“It’s time.” The hair-raising words of the exorcist made Doris swallow hard. She took a deep breath to steady herself. “Millicent has released the most potent demon of all time.”
“Oh, God, please help us.” Doris shivered. Her maternal instinct of protection for her offspring was no match for the powerful force of evil that seized her daughter.
She followed the demon-chaser and his two assistants up the stairs to Millicent’s bedroom with the windows boarded up. Her husband Robert, and their parents trailed behind them.
When they entered the room, Vincent and his assistants tied the young archeologist’s limp wrists and ankles to the bedposts with coarse pieces of rope while she slept. Once they secured Millicent, Vincent’s assistants lit their candles and used them to ignite the candles held by the family members around the bed.
Vincent was the family’s last hope after a procession of priests had arrived and left with slouched shoulders of defeat. The demon in Millicent had chased them away with loud taunting that exposed deep dark secrets that they had buried.
The last priest had called from the safety of his church an hour after leaving the home. He had dropped an unofficial hint about his twin brother who dabbled in the paranormal as an amateur ghostbuster and demon-slayer. Doris had jumped at the suggestion. The family was desperate to try anything to liberate their daughter.
At midnight, Millicent’s upper body lifted and strained against the ropes that strapped her to the bed. She glared at her captors with hate-filled snarls.
In the space of six months, the 27-year-old Egyptologist had aged into a one-hundred-year-old woman. Thin white hair formed a halo around her shiny scalp. The demon grew stronger each night by sucking the energy and life out of her.
Millicent’s dark shadow danced on the walls around the room. The demon loomed large behind her. He spread his bat-shaped wings to exhibit his ownership and superiority over his victim.
Slimy saliva oozed from the corners of Millicent’s mouth, and she peeled her lips back, baring large brown-stained teeth. Her body twisted and contorted from her struggles to free herself from the ropes.
“I command you to leave this woman alone!” Vincent popped the cork out of a vial that released a pungent gray smoke into the air. He placed the bottle under Millicent’s nose. She lunged forward to bite his fingers. In a flash, he plunged it into her mouth and clamped his hand over her lips to hold it in.
Her eyes rolled back into her forehead, leaving only the whites exposed. She crunched the small bottle between her teeth and laughed. She spat glass filled bloody saliva into Vincent’s face and let out a blood-curdling giggle that mocked him.
Vincent reached into his pocket and produced a stone talisman. Millicent leaned her head sideways and glared at the object with suspicion.
Vincent shoved the stone into her nose. She reeled back and yelled in pain. The stone burned through the skin of her nose and fell on the bed. Before Vincent could pick it up, Millicent snapped the rope off one wrist and swatted the stone into a corner.
“What else you got, Mr. quack healer?” Millicent’s face turned blood-red. “You’re starting to bore me with your amateurish stupidity!” Her voice went into a deep bass that echoed around the house.
Vincent closed his eyes and intoned himself into a trance with ancient babble. Millicent squinted in distrust. She tugged on the other restraints, breaking several strands of the fibrous rope until it snapped.
“I invoke you, Lord Bathysheria.” Vincent closed his eyes and leaned his head back. He raised his arms in the shape of a ‘V’ above his head. “Enter this earthly body to do battle with your ancient enemy, Bhaador.”
Millicent sprang forward to catch Vincent by surprise. She choked him with both hands and dragged him onto the bed. His bloodshot eyes bulged out of their sockets.
When Vincent’s body went limp, Millicent threw him across the room. He slammed against the wall and slumped to the floor in a heap. Millicent’s eerie laughter accompanied her leg kicks that broke the leg restraints.
“I call upon you, Bathysheria,” Vincent spoke in a feeble whisper. His broken body lay crumpled on the floor. “Use me as your sacrifice to send Bhaador back to Hades, where he belongs.”
Millicent hopped off the bed and picked up Vincent. She lifted him over her head. Before she had a chance to send him crashing through the boarded windows to his death, the door flew open. Vincent’s twin brother, the priest, dashed into the room and tackled Millicent around her waist with a flying leap. The force of his rush slammed her body against the wall and knocked her unconscious. Bhaador abandoned Millicent and dived into the priest’s body, whose eyes turned a dull gray.
Vincent invoked Bathysheria and threw himself at his brother. He hugged him on his way toward the window. The twins crashed through the wood, shattering it, and the glass panes into pieces. In their bearhug, they fell to the ground thirty feet below onto a splintered piece of wood that pierced the priest’s heart. Bhaador screamed in defeat through the priest, and Bathysheria laughed in victory through Vincent before both bodies went limp. The shiny outline of Bathysheria left Vincent’s body and soared toward the heavens. Stunned silence gripped the onlookers from the window above until Millicent’s whimpers drew everyone’s attention back to her. Her family ran to console her while Vincent’s assistants bounded down the stairs to the dead twins in the yard.
The assistants buried the wood holding Bhaador’s spirit in an underground vault of the church to lie dormant for another thousand years until a young Archeologist like Millicent excavates the ruins of the church to unleash his evil onto the Earth once more.
Millicent recovered to continue her work with no memory of her encounter with evil.

By Romeo Kaseram

Oscar Ronald Dathorne was born on November 19, 1934 in Georgetown, Guyana, then British Guiana, the oldest of seven children. His father, Oscar Robinson, was a machine mechanic. The website Biography (biography.jrank.org) adds Dathorne senior was also an electrical engineer, while his mother, Rosalie Belona, worked at home caring for the family. Biography highlights the difficulties faced at the time by Guyanese to acquire skilled professions in a colonised world, and that Dathorne’s family struggled “to become educated and improve their status”; also, that his maternal grandfather “studied in England and had become an engineer”.
With the successes acquired by Dathorne’s family in surmounting systemic, societal hardships with diligent work, Biography tells us their upward financial and social gains were then closely guarded, that “[they] were protective of their children and did not want them to associate with poorer black children who lived nearby”. Biography adds: “As a child, [Dathorne] often felt suffocated and confined when his parents discouraged him from making friends with children of a lower class. He was already beginning to learn how difficult it could be to navigate the divisions of a colonial society.”
Writing in Fifty Caribbean Writers, Leota S. Lawrence tells us the young Dathorne won “one of the few highly competitive government county scholarships” in 1946 to “the prestigious boys’ school”, Queen’s College. Picking up this early narrative, Biography notes because “its founders were British, Queen’s College was organised in much the same way as exclusive British academies”; and that while it “accepted students of all races… the principal and most of the teachers were white”. Here, Dathorne was taught there “were six races of people inhabiting Guyana: the English, the Indians, the Blacks, the Amerindians, the Chinese, and the Portuguese”, and that “[it] interested him to learn that the English did not even consider their fellow Europeans the Portuguese to be members of their race”. Biography notes an emergent dissatisfaction in Dathorne’s early school life, where he “was acutely aware of racial prejudice and resented the easy assurance of the white students who unthinkingly accepted the privileges of their race, interrupting other students and taking the best places without even seeming to notice”.
He attended Queen’s for seven years, and wrote the Cambridge School Certificate and the advanced General Certificate of Education exams. His intended career was to become a rural head teacher, and he applied to a London university for acceptance as an external student. However, his plans were altered following his father becoming unemployed, with Lawrence quoting Dathorne saying, “Those were dark days for us…. in those days when you lost your job, you lost if for all time”. As a result, the family left Georgetown behind, and headed to England.
With family resettlement, Dathorne worked for two years as a clerk in the office of the London County Council while studying the advanced Latin required for acceptance into an English university, Biography tells us. It adds in 1955, he was accepted to the University of Sheffield, and convocated in 1958 with a bachelor’s degree in English; he later studied education at the University of London for a year. Following this study, he returned to Sheffield, where he pursued both his master’s and doctoral degrees.
Dathorne then travelled to northern Nigeria, where he became a lecturer in English at the University of Ahmadu Bello. In addition to lecturing, Dathorne was also involved in production of the Radio Nigeria Educational Series. In 1964 he accepted a position as lecturer in the English Department at the University of Ibadan. The second political coup d’état in Nigeria saw his exit, following which he took a position with the UN, and set out on a lecture tour of Europe. In 1970, Dathorne travelled to the US on invitation, where he lectured at Yale University; he later taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C., at the Center for African Studies from 1970-1971.
Lawrence notes he taught at Ohio State University from 1971-1974, and was a visiting professor of English from 1974-1975 at the University of Miami (Florida). Two more years were spent in Ohio, and then in 1977, he returned to the University of Miami as director of American studies; he later directed its Caribbean, African, and Afro-American studies. Lawrence tells us in 1979, Dathorne founded and edited the Association of Caribbean Studies, and the Journal of Caribbean Studies.
As Lawrence notes, Dathorne’s involvement with reading and writing started at an early age; additionally, writing was the “only medium he knew which he could capture and contain any and all experiences”. Lawrence also reveals Dathorne viewed himself as a “comic”, and “a funny person” capable of seeing “humour in the behaviour of the people around him”. It was Dathorne’s hope, Lawrence notes, “to capture this humorous side of life in his early stories and poems”.
Dathorne’s first novel, Dumplings in the Soup (1963), strives for comic intent in writing to convey humour. As Lawrence notes, in this novel he is “certainly following in the tradition of Samuel Selvon, who makes use of explicit humour in his Lonely Londoners (1956), for example, and V.S. Naipaul’s more subtle humour in his tragicomedies The Mystic Masseur (1957) and The Suffrage of Elvira (1958)…”
Dathorne’s other novels are The Scholar Man (1964), and Dele’s Children (1986). Among his writings are The Black Mind: A History of African Literature (1974), African Literature in the Twentieth Century (1976), Dark Ancestor: The Literature of the Black Man in the Caribbean (1981), In Europe’s Image: The Need for American Multiculturalism (1994), Imagining the World: Mythical Belief Versus Reality in Global Encounters (1994), Asian Voyages: Two Thousand Years of Constructing the Other (1996), and Worlds Apart: Race in the Modern Periods (2001).
He received several honours during his lifetime, including being among ‘The Men and Women of Distinction’, an honour conferred by the International Biographical Centre of Cambridge, England, in 1972; a Certificate of Appreciation for contributions to Black History Month by the Veterans Administration in 1982, and twice recognised, in 1980, and then in 1982, by the United Black Students Organisation at the University of Miami for ‘Outstanding Services and Contributions to Black Culture Week’. He died on December 18, 2007.

Sources for this exploration: Wikipedia, biography.jrank.org, and Fifty Caribbean Writers.

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