more, and Judge Gold was clapping, and Eddie Horton, and the whole courtroom was an echoing chamber of empowerment and applause as people cried and embraced one another.
Nero wasn’t clapping. Neither was Satan. They wanted this to pass, but it didn’t seem like it would anytime soon. Finally, the applause died down and, except for a few sniffles, it was quiet again.
“I don’t remember anything about my childhood,” Frita Babbit began in the fragile voice of a true survivor. “We lived in a safe neighborhood. There weren’t many black people and the ones who were there were clean and well-spoken. I thought that the world was a good place. But then came...that night.
“The first time the Satanists came for me, I remember it like it was yesterday. October 25, 1988. I remember it was a Tuesday because I checked Google calendars a few days ago with Ms. Standing and that’s what she told me. My parents and I had just finished watching Geraldo’s two-hour special, “ Exploring Satan’s Underground,” and it was my bedtime. I went up to my room and I remember feeling heavy and tired, like I was sleepy. The next thing I knew my mother was holding me over the toilet and then she flushed me down it. There was a secret tunnel inside the toilet leading from our upstairs hall bathroom to an underground chamber.
“I was so scared. I came out of the toilet pipe and three tall men in black robes with horned helmets grabbed me and one of them washed me so I didn’t smell like toilet. And then they took a turkey baster and put a baby inside of me. They told me that when the baby was born they were going to eat it and make me drink its blood so that my soul would belong to Satan. One of them was Joe Biden.”
“The Vice President?” Eddie Horton asked. This was obviously new to him.
“Yes,” Frita said. “He has a double who fills in for him in the Senate when he’s performing Satanic ritual abuse. That’s why he’s such a big advocate for stem cell research: he wants to clone himself. After that I developed a fear of toilets and of Joe Biden. Somehow they returned me to my bed, almost as if it had all been a bad dream. But if it was a bad dream it was one that never ended because night after night my parents helped the Satanists abduct me.
“Their Devil church was ruled by the Dungeon Master, and it had underground tunnels that ran all over the city. Tunnels led to the hospital where they stole amputated feet and removed appendixes for their buffet tables, to the local record store where they would play Black Sabbath albums backwards. The name of the cult was Knights in Satan’s Service. They would make me inject drugs in my eyeballs, like heroin and crack, and when I was a teenager they kept me from telling anyone what was going on by giving me lots of mind control drugs like LSD and NutraSweet.”
“Did you have a baby during this time?” Eddie Horton asked.
“I had lots of babies,” she said. “ They ate them all. They cooked them in a big baby loaf, like a meatloaf, and put barbecue sauce on them made out of the spit of Jews.”
“I’m sorry, the what?” Eddie Horton asked.
“Jew spit. It’s their favorite thing to eat in the world after babies,” Frita said. “For Satanists, Jews are like prize cows who make delicious spit for them to eat.”
“Let’s move on from the, um, Jew spit,” Eddie said.
“Sure,” Frita Babbit said. But it was clear that she was just getting warmed up. “All of the Satanists were homosexuals, too. I knew most of them. There was Joe Biden, of course, he was a big homosexual. And then my mom, my dad, our minister, all the teachers at my school, the entire town council, our neighbors, my family doctor, the entire cardiology department of our local hospital, and most of the English department from the community college. They used to bury me in a coffin after they made me pregnant and then they’d dig me up to take the baby and eat it. Once they cut off my head to show me what would happen if I told anyone, and then they sewed it back on before I could die. It really hurt. They would make me have babies with anything: turkeys, seagulls, pelicans. Almost any kind of