Children Terrify Demons and Grandparents Help Them

Taking The Screwtape Letters as a model, Mr Hall envisions the demonic attack on the family during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

From One Peter Five

By Kennedy Hall

Read Chapter I here, Read Chapter II here, Read Chapter III here, Read Chapter IV here, Read Chapter V here, Read Chapter VI here, Read Chapter VII here, Read Chapter VIII here, Read Chapter IX here, Read Chapter X here, Read Chapter XI here, Read Chapter XII here, Read Chapter XIII here, Read Chapter XIV here, Read Chapter XV here.

Chapter 16

Malthus my boy,

If you are wondering why I am spying on you, well, then it seems you still do not understand the control I am entitled to over your affairs. You are my pupil, but more important, I am you master. I feared that you were growing complacent in your treatment of the children, and I was correct. You may have made great inroads with the father, but the job is far from over. Do not be shocked that that dimwitted devil Dagon took such a cheap bribe in order to feed me information. He is the lowest of the low that we produce in Hell, and he jumped at the chance for what he believed to be a slight promotion. In reality, being a simple henchman on your team was probably too complicated for him, so I figured I may as well have him complete a moronically simple task and transfer him to another unit. He is now assisting in our torturing endeavours of the damned, which offers him more action but requires no thought. He believes he has “moved up in the world,” but in reality we always put the most idiotic devils in his new location. He does not need to listen to any orders, think about any actions, or be restrained in any capacity; he simply needs to release his insatiable rage on whatever damned soul passes in front of him. I sometimes visit those lower chambers, it does offer quite a thrill.

Here’s the point: you must remember that for all the fun you may be having with the parents, especially the father, you still have the problem of two youths praying and growing in devotion. You have failed to transmit this information to me accurately and in its entirety, which is why you forced my hand. I have attached a devil to your team over whom I have complete control, and who is also quite cunning. He has shown promise and I will gladly replace you with him, and send you to spend time with Dagon if I must. Oh yes, we do enjoy torturing our own when the time is right, and a petulant devil like yourself would do quite nicely.

The information that I should have received from you is not the sort of thing I am looking to hear. The boy has not given up on his prayer habit, and his little sister still joins him each evening praying on her knees to the Terrible Woman who comes as an Army with Banners. The greater the chasm between the mother and father grows, and it is wide, the more the young ones retreat to prayer. I am certain at this point that some deceased relative who holds a prominent place in Heaven must be working on their behalf. There is simply no rational explanation as to why such relatively unformed children are able to withstand the veritable nuptial suicide that persists between the mother and father. It is as if they are impervious to the constant negativity and moral decay that causes such a pleasing stench of despair in the marriage.

I have seen this before, although it is fortunately rarer in our current era. Sometimes in a family, a dying member from an older generation will make a contractual arrangement with the Enemy by which they offer the totality of their sufferings for certain relatives. Again, we have no way of retrieving information from Heaven unless it is shown to us, but there have been various Exorcists who have taunted our tempters with this information in the past. From the scant bit of information we can remember from those encounters, we can piece together a reasonable hypothesis that confirms my suspicions. As I said in my last letter, the Terrible Triune Majesty works unfairly with the notion of forgiveness and so on. Not only is the farcical application of forgiveness a thorn in our side, but the Enemy goes even further and applies merits gained through the suffering of one person to another. This is what the insufferable Vessel of Election speaks of when he claims he fills up those things that are wanting in the sufferings of Christ. We have largely cured the Christians of any delusions that they need meaningfully partake in any suffering, let alone those of the Awesome and Terrible Name, however we cannot as of yet cure the more devoted lemmings.

As a result of our most devoted assets in the world of academics, the philosophical outlook that has been transmitted to the majority of educated people is a horizontal outlook. They have been trained to deny the three dimensional reality of time as the Enemy sees it. He is outside space and time, but also present at each moment of the lived time that the humans experience. For this reason He is able to gather their offerings, however deplorable they may be, and apply them as He sees fit. His existence in an eternally present moment allows Him to be He Who was and is and is to come (if we are forced to speak this awful lyrical “beauty” as they call it). As a result, his application of graces is done in a manner that eludes our predictions. He must be cheating in some fashion—I told you, He does not play fairly.

I reread the dossier about the family that you gave me in the beginning, and I believe that our current problem is due to the mother’s deceased grandmother. As much as I would like to blame you for this blunder, I myself failed to see the potential for such activity.  As you know, the grandmother was from one of those Central European nations that has historically been repugnant in their fidelity to the Church.  She lived through the major wars, the civil conflicts during the revolutions, and for years under the most delectable of Communist dictatorships. Through all those trials, she kept her faith like a stubborn mule. Even as we inspired the happy return of iconoclasm in churches all throughout the world, she still persisted. We leveled heresy after heresy at her from the pulpit, inspired hellishly deviant advice in the confessional, and decimated the religious orders that educated her as a girl. She watched as the Church began to implode while the ripe smoke of Satan seeped through every welcoming crack. No matter. She did what the most irritating saints always do; she embraced the Tree of Suffering.

Although we never admit this in a public fashion—don’t you dare suggest to anyone I have told you this—there are some humans that we simply cannot break. Many devils have been driven to perdition as a result of contemptible souls such as this. I found the failed devil who oversaw the grandmother; he is in the Asylum and does nothing more than blabber on about his traumatic memories like a demented fool. I asked him about the woman and he shrieked like the humans do when we first introduce them to real fire. He was too pathetic to get any coherent information out of him. However, the warden of the Asylum presented me with the daily logs the demon recorded at the end of her life. I was correct. She offered the sufferings she endured at the end of her life from a strong cancerous disease. For reasons beyond us, this nemesis of ours chose to present her anguish to the Enemy and begged Him to apply their merits for the salvation of the children under your care. Why she chose them I do not know. But, we now have a better understanding of the force with which we are dealing.

For all the venom being funneled into the mother and father, we must act with more severity if we are to break the children. There is no option but to pull the strings with more ferocity. I haven’t done this in years, but I myself will be making a visit to the family. I believe I can accelerate the process in a more lively fashion. Perhaps you may learn a thing or two from me.

Until next time,

Quelle

To be continued next week.

Editor’s note: this serialization is from the novella Lockdown with the Devil.