by Dean Koontz
“We experience time,” she said, “as flowing from the past, from the moment of the big bang, through the present to the future, but that’s not how it is at all. Do you know quantum mechanics?”
Joe only meant that she continually surprised him, but what he said sounded like the disappointment of a guy hoping for a make-out session. “The last thing I thought we’d talk about is science.”
Still gazing at the empty bottle, she said patiently, “What we’re talking about is life and death. Your life and death.”
He regarded the bottle with interest. “Tell me about time.”
“Everything in the universe was once condensed into something smaller than a pea. Which is why, thirteen billion years after the big bang, atoms at one end of the universe still have an eerie connection with atoms at the other end of the universe. Set up the same experiment in a lab in Los Angeles and one in Boston, run them simultaneously, and events in one lab instantly affect the outcome in the other lab three thousand miles away. It’s called ‘spooky effects at a distance.’”
“Time,” Joe reminded her.
“Getting to it. In some way not easily comprehended, every place in the universe is the same place, so that some physicists think what we perceive as distance is a misperception, an illusion that we require to make sense of it all.”
A thin stream of water issued from the air above the table. Winking and rippling with reflected light, but silent as time is silent, the water drizzled down into the empty brandy bottle.
The water had no apparent source, so it shouldn’t have taken Joe more than an instant to be astonished to his feet, but he gaped at the glimmering stream for three or four seconds before he pushed his chair away from the table.
Portia reached out, took his hand, and said, “Don’t be afraid. You’re only remembering what you’ve always known but forgot when you were born.”
Joe looked from the magical water to Portia. She was still a beautiful girl, but if she’d been slightly mysterious before, she was deeply so now. He didn’t fear her. But he was disturbed in mind and heart in ways that he could not have explained to her, that he could not define even to himself.
He said, “How . . . ?”
“How is always less important than why.”
“Then why . . . ?”
“Why is for later, Joe.”
Hesitantly, he drew his chair back to the table and remained seated, though it seemed to him as if the floor under him yawed ever so subtly, like a ship’s deck.
The stream continued to pour forth from midair. Two inches of water had collected in the empty bottle.
She said, “We’re as confused about time as we are about distance. We think time flows from the past through the present to the future. But time doesn’t flow. All time—past, present, future—existed in the first instant of the universe’s creation. Textbooks will tell you so. Time is not a river. It’s an invisible ocean encompassing the universe, with tides that run in all directions simultaneously.”
“My watch,” Joe said, hoping to quiet his heart and stop the floor from moving. “Time only goes forward on my watch.”
“Clocks are human inventions. We made them to measure time as we need to perceive it in order to function as we do. Watches and clocks measure our perception of time, not time itself.”
“We grow old and die,” he argued.
The once-empty bottle was more than half full of the water from nowhere.
“Time is ours to use,” she said. “But we fail to understand it, and so we ride it always in one direction, straight to the grave.”
Joe reached for the full fifth of brandy to add an ounce to his coffee, but he snatched his hand back when he saw that the bottom quarter of the bottle now seemed to be filled with water on which the spirits floated. Just then, a stream of brandy, forced out of the neck of the bottle, rose slowly two feet into the air and then vanished at a spot parallel to the point at which the stream of water issued and fell into the first container.
He thought perhaps he’d had enough brandy, anyway.
“There are some scientists who believe that the universe is in fact an infinite number of parallel universes, and that perhaps we never die. If the forward motion of time is only our perception and not true, then perhaps when we appear to age and die, we actually continue in a parallel universe . . . and so on and on.”
Mesmerized by her lips, but this time because of the words that spilled from them, Joe had turned his eyes away from the bottles. When he looked at them again, he thrust to his feet, knocking over his mug of coffee. Thirty or more bottles stood on the table, some with labels and some without, some with golden spirits silently exiting them, some with the same elixir silently drizzling into them from thin air, others with water entering, and still others from which water exited.
“They’re only bottles, Joe. Or worlds, if you will.”
After everything that had already happened to him on this fateful Saturday, he felt foolish for being frightened or even startled. No matter how he felt, he didn’t want to look foolish in front of Portia.
He sat once more, and he saw that the coffee mug he had knocked over . . . had not been knocked over after all. The coffee that had slopped across the table was in the righted mug, and the table was dry once more. He checked his wristwatch, but time for him had moved forward, separate from how time dealt with the mug and its contents.
Earlier, after the encounter with the purse snatcher and after the events in the pool hall, an inexplicable calm had poured through Joe, a serene acceptance of those impossible pursuits and the danger that they entailed. Such a tranquility quieted him now. He supposed it was a gift from Portia, conveyed into him by psychic injection, although a still, small voice suggested that the soother of nerves might be someone other than her and perhaps someone less pleasing to the eye.
He saw now that brandy and water were not just entering and exiting the mouths of the bottles in vertical flows but were also transferring from one container to another in horizontal streams that pierced glass without cracking it. Each of the myriad bottles held water and brandy layered like parfaits.
“All time—past, present, future—existed in the instant the universe came into being, but also in all the infinite number of universes that exist alongside one another. Time is one big ocean encompassing all those possible worlds. And so for those who truly understand time and the uses to which it can be put, not only the past and future can be visited, but so can universes floating far, far away from theirs in the sea of time.”
Joe began to discern the shape of what she meant to tell him, and though it surely would be as terrible as it would be grand, his calm did not desert him.
“Here in Little City,” she said, “lives a traveler who didn’t come from this world. Or perhaps it came from a million years in the future. Or from outside of time, from before this universe or any other was created. Either I am thought incapable of understanding the fine details—or I am thought to be safer not knowing them. Or maybe knowing them would destroy my sanity. In any case, I call this traveler Parasite, because its real name is nothing I can pronounce. This vile thing invades a human host and lives secretly among us, and by our definition, it is pure evil. It infects others, not with its substance but with a controlling poison, and those it infects eventually infect still others. It is a parasite but it’s also a puppeteer, and it pulls a million strings, ten times a million, all over the world.”
6
THE MASQUERADE
She’d said this was a matter of life and death, and the life that hung pendant over the abyss was Joe’s.
As he met Portia’s pellucid eyes and listened to her speak of evil, however, he realized that her life was at risk no less than his. He had never claimed to be a man of courage; and he made no claim to courage
now. He had thought he didn’t have in him the stuff that made a hero, but in light of the danger to this girl, he hoped he might be braver than he knew.
“The purse snatcher was under its control?”
“We don’t think so. Petty crime doesn’t entertain it, and its puppets aren’t dysfunctional drunkards. The infinite varieties of violence are what it craves.”
“The two men at the pool hall.”
Her blue-gray eyes seemed grayer now than blue, and surely her role in all this haunted her. “They belonged to Parasite. The shots you heard and that I pretended not to hear—they were the shots my uncle fired to kill them.”
Although he remained in his chair, Joe reeled at this news, and again the floor beneath him seemed to roll as if the house were a ship. Acid rose in his throat, and he swallowed hard to press back the reflux.
“Infected people can never be made well,” Portia said, not with a note of defensiveness, but confidently, as if she’d seen too much to doubt the rightness of the killing. “Only death can break their bond to Parasite. In their case, death is a mercy when it comes. The parasite has evidently identified Patsy as an enemy, and he’ll have to leave town quickly and never contact us again until the day this war is over or moves on to another city.”
Joe was deeply distressed to hear this girl speak of murder, to hear her countenance it, even if this wild story were as true as it seemed to be. When he looked away from her, the bottles were gone and with them all the vertical and horizontal currents of water and brandy that represented the omnidirectional tides of time’s ocean.
“I didn’t conjure all of that,” she said. “The seeker worked through me to instruct you. I have no power. I’m only me. The seeker has sought Parasite and others like it for maybe a thousand years, maybe forever. I can’t be sure how long the hunt has lasted, because the seeker speaks of time in ways that exceed what I described to you, in ways I can’t understand.”
This revelation seemed to be one too many: that she was host to something that pursued the parasite, that looking out at Joe through her eyes was Portia but also another presence perhaps not born on this world, perhaps not born in this universe.
His horror must have been as evident as his desire when he had watched her drinking a cherry-ice-cream soda through a straw, for she said, “No, I’m not possessed. There’s no one in here but me. The seeker doesn’t use us the way Parasite uses people. The hunter and the hunted play their game in masquerade, but they wear far different costumes.”
Into the kitchen padded a golden retriever. Although the dog came directly to Joe, he didn’t realize that it was anything more than it appeared to be until he reached down to pet it.
He was overcome with a gladness unlike anything he had ever experienced. The kitchen fell away from him and he was borne into another room, which for a moment he considered from a curious perspective. Then he found himself gazing up at the mother he had known only from photographs and a bit of video, she who had died when he was two. She smiled down at him, and in her arms he was no more than a year old, returned to a time of which he had no memory. Although he had been too young to understand her then, her words had meaning now. She said he was beautiful, her special boy. She said that she loved him and always would. She told him he would grow up to do great things. She bent her face to his and kissed him, and gladness became a joy so sharp that it cut loose all the sadnesses that had been tethered to his heart. She wore a blue ribbon in her hair. With one small hand, he seized it, and the ribbon unraveled as she raised her face from his. He was delivered out of that time, that place, and returned to the kitchen.
The dog smiled up at him.
Wound through Joe’s fingers was the length of blue ribbon.
7
HOUND OF THE HOUND
The dog lay in the corner on her bed, by all appearances a dog and nothing more, except that her head remained raised and her ears slightly lifted throughout Joe and Portia’s conversation.
Joe paced, excited and restless and ecstatic and afraid, while Portia, who had never touched her mug of spiked coffee, sipped brandy straight from a snifter as she counseled him.
“Seeker doesn’t control us like Parasite controls its puppets. She gives us the confidence to be as brave, quick, and competent as we have the potential to be. But in the end, she does not force us to join in the chase . . . or to pull the trigger.”
“How long have you been . . . caught up in this?”
“The parasite moves often. We think it came here seven years ago. Seeker homed in on Little City four years ago. Parasite has been damn hard to find, and it’s changed bodies several times.”
“How was I chosen?” Joe wondered.
“I don’t know—other than your innocent heart. Because of your special role, you have to have an innocent heart.”
“I don’t think I do.”
“That’s up to Seeker. As for the rest of us, no one knows why she chose us to help her. Anyway, she gave you that tracking skill, and you ricocheted through town. Neither fear nor disbelief stopped you from using it. And you had better control on the second chase. She was right to choose you for a paladin.”
The dog made a low pleasant sound more purr than grumble.
“Why doesn’t she enter a more ferocious dog than a golden retriever,” Joe wondered, “something with big jaws and bigger teeth, and then go after the parasite herself?”
“By senses we don’t possess, it’ll detect her when she’s still blocks away. Before she can get there, it’s gone. She always needs a knight like you, someone Parasite isn’t likely to suspect.”
He thrilled at hearing Portia call him a knight. Nevertheless, the ordinary Joe whom he had been still lived in him; he remained prudent. “So I’m like the hound of the hound.” He wasn’t sure he was ready for the answer, but he had to ask, “What are the chances that I come out of this alive?”
“If you find the thing—and you will—when you’re alone with it, don’t turn your back. Never turn your back alone with it. Never, Joey. When you’ve identified it, kill it at once.”
“Yeah. But how do I identify it?”
“You’ve been given the vision to see the hidden form of it. Just 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.”
“It can die? It lives thousands of years, but it can die?”
“The host will die. Parasite has to come out of the host to find another—which might be you. It can’t stay in a dead thing more than a few minutes. When it exits, you’ll know it. And yes, you can kill it. Though it’s . . . hardy.”
She put down the brandy and came to him and put her arms around him and held him tight, her head against his chest, as if she were listening to his heart.
Being hugged by Portia felt good, felt wonderful. Somewhat awkwardly, he put his arms around her, and that felt even better.
Best of all, she kissed him. The kiss was long and warm and deep. By the end of it, Joe felt a little drunk, though not because of the residue of brandy in her mouth.
Another question occurred to him. “Uh . . . how do I kill it?”
She took her smartphone from the table and speed-dialed the chief. “Daddy, he’s ready.”
8
THE CHIEF
Chief Harold Montclair appeared to be too hard a man to have fathered a daughter as lovely as Portia. In fact, if you were to encounter him out of uniform at night, you’d cross the street to avoid him. Scabs crusted his knuckles, as though he had been punching a brick wall for sport. For his stone-gray stare to have been any harder, his eyes would have had to fossilize.
He took Joe into his home office, to a locked gun safe. Before selecting a firearm, he said, “So you donate time to Volunteers for a Better Futu
re.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Why do you volunteer, Joseph?”
“I don’t know. I guess I like to feel good about myself.”
The chief’s eyes were as direct as two drill bits. “Many of our worst criminals have very high self-esteem. Do you have very high self-esteem, Joseph?”
“Not as high as I think you mean.”
“Daddy,” Portia said, “this isn’t necessary. Seeker chose him. Seeker knows his character.”
The chief grunted noncommittally and said to Joe, “So you asked my daughter to the malt shop.”
“We sort of went for a walk and ended up there.”
“So you have an interest in my daughter.”
“Daddy.”
“Yes, sir. She’s like the most interesting person I’ve ever met.”
“That’s what drew you to her—how interesting she was?”
“Well, I also noticed how pretty she was.”
“You really noticed that, did you?”
Portia growled, and Seeker barked.
The chief said, “Okay, okay. I’m the father here, let’s not forget.” He unlocked the gun safe and opened the door and pondered the selection of weapons.
“I’ve never fired a gun,” Joe said.
“Doesn’t matter,” the chief said. “When Seeker gave you the tracking talent, she gave you expertise with guns, too.”
This was something Joe had been wondering about. “When exactly did Seeker give me all this?”
“One of the times she came in your house at night while you were sleeping.”
“One of the times? How did she get in even once?”
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.”
