The Little Demons Inside

by Micah Thomas

  Henry thought of these parts like little demons inside, and the fire, another part, another demon. But the fire seemed to have access to the whole shebang. There was more than a little of the fire response that tied to Henry's exiles, and he could see that now. It's probably why he was able to make contact so well, what made him a good candidate for the experiment. The fire fed on those feelings, magnified them and then pushed a physical manifestation of the pain out into the real world. Henry thought that if he could make peace with his own exiles, maybe there'd be nothing left for the fire to feed on. That's a hell of a thought. He believed he was a chill dude, a happy loser, but he was growing more and more aware that he had some fire of his own rattling around in his head and heart.

  He wished he had made better use of his time with Del. Where was he going to find another therapist now? Maybe he'd be better off in Black Star, tucked away in a lab room with professionals. He didn't know how to get in touch with them, but if what he had learned online was true, with Wiseman grandstanding in Vegas to debate the president, Black Star had to be there. It was a given, in his mind. He didn't know how to surrender without a confrontation, but he was going to try. Either to Black Star or the feds if they showed up again.

  He got to Vegas as the sun was low in the sky. Summer days were long and hot, and the dusk sun gave the city a yellow tint. Following old instincts, he sought out the crappy part of town, off a ways from the glint. Side streets, and the telltale homeless stringing around like a murder of crows. There was what he was looking for, a food bank. He pulled up out back and left the keys in the car. God bless. Either impounded or re-stolen, he hoped that it would eventually find its way back to the family that he took it from, eventually, but unlikely. Henry figured he'd bum around until the following day, when Wiseman was set to take to the stage. Not much of a plan, but he knew that either he'd recognize the suits or they'd find him if he hung around long enough.

  He carried nothing, except the clothes on his back and some bills scrunched up in his pocket. He'd never really had much, but he knew he wasn't crazy and this was enough to make him feel fine, taking his place leaning against the wall of the food bank, back in the company of his people.

  "Hey, young man, what are you doing here?" asked a tall white guy, missing most of his teeth, and looking like some depression-era bum.

  "Just chillin'," Henry said.

  "Well, look, if you're here for the food bank, they closed," he advised.

  "Naw, I'm cool. Thanks though," Henry replied, "I'm just here for the good company."

  The man thought this was funny and laughed hard until he worked up a cough and a phlegmy clot splat onto the sidewalk.

  "I know it. I know why you're really here, too," he said conspiratorially.

  "Oh yeah?" Henry said, enjoying the banter. This was more like coming home than Reno had been.

  The man leaned, close enough for Henry to smell the booze on his breath and the reek of his body odor.

  "The good man is here, and I bet if you ask him for something, he'd give it to you."

  "I appreciate it, but I'm all good. Clean and straight edge, like my momma taught me," Henry said, trying to pull back and get away from the smell of the man.

  The man leaned in closer, whispering to Henry, "I don't mean dope, unless that's what you're into. The good man came a couple days ago, and it's like meeting Santa Claus. He has what you need."

  This couldn't be him, Henry thought. Like fucking Christ with the lepers, it made a dumb sorta sense.

  "Is the good man black? Talks pretty?" Henry asked.

  "You bet. He's right over there with Theresa. She got a new eye from him, works good and she can walk straight again too," he said with a goofy toothless grin.

  "Oh yeah? What'd you get?"

  The man's face looked like a happy child, no shit, it was Christmas in skid row. The man took out a folded sheet of paper from his pocket. He tapped it three times and it unfolded itself like a magic trick, revealing an animated hand drawn map straight from fucking Harry Potter. Circles blinked at certain intersections and stars lit up others.

  "It's a special thing, a map of anything I want, where my friends are, and where the fucking pigs are," he said happily, "I can find anything I need with this and he gave it to me for free. Not a fucking penny."

  Henry thought it was funny the man hadn't asked for teeth or piles of gold. Even wishes were moderated by the confines of homelessness. Henry said his goodbyes and walked over to where the man had said Theresa was. A woman with her back turned to Henry was leaning over a sitting figure. He could hear her cackle laugh and make out that she was spilling praises and thanks, trying to give whoever she was talking to something she found precious.

  "Take it, please. It was my grandmother's and I want you to have it. It's real gold and I never pawned it," she said.

  The figure demurred, and Henry waited as if in line behind her. He still couldn't see the man, but that voice was pure class. Theresa hugged the sitting figure, who then locked eyes with Henry, and gave him a twinkling smile.

  "Theresa, you go on now, I need to talk to my friend," Wiseman said.

  When she turned around, Henry saw the new eye with wonder. Her face was that sun and street-damaged Iggy Pop lookalike texture, but that eye! Her right eye was normal, hazel and a little blood shot, but the left, was a piercing blue, clear and alarmingly insightful. Henry felt like she could see right through him to his bones, to his fire, and maybe she could.

  She gave Henry a glance, and said, "Be good, you two."

  Henry shook his head and looked down at Wiseman.

  "Help me up, would you?" Wiseman said as he rubbed the dirt off his hands onto his pant leg.

  Henry gave him a hand at the hand and steadied at the elbow. He felt real, like an old man, but Henry knew better. He'd finally found the wizard of Oz, of Black Star.

  They walked passed the homeless, Wiseman smiling benevolently at the people, some timidly dipping their heads, others just grinning with thanks.

  "You've been busy," Henry said.

  "Oh, well, you know how it goes. Idle hands are the devil's playground."

  "And here I thought you might be the devil himself," Henry said, "After all, I think you wanted me dead. Or did I misunderstand that bit?"

  "Was I wrong, Henry? Have you helped out your fellow men in your time of relative freedom?"

  "No. I guess not," Henry said, admonished, "But why? Why to everything?"

  They stopped outside of a shitty little motel.

  "Let us procure a room here for the night, unless you prefer the open sky?"

  Henry felt Wiseman's influence hit his mind, the fire's awareness woke up to it, and pushed back.

  "I'll do as you say, if that means we can have a little talk. Straight talk, not like the bullshit you say on TV."

  Wiseman, as if knowing that his tricks of influence wouldn't work, not on this one, shrugged as if to say, sure, but no promises.

  Henry insisted on paying cash and talked fast, not letting Wiseman talk. Didn't he know that nothing is for free? If he made the clerk give him a room, eventually the worker bee would be in trouble for having a short register? Didn't he care about the little guy? For all his altruism, Henry felt there was something deeply inconsistent, but he had bigger fish to fry. The clerk, bored and more than worldly, gave them a look that said, go ahead, prepay for a night at an hourly motel. Henry didn't care if anyone presumed he was a twink headed off to blow an old man. Fuck it.

  The twin beds crinkled with the sound of plastic sheets, and the room smelled like the off-putting mix of cigarettes, stale sex, and possibly crack smoke residue. Henry pushed the double vision back down, not wanting to know if he could perceive the semen stains and whatever else residue in the room.

  They sat, each taking a bed and facing each other.

  "Talk," Henry said.

  "With us, talk is cheap," Wiseman said, "I'd much rather show you."

  Henry was about to say something cr
ass, but the double vision descended on him so rapidly he couldn't speak. Wiseman's face, he saw through it, and saw the thing beneath the man. Large luminous eyes held him capture, lines of force, energy moving in rapid pulses and he was reminded of the painting, in what seemed a life time ago, he had seen on Cassie's wall. The chakras, the infinite complexity of this being and its vast power.

  "What are you?" he asked managing to get the words in thoughts if not in speech.

  "What are we, you should be asking," Wiseman replied, "It started long ago..."

  A sonic boom of the mind replaced words and sight.

  A field of view, a deep black nearly nothing, a wet oil slick of gloppy almost nothing, both clear as night and hazy and surreal. Scale was impossible to determine. Was it near, or far, and did it matter? The black wet nothing, rose and roiled in a breathing, respiratory something. It released a bubble from deep within, a wet fart of birth, an expulsion of airy sprites, scattering and circling in an invisible breeze. They were little more than ideas and feelings made real, or real enough for this place. The sprites sparked and flew together and apart, elemental and not able to make anything in their collective spin.

  Another creation bubble burst forth from the muck, and with it the spontaneous formation a single large spark, a noisy, buzzing vibration, more powerful than any of the others at a scale that almost made no sense. That power did nothing for it, and it grew lethargic in the absence of resistance and companionship.

  Out of a hole in the dark, a blackness even more, came a small egg of tightly wound filaments of light. What it lacked in radiance, it made up for in focus. The massive spark spun through the egg like it was a lens, transforming in output into land, liquid, terrestrial shapes. The egg popped out of existence and Henry sped through the narrative pulling close to the stuff itself. The slagged landscape, a slowly sludging mess of land and wetness. Land and liquid and a fucking forest. There he was, in his forest. Damn.

  The view cast upwards and in the darkness, more lights blinked into existence. These showed a greater complexity and dynamic vibrancy as they showered down like snowflakes. These had real personality. Henry could feel them, each something essential, a lust, a control, a kindness, a destroyer. On examination, the light forms were each themselves infinite, and internally self-replicated patterns of energy. Henry felt awe as they segregated into discrete forms, coming together and pulling apart. Linked and unlinked, they floated and rolled like giant luminous eggs as a land formed in the haze. Those smaller sparks, those there in the haze first, changed as they came in contact with the land, taking on reactive qualities. The new light forms threw out lashes, long tendrils of energy, of themselves. The filaments lassoed the lesser entities. Combined or linked and unlinked, Henry couldn't tell what he was witnessing.

  The forms raised mountains, pulling earth upwards through gravitational arcs of power, scooped out trenches with strange grasping digits of light. The valleys and seas filled with dark liquids as if the land bled something not quite water. Zones of dominion, spheres of influence and confluence took shape. Henry could sense a power struggle among the forms, but if this was warfare, he could not understand it. One form continued to expand its ever-strengthening filaments, in a web of vibrantly pulsing blue light. Control it said, mastery and domination, without end, and without other motive. It was not without a rival. Other forms rose up from conglomerate alliance, but in the colorful display, it wasn't apparent that any gains were lasting. No, it was the first, the old and dim, but vastly more powerful presence that quelled them with a mighty shockwave of spiraling force, but that too was a temporary silence.

  They slowly rose up, reformed, and clashed again and again and again, in never ending cycles of rivalry. Henry had a sense of time, ages, eons, meaningless vast periods beyond his imagination.

  Wiseman's voice carried over in a narration worthy of Morgan Freeman, "And so it was for more time than your species has been aware. Our private struggle, without birth, renewal or change, until, eventually we slept. Unable to die, unable to think a way out of our existence, but weary in a bored sort of way."

  The view returned back to the familiar path and zoomed through the dark forest, ending in archipelagos, some lit by entities, large and small, but docile and lowly humming like a computer in sleep mode.

  Henry blinked once and it was over. Though they were back in the hotel, they'd never left, but Henry realized that he'd tipped over and was lying on his side. He sat and rubbed his eyes, the fire again dormant inside him.

  "I don't understand," he said.

  "I've never been a good storyteller. Sharing a memory. I thought it might be faster, but you're too limited in your understanding and I just don't know how else to explain. It's not my nature, but I am hungry," Wiseman said, clearly disappointed in Henry.

  "I don't want to say you've wasted your breath on that exposition, but what the fuck? Was that supposed to clear everything up for me?" Henry was aggravated and struggling to piece together the meaning of the vision.

  "There's an In 'N Out across the street. I am very fond of their burgers," Wiseman said, "We'll talk more when you come back. It will give me time to organize better words for you."

  "Fine," Henry said. What the fuck, he asked himself again, and again.

  ***

  Henry set out in the sunset, walking from the shitty motel to the In 'N Out Burger. That was some mind-bending shit. Wiseman is weirder than he expected. He thought he'd finally have answers and instead, there's a dude almost as messed up as he was, just trying to get by. Henry was minding his own business, when he was accosted by a voice dripping with absolute hate and ignorance. He really did not have time for this shit.

  "Hey! Faggot!"

  The voice called out from across the parking lot as he approached the steps to the upper level. He spun around, a mix of startled and curious.

  "Fucking fag!"

  There the guy was. Baseball cap, white t-shirt, jeans. Standing there as if cast in stone. An eternal monument to assholes everywhere. Henry saw the scabs on the guy's knuckles, indicators of a scrapper. This would not be pretty, Henry thought.

  "Yeah? What do you want?" Henry answered as he walked up to the asshole.

  "You're a faggot."

  It should have been obvious that a guy this drunk this early in evening, no good. The parking lot was the ass-end parking lot attached to the colon of a dive bar and a coffee shop and the burger place. A coffee shop was trying to be something different in a town that only wanted its dive bars and tourist crap. Either way, no patrons could see them out back.

  "Ok. I'm not gay, dude. But I don't like the way you use that word, as if it's something bad."

  "Fuck you, faggot!"

  How many breaths does one have before you know a fight is about to go down? Enough time to think through how to reason with a drunk asshole? It was too late to walk away. Henry was within striking distance. If he turned his back now, anything could happen.

  "You got a problem with me, faggot?"

  "I don't have a problem with you. I have a problem with your language."

  "You got a problem with me, faggot?" Spit reached Henry's face with that one.

  "I don't have a problem with you. I..."

  Dude's stance shifted. The haymaker was in slow motion. Henry saw the center of gravity move with the asshole's leg going back, arm cocked and fist headed for his face. Henry leaned in close as the fist and arm shot past his head. A quick pivot, easy in the slow-motion universe, and the motherfucker was over Henry's hip. Dickwad hit the ground and lost his breath.

  Henry seriously considered stomping on Dickwad's face, but settled for waiting to see if he'd get back up instead. He showed signs of getting up, after all.

  "Stay down!"

  A count, maybe to ten, and Henry walked away. Adrenaline nausea and throbbing head hit him as he walked up the stairs to the second story level. He stopped, lit a cigarette and maybe that minute of calming was longer than he thought. ShitFace was up and ha
d come up the other staircase.

  "You want some more?" Henry called to him, angry but in control.

  FuckFace leaned into the back door of the bar at the top of the stair and shouted something unintelligible, but obviously meaningful. Two more shitfuckers came outside immediately. One Charlie Manson-looking son of a bitch and the other, Bluto straight from Popeye.

  Bluto and Charlie moved fast. They grabbed Henry's arms as Choad came up and launched into a series of body punches. Henry managed to slide his feet back, and twisting, expose his back to the strikes.

  "You got a problem, faggot?"

  At least that part of the script was familiar.

  "Fuck you," Henry growled.

  The beating continued. Back of the head, kidney punches, kicks. They all had their time, until Henry, spitting blood on his shirt front, was leaned against the wood railing.

  "You got a problem, faggot? We're gonna throw you over."

  "No. I don't have a problem," Henry grunted, drooling a bit with the last word.

  As if it were the magic words, they let him go. Henry straightened up and looked them in the eyes, taking time for each of them, CockScum, DipShit, and MotherFucker, all. Henry felt the double vision threaten to descend of his eyes. His sweat steamed off of his skin, almost a smoke rising from his clothes. Did these rough necks feel the temperature increase? He saw their dumb faces do some sort of calculation before deciding not to rush him again. They backed off. Doubt just short of fear evident in their movements. Before they'd completed their retreat or reconsidered attack, Henry took a deep breath, and pushed the fire back down. He turned slowly and walked away with a limp. By the time he turned the corner and entered the burger shop, he was happy. Happy that no one died tonight.