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 leave 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.