When I was young I was afraid of the demonic, not because of my Episcopalian background but because my young and paranoid husband not only believed in them, he was determined, via some spell or other, to raise one! He wasn't planning to do this at our own little cottage, thank Heaven, but with some of his "friends."

During the time he was brooding and planning this project, we began to have cockroaches invade our house, and he did some research and came home with sulphur candles that he'd bought at the drugstore, so he said. He lit them all over the house, and they exuded the most hellish stench. Our cottage seemed (I expound the obvious here) to be overtaken demonically, what with my husband coming his hair down into a point over his forehead and reading The Golden Dawn and talking about his plans, while the house reeked of sulphur.

I began to be terrified and jumpy, unsure if my husband was overtaken already by a demon or whether the babies and I would be--he looked so odd with his pointy hair...

He told me he would be driving down to Atlanta and joining his friends to raise a demon in October. Naturally. I dreaded being alone in the house, with the closets still smelling (and they probably still do) of sulphur...

Close to Halloween, he told me that the plans to cast their spell were off. He didn't explain. I believed everything he said in those days, and I was utterly relieved, because I thought he really could have done it, and maybe brought something unholy home with him.

Now I know that he'd probably made up the entire story.

God, those were dark days. The cockroaches were with us until we moved, and the house still carried its sulphurous odor in deep closets.

I took the children and left him soon afterwards, leaving him and his Golden Dawn books behind in Florida, in a cottage infested with palmetto bugs, which are cockroaches that can fly.