Other texts are written with a quiet desperation. The writers aim to unravel the mysteries and plumb the depths of knowledge. The reasoning is similar to that of the compulsive gambler. One more roll of the dice, one more answer, they tell themselves, and they’ll have a way out from beneath the debt that has piled up around them. They will have an escape from the unbound beings that bay at their heels with every waking and sleeping hour. This writing is too focused on immediate answers, or on big ones, and tends to the myopic.
What are my motivations for writing? Look to the title of this text. I am the black sheep of my family, but I am still new to this world, relatively speaking, relatively innocent. The black lamb, perhaps. The blood? That of a martyr. The conceit of a preacher’s get, to romanticize martyrdom.
I researched not the binding of demons, but the aftermath in the wake of these bindings, and in the wake of their actions. I researched karma, the paths my peers took, I look at the lies we tell ourselves. I mock my peers where I think they deserve to be mocked, call them repulsive when they act repulsive. I curried favor, played to their love of themselves, the wide-eyed student eager to pay them homage.
They will, I think, be less than pleased when they see what I actually wrote.
I write this because I feel the field is largely ignored. All of the rest of us, it seems, even the greatest of us, are focused on the present. What happens in the future? What happens when the binding is done? What happens to us? To the ones touched by the Wrongs?
Is there, I ask, a way out? A methodology that might allow us to deal with evils without a sum loss for our world as a whole? I would suggest there is, though I do not yet know what it might be.
I write this knowing that my audience will be small, if it exists at all. Years of interviews and analysis point to the same conclusion. My work will not be read, not as it is intended to be read. The solutions I posit, and the questions I want others to answer, will each be ignored. The unrepentant will refuse to challenge their own world view, moderate diabolists, my target audience in this, will feel uncomfortable with the emphasis on the future and dismiss me. Lesser diabolists will not be in a position to read my work.
Beyond diabolists, I expect others will see it as self pity, which it is. Failing that, they’re liable to see it as a kind of manipulation. I wouldn’t blame them. I have far too little to say in concrete terms, and talk around subjects, raising questions. In their shoes, I would say the same about this text.
I write with a goal in mind, but perhaps it will solely for my own benefit, a masturbatory exercise in the end.
Masturbation or martyrdom, I chose my path in life, and I pray to God that this is a final destination that leads to a greater Good.
Chapter One: The Nest
I remember the first demon I encountered. My eldest brother was studying Religion, my sister enjoying a brief flirtation with freedom, partying and men, before her return to the family and assumption of her responsibilities. I was an older teenager, I’d studied the books my father provided, and the task was one that needed as many hands as possible. I was conscripted.
Our community knew my father as a local preacher. He was more beneath the surface, privy to things beyond the curtain. Practitioners called him an evangelist, a summoner, a man powerful enough to sway the world with words. He called angels forth, cherubim, Madonnas carved of ivory to give others shelter.
That night, I saw him take off the mask he wore with his wife, his family, and his congregation. He was always stern, but I saw him grim. I saw old companions, others who had once been taught by the same teacher as my father, a man who taught them to use angels and guns both. Men and women, wearing armor beneath clothes, long coats to hide their weapons, not one span of their body unadorned by tools of their trade. Water, poisons, incendiaries, scrolls.
It would take me long decades to learn what proper diabolists already know. Most practitioners count themselves unlucky if they have to deal with one of the darker powers. Diabolists make such dealings their stock and trade. My father and his fellow templars walked a middle road. They had irregular contact with the Wrong things, but the only things they dealt out were fire, bullet, and death.
Were this another text, I would spell out the fighting, the measures taken, in hopes that others could use that knowledge and better survive. My focus lies elsewhere.
The being we sought that night was more powerful than we had anticipated. It was intelligent enough to hide the bulk of its activities from the outside world. We expected an imp. We found something evolved enough to be birthing its own imps, to have a form and its own symbolism.
A devil of the sixth choir. The choir of man’s evils. A weaker choir, and the one most personal to all of us.
She had collected inhabitants of a small town into a cult and church, and she had done it long enough that her initial followers had descendants. Mother, father, child, grandchild. All rutted on the floors and pews of the devil’s church in a grand, senseless, ceaseless orgy, the devil herself presiding above all in naked, Wrong splendor.
A devil of incest, she had made her own monsters even before she began creating imps, by way of inbreeding and birth defects. There was only horror there, enough to sear its way into my eyes.
I will sum up that night by saying that each of us who walked in there with guns at the ready walked away alive, but we did not walk away intact.
When I think of what drove me to write this work, this event was one that remained with me. I spent some time wondering about the aftermath. It was my first eye-opening experience, and it was the last incident where I researched the long term effects.
It was only when I’d researched the events that are covered in each chapter that follows, that I let myself look into this one. I looked at the numbers, and I want to point to statistics, the increase in birth defects in that town and county. To the rise in the divorce rate, or the rates of abuse.
I want to, but I can’t.
It’s an event that touched me, personally, and started me on a different path in life. Allow me, instead, to open my first chapter with the reality virtually all diabolists are cognizant of.
By the time my siblings returned the following April, almost a year later, my parents had announced their divorce. My father said two words to either of my siblings. Which was about as many as he’d said to me in the month prior. That first night my siblings were home, I dreamed, and I realized why my father had been keeping his distance.
The morning before I left for that fight with the young devil, I was seventeen years old, doing the sort of thing seventeen year old boys are particularly inclined to do when locked in the bathroom. An activity flavored with that uncomfortable mix of guilt and rebellion that is unique when your father preaches every night of the week.