Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon
67
The Erinyes
I FOUND the Bohemian Flat the next afternoon and followed the instructions for entering through the door with a dog flap and climbing the three stories to the top floor. Tassa greeted me there and welcomed me into her apartment.
“Just drop your bag there and let me fix you a cup of coffee. We’ll sit and talk. I want to know all about you,” she said.
“This is a lovely flat,” I said, joining her in the kitchen.
“You have the run of the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and your own room, which I’ll show you shortly. Please don’t enter any other rooms as I have a couple of boarders and, of course, my own room.”
“That is quite a little business,” I said.
“Oh, it isn’t really a business. This was my mother’s flat and when she died it was just me here and was very lonely. I started letting out rooms just so there would be company occasionally. Now what brings you to our lovely city?”
Speaking of lovely, I will say that Tassa was a young woman under thirty—I’d have to look at the application to get her exact age—and was elegant in a way that I learned to expect of most women in Romania. She wore a skirt and a blouse with a large bow at the collar. Her hair was just less than shoulder length and beautifully styled. Her fingers were nicely manicured and painted red, a color I noticed on her toes as they peeked out from her open-toed high heels. Her makeup was perfectly done. As I observed her, I noticed my camerawoman of the day scanning her as well.
“I am in your lovely city on business, but came to spend the weekend first. I thought that taking a Rent-a-Bed would give me an opportunity to see the city without being fed a false image,” I said.
“That’s very good of you. So many people come to Bucharest, to see the Parliamentary Palace and to see the grave of Eugene Ionesco, who is actually buried in Paris, or to attempt to meet Nadia Comaneci, who actually lives in Oklahoma in America. People have so many misconceptions.”
“Where would you recommend that I go to see the real Bucharest, eat good food, and meet people?” I asked.
“There are many places. I have a little map here with various walks that you might take, with sights that are worth seeing marked on it.”
She proceeded to unfold a map that she had obviously drawn on and annotated. She highlighted routes as we talked and I assured her my preferred transportation was by foot. We sat there drinking coffee for over an hour before she showed me my room.
“Keep your head down. The ceilings are low on this end of the apartment.”
They were, indeed. I could stand up straight in the center of my room, but the ceiling soon sloped down under the eaves. My feet in the bed would be only a few inches from the ceiling. Fortunately, the head of the bed had a ceiling high enough that I could sit up.
“Tassa, I’m wondering if I could hire you.” She caught her breath. “Hire you to guide me on some of these routes. Show me your favorite places and let me see Bucharest through your eyes.”
She tilted her head quizzically.
“I have often been propositioned, but never hired as a guide. Please do not think my service would include anything else. If we can agree to that, I would have no difficulty accompanying you on some of these walks. They are my favorites.”
“Would one hundred leu per day plus meals and treats along the way be adequate?” I offered twice what I’d rented the room for. She smiled.
“That would be excellent. How soon would you like to leave?”
We agreed to head out immediately and had a wonderful time as she described to me a city that she certainly loved. We walked for miles and I was concerned about her feet in her high heels. She seemed to be impervious to strain, though, much like Peninnah.
It was a lovely day. We had dinner and wine in a local restaurant and when we returned to the apartment, she bid me goodnight and went to her own room. I retired to the Bohemian flat.
In the morning Tassa took me to the Orthodox church she attended—an historic building that had been one of the few left in the hands of the church during the communist regime. We dined at out-of-the way bistros, listened to very Bohemian music, and drank vodka. We were a little tipsy when we returned to her flat that evening. She paused at my door and gave me a little light kiss on the lips. I was ready for much more.
“Bob, I think you are a wonderful man and would probably be a good lover for the right woman. And I thank you for the opportunity to show you my fair city. But I must tell you that sex doesn’t interest me. I don’t mean sex with you doesn’t interest me. Sex at all doesn’t interest me. With anyone—male or female. I’ve tried, but it isn’t that I can’t get turned on, it’s that I’m just not interested in it. I hope you will understand and not attempt to pressure me. You would make a very good friend.”
She left me at my door and went to her own room. Was this the infamous ‘friend zone’ I’d heard mentioned so often? Hmm. As I thought of it, I really didn’t mind. Tassa would, indeed, make a great friend.
I will not bore you with my adventures in Pakistan or the Philippines. In one instance, the woman I met would not speak to me because I was not Muslim. I wondered what she thought The Bob was. The Filipina woman was ready to move with me to the United States at once. With her mother, aunt, three sisters, and a cousin. I was very happy to return to Cleveland. Alone.
I made some calls and then planned out my date with May. I really liked her and I was waiting in my office for her when she arrived to clean Friday evening.
“Oh! You’re here!”
“Yes. Sadly, I didn’t have your phone number with me. We didn’t set a time this evening, so I thought I’d just stay here until you showed up.”
“Bob, that’s a weak excuse. You could find my contact information through the office building. But it doesn’t make any difference. I really wasn’t expecting you to call. I was only half expecting you to show up tonight. I’m kind of pleased you did. Give me half an hour to finish my chores and I’ll be back and ready. And I’m starving. I didn’t get a chance to break for lunch today. I switched rotations with one of the girls from building C, just in case you were here and I needed someone to cover the rest of my offices tonight. Give me thirty?”
“Absolutely. I’ll find a place for dinner.”
I hadn’t asked May what she’d like to eat, so I took a wild guess and made a reservation at a highly rated Italian restaurant near the water. I was ready to go and my camerawoman was ready to slip into the car with us. May arrived and we headed out to eat.
This time, I probed a little more deeply regarding her concept for the colonization of the planet, and a ship that would get us there, careful not to ask questions that would seem like I knew too much. It was so tempting to just say “I am The Bob and I want you!”
“It’s simple, really, but I suppose they’re trying to cut costs. We used to have a space station up there in orbit 250 miles above the earth. That still wasn’t enough to keep it from crashing into the atmosphere when the alliance fell apart and the station was abandoned. I wish we’d been getting ready for a colonization trip back then. Rather than risk it crashing down on a populated area, they blew it up and most of the pieces burned upon reentry. But conceptually, they had the right idea. Launch a core into orbit and then keep delivering parts, one ship at a time, until you’ve built a ship the size needed to hold a colony starter. Equip it with a rocket engine and transport fuel for the journey. Atomic fuel. There’s no sense fooling around with liquid fuel for a ship this big. They could even conceal its capability by sending a ship up to ‘move it to a higher orbit’ every few months. Once we have an orbit at about 400 miles, breaking out of Earth’s gravitational well is a relatively simple feat. Even for a ship that is estimated to weigh 20,000 tons, we could bust out of the gravitational well with no more thrust than it takes to do a lunar landing, and be happily on our way with an atomic engine.”
“Do atomic engines work?”
“Nearly all the serviceable submarines in the world now are atomic powered. There’s no reason it wouldn’t work. And I’ll bet even on Mars we could find fissionable fuel. It just seems like such a waste to keep redesigning and building a ship for a dozen people when that won’t even begin to get us to a colony.”
Well, I had information that she didn’t, regarding how much three and a half million people weighed. But conceptually, I liked her idea.
“I know some of the people there. May, how would you like to visit Space Pioneers?” I asked.
Her eyes got very big.
The Bethany Consolidated Church of the Holy Grail did not fall apart when it was discovered that several dead men had been found in their preacher’s torture chamber and the preacher had disappeared. Instead, they doubled down on him and the church grew in membership.
“It is obvious to anyone who looks that our beloved Pastor Ron has bravely taken to the underground to visit retribution on those who would harm God’s people,” said a deacon in the church. “He laid a trap for these criminals and they fell into it. I would not be surprised if forensic evidence emerged that one of those filthy men was Bob.”
Well, that was disgusting. Perhaps I should have left more evidence. But, the disappearance of ‘Pastor Ron’ served to keep all attention off me. I was not considered a person of interest in the case. Oh, when I got back to the mansion, I was visited by a detective wanting to know if I’d seen the man. They were following up a lead that suggested he might actually be one of my own people. There was no evidence linking us together other than his preaching about my evils. We’d never met and I never mentioned him.
I’ve seen it happen before. Seems the world goes in cycles of denying what is plainly in front of them.
People can’t view the recent past with any perspective. They are still caught up in living it. So, let me go back a few generations. In the Civil War… Um… No, people are still living in that past. Let me go back further.
In American history, much fuss is made over the Mayflower arriving at Plymouth Rock and the pilgrims founding a new settlement. You’ve probably heard the romantic tale of John Alden going to Priscilla Mullen to propose on behalf of Myles Standish. Her famous line, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” is known to us through the poem of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who lived from 1807 to 1882. Understand? Poem. Not an eyewitness accounting.
We are led to believe through this poem and popular ‘history’ that the Pilgrims were religious refugees coming to the new world for religious freedom. In reality, they were roughly the same as the Spaniards invading the Caribbean and South America. They used religious zeal to fund a trip in search of gold, jewels, and wealth. They would come to America and convert the natives to their religion in return for all their wealth.
We are told of the kind natives who helped the strangers through their first winter and celebrated the first Thanksgiving with the kind pilgrims. We are not told that Myles Standish was a murderer. He invited the native chiefs to parlay in one of the new cabins the Pilgrims built. Then he closed the door and killed them all, burned the cabin, and blamed it all on the evil Indians who were attacking the village.
No. The Pilgrims were righteous and God-loving people, spreading His word to the heathens. Myles Standish was the protector of the Pilgrims who made it possible for them to establish their village. John Alden was a poetic master of the language who…
Let me just say that we double down on the lies even when the evidence is right in front of us. We deny that anything bad was occurring or that our cultural heroes were anything less than what we wanted to believe of them.
History is not true. I know. I lived there. What you believe tells me nothing about what is true. It tells me only about what kind of person you are.
That’s why it is getting harder and harder to choose people to join me in the infinity room—Areola. It isn’t about whether they are nice people. Hitler was nice to Eva Braun. Until he killed her. Standish was nice to the Indians. Until he killed them. Columbus was… Never mind. Columbus wasn’t nice.
The problem comes down to what kind of person he or she is deep down inside. Does he believe he is superior to everyone else (or even most people)? Does she use sex as a tool to manipulate people? Do her religious beliefs send everyone who disagrees with her to hell? Is he willing to sacrifice you for money? Or just for a better deal? These are all things that nice people will do.
Reverend Ronald Richards could preach love and reconciliation in his church and gain thousands of followers, but at his heart, he was a demon-possessed man who had sold his soul for money and the pleasures of the flesh.
Not every rescue the priestesses made was quite so bloody. Some were simply reported to proper authorities. But try finding who to report 200 sex slaves on a barge in New Orleans to. Yes, you can call the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888. And if you or someone you know is a victim, call it right damn now! But they aren’t equipped for rapid response when there are 200 victims involved.
In the US, nearly three-quarters of a million people are reported missing each year. Many, I’m happy to say, are quickly found, but 3-10 thousand each year are not found. There are nearly 100,000 active cases of missing persons. Of that number, 35% are under the age of 18. Back in the late ’60s, I was responsible for some of those who went missing. I collected them off the streets just before they died and restored them to health in Areola. All elected not to return to the natural world. They were looking for Nirvana and found it.
We found that barge, and it was a mess. I’d read it in the mind of the trafficker at the preacher’s house. I’d like to say it was a foreign entity transporting boys and girls into the US, but this was a US-based mob I’d been tracking for some time. They specialized in collecting runaways, homeless, and abused teens.
Once they had a barge full, they towed it out into international waters and held an auction. Most of their cargo would be sold to bidders from around the world. The leftovers were discarded into the ocean.
I’d never been able to locate them before they set sail.
This time was different. But we needed help to rescue the children.
I called the FBI from an anonymous phone that could be tracked to our location. I wanted them to find it. I explained that I was about to liberate two hundred captive children from a barge in New Orleans and even gave them the pier number.
During the time I was on hold, I unleashed the priestesses. There were alarms on the barge, of course, but even after we set them off, the kidnappers could not locate us as we moved stealthily around the barge. I went room to room, delivering concubines from Areola to aid and feed the kids.
I said we were not as bloody as the previously related affair. Well, not quite. About half of the two dozen guards on the barge were dead when they were nailed to the side of the barge. The priestesses had advanced in their technology and in addition to their traditional weapons, they carried air cartridge-powered nail guns. The other dozen guards were needed as witnesses. They watched as their comrades were displayed.
I personally checked all the enemy for demons or signs of demon possession. Finding none, I approved the priestesses to complete the job. The remaining dozen were nailed next to their comrades, often with nails through body parts they thought were safe. All they saw were black clad ninjas who perversely glowed with an inner light.
I collected all the ninjas and the concubines who were assisting the prisoners, dropped my cellphone (still on hold), and fled into the night. I took up a post on a roof nearby where I could see as the first local policeman arrived to check things out. He was frantically on his radio, urgently requesting backup as there had been a massacre on the docks. When they entered the barge and discovered the kids, their tune changed.
“Angels came to bring us food and water. They said not to be afraid because help was coming for us,” a fourteen-year-old girl told investigators.
“Demons!” declared a critically wounded man in the hospital. “Angels of death rained down upon us and made us pay for our sins. We couldn’t see them at all as they killed and captured us. They glowed in the dark when they had us all and seemed to get brighter with every nail they drove through our bodies. I wish I’d been killed instead of living to witness their retribution.”
Most importantly, the twelve men we let live put the finger on another fifty who had not been present that night. I ripped the memories from their minds. They included two of their chief operators who organized the auctions, and the ‘trainer’ who was due to arrive the next day. I would be ready.
The Furies had struck again.
It was the second time I’d heard one referred to as ‘the trainer.’ It was believed he could take any woman or child and turn her into a compliant sex slave overnight. Slaves trained by him were highly valued. Of course, this mysterious trainer never showed up the next day. If he even got within a few blocks of the dock, he’d have known things weren’t right. Something about police cars and yellow tape and ambulances.
Reading the guards had provided other clues, though. We found out about a yacht located in international waters, prepared to receive the merchandise for the auction.
It had been a long time since a ghost ship had floated toward the shore. I let the authorities sort out who the bodies belonged to. Their crimes were written out and nailed next to their bodies. I’ve often wondered if that yacht was ever sold again.
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