Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon
65
The Exorcist
LIZ AND PENINNAH, of course, were always with me when I was out in public talking about the show. Doug was usually nearby, but he had responsibilities that took him to other offices or studios as he got us geared up for production. We had to verify that we were using union employees and were paying union scale, or we couldn’t be broadcast. Our contacts at HCEN told us they’d had to comply with the union standards eventually, though they’d managed to fly under the radar for several years as providing educational internships.
We were usually pretty friendly with people. Police and security services made sure fans didn’t get too close to us as we went from the studio to the waiting limo.
As we made it to the limo, I became aware of a man on a step stool with an amplified megaphone preaching to the crowd about the evils of my show and the perversion of Bob. I paused to listen to him as he railed on. As loud as he was, I was sure he was breaking some kind of noise ordinance. No one moved to stop him, though.
“Women boldly go into his lair and are never seen again. He preys on the dreamy-eyed, making them victims of his perversions. I tell you, he is an emissary from hell and has possessed those women. Do not render yourselves into his devilish lair. Stand firm upon the word of God and resist this temptation.”
I was thinking about replying to him, but Peninnah grabbed my arm and pulled me into the limo with her. We headed back to our hotel and ordered dinner sent to our suite. We always did that rather than simply stepping into the infinity room and eating. Hotels became suspicious if you never ordered food or ate in their restaurants. This week it had been much easier to book a downtown hotel than to commute out to the hills to the mansion.
As soon as dinner had been delivered, I opened a gateway and half a dozen others came out of Areola with additional food to join us. Peninnah and Liz went back to the palace for the night. That, too, was typical as they did not like to spend the day in the natural world and then the night, too. They were concerned that they would start aging. I believed the room had a rejuvenating effect on them as they looked as young and fresh as the first day I met them.
We were finishing dinner when I decided to tune in on the television for the evening news to see if we were mentioned.
“At the bottom of the barrel for entertainment news tonight, Bob is causing quite a stir as he announces plans for casting the coming season of To Boldly Go,” said the news announcer, Delilah Samson. “According to an interview and press release from Bob’s Studio, the entire second season will be done candidly, with Bob in disguise and secret cameras recording every interaction as he travels the world looking for additions to his harem crew. But not all reactions have been positive. Here’s a report from our woman on the street, Lily Lalane. Lily?”
“Thank you, Delilah. It’s hard to tell if Bob’s announcements about how to behave with a new man, his threats against men who try to imitate him, or the denunciation of his entire being by Rev. Ronald Richards of Bethany Consolidated Church of the Holy Grail is at the top of the news tonight. Rev. Richards preaches regularly to crowds nearing three thousand people at his megachurch, but has taken his ministry to the streets to reach out to the people who throng after Bob.”
“I tell you, this Bob is the devil incarnate,” Richards said in the interview. “He thinks the world has sunk so low into depravity that it will sit idly by as the flower of humanity is plucked and destroyed. Oh, we can all get a little wistful about the promise of wealth, sexual gratification, abundance, and gluttony. But down that road lies the gates of hell. Bob must be stopped and the women he has captured must be freed from this cult that has risen around him.”
“So, you believe the women have not gone willingly to be on his show and compete for inclusion in his space journey?” Lily asked.
“I believe they have been bewitched, enchanted, and possessed,” Richards said. “They might think they have entered his lair of their own free will, but once there, like a fly on a spider’s web, they discover there is no return—no way out. They must have the devil within them exorcised.”
Maya grasped my arm and buried her head on my shoulder. She was shaking and sobbing.
“Don’t let him near me, Bob. He is like the Spanish priests of so long ago. They exorcised demons by burning people at the stake or cutting their heads off. Don’t let him, Bob. Please don’t let him near us.”
“I won’t, my sweet love. You were given into my care by the god Kukulkàn and the goddess Ixchel. You asked me to possess you and I entered every fiber of your being. But that is a two-way street. At that same moment, you entered every fiber of my being and we became one heart. I will protect and defend you to my last breath.”
Over the years, I’ve met various priests who practiced exorcism on people mostly possessed by the priests. Nor were they all within the so-called Christian religions. It seemed in every religion, there were those who felt anyone who disagreed with them must be possessed by an evil spirit.
I’m not saying no one ever was. I’d met people possessed by demons. I mean people other than the women I possessed. Most seemed to be living in a mutually satisfying relationship. There were some who had been possessed by demons ordered by a conjurer to torment them. I know Issa had encountered some like this. In fact, he cast Maureen out of a fellow she’d been confined to and she fled from the area as soon as she was free. She didn’t enjoy it any more than the guy who’d suffered from her.
But most of the people exorcists practice their rituals on aren’t possessed at all. They simply disagree with the exorcist’s peculiar brand of religion. During the Spanish Inquisition, when I was traveling as a priest, the majority of those burned as demon-possessed were simply Jews who refused to convert. That doesn’t mean there were never Jews who consorted with devils. The Kabala has instructions in it. Solomon was dead before I made my way to Judah and was taken to Babylon, but it is said that his wisdom included how to tame a demon.
Experience told me, though, that the loudest denouncers of evil were those who practiced it. Pick any preacher or politician who makes a stand against homosexuality, child abuse, adultery, trafficking, or any of the deadly sins or ten commandments, and you will find a practitioner or a person wishing he was and lying in wait for his opportunity.
Take Ahman, for example. I ran into him in Southeastern Africa, sometime after I finished my time working for Ninra and Namri. In general terms, I was still pretty much an innocent in the ways of the world. I knew there were good people and there were bad people, but I didn’t expect them to affect me much. Nobody would care about me.
Ahman was nobody.
I was a stranger, just wandering through the world, but Ahman saw me as an opportunity.
“Bob is a danger to our children and our women,” he whispered. “Why is Bob always alone? Where does Bob go at night? Why is Bob so secretive?”
It was a primitive area and an even more primitive time. There was always the possibility of a raid by one village or sect on another to get something the other had—food, animals, women, children. There wasn’t much commerce that used tokens, though occasionally a gem was discovered that inspired a certain amount of lust.
Anyway, when a young woman of the village disappeared, most people mourned her a little, but assumed she’d been stolen by another village in the night. Shit happens. Sometimes, they’d mount a raid of their own and steal a woman or a child to replenish their village.
But Ahman whispered just a hint.
“It might have been Bob, you know.”
Most people shrugged it off as unlikely, though some amount of interest was shown in where I went at night. I had to be especially careful where I hid the satchel and crept into it to spend time with my precious Nimia. We tried to spend a lot of time together because otherwise she was almost alone in the bag. I say almost. I recall that she’d enticed a couple of other women into the bag with her, but over the course of a century or so, some would stay and some would go. I was never sure how many she’d attracted.
When another woman went missing, Ahman whispered again.
“Why would the other village want another woman so soon? It must be Bob. He’s too secretive.”
Then a few men from a neighboring village showed up one day and demanded their women back. They accused the village of stealing too many of their women and would kill all the men in the village if they didn’t return some.
“We haven’t been on a raid. You took two of our women!” an elder declared.
“We’ve taken no one!” the elder of the other tribe protested. “Who else is there?”
“There’s Bob,” Ahman whispered. “He might be behind it.”
It didn’t take long before Ahman was no longer whispering. He was speaking out loud about the evils of abducting women and each time, he would point at me as if I was the perpetrator.
I could have just left. Then, a thousand years or three thousand years later, the story of the demon who stole women in the night would still be told and used to explain abductions and all kinds of other atrocities. I waited and watched. And then I saw Ahman creep away in the middle of the night.
He made his way to a cave. It was so difficult to find I wished I’d discovered it to hide the satchel in. Inside, Ahman had nearly a dozen women, tied with vines so they couldn’t escape and gagged so they couldn’t cry out. Of course, they couldn’t eat either, which didn’t make much difference. Ahman wasn’t feeding them. They were getting weaker by the day and one lay dead in the back of the cave. All Ahman did was use them. When they became too filthy or starved to satisfy his desires, he stole another woman from one of the villages.
I went full goat. I stormed into the cave and knocked Ahman out. I didn’t kill him. It wasn’t my injury to revenge. I untied the women and they fell upon the unconscious man, tearing and disemboweling him. He awoke only long enough to understand his predicament and scream. When they had completely butchered the man, they sat, weeping. I had Nimia and her women bring out food for them and minister to them.
When morning came, I showed the women the way to the village and they dragged the remains of Ahman and the body of the dead woman to the center of the village. There, they began to wail.
The village awakened and rushed to see what the uproar was about.
At first, they thought Ahman and the woman had died rescuing the others, and swore to hunt down Bob. But it did not take long for the women to set things straight. The village sent a runner to the next village and asked them to come and witness the return of the women. One young woman was selected to tell the story, and she was quite a story teller.
“That man took us from our beds in the night and carried us to his burrow in hell,” she said, pointing at Ahman’s corpse. “He tied us and raped us. He starved us and we were his slaves until hunger killed us. But then when this man came to work his evil on us last night, Tiger followed him,” the young woman said. I wasn’t sure how she got a tiger out of my goat. “Tiger swore at that man for being cruel to his own kind and starving us. Tiger tore apart that man until there was no part recognizable and then Tiger cut our bonds and freed us from this demon of the night. Tiger gave us food and told us to bring that man to the village so the village would know how we were harmed by that man.”
“It wasn’t Bob?” an elder spoke. “Where is Bob?”
“Bob is here,” I said, standing from among them, having returned to my human shape. “It was never Bob. It was Ahman.”
“Well, our women are back home,” said one of the elders. “We needn’t worry now. Ahman is dead and all is well. We will make wives of these women.”
That did not go over well with the women.
“What? You will deprive us of our freedom now that we have been freed by Tiger? You will rape us in your huts and starve us until we die? We will not return to the way things were. We will not be your property and live in fear for our lives. We will not bear your children or cook your meals or kneel before you while you plant your seed. We will go and find Tiger and we will serve him. He was the one who saved us, not the worthless men of these villages,” the young woman said.
The rescued women seized spears and stones and backed away from the center of the village. When the men made to pursue them, other women of the village attacked them from behind with rocks and sticks. Then they rushed to join the women leaving the village.
The remaining men shrank back when they heard a Tiger’s roar from the jungle.
That left me with a great deal to do. I couldn’t just let the women wander away in the jungle. They could find a real tiger out there and be worse off than they were. I stood before the men and spat at them.
“May your manhood shrivel and your villages die,” I cursed. I turned and followed the women.
As soon as we were out of sight, I got in front of the women and appeared in my goat form, leading them through a gateway into the bag. Nimia awaited them with her women and saw to it they were fed and cared for. She discovered whether any wanted to return to the natural world, and most did, but not to the men they had left. I carried the bag inland and found a peaceful and isolated tribe. Sadly, mortality was higher among women in their tribe due to poor birthing conditions.
I had Nimia come out to help improve their success rate, and then those women who wished to return to the natural world came out, willing to replenish the number of women in the tribe. There were then more women than men in the tribe and so a kind of matriarchal society grew. They called themselves The People of Tiger.
After spending some years there, helping the society become established, improving their water supply and sewage removal, and seeing that the imbalance between men and women didn’t become a problem, I picked up my satchel and headed back eastward, where I built a small boat and made my way north along the coast of Africa once again.
That was just a story the current situation reminded me of. Something told me the one who was protesting the most was the most likely to be an offender. Centuries of experience seemed to bear this out.
I bundled everyone but Zhi and Artemisia back into Areola and the three of us went out hunting. I chose these two for many reasons, but not the least of them was their devotion to me. They were devoted but not possessed. Should it happen that the preacher attempted an exorcism—which I doubted would work—I didn’t want to risk one of my possessions. For now, the five of them would stay in Areola until I assessed how big a threat this was.
It wasn’t difficult to find where the preacher lived. His mansion was every bit as big as mine in the hills. The difference was that mine was meant to entertain dozens of people inside. It was actually rather modest from the outside. His was meant to be seen from afar. I very much doubted that anyone who belonged to his megachurch had an idea of just how he lived.
We prowled around the grounds and discovered several cars and a panel truck waiting. Drivers were with the cars, but we didn’t disturb them. We had nothing against the church’s board of directors meeting with the preacher, if that was the case, and certainly their drivers would be harmless.
When we got inside, we saw that no one could possibly be harmless.
Yes, we got inside. Even though my look-away spell that I’d been using for millennia didn’t leave us undetectable from electronic devices, Artemisia, Zhi, and I had developed many ways to circumvent alarm systems. Zhi and I had developed our tech when I started unleashing the ninja priestesses on traffickers. Artemisia was a natural at it, excelling in the physics and electronics aspects during our rocket school training. We avoided most of his alarms and disabled others.
When we got inside, we found a hedonistic palace made for the pleasures of the flesh. And Reverend Richards was taking great pleasure in them.
Well, he was in one of them. Others were attending him in various stages of preparing for him to be in them. Now, I can’t really be judgmental about a man with any number of women ready to please him. Or any number of men for that matter. Reverend Richards had both. But there was something I didn’t like about the scene. Every one of the sex objects wore a collar. And it wasn’t just a necklace collar or a collar from the lifestyle. I don’t argue about the lifestyle either. I recognized these collars for exactly what they were: slave collars.
And each had a blinking light on it, which told me they were undoubtedly equipped with some kind of electronic system, most likely for tracking, but possibly to administer punishment as well. I could see red burns on the necks of two or three.
All told, the right reverend was entertaining half a dozen men with over a dozen of his slaves. We stayed quietly in the background witnessing to make sure we understood fully what was going on.
“What did I tell you, Ronnie old boy? This new batch has been trained by the best. The drugs and the shock therapy keep them compliant to your every wish,” said a broad man sodomizing a boy who was definitely underage.
“Oh yeah. I like this,” the preacher said. “She lubricates on command. And you’re sure they’re all clean?”
“Clean and sterile. No fear of disease or pregnancy to spoil your fun.”
“How about the pain quotient?”
“Oh, they’ll take it. They don’t like it at all, but they’ll submit. Hell, if you commanded one of them to slit her wrists while you fucked her and let her bleed out, she’d do it. They can’t resist.”
“I’ll take them, but you’ll need to remove the last batch from the playroom downstairs. Two didn’t make it. The others are pretty much used up.”
I’d heard enough. I nodded to Zhi and Artemisia and in a few seconds, all seven of the traffickers—including the preacher—were unconscious. I worked a releasing spell on the collars and they fell to the floor. I couldn’t do anything about the compliance of the slaves, but at least if I missed something, the slavers couldn’t punish them with the collars. I examined one of the collars and was shocked to find that they contained an explosive charge as well. I put a binding spell on the seven slavers and left Zhi in charge so that the slaves didn’t attack them. The slaves seemed unaware that anything had happened as they continued in whatever activity they’d been engaged in when we arrived. A look in their eyes told me they weren’t home.
In the basement, we found a horror. Another dozen slaves lay chained to the walls and various pieces of torture equipment. Two of them were dead. All bore scars and open wounds. The room was filled with various dungeon equipment, most of which was used in the more radical forms of torture and bondage.
I didn’t hesitate. I opened a gateway and my concubines flooded out to care for the tortured slaves as I released their bonds. They led the slaves—or in some cases carried them—to Areola. When all were gone, I took Artemisia back to join Zhi and our captives.
She was having a bit of difficulty controlling the slaves as whatever commands they were under began to dissipate. I opened a gateway again and concubines took charge of the freed slaves and led them away as the slavers looked on. They had awakened from their nap, but were still under the effect of the binding spell that immobilized them.
While the gateway was open, I called forth the ninja priestesses. I could see a flicker of recognition in the eyes of one of the men as he realized this meant he was about to die. Rumors in the underworld of the black-clad glowing ninjas had been whispered for a few years as we’d cleaned out various nests of traffickers and freed their prisoners. I selected that one to read the memories of. It was possible he could lead me to more of his kind.
It is hard for people to believe, but thirty-five million people worldwide are hurt by trafficking each day. And more startling, fifty percent of sex trafficking goes through the United States.
His memories were disgusting, but they revealed another level of his organization. And the ‘trainer’ who created the slaves for the market. That one would receive a very special visit one day soon.
I shook my head in disgust, trying to clear the filth from it. Then I turned to the preacher.
“What is it that makes you think you can cast demons out of people when you are worse than any demon I have met?” I demanded. I freed his tongue to answer.
“By the power of the Lord Jesus Christ, I command you to release me and to depart from those you have possessed!” he shouted.
“Hmm. Not going to happen. Where’s your authority? Show me your documentation,” I yelled back.
“I have the power of holy writ behind me.”
“Not good enough. Nothing in the Bible gives you the power to cast out demons.”
“Jesus sent his disciples into the world with authority to cast out demons and unclean spirits.”
“He gave that authority to his twelve disciples and later to Paul. He never said anyone else could have it. Even Paul, who wrote half the New Testament in his letters, never mentions casting out demons. You have no such authority. And when your church finds what you have concealed here, paid for by their loving donations, you will have no authority there. And when you lie in a prison cell, the next to be gang raped, you will be powerless to stop them.”
I could see a change come over him. I half expected it and was prepared. I strengthened the binding spell as he struggled against the bonds.
“You have no authority over us either, Demon Bob,” a different voice issued from his mouth. “You cannot fight all the demons of hell. I will…”
His voice was cut off with his head.
I had suspected he was not completely human, but I couldn’t act on the suspicion at once. I’d intended to kill him as soon as I found out he was trafficking. But knowing he was a demon left me few options in how to deal with him. Removing his head and burning it was one of the effective ways of killing a demon. I set the body and head aflame. My priestesses, glowing like avenging angels, set upon the six remaining traffickers and nailed them to the walls of the preacher’s torture chamber. Their particular signature for the purging of sex traffickers.
The last of the men died, choking on his own genitals.
END PART XII
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