Ricochet Joe

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 close 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.