Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  There was a trap ready to spring on Mark. But Mark knew better than to ask who the Claimant was. Claimant, Master, Prince, Leader—it all came down to one being: the supreme intelligence of evil which had led and which leads all intelligences in revolt against the truth of God. Mark never felt in all his life that he wanted a direct tussle with that personage. Deep instinct of his own limitations held him back from such a step.

  Instead, Mark pursued his urgent quest of uncovering the relationship between Uncle Ponto and the Shadow. “But Uncle Ponto uses his own intelligence on his own account.”

  “Never.” The definitiveness of that word hit them all.

  “Ponto’s intelligence is subordinate to you.”

  “Always.” The answer was a stony blow. Imperious. Curt.

  “And Ponto’s will?”

  “Those who accepted, those who accept the Claimant, have his will. Only his will. Only the will. Only the will. The will of the Kingdom. The will of the will of the will of the will of the will…” The voice faded down from a curt, domineering tone to a sniveling, breathed whisper and died away. Mark detected the sudden influx of fear in it.

  The young assistant priest also caught that note of fear, and, in a kind of victory yell, he leaned forward with a sudden ebullience: “Hit them hard, Mark!”

  Mark rounded on him, his eyes blazing. “Shut your mouth!”

  “That is right!” came the mincing tone. “That is exactly right! But our quarrel is with you, Priest! We have years to deal with this little virgin and to show…”

  Mark broke in. “You will speak when questioned. Only then. And you will tell us in the name of Jesus,” Mark thundered, his annoyance with the young priest’s mistake filling his voice and channeled at the spirit, “you will tell us: Jay Beedem, has he consented to your power?”

  There was complete silence. Only Jamsie’s breathing could be heard. Mark had never met Beedem, but he figured oddly in Jamsie’s story, and Mark’s nose caught a strange scent there, even from a distance. He needed to know if there was an essential connection Beedem had with Ponto or with his “superior” that affected Jamsie.

  “Jay Beedem,” insisted Mark. “You will tell us when…”

  “No.” It was summary and definitive. “We will not tell you anything, Priest.” Silence again.

  “By the authority of the Church and in the name of Jesus, you…”

  “That Church and that Person have no authority over Jay Beedem. He is ours. Ours. Ours. Ours. The Kingdom. Ours.”

  Mark drew a deep breath. This was not new for him, but it always gave him a sinking feeling to find out that someone was protected by summary evil, protected even from the touch of grace. He knew better than to pursue the subject. Once before, about ten years before, he had tried. And the onslaught that ensued had interrupted the exorcism (which someone else had to start all over again and finish), and left Mark literally dumb and deaf for about five weeks. Something vital had almost died in Mark that time. He had challenged Evil Spirit on its own secure ground.

  He switched to another tack. “Your funny-looking face: what was the purpose of that?”

  “The funny-looking face was not our doing. We do not frighten those we prospect.”

  “What result was effected by showing Jamsie that face?”

  “By it, his protector wished to acquaint him with the face all take on who belong to us…”

  “Was it this,” Mark interrupted almost involuntarily, “that stopped Jamsie at the reservoir? That face?” There was no immediate answer.

  Mark got the faintest hint of something strange happening to the others in the room. He glanced quizzically at his young priest; his face was beaded with perspiration. Mark paused.

  Then all four assistants flung their hands to their ears, their faces screwed up in expressions of pain.

  “Mark, for the love of God, get them to stop that whistling!” the doctor was shouting at the top of his voice. “It will stun us.”

  He and the other three started to moan in pain; then all four were shouting and screaming, their heads and bodies turning this way and that, backing away from the cot where Mark stood beside Jamsie’s inert body.

  Mark took a step toward them, but quickly withdrew. He tried again, and again withdrew. Every time he stepped outside a certain invisible circle around the cot, his ears were assailed by the most horrible and deafening hail of high-decibel sound.

  As his four assistants writhed and withdrew slowly, they were looking at Mark, imploring help. He made animated gestures to them indicating that they should keep backing away. They did so until finally, within a foot or so of the back wall near the door of the room, all four suddenly stopped writhing in agony. Their faces lost the lines of pain and concentrated effort.

  They looked at Mark finally as though across a huge distance filled suddenly with silence and fog. While Mark could see them clearly, he could not hear them at all. On their side, they could only hear Mark and see his lips moving and his hands gesturing in a distorted fashion. It was like looking through frosted glass into a sunlit room; they saw everything, but unclearly.

  Rooted to the opposite side of the room with their bodies to the wall, it was through this weird medium that his four assistants saw Mark’s final settling of Jamsie’s exorcism. It was a shadow play of horrors for them.

  They saw Mark’s figure turn partially away from them to face Jamsie’s body on the cot. They saw Mark lift the crucifix. They saw his lips move and at first heard nothing. Then, as from a great distance and through a low, rumbling noise like a continuous avalanche of pebbles down the side of a mountain, they began to hear his voice.

  “…shall be as we bid, because it is in the name of Jesus that we bid you answer us. Was it the face that stopped Jamsie from suicide?”

  Another voice, the one with the mincing words, broke through in a guttural tone, sharp, decisive, cold, inimical. “Are you interested in that funny-lookin’ face, Priest? Would you like to see it yourself?”

  “Answer our question,” was Mark’s rebuttal to that invitation to be curious. “Answer it!”

  “Yes. Ye-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-es.” The voice was grating out the sounds grudgingly. “It was that face. We are always present when inferiors are about to make a killing.”

  “So every time you were present, Jamsie’s protector endeavored to let him see that face?” There was no answer to this.

  Mark went to another point. “Why did you allow Jamsie to see the…the…the Shadow?” Mark stumbled over that one, and then regained his composure. There had been moments in his own life when he had been about to make some important decision and, he now realized with a little shiver, there had been some sort of shadow present. He had always put it down to something else. But the wisps of memory disturbed him now. Those moments had been during his bouncy, jaunty days, his “scenario” days, when everything had to have a logical and describable cause, and it was all very simple.

  “We did not. Notnotnotnotnotnot.” The word was a thump of sorrow and regret and dreadful aching. Mark felt it. He went on, pressing his questions, still holding the crucifix high.

  “Why did a common look exist between the Shadow and Uncle Ponto and Jay Beedem and the pimp and many others; why did a common look exist?”

  Mark could see a change in Jamsie that his four assistants could not see through the haze that kept them apart. Jamsie was now wide awake, but his eyes were not on Mark. They looked up to his left. Mark was careful to note this, but he kept looking steadily at Jamsie. He repeated his question. He was getting closer.

  “Why the common look? Is this another part of your evil stupidity?”

  “Beyond our control.” The words came with difficulty. “We also…must submit…in material things, we…also bound…Person beneath contempt holds…holds…holds…holds…” The voice started to get slurred. “Ho-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-l-l-l-l-l-l-dsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsdsds” The voice died away in an angry buzz until there was no more sound.

  “Why the common look
?” Mark kept staring at Jamsie, looking for any hint or clue in his reactions.

  Still pinned to the opposite wall, Mark’s assistants were suddenly horror-struck. They shouted and screamed in warning to Mark. He could not hear, but continued to face Jamsie.

  At first what they saw seemed vague, a bulky shape, rearing up behind Mark, much like a cat standing crookedly on its hind legs, front paws lifted, claws open and spread-eagled, ears flattened against its head, mouth opened to hiss.

  They heard the distorted rumble of Mark’s voice as he continued the exorcism. There was nothing they could do but watch and pray.

  “What do you place in those human beings so that they get that look?”

  And the voice came rasping out in a slow, steady tone: “Obedience to the Kingdom. They give their will. We fill the soul. What’s inside peers out willy-nilly…”

  Jamsie, still strapped down, had raised his head from the bed to stare at the threatening form behind Mark. It was constantly weaving back and forward, turning from left to right as if seeking something. But to Jamsie it was less like a cat and more like a man swathed in heavy, black clothes. Mark, intent on watching Jamsie, did not follow the direction of his gaze.

  “You have to come out.” Mark began his final pounding at the spirit. “You have to manifest yourself and leave this human being. In the name of Jesus!”

  The assistants, all still at bay, could see both faces—Jamsie’s and the darksome figure’s—contorting at this moment. “And not only you, but your inferior and slave, your Uncle Ponto. Him and all who go with him. Out! I say! Out with all of you.”

  Mark’s assistants were now in utter panic. All they could see was the menace to Mark from behind him. They tried to move forward against the excruciating rain of sound.

  “We will never rest until we avenge ourselves on you,” the voice was saying, “we will leave this miserable blob of muck dead when we go.”

  “Life and death are not yours to give or take. They belong to Jesus.”

  Jamsie started at that moment to scream, wild hysteria in his voice.

  Mark’s ears were filled with that scream; he held the crucifix and prayed out loud, using only two words: “Jesus! Mercy! Jesus! Mercy! Jesus! Mercy! Jesus! Mercy! Jesus!”

  Then his ears were hit by the agonizing screams of the four assistants: they had left their sanctuary-prison against the opposite wall, had penetrated the space between the wall and the cot where Mark stood beside Jamsie, and were once more writhing under the impact of the torture that stabbed at their eardrums.

  But even through the din of Jamsie’s shouts and his assistants’ screams, deepened by his own praying, chanting voice, Mark heard one sound that reassured him and gave him hope.

  It was the rattling of the pebble avalanche that had never really ceased, but now became more defined. It was a hubbub of wordless voices and senseless syllables all running together and splitting each other in fragments, interrupting and fractioning and changing each other, an undistinguishable medley of sorrow, regret, foreboding, agony. It persisted in rising and falling waves, then started to build up and up to a crescendo.

  Mark took his cue: it was the confusion of defeat and rout. He hurled the words of his power at it all.

  “In the name of Jesus! You must depart! Unclean ones! There is no room for you! No dwelling in this human being. For Jesus has commanded: Go! And you go! Go! Go!”

  Mark remembers clearly stopping at this point. He did some quick thinking. By now the possessing evil spirit should have been sufficiently weakened and Ponto’s grasp on Jamsie sufficiently diluted for Jamsie to make his fatal and all-important choice.

  Mark bent down near Jamsie’s ear, speaking in a gentle, firm tone. He remembers almost word for word; it was the choice that always came in some way. “Jamsie! Jamsie! Jamsie! Listen to me: Now! You have to choose! You have to make a choice! Either you take a step in trust. You renew your faith. Blindly, mind you, blindly. Or now you yield to Ponto and to all of Ponto’s friends. Jamsie! All of them, Jamsie! In the name of Jesus, choose! Now choose, Jamsie!”

  In his turn, Jamsie recalls that at this moment he woke up to the confusion around him. Gradually, as in a thinning haze, he began to make out dim figures besides the Shadow behind Mark, and he saw zigzag gestures, the ceiling and the walls of the room; he felt the pressure of the straps across his chest, middle, and legs. His mouth was dry, he remembers, but he was breathing easily.

  Farther away from the bed, he could not see anything except as a fuzzy gray-black background—the closest comparison Jamsie can give to describe that blurry background is what he saw when he once tried on the very powerful eyeglasses of a friend who was almost blind. Everything blurred together and seemed to darken.

  Closer, he could see the figures of the assistants as they held their ears and struggled with that deafening whistling noise. One was staggering. Two had fallen to the floor. One was standing upright, moving slowly and agonizingly toward him.

  Still nearer to him, he could see two or three single figures, together with a multitude of shapes and forms. Ponto was there, but some infinite distance away. Jamsie could not understand this: Ponto was near, yet far. He seemed to be all squeezed together as if his body was boneless and someone had caught it in an invisible clothes wringer narrowing his girth, splaying his limbs, bulging his eyes. And his look was no longer merely importunate and mischievous. For the first time it was nasty, Jamsie felt, nasty, bitter, hating, desperate all at once.

  Ponto’s agony seemed to be multiplied by a whole river of forms and shapes—torsos without heads, heads without bodies, arms and legs without a trunk, fingers without hands, toes without legs, bellies without a body, genitals floating free, long plaits of gray and yellow hair—all wreathing and snaking fitfully, aimlessly around Ponto in zigzag tracery.

  Closest to him of all, except for Mark, Jamsie saw the Shadow. It loomed up above him with a superhuman stature. It was neither black nor gray nor white but an indefinable amalgam of shifting darkling shades, much like the smoke from wet coals—never still or calm, but ruffled and rippling irregularly. Head, shoulders, hands, mouth, eyes, feet were clear enough to be perceived, but not clear enough to be described.

  Jamsie heard Mark’s voice then, gentle, firm, finalizing.

  “Jamsie! Now is the time to choose. Remember! I told you. You! You choose. You have to choose. Of your own free will.”

  Somehow or other, Mark’s voice was reaching Jamsie in spite of the din and the distracting gyrations and febrile jumping of all those forms.

  “Choose! Choose! Yours is the choice. Now!” Mark’s unhesitating syllables clung to Jamsie’s memories.

  Jamsie could not see Mark’s face as Mark bent down to speak in his ear, but the Shadow’s features were clear. A kaleidoscope of expressions passed over that face. Jamsie began weakly to remember. Where had he seen this expression? That expression? The next one? The last one? They all seemed different, yet they all seemed to be the same.

  Then Jamsie realized that the various changing expressions were repeating themselves over and over again, coming and fading and returning in a carousel set to the din and shouts and screams.

  “Choose! Choose!”

  It was Mark’s voice again. Jamsie turned. He tried to make out Mark’s face. He could not. From forehead to chin Mark seemed to be faceless. But he still heard Mark’s voice.

  Then his memory began to clear. The expressions became more familiar. Yes…yes…that was his father’s, Ara’s…and that one Uncle Ponto’s…the pimp’s…Jay Beedem’s…Jay Beedem’s?”

  “Choose! Jamsie! Choose!”

  Then, interspersed with the changing faces, Jamsie began to see the other funny-looking faces he had seen in all the years back to his childhood, 1960, 1958, 1957, 1949, 1942, 1941, 1940, 1939, 1938, 1937, 1933. And he began to see that his fright for all these years had been a form of fascination, that even while running away from the “funny-lookin’ faces,” he had been inviting them, that h
e had wanted to be found by them!

  Inside his deepest self another movement started, beyond his willing. The desire to be rid of that fascination. But there was still the agonizing fear and doubt. “If I stopped looking at that carousel,” Jamsie today describes his feelings at that point in the exorcism, “I felt I would cease to exist. I would die, die, die sort of thing.”

  Then his fascinated gaze faltered and flicked away from the carousel of faces for an instant over to Mark’s face.

  Mark was no longer faceless for Jamsie. He did not have the features Jamsie knew as Mark’s. Still, Jamsie knew, they genuinely belonged to Mark. Another puzzlement for Jamsie.

  He peered at Mark, staring at the eyes and the nose and mouth. The colors of his face were beginning to glow and shimmer in old gold, in tarnished silver, faded blue and brown and yellow. Jamsie half-feared to find some phase of the “funny-lookin’ face” on Mark, but there was none. And he had no fear or fright. Another emotion, other thoughts were coming to Jamsie.

  Mark’s voice reached him again. “You must choose, Jamsie.”

  Jamsie glanced again at the Shadow. In all its bulk and in every weaving curve of its changing face and figure there was now a certain cringing. Jamsie read hesitation there, even as he found himself fascinated always by the changes.

  Jamsie began to look back and forth from the Shadow back to Mark, then at the Shadow, slowly at first, then quickly. And Mark’s insistent “Choose. Make your choice, Jamsie!” came to him again and again.

  Suddenly he understood. He was free. No one would force him. No one could. He was free—to go on immersing himself in the changing horrors of the Shadow, or to look at Mark and make an opposite choice.

  He started to gaze steadily at Mark; and in that look he knew he was choosing.

  There were no words on his lips. He had no sentence in his brain, no concepts in his mind about that choice. He was choosing, merely because he chose to choose; and, choosing thus, he was freely choosing.

  And as the thrust of his choice gathered strength within him, he began to recognize the new lines and shades in Mark’s face: all the traits of goodness and joy and freedom and welcome he had ever known in others—Lydia and Ara of years ago, Lila Wood, the old icon at home in New York—all were there as so many frames, as mirrors reflecting an immense beauty and joy and peace and unshakable eternity.