I am a big fan of the diabolic made manifest in art. The first album to seduce my senses was Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast. Films like Häxan, Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and the recent retro and recusant flick, House of the Devil, have burned their imagery behind my eyelids, like some Hieronymus Bosch panoply of the perverse. Noting this, it should come as no surprise to learn that, before I reached the age of reason, I thought the devil something very real, like a home mortgage or cancer.

     A Catholic childhood spent in the 80s, a decade which spawned the phrase “Satanic Panic,” is largely to blame. The Christian Right, its so-called Moral Majority, had substantial political power. The Parents Music Resource Center, stewarded by Tipper Gore, warned of the appeal to the occult that certain records possessed. There were apocryphal stories of Satanic abductions and ritual abuses, an uncomfortable fascination with serial killers like Richard Ramirez, and a slew of sensationalist media stories, of which Geraldo Rivera was the worst offender, waiting to further gorge a public already glutted on fear.

     By 1988, I was convinced Satanic cults were prowling the neighborhood. My eyes scoured the skeletal trees dotting the wooded embankment behind my house for the pumpkin glow of circle fires unfurling into the night. Never mind the actual surface area my parents owned was a grand total of 125-by-130 feet: I was 13 and credulous.

     One late October evening my parents left for a dinner out, my sister was away at a friend’s house down the street, and I was home alone. I recall Robert Stack’s voice grimly intoning another Unsolved Mystery on the television, as I lay supine surrounded on three sides by windows, which I had quickly curtained upon my parents’ departure. I felt secure enough to doze.

     WHAM!

     My eyes opened and I tried to reconcile the sound as a fragment of a dream or something of the material world.

     WHAM!

     I hadn’t imagined that noise reverberating like black waves from the bay window in front of me.

     WHAM!

     Another impact this time from the windows to my right. Someone was on the deck that wrapped itself around the living room like a noose.

     My first instinct was to freeze, to play dead before the awful maw of the unknown. But as the pounding continued, I forced myself upright and wandered through the kitchen, down the hallway, into my parents’ darkened bedroom for a view of who was out there. Two figures, robe clad, clutching candles as white as snake fangs, skulked along the side of the house, an alien chant ringing in the supernatural stillness.

     A glacial weight settled in my guts, but it came with a corresponding clarity. I carefully backed out of my parents’ room and crossed the hall to my sister’s room. I shut the door before flicking the lights so as not to give away my position. My plan was to call the neighbors for help. The phone book was absent.

     Dousing the light, I moved through the hallway towards the kitchen as the pounding resumed. Suddenly seized with the terrible knowledge that the front doors might be unlocked, I crouched to avoid the sightline from the kitchen window and crabbed my way to momentary relief. Locked.

     I headed for the phone in the kitchen. As I put the receiver to my ear, our dog (finally) let loose a piercing series of barks. I turned my head only to see my sister and her friend pull “Oh my gosh!” faces and duck below my sightline. My legs felt frail and wobbly.

     In retrospect, the whole performance comes off a bit trifling. No robes but hooded sweatshirts. No candles but Diet Coke cans. No chanting but their own girlish giggles. More sobering is the thought that if I were that 13-year-old kid today, my sister and her friend might come calling in turbans, clutching guns, and chanting from the Qur’an. “Islam-o-panic,” this decade’s diabolic apparition.