Chamelea

by D.H. Robbins

Anguished voices gnaw through the subconscious of a schizophrenic like termites of the psyche. There is nowhere to turn as the commanding voices conjure up a will to murder. Such is the case with Reverend Thomas Barragan Deavers as he hears the controlling voice of his inner God.

By the time Thomas Barragan was an eight-year-old boy, his mother had instilled within him the emotional foundations of the daughter she would have preferred. Now, as an adult, and a Reverend, his female instincts have consumed him. Operating under his alter-ego, "Chamelea," he becomes a "liberator of souls." He has developed his talent as a hypnotist and his calling as a man of God to secure the trust of his female victims. He worms his way onto his female victim's insecurities to mesmerize them-with the help of LSD-laced Communion wafers-into finding absolution to then die by his hand under his direction. It is, after all, God's will for them. By dispensing his own brand of last rites as predator and priest, they die in his embrace, as he feels the warmth of their departing souls enrich his own. Only in this way can The Reverend Barragan satisfy his--and his inner god's--compulsion to nurture his inherent and rapacious woman's soul. It is, after all, his god's will for him. He believes Chamelea, that person within him, is pure.

"Chamelea" is also a story of the dysfunctional relationship between Reverend Barragan and his estranged twenty-one-year-old daughter, Regina. Having lost her mother to a suspicious drowning over ten years before, she and her father have distanced themselves from the ability to love. The Reverend is as driven to seek her out as she is compelled to escape her memory of him.