Demon Camp: A Soldier's Exorcism (12 page)

“I worked at AT&T for twenty years,” Pam says. “Nothing to write home about.”

The minister has four children and fourteen grandchildren. They all live in Portal. His oldest child lives a dirt road away. It’s a Saturday, and by late afternoon all fifteen grandkids, ranging from two months to nine years, are in the yard, jumping on the trampoline, screaming, running naked. One pisses on the ground, facing me, as close as possible without hitting my feet. Another picks ants out of the portable swimming pool and eats them. A redheaded nine-year-old named Amaryllis comes up to me and opens her mouth. I feed her.

Then there’s the child that they say is different from the others. She does not talk, she moans. She always appears to be drowning, looking up while her eyes pool with light. Her hands are small white moths roaming the curves of her mother’s body. Her mother is married to the minister’s only son. She tells me she doesn’t believe in autism.

A few veterans wander the yard fixing cars: Iraq, Somalia, Vietnam.

A hundred yards out, past the lawn chairs facing nowhere, past the pool full of dead ants, past the fallen children’s toys, the grass turns to field, boulders break from the ground, and sunflowers stand leaning like the silhouettes of men. The field darkens at the curve of the earth, until it is eaten by the sky.

Out there, a dog, big as a colt and matted like it’s just been put through the wash, is digging. He and the minister’s dog Hoss make love at night, and everyone can hear their violence made public by the clear air. Hoss comes home in the morning, bloody and smiling.

Black clouds rise over the eastern sky and Pam takes me inside where the air is dense with the smell of butter and children. The minister’s wife cuts lasagna into neat squares and passes them among us. The children sit at a long oak table, the adults in the living room.

The lights flicker and moan and one of them dies in a quiet flash.

Ice cream is passed. The power goes out. The trailer shakes with thunder. The children scream on cue and the mothers laugh, lighting candles. The men put on work boots and head outside. Lightning made a gash in the earth, they report. Smoke rises from the ground and hail replaces rain.

I ask Katie if we need to worry about anything.

I feel the room go quiet behind me and when I turn around everyone is staring at me, forks stopped in midair, mouths open.

“Georgia gets tornados,” she says, crossing her arms. “But this property doesn’t.” I excuse myself to the living room. They stop talking to me. I pick the smallest infant to hold. It has blue eyes, same as all the others.

Caleb joins me and touches my back. “Don’t worry,” he says. “They’re not being rude.”

The baby is as fat and pale and hairless as a baby could possibly be. It crawls along the floor using only its front arms to slide forward.

“It’s just that they don’t think they’re talking to you. They think they’re talking to your demons.”

•  •  •

Morning, and the television is the trailer’s bright center. The minister rocks in his chair, whistling with a wide mouth.

Katie’s drinking tea on the couch next to him with her legs crossed, hunched over a book called
When Heaven Invades Earth,
purple clouds and a lightning bolt on the cover. I step into the room and they tell me Caleb’s gone to work on the vehicles. Faraway towns, asking for money. “He’ll be back.”

The light is filtered through dark curtains. I sit down on the couch across from Katie and look at the minister. “Caleb told me to talk to you.” The television goes dark. “About what?” he says. He was a preacher for twenty-nine years and his voice is thick and cool as a bite of peach. Katie puts a pen in her book and leaves the room.

“If you really want to know,” he says. “I’ve written six books on demonic bondage. I’ll let you borrow one if you want.” He lifts himself out of the rocking chair, using both hands to leverage his weight, and disappears into his bedroom. The door opens just enough to reveal a wide bed burdened with yellowing pillows. One of his granddaughters reposes naked on the bed. She holds both her feet at her ankles and spreads them winglike, lifting them outward and upward. Her head falls back in a quick flourish and she springs to her feet, dancing, using the mattress as a trampoline to propel her frame upward. She lands and balances herself, elegantly, a ballerina before the onslaught of applause.

The minister’s son walks into the room. “Who are you?” he asks.

“I’m Caleb’s friend,” I say, not wanting to explain.

“Caleb has friends?”

The minister returns with a book called
Prophetic Deliverance: The Missing Ministry in the Church of God
. On the cover a sunset breaks foamy clouds. The book is self-published and the category is spiritual warfare.

I flip through the pages. Definitions of demons. Origins of demons. Names of demons. It’s mostly anecdotes about the minister’s encounters with demons. The whole religion came to him in a prophecy while mowing the lawn six years ago in Elmira, New York.

“How many have you brought through deliverance?”

“I stopped counting at five thousand.”

All deliverance ministries believe people are in bondage to a pattern of sin. Trauma is a doorway through which demons can pass. It grew out of Pentecostalism, a movement often traced to a run-down Apostolic Faith Mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles, birthed in 1906 by the fervent demands of the one-eyed preacher William J. Seymour, son of slaves. Three waves of Pentecostalism followed. Many third-wave Pentecostals assign a demon or a corps of demons to geopolitical units in the world.

“One of the biggest problems with prophetic deliverance,” the minister says, “or so I’ve been told by religious minds, is that it’s too simple. We had one woman who used some severe language after hers. She stomped her feet and started yelling, ‘I’m so fucking mad. I’m so fucking angry.’ The birthing process, it just takes a minute. It doesn’t take hours.”

“Do you think everyone has a demon?”

“Yes. It’s usually people who’ve been through traumatic experiences.” He throws a thumb at the place where Katie had been sitting. “She experienced trauma that could only be fixed with deliverance. But the trauma can be small.”

“Can I observe a session?”

The minister says no, that won’t be happening. He reaches for his lemonade. The chair groans beneath his weight. “It’s too dangerous.” He gulps, sighs. “The demons can transfer. Once we forgot to put protection over the cars out in the parking lot and the demons tore up four vehicles in a row. It’s no joke.”

“I asked what would happen if I went through deliverance.”

He tells a story about a depressed Protestant. Protestants don’t believe God can inhabit the body, and deliverance requires this belief to work properly. Eventually the Protestant told the minister that he converted but must have lied because during the session the man started gagging, making terrible retching sounds like his insides were coming out. He put his hands on his knees and coughed up a cloud of black flies.

Two months later he was in jail for armed robbery.

“How much does it cost to get the demons out?”

“God said if I ever charged you, he’d kill me.”

For a while, the Mathers gave deliverance to anyone who asked, but Tim heard stories of people going crazy, ending up in jail. Now it’s required that anyone who receives deliverance spend three days in Portal. He calls it a deliverance retreat. It costs $199, which includes food, housing, a demon workbook, classes on spiritual warfare, and a thirty-minute exorcism. Each retreat has a fifteen-person limit and everyone’s required to have read Tim Mather’s book. They’re thinking of buying a building where they can bring people through deliverance on a regular schedule, but for now they go anywhere there’s space: the trailer, empty stores in Portal, abandoned buildings, their daughters’ houses, the Covenant Bible Institute.

“The best way to understand deliverance,” he says, “is from a military standpoint.” He starts equating prophecy with military intelligence and deliverance with boot camp. “Boot camp is where civilians are transformed into soldiers. It’s uncomfortable and unsettling but you come out of there a warrior, well-equipped and unafraid.”

At one point he thought of calling it death camp because you would be dying for Christ. But then he realized the name would scare people.

Tim reaches for the remote. “Well, it’s a good thing I have a TV. It’s my only connection to the real world.”

The phone rings. He answers, listens, sighs. He presses the receiver to his chest and bows his head. Katie looks up from her place in the kitchen. They embrace in the light near the porch doors. Katie leans her head back and closes her eyes to a wide beam of sunlight.

“A poverty demon just arrived in Portal,” he says.

•  •  •

Tim and Katie met as ten-year-olds at Bible camp and went together as much as ten-year-olds could. They lost touch, found each other again. Another Bible camp, another town. They were sixteen and played in the high school Gospel band. Three years later, they married, and after they married, Tim enrolled at Toccoa Falls College in Georgia. After a semester and a half, he quit. It was a recession and they had three kids. The military was Tim’s last-ditch effort to get a job.

He was stationed in the small town of Minot, North Dakota. One day a traveling evangelist named Bill Putnam made his way through town to visit the soldiers. They gathered at the Christian and Missionary Alliance Church and Tim confessed to Mr. Putnam that he’d been having some bowel problems. Mr. Putnam told Tim not to worry—he knew just the thing. Mr. Putnam placed both his hands on Tim’s head and told a group of demons to get off his tongue. Tim didn’t like the idea of demons living in his tongue, but then his mouth filled with saliva and he felt them leave. Swallowing, Tim wrote in
Prophetic Deliverance
, never felt so good. They stayed for seven years, and an ex-pastor took Tim through deliverance in 1980. At the time, he was in his late thirties and feared darkness. Now, when it’s completely dark, he can walk out the door of his house and across the yard, down the lane, past horses and the animals in the woods.

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.