The Taking

  the front steps, onto the flagstone walk.

  When she turned, she was relieved to see that Neil hurried close behind her and that he had not been imprisoned by animate architecture.

  The house looked no different from the way it had been when they’d first seen it. Craftsman style, no Cthulhu.

  In the hush of the purple mist, Molly expected to hear the structure creaking, groaning, midway in a performance to match that of Poe’s self-consuming House of Usher, but her expectations went unfulfilled—not for the first time in this bizarre night—because the residence stood as silent, as deceptively serene, as inspiring of convoluted syntax as the stately manor in a ghost story by Henry James.

  The front door slowly drifted shut, as though it had been hung with an inward-swinging bias on well-oiled hinges. She suspected, however, that a less mechanical force—one capable of conscious and cruel intent—was at work.

  The crusty lichen on the stone pines, flecked with emerald-green radiance, though cancerous in appearance and rapidly metastasizing up the limbs, now seemed to be a benign and almost charmingly festive bit of extraterrestrial vegetation compared to whatever hellish things had been breeding or growing in the walls of the house.

  Assuming that the rising sun had not faltered in its ascent, the mist must have thickened overhead even as it had dissipated somewhat here at street level, for the amethystine light had darkened to plum-purple. The promise of morning had already given way to a threatening shadowland more suitable to a Balkan twilight than to a California dawn.

  “Where do we go now?” Johnny asked.

  Molly looked at Virgil, who regarded her expectantly. “Wherever the dog leads us.”

  At once, the shepherd turned away from her and trotted along the flagstone path to the street.

  The four of them followed Virgil into a mist that had thinned and lifted until visibility, even in this false dusk, extended about two blocks.

  Molly’s initial sense that the overhead fog had grown markedly more dense, even as the lower blear somewhat clarified, proved correct on calmer observation.

  In fact, the stratification between the ground-level haze and the higher pea soup was so abrupt that a ceiling seemed to have been constructed over Black Lake at a height of fifteen feet. Everything above that line—part of the upper floors and the roofs of two-story houses, the higher limbs of trees—vanished entirely from sight in the livid murk.

  She felt oppressed by the impenetrability of the overcast and by its proximity to the ground. The sluggish, clotted fog allowed penetration by only a narrow band of the light spectrum, resulting in this plummy gloom, piling a weight of claustrophobia atop the onerous mood.

  Something else about the lowering sky disturbed her, but she could not at once identify the reason for her concern.

  They had followed Virgil only half a block, however, before that cause presented itself: Things could move half seen or even unseen in that dismalness.

  Out of the west came a light in the overcast. The fog diffused it, obscured the source, but the brightness approached across the besieged town.

  The nearer it drew, the more evident its shape became: a disc or perhaps a sphere. At the heart of the surrounding corona burned the more intense light of the object itself, which approximately defined it. She guessed it might be the size of an SUV, although she couldn’t accurately discern proportions without knowing at what altitude the vehicle cruised.

  She had no doubt that it would prove to be a vehicle. The movies had prepared her for this sight, too, as had decades of news stories about UFOs.

  The object traveled silently. No purr of engines. No whoosh of displaced air. From it emanated none of the pulsations that had radiated from the larger ship and that had throbbed in blood and bone.

  If the southbound leviathan that had recently passed over was the mother ship—or one of many mother ships—then the approaching UFO had most likely been dispatched from that larger vessel. This might be an observation craft, a bomber or the equivalent, or maybe a troop transport.

  Or none of the above. This war bore little or no resemblance to any of the many conflicts of human history, and the usual lexicon of battle had no application to these events.

  As the UFO drew near, it slowed, appearing to glide with the gravity-defying ease of a hot-air balloon.

  It came to a full stop directly above their little group, where they stood in the street, and there it hovered soundlessly.

  Molly’s heart swelled with a rush of dread.

  Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still: quoting Eliot to herself now, seeking consolation in the cadence, reassurance in the rhythm.

  When Abby cringed against her, Molly dropped to one knee, to be at the girl’s level, to pull her close and to help her find the courage to face whatever might come.

  36

  BENEATH THE FLOATING MYSTERY, IN ITS golden yet baleful light, under its malevolent influence, the four of them gazed up, afraid but unable to look away.

  At first sight of the approaching light, Molly had considered fleeing with the children, hiding, but she had realized that if the pilot of the craft wished to find them, they would be found. Surely these ETs could track ground targets by infrared surveillance, by body-heat profiling, by sound-spoor detection, and by other means beyond the capabilities of human science and technology.

  She felt watched, and more than watched: intimately scrutinized, physically and mentally analyzed, her fullest measure taken in ways unknowable and profound. As she became more sensitive to the depth of this analysis, her fear grew more intense and, to her surprise, she was also overcome by shame—her face burned with it—as if she stood naked before strangers.

  When she heard herself murmuring the Act of Contrition, she realized that instinctively she expected to die here in the street, in this minute or the next.

  Neither the hovering transport’s powerful light nor the effect of its silent propulsion system to any degree burned off the fog beneath it. If anything, the mist thickened, conspiring to keep hidden the contours and every detail of the machine.

  She expected to be incinerated, reduced to burning tallow in a boiling pool of blacktop, or to be atomized.

  Alternately, the prospect of the craft descending to the street, of being taken aboard, of coming face-to-face with their inhuman masters and subjected to God knew what experiments and humiliations made atomization almost appealing.

  Instead and unexpectedly, the luminous object moved away from them, receding rapidly. In seconds, every glimmer of its golden glow had been extinguished by the overcast.

  The thick mist was empurpled again, and the street cast into false twilight, as before.

  After hugging Abby almost too fiercely, Molly rose shakily to her feet. Neil stood with one reassuring hand on Johnny’s shoulder. His eyes met hers, and did not blink.

  Their mutual sense of relief was palpable, but none of them had a word to say about the event that had just transpired, as though to speak of the craft would be to invite its immediate return.

  During the encounter, she had not been aware of the dog. If he had been frightened, he had recovered as quickly as the vessel had vanished in the fog. He stood, alert and apparently undaunted, ready to lead the search for other children.

  Molly was eager to follow him—and grateful to have a purpose important enough and difficult enough to prevent her from brooding too intently on the hostile new world they would have to face in the days ahead.

  Nonetheless, as Virgil led them farther north along the street, Molly noticed that the radiant lichen crusted a significant number of trees: stone pines, sugar pines, sycamores dressed with the yellow foliage of autumn. The transformation of the earth continued apace.

  She saw other sycamores and cottonwoods with beards of gray moss like nothing that previously had grown in Black Lake. Some of this mossy bunting hung in swags as wispy as the mist, but other drapings were dense, conveying an impression of rot and disease.

&nbs
p; Two massive trees had toppled, but their fate appeared to have nothing to do with aggressive alien plant forms. They had stood in soil so saturated by the rains that their weight was greater than the power of the sodden earth to hold them erect. One tree had fallen into the street, entirely blocking it, and the other had crashed onto a house, doing serious damage.

  Never wandering, never pausing to sniff the ground or the air, Virgil proceeded one block farther north, then turned east and trotted uphill to Chestnut Lane.

  Molly expected to be led to another residence, in which the walls would be infested. Perhaps this time the fluttering multitudes would escape their hive and seek whatever sustenance they needed.

  The shepherd took them instead toward St. Perpetua’s, the church at the corner of Chestnut Lane and Hill Street, the steeple and the roof of which thrust up and vanished into the overcast.

  This structure had been built of stone quarried from these mountains. The two oak front doors stood under handsome limestone tympanums that together cradled a stained-glass rose window, all surrounded by a cinquefoil arch.

  The north and south walls of the church also featured stained-glass windows. Through two of these, toward the altar-end of the nave, came a constant but slightly quivering light, not nearly strong enough to transform the mosaics of somber glass into bright scenes of grace and miracles, but sufficient to reveal that someone had taken refuge in the building.

  Earlier, when Molly and Neil had quickly toured the town in search of neighbors gathered in mutual defense, before finding the crowd at the tavern, they’d cruised past St. Perpetua’s. It had appeared to be deserted.

  Virgil did not proceed to the front doors of the church. He went to the open gate in the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the adjacent cemetery.

  There, the dog exhibited his first moment of trepidation: ears forward, breath held, tail tucked. From rump to stifles to hocks, his back legs trembled.

  Yet after only a brief hesitation, the shepherd went through the gate and among the tombstones. Molly, Neil, and the children reluctantly followed.

  Two ancient live oaks, growing at maximum altitude and unlikely to have survived higher on the mountain, shadowed the farther reaches of the cemetery. Their massive crowns were for the most part cloaked in the fog, and the aisles of graves under their limbs were obscured by filigrees of blackest shadows worked across a field of purple light.

  In those open areas closer to the gate, however, the enduring and anachronistic twilight brightened the yard enough to reveal that some gravestones had been targeted by busy vandals. Simple rectangles of granite, carved angels, two Latin crosses, one cross of Calvary, one Celtic cross, molines and botonées and patriarchals had been toppled and broken.

  Graves had been opened. Not most. Perhaps a dozen, fifteen, out of hundreds.

  Young Abby sought Molly’s hand and squeezed it tightly.

  Masses of mud, excavated earth, covered some areas of grass. Scattered across the mud were coffin lids of all varieties: shattered wood, twisted and mangled metal.

  The open graves were nearly full of muddy water. In them floated tangled lengths of satin lining from the caskets. A stained and lace-trimmed pillow on which had once rested the head of a cadaver. One black shoe. Scraps of rotting garments. A few small bones, clean and white, mostly phalanges and metatarsals….

  The dog had brought them here to see this.

  Molly had no idea why.

  Or perhaps she knew the meaning of this outrage, but lacked the nerve to follow logic where it would take her.

  37

  THE NARTHEX OF THE CHURCH HAD A SINGLE window: the stained-glass, multifoliate rose above the front doors. When filtered through red-and-gold glass, the plum light lost all ability to illuminate.

  This was a dark place, paneled in mahogany. The air smelled sweet with incense and rank with mold.

  The dog sneezed twice, and snorted to clear his nose.

  Molly’s flashlight found a colony of fungi in a corner, not black and yellow but pure white.

  The specimen consisted of two forms growing in an apparently random mix. Round bladderlike structures clustered in many sizes, swollen as if with a barely contained quantity of fluid, glistening with an exuded milky mucus. What appeared to be soft fabric sacs, not quite fully inflated, slowly swelled and subsided and swelled again as though they were lungs.

  The colony measured approximately four feet wide, three feet deep, and six feet high. Massive. Malignant. Aware.

  How Molly knew it was aware, she could not say, and perhaps she reached this conclusion largely by imagination rather than by reason or even intuition. Yet she remained certain that the interiors of the white bladders, if not the pale lungs, teemed with malevolent and sentient life.

  She wished that Abby and Johnny could have waited outside. The kids couldn’t be left alone, however, and neither she nor Neil was ready to compromise their commitment to stay together at all times.

  Virgil pawed at the door between the narthex and the nave, pawed with such insistence that he seemed to suggest they had little time to do what must be done.

  When Molly pushed the door open, she glimpsed a white marble holy-water font immediately to the right, but was more drawn to the sight of scores of candles clustered at the front of the church, toward the extreme right side of the chancel railing.

  By habit, she dipped two fingers in that small marble reservoir. Instead of cool water and the usual sense of peace, she felt a damp, spongy, foul something.

  Snatching her fingers back, aiming the flashlight more directly at the font, she discovered a severed human hand lying in the water. Palm up. Digits bristling like the legs of a dead crab.

  A cry caught in her throat, then issued as half whimper and half wheeze.

  A thing as familiar as a hand, in such unexpected and offensive context, seemed alien in the extreme, less grisly than shocking, but grisly enough.

  To spare the children from this sight, Molly at once turned the flashlight away from the font, toward the main aisle of the shadowy nave. Twitching on the wooden floor, the beam revealed her state of mind.

  “Stay away from the font, don’t even look at it,” she warned them, and hoped that the poor light would spare them the sight now etched in her memory.

  Although fresh, Molly’s recollection of the hand was imperfect. She suspected that something about that severed member had been revelatory, premonitory, but the crucial detail eluded her.

  She did not turn back to take a second look. The nave ahead of her compelled attention, for three children and two men were gathered in the light of the many candles in the southwest corner, just outside the sanctuary.

  From a distance, the posture of that group of five appeared defensive, fearful. Judging by their tense but passive attitude, they had no guns, and they seemed to expect not a group rather like themselves but storm troopers from another world.

  Molly suddenly realized that from the perspective of the five among the candles, she and Neil, and their two charges, were embraced by darkness, their true nature indiscernible. Consequently, as she proceeded along the center aisle, she called out a friendly greeting, identifying herself and her husband.

  The five remained silent and still, and stiff with tension. Perhaps their experiences of the night just past had led them to expect deception; their response would depend on the evidence of their own eyes.

  The candles, though numerous, did nothing to relieve the gloom in the congregational section of the nave. Likewise, the dim purple daylight at the stained-glass windows failed to unravel a single thread of the tightly woven shadows.

  As she followed Virgil along the aisle, Molly heard a low voice murmuring what might have been an Our Father, and a second voice even more softly reciting what sounded like the Hail-Mary rhythms of the Rosary.

  She realized that others had taken refuge in St. Perpetua’s, turning to God in this crisis as she had once expected more of the townspeople might have done. These faithful sat sing
ly and in pairs, sat quietly here and there among the pews, humble shapes in the darkness.

  She didn’t disturb their prayers and meditations by picking them out with her flashlight, but respected the privacy of their worship and their penance.

  As she reached the crossing, that open area between the front row of pews and the chancel railing, a tremor passed underfoot, accompanied by the creak and pop of tongue stressing against groove in the oak planks.

  She swept the well-waxed floor around her with the light. A couple of buckled boards, lifting slightly from the subflooring, suggested pressure from below.

  Virgil sniffed at them only in passing, making a wide berth around the deformed planks.

  The church had a basement. Down there among the supplies and the stored-away holiday decorations, between the furnace and the water heater, perhaps some beast with no Christian purpose had taken up residence.

  Every candle in the red glasses on the votive rack was alight. Others, from a box of spares, had been set on the chancel railing and around the base of a life-size statue of the Holy Mother just inside the sanctuary.

  In the ruby, gold, and fluctuant radiance, Molly saw that the three children shared freckles, green eyes, and a certain cast of features that identified them as siblings.

  The face of the youngest—an auburn-haired girl of perhaps five—glistened with steady, quiet tears. Abby at once took her hand and stood with her, perhaps because they knew each other, or just because she realized that she could lend some courage to the younger girl.

  The other children were boys, a pair of identical twins, eight or nine years old. Instead of their sister’s auburn locks, they had dark hair, almost black. While they looked scared, they also appeared to be both tense and restless with that healthy rebellious energy that from time to time animates the best of boys. They wanted to do something, take action, even as they recognized that the resolution of their current hated situation was beyond their power.

  Neither of the men with the children appeared to be related to them.

  The first, tall and thin, had a prominent Adam’s apple, and a sharp nose. While he chewed on his lower lip almost vigorously enough to draw blood, his hopping-hen eyes pecked nervously at Molly, then at Neil, then at the kids, then at the worshipers in the pews, then toward the dark altar.

  The other was shorter, heavy, literally wringing his pudgy hands with anxiety, and earnestly apologetic. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, but there was no other way.”

  “Sorry about what?” Neil asked.

  “We don’t have guns,” the heavy man said. “We hoped you would—and you do. But now I’m wondering—how could guns make a difference?”

  “I’m not good at riddles,” Neil said.

  “We could have warned you off, but then what would happen to us? So we let you walk into a trap. I’m so sorry.”

  Another tremor passed through the floor. The ruby-glass candle holders clinked against the metal votive rack. The flames quivered on the wicks, licked higher, bright tongues in silent screams.

  38

  WHATEVER RESTLESS PRESENCE STIRRED IN the church basement, the heavyset man, like his tall companion, appeared to be less interested in the threat under their feet than in the dark chancel behind them and the worshipers in the pews before them. His nervous stare roved from one knot of shadows to another.

  “Can you get us out of here?” the tall man asked, as though he had forgotten the location of the doors.

  Behind her, Molly heard movement from various points in the church, as if those in the pews had risen in unison, in response to an invitation to Communion.

  Turning, she recalled the hand in the holy-water font. Because of the shock of that repulsive contact, she had blanked on a crucial detail, which no longer eluded her. The severed grotesquery had not been that of a man dismembered in the current conflict, for it had been bloated, discolored, pocked with corruption.

  The hand had belonged to a man dead and buried for some time. Preserved by the embalmer’s art, it had only gradually succumbed to the process of decay, but it had not weathered the grave unblemished.

  One by one, her flashlight picked out ten figures standing among the pews: these sham worshipers, these soulless worm-riddled hulks, in their rotting funeral suits and dresses. Blind behind their sewn-shut eyelids. Deaf to truth, incapable of hope. Resurrected in only a physical sense—and perhaps in a spirit of mockery. Mockery. Travesty. Desecration, profanation.

  Here again was that unearthly power that did not differentiate between the living and the dead, or even between the organic and the inorganic. It seemed that Earth was being taken and remade not by ETs from another spiral arm of the Milky Way or from another galaxy, but by beings from another universe, where all the laws of nature were radically different from those in this one.

  Humanity’s reality, which operated on Einsteinian laws, and the utterly different reality of humanity’s dispossessors had collided, meshed. At this Einstein intersection, all things seemed possible now in this worst of all possible new worlds.

  In rising to their feet, the dead stirred within themselves the gases of decomposition. What had seemed to be the reek of the white fungus grew more pungent and could be identified more accurately.