Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism (11 page)

Caleb pointed at his chest.

“When my mom was vacuuming, she heard the Lord say,
He will love her more than life itself.
”

Her sisters had dreams.

“My brother heard from God when we were out shooting. I was shooting his gun, it was huge, and he was standing behind me. He had his left hand on my shoulder, and his right hand out in case I dropped it. I was kneeling down and aiming. It was gonna give me a big kick. The Lord said,
Caleb will guide her and protect her.
Another lady that we are kinda friends with had something else too.

“Honey,” she said, interrupting herself, “can you pass me another piece of pizza?”

“Then turns out we both wrote lists,” Caleb said. “Eden wrote hers when she was sixteen. One hundred and ten things she wanted in a man. I had my own list. Guess what? They were exactly the same.”

It didn’t take long. Eden canceled her marriage to a man she didn’t love and started a new one with Caleb. They had the ceremony in June 2007. Caleb wore a white tux and the minister walked his daughter up the aisle.

After dinner Caleb shuffled to the freezer. It made a growling sound. He disappeared into its cold light, returned with Popsicles. “Thai Thai,” he said. “Isabel Goose,” he said. The children ran to him. He kneeled.

“When God speaks,” I said, “what does that sound like to you?”

“When God speaks,” she said, “it’s a very strong inner thought. People are lying if they say they hear God’s voice because it’s not a voice. It’s a consciousness.”

“It plays like a video,” Caleb said, putting his elbows on the table.

“I don’t get those,” Eden said. “Sometimes it’s just knowledge. Everyone has different styles. Even when it’s crazy like what Caleb saw in the army.”

“Remember how I told you there’s going to be a flood in July?” Caleb said. He’d had a few prophecies for me. One included a flood in July and another that I’d marry a dirty farm boy. “Well, when this stuff comes down the pipe people will say, oh, how’d you know that? Because the day before you were crazy.”

“But you
are
crazy, honey,” Eden said, rubbing his back. “The Lord is actually talking all the time. It’s like a radio station. You have to tune your ear into it. I don’t know why, but I’m a little slower than others. I’m trying to figure out how to trust my own instinct. Once you start to get it, he will talk to you more and more and you will start to see crazy things. My sister, she has the gift of seeing, just like my dad.”

“It’s like how we trained in Special Ops. The sixth sense. It works both ways. The dark side has the same giftings. I view it as a war, as a battle going on out there. You are either fighting on one side or the other.”

“What if you don’t hear anything?” I said.

“If you don’t hear anything,” he said, “then you aren’t on either side.”

•  •  •

Before he met Eden, Caleb’s time with Wombly gave him headspace enough to hire eight men from flyers stapled to telephone poles. He started a construction company that served rich people in the Atlanta suburb of Buckhead, fixing unnecessary technology like voice-automated torchlights for driveways, refrigerated wine cellars with video security. He was running a profit until one of the workers stole all the money and ran away. It wasn’t much, but it was everything. He worked three months with no pay so that he could give paychecks to the rest of his men.

Once again, he’d lost everything.

Caleb quit the construction job and started work at Canton Chevrolet. Quit that too. Started work at Meineke. The cement there was always cool and he liked the way it felt on his skin when he pressed his hands on the ground to lower himself beneath a truck. He knew the inside of a truck as he knew a body; he kept it alive, seeing the complicated map of silver pipes and wires as a delicate surgical task. Sometimes, when the rain would start with the quick, static sound of an electric fuse, he’d push himself from under the truck, rising to watch the rain fall on all four sides of him, enclosing him in a soft blue world where he felt safe. He worked long hours until the sky turned orange and he returned home, still renting a room from his buddy Ryan.

On a Thursday, a man stepped into his office at Meineke. He told Caleb to shut up because he had some things to say. Caleb folded his arms, leaned back in his chair. “Do I owe you money? Did one of my guys screw you over?” The man told Caleb he wasn’t there about his business. “Your business is a piece of shit,” he said. Instead the man offered Caleb enough money to take a flight to Rhode Island the following week to attend a conference on theophostics—god
(theo)
and light
(phostics)
—where people came to be delivered from phobias, addictions, disorders, post-traumatic stress.

Caleb told the man he didn’t want his money. The man left it anyway. An envelope of cash. The man told Caleb he needed help. Many years later, Caleb would say that this man was sent by God.

At the time, Caleb owed money for rent but he did what the man said and traveled to Rhode Island anyway. At a session, the leader fluttered her hands around Caleb and told him he was holding on to darkness. She brought Caleb to the center of the room. He stood under fluorescent lights, bowed his head. “Have you ever heard anyone pray in tongues?” the woman said.

“No, ma’am, I haven’t.”

She prayed in tongues, under her breath, reminding Caleb of those languages he’d never understood in the Middle East and Afghanistan. “Now, Caleb, do you believe in Jesus Christ?”

“Well, sure.” He was born into a family who spoke of God at warm meals.

“Close your eyes and tell me what you see.”

“I see the back of my eyelids.”

“Father, show him what he needs to see!”

And he could see all the way back to when he was thirteen years old. It started with the guys burning in the helicopter, and the flesh coming off their skin. The day his ex-wife, Allyson, called him a murderer. The Black Thing telling Caleb he needed to die. All the horrible things that had happened in his life.

“Do you want to keep all those memories?”

No.

Everything went black. He could remember what happened—he knew his friends had burned and died—but he couldn’t feel it. The emotion was gone.

Caleb looked at the silent, weeping crowd. A gathering of people also seeking help in this world. “I’m only twenty-five years old,” Caleb told them, “but I feel like an old man.” He wept too. Something he’d never done in public view.

The group’s leader encouraged Caleb to talk in detail about the war, his dead buddies, and the apparitions that followed. A Vietnam veteran named Troy was in the audience, listening. When it was over, Troy introduced himself as a healer who sees and speaks healing to the deep hurts in the hearts of men. He had small, dark eyes. After Vietnam, he served twenty years as a firefighter and nineteen months as a trauma paramedic on combat posts in Afghanistan.

“Theophostics gets the little thing,” he said, “but it’s not going to make the big things go away.”

Troy said he knew how to get rid of the big thing. The thing that was following Caleb home from the war.

“Society thinks PTSD cannot be healed,” Troy said, “but society is wrong.”

Troy described a place in South Georgia where the layer between heaven and earth is very thin. He’d traveled there two years ago to get rid of the Black Thing. He wished he’d done it earlier. “It’s called deliverance,” he said. “It works wonders.” Troy offered to stop by Caleb’s home and drive him to Portal. He’d take him through deliverance.

“Other veterans had done it,” he said. “More are going to do it.”

Troy showed up at Caleb’s house the next day and unloaded a bundle of stakes from the trunk of his car. He wrote Scripture on their sides. Longhand with a permanent marker.

“You don’t have to be this formal,” he said, “this is just how I do it.”

And he drove the stakes into the ground. “Now,” he said, “nothing demonic can come on this property.”

A week later, they drove together to Portal. Two hundred miles of night road while Troy spoke quietly of demons.

The town was no town at all really. A region of pine and dust and a violent history where turpentine hunters once distilled resin, and woodriders with bush knives hacked at undisciplined workers until they bled like hogs.

Off Highway 26, down a long washboard dirt road, Troy pulled up to a trailer where a minister and his wife lived alone.

They sat Caleb down in a room and all these Christian people surrounded him in foldout chairs. No one said anything. They were writing things down on pieces of paper.

Then one by one, they all said something was trying to kill Caleb. They got images, visions. They described his wrists bloody and wrapped in barbed wire. They described a sword coming for his heart. They said he was tied down to a railroad track and the train was coming. “I see a Destroyer,” a man said, “in the form of a buffalo, trying to kill Caleb.”

The minister saw an angel fighting the Destroyer. The angel was worn out and tired and all the hair had been ripped out of its head.

Caleb felt a burning sore rip open on the back of his neck. It felt as if the flesh was coming off and something was being pulled up his spine toward the burning. They prayed for the blood of Jesus. He could feel hot Jesus blood coming down over his face. Everyone in the room started freaking out. A glowing thing moved down his legs. They said they’d never seen that before.

The minister reached his hands into the air and closed his eyes. “Caleb,” he said, “you have a reason to be alive.”

P
ART
III

HOW TO KILL AN INVISIBLE ENEMY

P
ortal, Georgia, which lies between Statesboro and Swainsboro, has 562 people, one streetlight, one restaurant called Pepper Jack’s, and a beauty pageant for infants called Baby Miss Turpentine. Dead armadillos are all over the road, shining dull the way I imagine diamonds look when pulled from the earth.

The minister and his wife, Tim and Katie Mather, Caleb’s in-laws, perform deliverance in a building called the Covenant Bible Institute, next to the Portal Church of God and two gas stations, off a street called Railroad. The institute is dry and full of sun and looks like a colorless Pizza Hut. Tim and Katie don’t actually hold service in a church, they gather at home, underground cells, a thing inspired by a fear of End Times, the Battle of Armageddon in the deserts of the Middle East.

In Portal there are dirt roads with signs pointing down more dirt roads. Most of them say
CHURCH
. Some of them are handwritten, some of them are fresh, industrial, but in most cases there is no church.
LIFE IS SHORT. ETERNITY ISN’T. I WOULDN’T BE CAUGHT DEAD WITHOUT JESUS. GO TO CHURCH OR THE DEVIL WILL GET YOU. PRAYER IS THE KEY TO UNLOCK JESUS. FOR THE HOPELESS JESUS IS THE ONLY HOPE. YOU THINK IT’S HOT OUT HERE? TRY HELL. BE HAPPY WITH YOURSELF. GOD LOVES YOU. COME IN, GOD HAS A PLAN FOR YOU. YOU HAVE ONE NEW FRIEND REQUEST FROM JESUS. ACCEPT? REJECT?

Tim and Katie live in a trailer fifteen minutes outside Portal. It’s a double wide, down four dirt roads, past a bullet-holed sign that says Church, in the middle of a field they claim was once an ocean. Fossils were dug from the ground; polished remains of giant sharks and things with necks longer than a house. Eden says it was the Flood.

No neighbors in view of their house. Only an abandoned building half eaten by vines.

Caleb says ninety-nine percent of people who come to the trailer return to the trailer.

After Caleb gets his kids, Isabel and Isaac, settled, he puts me in the windowless guest room with thin floral sheets and a porcelain angel. The angel has her hands raised in a nice way but her lips are painted wrong. They are on the side of her face, near the cheek, looking more wound than lip.

The minister is watching TV in the living room, on a leather chair with gold trim and a foldout footrest, demanding things from his wife, Katie. She didn’t buy the right ice cream. He wanted vanilla but not the kind with all the fruit in it. Katie looks around fifty years old and has long blond hair that falls to her hips. Her shirt says
WILD WEST
and her boots click softly on the blue linoleum. The kitchen is a spread of raw ingredients waiting to be cooked.

The minister unpauses the TiVo. “We have visitors here all the time,” he says. He doesn’t turn his neck but moves his entire torso in my direction. He has small blue eyes like badly sewn buttons. Hands big enough to grip a watermelon. “It’s like a hotel. Help yourself to anything.” A dusty copy of the
Virginian
is propped under the yellow glow of a rawhide lamp. He rocks slowly, watching an old Western on a flat-screen TV. His face breaks into a wide grin and the yellow ceiling light spills onto his forehead, making him glow along with the screen.

The trailer is blessed. The minister blesses all houses before he moves in. Words for him, once said, don’t perish, but live on, in the plywood boards of his home, in the carpet, in the water he drinks. He uses the word
divorce
as an example. He says it quietly, with his hands over his mouth. He doesn’t want the house to hear.

He blesses water and says the water that is blessed looks different under a microscope than the water that is cursed.

On the day the minister was outside feeding the chickens and came back inside to find his wife gone, a pot boiling, he was sure that God had come—taken his wife and left him. He got down on his knees and felt the first whimperings of despair.

There are photos of Roy Rogers in the bathroom and a saddle in the living room.

While Caleb watches TV with the minister I wander outside, onto the porch, where a woman’s drinking something yellow, wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt. She introduces herself as Pam. She’s forty years old and she’s “the adopted child.” Pam followed the minister’s family to Georgia from their previous home in upstate New York. She lives in Portal now. Her body spills from the chair. I hear her breathe. Some of her hair is curly and some straight. She kills ants with her feet.