by Mark Teppo
He sucked deeply on the cigarette, making sure the tobacco caught. A blur of smoke flickered out of his mouth and vanished, whisked past his collar by the wind. "Detective John Nicols," he said, offering me his hard hand.
I took it. "Markham."
He smiled. "Yeah, with a first name like yours, I'd stick with just the family name too."
"It's a perfectly good given name," I said. "I even let my friends use it."
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves." He sucked in his cheeks, highlighting the shape of his skull. There were dark circles under his eyes, which had been bright green once but the job-no, something else-had dulled the color. Now, though, they twitched and moved like he was tracking shadows and ghosts. Like he was Seeing. "I want to ask you some questions."
"Didn't Pender tell you?"
"Pender. ." He made a face like he had just swallowed a bony piece of fish. "The lieutenant is. . efficient. He knows the right people, and he knows how to get them to move quickly." His cigarette found his mouth, and his words slipped out around the obstruction. "I'm on administrative leave-with pay-for two weeks. My therapist has already been instructed to double my sessions, and she's already offered to write me a prescription for anti-depressants.
"Patrolman Murphy-the kid you jumped-is off the streets. Got himself a promotion."
"Really?"
"No one is talking about what happened to his fingers. Including Murphy." Nicols removed his cigarette, but didn't look at me. "Way I remember it, you did more than crush his gun, but you wouldn't know it looking at the kid.
"He's smart. This is his lucky break, regardless of what really happened. He's not going to rock the boat. He's going to just forget it, along with everyone else, just like Pender wants. The lieutenant has. ." He weighed how much more he wanted to say, how much more he wanted to confide in me. An uncomfortable position for a man like him. He grimaced, deciding I probably already knew more than he did, even though I was the outsider. "Murphy's been hooked. He doesn't realize it yet, does he? Pender isn't one to waste any opportunity that can be leveraged. I've never had any reason to run into the guy-I knew his name, his reputation for being a hard-ass-but it didn't take him long to twist everything to. ."
"His advantage," I finished.
"Yeah."
"It's a carefully cultivated skill," I said.
I had broken bones in Murphy's hand. The patrolman had, whether Pender allowed him to remember it or not, accepted a gift from a Watcher by letting Pender heal his hand-that was most certainly what had been done to sanitize the scene. Such gifts were never free-these were the sorts of favors that would be called due in the receiver's lifetime. Having been exposed to magick, the young officer would be primed to deal with it again. Such agents were useful. But he didn't know what awaited him in this new world, and I doubted Pender planned on telling him. Murphy had been asked to take on a little faith.
"You're apparently too old to be useful," I said. Or too obstinate. "You get the 'let's medicate the lunatic' option."
"Yeah, lucky me."
"Are you seeing things, John?" I asked. Not Detective. John. Two men sharing things they have in common, sharing secrets. Building a bond.
Some of the techniques the Watchers taught their young were worth remembering. Hell, Nicols probably knew a few of them himself. Probably had been shown them by his mentor when he came on the force. Thus was ever the way secret knowledge passed from generation to generation.
He looked at me, and then his gaze skipped away as if I were too shiny to look at for very long. "At first," he said, "it was just a weird glitter, like being outside on a sunny day without sunglasses. Everything seemed shinier than it should be. But it's getting worse. Now people are starting to glow. From their eyes."
The windows to the soul. Trite, but true: the eyes were the most light-sensitive route to the soul. You could hide beneath the flesh, but it was more difficult to hood the eyes. "What else?" I asked. Could he see the flow?
He gestured toward the front of the boat. "I see a big stripe in the water. It runs right beneath the boat. Like we're following it."
Doug's possession had been brutal enough that Nicols' vision had been torn wide open, a huge rift in the protective layer over his psyche. He was Seeing too much and he couldn't turn it off. "It's called a ley line. Spelled L-E-Y. There are natural ones-geomantic lines formed by the magnetic fields of the planet-and there are the ones we make by traveling over the same route again and again."
"So I'm seeing some sort of energy pattern?"
"More of a grid. A framework of flow. We're all part of it. Our first roads followed the natural lines. As we became more forceful with our own desires, we strayed from the leys, and started creating our own tracks. Over time, the constant passage of human energy along a new path causes a shift in the Earth's geomantic fields. The ley moves to correspond to the new route. You can't escape entropy, Detective. All systems move to a state of least resistance."
"And I'm seeing all of this because of what happened on the boat."
"What do you think happened on the boat?"
He looked at me, squinting as the Chorus lit up the narrow choker about my throat, as I let him See the coiled energy in me. He needed an anchor, some place he could ground himself so he could start to understand his altered sight, and I showed him mine-the strands of hair twisted and woven into a tight braid permanently bound to my skin. "Who's Doug?" he asked. "And why do I know him?"
"Because you two were sharing the same space for a little while. Doug was the guy who assaulted your body and tried to push out your spirit."
"My spirit?"
"Your soul."
He laughed, a guttural cough that trailed off as he put his cigarette in his mouth. "My soul," he said as he exhaled, smoke dribbling from his mouth. "Are you shitting me?"
"I have better things to do, Detective." Formal now. Cold. The door to my secrets closed. Make him reach for it, make him try to pry it open again. Make him realize he wants to know what secrets I have to offer.
He chewed on the end of his cigarette awhile, struggling to decide what he could believe, what he thought possible, and what would help him to understand the streams of light he was Seeing. I let him work to his own conclusion, to his own understanding. I never forgot my first night-how my sight had been ablaze with light and color, everything had been richer and fuller than it had any right to be. How the woods had been so alive. And yet, beneath all that glitter, how dark the belly of the world.
"This is what happens when a soul is attacked." Give him a glimpse now. A little flash of what he wanted. "You become more aware of your surroundings; you become sensitive to the energies of the world."
"Everyone can see like this?"
"Sure. But not everyone wants to. Nor do they need to."
"If I try hard enough, it'll go away? Sort of like selective blindness?"
" 'It' won't go anywhere. You'll just stop Seeing the lines. Just because you don't understand or believe in something doesn't negate its existence. Your brain records a great deal of sensory data which you-the part you think of as 'yourself'-don't bother processing. You've decided-consciously or unconsciously-that you don't need to See. Therefore, you don't."
"If it doesn't go away?"
I shrugged. Choices: some we make for ourselves, some are made for us; what defines us is how we react. Opportunities or obstacles. Ten years ago, I could have tried to blind myself; I could have ignored the cold hole in my chest, and maybe it would have gone away. Maybe. More likely, I would have just stopped feeling it, but that didn't mean it wasn't still there. That it wouldn't have killed me.
"What if I fight it?"
"What is there to fight? You going to dig out your eyes with a spoon?"
He snorted smoke out of his nose. "This is such bullshit."
"Sure it is, which is why you came crying to me."
His eyes narrowed and, for an instant, I saw the bull that had terrorized the offensive line and, later, was u
sed to a similar effect on criminals. "I should throw your ass back into that holding room."
"For what? Because I haven't said, 'Oh boo hoo, Mr. Police Man. I'm so sorry you got something in your eye. Let me get some holy water and just wash that nasty gunk right out.' " I tapped the pockets of my coat. "Gee, I must have lost my supply when those cops were dog-piling on me this morning. One of the other officers must have picked it up and neglected to log it in with my personal effects."
His face reddened as he thought about wrapping those big hands of his around my neck. He considered tossing me off the heaving ferry. I knew the tension that pulled at the corners of his eyes. A similar insanity moved in the darkness beneath the Chorus, a pernicious tendency toward violence.
The darkness had been quiet for a long time, but it had bubbled up this morning with Murphy and the gun. I had been frustrated at being denied the chance to find Kat, and I had listened to them. The Chorus had influenced me. It had happened before when I had stumbled upon Kat's trail, but it had been stronger this morning. As if her proximity gave them more strength over me.
As if a secret part of me agreed with their whispers and insinuations; as if, in the end, I was no different from any of them that I had taken. Blood stains everything. Maybe we can hide the visible marks-scour our hands clean-but a secret taint remains.
"Look," I said, swallowing the shiver rising in my throat. "I am sorry this happened to you. Really. It wasn't my choice. But I can't turn back time, and I can't make you blind again. You either deal or you don't. But, either way, it's not my problem, okay?"
He needed just a push, really, to put him on the right path. I wasn't interested in coddling him during this awkward time of lost innocence; nor was his temperament suited to being sheltered from the hard truths. I figured Detective Nicols for a man of action. All he really wanted was knowledge, useful information that would help him make informed decisions. He wanted to trust his senses, wanted to comprehend what they were telling him. He didn't have to understand why the world worked as it did; he just wanted to understand the rules.
He fumed a little longer, suffering the bite of my words until he, too, realized my intent. His jaw worked, muscles flexing in his cheeks, as he swallowed the bitter words half-formed in his mouth. "All right," he said. "I'll deal with it. It would help if I had a name for IT."
"There are a lot of names. Call it 'magick.' That's easy enough."
"Magic?"
"With a 'k'. "
"The 'too cool for school' spelling?"
"Because it isn't card tricks and rabbits in hats. It's not about pulling coins from the ears of eight-year-olds or stringing fifty scarves out of your sleeve. There are a hundred schools of the 'Arts' that are known, and another hundred that are lost, hidden, or otherwise obscured. But they're all part of the same Universe, part of the same system. We are the agents who effect Change. It is our Wills that alter the elements. Magick is a generic term that covers the whole spectrum whether you believe in the Power of God as defined by the Catholic Church, the strength of Allah as envisioned by the Muslims, the Kabbalistic God or the Hermetic God, the God in the Machine or the God in the Wood. Whether your holy text is the Koran, the Torah, the Bible, the Necronomicon,Liber Null, or The Book of the Law. It doesn't matter. They're all the same."
"They're all right?"
"They're all wrong. 'Nothing is true, everything is possible.' "
"What the hell does that mean?"
I laughed. "It's an old saying that we magi like to toss at one another in that chin-stroking way of saying, 'Ah, yes, I understand the secrets.' It's nearly as ubiquitous as 'As above, so below.' "
He angrily jabbed his cigarette in my direction. "Now you are just fucking with me."
"No, I'm trying to tell you that what you believe is equally as important as anything I might tell you. 'Magick' is just a word. Like 'belief,' or 'science.' It only has the meaning you give it. If I can demonstrate and re-create a phenomenon through reasoned and quantifiable steps, you would say that I have 'scientifically' verified the existence of this phenomenon. If you required faith to understand the phenomenon, it would be an act of magick. The terms are subjective to the viewer."
I pointed toward the water, at the silver track only he and I could see running in front of the ferry. "If you told someone about the lines-someone who couldn't See them like you do now-for them to believe you, they would have to accept the validity of your statement on faith. But we See them. It is sensory data that we independently observe and agree upon. Why isn't this 'science'? It's data we measure, it is a phenomenon, evidence based on verifiable data. Why do you think of it as 'magick'? And does that lessen its 'truth' in any way?"
"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.