Дин Кунц - Ricochet Joe

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.”

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.