The Demon in the Computer

My last blog asked a question that’s been on my mind since I began writing Hell’s Gate, which will be available very soon—really.

I asked, “What if demons are real?”

I should have known better.

Never ask a question unless you really want an answer. And, of course, I got an answer.

After I finished writing the blog, one of the images that I’d used, a picture of a demon from a 14^th century Arabic manuscript, remained on the monitor. In fact, it was on both of my monitors. And I couldn’t figure out how to get it off. There were no Xs in the upper right hand corner. Contol-alt-delete didn’t work, and neither did the escape key. The demon remained, grinning out at me from the screens.

I have been writing this blog and inserting images into it for over ten years and nothing like this has ever

happened. Totally weird. And I was beginning to get just a little bit freaked out. Well, maybe more than just a little bit. If demons were real, this is just the sort of thing they’d do.

“It’s late,” I told myself. “You’re tired, and not thinking straight. And probably seeing trouble where there isn’t any.” So, I restarted the computer and went to bed, hoping that would fix things.

The next morning when I opened the computer—up popped the demon.

Oh shit. I shut it down and unplugged it. Now what was I gonna do?

In cases of possession, an exorcist will often ask help from an Archangel. And my computer was definitely possessed. So I cast a circle around it and begged Archangel Michael, who has a really big sword and knows how to use it, and Archangel Raphael, the archangel of healing, to get rid of any demons and demonic influences in my computer. Then I blasted it with electric violet light until they told me to stop.

It was quick and didn’t feel like they did much, but when an Archangel says they’ve fixed something, you don’t argue. I plugged my computer in and re-booted it.

And up popped the demon. Still grinning and still on both monitors. But this time I knew what was wrong. A voice in my head  whispered, “That’s a desk top image.”

Sure enough, the demon was ensconced in settings as the background image. I pulled him off the monitors so fast I could almost hear his fangs click and reset the slide show that had been running. My computer has been fine ever since.

But how had the demon gotten on my desk top?

I told a friend who is a magician this story and he laughed. He said that stuff like this happens to computers more often than we think. They are so complex, and work so quickly that they, like us, are susceptible to nudges from other dimensions. And he reminded me that since the image appeared in an Arabic manuscript it was a double no-no and very powerful, because Muslims are prohibited from drawing or sculpting figures of people, animals, or spirits.

I told my son, a geotechnical engineer, and he rolled his eyes. “Oh, Mom, it’s simple to put an image on the desk top. Just right click on the image, and a menu pops up, and you select ‘move to desktop’”

“But I didn’t do that,” I replied.

“You did. You just don’t remember or you did it by mistake,” he said.

My son is more willing to believe that his mother’s memory is failing and/or that she’s a computer idiot than in the possibility of demons. Which, I’m pretty sure, is just fine with the demons. It makes their job easier.