Hostage to the Devil

by Malachi Martin

  Only by reflecting on this incident did Hearty begin to understand why it was better not to be able to “send” messages or move objects at a distance. To have those abilities apparently laid one open in some mysterious way to assault by others—human beings or spirits—who enjoyed similar powers. To be on the same plane as they was somehow to be vulnerable to them.

  By the time Hearty’s enlistment as chaplain came to an end in 1949, the Himiko incident in the jungle as well as Obata’s fall near the Geon had receded in his memory. He had already applied for and received permission to transfer himself to the United States. A bishop on the East Coast was more than willing to accept Hearty into his diocese.

  Hearty had been living and working in Newark, New Jersey, for two years when the bishop called him and asked him to assist the diocesan exorcist. There would be nothing to it, the bishop assured him. Hearty had nerves of steel, and the bishop felt anyway that nine-tenths of all these things “are simply bad nerves or bad faith or both.”

  The exorcism proved to be neither bad nerves nor bad faith. As far as Hearty could see, the exorcee—in this case, a middle-aged man—was afflicted with some peculiar disturbance and anguish that ceased once the exorcism rite was completed. He reported back to the bishop, adding a request to be included in future exorcisms. The bishop remonstrated; no one, absolutely no one, wants any truck with these matters. “Well, I do. And I don’t know why. But I do,” had been Hearty’s answer.

  In the next six years Hearty was assistant at more than 17 exorcisms.

  When the diocesan exorcist died unexpectedly after a long and exhausting exorcism, Hearty was clearly the strongest and most experienced man to replace him. When he was approached by the bishop, he did not hesitate for a moment.

  In that same year he took his one and only holiday vacation: two weeks in his native Wales. He wandered once again around the countryside he had loved, visited the cottages of the ordinary people, ate great meals of bacon, potatoes, buttermilk, cheese, and oatcakes. He spent evenings reminiscing with old friends around open fires and tasting the fire in cwrw, the Welsh national liquor.

  For the next six years or so after his return from Wales, Hearty served as an assistant priest with several assignments in the diocese. He remained diocesan exorcist. In 1963 the bishop offered Hearty his own parish. Hearty took this rather important occasion to sit down for a long and serious conversation with his bishop. With six years as exorcist behind him, as well as broad day-to-day experience with normal parish problems, Hearty had begun to see a subtle but already pervasive change.

  There was, he said to the bishop, a new situation rapidly developing which the Church had not yet recognized. It concerned a new direction of psychology and psychiatry; but it seemed to Hearty that it also involved popular devotion and piety. Several times when putting candidates for exorcism through psychological and psychiatric tests he had found the experts talking of parapsychology. They seemed to look forward to some future date when all religious phenomena would be easily and understandably taken as the products of the human psyche as the psyche somehow passed through hitherto unknown altered states of consciousness. It bothered him a good deal, he told the bishop, because the new study, parapsychology, tended to displace religion altogether and to empty it of its significance.

  There was a sabbatical coming to Hearty. If it was all right with his bishop, he could take a two-year sabbatical and do some private research on the subject. He would, of course, maintain his activity as diocesan exorcist; for anything of that nature he would return home, he said. The bishop gave his consent and promised Hearty the necessary financial support. Only later did Hearty tell him of his intention to follow courses at a university.

  Hearty thus came to study on the campus where Carl V. had already made his name. At that point in his life, by the time Hearty started to attend Carl’s lectures, he had developed a very strong instinct in matters concerning diabolism. He knew almost immediately that Carl V. was in trouble. How deeply he could not make out in the beginning. But after three semesters and various conversations with Carl and his group, Hearty was convinced that Carl was heading for serious disturbance and possibly was already well into the first stages of diabolic possession.

  In the last few months of his stay at the university, Hearty was somewhat puzzled by Carl’s effect on him. On the one hand, Carl took no pains to hide from him and the others that he regarded Hearty’s clerical profession a definite hindrance to Hearty’s full potential as a parapsychologist. On the other hand, time and time again Hearty “received” subtle “messages” from Carl, messages that were appeals for help.

  The process of receiving “messages” always followed a pattern. The “messages” came as little chunks of knowledge suddenly appearing in Hearty’s consciousness, always preceded by a short blank period when, it seemed to Hearty, his mind stopped thinking but he remained conscious. Immediately after that, he knew something without knowing what he knew. And then there was a sudden realization of what he knew; images appeared for what he knew; and after that he attached words to the images.

  Hearty finally realized that, if part of Carl was already under the domination of an evil spirit, nevertheless another part of him was still free and as yet unpossessed. It was this profound part of Carl’s being that was appealing for help. In a somewhat disconcerting moment, Hearty realized that Carl must be aware that he, Hearty, knew of the possession.

  It was quite a while before Hearty got used to the idea of such a fission in a human personality with whom he was in contact several times a week. But Hearty had already learned enough over the years to realize that evil spirits do not always know everything—they do not necessarily know accurately even what they already possess. He had more than once taken hope from that very fact.

  The last three “messages” Carl sent him occurred at some distance apart both in terms of time and space. One came to him on the day of his farewell to Carl at the end of his studies. When he looked back at the office building where he had just left Carl, the message came loud and clear for Hearty’s psyche: “Help me! Come when I am just about to be completely taken.” Hearty dropped into the college chapel and said some prayers. He had to believe and trust that he would arrive in time for that moment when Carl was about to be “completely taken.”

  The next message came to him one morning in Newark in late 1972: Carl was about to take some final step; he needed now to be pulled back, but he was helpless. Left to himself, he had to go on and perform the final act of submission to the spirit that had taken possession of him. Hearty came as fast as he could to the university campus, but he missed Carl both at the campus and at the airport.

  The last message came to him at the end of July that same year. He knew Carl was home in Philadelphia and that he needed him. Again Hearty set out without delay in order to get to Carl. Hearty lost no time in beginning the examinations and study that were needed in advance of any expected exorcism.

  His first undertaking was to acquaint himself with Carl’s life and to test the validity of Carl’s supposed psychic powers. He spoke with all those who had known Carl intimately. He tracked down both Olde and Wanola P. in different parts of the country. They both came to see Hearty; and Olde in particular was an enormous help. Carl’s mother, now divorced from his father and remarried, lived in Malta. But his father and two brothers gave Hearty all the help they could.

  The best parapsychologist Carl knew, a Swiss-born German, was in New York for a lecture series. Carl and Hearty spent three weeks there; and the parapsychologist completed his examination of Carl between his lecture commitments. His verdict on Carl: positive. That is, the man possessed extraordinary extrasensory powers, but he was suffering from some deep trauma which was out of the parapsychologist’s reach. Neither hypnosis nor pharmacological treatment was of any avail.

  Hearty and Carl returned to Philadelphia, but Hearty was not yet satisfied. He distrusted parapsychologists.

  While maintaining a home base i
n his own diocese in Newark, he went to New York several times with Carl. After a thorough physical examination, Carl was put in the hands of two psychiatrists who put him through a battery of tests. In substance, their verdict was the same as that of the parapsychologist: Carl V. was normal and sane by any standard acceptable to their profession. He had suffered, they said, from a good deal of nervous tension during the previous summer. But they could uncover no abnormality.

  One of them urged Carl to return to Aquileia and finish the rite he had gone there to perform. Hearty vetoed this suggestion.

  The other suggested mildly that Carl “go easy on the religion bit” for a couple of years, to give himself a chance to recuperate lost ground and gain self-confidence. As Hearty was leaving his office, the second psychiatrist became a little more expansive. He felt a lot of people were crazy on account of religion, he said. All that guilt. “Get him to go out and lay broads, Father. That’ll do the trick.”

  “God bless such salutary broads, Doctor,” Hearty said, tipping his hat as he left.

  As his investigations progressed over the weeks and months. Hearty was increasingly certain. Carl had to be exorcised. All this while, and right up to the exorcism, Carl was completely docile. He urged Hearty to hurry up. “I haven’t much time, Hearty,” he used to say wistfully.

  But Hearty felt he had to be thorough. He had never been involved in an exorcism of a person as psychically gifted as Carl, and he did not know how this unusual element might be used, even against Carl’s will, as a serious weapon against them both. He insisted on covering every inch of ground Carl had traveled in parapsychology since his student days. Only in this way would Hearty be at least reasonably well equipped to follow and deal with any vagary through which Carl might pass during the exorcism.

  In addition, Hearty had one profound doubt. For the first time he foresaw the possibility that in an exorcism the exorcee might die or go insane because of the exorcism.

  Hearty was rather sure of a few things: that Carl’s claimed perception of the non-thing aura as well as his professed astral-travel trances and his knowledge of former reincarnations were deceptions induced by the evil spirit. And he guessed the only tangible proof that the spirit had been expelled would be the cessation of these effects in Carl.

  Hearty felt that, if he was correct in his basic analyses, then the final and possibly the greatest danger to Carl would lie in his reaction to the sudden exposure of how he had been deceived over and over and had consented to each deception. The bottom would fall out of his life. Could he take the strain? Disillusionment or disappointment as profound as Carl would likely undergo in this exorcism could, as Hearty knew from his studies and experience, render a human being not merely catatonic, but in extreme cases suicidal.

  Right up to the last moment, in spite of the assurance that every precaution and test he could devise showed Carl to be strong and sturdy. Hearty could not rid himself of this idea of extreme danger for Carl. Finally he gave Carl the option to withdraw or to go ahead. He warned him of what he felt to be the risks if he chose to go ahead.

  Carl insisted on going on with the exorcism. “If I live as I am, I will die a real death of soul. If I die under exorcism, I may be saved. If I go insane, perhaps God will take this into account when judging me.”

  The choice of locale for the exorcism was easy. Carl wanted it to take place in his childhood home out beyond Chestnut Hill among the hills of the Piedmont plateau, and in the place where he had had his teenage vision—his father’s library-den.

  Hearty, going against the practice of many exorcists known to him, had nothing removed from the place except breakable objects such as desk lamps, vases, ashtrays, light tables, glasses, statuettes, and pictures. He had the carpet taken up. Books and bookshelves he left in place.

  He had a reason for this which was part of his guessing game at this point. He assessed—rightly, as it turned out—that any special difficulty in unmasking the evil spirit in Carl would arise because its possession of Carl was so subtle and so bound up with his psychic forces.

  Carl did possess a power of telekinesis. It was theoretically possible that Carl would use this power to make the exorcism difficult, if not impossible. But Carl, relying on that still-intact part of him with which he had signaled to Hearty before for help, now reassured Hearty that he, Carl, would not use, and could refrain from using, that telekinetic power. Hearty felt, therefore, he could be practically certain that, if there were telekinetic disturbances during the rite, they would be signs of the evil spirit’s displeasure. And in that case, he could follow that clue and seek the further discomfiture and final expulsion of the spirit.

  Hearty was ably aided in the exorcism by four men whom he had trained over the years as assistants. They never failed to come to him whenever he was performing an exorcism. One was a doctor; two were businessmen; the fourth was a factory foreman.

  The exorcism of Carl V. lasted for five days. It was very unusual in that its course was largely determined, as Hearty had been certain it would be, by the exceptional psychic gifts Carl possessed. Hearty had to deal with Carl not only as possessed, but as a medium in the psychic sense. Indeed, there were brief silences throughout part of the exorcism when only the looks of Hearty and Carl indicated to the assistants what was going on. At those times, the quick interchange of challenge, threat, command, and insult between Hearty and the evil spirit possessing Carl were telepathic. Hearty’s notes serve us well for these verbal blanks.

  A dangerous, complicating problem, in addition, was that Hearty could not always determine whether it was Carl or the possessing spirit that was producing psychic effects. In this case above all others in Hearty’s career, all care and alertness had to be maintained. There was no shortcut. As exorcist. Hearty had to get to the core of the possession and make sure that the evil was expelled in its vicious essence.

  Hearty also realized his own danger in such an exorcism. He was moving on a slippery psychic plane, where thought and memory and imagination are peculiarly naked and open to aggression. His friend in Kyoto had shown him that many years ago. He had had occasion to learn it again since.

  Curiously, but briefly, the one great advantage Hearty enjoyed at the beginning of the exorcism was precisely Carl’s power as a medium. With Carl disposed to help, Hearty had little difficulty in ferreting the evil spirit out and compelling it to identify itself. Therefore, Confrontation with Tortoise, as it called itself, was achieved quickly. But, by the same measure, the Clash between Hearty and Tortoise was immensely painful.

  Carl’s cooperation with Hearty was cut off abruptly when the Confrontation took place between Hearty and Tortoise. Carl became helpless and unhelping. In his struggle alone, the wrenching of Hearty’s will and the wound to his mind were acute, sharp beyond words, and irreparable.

  In excerpting the exorcism transcript, therefore, choice has been made of passages concerning the identification of the evil spirit, the unmasking of the deceptions Carl had accepted, and the effect of that unmasking on Hearty and on Carl himself. The transcript contains many more details (omitted here) about Carl’s supposed reincarnation in the ancient Roman, Petrus, about early Christian rites, and about Carl’s own psychical development from teenage on.

  TORTOISE

  “Do you feel all right, Carl?” Hearty’s voice at the opening of the exorcism is full of feeling. But Carl is perfectly calm.

  “Yes, Father. Don’t worry anymore. Let’s get going.”

  Carl is lying on the couch in his father’s den. Hearty’s four assistants are kneeling around the couch. Hearty, flanked by his assistant priest, stands at the foot of the couch. It is 4:30 A.M., the beginning of the first day of the exorcism.

  Hearty takes up the opening words of the rite. His chanting stops after the first three sentences.

  He looks at Carl. He is motionless. Something alarms Hearty.

  “Carl! Carl! Answer me! Don’t slip away, Carl! Answer me!”

  Carl stirs and speaks une
asily. “It’s hard. Father. It’s hard.”

  “Carl, what’s happening?”

  “Low g-g-ga-gate…” Carl stumbles off into silence.

  “Carl, before you slip into high-gate, tell me. Just before. Do you hear me? Carl! Do you hear me?”

  “Ye-e-e-e-e-e-e-es, Fa-a-a…” Carl’s voice trails off.

  Hearty continues for a minute or two with his monotone chanting of the exorcism prayers, then the chanting stops. Carl’s mouth is opening and shutting. His fists are clenched.

  “High-g-g-g-g-g…” Hearty can hardly hear his voice.

  He motions to the assistants to take hold of Carl’s legs and arms. Hearty speaks.

  “Spirit of Evil, you are commanded in the name of Jesus: Do not cloud the mind of Carl. Do not enslave his will. There is to be no deception. In the name of Jesus, stop.”

  Hearty looks at Carl: his face relaxes; his fists are unclenched. After a few moments, Carl speaks slowly without opening his eyes.

  “I cannot hold against them…him…them, Father. I cannot hold much longer. Too habit…” His voice breaks.

  “In the name of Jesus…” Hearty breaks off. The strain in the faces and arms of the assistants is a warning to him. Carl’s body is struggling to rise.

  “Speak, Evil Spirit! Speak and declare yourself,” Hearty commands.

  He sprinkles some holy water and holds up the crucifix. Carl struggles for about a minute or so. There is silence in the room, except for the rustling and heavy breathing of that struggle.

  Finally, all signs of life disappear from Carl’s face. Carl’s body ceases to move. His lips open. Hearty hears the voice of Carl, but silken, smooth, ingratiating in tone, without any accentuation; it speaks in short broken sentences. It is like a slowly turning record. Clearly Carl is now a medium for the evil spirit.