by Dean Koontz
Never turn your back alone with it. And yes, you can kill it. Though it’s . . . hardy.
Five minutes.
Each minute had begun to seem like ten.
Eyes to the clock and quickly back to the corpse. Give the parasite no opening, no chance.
Instead of Portia, Grandma Dulcie spoke in memory: Men are often made stupid by love.
No. Joe knew what he had seen inside his grandmother. The hideous fat leech. Its ribbon of a tail twining through her spine.
Portia hadn’t described the thing to him. He hadn’t merely seen what she had told him he should see, would see. He had seen what was really there.
Six minutes.
He had been borne back in time to lie in his mother’s arms and hear her say she loved him. He had not imagined that. He had touched the dog, had touched Seeker, and it had taken him back in time. It couldn’t have been hallucination, some form of dream, produced by a drug in his coffee.
Seven minutes. Eight.
It can’t stay in a dead thing more than a few minutes.
A few might be three or four. Or might be ten.
The woman’s unblinking green eyes stared at the ceiling. A starburst hemorrhage in the right one.
The house lay in a dreadful hush. The silence felt sacred, as though this was a place where mourning would be done and prayers should be said.
Eleven minutes.
A noise. Not from the corpse.
Joe looked up and saw the back door opening.
Agnes Jordan, the next-door neighbor, stepped into the kitchen, carrying a plate of cookies in plastic wrap—her contribution to an evening of cards. She saw Joe and started to smile, saw the gun an instant later and did not smile after all, saw the dead woman on the floor and dropped the cookies.
Gray-faced, Agnes turned her eyes on Joe again. “What have you done? What have you done? Oh God, what have you done?”
He knew what he had done, or thought he knew, but he could not speak in his defense. Anything that he could say would sound like a demented, paranoid fantasy.
He backed away from the dead woman, to the hall door, which stood open. He reversed across the threshold and into the hallway as the neighbor lady asked for a fourth time, “What have you done?”
With doubt came panic and horror multiplied. He turned and hurried toward the foyer and the front door.
12
NOTHING LESS THAN EVERYTHING
In the kitchen, Agnes Jordan began to scream.
Joe almost kept going, almost fled the house. As he reached the foyer, however, he realized that Agnes had not screamed when she’d seen Dulcie dead. And these were neither shouts of shocked discovery nor cries of grief. These were screams of terror.
As in a nightmare where the dreamer runs away only to find himself running toward the thing he hoped to escape, Joe hurried along the hall to the back of the house and stepped into the kitchen and saw that Agnes had fallen to the floor. She scrambled backward, retreating from something born in another universe or born before time began.
Less like a leech outside of its host, the parasite was a thing so different from all other creatures of the earth that there was no name for it, no comparison to be drawn between it and another living thing. Black it was, though not merely black in color, a squirming void in the scene, as if its perfect blackness were both color and substance, so that the human eye could see it but not fully define it. The size of a can of cola, with six multijointed legs—now four, or maybe eight, or six after all—and a thin lashing tail. Faster than the laws of physics allowed, it proceeded not in a straight line but darted and jigged frantically in an apparently random series of movements, yet always drawing closer to Agnes. Perhaps it had been hunted over so many millennia that it had learned to augment speed with the chaotic misdirection of Brownian motion. It seemed to have a head, but then didn’t, a carapace, but then not, as though it must be continuously bombarded by particles undetectable to human beings, by some radiation that instantly and ceaselessly mutated it.
With a scuttling sound, a hissing, a high-pitched twittering almost beyond the range of human hearing, it found Agnes’s right foot and moved directly now, fast up her leg, seeking entrance to her by some means unknowable, unthinkable.
Unable to shoot the thing without wounding or killing Agnes, Joe hurried forward. He held the pistol in his left hand, reached down with his right, and seized the parasite. It furiously resisted his grip, at one moment a prickling spiny mass, but the next moment a gelid mush that oozed between his fingers, foreign in every way, profoundly contrary to all human experience, so that he felt that he had reached into the body of some evil angel to grasp its foul and throbbing heart.
He meant to throw the thing aside and bring the gun to bear on it. The parasite seemed to realize his intent. It stopped resisting and clung fast to him, as an octopus might cling with suction. Joe’s scream was entirely internal, a shrill tinnitus of terror. He swung his arm, slammed the refrigerator, battering the creature between the back of his hand and the stainless-steel door. Taking the brunt of the impact, it lost its grip and fell to the floor and zigzagged across Dulcie’s dead body, pattering through her cooling blood, each incremental move sheering obliquely from the one before it, and disappeared under the dinette table.
The feel of the parasite had filled Joe with such abhorrence that every square inch of his skin seemed to be acrawl with ants.
With exquisite caution, he eased around the corpse and dropped onto one knee to look under the table. Nothing.
He surveyed the room from that low perspective, listening for telltale movement. Quiet.
Scrambling off the floor, to her feet, Agnes Jordan warned him, “There!”
He looked where she pointed and saw the quivering black mass cuddling itself in a corner, under the toe kick of the cabinetry.
Before Joe could squeeze off a shot, the parasite raced along the cabinet base, staying in that recess, for once proceeding in a straight line, almost faster than the eye could follow. Somehow it flicked open a door on a lower cabinet and squirmed through the gap. The door banged shut behind it.
For a moment, the clink-rattle of jostled dishes and bowls arose from within the cabinet, but then the creature either went still or crept through the contents with greater stealth.
If ever Joe considered abandoning all principles and fleeing from a challenge, this was the moment when he might have done so. But he heard in memory his grandmother’s voice and took guidance from it: Whatever task you’ve taken, whatever fight you’re facing, you must bring to it nothing less than everything you’ve got, or otherwise you’ll fail for sure and always wonder what might have been if only you had given your all.
Thinking about the five paladins who had failed and the two who had perished in the effort, he approached the cabinet into which the parasite had disappeared. Pistol in his right hand, he reached with his left to open the door. Plates, crockery, and casseroles. Shadows toward the back. He leaned in closer, wishing he had a flashlight.
The clatter, knock, and rattle of brooms and mops tumbling through the flung-open door of a tall corner closet brought him to his feet with a cry of alarm. He thought the parasite had burst out of hiding with the spill of household cleaning items, but as he swung the pistol left and right in search of a target, he realized that it had not come into the open yet.
Stealthy sounds inside an upper cabinet. Joe stepped back, gun in a two-hand grip once more. If the creature flung open an upper door and sprang out, it would be above his head and might fall upon him and fix itself to his face.
He held his breath, listening intently.
Agnes Jordan made small whimpering sounds of distress. When Joe motioned her to the back door, intending that she should clear the battlefield and lea
ve the fight to him, she did not move, apparently paralyzed with fright.
Deep silence. Silence persistent.
Agnes must have heard a faint warning sound to which Joe was deaf, because she gasped and ducked defensively and moved fast to her right just as an upper cabinet door flew open. Having maneuvered itself to drop upon her head, Parasite exited the cabinet in a cascade of drinking tumblers. The thing fell to the countertop as half a dozen tall glasses rang and shattered against that granite surface, its absolute-black contours crankling and shifting as splinters and shards of glass raised a glittering spray and then rained to the floor.
Joe squeezed off a round from a distance of eight feet—six bullets remaining in the magazine—and Parasite was flung against the backsplash by a direct hit. Anything its size, if born in this world, would have been stone dead. Still alive, the thing zigzagged away from him, across the granite, a dissonance of broken glass shifting under it. He fired again, missed, fired again—four rounds left—and scored another hit.
When the creature rebounded from the backsplash again, now all black bristle and menacing hiss, Joe could hear Portia speaking as clearly as if she had been in the room: You can kill it. Though it’s . . . hardy.
Adopting a new strategy, Parasite stopped fleeing, instead jittered across the L-shaped counter, toward Joe. With a skill that improved with each shot, Joe tracked it, nailed it once more. Three direct hits. Still it came, turning the corner of the L, streaking toward him across the granite, no longer moving evasively.
Three rounds left. Risk nothing less than everything. He waited until it was four feet from him, until it sprang for his face. He brought the .45 higher, so that instead of sailing over the pistol, Parasite clutched the thrusting barrel, for an instant embracing the muzzle. An instant was all Joe needed to squeeze off a shot.
If the slug passed through the body of the beast, he didn’t hear it crack a cabinet or ricochet off a hard surface. Parasite swelled, as if the overpressure of the captured bullet inflated it.
Joe triggered his next-to-last round, his hope of escape fading as Parasite endured another point-blank hit. It swelled further, like some vile blowfish . . . and then the alien substance of it exploded backward, away from him, splattering the cabinets and the countertop, as if a ladle of infinity matter had been scooped out of the void beyond the outermost edge of the universe, where not one star shone, and had been cast here by some prankster god.
Every glob and smear of that unearthly tissue spiderwebbed and crackled with a visible electric current. A thin black smoke rose from each morsel, but only briefly. With the withering of the smoke, nothing remained as evidence of invasion.
Joe could not at once accept that he had seen the last of the parasite. He stood shaking, weapon extended, his mind ricocheting through the memory of the encounter, searching for the mistake that he might have made, the error that would allow the creature to rise again and launch itself at his face.
Slowly, he became aware of Agnes Jordan weeping. He lowered the Heckler & Koch and went to her. He put a hand upon her shoulder, and she didn’t recoil from him. He held her for a long moment.
Suddenly he wanted to see Portia, needed to see her. His need was so urgent, he understood that he had not yet been released from his role as paladin, that a grave task awaited him.
“Go home,” he advised Agnes. “Wait there. Chief Montclair will come to see you. He’ll explain everything. You understand?”
She nodded, and off her nod, Joe turned and ran.
13
THE PUPPET
Joe ran for his life, ran to preserve the meaning that had so recently been given to his life. The overcast brightened as chain lightning traveled pathways of oblique angles through convolutions of thunderheads. The flesh of the storm was rent, and rain roared down upon him in torrents.
Five blocks to the Montclair house seemed like five light-years and five millennia. As he bounded up the porch steps, he could have sworn they telescoped ahead of him, adding risers and treads to the climb.
If he had heard the shot, he had thought it was one with the peals of thunder. When he rushed through the front door and into the living room, Joe believed that, no matter what might be about to happen, he had arrived to thwart it. The sight of Portia dead on the floor brought him to a halt and wrenched from him a wretched sob of grief and self-disgust.
Evidently, the chief was not at home. Her uncle Patsy O’Day had come calling with a Colt revolver. Whatever had happened under the pool hall, after Joe and Portia had left, even if Hocker and Jagget had been shot to death, Patsy had been poisoned.
The puppet master was dead. It didn’t live in Patsy or anyone else. But its poison still circulated through this man’s veins.
Our illusion is that we travel through life on a calculated and straight trajectory, from the past through present into future, on a journey to understanding, truth, reward. But by Brownian movement we progress, sent angling off this way and that by the impact of everyone we meet and every event that we cannot foresee.
Joe didn’t hesitate to shoot Patsy dead, for otherwise Patsy would have shot him.
He could not bear the sight of Portia in death. Yet he was about to kneel and take her in his arms when the dog came through the archway from the hall. It regarded Joe with an intensity that conveyed to him that psychic tracking and the skill of an experienced gunman were not the only gifts he had been given in his role as a paladin.
He left her poor broken body on the floor and retreated through the living-room arch. When he crossed the threshold, the hallway was not as it had been. In its place lay a white corridor of luminous walls, with every so often the ghostly suggestion of a door. He did not seem to walk, but glide. When he passed through the door to which he felt drawn, he found himself in Chief Montclair’s home office, alone.
Night pressed at the windows. But no rain streamed down the glass. The digital clock on the desk read SATURDAY. The time was ten minutes before he had arrived in this place after shooting Dulcie.
The gun safe remained unlocked, and he selected a .45 pistol.
He opened a box of ammunition and loaded the magazine.
Portia sat at the table in the kitchen, in a state of distress, a half-eaten sandwich on a plate in front of her, a snifter of brandy beside it.
Perhaps her father had ventured out in search of Joe, concerned about how long he had been gone.
She looked up when Joe entered the room, and relief wiped the worry from her face.
Because he didn’t know what word or action might bend the past the wrong way and make an even greater nightmare of the future, he meant to say and do only what seemed essential.
As she started to get up from her chair, he raised one hand.
“No. I haven’t returned yet. I’m still at my grandmother’s house.”
She regarded him solemnly, and he believed she understood.
He put the pistol on the table.
“When the doorbell rings, let him in and shoot him in the foyer. He isn’t who he appears to be. And if you let him, he’ll kill you in the living room.”
Although he longed to touch her, he walked away, directly to the back door. He stepped outside and closed the door behind him. No porch lay where a porch should have been, no yard, not even the dark of night. Ahead was only a whiteness more terrible than might have been the dead and starless blackness beyond the universe.
When he walked into the blinding brightness of the sea of time, he might have thought that he was drowned by it, dissolved to atoms and his atoms scattered into eternity—except one thing remained to assure him that he lived: the mental image of Portia, vivid and vibrant and beautiful.
In the whiteness, a door. Beyond the door, his grandmother’s kitchen, where she still lay dead.
&nb
sp; Agnes had gone.
Joe hurried to the hallway and saw himself running toward the front door. He waited a moment before following.
Lightning revealed the Wagnerian heavens in dark tumult, the perfect stage sky for a performance of Götterdämmerung, here at the end of all things. Sabers of lightning eviscerated the thunderheads, and rain chased down the night in torrents.
Joe pursued himself at a distance, for he knew that the first Joe, the self ahead of him, would not look—had not looked—back.
The five blocks to the Montclair house seemed to pass beneath his feet in seconds, though he knew the journey was one of minutes. Just short of his destination, he left the sidewalk, crossed the street, and stood in the darkness under a tree.
Over there at the house, where a bright future might yet await Joe Mandel, that ordinary young man raced up the steps just as the front door of the Montclair house opened. She appeared, the pistol in one hand. He halted, almost recoiled, surprised by her weapon. But Portia came into his arms, and he embraced her. They held each other in silence for a moment, and then their excited voices carried into the stormy night . . .
. . . carried across the rain-swept street to the Joe who stood in the darkness under the tree. He waited until they went inside and closed the door, the terror of the night and all the killing behind them, a cover story in need of invention, a discussion between the chief and Agnes Jordan certainly necessary. But now, the future had angled sharply away from despair to hope. Evil, which endured all of time, was for this precious moment held at bay.
Joe set out into the rain, heading downtown toward the quaint shops and the sparkling cafés, and then past them to a semiquaint district where the bus station stood. A counter clerk sold him a ticket to a town five hundred miles away.