Heaven's Harlots: My Fifteen Years in a Sex Cult by Miriam Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

us— anything we wanted.
    Now he was drinking from a bottle, and he lit up another joint as he lay back on the bed, totally wasted. I nudged Daisy, and we grabbed our stuff and bolted out the door, down the steps, and out onto the street without looking back. We couldn’t hear Charlie or anyone else behind us, but we still ran through the street in the direction of any light.
    Finally, we found ourselves in front of a well-lit college dormitory.
    By this time we were so desperate, we did not care what anyone thought.
    We started banging on all the doors until someone answered.
    “Please, let us in,” I asked. “Some man is chasing us, and we don’t know where we are.” The boy who answered the door didn’t seem to believe us, but he reluctantly agreed to let us stay. We bedded down for the night on the floor.
    The next day we were back on the street. I suggested that Daisy sing in the cafes so we could make some money to get a train out of there.
    After searching in vain all morning for places to sing, we decided to give up on that idea and just bum money instead by panhandling on the street.
    By nightfall, we had only collected about ten dollars. We decided to go to the train station, spend the night there, and start panhandling again in the morning. On our way we passed an art gallery, and I stopped to look at the paintings.
    “Hi, do you believe in Jesus?” someone asked.
    It was a boy about my age carrying a guitar. He had a short, smiling girl with him.
    “Yes. In fact, I carry a Bible with me all the time,” I responded gaily, happy to hear a kind voice.
    “You do! Wow! What version is it?”
    “New Revised.”
    “Oh,” he said, looking disappointed, but his face quickly lit up again.
    “I have a King James Version with me. Do you want to compare verses?”
    I looked to Daisy, who was engrossed in conversation with the girl.
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “Here, I’ll show you a verse in my Bible, and you look for it in your Bible, and we can see how they’re different.” I thought he had some point that he really wanted to make, so I joined in. We sat on the edge of the curb and he took out a three-by five-inch King James Bible.
    I took out my paperbound New Testament.
    For the next half hour, we looked up scriptures, which he was much better at than I. He explained the beauty and purity of the King James version, which is written in Shakespearean English, and I felt my puny New Revised Version was totally inadequate.
    Daisy and the girl she was talking to came over to participate in the impromptu Bible study. The girl’s name was Praise.
    “Should we go get some coffee?” said the boy. “It is cold out here.”
    Daisy and I agreed, and we walked together to a diner, where we spent the next hour listening to their explanations of Bible verses over cups of hot coffee.
    “Why don’t you girls come home with us?” Praise said. “We have a big campground upstate, and there is plenty of room.”
    “Who are we?” asked Daisy with a commandlike quality to her voice.
    “Oh, we’re a group of people trying to serve the Lord. Maybe you heard about us. The papers call us the Children of God.”
    “You are with the Children of God?” I asked. “The ones I saw in a documentary?”
    “Yes, that was our camp in Texas. We have a camp here in New York now. Do you want to come up with us tonight?”
    “How far is it from here?” asked Daisy.
    “oh, not far,” said Praise. “We have a bus taking us up in about an hour.” Daisy seemed okay about it, so we followed them to an old yellow school bus surrounded by a large group of noisy young people.
    One boy from the crowd came over to us.
    “Praise the Lord,” he said, giving Praise and the boy a quick hug. “You found some sheep!”
    “Yes. This is Miriam, and this is Daisy,” piped up Praise, pushing her long brown hair out of her eyes with tiny cold fingers. “They want to come home with us.”
    “Hallelujah! Are they saved