“I led Catch into town, where I asked the local priest to perform an exorcism. Before I could convince him of Catch’s existence, the demon became visible and ate the priest, piece by piece, before my eyes. I realized then that Catch’s power was beyond the comprehension of any normal priest, perhaps the entire Church.

“Christians are supposed to believe in evil as an active force. If you deny evil, you deny good and therefore God. But belief in evil is as much an act of faith as belief in God, and here I was faced with evil as a reality, not an abstraction. My faith was gone. It was no longer required. There was indeed evil in the world and that evil was me. It was my responsibility, I reasoned, to not let that evil become manifest to other people and thereby steal their faith. I had to keep Catch’s existence a secret. I might not be able to stop him from taking lives, but I could keep him from taking souls.

“I decided to remove him to a safe place where there were no people for him to feed on. We hopped a freight and rode it to Colorado, where I led Catch high into the mountains. There I found a remote cabin where I thought he would be without victims. Weeks passed and I found that I had some control over the demon. I could make him fetch water and wood sometimes, but other times he defied me. I’ve never understood the inconsistency of his obedience.

“Once I had accepted the fact that I couldn’t run away from Catch, I questioned him constantly, looking for some clue that might send him back to hell. He was vague, to say the least, giving me little to go on except that he had been on Earth before and that someone had sent him back.

“After we had been in the mountains for two months, a search party came to the cabin. It seemed that hunters in the area of the cabin, as well as people in villages as far as twenty miles away, had been disappearing. When I was asleep at night, Catch had been ranging for victims. It was obvious that isolation wasn’t going to keep the demon from killing. I sent the search party away and set myself on coming up with some kind of plan. I knew we would have to move or people would discover that Catch existed.