Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  Beneath the crag there was suddenly only darkness. Jamsie’s eyes fell away from the Shadow’s hiding place. His thoughts came back to the reservoir.

  He looked at the smiling calm of the waters and up to the North Chalone peak. He remembered what his father had said to him when they had looked at it together years before: someday he would climb all 3,305 feet of it. Waters and peak were clean—wholesome in some way Jamsie could not explain but did feel intensely. He could not, he thought to himself now, he could not soil them with his own dead and bloated body floating face down, its back to the peak, its juices polluting the water. Just the thought now made him feel uncouth, almost sacrilegious.

  He looked away quickly from the clear surface of the reservoir. He stood stock-still. His mind was blank, his eyes, unseeing. He no longer desired to end it all here. But he could not think either of returning to the increasing torture of life with Ponto. “I have no desires at all,” he thought helplessly. Then, as though pointing out to himself something he could not quite grasp, he repeated again and again: “I’m in shock. I’m in shock.”

  Ponto broke in peevishly: “You can do nothing, desire nothing, are nothing—except a human wreck about to kill yourself.” Then viciously: “You”—a long drawn-out pause—“are finished”—again the cruel pause—“dead already, but you don’t know it.” A short pause. Then, like a pistol shot: “Jump!”

  Jamsie did not budge, did not even shake or move. He was certain that Ponto lied. He knew that his will was not helpless, although he did not know what to do. He knew now that preserved in him was a deep desire stronger than any other. He felt tears coming to his eyes; and he knew those tears were forced from him by that deep, deep desire.

  Alarm entered Ponto’s voice again. “Jamsie! Be a man. Get it over with!”

  Jamsie looked over his shoulder at the Shadow’s hiding place. It had not gone. It seemed to have lost its undulating ease and draped complacency, to have gone rigid in some way he could not fathom.

  Then Ponto started to chant in his eunuch’s voice: “Jump-uh! Jump-uh! Jump-uh! Jump-uh!”

  The words with their rhythmic extra beat hit Jamsie painfully as hailstones lashing his ears. He sought some escape, some gimmick to block those quick, stinging blows.

  “Jump-uh! Jump-uh! Jump-uh!” went Ponto’s voice in a high, spiraling tone, speaking quicker and quicker.

  Jamsie’s thoughts started to go awry. The torment of that voice was becoming too much. He remembered Father Mark and his instructions. The trick, that was it! The trick! He began desperately spelling out the name of Jesus again and again: J-E-S-U-S. J-E-S-U-S. J-E-S-U-S. Then he ran all the letters together like an incantation—J-E-S-U-S-J-E-S-U-S-J-E-S-U-S.

  But now, he found, those letters and their piecemeal pronunciation meant more to him than a gimmick. The pain of Ponto’s chanting diminished. Jamsie’s tears flowed more sweetly, more as a relief than a gesture of suffering.

  The tears blurred everything as he threw one more glance at the sky and the water, then heard himself break the silence of all nature, shouting, “Father Mark! Father Mark!” He shouted the name over and over. The echoes came back at him from all sides, from above and below, Father, Father, Father…Mark, Mark, Mark, and died away over the rocks and pinnacles.

  He stepped back a little, then a little more, then some more, away from the edge of the reservoir. He turned back, looking toward the cave mouth and then at the Shadow. He realized he would have to pass by them both if he returned to the Monument Gate by Bear Gulch Caves.

  The echoes died away. The Shadow beneath the crag had dwindled into itself and was almost indistinguishable again from the darkness beneath the crag. There was no sound from Ponto.

  In the silence, Jamsie turned around and stumbled off down by the Moses Spring Trail, hugging the walls of the canyon. He was alone all the way down. The two hours of respite were welcome. When he arrived in full view of the parking lot, he was still saying two names, Jesus and Mark, over and over again to himself.

  The ranger looked up from the magazine he was reading. “Need any help, buddy? You look beat.”

  “The phone. May I use the phone?”

  Within a few minutes Jamsie was talking with Father Mark. “Stay where you are, Jamsie,” Father Mark told him. “Don’t drive back, whatever you do. Wait for me.”

  That evening Jamsie returned with Mark to San Francisco. They spoke little on the way. As they approached the rectory, Mark sensed a new unrest in Jamsie.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Ponto. He hasn’t said a word. He hasn’t appeared. I wonder if…”

  “Don’t. Just don’t.” Mark spoke firmly. Then he added drily, “Your old Uncle Ponto couldn’t sit in this car.”

  Jamsie nodded. But he remained uneasy.

  As they entered the rectory, Jamsie was not sure if for one moment he had not seen Ponto inside the gateway. The shadows cast by the street lamps were playing against the gate pillars and seemed to be a rustling cover for some rigid forms towering above him, leaning forward in an askew fashion, watching his every move, waiting for some moment of their choosing.

  JAMSIE Z.

  The case of Jamsie Z. presents us with an almost open-and-shut example of what used to be called “familiarization” or possession by a “familiar spirit” in the classical terminology of diabolic possession. I say “almost” because, in Jamsie Z.’s case, “familiarization” was never completed. Jamsie resisted, was exorcised, and the intending “familiar spirit” was driven out of his life.

  “Familiarization” is a type of possession in which the possessed is not normally subject to the conditions of physical violence, repugnant smells and behavior, social aberrations, and personal degeneracy that characterize other forms of possession.

  The possessing spirit in “familiarization” is seeking to “come and live with” the subject. If accepted, the spirit becomes the constant and continuously present companion of the possessed. The two “persons,” the familiar and the possessed, remain separate and distinct. The possessed is aware of his familiar. In fact, no movement of body, no pain or pleasure, and no thought or memory occur that is not shared with the familiar. All privacy of the subject is gone; his very thoughts are known; and he knows continually that they are known by his familiar. The subject himself can even benefit from whatever prescience and insight his familiar enjoys.

  Although there was a definite connection between certain events and traits of his childhood and the experience that culminated in his exorcism, it was only after the age of thirty that he was openly approached by a “familiar” spirit and proffered “familiarization.” From the age of thirty-four onwards he was subjected to multiple forms of persuasion by the spirit calling itself Uncle Ponto. But Jamsie’s case does illustrate many of the traits of “familiarization” and the inherent dangers for those who give even a token consent to “familiarization.”

  Jamsie was born in Ossining, New York. His father, Ara, was of Armenian descent; his mother, Lydia, was of Greek descent. Both were third-generation Americans. Ara was a carpenter by trade, and played the clarinet in his spare time in order to earn extra money. Lydia belonged to a Boston family whose large fortune had been made in ship chandlering and on the stock market.

  Lydia saw Ara for the first time at a small evening concert in Glen Ridge, New York. Improbable as it seemed to her family, she fell in love with Ara then and there. And Ara with her. On Lydia’s eighteenth birthday they were married, over the violent objections of her family. Even the threat of being disowned and cut off entirely from the family fortune could not stop Lydia.

  Jamsie was born one year later, in 1923. The family lived in Ossining for another five years. But by 1929 Ara and Lydia had decided to move to New York. He was not making enough money in Ossining. Lydia’s mother and father were pestering Lydia to desert Ara and to return to the family with her son. New York, Ara and Lydia thought, would provide more work for Ara and a greater anonymity for the three
of them. Ara had a letter of recommendation to a taxicab-fleet owner. He and Lydia had high hopes of success in the city.

  In October 1929 the family moved to New York, taking with them some blankets, kitchen utensils, Ara’s clarinet, and an old family icon of the Virgin that Ara’s father had left him in his will. They first lived in a three-room walk-up in Penn Street. After a year they moved to a two-room apartment at Lexington Avenue and 25th Street. There they lived until Ara died in 1939.

  Lydia, once more living in a big metropolis, wrote out a memento of their arrival in large black letters and hung it beside the old icon on their living-room wall: “Today, our first day in New York, George Whitney bid 204 for U. S. Steel.” It hung there beside the icon for years; and these two objects were the center of Jamsie’s earliest recollections.

  But the golden age of New York which had begun at the end of the Civil War was just coming to its close, although few guessed its imminent collapse. New York’s strength and prestige as the source of funds and leadership for the nation had been established in that 64-year period: great New York fortunes were made; famous New York homes were built by a Brokaw, a Dodge, a Carnegie, a Stuyvesant, a Whitney, a Vanderbilt, a Frick, a Harkness, the city’s big financial district was created to sell the country all kinds of services. After World War I, most of New York’s energies were turned toward Europe. But the old leadership was gone, and New York’s manufacturing declined. As one writer put it, the financial soul of New York “worked itself up into a lather of paper profits and then collapsed.” Ara and Lydia arrived just in time for that collapse.

  Nevertheless, their first seven years in New York were relatively happy ones. Ara did not immediately use his recommendation to the taxicab-fleet owner. Instead, he worked as a handyman and carpenter, first around his own neighborhood, and then venturing down around Washington Square and up as far as Yorkville. Lydia at first stayed at home with their young child. Then, as Jamsie started parochial school, Lydia took a daytime job in an Armenian laundry.

  In the opinion of the present writer, the New York which Jamsie knew from his earliest years had something rather intangible but definite to do with his later experience of attempted “familiarization.” Between 1820 and 1930, over 38 million people had immigrated to the United States, and a good one-sixth of these had stayed in New York. The doormat for those “ragged remnants” was the Lower East Side.

  New York was then a city of nearly seven million, with 25 foreign languages in daily use and 200 foreign-language newspapers and magazines to satisfy the needs of this heterogeneous population. “No one can become an American except by God’s grace,” wrote I. A. R. Wylie in the early 1930s. And, for the long-standing Yankee Protestant Establishment, New York, which was in the first third of the twentieth century five-sevenths Italian, Jewish, German, Irish, Hungarian, Armenian, Greek, Russian, Syrian, and otherwise foreign, was not American. The felt differences between the Establishment and the newly arrived was more than ethnic. The Establishment had adopted none of the ancient gods of the New World; they had imported their Christianity, which had no roots in pre-Columbian history. The millions of immigrants came from lands where their religion (mainly Christianity, with Jewish and Muslim minorities) had its roots deep in ancient pre-Christian cults. European and Middle Eastern pagan instincts were never rooted out; they were adopted, sublimated, purified, transmuted. In that mildewed baggage of morals, ritual practices, folk mores, social and familial traditions, the new Americans surely transported the seeds and traces of ancient, far-off powers and spirits which once had held sway over the Old World.

  Jamsie’s childhood until he was nine passed without any serious disruption. Home life was orderly and secure. Mornings and evenings he ate with his parents. Most evenings, Ara would take out the clarinet and play for his wife and child. Every night, as a small child, Jamsie knelt with his mother in front of the ikon and said the night prayers she had taught him, while he looked into the wide eyes of the Virgin.

  His father took him to ball games and boxing matches. Some Sundays they went roller-skating down Wall Street; at other times to the zoo, or for nickel rides on the Staten Island ferry; and two or three times a year he took Jamsie for a swim in a hotel pool. In the summer months there were all-day outings to Coney Island.

  The three of them left New York only once. It was a week’s vacation in San Francisco made possible by a gift of money from Lydia’s parents. Jamsie never forgot the outings on that trip with his father, and their evening meals at Fisherman’s Wharf, and the day’s visit they made to Pinnacles National Monument.

  As Jamsie grew up, he gradually moved around the East Side and got to know and like its ethnic mix, its smells, sounds, and sights. In the early morning he picked his way to school past windows stuffed with bedding and fire escapes where people were still sleeping. As he wandered home, his ears were filled with the medley of dialects used by pushcart peddlers and shopkeepers—Tuscan, Serbian, Yiddish, Ruthenian, Sicilian, Croatian, Cretan, Macedonian.

  Jamsie was in his tenth year when his parents began to notice a strange trouble that seized him from time to time. Sometimes, among the clutter of plaster saints, brass pots, secondhand garments, Balkan stogies, mezuzahs, and other bric-a-brac that filled the shop windows, Jamsie caught sight of what he called a “funny-lookin’ face” or “a face with a funny look.” Then he was seized with a violent fright and literally fled home in a blind panic. He used to arrive white-faced and trembling at Lydia’s side. She always knew what had happened—or so Jamsie thought—and she was able to calm him down and still his fears.

  As he grew older, the “funny face” incidents became rarer, but they never totally disappeared. As a child, he was never able to describe that “face” to his parents. They, wisely, never insisted on details. But from what they could understand, it seemed the child’s terror was caused, not by any particular ugliness in the “face,” but chiefly because of the curious conviction Jamsie had that the “face” knew him personally. “It looks at me and it knows me. It does!” he used to sob to his mother.

  Gradually Jamsie worked out a sort of home geography for himself. He made many friends among the Hungarians living between 82nd and 73rd Streets. His father had distant relatives living there; and once a month or so, Jamsie visited them and was fed on goose-liver paste, stuffed cabbage, and chicken paprika. He skipped the neighborhood of the Bohunks (Czechs and Slovaks), who lived just below the Hungarians.

  For it was lower down on Lexington Avenue, between 30th and 22nd Streets among the Armenians, and with the Greeks in the West 30s and 40s that he felt at home. He spoke a little of both languages. His boyhood friends were there, and he was never frightened when with Greeks and Armenians. He never saw his “funny face” among them.

  In the late spring of 1937, when Jamsie was fourteen years old, Ara made an important decision that ended forever the happy days of Jamsie’s childhood. Ara was not earning enough money as a handyman-carpenter, so he utilized that old but carefully guarded recommendation to a taxicab-fleet owner. Very shortly afterwards, he became one of approximately 25,000 licensed hacks in the city. He drove a two-year-old Y-model Checker for Burmalee System, Inc. Jamsie was very proud at first of his father’s cab with its silver roof and the black-and-white checker band running around the middle of its yellow body.

  Ara worked a 12-hour shift, driving approximately 50 miles a day to service 12 to 15 calls. On a good day he might bring home $3.00 from the meter and $1.25 in tips. It was no good. The constant sitting at the wheel, the endless war with the New York policemen, who were out to eliminate cruising cabs, the weariness at the end of each grueling day, the small earnings brought in by this labor, all produced a change in Ara which alienated him from Lydia and frightened Jamsie.

  He no longer played the clarinet for them in the evenings; he locked his “old stick,” as he called it, in a drawer of the living-room bureau. There were no more family outings. Instead of the occasional game of pinochle and hearts with
some friends, he stayed out late drinking with other cabbies. He developed ulcers, spent two weeks in the hospital with kidney trouble in November 1938, and had a back condition before the end of the year.

  For a while, only his language grew coarser for Jamsie—“palooka” (a cheap fare), “high booker” (a big fare), “rips” (fares over $2), and so on were his father’s new expressions. But matters got worse. At the beginning, Jamsie and Lydia took turns keeping Ara company as he cruised long hours in his cab. When Lydia found out that Ara had fallen into the easy money of occasional pimping, steering out-of-town clients to hotels and parlor houses for a percentage of the “take,” she forbade Jamsie to go with Ara at night. But Jamsie, by now a boy of very strong will, disobeyed.

  Now and then, as he sat beside Ara in the cab, Jamsie was struck by some trait in his father’s face. Once, while he sat in the cab late at night and his father was chatting on the curb with a pimp and two of his girls, Jamsie thought he saw that trait on all four faces as they laughed together as at some joke.

  The “look” did not frighten him, but it repelled him. At the same time he was fascinated by it. As time went on, he deliberately looked for it. He found, however, that he only noticed it when he did not look for it. It was as elusive as ever; he could not pin it down.

  At times that “look” acquired a terrible intensity. Two related incidents that happened in 1938 stand out in Jamsie’s memory.

  With his father and some friends he had gone to see the Brooklyn Dodgers play. It was at a moment toward the end of the game when all the fans were on their feet cheering Cincinnati’s Johnny Vander Meer, who was making baseball history by pitching his second successive no-hit, no-run game. Shouting and cheering like everyone else, Jamsie looked around at the excited crowds. And from deep in the middle of the faces there leaped out at him that “funny-lookin’ face.” It was looking at him. It knew him, he thought. He froze into silence and looked away in panic. Then he glanced back at the spot where he had seen it, but it was gone. All he could see were the fans shouting and gesticulating.