Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  Carl was still stuttering: “Christ…Christ…Christ…” Donna at her camera noticed the white foam gathering at the corners of his mouth. Norman reached out to take Carl’s right hand in his. “God!” he exclaimed in a loud whisper, “his hand is like ice.”

  Carl was now struggling. He had ceased speaking. He was like a man trying to forge ahead and walk against a strong, buffeting wind. His hand trembled in Norman’s, and his whole body vibrated in his effort to push onward, to step on to that Rooster in the mosaic medallion. His lips were drawn back over his teeth in the effort. The skin on his face tightened and whitened; and although he no longer spoke, there started in him a low moan like a man expelling his breath in a vast, heaving attempt to push past an obstacle.

  Norman felt the icy cold entering his own fingers and hand, deadening all feeling there, loosening his grip on Carl.

  The moaning rose in volume, changing to a growling, then increased in volume again until it resembled the shouting of a man through clenched teeth. Norman had let go of Carl’s hand by now and was standing back, confused and dazed. The others had drawn back a few steps in apprehension at this unexpected turn of events. Carl was now alone, still facing Donna across that medallion.

  At the height of that peculiar muffled shout from Carl, a change seemed to come over him; and the shock was too much for Donna. Suddenly, it seemed, what had been buffeting Carl closed in around him like an invisible cocoon. Some unseen bonds and wrappings tightened around his entire body, squeezing and narrowing him, binding him in a crunched fashion and bending him down lower and lower to the ground. He seemed to diminish in size. The expression of effort and straining rage on his face was replaced by a look of crushed, broken helplessness, almost of infantility. It was the look of one trying to draw into the smallest possible diameter of his own body.

  Donna still held the camera in operation, but she whispered in panic: “Somebody help me! Please! Quick!” Nobody budged; they could not take their eyes off Carl. He was whining in an up-and-down fashion, as if pain and struggle had emptied him. It was a protest against agony. All this became too much for Donna. The camera slid from her fingers to the floor. And the last shot taken of Carl shows him bending forward, his hands locked tightly across his chest, his head twisted to one side, eyes closed, his tongue between his teeth, and an expression of resignation, defeat, and repose on his face—the same that many have seen on those who have been garroted or drowned. It was an emptied-out look.

  The clattering fall of Donna’s camera broke the frozen fascination of the others. Bill and two students finally rushed to help Donna. Norman and the others lifted Carl up. As they did, his body relaxed from its rigid posture and he was carried limp and unconscious out into the open air.

  All were perspiring and shaken. Carl’s body was cold. They poured some drops of whisky between his lips, and he began to recover. After a while, he breathed normally and opened his eyes.

  “Carl,” Norman spoke quietly, “Carl, it will be better if we go on to Venice now.”

  A little over a week later, back in New York, Carl was far from all right. Even after a few days rest in Venice and Milan, and the long flight home, Carl was still in a dazed condition that none of his associates could understand. He was no longer the commanding, self-possessed, and self-confident leader he had been. He ate and slept fitfully, talked very little, canceled all his scheduled appointments.

  Carl seemed to be reliving again and again the scene in Aquileia, always in the same way: he muttered and talked, sometimes strode around the house and garden reenacting each step of that disastrous morning. And always, at the crucial moment, he went into the same queer seizure. It was Donna who remarked one day that he seemed to her to be trying to carry the Aquileia incident past that difficult moment at the medallion.

  Finally Norman and Albert called Carl’s father in Philadelphia. Carl was taken home. A long rest was prescribed by the family doctor.

  There was no suspicion in anyone’s mind that Carl was possessed or in the process of possession, until one night when only Carl and his father were sleeping alone in the big house. His father was suddenly wakened from sleep. Carl stood by his bedside, crying quietly. He spoke very clearly, although not all he said seemed coherent to his father. He evidently wanted help from a priest. He named him: Father Hartney F., who lived in Newark, New Jersey. And Carl wanted his father to call the priest then and there. It was after midnight, but his father was sufficiently alarmed to call the priest. Father was out, his housekeeper said; she would give the message to him when he returned.

  Carl’s father had just hung up when there occurred one of many peculiar apparent coincidences that marked the case of Carl V. The telephone rang. The man’s voice at the other end was level and pleasant. He announced himself as Father F. Yes, he would like to see Carl; that was why he was calling. No, he was not in New Jersey; he was in Philadelphia. No, he had not been contacted by his housekeeper.

  “Mr. V., I must ask you to trust me as a man and as a priest. I have something to say to your son which is for his ears only.” His father looked at Carl, then handed him the telephone. Carl appeared to listen, tears flowing, his face drawn. All he said was “Yes” a few times; then a slow “Tomorrow. All right.” He hung up and, without looking at his father, turned slowly away and left the room.

  Carl spent three weeks in New York with Father F., for a first round of pre-exorcism tests. He was back home by late August. During September and October he commuted frequently from Philadelphia to Newark and New York. At the beginning of November the exorcism began.

  CARL V.

  Although there are many in the field of parapsychology who deplore the disappearance of Carl V. from their midst, very few are acquainted with the circumstances in which he finally renounced all research and study of this very modern branch of knowledge. Carl was already a brilliant psychologist when he turned to parapsychology. Many who knew him and his gifts predicted that he was the right man in the right place at the right time doing exactly what needed to he done. They could see the premature termination of Carl’s career, therefore, only as unfortunate, a loss to the cause of true humanism.

  Carl was not only very intelligent. He apparently possessed to an eminent degree some psychic gifts that are highly valued nowadays and the object of much research, such powers as telepathy and telekinesis. He found, in addition, a suitable academic location where he could exercise and study those gifts. Within that ambient he was surrounded by men and women of talent, students of ability and acumen. And, to cap his potential, there were two or three major events in his personal life that placed him in a category all by himself.

  There was first a vision he had had as a teenager. There was, too, unexpected support of his general ideas about parapsychology from an unusually reputable quarter with the appearance of Aldous Huxley’s book The Doors of Perception in 1954. In addition, Carl himself enjoyed altered states of consciousness at various levels for almost ten years (1962–72). As early as 1965 he began to have constant perceptions of the “aura” surrounding objects—the “non-thing aura,” as he called it. Finally he achieved his first “exaltation” (his own term) in 1969.

  In retrospect, Carl himself now assumes that, while his “exaltation” had a definite psychic character, at its core it was the threshold of diabolic possession.

  But in the meanwhile, what gave a particular cachet to Carl’s career was the scrutiny of admiring colleagues who were applying their scientific principles precisely to such phenomena as altered states of consciousness, visions, astral travel, telepathy, telekinesis, reincarnation.

  What added a new dimension in Carl’s case and in his own work was the authentically religious bent of his mind. Carl V. did, indeed, set out to find the truth about religion, Christianity, in particular. And the combination of psychic gifts, the extraordinary progress of what seemed to be his personal powers, and his religious leanings all gave him a peculiarly commanding appeal in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For
in the decadence of organized and institutional religion people had begun to switch their active interest to parapsychology as a possible source of religious knowledge and even of wisdom.

  Indeed, as far as human judgment can go, we can only surmise that Carl should have achieved much in his chosen field if his life had not been upset by diabolic possession and the consequent exorcism.

  There was little that distinguished Carl either from his two brothers or from his school companions during his early childhood. His family had plenty of money and enjoyed considerable influence in their hometown of Philadelphia. The family was Mainline Protestant and worshiped at the Episcopal church. Carl’s growing-up was not particularly difficult. No misfortunes or tragedies hit the family. Neither the Depression nor World War II affected it very adversely. Carl did well in school and at sports. He traveled a good deal with his family, visiting Europe, South America, and Hawaii at various times.

  The first manifestations of any extraordinary psychic gifts came slowly, and only gradually did his parents realize that Carl had capacities beyond the ordinary. When Carl was between seven and eight, they began to notice that when, for instance, his father or mother were looking for something—a newspaper, a pen, a glass of water—more often than not Carl would appear almost immediately carrying what they needed.

  They put this down to coincidence at first. But then it became so frequent and, at times, so eerie that they set out to determine whether it was merely coincidence. After some weeks of close and discreet observation, they concluded that Carl did know in some way or other what they were thinking at times.

  They might have brushed even this aside if they had not one day overheard his brothers asking Carl to bend some nails. Obligingly Carl bent and twisted two one-inch nails by “feeling” them with his index finger and thumb.

  Carl’s father consulted a psychologist. A long series of discussions followed. Carl was brought by his parents to that psychologist, to another psychologist, and to a psychiatrist. The unanimous decision, after some testing, was that the child had incipient psychic gifts of telepathy and telekinesis. They maintained that he should not be made to feel out of the ordinary. His parents should endeavor to get him to recognize his gifts as nonordinary and to restrict their usage.

  The difficulty with all this decision making behind Carl’s back totally escaped Carl’s parents and even the psychologists. For, without realizing fully its implications, Carl knew what they all thought and knew their decision. In a subtle recess of his child’s mind he decided to go along with the entire plan. But from that day on there began in him that “aloneness” that marked him in later life.

  Carl obeyed his father’s suggestion that he bend no more nails, that he no longer tell people what they were thinking, and that he take no more initiative due to any telepathic knowledge he had of their wishes. By his eleventh year, as far as his parents could see, all manifestation of psychic powers seemed to have ceased in his external life.

  But, in reality, Carl had now got a command over these powers in himself that no one realized and that he guarded almost as a jealous and lonely secret. Only occasionally did he slip. In a fit of temper he might smash a cup in another room or shout at a companion some boyish insult to match the insult the boy was about to launch.

  In spite of this continued connivance on his part, Carl’s excellent relationships with his father and mother were genuine. In later years, after his parents divorced, Carl remained closest to his father.

  As the eldest child, Carl was looked upon by his two brothers, Joseph and Ray, with something approaching awe. The three of them had an intimacy and openness with each other that lasted beyond childhood. It was within that framework of boyhood intimacy that he told Joseph and Ray of his vision at the age of sixteen.

  From their accounts and Carl’s recollections, it appears that the vision took place in his father’s library one evening as Carl was preparing his homework. He glanced at the clock. Dinner was served punctually at six o’clock each evening. He had, he saw, one minute to go, just enough time to find a particular volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and open it to the article he needed for his written composition.

  After he found the information he was looking for, his consciousness underwent a peculiar change. He was not frightened; instead, the change put him in what he describes as a great hush. He no longer saw the book in his hand or the shelves of books in front of him. He no longer even felt the weight of the volume in his hand. He did not feel the floor beneath his feet. But he did not miss them. They seemed no longer necessary.

  He did not perceive all this directly. Only on the periphery of his consciousness was he aware of perceptual changes and of his lack of any need for physical feeling of his surroundings. His attention was riveted on something else, something totally different from, but in a mysterious way intimate to, all his experience up to that moment of his life.

  It was, first of all, an atmosphere. There was much light, but, he says, a dark light. Yet, that darkness was so brilliant that no detail escaped him. He was not looking at something or at a landscape; he was participating in it, so clear was every detail shown and conveyed to him. What he saw was dimensionless: no “over there,” no “up” or “down” or “large” or “small.” Yet it was a place. Objects were in that place, but the place was nowhere. And the objects located in that space were not found by coordinates, or seen by the eye, or felt by the hand. He knew them, as it were, by participation in their being. He knew them completely. Therefore, he knew what they were and where they were. And even though they had a relationship to him and to each other, it was not a relationship of space and distance and comparative sizes.

  Not only was normal spatial dimension in abeyance as nonextended time. It was not that time seemed to be suspended. There was no time, no duration. He was not looking at the objects for a long or a short time—it could not have been seconds. Neither could it have been an infinity of hours or years. There was no sense of duration. It was timeless. Yet he did clearly, if indirectly, perceive a time. But it was, again, an internal time and seemed to be the total existence of himself and of all those objects without perceptible or receding beginning, and without an ending or an approaching ending.

  As for a description of that landscape and the objects “in” it, Carl could only speak vaguely. It was a “land,” he said, a “countryside,” a “region.” It had all you would expect—mountains, sky, fields, crops, trees, rivers. But these lacked what Carl called the “obscurity” of their counterparts in the physical world. And, athough it had no apparent houses or cities, it was “inhabited”: it was full of an “inhabiting presence.” There was no sound or echo, but the soundlessness was not a silence, and the echolessness was not an absence of movement. It seemed to Carl for the first time he was freed from the oppression of silence and rid of the nostalgia produced in him by echoes.

  As he took all this in, or as he was embraced by all this—he could never distinguish exactly which was a truer way of speaking—there was in him a sudden desire. That desire had a purity and a sacred immunity that freed it of any aching and did not imply a want in a way we normally understand. It was a summary appeal, but without request. It was desire as its own confirmation. It was substantial hope as its own trust. Yet it was desire. He would describe it at times as a “Show me!” or a “Give me!” or a “Take me!” or a “Lead me!” arising in him. But, he said, none of these expressed the bones and marrow of that desire. And over all his desire and desiring self there was an all-satisfying acceptance and acceptability.

  Then the whole focus of his vision changed. It was the highlight of his real wonder. He was listening to a small voice and seeing a face he cannot describe. He heard words and saw expressions he cannot put into language. The dominant trait of the voice and face was expressed by him later in the word “Wait!” He did not know what that “Wait!” meant or what he was to wait for. But the whole idea was intensely and deeply satisfying.

  Carl does not k
now if the vision would have “lasted” and carried him farther or not, for he was suddenly jerked out of it. “You’ve exactly one minute to finish.” It was little Ray. “Hurry up!”

  An immense sadness welled up in Carl at that moment, an indescribable sense of loss. He saw the cold books, the long, hard shelves, and his little brother’s face. He felt the volume in his hands and the floor beneath his feet. He glanced at the clock. It was one minute to six o’clock.

  As he hurried to his table, he had tears in his eyes. But, afterward, he could not make out whether they were tears of pain or thankfulness. He never knew.

  Before going to bed, he confided in Joseph and Ray. “Perhaps it was Grandma telling you something,” Ray suggested helpfully. Their grandmother had died the previous year. “No,” said Joseph, “it was from God. They told us in Sunday school that God sends these things to show you what’s going to happen.”

  Carl often wondered subsequently about this unique event in his life. What was he to wait for? Who or what had been talking to him? What had he been so desirous of at that moment? But, in spite of these questionings, the vision remained in his memory with a sweetness that nothing could dispel. And it made one subtle difference in him which many noticed but few understood. In his own mind it separated him from all others. He was never quite “with” others, never fully together with them. At parties, dinners, meetings, lectures, he would see himself essentially separate from the others and on the sidelines.

  He was, indeed, waiting. Only years later did he know what it was he had been told in the vision to expect.

  Carl entered Princeton in 1942, got his master’s degree in psychology in 1947, his doctorate in 1951, spent six more years studying and doing research. Four of those years saw him in the United States and two in Europe. He returned only in 1957, to take up a permanent teaching post on a Midwest university campus. In those 15 years, from 1942 to 1957, some major changes took place in him.