The Taking

  Behind them, church windows burst from the heat. Showers of bright glass rained down and puddled into darker mosaics on the wet lawn.

  Like cloud-fluttered moonglow in a dream rich with psychosis, orange firelight rippled across the rain-soaked lawn, over the loathsome bulbous fungus that now seemed obscene in its slimy tumescence.

  She remembered her certainty, at first sight of the larger specimen in the narthex, that it was malignant, if not malevolent. And aware.

  Drunk or not, Derek Sawtelle had gotten to the heart of the matter when he had said that on the world from which these invaders came, perhaps the differences between plant and animal life were not as clearly defined as on Earth. Consequently, predators might not be easily recognized in all instances.

  The creature didn’t deviate from its original line of direction, didn’t start toward them, but marched steadily southward. It crossed their path and kept going.

  As it began to move away, a sound so unexpected and disturbing issued from it that Molly felt her reason wobble like a spinning coin losing momentum. This thing, this pale atrocity, let out a sound that was too much like a grief-stricken woman weeping quietly, quietly but in the most poignant misery.

  For an instant she tried to deny the source of the lamentations, and scanned the nearby night for a human figure to match the voice. She could see no one.

  The eight-legged abomination was indeed the mourner, although the quality of its cry was most likely natural to it and not mimicry, a similarity explained sheerly by chance.

  To hear it as grief or misery was no doubt to misunderstand it. The cry of a loon pealing across the stillness of a lake on a summer night will sound lonely to the human ear even if loneliness is not the state of mind that the loon intends to express.

  Nevertheless, to hear such pitiable human sounds issuing from a creature so alien and repulsive in every regard was profoundly disquieting, chilling.

  The thing fell silent—but a moment later, from between or behind the houses across the street, came a faint answering pule.

  Another of its kind was out there in the purple morning, and the monstrous crier halted, as if listening to this response.

  A second reply rose from a different direction, also faint—but this one was of a deeper timbre and sounded less like a weeping woman than like a weeping man.

  When those other voices fell silent, the abomination moved once more, continuing on its original course.

  Surreal. Unreal. Too real.

  “Look,” Neil said, pointing north.

  Another luminosity, like the one that had hovered over them on La Cresta Avenue, appeared in the dense fog layer, traveling soundlessly across the town from the northeast to the southwest.

  “And there.”

  A second glowing craft brightened out of the west and proceeded eastward on a serpentine course.

  Behind the secreting overcast, the masters of the morning sky were attending to the business of conquest.

  PART SIX

  “But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.”

  —T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land

  43

  EN ROUTE FROM ST. PERPETUA’S TO THE TAIL of the Wolf Tavern, Johnny and Abby stayed close to Neil, while Virgil trotted behind them, alert to the possibility of attack from the rear or from either flank. The dog seemed to understand that for the moment his primary duty was to guard rather than to lead.

  At the front of their small column, traveling with the twins and their sister, Molly learned that the boys were Eric and Elric Crudup, born on New Year’s Day ten years ago this coming January. They had been named after Viking heroes, although neither of their parents could claim a single Scandinavian ancestor.

  “Our mom and dad like aquavit and Elephant beer,” said Eric. “They chase one with the other.”

  “Aquavit and Elephant beer are made in Scandinavia,” Elric explained.

  Their sister—more Scandinavian-looking with her lighter locks than her brothers were with their dark hair—went by her middle name, Bethany, because her first name was Grendel.

  Her mother and father had named her Grendel because they knew it to be Scandinavian. The girl was almost four years old before her parents discovered that Grendel was the name of the monster slain by Beowulf. Their knowledge of Scandinavian myth and English literature had not been as complete as their appreciation for Scandinavia’s finest alcoholic beverages.

  Neither of the two men who perished in the church had been related to the Crudup siblings. The heavyset man, whom they’d known—but not well—as Mr. Fos-burke, had taught sixth grade at their elementary school. The tall man had been a stranger to them.

  Eric, Elric, and Bethany believed their parents were alive, although they—and the maternal grandmother who lived with them—had “gone through the ceiling,” during the night, leaving the children to defend themselves.

  Later, when the power went off, the three kids had become too frightened to remain at home. They had fled two blocks through the rain to the protection of the church. Where evil found them.

  …gone through the ceiling…

  Under the sea of purple fog, in this dim mortuary light of the drowned sun, with the trolls and menaces of another world set loose in unknowable numbers and forms, Molly had to remain alert to every shadow, which might be simply a shadow or instead a mortal threat. On the move and in a hurry, she couldn’t concentrate on conversation intently enough to finesse from Eric, Elric, and Bethany a coherent explanation of exactly what they meant by “gone through the ceiling.”

  The children hurried with her, eager to share what they had witnessed.

  “Just floated up out of the family room,” said six-year-old Bethany, who seemed to have rebounded with remarkable resilience from the trauma of having dangled, baitlike, above the basement lair of the insectile horror.

  Elric said, “Floated like astronauts with no gravity.”

  “We ran upstairs,” Eric said.

  “And we found them in our folks’ bedroom, but they kept going up,” said Elric.

  Bethany said, “I was scared.”

  “We all were,” said the twins simultaneously.

  “Not Grandma. She wasn’t scared.”

  “She went crazy,” Eric declared.

  Bethany took offense. “She did not.”

  “Fully, totally nut-ball,” Eric insisted. “Laughing. I heard her laughing.”

  From a nearby backyard or alleyway came the weeping of a woman, which might have arisen in fact from a grieving mother or a desolate widow, but Molly wouldn’t have bet on either.

  In normal times, she would have gone at once to investigate these lamentations, to offer assistance, consolation. Now she dared spend her compassion only on the children. These cries of anguish and woe were a lure, and her pity would be repaid with a hook, a gaff, a gutting.

  She walked faster, thinking of Cassie at the tavern, in the care of the drunk and the self-deluded, and the Crudup children matched her pace.

  “Anyway, whether Grandma went crazy or not, that was later,” said Elric. “First we ran upstairs and saw how they came through the floor from the family room.”

  Eric said, “And then they floated right up through the bedroom ceiling, too.”

  “They grabbed at us,” said Bethany, “like maybe we could weigh them down, but we were scared, and anyway they couldn’t hold us.”

  “They could never hold on to us or anything.” Eric sounded angry about offenses committed long before the taking of the Earth had begun.

  “When it happened again later,” Elric remembered, “I tried to hold Grandma by the foot.”

  Bethany said, “And I held Elric ’cause I was afraid he’d go right up with her.”

  Bewildered by this tale, which on any other night would have sounded like a report of a nightmare or a hallucination and might have been easily dismissed, Molly said, “What do you mean through the ceiling?”

  “Thr
ough,” said Eric. “Like the ceiling wasn’t solid at all, just a dream of a ceiling.”

  Elric said, “Like when a magician puts his assistant in a box and saws her in half, and the blade goes right through her legs but she isn’t hurt and the blade isn’t bent.”

  “We thought we would float up, too, since they did,” Bethany recalled, “but we didn’t.”

  Eric said, “We climbed the pull-down ladder into the attic, and they were screaming up there.”

  “Not Grandma,” Bethany reminded him.

  “No. She was getting ready to go crazy later.”

  “Not true.”

  “Is true.”

  “Anyway,” Elric continued, “they were screaming and trying to hold on to things, like the attic rafters.”

  Eric said, “Screaming at me and Elric, ‘You little bastards, do something.’”

  “They used lots of words, all worse than ‘bastards,’” Bethany said. “But we agreed months ago never to talk like they do.”

  “We would’ve done something,” Eric said, “but there wasn’t anything we could do, and they couldn’t hold, so they went right through the roof.”

  They turned the corner into a street where half the trees were festooned with gray moss, like a scene from the swamps of Louisiana or from the mind of Poe on opium. The gnarled trunks were embossed with luminous lichen and deformed by growths that Molly had not seen before, ringworm forms the size of ashcan lids, fat and festering under the bark.

  “We couldn’t get onto the roof,” Elric told Molly, “we couldn’t see what happened after that.”

  “But we could hear them out there,” Bethany said solemnly.

  “Screaming,” Eric said, “out there in the rain above the house.”

  “We were scared.”

  “Real scared.”

  “So pretty quick their voices faded in the rain,” Eric said.

  “They were beamed up,” Bethany explained.

  “To the mother ship,” the twins said in unison, shaped by the enduring age of techno-fantasy that their parents and grandparents had bequeathed them.

  “Mother ship. That’s what we think,” their sister agreed. “So they’ll be back. People who get beamed up sooner or later get beamed down again, but sometimes in other places.”

  Even in the middle of the street, they had to pass under the spreading boughs of the infected trees. Molly almost turned back, but they were on the last leg of the shortest route to the tavern.

  In the windless stillness, Molly thought she heard furtive noises overhead. Squinting up into the fretwork of branches, which at fifteen feet vanished in the purple fog, she could not see much, for where the limbs were not leafed or hung with moss, they were leafed and hung with moss.

  The kids, creeped out as well, resorted to more chatter to talk themselves through this haunted woods.

  “When we went up into the attic, after Grandma,” Elric told Molly, “this thing was there, though we didn’t see it at first.”

  “We smelled it though, right away,” said Eric.

  Bethany said, “It smelled like rotten eggs and burnt matches.”

  “It smelled like shit,” Elric said bluntly.

  “Poop,” Bethany corrected, clearly disapproving of his use of the vulgarity. “Rotten eggs, burnt matches, and poop.”

  Through the piercings in the woody fretwork above them, against the purple backglow of the luminous overcast, Molly saw quick and fluid movement. She glimpsed too little to judge the form or size of whatever tracked them from branch to branch.

  “We didn’t see the thing until Grandma was gone through the roof,” said Elric.

  “And then we didn’t exactly see it,” Bethany recalled.

  “The power hadn’t gone off yet,” Eric said, “so there was a light in the attic.”

  Elric remembered: “But when you looked at the thing straight on, you couldn’t see any details, only this shape.”

  “And it kept changing shape,” said Bethany.

  “You could see it clearest like from the corner of your eye,” said Eric. “It was between us and the attic trapdoor, and it was coming toward us.”

  “Then we were way scared,” said Bethany.

  “Shitless,” said Elric, but he at once apologized to his sister, although perhaps not with complete sincerity. “Sorry, Grendel.”

  “Dork,” said the girl.

  “Geek.”

  “Walking fart,” she countered.

  The longer they proceeded beneath the canopy of branches, the more movement that Molly detected above them, although it remained stealthy. She suspected that they were accompanied by many arboreal presences, not just a single creature.

  When she glanced back at Neil, Abby, Johnny, and Virgil, she saw that they, too, were aware of the secretive travelers in the trees.

  Neil held the shotgun in both hands, in a semi-relaxed grip, the muzzle pointed upward as he walked, ready to swivel left or right and fire into the branches at the first provocation. This lovely man had passed thirty-two years in gentle pursuits—scholar, shepherd, cabinetmaker—but this night he’d proved to be a courageous protector in a pinch.

  “The thing in the attic,” Elric said, “might’ve got us if she hadn’t made it back off.”

  “Would’ve gotten us for sure,” said Bethany.

  “She just sort of shimmered out of thin air. She was like that guy in that old movie, that Star Wars guy,” Eric said, “but she wasn’t a guy, and she didn’t have a light sword—or any sword.”

  Immediately ahead of Molly, though not stirred by a breeze, leaves spoke to leaves, moss trembled at this conversation, and a hand of one of their stalkers appeared, only the hand, gripping a branch for perch, for balance.

  “Obi-Wan Kenobi,” Elric said.

  “That’s the guy,” Bethany agreed. “An old guy.”

  The revealed hand was approximately the size of one of Molly’s, perhaps with an extra digit, fiercely strong by the look of it, deep scarlet, scaly, reptilian.

  “She wasn’t old though,” said Eric.

  “Pretty old,” Bethany disagreed.

  “Not as old as the Star Wars guy.”

  “No, not that old.”

  Four knuckles per finger, endowed with black claws as pointed as rose thorns, the scarlet hand released the limb and vanished into foliage as the nimble creature proceeded ahead of them.

  Speaking of the menacing presence encountered in their attic, Elric said, “I don’t know how she made it stay away from us.”

  “She spelled it away,” Bethany replied.

  Molly wondered how something her size could move so swiftly from tree to tree, yet in near silence and with so little disturbance of the leaves and moss. And she wondered how many of them were swarming through the branches both below and above the dense fog.

  “She didn’t spell it away,” Eric said impatiently.

  “Magic words,” Bethany insisted. “‘The force be with you.’”

  Molly counseled herself to keep moving. Intuition told her that any hesitation would be interpreted as weakness and that any sign of weakness would invite attack.

  “That’s stupid,” Eric said. “She didn’t say ‘the force be with you’ or anything like that.”

  “Yeah, so what did she say?”

  They were just fifty feet from the next intersection. Ahead lay Main Street, with three generous lanes of pavement instead of two narrow ones; trees did not overhang the entire width of it, as they did here.

  “I don’t remember what she said,” Eric admitted.

  “Me neither,” his brother said.

  “She said something,” Bethany declared.

  Just three steps ahead of them, the scarlet hand or one like it appeared on another bareness of branch.

  Molly considered firing her pistol into the tree. Even if she hit the creature and killed it, however, this might be reckless. Instinct—which, with intuition, was all she had to go on—told her that firing a shot might invite instant v
icious assault by others in the wooden highways overhead.

  Simultaneous with the appearance of the hand, an appendage, at least four feet long, red mottled with green, more than an inch in diameter at the shank but dwindling to a tasseled and barbed whip at the end, perhaps a tail, slid out of the leaves, drooped down before them in a lazy arc—then snapped up, shearing moss, and out of sight.

  Bethany and her brothers had seen this sinuous display. They had been meant to see it. The exposed tail was intended to be a challenge and a prod to panic.

  The kids halted, clutching at one another for reassurance.

  “Keep moving,” Molly whispered, “but don’t run. Walk. Just like you were doing.”

  Fear made the children cautious, but a slow pace was better than a sprint, which might, as with a tiger, invite pursuit. They would not win a chase.

  They were thirty feet from the end of the canopy.

  As if all these terrors were a mad composition, systemized in meter, orchestrated, out of the bleak morning came again the weeping of a woman, answered by the more distant but nonetheless miserable weeping of a man, and also ahead of Molly and to her right, an iron manhole cover rattled in the blacktop, knocked upon from below by some restless entity, perhaps by the headless body of Ken Halleck.

  44

  HUMAN WEEPING OF INHUMAN SOURCE, RED reptiles as big as cougars in the trees, a headless dead man or something worse knocking on the manhole cover, knocking to be released from the storm drain: Mere anarchy had been set loose upon the world, a blood-dimmed tide that threatened to wash sanity up by the roots, tangle it like weeds, and sweep it away.

  Molly kept moving, although she doubted they would escape the canopy of trees. To her surprise, they reached the intersection with Main Street, where the only architecture overhead was the ceaselessly changing, frescoed purple vaults of fog on fog.

  Before she could indulge in even a timid hope, one of those silent luminous craft appeared again in the overcast, racing toward them out of the west, one second glimpsed, six fast heartbeats later hovering overhead. Shape without form. Light that did not reveal its source. Its awesome power was suggested by the absolute stillness of its levitation.

  As before, Molly felt physically scrutinized to a cellular level, every filament mapped in the rich braid of her emotions, every turning of her mind from its brightest to its darkest places explored in an instant and understood in finest detail. By analytic rays, by probing currents, by telepathic scans, by science and technology beyond the conception of the human mind, she was pored through, and known.

  In the previous encounter, she had felt naked, terrified, and ashamed. She felt all those things now, and in no less measure than before.

  The children appeared to be bedazzled, as might be expected, and afraid, as they should be, but she did not believe that any of them felt violated as