Her foot smashed the accelerator pedal and the car leaped forward. The impact with my legs was hard and fast, knocking me aside. The car thundered across the lowered metal plank and crunched onto the concrete of the pier.
Doug stayed with her, clinging to the energized flight reflex he had activated in her mind. In a second, her car plowed past the line of police cars and was gone, nothing left but a spatter of rainwater on concrete to mark her passage.
I had nothing. My hands were empty.
A uniformed officer rushed down the gangplank with his pistol raised. "Stay down!" he shouted at me, waving the gun toward the deck. "Get on your stomach and put your hands behind your head."
I ignored him, staring past the line of police cars. Doug was gone. He could have told me. The Chorus was a furious wall of snakes in my head, a hydra movement of engorged desires. A cold darkness tightened in the pit of my stomach. Had I lost my connection to her?
I felt the ragged edges of my soul tear, felt like it was all happening again.
The officer was persistent. "Get your hands behind your head, motherfucker! Move 'em or I'll fire." He wasn't a fooclass="underline" standing close enough to be sure he wouldn't miss me, far enough away that I couldn't grab his weapon. His jaw was firm. He was trying his best to be sinister.
I touched the ache in my gut and gave him sinister. Elide. The Chorus wailed as I came off the deck and closed the distance between us. The barrel of his gun groaned and creased like wet paper under my grip. I didn't stop when I got to his fingers.
III
That stunt got me a free ride in a police cruiser, wrists cuffed savagely behind my back. The back seat stank of stale bodies, but the scent of fear pooling in the car came from the pair of officers in the front. Rumors were already spreading, fantasy informing gossip. These two weren't sure what had happened and, as a result, their imaginations were feeding all the wild stories.
All it takes is a seed.
We entered police headquarters in downtown Seattle through an unmarked entrance in the back, spiraling down fluorescently lit passages of white stone into the sub-levels beneath the street. I was hustled through equally unadorned hallways to a tiny room with two plastic chairs and a cheap metal table. A steel ring was welded to the top of the table.
My jacket and the contents of my pockets had been taken from me at the ferry terminal and, after we entered the interrogation room, they took my belt and shoelaces. A young officer tried for the thin braid of hair about my throat, and the Chorus nipped at him. Trying to keep his cool, he pulled back and made a half-hearted dismissive gesture. Something to hide the tremor in his hands. No one offered to take a look at the bloody nick along my side. The fact that it had stopped bleeding was apparently good enough for them. After that, they locked one of the handcuffs to the metal ring and left me alone.
A history of desperate chain-smokers was an old stink permeating every surface-nearly a tactile crust on the room. The paint on the wall opposite the door was less dull than the other walls. An observation window once, perhaps, sheet-rocked over some time ago. The floor was a cheap parquet, an ugly color stained even uglier. The table and chairs were utilitarian: the table legs were welded to the pitted top, the chairs were the molded plastic sort found around the pool at two-star motels. The room didn't bother to obscure its purpose. Out of sight, out of mind. No one wanted to know what happened here.
I tried to get comfortable. The handcuffs and the ring meant I had to lean forward as if I were considering a session of earnest supplication but hadn't quite committed myself to the act. Easier to lie on the table with my hands resting above my head, wrists next to the metal ring.
I was tired. It had been nearly 3:00 a.m. when I had spotted Doug, and the resulting chase had been unexpected and draining. Prior to that, I had been out on the peninsula visiting an old friend.
Father Lenbier was a retired Naval Chaplain with a house outside of Lofall-an hour from the ferry terminal at Winslow. He had been stationed in the Far East for thirty years before being tossed back across the ocean for his final tour at the Naval Yard at Bremerton. I had been to both China and Japan, and I had wanted to catch up.
I had met the priest in Olso years ago-just two wanderers washed into a back-alley bar, looking to offset the permafrost of the dark winter. His faith provided an interesting counterpoint to the. . melancholy that had driven me north. A bottle of Laphroaig consecrated our friendship. It hadn't been my choice-he was the single malt fan-but, by the end of the night, I had learned a measure of respect.
We had spent the evening telling polite lies about our secret histories, and trying to deconstruct the nature of faith via the magic of a bottle of Dalwhinnie 15. The antique market in the Pacific Northwest looked to the East for its history (unlike the New England market which was perversely fixated on Louis XIV's bedroom furniture), and Father Lenbier's stories about the Far East station were filled with useful details. Grist for the small talk which invariably crept up in my business. One must keep up appearances on one's public persona.
Then, on the way home, there had been the deer, with Doug squatting on its spine. Like a guiding star half-glimpsed through a barrier of thick trees or a glimmer of bewitched swamp gas intended to lure the unwary, the animal with its spiritual possessor had drawn me away from the road and into the wilderness.
Chance plays a very small part in the Weave of the Universe. There are currents and eddies in the natural world that influence the mind, but very little of the Universe is driven by random luck. It is a matter of synchronicities, the seeming coincidences have a hidden connectivity. The Weave is the fabric of the World, and its threads are the convoluted tracks of every personal history.
For the last two weeks, I had been tracking Katarina. It had been ten years since we had seen each other-a decade that had done nothing to dull the ache in my chest. On the few previous occasions when her trail crossed mine, the threads had always been stiff and brittle-too old to follow without breaking them. This time, I knew she was still in Seattle. The trouble had been finding something more substantial than the persistent itch caused by her proximity.
The Chorus crystallized in my head, spinning memory. Doug's history. Hazy, but still of some use. Close enough. That scent, that familiar taste.
Kat had touched his soul. Last night, she had participated in a ritual of disengagement. I could taste her presence on him. She had directed the wedge used to drive apart flesh and spirit.
In my travels, I had learned many names for the same objects, the same rituals, the same beliefs. All the names carried with them a different history, a different mnemonic resonance. Kabbalist mystics would label her the unclean child of that harlot Lilith, a foul child who sucked energy from a vessel, allowing the Qliphoth to invade the empty shell. The modern Hungarian Gypsies-who split their time between modern apartments in Budapest and hand-built cabins in the mountains-named her "szuz ordog": demon maid, a succubus whose ill touch separated the light from the dark.
They taught me other names too. Names meant, not for her, but for me. Lelek rablo. Feny rombolo. Spirit thief. Lightbreaker.
Doug's contact with her hadn't been like mine. There was no fear on him-none of that panic that had overwhelmed me. Their interaction had been a ritual affair, a ceremonial act knowingly consecrated. In the last decade, Kat had learned new tricks and found new friends. They were using psychoanimist techniques: direct manipulation of the soul, spirit possession, and astral travel. New tricks, indeed.