Crossfades Read Free

through them. Once, these people had loved and laughed and lived. But now, so close to the finish line, they’d become nothing more than biological eavesdropping devices. The snippets of captured conversation were dutifully recorded, noise reduction applied, and the gain adjusted until voices from the other side emerged.
    Position could be triangulated, in part, by the strength of the voices. The more clear and distinct the words, the closer the Crossfade was to physical space. Algorithms Chuck didn’t fully understand yet calculated a set of coordinates from the collected data, cross-referencing it with heart rate and brain activity. This, in turn, created the equivalent of a pushpin in the topography of Space-Time, and that pushpin was both his focus and destination.
    As a Whisk, Chuck had been trained in the art of meditation. He wasn’t the fastest by far, but he could guide himself into Theta in the same amount of time it took most people to mumble their bedtime prayers. At that level, visualizing the silver cord was easy. He let it out like a guide rope tethered to his mortal body, a little at a time, taking tentative steps into the unknown until the feeling of claustrophobic suffocation passed. After that, he was able to travel freely. Laymen called this practice astral projection, but to a Whisk, it was simply called The Walk.
    Chuck’s walks corresponded to the messages his partner broadcasted; most were simply routine assignments since that was all he had clearance for. These were the spirits who longed to cross The Divide; they sensed the mystery and knew the trappings of the flesh were no longer of concern. They’d just got sidetracked on their journey into the unknown and needed a little help finding their way.
    The casual listener, though, wouldn’t have detected anything out of the ordinary. Nearly drowned by the rhythmic hiss of the ventilator filling and deflating Nodens’s lungs, the voices that spoke through the comatose man were so faint that it almost sounded as if the breathing tube had sprung a leak somewhere deep within his trachea. A microphone embedded in the man’s throat lining dutifully recorded the words, but even then the messages had to be amplified, filtered, and digitally finessed before meaning could be extracted. Forty hours a week in the company of Sleepers, however, had acclimated Chuck to the slightest of changes in his partners’ respiration. He could tell when the Med Techs would need to suction sputum before the airways had even begun gurgling; he knew when the water in the humidifier’s reservoir was running low or when a valve in the tubing was malfunctioning.
    So when a sound that was no more than the softest of sighs passed Nodens’s vocal cords, Chuck looked up from his paperwork with a smile. His eyes twinkled as he pressed his palms together and bowed his head. Someone, somewhere, was coming through.
    “All right,” he said aloud, “time to get to work.”
    The assignment, of course, would be what Level I Whisks dismissively referred to as a
Show ’n Go
. The soul would be freed from the Crossfade with only minimal guidance and The Walk would be over far too soon. Even such mundane tasks, however, were preferable to the reports Chuck was required to file; his heart always beat a little more quickly when the voices of the dead bled into the physical realm and tingles tickled the thin hairs on the back of his neck.
This
was what it was all about; this was the moment he lived for.
    The first warning in the handbook stated, in no uncertain terms, that there was some malevolent shit out there. Chuck Grainger knew this. But the routine nature of Level II assignments sometimes caused him to forget that occasionally things could go very,
very
wrong…

Chapter 1
Alone in the Dark
    The darkness devoured everything. Though her palm was so close that it brushed the tip of her nose, the woman couldn’t detect even the hint of a silhouette. Deprived of sight, she relied