Mark Teppo - Lightbreaker

"We could be imagining these lines. Some sort of shared hallucination."

I laughed again. "All existence is a hallucination, Detective, brought about by our persistent state of suffering. It's the first thing young Buddhists are taught."

He didn't share my amusement. "What about the guy on the boat? The guy who got into me." He hid his discomfort by a heavy drag on his shortened cigarette.

"We are filled with Divine Light," I said. "An old occultist once said that every man and woman is a star, a singular point of light set in the infinite night sky. Our light-our spark-is contained by a shell of flesh. This is our vessel. The French philosopher Descartes called our bodies 'bete machines,' autonomous constructs that run without conscious thought."

"Wait a second. Wasn't Descartes the one who said, 'I think, therefore I am'?"

"He did. Is affirmation of 'Mind' somehow contradictory to the idea of a shell of flesh that we inhabit?"

"But he was affirming the nature of doubt, Markham. He said that he existed because he could doubt the existence of his perceptions. You're telling me to accept what I'm seeing on faith." He poked his cigarette stub at me. "Why should I accept that? Why shouldn't I demand a rational explanation for magick?"

"Okay, go ahead. Demand it. Force me to tell you the Universal Truth."

His cigarette paused.

"The trouble with Descartes," I explained, "is that he, while being the daddy of modern philosophy, killed the concept of faith which had informed alchemical thinking for the last eight hundred years. His 'I' is the presence of the thinker. It grounds you in space. His Meditations were full of such rot. The realization of existence within the self grounds the self as an object. It is the first point around which the rest of the Universe is defined. Self-knowledge implies position because you now have a spot from which to look beyond self. This egocentric ideology denies us the opportunity to be not-self .

"Magick is simply the action of your Will on what is not-self. Until you understand that concept, yes, you must have faith. Until, if you want to cling to Descartes, you have no doubt about what I am telling you."

"Christ." He rubbed at his forehead. "Okay. So, faith. I believe in the Divine Spark. Yes, I do. Yes, it fills my vessel. What's the catch?"

"You can remove the light from a vessel, and the shell-for a brief period of time-will continue to function."

"If you can take a soul out of a shell, then you can put another one in." It was a minor step, but something just clicked for Nicols. A couple of pieces fit together in his head, and he took several steps closer to being free.

"It's just flesh," I said. "Too, too mutable flesh. 'Possession' is simply the act of inhabiting a shell when the true resident has not abandoned that flesh. The spiritual intruder attempts to wrest control from the ingrained control mechanism."

Nicols nodded. "He fired the gun. I had no control over my hands. As much as I wanted otherwise, my finger just squeezed that trigger."

"It was a smart move to drop the gun. Even though you didn't understand what was happening, you could still fight it. The urge to survive is coded pretty deep. Doug got enough control to fire the gun, but as long as you fought back, he didn't have full access." The detective's physique and sports history had helped him. He knew how to bind his flesh to his Will and keep functioning when he had sustained an injury on the field. Doug's possession had been a lucky stab through a small crack, an opening Nicols was starting to realize how to close.

"Why do it?" Nicols asked. "Why would someone want to do this?"

"It's a simple reason: flesh doesn't last. Bones break, skin tears, your organs turn into cancer farms; after sixty years or so, everything starts to wear out. Hell, your physical peak was, what? Your mid-twenties? After that, it's all downhill-a rate of decay you can slow but you can't stop. What if a new body-a fresh sack of meat-just meant moving your soul from one shell to another?"

Nicols thought about immortality; he gave some thought to the idea of living forever, of being indestructible. Who hadn't? It was the Philosopher's Stone of alchemical research, the Holy Grail sought by treasure hunters and students of the material occult mysteries. Immortality didn't just mean a lifetime without end, it also meant having the purest freedom in which to contemplate the Word of God. Alpha and Omega, and everything in between. Immortality opened up your mind on a scale that could-potentially-comprehend God.

But it was an illusory pursuit, really. "Immortality" was nagged by questions that refused to be easily dismissed: entropy happens; everything has an end as well as a beginning; and God, by whatever definition chosen, was the equivalent of Infinity, and no metaphysicist had ever adequately wrapped their mind around that concept.

Still, that didn't stop generations of occultists from trying to find answers to the question posed by Immortality. Sometimes having the goal was as good as reaching it; the quest gave the aspirant something to fixate on, a direction for their lives. There was a sort of immortality in that, a persistence of existence that came from such an endless search.

"Are you looking for Immortality?" he asked.

"Me?" I shook my head.

"Why not?"

"When the novelty of being able to See wears off and you start paying attention, you'll start to understand that everything is energy. All of it. 'Immortality' implies a persistence of vision, a permanence of Ego. That runs somewhat counter to the Universe's insistence on change."

He chewed on the inside of his cheek. "What's your interest in this guy who possessed me?"

"I saw him in the woods, when he was possessing a deer. Surprised us both, and he took off before we could talk."

"Talk about what?"

"He has some information I need."

"That's it? All that on the boat just because you wanted to talk?"

"He didn't understand what I wanted. He didn't stop to listen."

"Why was he running?"

I didn't answer that question, and Nicols stared at me for a long time. He wasn't looking at the flicker of the Chorus in my eyes or the sheen of light on my skin. He was watching me with his cop eyes, studying my human frailties, my unconscious tells and ticks, which would tell him a story that would make sense to his profane knowledge of the Universe.

"Is that why you're heading out here? I thought he went into the city?"

"He did."

He took a final pull on his cigarette. "You told Pender about him, didn't you?" When I didn't answer, he dropped the cigarette on the deck and ground it out. "Yeah, you gave him up. That was the deal you cut. And now Pender's chasing him." He smiled at me. "But it isn't him you're interested in. You want his friends."

"One of them." The Chorus hissed, a black fog in my belly rising up toward my throat, toward my head.

His eyes went to the approaching shoreline. "It happened in a barn," he said. "I have memories that aren't mine. They're like weak Polaroids, snapshots from a trip I didn't take. There's a red barn out there. It's old, hasn't been used to store anything for some time. That's where they did it."

I nodded. I had the same memories, the same trail had been left in my head by Doug's passage. Nicols didn't understand the images in his head, but I did. I knew what they had done in that barn. I knew what rituals had been conducted.

Not so different from another ceremony performed a long time ago. Unlike Doug, there had been no path for me to follow. No one to take my hand and guide me. Just an innocent child, abandoned to the darkness.

A tow truck had absconded with my rental car-a reminder from Pender of his omnipresence-so we stayed with Nicols' car, tracing out routes with the Thomas Guide he had in the vehicle. He lived on the Olympic peninsula, and had a fairly detailed knowledge of the roads that were just thin lines on the pages. It still took several hours and a few false starts before we established a better sense of what we were looking for. "Police work," Nicols said after the third barn, "is all about checking every possibility. It's the drudgery that no one expects us to have the tenacity to do, but it is why we get things done. Ultimately you run out of options. You just have to be patient."