Mark Teppo - 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.