Chapter 19: The Shepherd

9th Grade: March 2nd - April 17th, 1986

My father wasn’t that crazy about the idea of letting a bunch of homeless people live at the Hamilton mansion, even in the south wing. But I knew my father well enough by then to know how to tempt him into agreeing. I played the son needing his father’s knowledge and guidance in properly adjusting these people to serve the purpose I needed them to and securing their memories to hide my identity long term.

He couldn’t resist that. My father knew that would require some pretty complex controls and had been looking for something I’d tolerate applying it to.

So he agreed with the condition that he and the twins joined Jessica and me in selecting the shepherds. He didn’t need to give me his reasons as I was fine with that, but he did so anyway. They were pretty obvious, actually. He wanted to make sure the people wouldn’t be too difficult to adjust to our needs, and he didn’t want just anyone living in his old home.

After getting that cleared up, Jessica drove the two of us down to the mansion after having an early lunch with her parents when they got home from mass.

The south wing was so ... dated. We arrived just before noon and had the whole wing to ourselves until an army of staff arrived in various vehicles around one-thirty. By an army, I mean over a hundred people. And these weren’t just maids or handymen, though they certainly were in the majority. There were carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and practically every other tradesman involved in interior work.

For the most part, they were there to clean and make sure everything was in proper working order. They weren’t there necessarily to remodel the place, though they did start ripping out most of the dated carpet and prepping to give the ceiling and walls a fresh coat of paint. They projected that work would be completed by Tuesday around four.

Jessica left me there and went home around three. I stayed and helped with the tear-out. I was seriously missing Joey and Brad while I was doing that. We would have enjoyed doing that kind of manly work together even though we probably would have ended up goofing off together more than work and have ended up playing in the pool.

I had brought clothes with me as I was planning on staying there for the time being. Obviously, I’d stay in the south hall, and I specifically chose a bedroom that I hadn’t slept in before. I didn’t need any more reminders of the times I had spent there with Joey and Suzi. I found myself holding their gifts in my hands whenever I started contemplating what all I’d be doing in the coming weeks.

Sin. It was all around me. I couldn’t look at someone without subconsciously probing for their sins. Everyone carried their sins with them, though what a particular person considered was a sin varied a lot.

By the time I left to pick up Jessica and her family in a limo for dinner, I had a fairly good idea of what Father Xavier had done to me. I sought what a person felt guilty about and measured their sorrow concerning it. For those I spent more time with, I also went as far as to deduce what other sins they had committed that they didn’t feel guilty for.

As I said, sin was all around me. I couldn’t look at anyone without finding the guilt, and just eating dinner with Jessica and her family was an eye-opening experience for me.

I knew what the Lord considered a sin. You didn’t grow up Catholic without learning the gritty details. Jesus had released us from having to follow the much more restrictive Jewish practices, but he didn’t excuse us from the moral code the Old Testament taught, especially the ten commandments.

The ten commandments. Did you know there are really twelve core commandments? Various traditions have grouped them together in different combinations, a few separating the Thou shall not covets or the Thou shall not worship any other god/idols. If you include the Samaritan Pentateuch and Jewish Talmud, you get a total of fourteen commandments.

Even Jessica’s parents who were solid Catholics were guilty of sin they had ignored and had never confessed. And no, their sins were not sexual in nature, though her dad did sometimes have a wandering eye. Greed and lack of charity was their greatest weakness, but I’d find out that was a common failure among most people.

My heart yearned to make these people face their sins and ask for forgiveness. Yet I knew I had to save my energy for those I had sinned against and raise them up to know and embrace the Lord’s love and forgiveness. My expectation of taking their sins as my own and seeing them embrace that glory was making me restless. I wanted to get a move on instead of eating with these minor sinners.

The moment I set eyes on the twins felt as if I was seeing a pair of angels. Their purity of soul and lack of any guilt was brisk and refreshing to my senses. Of course, I couldn’t probe them telepathically like I could others, but my empathic senses helped make up for that.

My parent’s shielded minds prevented me from probing them, and that was a good thing as I really didn’t want to delve into the depths of their sins. Reverend Coolidge, however, was another matter. It shocked me how much pride he took in his physical appearance. His workouts were purely motivated by his vanity and pride. What concerned me the most was how it didn’t quite feel natural to me, but I couldn’t find anything specific to indicate why.

I wanted to find at least two good Adams and one Eve. My mission going to the shelter was complicated by my shock of who all stayed there. I expected there just to be people like Stu who were rejected from society and, well, bums. But there were families staying there along with adults of all ages with a variety of issues, some mental, but many were situational.

Seeing kids running around just jolted me. There wasn’t a lot, but just that was some. I was strongly tempted to offer them a couple of rooms at the mansion until they got on their feet, but Father Coolidge had warned me not to do that as I might just find myself having to throw them out to get rid of them. Shelters had to be basic to encourage people to move on.

Jessica had been there before as part of a church youth volunteer program. I felt ashamed how I had wormed out of going in the past, though I had only been old enough that past Christmas to have been asked.

Stu went with us. He had talked Jessica’s parent’s ears off during dinner. Jessica’s mother was not a fan of Stu and was intending to have a heart to heart talk with her eldest daughter when they got home.

Jessica’s parents were another distraction for me while I was there. Her mother was very uncomfortable and refrained from shaking people’s hands when she could like as if she’d catch something from them. Jessica’s father wasn’t as reserved, but he wasn’t that interested in hanging around there. He felt like we were trying to get them to contribute money or something.

When Jessica had invited them to go with us, she nearly had to guilt them into going. I didn’t ask her why she wanted them to go. I personally would have preferred they hadn’t from their attitude.

After the tour and greeting the various people of interest there, Father Coolidge introduced us to the small group of young adults living there. Seven males, nine females, ages seventeen to twenty.

Most of them had some sort of drug problem they were dealing with, but for some, drugs were just a symptom of their real issues. Drugs, sexual abuse, “alternate life choices” and in one case, pregnancy were the root causes of they being there.

My mom instantly latched on to the nineteen-year-old pregnant girl, Jessica (Jessie) Townsman. I took it as a given she’d end up living at the mansion.

Both Father Coolidge and my father insisted that telepathy alone wasn’t a fix for their problems. Yes, the drug users could be motivated to quit using, but there were almost always other factors involved. I started seeing why the gay and bisexual youth were their focus for redemption. For the most part, there was nothing actually wrong with them besides their sexual orientation. And the root cause was social rejection, not a mental or emotional one like the others.

Stu wasn’t what I was looking for. He could stay and serve as a cook for me and the others as that was what he liked to do, but tall and gangly, he just didn’t fit the image of an Adam to me.

Dale Goodwin was my immediate first choice. Physically in decent shape, good looking, and Jessica pointed out his eyes looked a lot like mine. Drugs and physical abuse were his core issues, but he also had a bit of a temper that liked to become physical. My dad didn’t have any issues with him since keeping him from stealing anything was easy enough to ensure.

Eighteen-year-old Collene Padgett held my father’s interest, and not just because she was attractive. I didn’t spend any time looking at her, as I had to admit she was my pick as well. If he didn’t have a problem with her, I’d just go on his recommendation.

The hard part was choosing a second Adam. The two gay boys were, well, gay. They would need to appear holy and pure to the others while I wasn’t in control, and having a gay guy be one of my shepherds meant hiding that aspect of their true personality from everyone. I acknowledged that just being gay didn’t make them unclean, but some people wouldn’t see them that way.

The next best choice was Tiny Peters. Seriously, that was his name. Twenty years old, five-eleven and just shy of two hundred pounds, his main problem stemmed from his life in foster care, sexual abuse before and while in foster care, and a slight stutter.

The others were just ... well, they’d need a lot of work to humble and elevate them to shepherd status, and they just didn’t have the physical looks I was going for.

In the end, I decided to fuck it and took all four of them. Buck Bearden and Ronny Nickerson were both eighteen and decent looking. Ronny was 6’1”, blonde, brown-eyed with an impressive scar on the left side of his face. Buck was an inch shorter than me at 5’8”, brown hair with peroxide blonde highlights that was overdue for a trim.

With that settled, I joined my parents and just accepted their decision I was taking not just Jessie and Collene, but twenty-year-old Pam Bowling and seventeen-year-old Stacy Keyes, both drug abusing runaways who had turned to prostitution to survive. They had teamed up with Fabian Patel, a twenty-eight-year-old part-time drug dealer, to act as their pimp.

The only one of them who left with us that night was Jessie. The rest would remain at the shelter until Tuesday when the work on the south wing was finished. Jessie wasn’t going to be part of my flock, so I just let my mom handle her living arrangements. That ended up being my bedroom at home, and Stu and I spent the next morning packing up my shit and then taking it over to the mansion. It was supposed to be temporary, but I wondered if I’d ever move back in.

After a furious planning session with my father Sunday night, my dad convinced me the whole hiding my identity using others would fail spectacularly with the girls who already knew me. They would know it was me behind whoever’s eyes I was looking through.

My dad taught me another set of tricks he had concerning memory and a person’s persona. If you know two identical twins, you recognize them as two separate people, especially if they have slightly different personalities or say had different types of jobs. Even though they look the same and sound the same, you identify them as two different people, both intellectually and emotionally.

Anyway, my dad showed me how to separate my identity in such a way that while they were at school and I interacted with them in that environment, they would know me as Tim and act accordingly. But when I was dressed in my Shepherd’s attire, they saw me not as Tim but as their Shepherd. The hope was that once all this was over, their attachments would be solely with the Shepherd and not with Tim. Intellectually those who knew me would still know I was both people, just not emotionally. Yeah, I didn’t understand that either, but my dad was pretty sure of himself.

My primary motivator of handling this myself was to limit those who sinned to just myself.

But I couldn’t do this alone. In addition to helping with the addiction, having multiple Shepherds would have also helped spread the management of the flock across them. Jessica was fine with continuing her role, and thus the identity of Eve was formed. In exchange of the sins I had taken from her despite hers later being forgiven, she was willing to carry some of mine.

But Jessica convinced me she couldn’t manage everyone alone and wanted me to include Stu so he could help managed the flock. Stu wanted to become a professional chef. In exchange for allowing me to use him, my father arranged a scholarship for him to attend a cooking school in Chicago in the fall.

After moving all my shit, the twins and I took Stu out for a haircut and shopping for a new wardrobe. Oh, the fight I had on my hands doing that. I needed him to look sharp and conservative, but the twins and Stu had other tastes. After a lot haggling, I allowed some “fun” outfits, but I had to condition him to only wear them while in Marlfield and later in Chicago.

Stu wasn’t a local boy and had only been at the shelter a few days before Father Coolidge befriended him and invited him to the cabin Friday night.

His hair had a conservative business cut without any of the highlights he had previously. I insisted he had to look sharp and business-like at all times, but it could be as simple as a sports coat, polo shirt and slacks around the “house”.

By the time I had finished outfitting him, I had also carefully added the appropriate motivators and inhibitors to excite him about his new look. We finished the shopping and headed back to the Hamilton mansion. Jessica joined us right after school to educate Stu on the foundation of our religion. We had a two hour joint praying session where I inducted Stu fully into the faith.

I sinned that evening. Not in the biblical sense, but a personal one. I took that innocent young man, spent nearly the entire two hours conditioning his mind to accept the prayers as undeniable truth, then flooded him with the love of the Lord with all my might at the end. I brainwashed him into this desperate man-child who I spent half the night helping him list out his sins.

Then on top of all that, I had him kneel before me, and after speaking a prayer, I forgave him. That act released the guilt and sorrow from his mind but added it to my own. Stu cried his heart out in gratitude and relief while I cried with him from the sorrow I felt for the injury to my connection to my Lord and Savior.

After attending early morning mass with Jessica, Stu declared he was officially changing his name to Adam, stating he needed a fresh start to a new life. Father Hennessy had returned from the cabin the previous evening, and we spent the rest of the morning with him giving Adam his baptism, confirmation and first communion - the communion following Adam confessing his sins again to Father Hennessy.

Father Hennessy was very pleased with what I had accomplished. I, however, only felt disgusted by what I had done to Stu in creating Adam, and I would be doing it at least three more times before the end of the week if everything went according to plan.

I found Father Hennessy lacking. He prided himself for being a true servant of the Lord, which, by and of itself, wasn’t a sin. But he lacked sympathy for those who could not fulfill the Lord’s expectations.

I made the mistake of pointing that out to him. I meant no disrespect, but that’s not how he took it. Pride was truly a weakness.

I had no pride. I felt no lust. I had endless patience, yet I was diligent to my task. My heart ached with gratitude and the desire to help people find their true calling, but I had the temperance to restrain those urges to those who asked for my help. The seven virtues versus the seven deadly sins. I was truly grateful towards Father Xavier for having blessed with such clarity of thought and purpose. Adam and I were of the same mind in that way, and despite his natural femininity in body language, I expected the flock to think of him as a saint.

Prior to picking up Jessica for dinner, I gave Adam the full story, leaving nothing out. Just as he had been conditioned to do, Adam accepted his new role as my representative to interact with my flock. Instead of anger at being violated, he was grateful for having been saved. The fact that he had been manipulated and altered only concerned him because of the sorrow it had caused me. And when he understood I had taken his sins as my own, out of pure compassion, he spent twenty minutes trying to convince me I shouldn’t have to carry his sins as his baptism had washed them from him.

Adam felt a great amount of gratitude towards me. He had never felt so loved before. Even his mother had been disappointed in his “life choice.” How does a seven-year-old boy choose to act effeminate? Instead of anger, I felt compassion towards the woman’s ignorance.

When we arrived at Jessica’s, Adam went to her front door to pick her up. During the phone call arranging it, I suggested to Jessica to have her mother answer the door just to see if she recognized Adam as Stu. I popped into Jessica’s head before Adam rang the bell to ensure she called him Adam instead of Stu.

Jessica’s mother had no idea the sharp-looking young man picking her daughter was the same she had turned her nose up two night previously. And we didn’t tell her as there was no point in it. Adam was not Stu.

Adam’s enthusiasm telling Jessica of his day sounded a lot like the old Stu, but he no longer felt nervous and it showed in how he didn’t laugh at every little thing. He had teared up talking about his christening and having been staring in Jessica’s eyes while saying it made Jessica tear up too. They ended up hugging each other while Adam kept going on and on saying how happy he was between happy fits of tears. I swear we should have called him something more feminine than Adam. Ashely maybe.

Thankfully Adam’s interest in food broke him out of that when our meals arrived. We were eating at a fancy French restaurant to celebrate Adams first communion. I felt it was justified to spend my father’s money on this; I otherwise would have looked for someplace to have a humbler meal at.

As Adam spoke about the food, I realized he was still Stu at heart. Perhaps I hadn’t sinned as much as I originally thought. While he was serving a purpose of my design, he had accepted our help ahead of time. Granted, it wasn’t exactly a completely informed consent, but I wasn’t going to ask him to sin on my behalf, so perhaps he wouldn’t be that upset when I removed all my careful programming of his mind.

Jessica was looking forward to being introduced as Eve. I wasn’t entirely sure I liked her being directly involved, but she was a key component to keeping me grounded and she insisted on doing this.

After dinner, we headed for the mansion to check it out. Now that the shepherds weren’t going to stay there, we decided the south wing would be our church instead.

We entered the grounds via the southwest gate where we got a look at the wing through the tinted windows. Even I was impressed by the sight. I had never seen that wing lit up like that. Not only was it lit from inside, but there were also lights on the exterior lighting up the white granite and marble walls.

The south wing had an empty drive-in six-car garage that hadn’t been used for nearly three decades. Like the rest of the wing, it had been thoroughly cleaned and repainted. At least that was supposed to be the limit of what my father had ordered done.

My dad had assured me, “Just a simple refresh, nothing fancy. Carpet and paint, and maybe some new lights. Oh, and we’ll need to make sure the plumbing and wiring was still good. Purge the water pipes and make sure the appliances and heating still work, that sort of thing.”

As we approached, the driver pressed a button on a garage door opener opening the entry garage door. I forgot I had agreed to have openers installed on the entry and exit garage doors as they originally had only been operated by hand.

The bright fluorescent lighting inside the garage surprised me. That, too, was new. From the looks of the freshly painted concrete and the stripes indicating where to drive and park, I wondered how much else I hadn’t expected had been done. The place didn’t look anything like the dimly lit empty cavern I remembered.

I was flabbergasted. In two days, they had completely renovated the whole wing. The halls’ white arched ceilings were lit up from hidden strip lighting, and there weren’t any signs of the old candelabra looking wall light fixtures or the yellowing wallpaper that had made the place look so ancient. Between the white stained wood panel accents and molding, the new carpet and the lighting, Jessica and I barely recognized the place. It looked clean and fresh and not the least bit old and dingy.

Yet it also wasn’t rich in detail like the rest of the mansion or anything near as glamorous as the Marlfield mansion. No, it was exactly what my dad said. Just I had never expected ... The walls were like new, and there was no sign of where the old fixtures had been. Then I realized the two-foot wide strips of white stained paneling spaced out equally everywhere must have been hiding where the fixtures had been.

I shook my head realizing how incredible such a transformation could have been done in such a short time, yet I could see how simple it had been. Strip the wallpaper, wire up the new lights, paint then install the paneling and molding. Carpet went down last. With an army of people working in concert, I could see it getting done. They probably had worked around the clock, though.

I frowned when I saw how all the faucets had been replaced, but the toilets looked like the originals. Showerheads in the private bathrooms were all new, but the rest of the fixtures were original. All of the appliances and faucets had been replaced in the common kitchen, and at first, I thought the cabinets had been too. But on closer look, they had just been painted and the pulls replaced. The marble countertops were the originals.

I assumed the beds were the originals with just all the linin replaced. The rest of the furniture I was certain were the originals just some of it had been reupholstered. Everything looked modern and brand new.

As agreed, the south study had been emptied and made into a sort of chapel. Nothing fancy, just an altar, a large gold-painted cross, some simple stained oak pews with padded knee rests for praying and a table with candles.

The unconverted harem room had been stripped bare. You couldn’t tell what its original function had been. It was just a collection of large interconnected rooms. We discussed getting some tables and chairs and making it into a bible study room.

The passageway to the south hall had been sealed off. The hallway ended at a paneled wall just past the entrance to the harem room. There was no secret door or anything to get to the other side. I hadn’t seen the need to go over there myself. The original idea had been that the Adams would be with them at all times, and I could just hop into one of them or anyone else over there telepathically. Now I’d have to have them put some kind of door in after all.

After Jessica left and Adam retired for the night, I sat down on my bed. I suddenly wanted to weep, wishing for the hundredth time I could go back to when I was thirteen and just redo everything.

I had been on the go all day, and I realized just how tired I was. I removed my suit and shoes and put them away before lying down on what I was calling my bed in just my underclothes and socks. After a few minutes, I got up and knelt beside my bed and prayed the Lord would forgive me for what I was about to do.

My dad arrived around nine the next morning to help me work on the first of the girls. We planted triggers to fire off various “realizations” that would move them towards their discovering Jesus’s love. This was using the same methods my father used to condition his “girls”.

We both enjoyed doing that together, and it was challenging for both of us for different reasons. He used hundreds of small motivators and inhibitors to direct the person’s mind little by little. It was like watching one of those Rube Goldberg machines where a ball hits a broom that slides into a chicken startling it where it released an egg that slides down a chute etc. They were so tiny that you couldn’t perceive them. The real trick was lining them up in such a way that they flowed naturally. The truly ingenious part was how my dad used inhibitors and motivators in exactly the opposite way the classic method described them.

It all started with a trigger. That trigger basically forces a thought to be thought which then gets shaped. For instance, making someone eat a banana like they were sucking on a cock. Instead of a motivator to excite or otherwise motivate them to suck on the banana, the thought “banana eat” triggers the inhibitor of using their teeth or otherwise cut the banana in any way. Not that my dad would have done it that way, that’s just an example.

My dad shaped thoughts rather than triggered thoughts people couldn’t ignore like most telepaths did. It took a lot more time to do, and to do it right you had to do little by little over time. For example, making the person discover they didn’t like the feel of biting into banana one day. Then they find the feel of it laying on their tongue pleasant. Little by little, you guide them that way.

For the next sixteen days, I spent most of the day preprogramming each girl to separate Jessica’s and my identities and implanting their discovery of their faith. I quickly determined I could only handle programing at most six people a day before my head made me stop. It was that much work. I went to bed early each night with a headache, an upset stomach and a guilty conscience, but I had the worst of the girls ready to induct them into my flock on Saturday.

“Forgive me, Shepherd, for I have sinned.”

Those words spoken to me by Robin Reed made my heart swell with compassion as I stared into her needy eyes.

I caressed her right check but did nothing else to stimulate her need. Robin shivered from the touch and gasped a moment later when I formed an empathic connection with her.

“Tell me your sins, child, so I may take them as my own and free you from their sorrow and guilt.”

My compassion and love for the Father flowing through the link easily countered the need’s lust shining out of her eyes. The need’s strength wavered for a moment.

In a breathless voice, Robin said: “Shepherd, I have pleasured myself, fantasized of sinning with the boys and...”

Robin’s shame, guilt and sorrow choked her up a moment, then with tears streaming down cheeks, she said with difficulty, “I had oral sex with Darin Fields.”

I easily picked out a few more from her mind and asked, “What else, my child. You must confess all your sins, not just your recent ones.”

“I ... I once stole twenty dollars...”

As I listened and nodded to each of her minor sins, Robin initially sped up as they crowded her mind to be let out. But once she had thinned them out, she slowed down from feeling the great weight of her sins constricting her soul.

“ ... and when I was in first grade, I took Sara Holtz’s favorite pencil and broke it because she was spending all her time with Kristin Bell and not me.”

Robin remained kneeling, panting slightly as she searched for anything she had missed, then finally said, “I think that’s everything, Shepherd.”

I caressed her wet cheek when she tried to lower her eyes but couldn’t without breaking the empathic connection. The need, having taken a back seat while she focused on her other sins, pressed itself to the forefront.

“Robin Reed, you have professed your love for our Lord, Jesus Christ. You have joined us in prayer and experienced the power of our Love, but your sins have prevented you from feeling His power flow from your own heart. If I take your burden upon myself, will you promise to open your heart fully to the Lord and let his love sustain you whenever you feel the temptation to sin again?”

“Yes Shepherd, I swear. With all my heart, I swear.”

“Will you Robin, out of compassion, promise to help those searching for his love just as Eve and I have done for you and the others here tonight?”

“Yes, Shepherd, I swear. With all my compassion, I swear.”

“Will you Robin, out of gratitude and humility, promise to put the needs of your good health, your family, our flock, and your friends, in that order, before all else?”

“Yes, Shepherd, I swear. With all my gratitude and humility, I swear.”

I hesitated a moment, knowing how big of a social butterfly Robin was.

I said, “Understand you may need to live two lives for a while. Your current friends won’t understand how great of a change accepting the Lord’s love will be to you. No one is asking you to give them up, but you will need to dedicate more time to the more important things.”