The Little Demons Inside

by Micah Thomas

  She shook her head, "Watch."

  Wiseman's voice was like rich bourbon. Smooth and aged.

  "Have you done as I asked, Cynthia?"

  "Yes, Wiseman. Here are the patent applications, drawn to your exact specifications. There have been problems, as you said there would be."

  "Come here, Cynthia. In front of this camera with me."

  "Yes. Of course."

  On the screen, Wiseman scooted his chair to the side, making room.

  Denzel against leaned into Cynthia and whispered, "What in the hell is this? Where is this going?"

  "Just watch."

  Wiseman continued, as Cynthia sat down beside him, looking just a little bit younger than she was today. Or maybe the same age, but her face was different too. She looked hypnotized and Denzel could see the child that she once was in her face.

  "How do you feel, Cynthia?"

  Cynthia looked small in the lab coat, shuddered. "I'm scared."

  "Don't be scared. What we build here will last a thousand years, if we do it right. I'm so very glad you found me, but I've told you not to seek the others. They are not at all like me. I'm here to help you. They sleep and need to remain sleeping. The others would not do as I have done, but still I feel you seeking them out."

  Cynthia looked very agitated, a child caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

  A voice from off camera, again that New England accent, "Chucky, wake up. The session is over."

  The voice continued, seeming to address someone off camera, "Jake, turn the lights on, please. And prepare a shot to bring him out."

  Wiseman apparently disagreed, "Sit down, Jake."

  The film grain twisted with distortion.

  "Cynthia, children must obey."

  She cringed against his words, and struggled to stand.

  "No," she said as if fighting her own will.

  That New England persona, Denzel could tell, was the test administrator. He'd used this tone before when guiding LSD trips with his students.

  "Chucky, if you're in there, please wake up."

  The film strip distorted heavily, the light in the lab room flickered, and a glow appeared to emanate from Wiseman himself.

  Wiseman looked directly into the lens of the camera and said, "Find Denzel Borken."

  The film strip flipped to blank and continued rolling white nothing.

  The two sat in darkness, Denzel fidgeted with a cigarette from his pocket.

  "What was that?" Denzel asked.

  Cynthia stood and flipped on the lights, "That, my new friend, was our last session with the research group in Boston, two years ago."

  "Am I to believe you are in contact with a supernatural being based on that performance? Hollyweird makes better movies."

  "The subject no longer needs the drugs. The Wiseman entity is present all of the time now."

  "That man, well, I'm not a therapist, but I think he could use some lithium and a padded room. I'm happy to refer you to someone that deals with this sort of thing. I'm not buying any of this."

  "No, Denzel. You are going to help us. And I'm going to help you."

  "How is that?"

  "We'd like your help in understanding what we've found. Funding is not a problem."

  "Oh? Some sweetheart endowment for spiritualists?"

  "No. Our subject, Wiseman, has delivered the means to our economic future and freedom from small-minded bureaucratic institutions, like the one you find yourself in now. We have schematics, diagrams, models of devices that are light years beyond anything anyone has seen. The proceeds of which have already funded construction of a new state of the art facility in Seattle, Washington. Welcome to the private sector. Think of the possibilities."

  "So you keep a genius doped up and supplying you with what? Inventions that you shill out to the industrial military complex? The ethical issues..."

  "Denzel, don't pretend to be a saint. We all have our secret sins, but in this case, it's merely a necessity. You'll never have to think about the money. It's entirely symbiotic. Chucky was a house painter, barely literate when we found him by accident. He is entirely onboard."

  "I'd need to see some more compelling evidence before I'm a believer. I'm still a scientist, for god's sake."

  "Naturally. Sign a contract with us, it will guarantee nondisclosure and your eternal financial security, and then, then you can meet him yourself."

  "What was that shit about the others? What drugs did you use?"

  "Sign on the dotted line and then we can talk. Should I leave it here for you to think it over?"

  Denzel signed before she left. After all, what did he have to lose?

  ***

  Henry listened with a growing sense of dread. That reveal was more than he expected, but despite greatly elaborating on the exposition of the situation that intersected with Henry's own story, he didn't feel like he'd learned anything more of substance.

  "Very fascinating."

  "Goddamn right, it was fascinating. I signed up with Black Star and was complicit with their sins for 20 years. I developed the formula, and the quotient, the parameters that determine a candidate's ability to access, to make contact, sustain contact."

  For a moment, Denzel showed a competency that was chilling.

  "They tried to keep me from Wiseman, especially at the end. The could tell something was up. The gifts had slowed for a long time. The protocol for avoiding commands to anyone, well, the illusion of control grew with their arrogance. But god damnit, he had chosen me. Me, not Cynthia, not goddamn Lester Fink in Nevada, not some charlatan psychic, me. And they cut me out."

  "Gifts? What were Wiseman's gifts?"

  "Fuck man, for thousands of years, including the industrial revolution, human life hadn't changed all that much. The internet, cellphones, the hyper addictive compute machines, they were Wiseman's backhanded gifts to man. He can look at you, and know everything about you. When he asks a goddamn question, you answer. When you have a dream, he can make it real. This is what he does."

  "I thought Al Gore invented the internet."

  "Black Star doled out pieces to various academics and governments to conceal a single hand control, but that's all besides the point. Only a few at the top, the few remaining from the old days, even knew any of this. You see, these narcissism toys, they keep us looking at the surface, they keep us from searching inward. I had it all wrong, the psychedelic days had to end, at least for the masses. The gifts were to keep us safe."

  "I thought you were into all that expanding consciousness stuff."

  "That was before I knew, really knew, what else is out there, waiting for us in the dark."

  "Why are you telling me all this? Where is Wiseman? Why am I here?"

  "Picture an ecosystem on an alien world. There's birds and trees, and men like you and me. Good men, wisemen, and badmen. But instead of creatures of balanced mix of these attributes arising from competitive evolution, like what we have here in our earthly paradise, this other world was static, fixed and eternal. The attributes that make up a person distilled into container forms of essential purpose. We cracked open the door between our world and theirs."

  "Are you talking about inter-dimensional aliens, like in the History channel shows?"

  "Fuck. Even after all this time, we have no idea what they are, where they are even. We get pieces of them filtered through a host subject's matrix of consciousness. There's some play there. Some bargain that they strike to experience our physical world. That much we know. The results are so goddamn crazy, I wish I could take it all back. It's not science. It's a species of magic and it's dangerous."

  "Fires," Henry said grimly. He couldn't follow most of the psychobabble, but he got the gist.

  "Well, yeah, for one. I didn't do that. I didn't touch you. That was Cynthia's goons in lab coats. They thought, if Wiseman was so great, what else can we get? What other rabbits can we pull out of the magic hat? What if Wiseman was keeping all sorts of great things from us? So they kept searc
hing. They constructed elaborate ways to keep me and Wiseman in the dark about it. What was sought, is sometimes found."

  "What is in me, Denzel?"

  "Let me put it this way, if Wiseman is a man-like creature, a compassionate and brilliant thinking thing, then you got something like an elemental animal."

  "Can you undo it? Why me?" Henry said and twisted his hands together, feeling very uncomfortable, like being told he'd just eaten a tapeworm.

  "If I could, I would. I swear. Black Star probably would try to commodify you for some defense contract, militarized shit, some personal nuclear weapon, but Wiseman wants you set free."

  "Do it."

  "They've got you wired like a bomb, man. I don't even know what your triggers are. You feel agitated when it comes over you? Is that it?"

  "I'm calm now," he said and it wasn't a lie. Even with this spectacular disclosure, impossible to accept crackpot ramblings, he should have felt something, but no, he was calm.

  "Full disclosure, dude, Henry, you've been chugging down lithium, anti-anxiety, and anti-psychotics everyday you've been with me. I'd say, you should be either sleeping or totally fucking Zen."

  "You drugged me?"

  "Couldn't risk a fiery inferno in this sweet pad, could I? I've been observing you too, and you're not a bad kid, just a bit stupid."

  "I guess not," Henry said calmly as he still felt pretty damned cheerful to everything really.

  His thought was slow and sluggish. Shouldn't I be pissed, about the drugging thing? He wasn't sure about anything.

  "So is there a ritual or a procedure to fix me?"

  "Aww Henry, I really do like you. Straight up truth, I'm going to miss you."

  Denzel got up from the table and left the room in his jangle walk.

  Henry shouted to him, still feeling pretty chill, "Where you going?"

  "Nowhere, just looking for something."

  When he returned moments later, Denzel had a large gun in his hand. A fucking cannon straight out of Dirty Harry.

  "Whoa. I thought you said you didn't have a gun," Henry said and looked at the large bore aimed roughly in his direction and squirmed in his seat. The lentils in his stomach threatened to come back up.

  "What? I never said that."

  Henry felt a stirring inside, much stronger than the chemical calm. A bass pulsing heartbeat and something else.

  "What are you doing with that thing? Are you going to shoot me, Denzel?"

  "Like I said, it's been real nice having company, someone to talk to, practically therapeutic in a way to get all that off my chest, but Wiseman says you are too dangerous, like a rabid dog, he said. Calm him down and take care of him. That's what he told me."

  "But I didn't do anything."

  "That thing inside of you, it's always ready to do something."

  "What if I could control it? Live a quiet life doped up on the good stuff? I'll be a good junkie, I've done it before."

  "Shit, buddy. Don't make this harder than it has to be."

  "Why didn't you just push me off the cliff or let me fall?"

  "I'm not your goddamn Obiwan Kenobi. So what? Yeah, I wanted to see something, just a little bit of the magic, but you didn't play ball. You're defective. Just another loser in life, that never even figured out what you had. Maybe if you had shared something with me, we could have done something else. But you didn't show me shit."

  Henry couldn't even hear him. Not over the sound of the bells that were steadily getting louder until they roared in his ears.

  It was as if someone was holding a flashlight to his right eye while he looked around at the world with his left. Henry saw everything, and yet, was almost blinded as his perception doubled. The world passed through the overlay of light, but not merely like retinal fatigue as this was truly another perception, another mode of seeing. Henry gasped as the entirely new set of perceptions took hold in his mind. In this second sight, perception, the world of the subatomic connections between all matter were obvious bonds, ready and willing to leap to energetic formations with he knew that with the most minimal of urging from that excitable presence within him, it could reach out and touch literally everything, opportunistically releasing stored energy. Henry wasn't in the driver seat on this one, and only halfway saw his own recognition of the threat being leveled at him. Henry, frozen in an eternity of time, perceived the man before him, the gun, the granite countertop, the painted walls and everything within these items down to the molecule, down to the atom.

  Denzel screamed, the gun steel screamed, Henry screamed. White hot metal, formerly comprising a gun, sloughed over Denzel's hands, melting them together as if in prayer. The anti-psychotic cocktail surpassed the usual seizure, making this the first time Henry was lucid during the flame. He sensed the dormant energy in all matter react in waves, like slapping a hand into a bathtub, ripples carried across from every object back to him. Even the air felt dense with combustible opportunity. Layers and layers of tightly bound bubbles of anticipatory action, waiting to pop all around him. The floor boards where he did yoga ached to be free and release their dormant energy. In fact, Henry could sense the history of that energy, absorbed from the sun when the wood was still a tree. Years as a sapling, storing up for this moment. He wanted to liberate it all.

  WHOOSH! Words sprang to mind, conjuring images of ecstatic release, orgasmic oh’s and aah’s as the granite counter top burst and melted into level pools.

  Denzel's screams had stopped, and he stood like a ghastly wax statue, and started to melt. Henry realized that there was probably not enough air to breath, or it had simply become too hot for human lungs to breath. Henry, however, had never felt so alive.

  A final push of hot air whirred around Henry's cocoon of softly glowing safety. Denzel charred so rapidly, Henry missed it in a blink. The windows and doors of the house exploded outwardly and Henry felt himself pulled from the home in a hot rush of air. His body, a mere collection of atoms, transformed into a cohesive unit of Henry energy, even his clothes, moved in an assemblage of ephemeral motes of energy, carried on a wind of aimless intention, up and out into the night air. His thoughts sped up and swirled in a dream like hallucinatory trip. He saw landscape fly by, he saw memories flit across his mind's eye, he was a mote in the air and someone else was driving.

  ***

  In a New York City television studio, a darkened audience waited patiently at the instruction of the studio handlers, as the host of the show, Larry, sat at his televised desk. Decades of interviews, from the soft puff to political leaders, in all the years on air, no one like this had ever sat across from him before.

  "Mr. Wiseman, you've wowed us all of the last few weeks. The video of your Late Show appearance has garnered the most views of any video on the internet in years. Your indescribable abilities, inscrutable to the point of seeming magic, have captured the nation's attention. Can you share your secrets with us?"

  "I am afraid that I will ever keep my own counsel on some matters."

  'Ok. Ok. Before we bring out today's other guests to showcase your special talents, our viewers, myself included, would love to know, do you have any plans to put your abilities to use in government or maybe the courts? We've seen impossible inventions materialize out of nothing, and perhaps even more importantly, you appear to have the ability to push someone's mind, to compel them in an almost hypnotic state, to tell the truth. As you must realize, a reliable truth, consistent and irresistible truth would stop lies on the stand in court or before congress. The impact to criminal justice alone could change the world, not to mention we have certain politicians, even some in the White House staff testifying even now on gravely important matters."

  "No doubt it would, but picture it, Larry. The thousands of hours it would take. The system growing more dependent on me with every conviction, and then I lose my voice or good heavens, if I were to pass away. Then what? A return to the shit?"

  "I understand you, but what about the rewards in the meantime?"

 
"Yes. Let us look at it from another angle. If I ask you a question, you are compelled to answer truthfully? Correct?"

  "Yes," he replied, mechanically.

  "Thus far, my demonstrations have been only to show you all that the world is stranger than you know. That powers and principalities exist. Now I want to show you the weakness of truth."

  "I'm not sure I follow you Mr. Wiseman."

  "Tell me, what is your neighbor thinking right now?"

  He answered as if from a long distance away, "I don't know."

  "Don't cry. Don't fret. Your truth is limited to your direct knowledge. We can prove this further if we delve more personally as well. This point is self-knowledge. What is your favorite food?"

  "Peanut butter."

  "Good. Very good! So delicious! Why do you like it?"

  Larry's jaw dropped open and he seemed to struggle to make a sound.

  "I... I... I..."

  "Forget it. You need not answer because you cannot. What would you have replied if someone, not me, had asked you that same question?"

  "It's sweet and salty. I really like it."

  "The reason for this gap between unanswerable and a ready answer, it's not a lie. Your words, as they form in your mind, are a post-experiential description of reality as your senses perceive and experience the stimulation around you. In that, you are forever limited. You may bring out your guest now. I am ready."

  Larry snapped back to control over his own voice, with an almost unawares sense that anything had even happened. It was weird.

  "Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Rand Jhandi to the show."

  After a gentle applause, a small man in his early eighties walked on stage with the assistance of a cane. He took a seat at the round table across from Wiseman.

  "I hardly need to introduce Mr. Jhandi, but for those that don't know, he is a professional debunker. He's been on our show several times over the years, credited with setting up scientific conditions to measure and subsequently disprove purported abilities in spoon-bending charlatans like the fantastic Yuri in the '70s, to the spiritualist crime solvers like Gloria Browning in the '90s. Welcome, Rand. It's good to see you again."