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.