Feral

Jackson descended into the abandoned building, noise assaulting him like a physical force. He could feel the floor moving, the air was thick with dust unsettled, unable to settle on a floor that was heaving like the tortured breath of a beast in pain.

He found the staircase, itself exponentially louder than the first floor, and he headed down, then opened a door into pandemonium.

The basement was a riot of sound and color. There weren't that many people down there, only thirty or so, but all of them were in motion, their actions frenzied, crazed it seemed. Colored powders were being tossed around, momentarily bursting into blues or greens or reds or oranges, but eventually mixing into an ochre that coated everyone and everything equally.

Almost everyone. There, at the back of the hall, Jackson saw him. The red haired demon, his personal nemesis. He walked through the basement, ignoring the colors, the sights, the songs, the acts, the entire gamut of human activity acted out by only thirty actors.

The Imp sat on his throne, lanky, pale, dressed in loose black silk, his red hair so wild as to seem disassociated. And he just watched. He just watched as Jackson approached. A slight smile on his face until Jackson climbed up onto the dais. And then the Imp simply clapped his hands once and said “Internally now, animals.”

The volume fell like someone had twisted a knob. The motion was only slightly subdued but the sound dropped from an assault to the level of noise you'd expect in a restaurant.

“Mr. Jackson, welcome to Babylon.” The Imp said, with a florid wave of his arm.

“Babylon was an empire, this is an abandoned basement. And Babylon fell.”

“Oh but it didn't. The shell fell away, the empire died indeed, but the butterfly inside lives on.” the Imp said.

Jackson ignored that. “How did you do it? How have you stayed a step ahead of me this entire time?”

“Ahead of you, beside you, behind you, around you. Why on earth would I want to walk ahead of you the entire time, kiddo?”

“You don't sound like some kind of mastermind,” Jackson said and the Imp laughed.

“Mastermind? Me? Moi? Ako? Perish the thought. What a boring thing to be.”

“And yet you've avoided us this whole time. Your messages were so secretly hidden, your agents so expertly trained — why are you laughing?”

“What messages? What agents? What training?” the Imp said. “There's your problem, Jackie. You thought we thought like you, but we have so much less need of thought than you thought.” Seeing that Jackson wasn't following, the Imp clapped his hands and said, “Sparrow, come here, if you like.”

A young lady, no more then twenty, ascended the dais and sat down on a sofa. Her clothing and hair and skin were all covered in the colored powders that had been tossed around, but her face was washed clean, her startling amber eyes bright, her skin tan and freckled, entirely without makeup and yet, to Jackson's eyes, incomparably beautiful.

“What are you doing, Sparrow?” The Imp asked, looking at Jackson the entire time.

“I was going to apply my Ceremonial Visage” she said, lifting a pink makeup box with a yellow handle and a green clasp, a relic from the 1990s, dusty and cracked.

“Please carry on, Sparrow darling. Would you be offended if Mr. Jackson and I watch as you do so?”

Sparrow shrugged and opened her makeup box. She pulled out a couple of tubes of thick, opaque body paint and adjusted a small mirror so she could see her own face.

Jackson moved closer to the Imp, curious and somehow shy. It felt like he was prying, he felt voyeuristic.

“What ceremony is she preparing for?” He asked the Imp.

“I have no idea.” The Imp said. Sparrow had drawn careful white lines down her face, from her hairline, crossing her eyelids, down her cheeks, and to the collar of her shirt. She then started spreading the white paint back from the lines, covering her ears and neck and cheeks, meticulously painting herself, the middle of her face shockingly human in contrast.

“What do you mean? How many ceremonies are going on down here?”

“Well let's see, we've got thirty, thirty three celebrants this evening, so I would guess fifty at least.” The Imp said.

“How is that possible? Are you even trying to make sense?”

“Mercy no. Why would I do that? I'm telling the truth, Jackie boy. Making sense of it is your department.”

Sparrow was now painting the middle of her face a solid emerald green, from forehead to chin to throat. This done, she outlined her eyes in bright yellow. The look was clearly very intentional but somehow entirely childish.

“Sparrow dear, can you tell Mr. Jackson about your visage?” the Imp said, Sparrow smiled, her teeth bright in the midst of the green on her face.

“I like green and white and yellow. They are powerful colors, and they combine to give me joy and power.” With that she hopped up, half-bowed to the Imp, and walked back off into the ochre mess, spinning and weaving, laughing and chatting, then dancing until she was out of sight.

“I didn't understand any of that,” Jackson admitted.

“Nor did I. But she did. And that, Jackie poo, is the point, the point you're missing. The reason you'll never catch me. Oh, please, you've found me, you haven't captured me. To be honest your desire to capture me and put me into a new environment you call 'prison' is exciting, but it doesn't quite capture my interest just now.”

For a moment Jackson imagined the Imp in a nominally orange jumpsuit, sitting quietly in a cell as the cells around him were a riot of activity and chaos. It was all too easy to imagine.

“You've said, in other settings, to other people, that I'm insane. That is entirely possible. Sanity is simply behaving in a way that makes you tolerable to others. And I don't mind being friendly. But what about living in a way that is tolerable to myself? To yourself? What about Sparrow there living the way that makes her heart beat and her eyes twinkle?”

“Letting people live like hippies is all well and good, but that's not all you've done, and you know it. You've orchestrated bank robberies, government data exfiltration, cyber attacks on several major corporations — “

“Have I? When? And how? I love stories about myself, especially the farfetched ones. Search my chambers, Jack-o-lantern. Look around. Find the stolen money, the data, the contacts with foreign powers.” The Imp was laying on his stomach now, looking at Jackson with merry eyes, his chin on his fist, his feet up and crossed behind him.

“We will. Your motives are still...obscure...but it's your influence that led to these acts, we've figured out your coded messages in those songs.”

“Oh this story gets even better! Which songs? What messages? What did I tell people to do?”

“We can go over all of that in court. Your use of nonsense as a cover is very entertaining, but it doesn't clear you of anything. Every one of those messages came from someone who follows you.”

“No, you are close but not on the mark. I don't tell people what to do. I can't! They would never listen to me. Watch,” the Imp said and yelled “stand on your heads!” and some people laughed, but nobody stood on their heads. “I'm not a leader. I'm not an organizer, Jack-jack. I know your world, you want, no you need someone to be the one who thought all these things out, these robberies and such. But that's not how it works.

“These people do what they want to do. I can no more tell them to do than I can tell you what they are going to do. All I can do is provide some energy, and they will do with it as they will. Like so:” The Imp raised his hands and started clapping out a rhythm, quick and staccato, with some syncopation, but nothing too special.

Clap, clap-clap, Clap Clap, clapclapclapclapclap

For a few seconds nothing much happened. People were doing their own things still, painting, chatting, eating, kissing, dancing, same as before. But slowly, subtly, the motion of the people in the warehouse shifted. They didn't all focus on the Imp, they didn't pick up his rhythm and clap along. Jackson found himself trying to turn the beat into a rhythm he could write down.

Dotted quarter, eighth-eighth, quarter quarter (sixteenth rest) four sixteenths, or was it five?

But the Imp was changing it slightly all the time.

But even with the Imp's changes, the people of the warehouse were picking up on the pattern. It was flowing all through the group. You couldn't tell what someone was going to do when the pattern started its next repetition, but you started to see waves, see everyone doing something when the pattern started over. Their motions didn't come into harmony, didn't join up, but they were moving to the same cadence.

“This is as close as order gets around here, Jackson. I'm providing a way to feel unity without giving up identity. You say I am chaotic, illogical. And so I am, Jackson. But so too is the sun. Consider: the sun's corona, millions of miles out from the surface, is hotter than the surface of the sun. Nothing, no science can account for that, but it's true. The sun is the largest single instance of glorious entropy you will ever see, an explosion so massive and rollicking that it will still be going on long after you and I have been cycled through this planet a thousand times. And from that chaotic explosion comes all life, all we know, all knowing things and all living things. Without it we are not.”

Jackson's eyes were defeated, enticed, trying to find the pattern in the motions of the crowd. “But now for the best part,” The Imp said. Once he was sure he had Jackson's attention, he theatrically dropped his hands to his sides, and sat still again.

“Don't watch me, watch them,” the Imp said.

Jackson did. He could still hear the beat in his mind, still feel it in his body, and...yes, the crowd was still moving to the beat. The way that one person hesitated for just a brief interval before turning, the way that person stepped and nodded...the beat was still going in each of them.

“I told you there were at least fifty ceremonies going on, and the glory of it is that each is deep and meaningful to the individuals involved. They each feel like they're connected, finally, to something bigger than themselves. But 'tis pure pareidolia, they are inventing the meanings in their heads. Thus they are not pure order, as you would hope, nor pure chaos. They are feral, a perfect blend of civilization and nature.”

The Imp moved, Jackson could feel it, but he didn't look up. His eyes were transfixed, watching the hypnotic patterns, seeing continual changes in the movement, the flow of the crowd. The pattern had shifted, but somehow it had shifted for everyone instead of fracturing.

The Imp's voice was behind Jackson now. “And then there's poor logical you, Jackie. You see a group of cultists, painted green and white and gold and think they must be connected to something bigger than themselves, and you seek for that deeper connection, for the organization,” the Imp almost spat the word, “to which they belong. Never realizing that there is none. There is no Illuminati, or rather, say that there are thousands, each believing itself to be the true descendant of the Bavarians, but each a new thing, sprung from the fertile imagination of your modern society.

“But because you seek for order, for logic, you try to connect the dots, and so invent connections where there are none, just as they do. And so when you are presented with this illogical truth, you cannot deal with it as it is, but instead are duped into searching it for what it never will be. Consider this well, Jackson mon ami. Perhaps we shall meet again. Adieu.”

Jackson barely noticed the swish of a curtain or sound of a door closing behind him. He was so close to solving the riddle of this pattern...if he could just see a little more, if he could just interview these people, he would pull back the veil and it would all be clear. Perhaps...yes, perhaps if he joined them, not as a celebrant but as an observer pretending to be a celebrant...

Jackson stood, and found Sparrow's face paints. He carefully drew a yellow line down the middle of his face.

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