by Dean Koontz
Touching one gun and then another with fondness, the chief said, “Whether she came from a million years in the future, from another universe, or wherever the hell, it should be obvious she can go anywhere she damn well pleases.” He took a pistol from the gun safe. “This here is a Heckler and Koch .45ACP with a ten-round magazine. We’ll load it with hollow points, screw a sound suppressor on it.”
“A silencer?” Joe frowned. “Is that legal?”
“In some states, it’s entirely legal. Besides, I’m a cop, and you’re a . . .” He turned to his daughter. “Pumpkin, what do you call it—what he is now?”
“A paladin.”
“For what’s got to be done,” the chief declared, “it’s legal enough. I’ve got a special shoulder rig that holds it with the sound suppressor attached and breaks away when you draw.”
When the pistol was loaded, Chief Montclair gave Joe minimal instructions in its operation. “Thanks to Seeker, you’ll feel like a lifelong shooter once you draw it.”
Evidently, on her nightly visits, Seeker hadn’t granted Joe a familiarity with shoulder holsters, because he tangled himself in the rig as if it were as complex as a straitjacket.
“Damn it all, son, let me do that for you.”
The chief had Joe rigged neatly in half a minute.
“I need a sport coat to hide it. I’ll go home and get one.”
“Pumpkin, go to the spare closet and get Joe a sport coat from when I was a bit less beefy.”
“It’ll probably still be too big,” Joe said.
“Won’t know till we try, son.”
While they waited for Portia to return, Joe said, “Seems like you would be better for this job than me.”
The chief gave him a look that said, Are you as smart as my daughter keeps saying you are?
“Oh,” Joe said. “Yeah, I guess Parasite would suspect the jig was up if an armed cop came to the door.”
“It’s important the thing suspects nothing. Otherwise, you’ll never get a chance. But there is another reason Seeker chose you.”
“What’s that?”
Chief Montclair glanced at the open door to be sure that Portia hadn’t returned. He lowered his voice and with evident chagrin said, “Parasite can detect the difference between an innocent heart and one . . . well, that’s maybe not so innocent. It won’t fear you and your innocent heart, but it would smell me coming a mile away, sad to say.”
This was a revelation that Joe could have done without, for if this was his future father-in-law, he would be forever wondering to what degree the chief’s heart was not innocent.
Portia returned with the coat, which was too big, though not as big as Joe expected.
“Helps hide the gun,” Portia said as she adjusted the lapels. “Just seems like maybe you’re wearing your father’s coat. And the last thing you look like is an assassin.”
“She’s right about that,” the chief said. “Last thing you look like is an assassin.”
“When do I start?” Joe asked.
To his daughter, the chief said, “Now?”
“Now,” she agreed.
Another thought occurred to Joe. “Where do I start?”
“You’re the tracker, Joey. Start where intuition tells you. But Parasite has a special vibe. You won’t mistake it for the vibe of a purse snatcher.”
Yet another thought occurred to him. “Seeker and all of you have been hunting it the last four years. Does it always escape by changing bodies? Have there been other paladins?”
“Seven,” the chief said.
“And they all failed?”
“Five of them were not innocent enough in their hearts,” Portia said. “They could track it but never get close enough without it being able to know they were coming.”
In the doorway, the dog wagged its tail and smiled at Joe as if to say, But you’re the one!
“Five failed, huh? What about the other two?”
“They’re dead,” the chief said.
9
MADE STUPID BY LOVE
Portia had said that Joe should let his intuition guide him. Unfortunately, intuition wasn’t like a Corvette or even a secondhand Honda; you couldn’t just get into it and start it up and cruise to where a parasite from another universe was living inside someone.
For want of a better plan, Joe retraced the route that earlier he and Portia had followed from Patsy’s Pool Hall to the Montclairs’ house. Hoping to detect the special residual vibe of his evil quarry, he touched parked cars, lampposts, crosswalk-control buttons, benches in the park, trash-can lids, the handrails flanking a set of steps leading out of the park. He picked up and fingered various items that people had discarded, because the parasite seemed likely to be the type who littered.
As the day waned, the sky recomposed itself until it appeared Wagnerian, the clouds such a bleak gray and so curdled and woven through with veins of black and in general so operatic that they were the perfect stage sky for a performance of Götterdämmerung, foretelling the end of all things.
In his too-large borrowed sport coat, with the pistol heavy against his left side, his innocent heart sometimes thumping loudly in his ears and sometimes as silent as if it had ceased functioning, Joe moved through his hometown as if he had come upon it for the first time, all things new and strange and forbidding.
They said that Seeker had given him not just the skills but also the confidence to do what needed to be done. Indeed, he strode the neighborhoods with self-assurance, afraid but fortified with courage that prevented him from being crippled by his fear.
But the heart is deceitful above all things. Theologians agreed on that issue, as did most philosophers, and if such a view of the human condition hadn’t been widely held, there would have been less Shakespeare to celebrate and no TV dramas whatsoever. For all his confidence and newfound courage, now that he was alone, beyond the immediate influence of the lovely Portia, Joe began to be troubled by the haste with which he had progressed from being an ordinary litter-collecting volunteer in Central Park to a believer in creatures from other universes and a stalker of cosmic evil.
True, amazing things had happened since that morning. He did not doubt his sanity or wonder if he might have been subjected to hallucinations after being secretly drugged. The events of the past several hours had been as real as they had been fantastic. Without Portia at his side, however, without her delightfully distracting presence, which in a delicious way sort of clouded his thinking, Joe’s mind seemed to clear. He began to consider whether the very real events of the day might have a different explanation from the one that she had given him. Although the story of Seeker and Parasite was a wild narrative, it felt true, and as he rambled around Little City, he could not find a contradiction in anything she’d told him.
Yet . . . something that Grandma Dulcie often said now echoed in his memory: Men are often made stupid by love. She meant that a woman’s charms could distract men from truths that the charms might cloak, that men could fall in love with love as easily as could any woman.
Grandma had a cruder aphorism related to the first: Men too often think with their little head instead of their big one. Joe was embarrassed to hear those words even in the privacy of his mind, and guilt rose in him that he would associate such a thought with the kind and virtuous Portia.
Yet . . .
Still he roamed the town, pressing one hand or the other to everything with which the person who hosted Parasite might have made contact, as if he had gone blind and must make his way by touch alone.
Twilight could not marry day to night with the densely clotted sky intervening in the ceremony. The gray and shadowed afternoon became night, seemingly between one breath and another, and the lights of Little City brought faux warmth
to the cool evening air. The street lamps and the strings of tiny bulbs wound through tree branches and the luminous shop windows in the quainter districts created a festive air for tourists and residents alike.
At the malt shop, when Joe patted the resin head of Lucky Duck, a psychic residue of perfect evil shuddered through his hand and up his arm. The vibe of the parasite centipeded through the chambers of his heart, as if it might turn those pulsing tissues to ice, and Joe nearly dropped to his knees. He snatched his hand back, however, and whispered, “Button,” and was on the hunt.
10
WHAT LIVES WITHIN
Along a route defined by nine points of contact, Joe went from one marker of evil to another, the effect of each more intense than the one before it. At the ninth, he whispered, “House,” and though he had come to a residential neighborhood with many houses, he went directly to the one in which his grandmother lived.
He stood on the sidewalk, paralyzed by disbelief. Of all the people he had ever known, he would have put this woman last on the list in a search for evil’s harbor. She was kind and generous and good. If his father’s seldom-expressed affection was love, then of the three people who might love Joe, he would have said that Dulcie loved him most of all, if only because she had loved him without a moment of exception for far longer than Portia had loved him, if indeed she did.
He would not act precipitously. He would not assume that the tracking skill conferred on him by Seeker was foolproof. For this woman, he must make every allowance. He’d been told that those poisoned by Parasite and operated by its thousands of psychic strings were not salvageable once they had been in its thrall. Surely, then, the host in which the creature actually lived, its pirated body of flesh and blood, would also be beyond all hope of rehabilitation.
If he went inside, he might have to kill his grandmother.
If he saw the creature within her, as Portia said he would see it in the host, and if he could not bring himself to kill her, then she, in some strange power’s employ, would likely kill him.
When he visited her, he always went to the kitchen door. Now he opened the side gate and walked around to the back porch.
She took her dinner at five thirty. Now at seven, her dinner hour had passed. Yet she was at work in the kitchen. Joe stood at the back door, watching her through its upper panes, as she busied herself cubing cheese and sticking a decorative toothpick in each cube.
It seemed to strain credulity to believe that a wickedness from across a sea of worlds, having inserted itself in a host, would in the privacy of its home, its nest, occupy itself with mundane domestic activities.
On the other hand, maybe such a masquerade could be successful only if conducted with unwavering continuity.
When he knocked on the door, she looked up and broke into a broad smile when she saw him in the porch light. “Come in, child!”
He stepped into the kitchen, which was redolent of some savory treat—cilantro, black pepper, phyllo dough—baking in the oven. He closed the door behind him.
“I like surprise visits best of all,” Dulcie declared as she continued to cube the block of cheese. “Whatever brings you here, sweetie?”
“Oh, I was just knocking around downtown, thought I’d go to a movie, but nothing’s playing that I want to see.” His voice sounded unnatural to him, as if he were reading lines. On the dinette table lay a deck of cards, a pen, and a notepad for keeping score. “Are you going to take some poor devil’s money at poker?”
“Don’t I wish,” Dulcie said. “But it’s just Agnes coming over from next door for a little five hundred rummy and gossip.”
Here was the sweet face that had brightened his life for eighteen years, the same Dulcie under a cap of white hair, her voice no less musical than ever, her green eyes bright with intelligence and good humor and love.
“Come here and give Grandma a kiss,” she said.
In memory, he heard Portia’s voice: When you’re alone with it, don’t turn your back . . . don’t get within arm’s reach of it . . .
He had been here only three days earlier, had spent two hours with her, had kissed her hello and good-bye. And lived. She could be no one but Dulcie.
As Joe took a step toward her, she said, “Oh shoot! I forgot to check on the mini biscuits.” She put down the knife with which she had been cubing cheese, snatched up a pair of pot holders, then hurried to the oven and opened the door.
He reached down to the deck of cards on the table, which she would have recently touched.
A bleak current flashed from hand to arm, into the walls of his heart, icier than the residue on any of the nine points of contact he’d followed from the malt shop. This time a darkness swelled behind his eyes, and there rose in his mouth a taste more bitter than bile. When the darkness and foul taste receded, he was overcome with grief. She was already lost to him, whether he killed her or walked away and left her in the control of her otherworldly master.
Portia again in memory: You’ve been given the vision to see the hidden form of it.
Joe saw nothing but Dulcie removing a tray of little biscuits from the oven, just Grandma Dulcie, his mother’s mother. In fact, she’d been his surrogate mother all these years, his playmate in childhood, his good counsel in adolescence.
She set the tray of biscuits on a cooling rack near the sink, put aside the pot holders, and turned to him, smiling. His expression must have been less well controlled than he believed, for her smile faltered. “Joey? Is something wrong, sweetie?”
Emotion trembled his voice as he heard himself say, “My mother told me I was her special boy. She said she loved me and always would. She told me I would grow up to do great things.”
Love and worry and sympathy reshaped Dulcie’s expression. “Oh, honey, Joey, something is wrong. Give Grandma a hug and tell me all about it.”
When she started toward him, Joe saw the fiend within. Dulcie became semitransparent, as if made of milky glass. Fixed to her brain stem, the parasite hung like a fat inky-black poor broken body on the floor leech, a leech with a long, thin tail spiraling down through her spine. When he saw it, he knew its history, which was broadcast to him in a condensed psychic flash. The thing had passed through millennia, across uncounted universes, a cruel rider of humanity and of other species, feeding on the anguish of those it enslaved and on the violence of the others whom it poisoned and used to murderous ends.
The woman ceased to be semitransparent and once more appeared to be the loving grandmother she had always been. She opened her arms to him as she approached.
For God’s sake, don’t get within arm’s reach of it. And, Joey, I can’t stress enough . . . don’t hesitate to kill it. Act at once.
He stepped back from Dulcie as she approached, and his retreat halted her. Love, worry, sympathy ebbed from her face like a tide from the shore, and in her suddenly wide eyes he saw suspicion.
She was almost within arm’s reach, and although she had halted, Joey drew the pistol that was fitted with a silencer. “Stay back.”
She was for a long moment silent, and in her silence he read neither fear nor sorrow, but cold calculation. Then she said, “Oh, honey, Joey baby, something’s very wrong with you. Your poor mind, sweetie. Your mind isn’t right. Keep the gun if you want, but sit down with Grandma—sit down and tell me all about it.”
She took a step toward him and reached out a hand to him.
An old song came into his mind, a favorite of his grandmother’s, written long before Joe had been born: “You Always Hurt the One You Love.” His eyes flooded with tears as he shot her dead.
The first round staggered her backward, into the table. Her face distorted less with pain than with bewilderment as she said, “Why? Why?”
The sound suppressor softened the shots but didn’t come clo
se to silencing them. As he fired twice again and saw her body torn by the terrible impact of the hollow-point rounds, as she collapsed to the floor, he knew that he would hear these half-muffled pistol shots in dreams for the rest of his life.
11
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
Shaking with horror and grief, weeping as he had not wept since childhood, making the most pitiful sounds that he’d ever heard issue from himself or anyone, Joe Mandel backed away from the bullet-riven corpse, still holding the Heckler & Koch in a two-hand grip, the muzzle trained on the dead woman.
Like a lifelong shooter, he had drawn the weapon smoothly, taken an ideal isosceles stance, adjusted for the recoil, and done what he’d come there to do.
Portia spoke in memory: The host will die. Parasite has to come out of the host to find another—which might be you.
The blood. The awful blood. Her lying in it. Eyes open wide in a sightless stare. Blood climbing from the floor through her white hair, like oil rising in a lantern wick.
It can’t stay in a dead thing more than a few minutes. When it exits, you’ll know it.
The gun felt heavy, seemed to weigh ten times what it had weighed when Chief Montclair first put it in Joe’s hand. His arms shook with the burden of the gun, with the burden of what he had done, and the muzzle kept jumping off target.
A clock hung on the wall, within his line of sight. Perhaps a minute had passed.
He thought he heard the corpse move, and his attention leaped away from the clock, but the dead woman was in the same position as before.
Why? She had asked, Why? Why?
If she had been possessed and ridden, she would have known why. She would have known.
He struggled to calm himself, to stay ready.