She knew that she had surprised him, that it was possible, for he halted in his ceaseless pacing and had no immediate reply.
“Forbidden by whom?” The answer to that would explain him.
After a hesitation, he said, “Forbidden by my code of ethics.”
At last she turned from the window.
He was standing by the door to the hallway.
“Forbidden by whom?” she insisted.
“Don’t badger me, Joanna.”
Although his grievous face and misbegotten body aroused a deep disquiet, heretofore he had seemed enfeebled by his ill-shapen bones and deformed joints, his grotesque proportions suggesting weakness and clumsiness. However, since he’d startled Joanna by erupting from the armchair onto the footstool with catlike quickness, she had been reassessing his condition. He was short but solid, perhaps muscular under his loose-fitting clothes. If his afflictions had left him frail, susceptible to sickness and the stress of gravity, he would not have lived to the age of thirty-seven at his current level of vitality. He was more formidable than he first appeared, perhaps stronger than Joanna, his strength magnified by madness and rage.
She returned to the footstool and, from the floor beside it, picked up the framed photo of herself at the age of seven or eight. She regretted that her hands shook, but she could not control her tremors. Anyway, he knew the true dimension of her fear, how deep and dark it was; she couldn’t conceal it from him.
When she saw him stiffen, she knew he’d read her mind and was aware of what she would say. She said it anyway, quoting him: “‘The pitiful monkey wanted it for whatever stupid monkey reason, but he doesn’t want it now.’”
She didn’t need to be a mind reader to recognize the fury with which he regarded her, the unreasoned hatred. She wanted to believe that he was sane when he’d been her secret friend. But whoever he might be, whatever he might be, he wasn’t sane anymore.
She said, “Were you speaking with self-hatred or with contempt for him? Did you call yourself a pitiful monkey?”
As if two monocular entities regarded her, each with its own eye from behind that tortured face, he said, “You should have gotten out when you could.”
“Or did you call Jimmy a monkey because he disgusts you?”
His silence was a threat.
Debating him required her to grasp the convoluted structure of his so-called ethics; and the effort to do so, rather than fear, had made her face slick with cold sweat. “Jimmy never before talked of himself in the third person. And I don’t think he called himself a pitiful monkey. I think you called him that.”
“I know how pitiable I am.”
“No,” she said. “Don’t play Jimmy for me anymore. Jimmy’s here in the flesh, but it’s not him that I’m having a conversation with.”
“I’m Jimmy Alvarez. Who else do you see? Is something wrong with your eyes?”
“Calling him a pitiful monkey—you’ve given yourself away.”
He closed the door to the hall.
She said, “Jimmy Alvarez wasn’t my secret friend. You were. Secret friend or secret something. You’re using him in the same way that you used the elk today, just like you used the grizzly bear.”
Nostrils flared, chewing on his lower lip, working his hands as though he yearned to rend something with them, he moved toward her.
Retreating from him, she said, “They’ll be back any minute.”
“So they find you dead. So maybe your friend Wyatt kills Jimmy. So what? Jimmy’s nothing to me. I’ve no more use for him, now that I called you here through him and found that you’re not who you were, that you’re just another parasite leeching the lifeblood from the planet. You give me no hope at all.”
“You’re forbidden to do this,” she reminded him, reduced to pleading with a lunatic for her life.
“I can execute anyone for a righteous cause. And I’m commanded to kill to keep my existence secret.”
Backing toward the window, which offered no quick escape, she scanned the room for a makeshift weapon. “‘Fair retribution, the impersonal visitation of the doom of righteous law.’”
“Yes.”
“But that isn’t what I meant by ‘forbidden.’ You seem to think you have a right to read my mind, but you said you’re forbidden to control my mind and use me like you used the elk.”
“I won’t control and use you. Just delete you.”
She backed up against the window. “You’re controlling Jimmy. Using him. You’re doing exactly what you say is forbidden.”