Prologue

HI! I’M BOB. I’ll be your uncle tonight.

No, just kidding. I’m your friendly neighborhood 4,000-year-old demon. This is the third volume of my memoirs and it will be filled with miscellaneous stuff from the past 4,000 years of my life, as I remember things while trying to sort out what is happening today. It’s all very confusing when you have that much trivia floating around in your head.

For example, I was just reminded of the time I saw Roman numerals invented. It was ... A story for later. I really need to learn to stick to the one I’m telling now.

I called the first two volumes of my memoirs “Before Caesar” (BC) and “After Caesar” (AC) because I thought Caesar represented the pivotal point that divided my ancient past from my modern past. It was the time that I moved away from the Mediterranean as my base of operation and started East. So, what should I call this third volume? If I have my way, it will be called “Escape from Planet of the Humans.” I doubt my editors will let me get away with that one. And if they let it pass, the censors at the Brazilian Forest book selling giant would ban it. Ah well. I’ll call this the ‘Current Era,’ which means roughly 2020+.

You don’t need to read the first two volumes of my memoirs if you understand a few fundamental things that I’ll go about describing now. However, as an author who considers each of his words sacred, I’ll be highly offended if you don’t read my magnificent adventures in the other two volumes. Now or later.

First, some 4,000 years ago, give or take a couple of centuries, when I was being chased from Knossos on Crete, I worked a spell on an old leather satchel to create room inside it for whatever I wanted to put there. At the time, I was thinking of things like Pinaruti’s scrolls of magic, ingredients that he kept in his magic room, and wine. But in the rush to leave, I stuffed everything I could grab into the bag, including the furniture, the food, my wives, and anything else that wasn’t nailed down.

Over the ages, we discovered the infinity room, as I called it then—now called Areola—expanded to accommodate whatever I put in there. And the things I put in it brought the memory of their surroundings, so that when I put sheep in the room, lush pastures grew. When I planted crops, rain fell. And when I brought in people they seemed to live forever—young and healthy. Areola in the Current Era (CE) has a population of some three and a half million. It has its own eco-structure and physics, seemingly unrelated to that of earth. And it exists conveniently in an old leather satchel that I have worked countless spells on to enhance its durability and invisibility. More about that later.

Among the people in Areola are my five wives and five possessions. The wives are not the only wives I have had over the past 4,000 years. I have married many times, but these are the only ones who have taken up residence in the infinity room. The rest have lived out normal lives and I stayed with them and cradled them in my arms as they passed from the natural world. I have often wept because I loved each and every one of them.

My wives in Areola start with Nimia—with me since Knossos, not long after I was first summoned. Then there’s Penelope—formerly Odysseus’ wife, but I had been masquerading as the fabled hero for years (a story you can read about in volume one). I met and married Lakshmi, the third of my infinity wives, in India about two or three centuries AC. Esmeralda became my wife just before I sailed with Columbus. She is the great granddaughter of my one-time wife Esmira, who succeeded in locking me in the infinity room for seventy years before Esmeralda set me free. And finally, there is Peninnah, my wife of the Current Era, who sort of came with my inheritance of 500 billion dollars.

Occasionally—not as often as you might suspect—a lover asks or commands me to possess her. Those words are like a compulsion within me. I think I could resist, but I have no desire to. Once she says “Possess me!” I merge myself completely into her mind, body, and soul. I have acquired five possessions in the past 4,000 years. The first was Josephet, or Josie. She was the unwanted daughter of a desert sheikh—a girl I rescued from a well. Back when I was serving in Nebuchadnezzar’s court in Babylon, he made a gift of the lovely Persian, Pari. I asked her if she was a willing partner because I will have no slaves. She responded with those wonderful words. “Yes. Possess me.”

Let me see. After my voyage with Columbus, I spent a good bit of time wandering the southern Americas, collecting Kukulkàn’s people with his priestess, Maya. She happily became my possession at the urging of her god and goddess. And Liz is my twentieth century possession. She was a bra-burning feminist from San Francisco in the 1960s. She has a better grasp of the modern world than all except Peninnah, so is often at my side when I’m dealing with movie scripts and television producers.

I said five possessions and that is only four. Princess Agora is the only person I have ever possessed who didn’t specifically ask for it. I found her on an island in the South Pacific and we fell in love. She came with me when I sailed from the island, but was soon overwhelmed by the sense of vastness of the world. She had thought her island was the entire universe. I possessed her to save her from a near vegetative state brought on by acute agoraphobia. I offered to free her again later, but she would have none of it and now seldom leaves my palace in Areola.