Lightbreaker

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.

VI

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.'

Patientia beneficium. I had never been good at waiting.

Nicols shared some of my restlessness. It was at odds with the terminal weariness soaked into the shape of his face but, as I watched the way his eyes flicked away whenever he looked at me, I realized the source of his unease. I was his occult anchor; at the same time, I was alien-bright and shiny in a way nothing ever had been before.

Shortly after sunset, we finally spotted a match for the barn we carried in our heads. A row of ragged evergreens hid the building from the highway, a natural barrier obscuring the property from casual view. We only spotted it because we were on an access road, looking for a way back to the main highway.

The barn had been red once, like all barns built as historical symbols of an anachronistic American cultural heritage. Time and the insistent Pacific Northwest weather had turned this one dull and scarred, like it was covered in old blood. It was fronted by a decrepit farmhouse, squatting like a sullen toad at the end of a woefully uneven gravel driveway.

Nicols pulled the car up to the farmhouse, headlights transmuting the cracked paint into a wrinkled layer of old skin. As he looked in the glove box for a flashlight, I got out and listened. Night was spreading fast, purple to blue-black like a bruise stretching across the skin of Heaven, and the nocturnal world was waking up.

The hiss of the highway was a distant sizzle beyond the row of evergreens. Energy flow along the ley beneath the road was a thin trickle, fading to near nothingness in the distance between cars. An owl hooted at us from the tall trees behind the barn, a solitary call that was more a querulous inquiry than a territorial warning.

Having found his flashlight, Nicols swung its beam across the front of the farmhouse. The windows were boarded over, and the front door was sealed by several clumsily nailed two-by-fours. A 'No Trespassing!' sign was attached to the siding beside the door but the faded condition of the letters detracted from the bluster of the message.

The Chorus touched the ley, orienting me on the magnetic poles. The front of the house looked due north, and we walked around the left-the eastern side-of the house to the back. Just as inviting as the front. Nicols examined the slabs of wood nailed over the windows and the back door with his flashlight. I opted for a magickal examination, and let the Chorus read the dilapidated building. Nothing. It was just an abandoned farmhouse, a dead spot on the landscape.

Nicols turned his flashlight toward the nearby barn. He played his beam across the worn surface of the building for a few seconds, and then clicked off the light. In the darkness of the developing evening, a thin gleam of magick leaked through the warped walls.

Definitely the right barn.

The door was on the west side of the building, and a heavy combination lock held the rickety portal shut. Nicols tugged on the lock once, a half-hearted pull in case it hadn't been closed properly. He stepped back, and glanced at the upper floor of the barn. He was trying to think of some acceptable excuse to kick in the door.

I grabbed the lock while he was rationalizing. Elide. The movement of the Chorus in my arm made my skin tingle. The lock held; it was the screws holding the hasp to the door that came out. I tossed the whole assembly aside.

'A little breaking and entering going to bother you?' I asked as I opened the door.

Nicols looked at the lock lying on the scrub grass. 'Not as much as how you just did that.'

'Just a crowbar of my Will,' I said. 'Crude, but effective.'

'Is that all?' I heard him mutter as he trailed me into the barn.

The barn had no windows on the ground floor, but the interior was illuminated by the phantasmal glow of