Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon
17
The Wrath of a Woman Scorned
“EXACTLY WHAT IS THIS, and who are you?” Esmira demanded from behind me.
I spun in my embrace with a naked Josie to see my wife standing right beside me. Behind her, I could see the open door to our palazzo. How could I have been so careless? I almost never entered the secret room from the palazzo and then only when I knew it was deserted. There was nothing I could do but own up to the situation.
“This, my beloved wife, is my devoted minion, Josie. Once a few thousand years ago, she asked me to possess her, and I have,” I said. I watched as Esmira tried to process what I’d said.
“You have a slave? From how long ago?” she screamed.
“What’s it been, Josie, my love? Three thousand and maybe five hundred years?” I asked my possession.
“Oh, Bob, we can celebrate our anniversary anytime you want,” she answered.
“How can you keep this little slip of a girl as your sex slave? It’s inhuman! You must free her at once!” Esmira insisted.
“Josie, are you an unwilling slave? Do I treat you inhumanely? Do you want to be free of me?” I asked.
“Oh, Bob! Don’t use words like that! Slave? I’m right where I want to be. And the sex—as you should know, Esmira—is fantastic. We were just about to go to bed. Please join us!”
My dear Josie had no qualms about having any number of women in my bed as long as I paid enough attention to her—and I did. Dear Esmira did not see it that way. The world had become progressively less tolerant of others since it stopped accepting a pantheon of gods and now fought wars over one or two who staked exclusive claim to the entire world. It was a trend I feared would continue a long time.
If you have never been scolded by an Italian woman who has had her honor slighted, pray to whatever gods you may that you never have the privilege. I, as meekly as I could, agreed with her that I was a monster and unfit to be her husband. She couldn’t believe a demon had entered the Catholic Church and married her before God, then took her precious virginity and forced children on her, all while maintaining a harem of teenage whores for my own enjoyment. I was a monster—not only an affront to her, but to God himself. Surely, the very walls of the cathedral I worked on would crumble and fall once it was known a demon had helped to build it. I had a special place reserved for me in the lowest circle of hell and she would see to it that I suffered for all eternity.
I was not sure that suffering for all eternity in hell would be worse than suffering the next few years living with Esmira.
Speaking of hell, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy had debuted about 100 years previously and nearly every library had a copy. As a favorite son of Firenze, there were many copies in the area, being the second most popular book next to the Bible. And probably more closely quoted by both laymen and priests as a description of the heaven and hell and purgatory that awaited all souls upon death. In the volume The Inferno, Dante holds that there are nine circles of hell, the last of which is reserved for treachery and includes Judas, Brutus, and Cassius. Interesting that the two murderers of Caesar were on a nearly equal footing with Judas Iscariot, but that is of no matter.
The interesting thing is that no demons are depicted herein as being tortured in hell. They are, in fact, the torturers and only Lucifer seems to suffer as he chews on the living bodies of the three traitors. I will provide a clue that pointing this out to my darling wife did not have the desired effect of lessening her wrath.
Scarcely a day went by that Esmira did not harangue me about my level of depravity. I took to sleeping in the winery. My marriage bed was colder than the stone floors. And since I was in the winery, I moved several barrels of wine into the infinity room where they were stored with casks from different ages of the world.
In the infinity room, we already knew that people did not age unless they had a marker for aging, like a growing child. In the same way, the things we brought into the infinity room, like wine, did not age further, either. So, there was a lifespan for wine in the natural world, but it stopped aging in the infinity room. Since most wine of that era was better drunk young, moving recently fermented wine into the infinity room was not in any way harmful to it. I had casks of wine from all over the world, collected over three-and-a-half millennia, that were as good and as fresh today as they were the day I acquired them.
And I drank quite a bit. A lot. Far more than my share.
I often visited the infinity room where my harem was more than sympathetic about my poor marriage. They did their best to keep me from despairing. I always went on a sales trip before going into the infinity room, though. I knew a couple of secluded caves where I could hide the satchel, lead the horse and wagon inside, and close the gateway for a few hours (or days) of peace and love. I would return home after a week or two in the infinity room feeling fine and refreshed. I would give my wife a loving kiss, silencing her raving about my demonic ways for an instant. If I was very insistent, she was silent for an hour or more while I made sure she enjoyed—thoroughly—every sensation a wife should receive from her husband. Bringing home a sack full of gold always helped to smooth my return, as well. As far as my wife was concerned, I’d sold the wine and brought her the payment, which enabled her to elevate her position with servants of her own.
I did not count on her treachery.
She followed me.
At first it was only to verify her suspicions that I was a horrid cheating demon. Then it was to find out if there was a way to trap me.
I’ve mentioned the demons of Egypt, called djinni, before. They were always kept trapped in a bottle or a lamp or some such container. It is essentially what Pinaruti had intended to be my fate. Well, the djinni are mentally a little slow. No offense if you happen to be one. A djinn is summoned from the primordial mass by a conjurer, much like I was. I can scarcely call the level of conjurer a mage. The djinn is then lured into a container, and the conjurer pops a cork in it. Demon sealed in a bottle and bound to the will of whoever releases him. Time and time again. I don’t know, but I suspect the conjurer just dropped a bit of sugar candy into the bottle to lure him inside.
My infinity room was full of my own special kinds of sugar candy in the form of Nimia, Josie, Penelope, Princess, Pari, Zhi, Chione, Lakshmi, and all the other lovely women who had attached themselves to our household. I was often willingly in my satchel.
But I had created many safeguards on my little world. I enchanted the satchel with a look-away spell that would make it nearly invisible to anyone who wasn’t literally in touch with it. I kept it on my person at all times, unless I was inside. After the unfortunate discovery, I always made sure I closed the gateway behind me so no one could stumble in. I didn’t think there was any way to be trapped there.
I was wrong.
I suspected she had hidden on the wagon when I went on a selling trip and slipped off at the very last minute when I led the horse inside. Then I closed the gateway and she felt around until she found the satchel. I was completely unaware that I had been trapped until two weeks later when I attempted to open the gateway and leave. It would not open! I tried everything. I pounded. I screamed. I swore revenge. I went to my library, which now contained thousands of books and scrolls collected over millennia, and read everything I could find regarding sealed magic chambers.
Nimia joined me. She had read nearly all the books in the library, learning the various languages from the librarians and people we had picked up along the way. There was likely no one in all of the infinity room she could not communicate with—and not by reading minds, like I did. She spoke their languages. She brought me books with spells and incantations and she tried them with me. She pointed out the hieroglyphic scripts that told how to capture a djinn. The best we could tell was that it was a simple matter of putting a cork in it. In any room (or container) all one needed to do to trap the demon inside, was to close the door from the outside.
It was easy for me to think of the infinity room as an entire world, impossible to wrap in an enclosure. But the truth was that this entire world was contained in a normal satchel that could be carried over the shoulder. I was trapped.
And so, I got drunk.
I emerged from my room in our house—which had grown to palatial proportions—only to rail against the unopening gateway to the wide world outside. I was quite sour.
My women didn’t know quite what to do. They attempted to entertain me and make sure I was distracted. To them—and to all the million or so residents of the infinity room—nothing was different. No one ever left the infinity room unless I disguised a man to go breed my current lover. The children born in the infinity room were just normal people. They grew up, met mates, had jobs, and died. Their parents aged with them. It was almost exactly as it had been on earth.
Only people who had come into the infinity room from the natural world had the ability to stay forever young. But if they chose to reproduce (male or female), they began to age into mortality. To all others, it was as if time stood still. Except it didn’t quite. I could tell that Nimia and Josie were very gradually aging. They were still young and beautiful women, but perhaps in their twenties instead of their teens. An increase in their physical maturity was showing.
It became a daily ritual for me to go to the gateway and attempt to open it, then go back to my room and drink and fornicate until the next day.
Then one day, it happened. The gateway opened.
I should point out that there is more to controlling a djinn than just capturing it. If you want to open the bottle and have the djinn obey you, you have to put a spell on it and get the djinn to agree to it. Most are forced to agree, but none are bottled who can’t be controlled when they are released. No one got me to agree to anything when I was trapped in the infinity room. I was angry and ready to fight.
“Esmira, I’m going to kill you for that!” I growled as I emerged from the infinity room and hit my head hard enough to flatten me out.
“She said that would be the first thing you said,” a cute young thing stretched out before me said. I was not expecting to be greeted by a child! What kind of trick was this?
“Who are you?” I demanded.
“I’m Esmeralda,” she said. “Esmira was my grandmother. Um… great grandmother.”
“Great grandmother? How long have I been trapped in there?” I asked. Time definitely flowed differently in the infinity room than in the natural world. I was still upset that I’d been trapped, but I had no sense of how much time had passed.
“I’m not positive. Sixty or seventy years, I think. There was no date on your monument to indicate when you’d died. Grandmother gave me the key, but forbade me from opening the flap until she was dead. She was really old. She thought having lived with you gave her an extra long life to live with her regrets.”
“Regrets, eh? I don’t know what she had to regret. I’m the one who let her trap me and had to serve the time cut off from the natural world.” I was still a little huffy, but I didn’t want to take it out on an innocent child.
“Oh, she lived as a widow all those seventy years. She had a beautiful stone erected to you at the cathedral she said you helped build. You should have seen the dome when it was finished. It’s fabulous,” Esmeralda said. Her enthusiasm was infectious. I could tell I’d have trouble with this one.
“How nice.”
“She was really sad you were gone. She told me she regretted having locked you away from the moment she did it, but was afraid you’d kill her if she ever opened the bag, but she thought I’d be safe.”
“Yes, you are. You…”
“…let the goat out of the bag,” she giggled. “You might want to do something about your horns before anyone sees you.”
I felt my head. Yes, I was fully in my demon form and that would certainly raise an alarm. I wondered how long I’d been in that form in the infinity room. My women, of course, loved the goat demon as well as any personage I’d adapted.
“Where are we? Why is the ceiling so low?” I asked.
“We’re on a boat. Under the bed. I didn’t want anyone to see me or you.”
“Where are we bound to?”
“Um… Spain. If we get there. I need help.”
“Help for what?”
“I kind of killed him,” she said, pointing across the floor to where a man lay bleeding. Oh, great! We crawled out from under the bed and I grabbed the man’s hand. What a disgusting creature! His body was already cooling, so the memories I collected were rather scattered. A church emissary to the King and Queen of Spain. He was very proud of the robes he wore, representing a bird of high rank. Or something like that. They were red.
Two things were foremost in his mind. First, that he carried a papal bull, Exigit Sinceras Devotionis Affectus, that established an inquisition in Spain under Ferdinand and Isabella. He hoped to be named the inquisitor general. The second thing was how he was going to rape his lovely little assistant, Esmeralda, now that they were at sea. That idea went south rather quickly when she slit his throat.
As I was collecting the scattered memories, I worked the spell that would transform my body into his.
“Oh, yuck,” Esmeralda said. “I hope you don’t think we’re going to have sex with you looking like that! I’d rather have sex with the goat.”
“Don’t worry, my dear Esmeralda. Sex and you are a long way apart. What are you thirteen? Twelve? I plan to protect you, even if I have to shove you into the bag for safekeeping. For now, however, we need to dispose of His (former) Excellency Bonaventure Calvino. Are his clothes here somewhere?”
“Acting as his secretary, I was folding them when he grabbed hold of my teats and said I could either take my own clothes off or he would,” she said.
“And you just happened to have a knife at hand?” I chuckled.
“Once I figured out what kind of man he was and what he intended, I sharpened my letter opener,” she answered smugly.
“Resourceful girl.” I searched my memory for a spell of dissolution and in a few minutes, the cardinal and his blood were floating out the porthole in a cloud of mist.
Esmeralda found a nightshirt in the cardinal’s bag and helped me into it. Then we sat on the beds to talk. I opened the bag, whispering my desire to Nimia inside. In a moment, Chione emerged with a table of food for the two of us, then quietly went back into the bag. Esmeralda set to the food with the gusto of a child who had not eaten lately.
“Now, since I’ve been isolated from this world for seventy years, you need to tell me everything that’s happened in that time and what I need to know for us to survive in this world,” I said, waving a chicken bone. “And why is a young girl on a sea voyage with an old priest who intends to rape her?”
“Mmm. There are, as usual, wars and rumors of wars,” Esmeralda said around a mouthful of noodles. “The Turkish Sultan is threatening to invade Rome and the only thing that stands between them and the papacy are the Spanish soldiers and navy. Ferdinand and Isabella consider themselves the supreme authority in Spain and Pope Sixtus has given them authority to examine and try heretics. He’s had armies out for years, trying to solve the Jewish problem,” she said.
“You are remarkably well informed.”
“I’ve been listening to all the conversations. I can stand right next to Monsignore… or I could… and fill his water glass while he talked of the most secret things, assuming I must be a deaf mute.”
“Where is the Christian god in all of this? Why would he play to such intrigue?” I simply hadn’t grasped the absenteeism of the Christian god, who seemed quite satisfied to just let people kill each other in his name and forgive them for their sins later.
“I don’t need God now that I have you.”
“Whoa! Whoa! Back off there. First of all, you don’t have me. I am a free demon and I will make sure you never catch me in the satchel unguarded. Secondly, I am a lowly free demon, not a god. I learned long ago not to contest with gods and goddesses. I don’t like impersonating a priest when I’ve no commission from this god of the Christians.”
“Um… You mean I don’t get three wishes?” she pouted.
“No. That’s an old tale from another part of the world. Though I’ve always listened to what my women want and have done my best to give it to them. Should you ever become one of my women, you can expect equal treatment,” I said.
“Don’t you just pop out and take control of everyone? I thought I became one of your women when I opened the bag. That’s what Grandmother said would happen. Maybe she was just trying to keep me from opening the bag,” Esmeralda said.
“You are too young to safely bring into the infinity room. Since you are not yet fully grown into your womanhood, you might cause everyone else to start aging as you mature,” I speculated. I thought back over the past 3,500 years and could not think of a time when I brought a child into the infinity room to mingle with my harem. Certainly, the children of the harem in Troy had been brought in, but they came with their own nurses and were sent directly to a private area away from the center of my city. Hmm. “Now, tell me how you happen to be on this boat in the company of an old priest who intended to rape you,” I said.
“It’s a long story.”
“We have all night before I need to see anyone on deck.”
The story Esmeralda spun kept me awake all night.
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