Ricochet Joe

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.