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.
The soul had found his host. That's what had happened here. He'd jumped someone in the parking lot, assaulted them as they were returning to their car. The clerk had seen it happen: the convulsion of the victim as he was attacked; the body suddenly whiplashing against the car, head bouncing off the roof; a moment of conflict, and then control. Then, the spirit had run off, leaving the car behind.
The clerk and the policeman exited the store, and the clerk pointed toward the Buick. The young man's finger verified my assessment. The traveler was no longer trafficking in animal flesh; he had moved up to human meat.
The Chorus swirled out along the ground and found the ley running beneath the nearby road. This current was stronger than the one in the woods, enriched by the increased traffic along its vector. The ferry terminal was close. I could feel the tug of its gravity well on the aroused spirits within me. That nexus where all roads meet.
A thin line of orange light creased the eastern horizon as I reached the ferry dock, but the slate clouds storming out of the west kept dawn from cracking the sky. The wind, thrashing at my back, blew rain at a sharp angle, lashing the upper deck and sides of the boat like a bloodthirsty Inquisitor. The ferry shuddered as it started to pull away from the dock at Bainbridge Island. I crossed the exposed upper deck, rain like a cat-o'-nine-tails across my back, the last pedestrian to board the old ferry.
Warm, humid air like the breath of a floral hothouse struck my cold skin as I entered the aft common room. Standing at the back of the long room, I let the Chorus read the spirit layer.
Forty-minute ferry ride, probably less with the wind behind us. During that time, the boat was a floating coffin, cut off from all the aberrant noise and light of the city and the dock. This was my last chance to find the traveler before we reached Seattle.
He had two choices: ride the host body like an unwanted hitchhiker or take control of the shell. The human body is a stronger container than the four-legged ones, but even two souls will eventually cause immolation. One of the reasons for self-combustion, really-that presence of a possessing spirit. However, the flesh responds to the Will of a single spirit, and if this spirit was going to assume control, it had to force the other soul out.
Neither solution was good for the owner of the body. If the rogue soul remained too long, burnout. If the possessor won control, the other-the innocent-would be expelled, and without any training, any awareness of what had happened, they would dissolve into ambient etheric energy. Absorbed by the streams and leys as part of the cyclical reclamation of life. Spiritual death, in other words.
Having read the room, the Chorus ghosted a spectral overlay onto my vision, showing me a different spectrum than the visual one. Streamers of pale florescence ran through the stateroom, the phantom trails of recently passed bodies; a pulsating knot of light winked at me, souls sparking with effervescent eagerness; other clusters of sparks were like planetary bodies and their satellites, celestial bodies in tight orbit around each other.
I bled the Chorus down into faint opacity so as to map this data to the physical arrangement of the stateroom. The knot of souls was the crowd at the espresso cart near the center of the room, and that concentration made it easier to individually sweep the remainder of the passengers scattered in the orange vinyl seats. Most appeared to be long-time commuters with established routines. Some dozed, heads resting against tiny neck pillows; some propped up thick paperback novels or flicked through web pages on tiny hand-held devices with a somnambulant boredom. Inwardly attuned, their ambient energies barely wisped, strands wrapped tight around their bodies like an extra blanket against the cold wind and rain hammering the boat.
There were no unusual sparks, no sign of spiritual contest. All the lights looked normal-the everyday glow which I had long ago learned to filter out. As I walked the length of the stateroom, the Chorus teased and touched the lights for some memory that might help me find the traveler. The flickering touch of these other lives made the back of my tongue numb. I swallowed the wash of sensory data, letting it all decay in my gut. None of it was worth the trouble to keep, not worth the effort of leveraging it against my existent memories.
Outside, between the aft and forward common rooms, I passed a stairwell that led down to the under deck. The car hold. That echo chamber where several hundred tons of inert metal waited to arrive in Seattle. Certain metals obscured spirit light and, while most modern vehicles had too much synthetics and plastics to be useful barriers against detection, there were older models which could be effective shields. I hoped the naivete I had sensed in the traveler meant he didn't know the best hiding place would be in one of these older cars; I hoped he thought it would be easier to hide among the spiritual noise of the crowds.
Unlike the passengers in the back half of the boat, the commuters in the forward room were eager for work, eager to reach their desks. Monday was always spent lamenting the death of the weekend and now that it was Tuesday, they had begun to consciously focus on the future-on what needed to be done this week. The chatter of their voices was a cicadaean buzz that roared over me the moment I entered the forward common area. Conversations darted like the motion of busy bees pollinating a ripe field. On the spirit level, the room was a sea of swirling and boiling spirit light.
The air was turgid, thick and hot from the overworked heaters beneath the windows. The fogged glass hid the white-capped waves, and the florescent lights made abstract reflections in the condensation on the windows.
Steam drifted off the wet leather of my coat as I walked the aisle between the vinyl booths. I scanned the faces of the passengers, seeking the bubbling radiance of the traveler and his assumed host. Most of them ignored me, their eyes like static recorders logging the world around them, and then immediately pushing the sensory details to the waste bins of their minds. A few met my gaze and quickly glanced away, brief contact broken.
No one stared, no one was paying enough attention to be a decent Witness. But peripherally, some of them would remember me. Too bright. I was bound to attract the wrong sort of attention sooner than later.
Through the miasma of espresso roast (another espresso cart doing equally bang-up business in the center of the room), the stink of wet synthetic fabrics, and a jumble of juxtaposed perfumes, I caught the scent of burned meat. Above a stairwell at the back of the room, a sign pointed down. Restroom, lower level. At the top of the stairs, the smell was definitely stronger.
The short flight of stairs doubled back, down to a narrow landing and a narrower hallway, before winding further down into the belly of the ferry. There were two doors-a potted plant between them-off the hallway. Universally recognized signs on the doors: men on the left, women on the right. Tendrils of cold air crawled up the steps from the open car storage below.
I found the body in the first stall of the restroom. The thin door was locked, but the corpse had fallen off the toilet seat, and an arm stuck out under the aluminum partition. Olive coat sleeve, white shirt cuffs, cheap silver-faced watch with a black leather band. The dead man's hand was curled into a ragged claw, fingers curved back toward the palm in a manner suggestive of a tightening of the skin and not a conscious effort to make a fist. He had been an older man: extra wrinkles on his knuckles, age spots on the back of his hand.