A Darkness in My Soul

balls, and the knuckles nearly pierced the skin-they protruded so harshly.
        I laughed at him.
        He couldn't risk it. He needed me too much.
        The freak kid laughed too, doubling over in his chair and slapping his flabby hands against his knees. It was the most hideous laugh I had ever heard in my life. It spoke of madness.
        

    III
        
        The lights had been dimmed. The machines had been moved in and now stood watch, solemnly recording all that transpired.
        "The hex signs which you see on the walls are all part of the pre-drug hypnosis which has just been completed.
        After he's placed in a state of trance, we administer 250 cc's of Cinnamide, directly into his jugular." The whitesmocked director of the medical team spoke with crisp, pleasant directness, but as though he were discussing the maintenance of one of his machines.
        The child sat across from me. His eyes were dead, the scintillating sparkle of intelligence gone from them, and not replaced by any corresponding quality. Just gone. I was less horrified by his face and no longer bothered by the dry, decaying look of it. Still, my guts felt cold and my chest ached with an indefinable pressure, as if something were trying to burst free of me.
        "What's his name?" I asked Morsfagen.
        "He hasn't any."
        "No?"
        "No. We have his code name, as always. We don't need more."
        I looked back at the freak. And within my soul (some churches deny me one; but then churches have been denying people a lot of things for a lot of reasons, and the world still turns), I knew that in all the far reaches of the galaxy, to the ends of the larger universe, in the billions of inhabited worlds that might be out there, no name existed for the child. Simply: Child. With a capital.
        A team of doctors administered the drug.
        "Within the next five minutes," Morsfagen said. He had both big hands fisted on the arms of his chair. It wasn't anger now, merely a reaction to the air of tension that overhung the room.
        I nodded, looked at Harry who had demanded to be there for this initial session. He was still nervous over the confrontation of the monsters. I tried not to mirror his unease. I turned back to Child and prepared myself for the assault upon his mental sanctity.
        Stepping easily over the threshold, I fell through the blackness of his mind, flailing… … and woke up to white faces with blurred black holes where the eyes should have been.
        They mumbled things in their alien language, and they prodded me with cold instruments.
        When my vision cleared, I could see it was a strange triumvirate: Harry, Morsfagen, and some unnamed physician who was taking my pulse and clucking his tongue against his cheek like someone had told him doctors were supposed to do when they couldn't think of anything intelligent to say.
        "You all right, Sim?" Harry asked.
        Morsfagen pushed my lawyer/agent/father-figure out of the way and thrust his bony face down at mine. I could see hairs crinkling out of his flared nostrils. There were flecks of spittle on his lips, as if he had been doing a lot of shouting in rage. The dark blue of his close-shaved whiskers seemed like needles waiting to thrust out of his tight pores.
        "What happened? What's wrong? You don't get paid without results."
        "I wasn't prepared for what I found," I said. "Simple as that. No need for hysterics."
        "But you were yelling and screaming," Harry protested, insinuating himself between the general and myself.
        "Not to worry."
        "What did you find that you didn't expect?" Morsfagen asked. He was skeptical. I could have cared more, but not less.
        "He hasn't any conscious mind. It's a vast pit, and I fell into it expecting solid ground. Evidently, all his thoughts, or a great many of them, come from what we would consider the subconscious."
        Morsfagen stood away. "Then you can't reach him?"
        "I didn't say that. Now that I know what's there and what isn't, I'll be all right."
        I struggled to a sitting position, reached out and stopped the room from swaying. The hex signs settled onto the walls where they belonged, and the light fixtures even stopped whirling in erratic circles from wall to wall. I looked at my watch with the picture of Elliot Gould on the face, calculated the time, assumed a properly bland expression,