, press them to tell what exactly happened. But don’t get into a give-and-take of a normal argument. They will always beat you. And a beating can be more than you can take.”

  Gerald looked again at Richard/Rita; his body was thrashing back and forth jerkily; the assistants were looking at Gerald for some direction. He decided to ask one more question.

  “Evil Spirit, in the name of Jesus, announce the trap in which you caught Richard/Rita. I ask this by the authority of the Church and in the name of Jesus.”

  Richard/Rita’s horrible voice answered: “We start with self-growth, self-discovery. We tell ’em, we told Rita: First, you must be yourself, find yourself, know who you are. They stick their noses in their own navels and say: I like my own smell! Then, that woman alone, woman alone, is the thing to be. She has it all within her, but man has it all hanging out.”

  The assistants had moved away from the couch and stood in almost unbelieving fright near Gerald. Bert no longer supported Gerald, but leaned on the night table.

  “To be a woman is to be completely independent, we tell them. No guilt. Not masculine. Not feminine. Complete in herself. Cunt and clit in one. Androgynous. Free of guilt feelings, of all responsibility to a man. Biologicaaaaaaaaaaal!” Richard/Rita’s voice stretched out, caressing the last syllable. At a sign from Gerald, the assistants moved back and laid hands on Richard/Rita. A pause. Then: “To be freed from any need of other. Let them think that they are past ambition of ecstasy on a prick, but totally sensual because they can laugh at love and all its makings; that they are developing their own self-contained skills; that her own intimacy with herself is the whole world, without the intrusion of the male; that she is full of internal spaces in herself, infinite spaces, infinite enough to contain all she could ever wish to have or be; that she can be tranquil, full of personalities, many-sided, all of man, without his tomfoolery, all of woman without the alley-cat carry-on.”

  Richard/Rita stopped. Only the four pairs of hands restrained him from getting up. His legs and arms wrestled for a few moments, then ceased. He groaned again and began to mutter inaudibly.

  “Speak, Girl-Fixer! Speak! Let us hear your voice clearly!”

  “Then…then…the same old trap. The same old trap we’ve taken many in—we still catch them in. That they fuck as necessarily as birds sing, as water flows, as the fire burns. Merely to show how independent they are. How superior they are. That if they don’t breathe for fucking, live for fucking, sing in fucking, they can’t breathe, cry, sing, love, or do anything. Be liberated. That’s what they begin to say. Man, woman, or goat, little boy, or if it comes to that, little girl. And then, when Rita got there—Oeeeeeeeeeeeh!” It was a yelp of triumph as before.

  Gerald was in command. There was not even a vestige of the Pretense now. But Richard/Rita was still caught in the teeth of this wild, evil thing and was virtually flung about on the couch as the Girl-Fixer cackled on.

  “And, after that…one penis. Then another penis. Then a third. A fourth. A fifty-fourth. A forest of ’em. Sharp stakes. All the same. Oeeeee! And then the hate at being loved so. And the disgust at hating. And the hating of so loving. And the loving of hate. And the lying in wait for the penis. And the laughter at its nonsense. And the slavery. Many of us are the rump of the Daring One. Every Rita is a piece of his shit…”

  It was enough. Gerald broke in brusquely. There was only one question more. “At what point in time did Rita give over possession to you? When was it consummated?”

  “In the snow. In the wind. We knew then we could find a place in him. Bend him to our will. But he had invited years before…”

  Gerald decided that all he wanted to know had been told. The evil spirit had been sufficiently subdued and humiliated. Now it could be expelled.

  “Lord God of Heaven, in the name of Jesus Christ, your only begotten son, and in the name of your Holy Spirit, we pray that you will grant us our prayer and free this your servant, Richard, from the toils of slavery and the foul possession of this evil spirit.” Gerald had been looking up at the ceiling during this prayer. Now he looked down at Richard/Rita, held up the crucifix, and prepared to begin the final exorcising prayer.

  Dr. Hammond broke in, whispering urgently in his ear: “Father, don’t let it stop here. Let me put a few professionally oriented questions.”

  In spite of his dislike of psychiatrists and his general annoyance with this one, Gerald remained afraid for him. He whirled around painfully, urgently pleading in a cracked voice: “For the love of Jesus, Dr. Hammond, for your own sake, keep your mouth shut. Stay out of this. You don’t know what you…”

  But it was too late. Dr. Hammond had gone over beside Richard/Rita. He sat down on the edge of the couch and began to speak calmly, persuasively.

  “Now, Rita, we have nearly finished. This is almost at its close. You will be calm. There’s nothing to be fearful of. Answer my questions. And after that, you will wake up.”

  Richard/Rita stopped turning and twisting. He lay utterly still. His face relaxed. The expression around his lips softened. Dr. Hammond, rather tense in the beginning, now began to relax. It was a mistake on Gerald’s part to allow the psychiatrist to do this. No experienced exorcist would have permitted such blatant and dangerous interference. It was dangerous not only because the whole exorcism might break down and be completely lost, but it could be possibly fatal for the person so unwary as to reach out in ignorance and touch summary evil. So it proved in one sense for Dr. Hammond.

  A sudden, dull silence fell in the wake of his opening words to Richard/Rita. After all the pain and noise and groaning and strain, that silence was surprisingly alien to them all. One by one, each head lifted. Hammond’s professional air—his blue business suit, his spectacles, his knowing tone, his very confidence in moving to Richard/Rita’s couch and sitting down to speak, overruling Gerald’s warnings by his behavior—all this made them think, as the policeman recalled, “After all, this may be more normal than I thought.”

  But what Gerald sensed was not the lifting of an evil presence, but a shift. Dr. Hammond had fallen into the same trap as Gerald had done four and a half weeks before, and with infinitely poorer defenses than even Gerald had had. Only Gerald and the teacher grew tense with the fear of understanding.

  But suddenly, almost in unison and as if their unwinding had been something you could see and hear, they all stopped unwinding. You could almost see and hear the sudden cessation of flooding relief. In that silence they were listening. A change was taking place. They all sensed now what Gerald and the teacher had sensed. A change in something or somewhere near them or connected with them, with that room, with Gerald, and with Richard/Rita.

  Finally even the psychiatrist stopped, his professional calm ruptured. He had the half-annoyed, half-hurt look of someone interrupted in the middle of a sentence. He looked quickly at Gerald and the others, alarm spreading across his features. For the first time in his professional life. Dr. Hammond was face to face with something he knew was far beyond his reach to categorize as a verifiable known or unknown. What he was then beginning to perceive, he felt, he had always known but never acknowledged, even in the deepest moment
s of the eight years of analysis through which he had successfully passed.

  But his scientific mind was his only ready defense, and he kept up the protest in his mind: Verify! Get the facts! Test them! But he knew. There was no verifiable fact. There was a reality made transparent to him. Before this moment, he would have labeled this a product of the irrational. But it now appeared to be real beyond all reason. And he had always known it.

  Slowly they all began to hear sound. It was, at the beginning, like the sound of a crowd or mob—feet pounding faintly, voices shouting, screaming, yelling, jeering, talking, distant whistling and grunting. They could not fix from what direction it came. The teacher glanced out the windows at the pond. The trees were moving gently in the wind; a few ducks paddled around in the water; the evening was still bright. Then the noise sounded nearer, just as confused as ever, but now with one overall mood or note: mourning for an ineluctable sorrow. Listening to that sound on the tape recording of the exorcism, and as it grows louder and louder, one begins to get the conviction of listening to the tortured murmurs and helpless protests of a mob in agony, keening and wailing for deeps of regret, screaming and groaning for the ache of punishment and unremitting penalty, yelling impotently in condemnation, vibrating as a whole beast of suffering, as some protean heart thumping in the mud and squalor that history never recorded and human mercy had never penetrated.

  Over and above all the voices but constantly weaving in and out among them, there was the full scream of a woman orchestrating all the other noises and voices around itself as their theme. It came in great rising and falling curves, louder and fainter, still louder and then fainter, regular, upbeat, jarring, resounding with a passion of pain and lost hope.

  Gerald noticed that everyone in the room seemed to be bending, lowering his height as if afraid of something moving in the upper part of the room. Nothing was visible up there.

  Dr. Hammond sat as if unable to move from the edge of the couch. Richard/Rita’s lips turned blue, his eyes open and staring vacantly. The attending doctor moved to his side to take his pulse and found his body very cold, the pulse steady but weak.

  “Father, this cannot go on much longer,” Father John managed to shout to Gerald. “He’s taken enough already.”

  “Not very much more! Not very long, now!” Gerald shouted back. But the remainder of what he wanted to say went unsaid. It was the psychiatrist who now claimed his attention. Dr. Hammond had slipped off the couch and stood in an askew way looking halfway around over his shoulder at Richard/Rita, his eyes narrowed with apprehension, his notebook fallen and forgotten. No one, the psychiatrist included, could shake his mind loose from the web of pain and regret pervading the atmosphere.

  The noise and the din of sobbing and mourning rose finally to an undulating pitch. Richard/Rita’s face suffused with color; red patches and streaks discolored his arms and neck. Even his eyes deepened in color. He was trying to speak.

  Gerald was alerted: something was coming, and he felt he must make his final challenge very fast.

  “In the name of Jesus, you are commanded to leave this creature of God. You will go out of Rita and leave him whole and entire…”

  Richard/Rita’s sudden scream split their eardrums. “We go, Priest. We go.” It was a million turbulent voices as one, full of eternal ache and pain. “We go in hate. And no one will change our hate. And we will wait for you. When you come to die, we’ll be there. We go. But”—Gerald heard the sharp injection of hate hissing through the sorrow—“we take him.” Richard/Rita’s hands suddenly swept up in a wide arc toward Dr. Hammond. It was a quick but clumsy movement.

  Hammond jumped backward. And Richard/Rita fell off the couch to the floor as the assistants jumped forward and held him down.

  “We already have his soul. We claim him. He is ours. And you cannot do anything about that. We already have him. He is ours. We needn’t fight for him.”

  Richard/Rita was wheezing like someone being asphyxiated, eyes bulging, neck muscles standing out, his long hair falling back, his chest heaving, as he half-rose in his effort. “You can’t get him back. He is ours. He does our work. He doesn’t need a box. He puts everybody else into it.”

  All calm was gone from Dr. Hammond; his face was a picture of black fear.

  “Here…we can’t stay here any longer.” It was still the voice from Richard/Rita, and it was full of inflexible pain and bitterness. “There is too much to suffer here. Where will we…” The voice trailed off.

  Richard/Rita kicked and scratched at the straining assistants. Then he started to scream until at last he fainted, and above and around them the last syllables of his words trailed off into the din of voices. They spiraled up to a thin, high note, then sank to a thumping resonance like the bellowing of a gored bull. Slowly they faded into the distance. Those many tortuous voices, those myriad footfalls with decreasing rhythm and ever fainter sound all began to withdraw farther and farther from their presence, like a funeral procession plodding its way inch by inch, swaying and twisting, out of the city of man, swallowed by the great, unknown wilderness of the surrounding night. That single beating scream of the woman still rang dolefully but more and more faintly above the dying echoes of the withdrawing multitude, until finally there was only a little swatch of sound rising and sinking, rising and sinking, and in the end never rising again out of the silence.

  As the sound had receded, Richard/Rita’s struggling had progressively ceased. The tension holding everyone had lessened and lessened until they realized one by one, as they lifted their heads, moved uneasily, then looked at each other’s faces, that they were standing alone with each other in a small bedroom, that there was a curious silence, and that their world was still right-side up. It was over. All was well.

  Gerald glanced at the psychiatrist. He was leaning back against the wall, spectacles in one hand, while he cried unreservedly into his other hand. “Bert, see to him, will you?” Gerald said gently.

  “Leave me. Leave me be,” muttered Dr. Hammond, in between his tears. Then he drew a deep breath: “I’m all right. Leave me be.” He walked slowly to the door, pulled it open, then half-turned and looked back at Richard/Rita and at Gerald. He had the look of someone unjustly hurt; and his eyes held a puzzlement and appeal. Then, without a word, he turned and went out. He would have conversations with Gerald later. But now he had no words. And he was tired beyond belief.

  After about 20 minutes, they lifted Richard/Rita on to the couch. He was coming to. He motioned with his hand to Gerald. He was obviously very weak but quite self-possessed and aware. Gerald saw the smile in his eyes and faintly at the corners of his mouth.

  “Father, I have not felt so restful and so light in ten years. I…”

  “No need to say much now, Rita,” said Gerald.

  “But, Father Gerald, I…I am happy for the first time for a long time.”

  “We’ll talk about it later,” Gerald said, smiling through his pain; he was bleeding again and his pelvis was riven with an aching soreness. He straightened up as much as he could, and turned to go.

  “Father Gerald!” Richard/Rita struggled up and leaned on one elbow. He was looking out the window. “I am…I…please…call me Richard. Richard I was born. Richard I will die.” He glanced up at Gerald. “The rest of it”—his gaze traveled down over his body—“for the rest of it, let’s rely on God and—and Jesus.” He paused and looked away as if remembering or trying to remember something. Then, looking again at Gerald, “Father, they told me…or I heard them say—I don’t know which—there isn’t much time…you know…” He broke off lamely.

  “I know, Richard,” Gerald said trying to smile, but feeling the lead weight inside him. Somewhere deep in his belly a gray slug was eating his vitals. And somewhere in his heart, a lump of coldness had taken up residence. “I know. I have known for quite a while. I know. It’s all right. It was my own choice.”

  Outside on the driveway, Dr. Hammond was sitting in the driver’s seat of his car wait
ing. The engine was already started.

  “Going to be a very wet night, Father Gerald,” he said. Despite the strain, there was a note of cordiality and respect Gerald had not noticed before. “Let me drop you on my way to the office. I must get my report on tape tonight before I forget anything. They can type it up tomorrow.”

  Gerald slid in painfully beside him and waved goodbye to Jasper, who had been helping him.

  “Tell me, Dr. Hammond,” he said chattily as they swung out on to the main road, “do you believe in the Devil?”

  Uncle Ponto and the Mushroom–Souper

  “Uncle Ponto!” Jamsie screamed in fury as he reached for the door of his apartment. “Uncle Ponto! This time, I’ll do it. By Jesus, I’ll do it. You’ll see! I’ll do it.” He banged the door after him. As he scrambled down the steps into the street and fumbled with the car key, he muttered angrily: “That does it—permanently, eh? That does it. I’ll fix you, you little bastard.”

  Jamsie was shaking all over his tall, raw-boned frame. He was gripped by a sense of frustration that put him almost out of control of himself. His reddish hair and high complexion had always been startling for people. But now his cadaverous face was flushed with passion, his eyes were blazing. His appearance must have been frightening.

  In a few moments he was at the wheel. Fumbling and cursing, he got the car started, made a quick, jerky U-turn, and was immediately off gathering speed as he headed away from San Francisco.

  Jamsie was seething with an accumulated rage so great that he continued to shake. He had put up with Uncle Ponto’s annoyances for over six years. Finally he had had enough. Even though Ponto had left him alone a lot of the time, and even though he had been able to sleep in peace in his own apartment at night until fairly recently, and even though he had at times even relished the eerie company of Ponto and got a kick out of their encounters, nevertheless, on this early Saturday morning, he had had enough. Ponto wanted to move in completely and permanently and immediately, to take him over, him and his entire life. And something had broken inside Jamsie. He had to finish the whole thing now.