The Taking

  “I love my boy, my Bobby,” said Halleck’s head, “where is my Bobby?”

  Neil raised the shotgun, but Molly stayed him with a touch.

  “It isn’t Ken,” she said. “There’s no need to put him out of his misery. Ken’s dead and gone.”

  “I just want to stop the damn thing,” he said angrily. “Just shut it up.”

  “You won’t. It’ll take the blast and keep on talking. And that’ll be even worse.”

  Besides, she believed they should conserve their ammunition. Although a few rounds from a 12-gauge had not deterred whatever had come after Harry Corrigan in his house, there might be adversaries in the hours ahead that would be vulnerable to a well-placed punch of buckshot.

  Retreating, they couldn’t at once find Virgil in the murk. He barked softly, sought them out, and led them again on the right path.

  Before they had gone a dozen steps, a metallic rattle-and-clank challenged the muffling mastery of the mist. They approached the racket cautiously.

  This time the parting fog revealed a man in the street, near the curb, on his knees, in the lurid light of this strange dawn. He knelt at an opening to a storm drain, his back to them, hunched forward, attempting to pry the heavy steel grate out of its niche in the pavement.

  Although the rain had stopped, runoff still fed the gutters. Dirty water, thickened by a jetsam of leaves and litter, surged over his hands.

  A low growl from Virgil counseled caution again.

  Molly and Neil stopped, said nothing, waited for the man to sense their presence.

  His gibbous posture, the intensity of his focus, the curious nature of the task to which he was committed—these things brought to Molly’s mind disturbing fairy tales of hateful trolls indulging unholy hungers.

  With the hard scrape of metal on blacktop, the grate came loose. The troll slid it aside.

  He raised his head, but had no head. He looked over his shoulder at Molly and Neil, but even if he knew they were behind him, he could not see them, because he was Ichabod Crane’s nemesis, minus a horse.

  The knock-knock-knock of Molly’s heart might also have been the fist of madness rapping on the door of her mind.

  In this unearthly purplescent morning and sky-shrouding fog, where the laws of nature seemed to have dissolved entirely in some instances and to have been remade in others, Molly half expected that day would not follow dawn. Sunset might swiftly succeed sunrise, without the intervening hope of light, and the next night would then be endless, moonless, starless, and filled with the furtive sounds of a thousand creeping deaths.

  The urge to shoot the headless atrocity proved difficult for both Molly and Neil to resist, but if the guillotining blade had not convinced the thing that it was dead, a 9-mm round through the heart wouldn’t persuade it to lie down and expire.

  The decapitated body of Ken Halleck—manipulated by a parasite puppeteer or by some extraterrestrial power that, based on effect, might as well have been sheer sorcery—lowered itself through the open hole into the storm drain. It dropped out of sight, landing with a splash below.

  For an instant the night was still except for the gurgle from the gutters and the drip-drip-drip of sodden trees.

  Then Molly heard the sloshing and the hollow thumping of the headless wonder as it slogged through deep water, under the streets of Black Lake, with unimaginable intent. Perhaps it would find a ledge in the storm drain, lie down above the rushing torrents, and offer its flesh as the spore bed for a colony of fungi or another life form of more sinister purpose.

  PART FIVE

  “We are born with the dead: See, they return and bring us with them.”

  —T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

  33

  WAGLESS, ALL BUSINESS, AND AS QUICK AS THE fog allowed, Virgil led them to a residence on La Cresta Avenue, which was neither near the crest of the mountain nor an avenue, but halfway between the lake and the ridge line, a two-lane street not appreciably different from all the others in town.

  The single-story house, in the Craftsman style, looked cozy and welcoming, in spite of the fact that the fierce rain had stripped all the leaves from the trumpet vines that climbed its trellises and had battered beds of cyclamens into red-and purple-petaled ruin.

  As they approached the front porch along handsome flagstones, Neil suddenly stepped off the walkway, squished three steps across the soggy lawn, and said, “Look at this.”

  The object of his interest was a stone pine, and not the tree itself so much as what clustered on its fissured bark. Squinting in the bruised light, Molly saw patches of a blackish thallus, flecked with green, growing on the trunk in crustlike forms.

  She’d seen lichen similar to this, although no earthly lichen featured luminous elements to equal these. Every emerald-green fleck was softly radiant; the glow pulsed in what she suspected might be a sympathetic rhythm that matched the long, slow throbs of the engines powering the airborne leviathan that had only recently passed over them.

  Along the perimeter of every thallus, the aggressive lichen grew at a visible rate, outward in all directions, as if she were watching time-lapse photography. During the minute that she and Neil studied it, the crust advanced almost half an inch.

  At this rate, the trunk and every branch would be covered in this scaly scab in only a few hours.

  Lichen were themselves complex symbiotic organisms composed of a fungus in union with an alga. They frequently thrived without damage to the host tree.

  In this instance, Molly suspected that the stone pine would not survive the encrustation. Either it would perish and fall, hollowed out by a species of rot as alien as the organism colonizing its bark, or it would be invaded, mutated, and remade into the genetic image of a plant from another world.

  The radiant emerald pulse that stippled the blackish thallus had a jewel-bright gleam. In different circumstances, the tree might have appeared to be inlaid with a wealth of precious gems, glittering and magical.

  No aura of fairyland wonder surrounded the pine, however. Quite the opposite: In spite of its bejeweled aspect, and though the lichen infestation had only recently begun, the tree appeared cancer-ridden, mottled with malignancies.

  Virgil had not approached the pine, but had remained on the flagstone walkway, watchful and tense.

  Molly shared the dog’s wariness. She didn’t touch the lichen, fearing that it might transfer to her fingertip and prove able to colonize human skin as readily as it did tree bark.

  On the other side of the walkway stood a matching pine, and from a distance, even in this half-light, she could see the luminous lichen thriving on that specimen.

  Virgil led them up the porch steps to the front door.

  No candles, oil lamps, or other emergency lighting shone inside. The windows were dark except for dim reflections of the purple glow that suffused the lazily stirring mist.

  If they entered without knocking, they were inviting gunfire.

  On the other hand, if children inside were already in any kind of danger—from Michael Render or from something even less human—Molly and Neil might raise the level of jeopardy by announcing themselves.

  Their dilemma was resolved, in part, when the front-door lock clicked and disengaged.

  Reflexively, they stepped back and to the side, making less obvious targets of themselves.

  Virgil stood his ground.

  The door opened in a swift, inward sweep. Although only the influx of fog-filtered morning sunshine illuminated the small foyer, visibility was sufficient for Molly to discern that the space was deserted, as though they were being welcomed by a ghost.

  The hallway beyond the foyer remained as dark as a snake hole.

  To leave both of Neil’s hands free for the shotgun, Molly produced her flashlight.

  Stout-hearted, Virgil boldly entered in advance of the light.

  From the porch, with the flash, Molly probed past the foyer. A narrow hall table, two vases atop it. A door at the far end. She saw no immediate thr
eat.

  Although all of the dogs had exhibited extraordinary behavior this night, though Virgil in particular had astonished with the rose and with his apparent understanding of Molly’s mission, entering a stranger’s house, uninvited and unannounced, required nerve and full trust in the animal’s reliability. For a moment, she couldn’t summon either, and Neil hesitated, too.

  In response to their reluctance, Virgil turned his head and regarded them with a golden gaze. To Molly, this seemed not to be the usual eyeshine of animals in the dark, but a phenomenon unique to this night, not simple light refraction, not bioluminescence, but something of a wondrous character: nimbuses pooled in sockets, signifying sanctification.

  Almost as if enchanted, spell-struck and spell-caught, by the dog’s golden stare, Molly shed her reservations. Her mouth was dry with doubt, but she worked up spit, and spat. She stepped across the threshold, entered the house.

  Neil followed her, and when they both stood in the foyer, the front door closed behind them with a softness more disturbing than a slam. No draft had pulled it shut.

  Fear abided with Molly, and fed on itself, and grew, but she did not turn back to wrench open the door. She knew that it wanted her to flee—whatever it might be. If she retreated, she would choose the moment of retreat and would not allow it to be chosen for her.

  Virgil sniffed at closed doors and open archways to the left and right of the central hall.

  The dog had no suspicion of the foyer closet. Molly opened that door anyway, and Neil probed the hanging coats with the barrel of the shotgun.

  Although Virgil showed no interest in the study, where the drapes were drawn and the blackness was absolute, Molly scanned that chamber with the flashlight. Shadows stretched and flexed, but they were merely the shadows of furniture, granted movement by the moving beam.

  At the living-room archway, the shepherd made a thin sound of canine anxiety.

  Amethystine light, from the dusky morning, pressed against the mullioned windows, revealing nothing, but Molly knew what troubled the dog, for she heard it, too: a whispery sound, a rustle and susurration.

  The flashlight winked and flared off the glass in picture frames. Off ceramic lamps. Off a vase, a cut-crystal bowl, a mirror above the fireplace. Off a dead TV screen.

  With the 12-gauge, Neil followed the beam, but he found nothing to shoot.

  The rustling grew louder and seemed to come from all sides.

  Ears pricked, tail lowered, the dog turned in a circle.

  “The walls,” Neil said, and with the flashlight, Molly found him with one ear to the plaster.

  She and Neil flanked the archway, and she moved to the wall on her side of that opening. She leaned close, closer.

  To a more analytic ear, the sound was not a rustle, exactly, but a fluttering, thrumming, as if a flock of birds or a horde of flying insects were frenziedly beating wings against the back side of the lath and plaster.

  34

  NOW IN THE WALLS OF THE HALLWAY AND, ON further exploration, in the walls of the dining room, and perhaps in the ceiling as well, the numberless wings, whether feathered or membranous, beat against confinement and against one another.

  Molly angled the flashlight at grille-covered heating vents high in the walls, but nothing fluttered at the slots between the louvers, trying to get out. The unknown horde had not yet migrated from the walls into the ductwork of the heating system.

  This was not a house anymore, but an incubator, a nidus for something more repellent and certainly more dangerous than spiders or cockroaches. She did not want to be in this house when the agitated legions found a way out of their wood-and-plaster prison.

  Stalwart Virgil, spooked by the denizens of the walls but not inclined to bolt, led Molly and Neil to the end of the hall. A closed door opened, as had the one at the front of the house, under the influence of an invisible hand.

  A kitchen lay beyond, barely brightened by the purple morning. With pistol and flashlight, Molly followed the dog through the doorway, even more cautious than she had been when entering the house—but then rushed forward, with Neil close at her heels, when she heard the fearful cries of children.

  A boy of nine or ten stood by the kitchen table. Virgil had startled him, and he held a broom as if he were at home plate, ready to take a swing. He had only this pathetic weapon to do battle with what might swarm from the walls—beetles or bats, or beasts from the far end of the galaxy.

  On the table sat a girl of about six, her legs drawn under her, as though she were afraid that jittering multitudes would suddenly surge out of cracks in the baseboard and across the floor. Thirty inches of altitude amounted to the only safety that she could find.

  “Who’re you?” the boy demanded, trying to sound strong, but unable to keep his voice from cracking.

  “I’m Molly. This is Neil. We—”

  “What are you?” he demanded, for he knew all the movies, too, and suspected body snatchers, parasites.

  “We’re just what we seem to be,” Neil said. “We live north of town, off the ridge road.”

  “We knew you were in trouble,” Molly said. “We’ve come to help you.”

  “How?” the boy asked suspiciously. “How could you know?”

  “The dog,” she said. “He led us here.”

  “We knew there would be kids alone, in trouble. Virgil is finding them for us,” Neil explained. “We don’t know why. We don’t know how.”

  Perhaps the directness of their answers helped reassure the boy. Or maybe he was convinced solely by Virgil’s new demeanor: the friendly cock of the shepherd’s furry head, his panting tongue, his swishing tail.

  As the boy lowered the broom, taking a less defensive posture, Molly asked him, “What’s your name?”

  “Johnny. This is Abby. She’s my sister. I’m not going to let anything bad happen to her.”

  “Nothing bad’s going to happen to either of you,” Molly assured him, and wished she felt confident that she and Neil would be able to fulfill this guarantee.

  Abby’s eyes were a dazzling blue like Johnny’s, and every bit as haunted as her brother’s.

  To counter what her own eyes might reveal, Molly forced a smile, realized that it must look ghastly, and let it fade.

  “Where are your parents?” Neil asked.

  “The old man was wasted,” Johnny said with a grimace of disgust. “Tequila and pills, like usual. Before the TV went out, he pissed himself watching the news and didn’t even know it. He was talking crazy about making a fortress, went into the garage to get tools, nails, I don’t know what.”

  “We heard what happened to him,” Abby said softly. “We heard him scream.” She anxiously surveyed the room, the ceiling. “The things in the walls got him.”

  As if the teeming hosts behind the plaster understood the girl’s words, they thrashed with greater fury. Entomologic. Polymorphic. Pandemoniac.

  “No,” Johnny disagreed. “Something else must’ve got hold of him, something bigger than whatever’s in the walls.”

  “He screamed and screamed.” Abby’s eyes widened at the memory, and she crossed her arms on her chest as if those frail limbs might serve as armor.

  “Whatever got him,” the boy said, “screeched and snarled like a cougar, but it wasn’t any cougar. We could hear it real good. The door was open between here and the garage.”

  That door was currently closed.

  “Then it shrieked like nothing I ever heard,” Johnny continued, “and it made this sound…something like a laugh…and there were…eating noises.”

  The boy shuddered at the memory, and the girl said, “They’re gonna eat us alive.”

  Resting the flashlight on a counter, still holding the pistol, Molly went to Abby, drew her to the edge of the table, and put an arm around her. “We’re taking you out of here, sweetheart.”

  “Where’s your mother?” Neil asked.

  “Left us two years ago,” the boy explained.

  His voice broke more ra
ggedly than before, as though abandonment by his mother still shook him more deeply, two years after the fact, than did any extraterrestrial horrors that they had encountered here in the past few hours.

  Johnny bit hard on his lower lip to repress this emotion, then turned to Molly: “Me and Abby, we tried to leave a couple times. The doors won’t open.”

  “They opened for us,” Neil assured him.

  Shaking his head, the boy said, “Maybe coming in. But going out?”

  He snatched a small pot from the cooktop and flung it hard at one of the kitchen windows. It struck the glass with a solid crack and a reverberant clang, but bounced off, leaving the pane intact.

  “Something weird’s happening to the house,” the boy said. “It’s changing. It’s like…almost alive.”

  35

  OUT OF THE KITCHEN, ALONG THE HALL, TO the foyer, they were accompanied by a rising chorus of frenzied fluttering within the walls, a rustle, a bustle, an urgent quickening, as if the horde sensed that its tender prey were escaping.

  “They talk,” Abby confided to Molly as they hurried out of the kitchen, behind Virgil.

  “Who, sweetheart?”

  “The walls. Don’t they, Johnny? Don’t they talk?”

  “Sometimes you can hear voices,” the boy confirmed as they arrived at the foyer closet.

  In the event that the storm resumed, the nearest thing to rain gear that the kids had were nylon jackets with warm lining.

  As Abby and her brother shrugged into their coats, Molly said, “You don’t mean—voices in English.”

  “Sometimes English,” Johnny confirmed. “But sometimes another language. I don’t know what it is.”

  Throughout the house arose a subtle creaking from floorboards, wall studs, ceiling joists. The structure sounded like a ship at sea, riding out the steep swells of a storm fringe.

  Virgil, thus far not given to barking, barked. Just once. As if to say, Let’s go!

  The creaking house abruptly creaked louder and with a greater number of complaints from floors, ceilings, doorjambs, window frames, walls. The bone-rattle of plumbing. The wheeze and whistle of hot breath in torquing ducts. Suddenly the place groaned like a tired old behemoth waking from the sleep of ages.

  When Neil tried the front door, it seemed to be locked.

  “I knew,” the boy said, and the girl clung desperately to Molly.

  Neil worked the deadbolt, wrenched at the door with all his strength, but it resisted him.

  Surrounded by groans and creaks and cracks and pops, Molly half believed that the house might close around them like a pair of jaws, grinding their bodies between the splintery teeth of its broken beams, tasting them upon its tongue of floors, pressing them against its palate of ceilings, finally swallowing their masticated remains into a basement, where the rustling legions would swarm over them, reducing flesh to fluid and bones to powder.

  Neil stepped away from the door. “Move, get back,” he ordered, and raised his shotgun, intending to blast loose the recalcitrant lock.

  Virgil padded into the line of fire and pawed at the door—which swung inward.

  Molly didn’t pause to puzzle over whether Neil, always as steady as a ship at anchor, had lost his cool for a moment and had turned the knob in the wrong direction, fighting with an unlocked door, or whether instead the dog possessed major mojo beyond anything they had heretofore witnessed. Holding Abby against her side, she followed Virgil and Johnny out of the house, onto the porch, down