Lightbreaker

'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?'