Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism

by Jennifer Percy

  Tim always believed he saw things in the dark. It began with shadows and faces and then the faces began to speak and then the ghosts stayed even with the lights on. Each night he said a sinner’s prayer and waited for morning to come. Otherworldly creatures stalked his bedroom. His first demonic memory comes from childhood, when a purple frog demon sat on his head. It came back every night and slipped beneath warm covers to join him in his dreams. His parents sometimes found him shivering on the porch in his underwear.

  In his early years, he made money as a janitor for his father’s church, mopping floors, scrubbing the bathrooms. Voices and footsteps in the silence. Demons enveloped him. The faucets ran. He locked all the doors. He played records to cover the voices.

  One day a formless ghost appeared at his bedside. It floated and teased and then it attacked by sucking all the air out of his lungs. Tim determined the acts of the demon to be torture and declared war.

  In the military, the hauntings increased. Tim was a policeman assigned to guard an intercontinental ballistic missile site. He was with his buddy and they saw something running in the dark. It came for them. This figure ripped through their truck. The radio cracked and the lights died and the thing was gone.

  The minister found comfort in the writer Stephen King, who he thought knew more about the spiritual realm than any Christian. He’d read on the back of one of King’s books: “When I was young, I worried about my sanity a lot.” He called the author an ungodly man.

  After his deliverance, Tim started attending classes at the local Bible college, and leading air force guys to the Lord. One night they ended up with almost a hundred airmen in the room. Tim and Katie discipled the men. Prayed for the men. Delivered the men. Demons manifested. Screaming and swearing and puking and levitating. Vile talk. The airmen spoke in demon voices.

  Katie was delivered for the second time in May 1993. When she was a kid she was raped by the older boys in her neighborhood. She didn’t tell Tim about the older boys until eighteen years into their marriage when he asked about her darkest secret and she punched him in the face. She split his lip. He’d been picking at sore spots, old wounds, brokenness.

  Tim suspected a second demon and called on his father to organize a session. They circled Katie and aked the Holy Spirit to reveal her demon. Katie waited for the news. Tim’s father grew anxious. He did not want to reveal the name of the demon. Finally he said, “It’s the demon of whoredom.”

  When the words reached her, Katie started gagging. Not just dry heaves—she was choking and she couldn’t breathe. Tim wasn’t going to let this demon take his wife. He stood up and commanded the demon to say its name. And in a deep, raspy voice, Katie bellowed: I am Control.

  Her real name is Kathleen, but after the demon left, God told her to change it to Katie.

  The Mathers came to Portal in 1999 because God told them to come. Tim was mowing the lawn when it happened. The voice of God came down to him. He looked at a map and realized Portal was not a town where any man would ever wish to live. That’s exactly why God wanted him to come to Portal. Nothing would ever happen in that town. It was off the radar of high-ranking demons, he believed.

  But still, Tim resisted the idea. He’d been preaching for twenty-nine years and didn’t want his preacher’s life to end. Corpse dreams haunted his sleep. In the dreams he was standing on the street, looking at a pile of dead bodies. He grabbed a body, pulled it out, set it on the curb. He did this over and over again. Piling corpses. Row after row. When he tired of this, he sat down and wept. After whispering to the Lord, after asking what to do, one of the corpses moaned. It got up suddenly and it moved around and it looked at him. You’re alive? Tim said. The corpse nodded.

  Tim decided the corpses were all the church people he needed to revive through deliverance and he decided on a title for himself: Harvester of the Dead.

  Tim gathered with pastors and prayed over cities; fought and lost against angels of death; dealt with demons in front of large crowds; witnessed a batlike creature standing behind a woman who feared everything; encountered a barking man with a demon named Unteachable; found a woman whose tongue was so twisted she couldn’t say my body belongs to Jesus; and entered the home of a worn, bag-eyed girl named Sally who cut herself bloody while a group of pastors blew shofar.

  On a mission to Africa, the whole Mather clan was spreading word about demons. They saw a woman manifest in the streets. A gaunt bishop grabbed ahold of her, hauled her onstage, and started banging the woman’s head against the ground. The minister walked up to the bishop and said, “Can you punch a demon?” The bishop said no, they’re ethereal. “Then why are you punching this woman?” All these years he’d been hitting people to get the demon out. Tim whispered, “Would you like the demon to go?” Her eyes spun like a slot machine.

  On a recent visit to the trailer, Tim’s mother reported back to the Mather family that she’d traveled into the spirit realm, floated over the property, and looked around.

  A battlefield, she said. All these dead bodies rotting in the grass.

  • • •

  The minister thinks each of his four children should have four children and that each of those children should have four children. I’ve seen him move his arms like a conductor and say, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth!”

  Eden is childless and therefore different from the others.

  We’re in the yard—wet, green, and bright. Pam, the adopted child, is at the porch table, moving her fingers on the plastic like someone tracing the shapes of small clouds. Eden calls her parents politically incorrect. “I just taught my mom to be more hospitable when guests arrive. You know: Do you want water? Do you need anything? But we’re all very close and give each other permission to speak into one another’s lives. Sometimes it’s too much.” Eden smiles, plays with her wedding ring, twirls it. “My father, especially, scares a lot of people. He can look at you and he can see your darkness. But don’t worry, he doesn’t really look unless you give him permission.”

  Eden gathers children in her arms, and leaves to make sandwiches.

  The yard is full of growlers and men, all of them working with Caleb on his business, holding beer cans to the sun. Among them is Troy, the Vietnam veteran who brought Caleb to Portal for deliverance. A big man with lines on his face rough as a dry ditch. His nose curves toward the earth, as if dripping, too many days standing on his feet in the heat and wet of the jungle.

  “What demon did you have?”

  “Devil of Religion,” Troy says. “They found thorns on my feet. Then later I come home and I find a giant Buddha sitting in my house.”

  I tell Troy I’m reading Tim’s book.

  “What they don’t tell you is skip the first half,” he says. “The second half’s the only half that matters.”

  Mud-covered men take tools to a steaming growler. Children dance about it in strange worship.

  “Growler burst into flames,” Caleb says. He walks toward me with an oily rag on his shoulder. “Max cracked his beer to put the fire out.”

  “I could of pissed on it,” Max says.

  “Marine,” Caleb adds, as if to define a species.

  The men grunt and point, exchanging deep-throated laughs.

  Max was in the Marine Corps Reserve’s Anti-Terrorism Unit and is a veteran of the war in Somalia. Caleb hired him to work in the factory. He’s blond and has a peanut-shaped head, peppers his talk with ah-shits. Born in Vidalia, a town in central Georgia known for its onions, Max is now divorced and twenty-five and has a three-year-old girl at home. The skull tattoo on his forearm says, UNITED STATES MISGUIDED CHILDREN. “Stands for United States Marine Corps,” he says, covered in grease, checking something in the vehicle’s insides. “I never went to Iraq, but that’s the war we talked about in Somalia.” As if to prove his point, he shows me a photograph he keeps in his wa
llet: men by a swimming pool, and beyond that, red earth.

  Everyone heads back to the trailer for sandwiches. I ask Max if we can talk. Caleb told me Max might kill himself because his two best friends killed themselves after they got out of the military.

  Max doesn’t answer. He’s too busy pawing the beer cooler’s tepid water. Pam, the adopted child, is still sitting at the porch table, picking lint off her sweater. I sit next to her. The rooster and his cohort of chickens sleep in a pile under the minister’s truck.

  I wait until Max manages a Bud Light from the cooler, gleaming like caught trout.

  “What was Somalia like?” I say.

  He brings the bottle to his lips but hesitates before drinking. “In Somalia there were people without arms running across the border. Christians. Muslims. I have no idea.”

  He’s been out two years, started in August of ’06, and in February ’07, he says, shit hit the fan. “They ordered us to go to this airstrip just across the border. Three planes landed. We didn’t know about the mission because we were just there for security. Next thing, the marine air crew is up on the intercom, saying stand by for fire. Out of nowhere three enemy planes landed. The gunship opened. We were in a truck with a bunch of kids from South Georgia. One of them—poor guy—he was sitting next to me and he was the first to fire. The Russian version of a grenade launcher shot off the bottom of his rifle. It fired and exploded about five meters near me. Killed some guys. A piece of it came and sliced me up. Hit me right here on the collarbone.”

  He speaks quietly and with mumbled words. There are details I miss, sentences swallowed.

  “That was pretty much it. Lasted about two hours. There for six months, saw nothing. Then, out of nowhere, everything went wrong.”

  Between Pam’s thumb and forefinger is a black ball of lint, small and robust as a tick. I cup my hand over my mouth so Pam can’t hear. I ask, “Do you believe in deliverance?”

  “Fuck no,” Max says. “Creepy shit.” He has a quiet, uncomfortable laugh, as if something he’s not used to feeling in his lungs. “Satan would blow fireballs out of my ass.”

  Max doesn’t want to talk about his dead friends. Instead he says Caleb once rode a C-130 plane into Vietnam, penetrating its wilds to save American POWs left over from the war. He says Caleb has been in South America, traveling by night, trying to kill Hugo Chávez. Max drinks five beers and says he knows a lot about trucks. Max says he’s trying to get a job at AutoZone. He doesn’t want to talk about Corey and the other guy whose name he swallowed up before I could hear. Corey was the kid he met on the bus to boot camp, the kid he ended up with in the desert of Somalia, same platoon. Corey’s brother died in a car wreck. He was in Somalia when it happened. He was on leave to attend his brother’s funeral when he shot himself. “I don’t understand why he didn’t call me,” Max says. “He was my best friend. I didn’t get the chance to talk him out of it.”

  Pam puts a hand flat on the table. “I’m getting milk,” she says. “We need milk. Does anyone want any milk or anything else that can be gotten at the store?”

  “We don’t want any,” Max says.

  “I’m going to the store. Does anyone need any milk?” she asks again.

  “No, thanks, Pam.”

  “Do you think anyone inside wants milk?”

  “You could ask,” I say.

  “Yes.” Pam pauses, looks off at the field, walks to the door with her back bent, rising slowly, poking her head into the house. Out come the minister’s bothered groans.

  She walks past us to her Camaro, turning to look back just once, showing us her eyes, as if the only thing she wanted in life were to be given the smallest task to complete. The car idles. She does not return for many hours, longer than one would need to get milk, and when she does finally return, she slams her bulldog frame against the sliding glass door. We are all inside. In her hands: a carton of two percent. Gripping it like a football, thumping it slowly and rhythmically against the glass. “Will someone let her in?” the minister says, but Pam enters on her own. “What is it, Pam?”

  “I saw something,” she says, pointing and bouncing, tripping on her shoe. Sweat pools in the curve above her lip. “It walked across the road, right in front of my car. I almost hit it.”

  The minister is half listening, watching a movie in which men are torn apart by dinosaurs.

  “It was like bigfoot,” she says. “It had horns. A silver back.”

  The minister recommends a glass of water. A small child lingers in the hallway. He tells the child, “Give Pam a hug.”

  The child shows his teeth. “I don’t want to,” he says.

  I help Pam with some water and we retreat to the porch, where the sky is livid and smoke corkscrews from the burn pile.

  “What was it?”

  She shakes her head and settles into her chair in the manner of a roosting hen. “They want to be seen,” she says.

  At some late hour I find the minister roaming the halls in his floppy nightshirt, moving around like a jellyfish. “I might send a demon into your room tonight,” he said. The comment is followed by laughter. That night, in the windowless guest room, I let the lamp burn until morning and keep my limbs close on the hard, skinny gurney bed. Field mice move around the bedroom’s shadows. The pillow’s fabric has yellow flowers. I wonder if they think I’m infecting the room. They could see a demon on me and strangle me. In Fra Angelico’s The Last Judgment, the demon has black hair and red eyes. Sometimes the devil appeared as a medieval bestiary of snakes, dragons, lions, goats. Bats were birds of the devil. Demons were toads and toadlike creatures. Often the devil resided in the body of a pig. Le lupeux, a night phantom of the Norman marshes, has birdlike aspects. Demons had membranous bat wings. Scorpion tails. Often the devil had red skin or red hair or red clothes or skin that burned with red flames. They carried tools of torture. For three centuries the devil was depicted as a beautiful young girl from the country.

  • • •

  Caleb’s twenty-four-year-old brother, John, just redeployed to Iraq and has been struggling. For the first time, Caleb told me, he’s been having trouble dealing with combat. On his most recent deployment, John helped four injured Iraqi soldiers by wrapping their wounds, giving them water, and listening to their stories. He knew the color of their eyes, the curve of their noses, and a few weeks later, after they were released from the medics, he shot them during a crossfire. Now he sees their faces everywhere he goes, at night and in his dreams. He’s thinking too much about the enemies. How what once was abstract now has a human face. He can’t pull the trigger. He misses on purpose, sweats under his helmet.

  Isaac, the five-year-old, asks Caleb about killing people. It’s my fifth day at the trailer and we’re all on lawn chairs, Caleb with his legs wide, a shirt draped over his shoulders, hand scratching his neck. It’s stiff and tendoned as a celery stalk. Isaac’s curled in the grass. The other children run circles in the yard. Caleb doesn’t lie. He tells Isaac it’s Uncle John’s duty.

  “Dad, I want to go to Iraq.”

  “Isaac,” Caleb says, “you’re really not old enough yet.”

  Caleb leans back and crosses his arms behind his head. “I think the only way we’re going to get you there is to FedEx you.”

  In the evening Isaac tells Isabel about what their dad said. They find a box and Isaac curls inside it. Isabel tucks newspaper in the spaces his body doesn’t fill.

  Later Caleb finds Isaac in the box, and he rips it open. Isaac says he was waiting to get FedExed to Iraq, just like his dad told him.

  • • •

  A few years ago Katie stopped keeping records of those who went through deliverance. “I don’t need that darkness on file,” she says, as if the darkness of the notes were a literal thing that would sustain life in her drawers.

  “Sometimes Caleb will send someone but they don’t have to tell us,” she says. “It might be something that comes up in deliverance. We don’t have to know about the war to save them
from it. Tim is a veteran. He served six years in the air force. There are many veterans that we’ve brought through deliverance, from the current wars, but also from past wars, people that are our age and older. Veterans as far back as, well, who knows? We’ve even done some from the Korean War. They’ve been over sixty years old. We’ve had lots of Vietnam vets. We just delivered a couple in Special Forces. Then another woman who’s a veteran and her husband who’s now in Afghanistan.”

  “And you believe they all have the Destroyer?”

  “What would be a typical personality that would be serving in the military?” Katie seems to be figuring this out as we speak. “I’m thinking especially of Special Forces. Usually those ones have a Destroyer on them because their jobs are dangerous. The enemy uses your tendencies against you. That’s something we’ve been looking into and thinking about.”

  I ask about Caleb’s theory that the demons would transfer to me if I spoke to any other veterans about their trauma.

  “If you’re in contact with those who are suicidal,” she says, “you can pick up what are called familiar spirits. They can attach to you. It’s basic spiritual warfare. We do it every day. It’s from Ephesians: The breastplate of righteousness, the belt of truth, the shoes of readiness, the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, and the helmet of salvation. The sword of the spirit is the word of God and it aims to do damage against the kingdom of the enemy. God is stronger than what the enemy can throw at you. You are able to crush all the fiery darts.”

  “What about suicide bombers? Is it the same drive?”

  “They aren’t killing themselves out of hopelessness. They’re killing themselves out of religious belief. It’s a religious demon. At least they have something to believe in. A lot of Christians here don’t really believe in the power of God. A lot of people who label themselves as Christians function more like unbelievers, not like heathens, but they don’t believe that God is bigger than their problems. They treat Christianity like insurance to keep them out of hell. But it seems like people who would martyr themselves to kill other people are the most dangerous of all.” She pauses and then says, “I attempted suicide when I was twelve. I punished myself. I wished I was dead. After deliverance, that all went away. Remarkably, it went away. For twelve years I was plagued with suicidal thoughts. Or I would think, what if my car went off the road and hit that tree?”