Free Remembering Satan by Lawrence Wright Page B

it’s real. It was real. It was real, Chad.”
    “No, this was outside my window, though,” Chad protested,pointing out that his bedroom had been on the second floor. Also, his older brother had slept in the same room—why hadn’t he ever seen anything?
    “What you saw was real,” Schoening insisted. “This same type of stuff has come out of your dad, too.”
    “Were you shaking in your boots or did you pee on the floor? Were you that scared?” asked Peterson.
    “No, no,” said Chad. He claimed he had no strong feelings about the dream, just a leaden sensation, as if he were stuck in concrete. “I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t move except to close the curtain,” Chad went on. “The only thing I could feel was pressure on my chest.”
    “What was on your chest?” Peterson asked.
    “Well, this is a different dream,” Chad said, recalling a recurring nightmare of his adolescence. “Every time a train came by, a whistle would blow and a witch would come in my window.… I would wake up, but I couldn’t move. It was like the blankets were tucked under and … I couldn’t move my arms.”
    “You were being restrained?” Peterson asked.
    “Right, and there was somebody on top of me.”
    “That’s exactly real,” Schoening said excitedly. “That’s the key, Chad. That’s what was really going on.”
    “Chad, these things happened to you,” Peterson insisted. “They assaulted your ability to know what was real.”
    “O.K.”
    “Pretty hard to remember this?”
    “No, it was like it was yesterday.” Chad then recalled that when the train whistle blew, he would find himself on the floor, and a fat witch with long black hair and a black robe would be sitting on top of him.
    “Look at her face,” Schoening said. “Who is this person? Somebody who is a friend of your family’s?”
    “It was usually dark,” said Chad. He said the witch’s visitsoccurred once or twice a week, lasting for half an hour, until they moved out of the old house. “I would hear the whistle; I would feel the pressure on my chest; I would be on the floor; but I would never feel myself getting out of bed, moving to the floor, and then I would be on the floor and then I would be back in bed, but never feel myself going from the floor back to the bed.” As for his brother, Chad recalled that when the witch was in the room, Paul Ross would be gone, “but then when I would wake up, I would look and he would be there.”
    “Who does this person remind you of?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You don’t want to know or you don’t know?” Peterson asked.
    “Probably I don’t want to know.”
    “Somebody you respect?”
    “Right.”
    “Is there something there physically to keep your mouth from making noise?” Schoening asked.
    “No, because I remember breathing.”
    “What’s in your mouth?”
    “I don’t know. A cloth, maybe.”
    “It’s very important, Chad. What’s it feel like in your mouth?”
    “Uh, it’s not hard.”
    “Just let the memory come,” Peterson advised. “It’s not what you think about, it’s what you’re trying not to think about.” When Chad resisted being steered any further, Peterson and Schoening told him that he had been programmed not to remember anything. “Why’d you have to run away from it?” Peterson demanded.
    And Schoening added, “You wanted to go somewhere safe, right?”
    “No, it was safe here,” said Chad. “I always felt safe.”
    “Even when all this was going on?” Schoening asked.
    “Except for the dreams,” Chad said, obviously bewildered. “I—Because I thought they were—I put them off as dreams.”
    “Destruction of his sense of reality,” Peterson said authoritatively. “Destruction of any ability to feel. Total, absolute obedience and subservience to the group.”
    A few minutes later, Schoening said, “Let’s go back to when you were fourteen to sixteen and this person’s sitting on you.” How much room did Chad think there had been