Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  It was only after a protracted period that he saw the first sign of real trouble. On his way home one evening Ponto, on the back seat of the car, said: “Jamsie, let’s get married.”

  Taking this as just a part of Ponto’s usual nonsensical prattle—of which there was always quite a lot in those days—Jamsie thought Ponto would prattle on to something else if he kept quiet. But Ponto was serious, and he said so.

  “Jamsie! I’m serious. Let’s get married.”

  Goose pimples started on Jamsie’s arms and legs. For the first time, Jamsie began to be seriously afraid of Ponto. He drove on in silence, but his mind was full of a new apprehension.

  The next day in the station cafeteria Jamsie was joined at the table by Lila Wood, Cloyd’s researcher. Ponto was somewhere among the coffee urns, gazing quietly at Jamsie. Lila, like others, had noticed Jamsie’s deep depression that day. But, as she says, she also sensed the grain of fear running through him.

  Knowing better than to tackle Jamsie head-on, she said lightly as she rose after lunch: “Wanta share a steak tonight with a friend and me?”

  It was the first time in a long while that anyone had approached Jamsie so nonchalantly. He had become accustomed to people avoiding him socially. He looked at Lila in disbelief. But Lila knew how to deal with the situation. “Okay,” she said as she turned away smiling. “See you at 5:30.”

  Jamsie stared after her. Her voice, or something in her voice, affected him. As he said afterward, “It was like a short chord of beautiful harmony struck in between the squalling of 200 squabbling cats and ten jackhammers all going at the same time.”

  But his reverie lasted a short time. Ponto’s voice broke in with a new sharpness. “I heard all that. Heard all of it. That smelly young bitch. Do you know her friend? You will. I do! A balding pig. That’s him. Isn’t man enough to get between her legs even.”

  For just a few moments Jamsie felt impervious to Ponto’s corroding accents, and it was a very great relief. He just smiled at Ponto. Ponto’s face twisted in anger; and, with a sort of a leap backward and upward, he disappeared.

  Immediately Jamsie felt a solid lump of agony within him. This was something new. It started somewhere around his middle. Then it moved to his spine. One spike of pain hit his coccyx, another pierced his testicles, a third prodded up through his spinal column; and from the nape of his neck it seemed to branch outward in two directions. One stream invaded his lungs. He grew short of breath and felt dizzy. Another stream reached upward into his skull and gripped his brain, as though contracting it. He remained sitting for a few minutes, his chin in his hand, waiting. It passed.

  As he stood up, he heard Ponto’s voice. “You see, pal! You see! You already belong to me in great part. Watch it tonight!” Ponto was not visible, but the smell was there.

  That evening Jamsie went home with Lila. She had just prepared three steaks when her friend rang at the front door. Jamsie opened the door to a stoutish man, completely bald, whose blue eyes looked at him with an expression of good humor.

  “I’m Father Mark, Lila’s friend. You must be Jamsie. She told me about you. Glad to see you.”

  As Jamsie found out, Lila had an ulterior motive for the invitation. Before the evening was out, Jamsie was talking freely to Mark. Mark seemed to know all about Ponto’s behavior. The only thing he did not know was Ponto’s name; and when Jamsie told him, he gave a short little laugh and said: “Good God! I thought I’d heard them all. But—Ponto! God!”

  The two men made an appointment to meet the following evening. Mark even promised he would make some of his own special mushroom soup for which he was so well known among his friends.

  After that mushroom soup dinner at Mark’s rectory, Jamsie told Mark his life story, omitting nothing. Mark listened in silence, puffing a long church warden’s pipe that reeked of tar, and interrupting now and again with a question.

  It was past midnight when Jamsie finished. Mark put down his pipe, reflected a little while in silence, and looked at Jamsie speculatively. The silence was not uncomfortable for Jamsie. Then Mark spent the next hour telling Jamsie what he thought of the whole matter.

  Jamsie, according to Mark, was the object of an evil spirit’s attentions. There were hundreds—and, for all Mark knew, perhaps millions and trillions—of different spirits. “You don’t number spirits as you number human beings,” Mark told him. He explained that in his experience, which was considerable, it appeared that each kind of spirit had its own characteristics and techniques of approaching humans. However, a certain kind of spirit—not a very important one—always sought to become a “familiar” of some human being, man, woman, or child. Rarely—but it did happen—did a “familiar” spirit possess an animal.

  What was a “familiar”? Jamsie wanted to know. Mark explained that the key to the “familiarity” which such a spirit sought to obtain lay in this: the person in question consented to a total sharing of his or her consciousness and personal life with the spirit.

  Mark gave an example. Normally, when you are walking around, eating, working, washing yourself, talking, you are conscious of yourself as distinct from others. Now supposing you were conscious of yourself and of another self all the time, like Siamese twins but inside your own head and in your consciousness. And supposing that the two, so to speak, shared your consciousness. It’s your self-consciousness, your awareness of yourself, and at the same time, it’s the consciousness, the awareness of that other self. Both at the same time. No getting away from one another. “Its” thoughts use your mind, but they are not your thoughts, and you know that. “Its” imagination likewise. And “its” will also. And you are aware of all this constantly, for as long as you are conscious of yourself. That was the familiarity Mark was talking about.

  Jamsie was aghast. “My God,” he says now, “I had already gone down that road, at least part of the way. I didn’t know what to do. I was lost!”

  Mark answered Jamsie’s panic. He was not lost. He had never consented to full possession by the “familiar.” He had just been invaded. But he was going to be more and more pressured to accept full “familiarity.”

  What could happen? Jamsie wanted to know.

  “You can be worn down,” Mark said quietly. “You can be taken. Like any of us. You’re up against a force more powerful than you can ever hope to be yourself.”

  Then Mark looked Jamsie straight in the eye and asked him directly if he wanted to undergo Exorcism.

  Strangely, Jamsie was speechless. Then slowly he asked in great concern: “Would that mean Ponto would never return?”

  Mark told Jamsie that, if the exorcism were successful, Ponto would be gone forever. He concentrated his attention on Jamsie’s every move and reaction. He was only now beginning to be able to measure how far Ponto had extended his hold on Jamsie.

  “Well,” he said finally, with a great effort to appear relaxed, “what is it going to be? Do you think we should go as far as that?” He did not want to send Jamsie off half-crazed with fear.

  Jamsie was confused. Memories of his loneliness and his having been deserted by his parents crowded his mind. Was this Ponto affair as bad as Mark made it out to be? Couldn’t he keep Ponto at a distance anyway, and still enjoy the exotic character of the whole affair? Besides, wouldn’t he lose some of that verve as a broadcaster that was now his great asset?

  Mark chatted with Jamsie for a while about all this. He poured them both another drink. Jamsie was not ready to accept Exorcism. Mark had to wait for Jamsie.

  Very earnestly Mark gave Jamsie some practical advice. The whole point, he said, was to resist invasion. Enjoy—if that was the word, Mark said wryly—Ponto’s antics and his stimulation, but resist invasion, Mark insisted. For instance, if Jamsie were to feel a strange grip on his mind, memory, and imagination, and he was not able to resist it, he should adopt a simple trick in order to offset such a “grip”: spell the name of Jesus out letter by letter, over and over. It was this stratagem that was to save Jamsie fr
om suicide at the reservoir later on.

  When Jamsie asked if he could use any other name, Mark said with a laugh that he could, but that he would find only that name effective. Mark explained the essence of Exorcism—what it meant, and its effects in the possessed. Finally Mark told Jamsie to call him: “Night or day. Wherever I am, wherever you are, whenever it happens to be, I’ll come immediately to you. But don’t delay, if once you decide I can help with Exorcism.”

  When Jamsie got home that night, he could not sleep. But Ponto did not appear.

  About a month later, when Jamsie went for his yearly medical checkup, the doctor told him that all was well except for his heart. He should be careful of too much excitement. The doctor prescribed some tablets and regulated Jamsie’s diet. The doctor asked him if he was worried about anything. Was there anything preying on his mind? Jamsie was surprised at the sharpness of the doctor. Yes, he admitted, he was very preoccupied with personal matters. The doctor recommended that Jamsie think about consulting a psychologist—just to chat over things, relieve the strain a little. He gave Jamsie the name of a man whom he could personally recommend.

  Jamsie thought over the matter for about a week. He could not accept Mark’s conclusion that Ponto should be exorcised—not because he did not believe that Ponto was a disembodied spirit, or “anyway partially disembodied,” he thought wryly, but because he could not face up to daily life without Ponto’s disturbances.

  But then he began to wonder why he liked such disturbances. Because Ponto’s possession of him had already gone a certain distance? That was what Mark thought. Or because, as he preferred to think, Ponto was the one relief in an otherwise bleak landscape—and, into the bargain, a marvelous stimulus for his work? Or was this precisely the trap Ponto had laid for him? All the lines crisscrossed in confusion. And the confusion only got worse when he began to have all sorts of doubts about Mark’s judgment and intentions. These priests were always looking for converts anyway, he thought. Yet Mark sounded so sincere. Perhaps, after all, a talk with a good psychologist would be helpful.

  All that week, Ponto did not appear.

  It was when he was driving to his first appointment with the psychologist that Jamsie heard Ponto for the first time in eight or nine days.

  “The shrink’s all right, Jamsie. He’s a good man; and you go and do what he says. But if you would only listen to me and do what I want, you would need no shrink.” Jamsie went anyway.

  The psychologist recommended by his doctor passed Jamsie on to a psychiatrist colleague. Jamsie spent over 18 months in therapy, but the results were terribly disappointing.

  The therapist started off by warning Jamsie that his psychological condition was precarious indeed. He needed extended treatment. But after about six months, the therapist reversed his judgment. He said he could not find any genuine psychological imbalance or abnormalcy in Jamsie. All of Jamsie’s accounts of Ponto, the therapist said, were concocted holus-bolus by Jamsie, were deliberate inventions. The damned thing was a hoax, and he for one didn’t think it was funny. Jamsie finally persuaded the man that this was no hoax, and went on earnestly with therapy for another year. But finally, when it was clear that there was no appreciable change for the better, Jamsie gave up on psychiatry.

  During this period of therapy Ponto appeared regularly and with his usual behaviorisms, but he never really distressed Jamsie. In fact, Jamsie was glad to see Ponto. He seemed more real than the therapist and all his analyses. And, as Ponto remarked to Jamsie one day, “You and I, Jamsie, are one, real flesh and blood; but that shrink lives in his head. Now I ask you: Which is the better off?”

  Toward the end of Jamsie’s treatment with the therapist, Ponto seemed to grow impatient, as if he had a deadline to meet in Jamsie’s case. More and more, Jamsie found that Ponto’s thoughts, reactions, feelings, memories, intentions were present to his consciousness, even when Ponto was not visible. He began to experience two sets of thoughts and feelings—his own and Ponto’s. He always knew which were which, but he literally had no privacy of mind.

  Amazingly enough, except for an occasional clash with Jay Beedem, who always treated Jamsie with marked coldness, Jamsie’s work continued to be excellent. But by November 1963, internally, inside Jamsie, life was becoming unbearable.

  Jamsie remembers clearly that it was from December 1963 that a new desperation began to take hold of him. Ponto did not let up. He kept devising new antics and developed the habit of appearing in Jamsie’s apartment at the end of the day and not disappearing till Jamsie went to bed. He chattered on and on, usually urging Jamsie to do something—quit his job, take a trip, hate this person or that—but most often to “let Ponto in.”

  Jamsie remembers one incident clearly. He had returned home one evening very late. Ponto appeared on his living-room table and spent about an hour juggling words and phrases and colored lumps of sound—or so it seemed to jamsie—in the air. Then, as Ponto grew more intense, he developed a chant that grated terribly on Jamsie, a sort of “rhythm and grunt.” He repeated a word over and over with a little rhythmic grunt after it each time. “Let me in,” he would begin. Then over and over and over: “Let-uh! Let-uh! Let-uh! Me-uh! Me-uh! Me-uh! In-uh! In-uh! In-uh!”

  The staccato beat was torture to Jamsie. He finally screamed at Ponto to stop.

  In the months following, Jamsie was treated to repeat performances along this line, sometimes once a week. Each time, Jamsie would be reduced to shouting and screaming in order to silence Ponto. Neighbors complained regularly about the noise.

  Very late one particular evening in December of 1963, after having had his nerves jangled in this way by Ponto for too long, Jamsie could hardly believe it when Ponto was finally quiet for a while. Jamsie soaked up the badly needed tranquillity.

  But rather soon he began to hear a new sound. He listened intently. He could hear Ponto’s voice clearly, but it seemed to be caught up in a babel of other voices similar to Ponto’s.

  He could not tell what was being said. There was a lot of laughter and many exclamations. But the whole thing reminded him of how sometimes he used to listen to the radio in his home of the 1930s and get nothing but a rising and falling stream of static together with indistinct and far-off voices.

  As Jamsie strained to hear, there was a pause and silence. Then Ponto’s mincing voice from the kitchen: “Jamsie, would you mind if some of my associates and family joined us? After all, we are going to get married, aren’t we? And soon, eh?”

  The babel of voices started again and seemed to be approaching the door of his living room.

  Jamsie froze for a second; then, seized by a blind, rushing panic, he stood up and dashed out the door, got into his car, and sped as fast as he could to the Golden Gate Bridge. His mind was numb, but his emotions were in turmoil. He felt cold, unwanted, persecuted, desperate. He could not take any more of it. He wanted out. He stopped in the middle of the bridge.

  “It’s no use, Jamsie.”

  Jamsie knew the voice. God! He could have cried. There he was, balanced on the damned guardrail.

  “It’s no use, my friend. You and I have much to do before your life ends. Why do you think I am to be your familiar? So that you die young? Don’t be a fool!”

  Jamsie turned away. For the first time he had the feeling of being beaten by Ponto. He made his way slowly back home. There was no hurry. He did not know what to do anyway. He thought aimlessly of Mark. But what the hell, the shrink hadn’t helped. What could Mark do for him?

  Ponto did not appear again that night, but it was a very brief rest for Jamsie. The nighttime had always been a great source of strength and recuperation for Jamsie; and even though Ponto had been encroaching a little more all the time, there had always remained some hours at night when Jamsie was alone, relatively at peace, and could rest. Ponto had never stayed the entire night without asking Jamsie’s consent.

  But now Ponto insisted: they had to be intimate. What he meant by that Jamsie was never sure. But it did me
an he would spend nights in Jamsie’s apartment. And with a significance that escaped Jamsie, Ponto wanted him to consent. They were going to be married, weren’t they? They were going to make the whole thing legal, weren’t they? Ponto said, grinning in his crooked fashion.

  After weeks of badgering, Jamsie was ripe to make a drastic decision. Anything would be better than this torture. Should he finish it all by suicide? Or would it be better to telephone Father Mark? Or should he just give in to Ponto and see how things worked out?

  The worst of the badgering sessions with Ponto occurred on February 1. Ponto installed himself in Jamsie’s bedroom. Jamsie spent the night stalking up and down his living-room floor, making coffee to stay awake, arguing in a loud voice with Ponto, weeping continuously, smoking and drinking intermittently. He could not get rid of Ponto. And he could not make up his mind. He needed time. It was the pressure on him by Ponto to make a decision that was crushing his spirit.

  Finally he decided to make time for thinking and analyzing it all. He would ask for a leave of absence from the station. During the leave he could go over all the events of the last few years, consult with the psychiatrist again, see Father Mark, and get sufficient control of himself to form some decision about a wise course of action.

  When he arrived at the station early the following morning and went to see Jay Beedem to request a few days’ leave, his difficulties took a new form.

  Beedem spoke without lifting his face from the notes he was reading. Beedem had noticed the increasingly peculiar behavior of Jamsie over the last few weeks, he said. Beedem did not think a leave of absence was the solution. Of course, Jamsie had some overdue vacation days coming to him. But Beedem felt that, if Jamsie continued creating a tension among the other station employees, there could be no other alternative but to fire him.