Lightbreaker

The deer lurched out of the forest on a dark curve of the narrow highway, staggering onto the pavement like a maritime drunk. Silver light radiated from its mouth and eyes, a spectral luminescence that made the animal visible against the dark brush.

I stopped the car and the deer shied away from the vehicle with an unorganized accordion movement of its legs. It was a young buck, a pair of knobby buttons adorning its head. Bloody foam flecked its muzzle.

The light leaking from the animal was spiritual overflow, a profusion of energy not meant to be contained in the deer's simple meat sack. The possession of an other. A human spirit.

As it wobbled across the road, the car's headlights bleached the shadows on its flanks. Not all the shadows disappeared, and what I had first thought were streaks of dirt or soot were revealed to be burns. With some difficulty, it traversed the shallow ditch running beside the road. At the top of the short embankment, the animal paused, chest heaving, and a tiny cloud of silver motes danced at its mouth.

I powered down the window, and the smell rolled into the car, an acrid sweetness of seared meat.

The human soul is too intense for the animal kingdom. The mythologies say Man was created as a reflection of the Creator. Crafted in His image and composed of the four elements, the human shell was built specifically to carry the fire of the soul. The Word written in flame and flesh. The lesser creatures of the world are too fragile, the fables tell us, they are vessels unable to sustain the intense presence of the Divine Spark.

Why then was a soul possessing the body of this deer? How had it become separated from its proper vessel?

The Chorus were a whispering echo beneath these questions, and-exquire! — responding to my curiosity, they arced across the road. Phantasmal snakes wiggling through ethereal space, they kissed the smoldering flesh of the deer, and the contact returned a taste of the hot human presence within.

The deer jerked as if it had just been shocked, the invasive soul reacting to my spectral inquisition. The animal snorted, hot blood spattering from its nose, and bolted. The sound of its movement through the heavy brush was pure panic-that unidirectional flight of instinct-driven terror.

My throat and nose tingled as the Chorus returned, flush with stolen memories. They brought me spoil like worker ants returning to their hive queen. Sensory data belonging to the traveling spirit coursed into my awareness, and for a few moments, I was overwhelmed by this rush of images and scents and textures.

There. A flicker of memory caught my attention. The Chorus wrapped it tightly, and when I squeezed, all of its secrets gushed out. Memory is nothing more than ego impressions imprinted onto raw sense data, consciousness lattices laid over the chemical cages of the brain. It is the psychological bindings-the way these structures become our identities-that anchors the spirit to the flesh. These secrets linger with the soul. The Chorus stretched this illicit memory so I could clearly dissect it. Yes, there. The touch of another spirit. More than flesh, more than spit or blood. Spirit touch. And with that touch, came other details. The ones I remembered. As I inhabited the foreign memory, my tongue unconsciously touched my lips and tasted her skin again; I inhaled deeply as if I could actually smell her on the night air.

Lilacs.

He knew Katarina. Shortly before this man had become a rogue spirit, he had been in close physical contact with her.

The Chorus, indelibly bound up in the cosmological memory of my past, sang in their eagerness to find her. Their collective voices, usually a persistent chatter of ancient skulls, became an undulating wind of wordless need. In the dark pit beneath them, I felt the twist of a long-buried root, as if its movement was giving birth to a breath of air that the Chorus magnified into a wind.

I left the car by the side of the road, and went into the forest after the possessed animal. The deer could move faster than I, and I couldn't hope to catch it during its terrified flight. But it wouldn't run for long.

The presence of the human soul was devouring the beast from the inside. Soon, he would be forced to find another host. He could use other animals, but they would suffer the same fate as the deer. He needed to find a human host if his soul was going to survive. This stretch of Washington state road wasn't more than a few miles from Winslow and the Bainbridge Island ferry terminal. He was heading for Seattle, and if he found a host and made it across the water, I would never find him in the glittering city.

He was a direct link. His contact with her was fresh, a few hours old. This was the closest I had been in ten years. A gravid tension lay in my testicles, a near sexual response to being in such proximity. The Chorus sang, a lyric resonating deep in my joints, and like a tuning fork, I vibrated with this need.

I had to catch him.

Unconsciously, he followed a faint ley line, and this gravitation made it easier to track him through a succession of animal hosts. The deer lasted about a mile; I found it at the bottom of a narrow ravine, its eyes burst and its tongue bloated and black in its mouth. An owl carried him over a copse of dense evergreens before falling into the sparse fringe of new construction outside of Winslow. A domestic feline, left outside overnight, carried him a few blocks closer to the ferry terminal. I found its twisted and blackened body in the gutter at the edge of an alley. Its stomach had exploded, and he had forced the animal's body another twenty yards before its heart gave out.

The next body was stronger, and it was a half mile or so before I found it. The corpse of the dog was curled up next to a pair of scraggly pine trees, on the corner of a convenience store parking lot. A large husky, the dog's muzzle was streaked with ash and its body was still warm, radiant heat fading slowly from the burned corpse.

A police car-its red and blue lights flashing-drove up the street behind me, and turned into the parking lot. The officer glanced around the lot briefly as he got out of his car, but the bubble lights on the roof of the car made him squint. Spoiled night vision and the fact that I was wrapped by shadows and the Chorus meant he missed me and the body of the dog. He strode into the store and, through the narrow gaps between the advertising plastered all over the glass, I watched his conversation with the clerk.

Yes. The clerk had seen something and dialed 9-1-1. I stroked the dead dog's fur as I sent the Chorus to find out. They scattered across the parking lot, tasting the silver stains left by the passage of souls. Smears of energy, flickers of memory, hints of personality: days and years of transient visitors. Nothing definite. Nothing-

The Chorus boiled near a brown Buick, a late '90s sedan that carried the nostalgia of the Baby Boomer generation in its lines. A stain on the roof, near the driver's side door, was what had caught their attention. Impact spatter. Someone had hit their head hard enough to split the skin.

The wind rubbed against the branches of the pine trees behind me like the wire brushes of a jazz drummer against his snare drum-that persistent whisper of rhythm. The air was filled with the damp scent of pine. Dawn was going to be wet, another rainy day in the Pacific Northwest. Bad weather would make it harder to track this traveler: wind and rain scatter the energy lines, the traces that aren't firmly imprinted on the world. The natural dissolution of ambient spirit noise-ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

The soul had found his host. That's what had happened here. He'd jumped someone in the parking lot, assaulted them as they were returning to their car. The clerk had seen it happen: the convulsion of the victim as he was attacked; the body suddenly whiplashing against the car, head bouncing off the roof; a moment of conflict, and then control. Then, the spirit had run off, leaving the car behind.

The clerk and the policeman exited the store, and the clerk pointed toward the Buick. The young man's finger verified my assessment. The traveler was no longer trafficking in animal flesh; he had moved up to human meat.

The Chorus swirled out along the ground and found the ley running beneath the nearby road. This current was stronger than the one in the woods, enriched by the increased traffic along its vector. The ferry terminal was close. I could feel the tug of its gravity well on the aroused spirits within me. That nexus where all roads meet.

A thin line of orange light creased the eastern horizon as I reached the ferry dock, but the slate clouds storming out of the west kept dawn from cracking the sky. The wind, thrashing at my back, blew rain at a sharp angle, lashing the upper deck and sides of the boat like a bloodthirsty Inquisitor. The ferry shuddered as it started to pull away from the dock at Bainbridge Island. I crossed the exposed upper deck, rain like a cat-o'-nine-tails across my back, the last pedestrian to board the old ferry.

Warm, humid air like the breath of a floral hothouse struck my cold skin as I entered the aft common room. Standing at the back of the long room, I let the Chorus read the spirit layer.

Forty-minute ferry ride, probably less with the wind behind us. During that time, the boat was a floating coffin, cut off from all the aberrant noise and light of the city and the dock. This was my last chance to find the traveler before we reached Seattle.

He had two choices: ride the host body like an unwanted hitchhiker or take control of the shell. The human body is a stronger container than the four-legged ones, but even two souls will eventually cause immolation. One of the reasons for self-combustion, really-that presence of a possessing spirit. However, the flesh responds to the Will of a single spirit, and if this spirit was going to assume control, it had to force the other soul out.

Neither solution was good for the owner of the body. If the rogue soul remained too long, burnout. If the possessor won control, the other-the innocent-would be expelled, and without any training, any awareness of what had happened, they would dissolve into ambient etheric energy. Absorbed by the streams and leys as part of the cyclical reclamation of life. Spiritual death, in other words.

Having read the room, the Chorus ghosted a spectral overlay onto my vision, showing me a different spectrum than the visual one. Streamers of pale florescence ran through the stateroom, the phantom trails of recently passed bodies; a pulsating knot of light winked at me, souls sparking with effervescent eagerness; other clusters of sparks were like planetary bodies and their satellites, celestial bodies in tight orbit around each other.

I bled the Chorus down into faint opacity so as to map this data to the physical arrangement of the stateroom. The knot of souls was the crowd at the espresso cart near the center of the room, and that concentration made it easier to individually sweep the remainder of the passengers scattered in the orange vinyl seats. Most appeared to be long-time commuters with established routines. Some dozed, heads resting against tiny neck pillows; some propped up thick paperback novels or flicked through web pages on tiny hand-held devices with a somnambulant boredom. Inwardly attuned, their ambient energies barely wisped, strands wrapped tight around their bodies like an extra blanket against the cold wind and rain hammering the boat.

There were no unusual sparks, no sign of spiritual contest. All the lights looked normal-the everyday glow which I had long ago learned to filter out. As I walked the length of the stateroom, the Chorus teased and touched the lights for some memory that might help me find the traveler. The flickering touch of these other lives made the back of my tongue numb. I swallowed the wash of sensory data, letting it all decay in my gut. None of it was worth the trouble to keep, not worth the effort of leveraging it against my existent memories.

Outside, between the aft and forward common rooms, I passed a stairwell that led down to the under deck. The car hold. That echo chamber where several hundred tons of inert metal waited to arrive in Seattle. Certain metals obscured spirit light and, while most modern vehicles had too much synthetics and plastics to be useful barriers against detection, there were older models which could be effective shields. I hoped the naivete I had sensed in the traveler meant he didn't know the best hiding place would be in one of these older cars; I hoped he thought it would be easier to hide among the spiritual noise of the crowds.

Unlike the passengers in the back half of the boat, the commuters in the forward room were eager for work, eager to reach their desks. Monday was always spent lamenting the death of the weekend and now that it was Tuesday, they had begun to consciously focus on the future-on what needed to be done this week. The chatter of their voices was a cicadaean buzz that roared over me the moment I entered the forward common area. Conversations darted like the motion of busy bees pollinating a ripe field. On the spirit level, the room was a sea of swirling and boiling spirit light.

The air was turgid, thick and hot from the overworked heaters beneath the windows. The fogged glass hid the white-capped waves, and the florescent lights made abstract reflections in the condensation on the windows.

Steam drifted off the wet leather of my coat as I walked the aisle between the vinyl booths. I scanned the faces of the passengers, seeking the bubbling radiance of the traveler and his assumed host. Most of them ignored me, their eyes like static recorders logging the world around them, and then immediately pushing the sensory details to the waste bins of their minds. A few met my gaze and quickly glanced away, brief contact broken.

No one stared, no one was paying enough attention to be a decent Witness. But peripherally, some of them would remember me. Too bright. I was bound to attract the wrong sort of attention sooner than later.

Through the miasma of espresso roast (another espresso cart doing equally bang-up business in the center of the room), the stink of wet synthetic fabrics, and a jumble of juxtaposed perfumes, I caught the scent of burned meat. Above a stairwell at the back of the room, a sign pointed down. Restroom, lower level. At the top of the stairs, the smell was definitely stronger.

The short flight of stairs doubled back, down to a narrow landing and a narrower hallway, before winding further down into the belly of the ferry. There were two doors-a potted plant between them-off the hallway. Universally recognized signs on the doors: men on the left, women on the right. Tendrils of cold air crawled up the steps from the open car storage below.

I found the body in the first stall of the restroom. The thin door was locked, but the corpse had fallen off the toilet seat, and an arm stuck out under the aluminum partition. Olive coat sleeve, white shirt cuffs, cheap silver-faced watch with a black leather band. The dead man's hand was curled into a ragged claw, fingers curved back toward the palm in a manner suggestive of a tightening of the skin and not a conscious effort to make a fist. He had been an older man: extra wrinkles on his knuckles, age spots on the back of his hand.

A greasy pungency of burned fat drifted off the corpse, a reek that cut through the lemon deodorizer used by the cleaning crew during their nightly routine. The host had been elderly and out of shape-in comparison to the natural leanness of the animal kingdom-and the odor of his burned meat was a dirtier scent than that of the animals. Beneath the stench of the meat was the faint iron taint of blood, still wet.

I sighed and exhaled the sensitive tendrils of the Chorus, letting them taste the ethereal record of the room. Wisps of glimmering light clung to the handles of the faucets and the knob of the paper towel dispenser, and the steam drifting from the bowl of the nearest urinal told me the last guy in the room hadn't flushed. The Chorus glided through the partition between the corpse and me, brushing over the spatter of blood on the inner wall of the stall. They circled the dead man's head and dove into his slack mouth. The flesh was hot but it was an empty shell. They could taste the lingering imprint of two souls: one a faint shadow, the other a deeper discoloration.

The traveler was gone. He had influenced the old man down into the bathroom where he could force the other's spirit out in private. Their fight for dominance had been too much stress, and something had broken inside the old man. The traveler had fled, and the innocent had recovered the use of his body in time for it to expire from the heat damage.

I left the bathroom. There was nothing I could do for the old man. As I reached the landing, the Chorus snapped to the approach of a quartet of lights from the upper deck. Three diffuse, one hard. I drifted downstairs, slipping away from the mid-deck toward the car hold below.

Four men came down from the common room: two in the business armor of expensive suits and precise haircuts, one in the blue jersey of the Washington Department of Transportation, and one with a gold star hanging around his neck on a chain-link lanyard. Seattle Police.

The detective-a wide-shouldered bull wearing an out-of-season jacket beneath an open overcoat-spotted me on the stairs. His eyes were quick, the flitting movement of hummingbirds, and they rapidly digested my physical appearance. I fought an instinctual reaction to hide behind an obscuration, and let him look at me. In a minute, I wouldn't be the focus of his gaze and I could disappear; but for an instant, I just had to stand my ground and appear to be as innocuous as the plant in the hallway. I am decoration. The unremarkable sort.

They were heading for the men's room. One of the two suits was babbling, strings of words that were making the state employee nervous and the cop curious. They clattered off the stairs and disappeared down the hall toward the dead man in the restroom. I glided down the stairs, leaving them to their grisly discovery.

The astral traveler was still on the boat. He had ravaged one body already. I had to find him before he attacked another soul, before he wreaked havoc on someone else.