Free Remembering Satan by Lawrence Wright Page A

from his children, was sobbing so hard that he could speak only in gasps. He managed to say that Chad had been a victim, and pleaded with him to try to remember the abuse. “You have to get it out,” he cried.
    “I’ve never seen him like that,” Chad later told Schoening. “It’s like it was a different person. It wasn’t my dad there.That wasn’t my dad there. That wasn’t my dad.… It didn’t even feel like him when I hugged him.”
    Chad accompanied Schoening to the interview room, where Dr. Peterson was waiting. Before Peterson turned on the tape, Schoening advised Chad that he might be arrested because of Ericka’s accusations against him, so from the beginning of this interrogation, which stretched over most of two days, there was an incentive for Chad to paint himself as a victim. He began, however, by once again denying that he had ever been molested. His main grievance in the family was that he had to do more chores than the other children. He did admit to attempting suicide three years before, when he was seventeen. “Probably something my dad said. I can’t remember the specifics,” he said. There was a pale trace of a razor cut on his wrist, or seemed to be. “Where is it?” Chad asked himself aloud, as he attempted to point it out to the detectives. “It’s right here, right along the crease.” The detectives did not indicate whether or not the scar was visible to them.
    “It was something very traumatic to you that your dad said that really hurt you,” Schoening said, theorizing. “Maybe it hurt your manhood.”
    Chad tentatively replied that his father might have called him a loser. “But I don’t think he said that. I can’t remember.”
    “You can remember what happened,” Peterson admonished him. “You can choose to remember that if you want to.”
    “Like what?” said Chad, obviously confused. “What do you mean, ‘remember’?”
    “What he’s sayin’ is, it’s there,” said Schoening. “The memories are there. We’re just tryin’ to help you.”
    “I know, I know,” said Chad. “They’re there. I just can’t—I just can’t put the dot on it, though.”
    “Well, I’m not surprised,” Peterson said. “It’s not unusual with kids who’ve been through what you’ve been through to not be able to remember. Number one, they don’twant to remember. Number two, they’ve been programmed not to remember.”
    “Mm-hm.”
    Some time later, Peterson said, “I can tell you that the way to being what you want to become—a healthy adult—is to deal with those memories.”
    “Mm-hm.”
    “Because they have—they—I say ‘they’ because I believe that there’s a ‘they’ who have done this to you.”
    “Mm-hm.”
    At moments, the conversation lurched into therapy or instant psychoanalysis, as Chad was urged to reveal his thoughts about his family and his rather limited sexual experience. Eventually, the interrogators prodded the young man into talking about his mental problems. He admitted that he had heard voices inside his head. Then, in a painfully halting manner that reminded the detectives of his father’s interminable pauses, Chad described vivid dreams he had had as a child: “People outside my window, looking in, but I knew that wasn’t possible, because … we were on two floors and I would … I would have dreams of, uh, little people … short people coming and walking on me … walking on my bed … uh, I would look outside and … out of my door.” The little people reminded him of the Seven Dwarfs, he said.
    “Those are dreams of being invaded,” Peterson declared.
    “Yeah, and I would look out my door and I would see … a house of mirrors and … and no way of getting out.”
    “Of being violated, trapped in an inescapable situation,” Peterson said, interpreting. “What happened to you was so horrible.”
    “Right.”
    “You want to believe it’s dreams,” Schoening said. “You don’t want to believe