Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon
19
The Greatest Demon
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that taking things out of order like I have would mean I have to go back in time in order to explain what happened next. In this instance, I’m going back around fifteen hundred years.
I’d been wandering around Egypt for some fifty or seventy-five years. Rome had consolidated its hold on the world and I had parted ways with Caesar when he burned the library at Alexandria. Well, he didn’t burn it, Cleopatra’s brother started the fire, but Caesar didn’t help. But since my ship was also burned, I had some trouble getting out of Egypt.
Yeah, me and libraries. I love books. I saw Ptolemy’s rabble headed toward the docks and had to choose whether I’d save my ship or the library. I ran into the great library to tell the librarians to start packing. I opened a portal into the infinity room and the librarians scooped up every scroll and book they could carry and took them to my little world. Then they came back and grabbed another handful. I went through the library grabbing everything I could and shoving it through the portal, telling the librarians to sort it all out when they got there. The library wasn’t quite empty when the flames caught up to us, but we’d saved thousands of volumes. I closed the bag and ran.
Ultimately, I ended up wandering around in the desert like the proverbial Moses, which was a big legend told in Egypt. “Be good, children, or Moses will get you.” It was quite a different story than what was told in Judea. In Egypt, Moses was painted as a lying magician who double-crossed the masters of the land, set traps that killed their children, and sent plagues on the land that forced Pharaoh to expel him and his chosen people. And then the idiot led a million people out into the desert and wandered around until all who had left the good life in Egypt were dead, including Moses. Their kids descended on the land near Jordan River like a swarm of locusts and consumed everything and everyone in their way. Egyptians had no love of Moses.
I digress. I wandered with little or no purpose. There were other libraries in Egypt and I could foresee more destruction in their future. So, I picked up the families of the librarians I’d collected and made my way south to the Temple of Rameses, later changed and rebuilt by Ptolemy Soter. The significant thing was that it had an immense library. The priests of Horus, who were also the librarians, had already begun moving and hiding the many volumes stored there. It took me a long time and a lot of convincing, with a few visits from the librarians of Alexandria, to get the priests and librarians to bring the books all to the infinity room and then to get them settled.
I almost settled down there and joined them in the infinity room. In fact, I did for a while in order to create rebuilt replicas of the two great libraries. There were a lot of old places in Egypt where I could hide us. I’d heard about Kafre’s tomb and the great Sphinx, but I’d never been there. What an engineering wonder! There was no question in my mind that the many Egyptian demons—djinni—had a hand in building the massive structures. There were places there where I could occupy a corner of the space and just enjoy the infinity room and my women.
After fifty or seventy-five years, I had a yearning for new wine and decided to head north again. This journey took me on the same perilous route Moses led the Israelites on. Except I took a few shortcuts and avoided the Red Sea altogether. There were other adventures, but I’ll talk about those later. That’s not the point of this story.
When I got up to Jerusalem, I found the most incredible thing I’d ever seen.
I’d had dealings with Jews over six hundred years before—ah, sweet Miriam, my wife—and found them to be reasonable people in everything except their religion. And I saw a few examples of why they were so devoted to it. But nothing had prepared me for Jesus.
I first heard of him from an itinerant preacher out in the wilderness who was baptizing people and telling them the Lord was coming. Well, I’ve always been one to follow the customs of the god whose land I was in, so I got in line and got baptized, too. Got the satchel sprinkled as well, so I counted that as having all its hundred thousand plus citizens baptized. Then I went off to see Jesus when John pointed him out.
I liked that dude! He preached some of the same things I’d advocated over the millennia. Peace, love, and kindness. It got me real excited. I mean, here was a demon summoned by an entire nation! They’d been working on the chants and pleas with their god for centuries until they finally built up enough unified will to conjure Jesus. He healed people, fed people, chastised those who were greedy, and forgave those who were weak. Just like Ninra and Namri. I wanted to do a little something for his ministry and I figured I could set myself up at a watering hole someplace in the wilderness and do what John was doing: Give people a ritual cleansing that would prepare them to meet Jesus.
I’d just found a place where I thought I might set up when I heard that John was dead! The fuckers cut his head off! What kind of place was this? I knew the Romans were merciless killers, but I’d never heard anything about the Jews being so single-mindedly violent toward one of their own.
I took shelter in a cave where I found a few scrolls buried in clay pots. I didn’t want to defile any holy place and there was no one to ask about taking the books. Being a basically honest demon, I took the pots into the infinity room one at a time and worked a duplication spell on them that I’d found in one of the old scrolls. Did I tell you about that? Oh, yeah. I did. Once I had duplicated the contents of a pot, I took it back and worked a little spell on it to make it watertight and impervious to the elements. No telling how long it was intended to stay buried there as a kind of time capsule. Then I took the next pot in line and duplicated it. I wished I could find some Jewish librarians to join me, but nobody was doing any active work except in the temple.
It really burned me when I heard the Romans had executed Jesus. I found out all I could about it and decided they couldn’t have been successful. You see, Zeus had told me when I was only a year old how a demon could be killed. I was sure Jesus had to be alive and word eventually filtered out that his disciples had seen him. I was relieved to hear it.
Still, I knew he wouldn’t be able to stay in this area. They’d just keep trying. And that decided me that I shouldn’t stay in the area either. I crossed over Jordan headed east and knocked the dust off my sandals, so to speak. I wanted as far away from this place as possible.
I knew this area from ancient times and it hadn’t changed all that much. I made my way back to the great river and built a raft on which I floated leisurely south toward the sea.
I acquired a good-sized fisherman’s boat near the mouth of the river and started stocking it up with trade goods to take me through the Persian Gulf to the Sea of India. I worked a few spells on the boat to make it more sea worthy. The routes were well-known by traders of the day and even back in my days in Bathra, we had seen traders bringing spices from the south. While I was working on the boat and preparing it for sea travel, a voice behind me spoke.
“Are you heading for the open sea in the south?” he asked.
“Yeah. That’s the plan if I don’t get blown apart. I’ve had a bad time with Poseidon in the past, but I don’t think he’s active down here.”
“I would expect there are others, but no one who would have a reason to harm you,” he said. He sounded familiar and I pulled my head out of the hold to turn and look at him. There was Jesus! Well, I’d assumed he wasn’t in Judea any longer. He sure couldn’t stay there after being crucified.
“Lord, how may I help you?”
“Start by not calling me Lord. I’ve had quite enough of that. Call me Issa. That’s the name my friends in the south use. If you can stand the company, I’d happily ride with you to get home.”
“That’s great, Issa. I understand you know your way around boats as well. I have provisions, so we can launch as soon as you’re ready.”
He grabbed a towline and we pulled the boat toward deeper water, then we both jumped in.
Ah, the salt wind in my hair! The smell of the sea! The sound of the waves lapping against the sides. And a congenial partner to share the journey—even if not the lusty goddess Aphrodite.
We talked and relaxed on the boat for the better part of a month, fishing and eating and enjoying each other’s company. Then he guided me to a port where I tied up and embraced him before he disembarked.
“Can I come with you, Issa?” I asked.
“Oh, Bob. You know it’s not a good idea for two like us to stay in the same place. I love you, brother, but I don’t want to compete with you.”
I understood, I guess. I’d considered doing miracles like he’d done. He’d tried to teach me the simple spell for turning water into wine and the result tasted so foul it brought tears to his eyes. I poured it overboard with my apologies to the local sea god. I’d stick to making my wine from fermented grapes.
I waved goodbye, and then shoved off to continue farther south along the coast of what would become India. I was in that region for a century or three before I continued eastward. I’ll revisit some of my adventures in India later. It’s a story worth telling about. I learned their pantheon of gods, the castes and social order, the architecture, oh! and tantric sex. From an interesting perspective. One day I’ll tell you all about that.
I bring all this little digression to the fore simply to tell you that I knew Jesus and I knew India. I knew the people there. I have many people in my household in the infinity room from the Indian subcontinent. I traveled the many islands surrounding the great peninsula and ventured across the warm eastern sea to the lands in southeast Asia, Japan, and China.
The people we saw on the island where Columbus first made landfall were not Indian. It was as obvious to me as the greed of my shipmates. They all but ignored the people who came out to greet us and went in search of gold and riches. They were disappointed.
Of course, you couldn’t tell Chris that he wasn’t in India. No, he named the people Indians and went to search for all the gold. Even if he had landed in India, I could have told him gold was a rarity there. The great trade goods from India and Asia were spices and silks. That other idiot explorer, Marco Polo, had given people false expectations. We crossed paths briefly in China. Maybe I’ll get a chance to tell you about him later.
Explorers. I’m sorry to count myself among their number. Let me give you the basics of the life and mind of an explorer. He is generally a man hyped up on his own manhood, who believes he can take on anything. He is not usually anywhere near as smart as he perceives himself. When he comes up with an idea of a place to explore, he makes that his single-minded goal. He decides to become a demigod and do something no other man has done or can do.
But his adventure must be financed. No adventure is free, especially if he wants the best equipment that will ensure his success. That is expensive. So, he must find a way to finance his exploration. The first way is to be rich. If he has enough money to fund even a part of his exploration, he can leverage that wealth to get others to invest in him. It is called a joint venture. A joint venture is when a man with experience teams up with a man with money. At the end, the roles are reversed.
The second means is to focus on what motivates a potential investor. Religion is always the most effective, because it can disguise any other motivation as altruism and concern for the souls of others. Chris almost screwed that up with Isabella the first time he met with her. A good Catholic girl may tease, but she doesn’t surrender. But when we whispered, “To save the souls of the heathen who have never heard the word of our Lord,” she wet her panties. And when we suggested the Lord would reward her with the riches of a new world for her faithful service, she excitedly spread her… um… purse strings.
You see, you can never jump to the conclusion that a person is just motivated by riches. That seems greedy and it’s an insult to his character. But to suggest a person who serves his or her god will be rewarded, not only with riches in heaven, but with wealth on earth, you have an unbreakable commitment. The gods have been using it to control people for all of human history.
Imagine if you will, a billionaire who has all the wealth he needs, but sees a new potential source of income. Of course, he will not risk all his own wealth on the enterprise. It would be seen as self-indulgent and suspect. He needs joint venture partners. What would happen if he went to the leaders of his religion and declared, “The poor people of Mars suffer under eternal damnation because we have not taken the word of God to them. We must evangelize the universe in the name of our god and God will reward us with eternal riches in heaven and with the wealth of the entire planet Mars in this life.”
Even poor Baptists in Alabama would be lining up to contribute to his missionary trip to Mars. People would work in his factories at substandard wages to pay for this great evangelical endeavor. The finest equipment would be donated by ‘sponsors.’
And somewhere along the line, possibly while waiting on a voyage of some months from Earth to Mars, the idea of untold wealth would come to the fore and greed would become the motivating force. So it was with Columbus and his merry men.
My insistence that this was not India, nor even an island near India, got me put off the ship. Actually, it was when the Santa Maria ran aground that I left the party. Chris couldn’t get all the men on his two remaining ships, so he made the bold move of establishing a settlement and leaving some forty of his men behind. I was ‘needed there’ to minister to the spiritual needs of the settlers.
I may have been the only one happy to see the ass-end of the Nina and Pinta. I marked it as the end of my time in the Christian world with the charlatans, priests, monarchs, and explorers.
It did not take long for the sailors put ashore to realize they were missing one of the principal ingredients for happy colonization. They were forty-one men (and one demon) who had no women and no prospect that Columbus would revisit them with European women. The natives would have to do. And that was a source of contention. The prevailing opinion among the settlers was that “god’s people” should have whatever they wanted. And they wanted women. The natives—and especially their women—were not enthused about the idea.
I’d been going out to visit the local tribe to learn as much as I could about their customs and society. They did not seem to the Europeans to have a religion and therefore had no excuse not to humbly accept their God and give the Europeans their women. But though there was no ‘church’ as such, I witnessed the natives asking the sea to bless their fishing, asking the sky to bring them rain, asking the earth to give them crops. They were very religious.
My words fell on deaf ears when I encouraged the men to a life of temperance and abstinence. I even considered asking for volunteers in the infinity room to come and provide for the ‘needs’ of these sailors, but I couldn’t see exposing any of my people to them, even if they volunteered.
I was returning to the settlement after listening to a shaman in the native village one afternoon, when I heard a scuffle and muted cries in the woods nearby. Upon investigating, I saw one of the sailors ripping the clothing off a native woman and plundering her sex.
I am not a violent demon. I believe in peace. I believe in love. I believe in sex. But I had made it clear that I considered rape a capital offense. I did not hesitate to slit the sailor’s throat. I’m sad I got blood on the woman. She scrambled away, gathered what clothes she had about her and fled. I didn’t even bother collecting the memories of the dead man. As far as I was concerned, I’d had enough foul memories from European men. I stripped off my ecclesiastical robes, dropped all disguise as a man, and scampered off into the wilderness with my bag as the goat-legged demon I am.
I found a cave in the island mountains and crept deep into it. I reviewed my spells that would keep us undetected, and strengthened them so no one from outside would stumble upon my bag. Once the spells were set, I opened the entrance to the infinity room and stepped inside.
Though there was no sensation of the passing of time in the infinity room, I was welcomed as if I had been absent for years and as if I just came home from a hard day at the office. My wives and harem spread a feast before me that included a wide variety of pussies. Esmeralda was fascinated to see my full demon form revealed and did her best to ride me to exhaustion. She succeeded, but it was her exhaustion and not mine. Then it was Princess Agora, Zhi, Lakshmi, Pari, Penelope, Josie, and finally Nimia. There were others as well, but don’t let me get distracted by going into their stories right now. I’ll get around to it.
My wives, possessions, and devotees had been hard at work administering the world within the infinity room. I was surprised to find there were now over a million and a half loyal subjects of Demon Bob scattered over a range of hundreds of miles. Wherever one of my people settled, the fertile land spread farther before him. It got me thinking there were frontiers aplenty in both my world and the natural world and no one needed to take anything from anyone else. Of course, the pride of our world was the library, and people came from all over the infinity room to read there.
When I first got to Italy—remember the beginning of this story?—I managed to get inside the vast Vatican Library, which was almost as big as the Library of Alexandria and was better kept. I spent nearly a year in the rooms. I would not steal the man’s library, but I did copy it. Using the replication spells I had used with the holy books of the Jews, I duplicated each book and handed it through to the librarians in the infinity room. I handed through a couple of librarians as well, and went off to collect their wives and children. One or two devoted monks found welcome arms among the priestesses of Aphrodite and were never the same again.
I have found over the centuries that the most dependable people in the world are librarians. Librarians are not duplicitous. They have no pronounced loyalty to any god, but only to the written words. They will defend the knowledge contained in those pages, even when the words of one contradict the words of another. Librarians are champions of knowledge, keepers of secrets, and fearless warriors for freedom. And when all else has failed, librarians are the leaders of revolutions.
I was always happy to sit with a librarian for a few hours to discuss what he was reading and how it compared to other volumes in the library. After spending a day discussing a good book, I would return to my little home—still reminiscent of my home with Pinaruti, though occasionally added onto to accommodate the needs of my growing harem—and I would indulge in lovemaking with my women. It was a good life.
Often Nimia and I would sit by the pool—very much like the pool I’d built in Babylon—and talk about the books we’d read and the meanings of various passages we’d found in the writings. She was more than a librarian and I loved her intensely.
Eventually, I decided I needed to check on our security and surroundings. I stepped out of the infinity room and back into the cave. There was a stillness over the island that I could not fathom. I shouldered the satchel and inspected my new body, patterned after the natives of the island. All was the way I expected it to be, so I went out to see what had transpired during my absence.
It was a wasteland. The village founded by the sailors was gone, as well as the native village. I found many had been killed by the European guns, but many more fell to the ravages of smallpox. As I wandered around the island, I found other places where new European settlements had been established, but in all areas, the disease had decimated the native population.
It was time to leave this place. I consulted my charts and decided I should go south and west in order to find another island or country where, perhaps, the Europeans had never traveled. I built a boat worthy of the sea and shoved off from this land to seek another.
Comments
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
