You want to know how I found out?

Imagine you're eight, face sticky and brain full of Nintendo, and all you want is to load up your saved game of Final Fantasy and see if you can beat the Marsh Cave. But no, you can't, because Dad's got the TV today and he's got that gray tightness to his face that tells you this is not the time to argue. So you sit on the couch, fidgeting constantly (because you're a Very Patient Boy) and watching your dad watch the news—and he makes a noise you don't recognize, high and wet and shivering; and you look at the TV and you see words you don't know, underneath a shot of a church painted all over with red stars, of people moaning and screaming in voices like wild animals, of a face that's all untamed eyes and shaggy, monstrous beard, talking about some terrible truth he's here to explain; and you turn to your poor, mouth-covering, shuddering father and you ask, ignorant of oncoming history:

"Daddy, what's a...cult?"

No answer. You keep asking. "Is Satan like Santa?"

Now imagine you're ten, a little taller and a little thinner, and your memories for two years have been of vans. They come to the school without warning, big white vans that smell like dust and spoiled cinnamon, full of men in thick coats and white collars who just want to talk to people. They talk to students and to teachers, always in corners or outside classrooms, whispers and furtive glances that fill your little mind with questions. Then they take students into the vans: the quiet staring ones, the ones who nobody likes; the ones like you. Most of them come back out. The news says they're looking for monsters, for howling people like the ones when you were eight. Of course, you're ten, and when you hear monsters some part of you thinks of Muppets; some part of you mocks them. But the rest of you wonders if the whispers you hear make you a monster, if that wart you keep getting when the exchange student stares at you is your real form trying to get out; wonders if that's what they're trying to find with their prodding fingers and questions about your faith; and listens in the night, ears full of needles, for the squeak of an Inquisition van's brakes.

Now imagine you're a graduate student with a penchant for cheap bourbon and self-absorbed poetry, another hedonist surfing the wake of the big papal apology. You like to read in French because it lets you make fun of people who insist on reading translations; you're considering religion just because everybody is an atheist these days. Where do you go for a vacation?

New Orleans is great, even after the hurricane, the kind of party you have when you're still hung over from last night. You're a graduate student, and you're drinking cheaply, so you decide to go on the Concrete Blonde-style ghost tour of the city with a tour guide who refuses to talk in anything but her very real and not very Cajun accent. You see the sights, you drink the drinks; you crawl through the French Quarter when it's still hot-washcloth weather outside, and then later when the sun sets you meet up with the tour guide and you have a little illicit encounter behind a grave. And then, as your breath is peaking and you think your cock might explode, you have the girl turn around right after you round third base and plant a mouth full of moldy cacti on your chest.

You're frozen over; it feels like someone is mixing cement in your veins. You club her off you with your bare hands and then you see through her skin to the electric camel spider wheedling around inside her chest, this wad of psychic energy that's nothing but thoughts of chewing and chasing and wide, open air. And you run.