The Little Demons Inside

by Micah Thomas

  He leaned on the trashcan, savoring the dream's reality of touch, and tried to sort out his next move. With a splash through a puddle of collected rain run off and grey mucky leaves, a city bus pulled up to the curb. Normally, Henry could count on a familiar driver to let him hop a ride. There used to be a free ride zone, but that went away, too. The bus lingered long and no one got on or off. Henry felt his awareness pulled towards the open door. This wasn't part of the memory. This was something else. He could feel a weirdness to it. He peered in and, with a shock, saw he recognized the driver. It was a black as night Black man. Henry recognized him as the cop, Officer Sanders sitting pretty in the driver's seat, wearing one crisp police uniform.

  "Stay out of trouble, Henry," he said, and held up his hand in a gesture to stop, "Wait now, a few more getting off."

  He saw her through the window before she came down the steps. The nurse. His savior. His Cassie.

  "What are you doing here?" Henry asked her.

  "Looking for you, dummy," she said, looking at him with deep brown eyes and a half smile on her lips.

  The bus started smoking, and then fully combust in a heatless fire, molten slag running down the gutters. The flames leapt together in a bus-sized orb of interlocking streams of sparking fire.

  "You should put a leash on it," Cassie said, glancing at the fire.

  Henry didn't have a witty response, but he blinked, and the dream crashed down around him like a sudden Netflix loss of service. His mind's eye shifted to another place, less formed, full of darkness and impressions of voices, and the sense of falling down an infinitely deep hole.

  "I asked earlier, and you need to answer now. I know it's hard, but be very honest, do you even want me here?" asked a masculine voice that seemed vaguely familiar.

  Words chasing a spiral of half thought.

  "Now that is typical. Just frickin' typical. You act all nice, but you're not nice to me," a female voice raged.

  Why remember that now? Henry couldn't see for shit through the hazy, nothing landscape, a wall of bloody and black sheets of emotional noise that flashed in darkly purple exclamations with the voices.

  "Oh, I should pity you? Fuck this shit!" a male voice raged back.

  Who was it that said that? Henry tried to trace the emotional string, but came up empty. Dad? Can one remember someone that left when you were five years old?

  "You're a sissy. Gotta ask, why not run away again? It's not like I'm to blame for this mistake. I'm not taking him," the voice he recognized as mom said.

  Both voices were slurred, drunk and scary. He felt scared. He felt like hiding. He was hiding. A sense of being crouched, maybe behind a door.

  "Don't do this."

  "You're an idiot. Self-glorifying, lazy, goddamn martyr."

  Henry's awareness sparked into a harsh visual, light and shapes, as he caught sight of the land below again. Trees tiny like broccoli, as if he was in a plane, so high above it, and with a whoosh, an acre or so caught fire. He heard, or perceived, a terrible cacophony of screams. Animals? People? The sound of timber splintering? The world went dark again.

  "I'll take him, but just until you get clean. I'm not made of money," another voice said.

  Grandma.

  On the outside of the noise inside, the world bled through again with a crash of thunder. A big storm getting worse. He shot up above it, hot air rising, and expanding. The sun on the horizon, and he was above the clouds. Was he cooling off? He sensed changes, but was so very out of control as his mind slammed back into black.

  Rage-filled words crapped up his mind, "I can't even breathe when you are here! Get out!"

  The sensation of rapid descent was followed by rapid ascent. He was a roller coaster of air currents.

  Henry's own voice started rambling on and on, unbidden and confusingly, "I have to go. I have to go. I have to go."

  He felt his heart beating hard in his chest, and opened his eyes. Stupid. Nothing was going on. He was getting coffee at Victrola with Chloe's friends, while on acid. Chloe was there. She hadn't died yet. Hadn't broken his heart yet.

  "You've been talking out loud. People are staring," Chloe said.

  He thought she liked him, but she always started talking bullshit when he was with her.

  "Relationships with persons of different genders have always been complicated things for me. You and I are just on different levels, too. Don't forget that."

  She was breaking up with him. He took a sip of the coffee sludge, bitter and sweet at the bottom of the cup, an almost chewy mix of grounds and gelled sugars. Did she ever even like him or was that another mistake?

  His words failed, always the first to go when he was tripping, and then the tilt-a-whirl world spun on him again, not even giving him time to blink.

  Seattle streets. Same trashcan. He ran his fingers over it, tapped it twice, as if to assure himself of the reality of this moment. Still in Seattle, but after Chloe. The day after Chloe. The molten carcass of the bus lingered and smoked on the curb, but no one took notice. Henry was alone, despite faceless uncurious men and women walking around as if it were just another Tuesday.

  "What's next?" Henry thought out loud.

  Though he was again in the Netflix Original movie of his life, he had some strange sense of being under his own control. It was weird. He could think, and move, but he was on rails. Unable to change the story. At the moment, he felt awake, but he couldn't be awake. He was really flying, a disembodied spirit of fire in sky, but that didn't seem right either. How could it be?

  His gaze was pulled down the block. He saw a couple bike cops, they almost always traveled in pairs. They didn't see him, but they were asking Crazy Jane something, and he knew it was about him. He looked around. Where could he even hide? He was blacklisted from the Barnes & Nobels bookstore, too many foul things done in that bathroom. There. There it was. The entrance to the lobby of the Black Star Institute. He'd heard rumors about what they did, something like the Scientologist brainwashing, but he'd never been inside. There would be a first time for everything.

  He went inside and was immediately greeted by a security guard.

  "You got an appointment?" he asked.

  "Um, don't you guys do walk-ins?" Henry asked, eyes darting back to the street outside.

  The smiling receptionist, god damn or bless her, said, "Today is your lucky day. You are just the person we're looking for."

  Henry didn't know how that could possibly be true. He glanced down at his unfashionably ripped jeans, boots held together with duct tape, and greasy stains on his hoodie.

  He pointed to himself with a smile, "Me?"

  "Absolutely. Come this way. Would you like a cup of coffee before we start orientation?" she'd asked, "It's from a local organic roaster."

  Organic roaster. Ironic, Henry thought. Yes, it was coming back to him now. They'd gone into a small office and he'd filled out a stack of paper forms, not even reading them. This happened again in the dream, and he cursed himself for his naivety.

  The receptionist took his papers, "Ok. Now for the fun part. Someone will be with you in a minute to conduct a little test of your, well, of your suitability here."

  Enigmatic. Henry really half thought that this would be when the cops got him, but that's not what went down at all.

  There was a technician, a lab coat with a machine, and Henry remembered thinking, yessir, Scientology lite. Here comes the e-readers.

  There were no drugs, not yet. They measured something about him, while asking him questions. Whatever they saw, they liked. "This was very good," they'd said, "Very, very good."

  Cassie was suddenly sitting next to him, another seat in the small office.

  "They really did a number on you, kiddo," she said and took his hand, holding it tight.

  The dream burned away like an old celluloid reel disintegrating.

  Henry, a mind without flesh, buoyant in the clouds of a night sky, was rocked like a baby in strong arms.

  "I had a dream I
was in a tree, or a tree house, or something," he said, feeling dreamy and comforted.

  His words made images appear. He saw a tree, old and gnarled, but with still-green branches. At its trunk, scorch marks, but no signs of the fire.

  "Is that the one where we burned? Burned up our friends. Ash and smoke," Henry heard himself ask.

  Like an unwelcome rain, words spilled over the firewall of calm and ran in an un-strung patter.

  "I'm doing it. I'm giving him up. Does that make you happy? One less mouth to feed."

  Strange starlight shined on the tree, revealing the valley below, and beyond that an island, one of many.

  "Shhhh. They're sleeping," Henry whispered.

  A clamoring of inner voices, some sounded just like his own, all ran together in his mind.

  "I have to get away."

  The landscape below flickered and became real in a transition from dark seas and islands to a child's book of amber waves of grain, cruddy little town and farmlands.

  He was descending and he could feel the energies pulsing him forward, slowing. They too wanted to sleep.

  One final push forward and he was teetering on unconsciousness, finally. No more voices. No more scenes of mental disarray. His body was solidly tangible again, somewhere, sleeping.

  ***

  Everyone answers to someone. Cynthia faced the executive and governmental advisory board before, and usually found she had the leverage she needed to continue with minimal interference. New developments threatened to unseat that relationship. The bureaucracy of legal fiction, the money changers that had no understanding of the magic and cared only about outputs and application.

  The monitors in the boardroom flipped on, receiving signal. Images of the stakeholders transmitted from whatever clandestine offices they used. Suits. Men in suits. She knew they resented her, but she was a founding member, there from the beginning.

  The governmental agencies, god only knew how much they were accountable in the public eye, had their representatives at the table and they were clearly upset.

  "We've turned a blind eye to your little experiments long enough."

  "You seemed fine so long as everything was quid pro quo," Cynthia was fine going on the defensive.

  "That may be true, but things have changed. The new administration is talking policy changes."

  She gave them silence. Politics have no place in her dominion. They've outlasted nosy intelligence probes, activists, presidents, and popes.

  "Have you been watching television? Are you even on the internet? Wiseman is everywhere. Uncontained. We never agreed to this."

  "It's nothing."

  "We feel intervention is necessary."

  "Do what you must."

  "Given not only Wiseman, but whatever you have unleashed in the subcontinent... We recommend termination. Any problem with that?"

  "If you can find him, do what you will."

  "And the remainder project deliverables?"

  "On schedule."

  "We'll be in contact."

  And that was that. A chase to the finish. Either Black Star contained their mess, or men in suits would exterminate the collateral. Not that Cynthia believed it for a minute. She knew that inside those towers of skunk works, her self-perceived rivals had tried to replicate the process, and she knew they had unilaterally failed. What Cynthia had on her side was data. They've had nearly a million candidates pass data through their process. With Wiseman as the ultimate baseline, they always had the upper hand. What factions of the government would ever understand that this is science mixed with magic? That it's not 100% process-driven. That the human element, their hard-learned lessons of compatibility, really drove discovery of that place and its inhabitants.

  The meeting over, Cynthia reviewed the plan created by the intern. Maybe there was something there. The plan as proposed showed a significant knowledge of the new administration and a certain marketing genius. The damned social media generation. They knew something. In this case, the play was to entangle the president in an interaction with the persona Wiseman has been trotting out on media. The intern was right, this might be irresistible. Position the chess pieces. This is something they could do. She decided to call him to discuss.

  As the junior project coordinator, or what Cynthia thought of as the intern, Matt has not really been on the radar for anyone, let alone receiving a summons from the top. It was late at night, but when you get the call, you get the call. He'd been browsing porn, the endless scroll, endless permutations of flesh in any arrangement. He'd not been expecting anyone to call him, but least of all Cynthia. He told her he'd be right in, and no, it was no trouble. During the elevator ride, he briefly thought that maybe this was a booty call. That's dumb, but not out of the realm of possibility. It's not like he had a thing for older women, but better people than he had slept their way to the top, at least in movies. He was only slightly disappointed when he found Cynthia wearing a suit and holding his presentation in her hands. All business.

  "I wanted to talk to you about this proposal. Where did you get the idea?"

  He flustered, the inner frat boy that he was faltered in the face of actual authority.

  "Is Thomas joining us?"

  "Why would he? I didn't call him."

  Going around the chain of command was always dangerous. But what can you do?

  "The president is very active on social media. He can't turn down any challenge, however below the office. On the other hand, Wiseman, where is he, right?"

  "Right."

  "He's everywhere, and nowhere. Why not in Vegas? I mean, Wiseman being on TV at all is a challenge to us, a middle finger to our partnerships with government. This shit he's saying, its short of fermenting a rebellion but I was just imagining, what if he did say that he wanted to meet the president. Call him out on certain statements of questionable truthfulness? If a trial is coming years from now, this single meeting could settle everything. If the president turned down the invitation, it's like admitting guilt, right?"

  "He'd have to accept," Cynthia agreed, and added, "What if Wiseman actually showed up? Have you considered the disruption that would cause?"

  "Oh, it's in the closure section of the plan. If Wiseman was identified, we'd pull the swap with the double. If he doesn't show, then the double is presented anyways and subsequently discredited as a fraud. The problem is solved either way."

  Cynthia looked at him and decided to take the gamble, "Can you lead this?"

  "I'd need a team."

  "You have it. Pick anyone you need, even those already allocated."

  "What about Thomas?"

  "What is it with you and Thomas? Are you his little butt boy? Effective immediately, you are leading what is left of Project Wiseman. Am I clear?"

  "When do I start?"

  "Now."

  Matt reached out to shake Cynthia's hand, but when the gesture wasn't returned, he nodded and left. Cynthia sat down and wondered if she was making another mistake. Mistakes were already made, so what different does it make to pile on? The event would draw the attention of the advisory board, but if Matt was as smart as she hoped, Black Star's finger prints would not be located. They had tools at their disposal, let's see how the kid used them. It was anticlimactic, and in that, a perfect smoke screen. She knew she'd be able to sleep now that there was a plan. Henry would be cleaned up by special agents, if he hadn't burned himself up already. Wiseman would be retaken. That left the question of what to do about Project Brahma. Wait and see, was all she could come up with.

  ***

  Not long before going on air to a live studio audience, a national broadcast, money on the line, and Jimmy was being paid a visit by the god damned men in black.

  "I'm a comedian for god's sake."

  "The network has already signed complete cooperation."

  Jimmy's normal smile, familiar to nighttime audiences across the world was not present as FBI, CIA, or NSA, whoever they were, dressed straight out of Agent Smith handbook, lined
the hall to his dressing room. The grand leader goon, a small man, almost effeminate in his oversized suit, stood while Jimmy sat.

  "I don't want guns on my set!"

  "How did Wiseman contact you? I'm not acquainted with how to produce television programs. Do you normally let people walk in off the street, as you previously said in your statement?"

  His voice was butter. Hostage negotiator voice. Jimmy didn't feel like being played this way.

  "Am I being interrogated? God! I don't do the booking. I told you. The talent team said, hey, you gotta meet this guy, I didn't check his god damned references. I don't think we even paid him."

  "Under applicable law, and powers under the Patriot Act, all we will do from now on is have a few inconspicuous agents here in case he drops by again. You won't even notice them."

  "Fine."

  The inscrutable agents filed out of the backstage area, but remained at entrances and exits. Jimmy had a few minutes to himself to try to get back in the zone. The laughing place, with the genial smile.

  All week, he'd fielded phone calls from friends, competitors, producers, and anyone else that was interested in a rating boost. His answer was the same. He didn't know where Wiseman came from, or how to get in touch with him. Some of the calls were angry. The legal representation for a certain young starlet wanted compensation for messing up the girl's mind. She apparently backed out of press engagements and even walked away from a major studio contract. The encounter had fucked her up good. Jimmy wanted nothing to do with it. He was in the business of food fights and celebrity impression. The wounded vet, not so wounded anymore, had been on a full circuit of daytime interviews, showing off his regrown limb. Jimmy didn't mind being associated with that kind of miracle. Again, not that he had any idea of what happened there, really.