The Taking of Amy Johnson

PROSPECT -- Embattled librarian Eve Foucault resigned abruptly Wednesday night after Cincinnatus County Public Schools Superintendent Roy Fraser told a packed school board audience she would not be offered a contract for the 1994-95 school year.

Foucault's dramatic resignation ended a two-month standoff between the 24-year-old Howell Elementary librarian and Prospect Parents for Decency, which in October accused Foucault of stocking inappropriate books and promoting Satanism to children at the school's annual Harvest Festival.

"I wouldn't say that I'm happy about this outcome, but I'm satisfied that Superintendent Fraser and the board have come to the right decision for our children and the community," said Amy Johnson, president of Prospect Parents for Decency. "I consider Miss Foucault a tragic figure, certainly a deceived young person, but she brought this infamy upon herself by insulting Christian values and defying the school community she served."

Foucault left the meeting in tears without answering questions and did not respond to phone messages seeking comment this morning. Her attorney, Delores Apple of Charlotte, said Foucault was "literally the victim of a witch hunt by the Prospect Baptist Association," and called the decision to deny her client a contract "proof that Prospect remains mired in 17th-century bulls**t."

Frasier's announcement came after Howell Elementary Principal Fred August told the board he had reversed his previous decision and would remove all copies of "The Good Little Witch" from the school library. Later in the meeting, Jane Eastway, chairwoman of the Howell Elementary PTA, read aloud a letter from the group promising to present its plans for the 1994 Harvest Festival for public review.

The 1993 festival became the focus of widespread community outrage after this newspaper published a letter to the editor written by Johnson, a 26-year-old mother of two and the wife of the Rev. Max Johnson, youth minister of Prospect First Baptist Church.

Amy Johnson, who represented Cincinnatus County in the 1989 Miss North Carolina Pageant, previously made headlines when she accused Foucault of purchasing and circulating copies of a children's book that promoted a Satanic religion known as Wicca. At the Harvest Festival, Foucault organized a "witches broom race," in which students wearing black paper hats raced around an outdoor course while holding a broom between their legs. In her letter, Johnson called the festival "a public insult to Christians" and announced the formation of Prospect Parents for Dignity.

"We are experiencing a civil war in America," Johnson said after Wednesday night's decision. "God is on one side and Satan is on the other. In New York City and Hollywood and Raleigh and Charlotte they laugh when they hear a truth like that, but we march on. We know first-hand that sin surrounds us, and the Devil wants nothing more than to slip inside us when we least expect it."

-- "Librarian resigns school job under PPD pressure," The Prospect Beacon, by Steve Black and Emily Du Bois, Jan. 6, 1994.

***

Oh, I've certainly had my eye on Amy Johnson for some time -- since before she was Amy Johnson, in fact. Back in those days her last name was Perkins, and the other kids called her "Amy Perky." It wasn't a reference to her personality so much as to her incredible breasts, which developed early and remained both luscious and firm well into her thirties.

Were they perfect? That's an unusual question, I suppose, but one I've often pondered. Because, yes, Amy Perkins' breasts were so awe-inspiring that one couldn't help but notice them, and having noticed them, one couldn't help but remember them, think about them, project them. Had God made them any larger they would have lost their shape, their gravity-defying projection. Had He shaped them differently, or hung them lower, or graced them with smaller nipples, less prone to arousal, would they have burned their way into the memory and secret imaginations of so many of her classmates?

Hell, forget her classmates. Imagine what those breasts, attached to such a beautiful, fresh teen, did to the older men in Prospect. How many followed their fat matron wives on expeditions to Belks just for the chance to ogle smiling Amy Perky behind the fragrance counter? How many closed their eyes and drilled those matrons hard while images of the innocent-but-provocative perfume girl bouncing across the cinema of their minds?

And so, with nothing but time on my hands, I often wondered: Were they perfect, her breasts, all perfume? Because one time she hugged me, and I felt them pressed against my torso like living, animate creatures. And they burned into my memory, leaving still-painful scars.

So yes, I determined. Amy's breasts were perfect.

Perfect for sin.

Perfect for sin because they evoked its mystery, expressed its power, and cloaked all of it in shame and bitterness. It's not quite sin without of that conflict, so in that light, Amy's breasts inspired sin. Perhaps she knew it. Perhaps they inspired it in her as well. Perhaps she wondered, as I often had, why God would curse her with breasts so certain to arouse the Devil in any man. Or woman, for that matter.

Which was why, when I finally brought her under my power, when she finally lay spread-eagled and naked on that round wooden table, bound tight at ankle and wrist, knees bent beneath the surface, her downy pubes hanging over the edge, wet and vulnerable, oh how my attention wandered there.

Middle-aged now, her breasts rippled and swung with each thrust of my cock into her sopping-wet sex. But rather than add my load to those who had come before me, so to speak, I pulled out of her at the last moment, my right hand gripping the base of my cock hard enough to dam the semen coursing upward while I walked to the head of the table and positioned its tip above her face and aimed for her chest. When I released my grip, sperm shot forth with impressive force, releasing contraction after contraction to fall on her once-perfect but still inspiring breasts.

Call it a tribute.

Satisfied with my work, I took my still-wet cock and rubbed it across Amy's lips. Instinctively, like a nursing infant, her mouth opened, taking me in. O how I enjoyed that moment, that visual.

The former head of the Prospect Parents for Decency, and our famously pious State Senator, bound naked to a table, covered in cool sweat and warm semen, blindly and contentedly sucking my sticky Satanic cock in the dancing firelight.

Anyway, that little Halloween ritual was the first of our encounters. It wouldn't be the last.

***

The first year was probably the most challenging. Sen. Amy Johnson was a heavily scheduled woman. Man does not live by bread alone, she liked so say, but Amy was a person who by all appearances lived solely by Blackberry. The device kept her schedule when it wasn't attached to her ear, which was most of the time, and she fiddled with it obsessively. I considered it almost an extension of her expansive will, Amy's own magic wand. Through it she kept dozens of people across the state jumping, motivated and perpetually agitated along the various strands of her web. Senate committees, various state boards, the state Baptist Convention, and now half-a-dozen national "values" groups relied upon her direction and leadership.

And then there was her husband, the aptly named Max Johnson. In public she always deferred to his "steward leadership" of their family and the Prospect First Baptist congregation, but it didn't take a gifted observer to understand that both those worlds revolved around Amy Johnson. In fact, Max's success in life could be fairly attributed to three convergent facts:

1. Max enjoyed the largest penis in Cincinnatus County, and I do mean he enjoyed it, at least in his youth. It seemed so alive to him, so separate and single-minded, that in his teens it actually felt like a companion, an independent entity. But Max's penis obsession, along with his mother's overwrought erotic horror of it, conspired to make him both enormous and enormously ashamed; 2. Max was, by nature, profoundly queer, perpetually rationalizing his overwhelming temptation to sodomy or desperately seeking God's forgiveness for his most recent furtive coupling; 3. In marrying Amy, and in surrendering to her power in their private life, Max was able to remain safely closeted and plausibly heterosexual.

So when Amy determined in college that Max would go beyond faith and declare a calling to the ministry as a condition of their marriage, he did it. And when Amy saw a path that could take him past the other associate pastors and straight to the top of the Prospect First Baptist hierarchy, he took it. And when Amy decided that the local Baptist association was shirking its steward leadership duty to the larger community, he saw to it that all the local churches understood what their social policy agenda would be for each coming year.

Obsessed as I was with Amy, I marked their progress carefully. Max was the only boy in her high school graduating class who wasn't usually calculating opportunities to grope her, which made him a natural boyfriend for a young woman so terrified by and fascinated with the extent of her sexual power, I suppose. Particularly given the circumstances of her home on Washington Street, where Papa Perkins took a great interest in Amy's hygiene routine and sleeping arrangements. An asexual boyfriend must have been a relief, if not exactly a pleasure, during her warped formative years.

Was Max such a pleasure in their twenties? It's hard to imagine that he was. He gave Amy two children before the bi-sexual libido shut down permanently, probably in self defense, but we're talking about a man with a profound aversion to the vagina, both as anatomy and symbol. As the intimate details of their marriage emerged in our annual confessionals, I began to feel quite sorry for her.

But I get ahead of myself.

The thing to understand is that the pit of Hell first opened through Amy Johnson's Blackberry. Not as emails or calls, but as service messages and pop-up warnings. Clever little thoughts like "YOUR SIN IS KNOWN TO ME. #666" and "YOU CANNOT ESCAPE MY POWER. #666." Amy was never stupid, but it's safe to say that she lived in a magical world, and this worldview largely defined her attitude toward technology, too. So before long she was conducting secret conversations with Satan through her Blackberry, convinced that Lucifer had turned the gadget into some kind of evil walkie-talkie.

A service alert would pop up on her phone with some message like "WE KNOW WHAT YOU REALLY WANT. SOON YOU WILL SURRENDER TO IT. #666," and clever little Amy would dash off a text message to the non-existent cell number 666. Answers like "YOU HAVE NO POWER OVER ME!" and "I AM WASHED IN THE BLOOD!" came first, but over time her tone shifted perceptibly. "YOU ARE THE PRINCE OF THIS WORLD AND HAVE WHAT YOU WILL, BUT MY SALVATION IS ETERNAL."

This kept up through the summer and fall of 2008, as the pretty illusion of America that she knew and loved began to disintegrate around her. Yet for all I could tell, she never mentioned her private banter with Satan to anyone from her circle of church friends.

The next step toward her inevitable surrender took place on Wednesday, October 29, 2008, when Amy's Blackberry chimed in with this message: "AT MY FEAST IN THREE DAYS TIME YOU SHALL SURRENDER TO ME, AS YOU HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN THAT YOU WOULD, AS YOU HAVE ALWAYS DESIRED AND FEARED. YOUR DELICIOUS RESISTENCE TO THE INEVITABLE IS YOUR GIFT TO ME. #666."

The message appeared to her during a prayer breakfast for the directors of Prospect's annual Lottie Moon Offering, and Amy blanched visibly, stood up unsteadily, and excused herself, tottering out of the Shoney's into the bright October sunshine of the parking lot overlooking the Bypass. After composing herself, she climbed into her white Suburban, drove home, went directly upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom. She cried and prayed for several minutes, then stripped down and slipped into the tub, where she spread her legs beneath the faucet and let the hot, pounding stream bring her rapidly and violently to an overdue climax.

Afterward, she put on a fresh outfit and went to her next appointment, appearing neither upset nor shaken as she spoke about voter registration to the Cincinnatus County Republican Party Women's Auxillary coffee club.

Her big test took place on Halloween, Friday the 31st. The mysterious #666 account sent Amy several preparatory messages, but she maintained her prepared schedule without deviation, beginning with a campaign team breakfast, followed by a mid-morning meeting with the mayor and a noon excursion to Howell Elementary, where a two-person crew from Eyewitness Action 5 interviewed her in front of the building.

"When people of faith say that they're powerless to stop the evil that's taking place in this country, I like to bring them here to remind them that we can accomplish anything so long as we're on God's team," Sen. Amy Johnson told the pretty blonde reporter, who looked something like a cheap imitation of the profound beauty Amy had been in the early 1990s.

"There was a time not so long ago when this school used to put on an annual Halloween Festival, using public dollars to promote a Satanic agenda. We challenged it, and they changed the name to a Harvest Festival, thinking they could skate by with politically correct language. But we kept on fighting, year after year, until the parents finally rose up and took control of not only the school's event calendar, but of their own lives as Christians."

After the interview, Amy scrolled cheerfully through her email while her volunteer communication director texted in the back seat and her full-time campaign assistant, a recent college graduate named Betsy Cone, steered the Johnsons' Suburban through lunch-hour traffic back.

That's when it all got real. The service-message chime went off on Amy's Blackberry, signaling an incoming missive from Satan, and Sen. Johnson silently read the following: "WE HAVE TAKEN CONTROL OF YOUR WEAK-SPIRITED ASSOCIATES. NOW YOU WILL COME TO US. #666."

"Betsy," Amy asked calmly, "you're very quiet today. Are you okay?"

"We are fine," her assistant said without taking her eyes off the road. "It's our highest of holy days." Then she turned and smiled ominously at her boss.

The fact that the controls on Amy's Blackberry had suddenly stopped functioning confirmed it: Satan was finally making his big move. Amy reached out to take the wheel from her assistant, but her volunteer communications director leaned forward from the back seat and restrained her. They struggled only long enough for the young man, a former linebacker at Gardner Webb, to inject Amy with the sedative, and though the scene took place in public, the Suburban's expensive tinted windows kept everything private.

***

When she woke, Amy found herself staring up into a twilight dome of sky, the tops of the silhouetted trees around the small clearing curving darkly across her field of vision. It took her a moment to remember where she had been, and she sat up with a sudden gasp, clutching at her knees reflexively and casting her eyes back and forth around the circle.

Forty-one-year-old Amy Perkins Johnson, Prospect's upstanding State Senator, sat upon a grassy lawn in a circular clearing in the woods, a sliver of waxing moon hanging in the dark field above her. Thirteen hooded figures encircling her in dense silence. Each held a burning torch, casting competing shadows across the flickering scene as the cool evening darkened with the rapid retreat of the sun. Amy, dressed only in a sheer while gown, practically glowed at the center of it all, a pool of moonlit quicksilver surrounded by black and red.

"Who are you?" she screamed, grasping at her gown and discovering that she was naked beneath it.

"You know who we are," I said, taking a step forward. "Just as you've always known who we are. And it's time we became one, Amy."

"You don't know me!" she shouted, then stood up formed a cross with her fingers and brandished it in my direction.

"Let's play a little game then, Amy," I said as I stalked slowly counter-clockwise within the circle, never taking my hooded eyes off of her. "I'm going to tell you things only you would know, and then I'm going to ask you questions. For every lie you tell, there will be consequences. Understand?"

"You don't know me," she insisted, but this time it was only a whisper. A hope. It quivered on her plump lips.

"I'll go first, Amy. Remember your first sexual experience?"

"No. I'm not playing your games."

"Oh, you remember. Someone you trusted."

"You leave Papa out of this!"

"Now here's the part that no one else knows beyond this circle, my dear: As horrible and confusing as it was, the part that frightened you the most was the way that, despite yourself, in the weeks that followed, you found that remembering certain aspects of the experience aroused you."

"You are evil," she hissed. "I hate your evil."

"Good," I said, purring the word like a big cat. "Now you have to answer a question. And be careful how you answer, because there are penalties for lying."

"I'M NOT AFRAID OF YOU!" she screamed.

"Ah!" I said. "I haven't even begun to question you yet, and already you lie. I warned you, Amy, that there are consequences for your actions here." I nodded to two of the men in the circle and they moved quickly to grab her by her arms. She squirmed ineffectually as they restrained her, and shrieked as I ripped off her sheer gown with one quick tug. Amy's legs collapsed beneath her as she grasped at the fabric, suspended above the earth by the two hooded men.

"Now answer my question, Amy. Did he have an orgasm that first time?"

She closed her eyes, reliving the moment.

"Yes," she whispered.

"Where?" I demanded.

"In my mouth."

"Good girl," I said, motioning for the men to release her and step back. They lowered her to the ground gently, and I stepped up behind her, stroking her short, frosted blonde hair with both my hands. "See? You told the truth, and nothing bad happened."

"Why am I here? What are you doing to me?"

I knelt behind her and whispered "Shhh...." closely into her sensitive ear.

"Here's another thing that only the people in this circle know about you," I said. "You don't usually like giving oral sex to your husband, but when you're alone and you touch yourself, the thought of being forced to suck a stranger's cock always helps you reach orgasm."

"Yes," she admitted.

"Good girl," I said, and kissing the top of her head as I stood up again. "Now tell us, Amy -- and don't lie, or you will face the consequences -- what did your husband Max do that brought an end to your sexual relationship?"

"How do you know that?" she pleaded.

"Answer the question."

"Sodomy," she said, looking down. "After a while he only ever wanted to sodomize me."

"And you refused him."

"It's not natural!" she said, bursting into tears. "What's so awful about me? The natural me? What's wrong with me?"

"Yes, Amy, what is wrong with you?"

"You know! My God, I've always felt you around me, watching me, hunting me, undressing me with your eyes! You're always taking me apart!"

"We want to hear you say it."

Amy wiped her eyes and composed herself, taking a deep breath and then staring up at the moon.

"I've always thought sinful thoughts. I've done everything I could to hold them at bay, but they're always there, waiting for me in the darkness. I'm ashamed of how they arouse me."

"And you fought the Devil so hard didn't you?" I said, my voice soothing as I stroked the skin on her shoulders.