The Taking

  The extreme alien aspect of these creatures caused even the peace lovers to panic. Some had tried to flee, but the ETs had halted them simply by pointing, not with a weapon or instrument but with a hand. Likewise, a mere pointing at once silenced those who screamed and caused those with weapons to drop them without firing a shot.

  To Molly, this suggested telepathic control—another reason to wonder if the taking of the world could be resisted to any significant extent.

  The three ETs had then moved among the people, “taking their faces.” What this meant, Molly could not adequately ascertain.

  At first, according to Cassie, there was just “smooth” where each person’s face had been, and the face that had been removed was “alive in the thing’s hand.”

  Subsequently, for a moment, an alien face—like those of the three who had risen through the floor—formed out of the smoothness where the stolen countenance had been. Then it faded, and the original face, the human face, returned.

  This had suggested to Cassie that alien masters had been installed inside these people, but that was definitely movie thinking and might not be the correct explanation.

  The girl had not witnessed all of those in the tavern being subjected to this process, because in fear she’d fled to the women’s lav, with the dogs accompanying her. She hadn’t been willing to risk leaving by the front door, because to get there, she would have been forced to pass too close to the ETs.

  Here in the lavatory, Cassie had waited, expecting one of the things to seek her out and to take her face.

  Molly wasn’t able to sift any useful hard facts from the girl’s bizarre account, but she inferred from it that Cassie had been spared neither by accident nor by oversight. The ETs intentionally allowed her to escape. When she’d run, they could have halted her as they had halted any adults who tried to flee.

  Abby and Johnny, trapped in a house that was “changing…almost alive,” had not been attacked either by the beast that slaughtered their drunken father in the garage or by the agitated multitudes whispering in the walls.

  Eric, Elric, and Bethany had not been “floated” through the ceiling and into the storm with their parents and grandmother. And in the attic, they’d been rescued from the amorphous predator visible only in peripheral vision, the thing that smelled of “burnt matches, rotten eggs, and poop.”

  In the church, although Bethany had a close call, all five of the children had been saved from certain death—and perhaps not entirely because of actions that Molly and Neil had taken.

  The inference that Cassie had intentionally been spared led to the further inference that at this point in the taking of the world, the war plan called for the ruthless extermination of most human beings above a certain age—but specified the preservation of the children.

  At first this seemed baffling if not inexplicable, but then in the mare’s-nest of surreal events, among the tangle of dark wonders and impossibilities that defined the past twelve hours, Molly found and followed a thread of logic leading inexorably to a suspicion that chilled her.

  One by one, she met the eyes of each of the three dogs. Mutt, mutt, retriever: They regarded her forthrightly, expectantly, tails wagging tentatively.

  She scanned the floor, walls, ceiling.

  If her thoughts had been read, her suspicion known, she expected that something would enter the lavatory through one solid surface or another, take her face, and then her life.

  Here at the still point of the turning world, she waited to die—and didn’t.

  “Come on, sweetie,” she said to Cassie, “let’s get out of here.”

  51

  THE OVERCAST REMAINED LOW, DENSE, PURPLE. The livid half-light might henceforth be a permanent condition of the daytime, from dawn to dusk.

  Elsewhere in the dying town, the weeping of a woman was answered by the weeping of a man, which was answered by the weeping of another woman, each of the three expressing her or his misery in precisely the same series of wretched sobs and wails. The crawling white fungi seemed to be ceaselessly exploring or perhaps seeding new colonies where they found ideal conditions.

  Outside the tavern, after turning Cassie over to Neil’s care and giving him a hug, Molly took the three Crudup kids aside to revisit the story they had told her during the journey from St. Perpetua’s to the Tail of the Wolf. Fresh from her experience with Angie in the tavern receiving room, and with Cassie’s account to consider, she should be able to make more sense of Eric, Elric, and Bethany’s tale.

  Their mother and father had floated up from the family-room floor as if suddenly exempted from gravity. The couple had passed through the ceiling, then through the ceiling of the second-floor bedroom above, and finally through the roof, out of the house. As astonished and amazed as they were terrified, the kids had dashed up the stairs and then scrambled up the attic ladder, following their parents from level to level.

  This had occurred during one of the leviathan’s transits over the town, when its hovering weight oppressed and when the silent throbbing of its engines could be felt in the bones. Therefore, the kids had reached the conclusion that their parents had been beamed aboard the mother ship.

  Their grandmother, of whom the children spoke with an affection that didn’t characterize any mention of their parents, reacted with horror to the extraordinary ascent of her daughter and son-in-law. She had not been comforted by her grandchildren’s assurances—based on movies and TV shows—that those who were beamed aboard an alien ship were always beamed down again, even if after rude examinations and sometimes painful experiments.

  Less than an hour later, when the grandmother abruptly floated off the floor toward the family-room ceiling, she had not let out a scream, as might have been expected, but only a small cry of surprise as her feet left the carpet. Looking down on her grandchildren, she astonished them by smiling, and she waved before she passed through the ceiling.

  By the time the kids caught up with her on the second floor, she was laughing. And in the attic, before she vanished through the roof, she said, “Don’t worry about Gramma, darlings. I don’t feel the arthritis at all.”

  Now Eric continued to insist that their grandmother had gone “nuttier than a can of Planters,” a contention that angered Bethany no less than it had earlier. Elric remained neutral on the issue.

  Because of Molly’s troubling suspicion, formed while she had listened to Cassie in the tavern, she was especially interested in the post-grandmother part of this story, when the Crudup children had been alone in the house.

  The sickening odor of the hostile presence had made them gag when they had clambered into the attic for the second time. Bethany cupped her hands over her nose and mouth, trying to filter out the worst of the stench, but the twins, being named for Scandinavian heroes, breathed through their mouths and endured.

  They hadn’t identified the source of the stink until their grandmother had passed through the roof, whereupon they spotted a creature that was more easily seen from the corner of the eye than when you looked directly at it, that was more shape than detail, that kept changing shape, that stood between them and the only exit from the attic.

  “It wanted us,” said Bethany.

  Of that, none of the three children had the slightest doubt.

  It would have gotten them, too, they agreed, if not for the woman who looked like Obi-Wan Kenobi.

  What they meant was not that the woman physically resembled Sir Alec Guinness (in fact, she was pretty), not that she might have been as ancient as Obi-Wan (old, they agreed, but perhaps only a few years older than Molly), not that she had been dressed in a hooded robe of extragalactic style (they couldn’t remember what she wore), but that she’d been a little bit translucent as they remembered Obi-Wan having been when, after his death, he sometimes visited Luke Skywalker to offer guidance.

  The kids were not able to agree by what means the woman had made the beast retreat—words of enchantment, a magic ring, elaborate hand mojo that gestured it into subm
ission, the sheer force of her personality—but they did agree that she banished it to a far end of the attic, away from the trapdoor, which had been the only exit. They fled that high chamber and never looked back either at the reeking thing of many shapes or at the apparition that had saved them.

  “She kinda looked like you,” Bethany told Molly.

  “No, she didn’t,” said Eric.

  “Well,” Elric said, “I sorta think she did.”

  “Kinda like you,” Bethany insisted.

  Eric studied Molly’s face. “Yeah, maybe she did.”

  Molly had no idea what to make of this development, whether to make anything at all of it.

  More important, in walking these children through their story again, she had found support for the terrible suspicion that had overcome her in the tavern.

  She surveyed the surrounding town. In the west, one of those luminous craft, disc or sphere, streaked north to south through the fog layer, and at ground level its passing light made the shadows of houses and trees appear to quicken after it like a horde of malevolent spirits drawn by a Piper playing a tune beyond human hearing.

  The ETs, these new masters of a remade Earth, were indifferent to suffering and were capable of cruelties that exceeded in every instance the wickedest acts of humanity, which was frequently a cruel species in its own right. Yet they were allowing—perhaps ensuring—the survival of most if not all of the children.

  These destroyers of civilizations were without mercy. If most or all of the children were intentionally being spared, surely their reprieve would be temporary. The ETs must have some special use for them.

  52

  “WHAT SPECIAL USE?” NEIL ASKED.

  “Don’t know, can’t even guess,” Molly said.

  They stood in the middle of the street, apart from the six children and the four dogs, speaking softly, looking not at each other but at the surrounding buildings and trees.

  For the immediate future and probably for the rest of their lives, which might be one and the same, they would be on sentry duty no matter what other tasks they were engaged upon. When they grew weary, they would have to take turns sleeping.

  Maybe the ETs wanted the kids to survive for the time being, and maybe Molly and Neil, as guardians of the children, were not on the extermination list, at least for the moment, but they couldn’t trust that she had made the correct inferences from recent events. Their best hope was diligence, if they had any hope at all.

  A grim analogy occurred to her. “We’re harvestmen.”

  “We’re what?” Neil asked.

  “The children are the crop. We’ve been sent into the fields to harvest them.”

  She could see that this idea was a spider that crawled his nerves, perhaps because it rang as true as penitential bells.

  “We are who we are, doing what we want to do,” he said by way of weak denial.

  “Which makes us useful to the bastards,” she suggested. “But whatever fate the kids are being harvested for, we damn sure aren’t going to deliver them to it.”

  Considering the imbalance of power between them and the aliens, this oath sounded like bravado and felt like ashes in her mouth, but she meant to die, if necessary, in the fulfillment of it.

  “Don’t trust the dogs,” she warned him.

  Neil studied the four canines that, alert for danger, slowly circled the children. “They’re devoted to the kids.”

  “Loyal, courageous,” she agreed, “as dogs nearly always are. But these aren’t ordinary animals.”

  “We know that much from their behavior,” he agreed.

  “They’re dogs but something more than dogs. At first it seemed magical, with Virgil and the rose and all. But it’s the ‘something more’ we can’t trust.”

  He met her eyes. “You all right?”

  She nodded. “It was ugly in the tavern.”

  “All dead?”

  “Or worse.”

  He said, “If it comes to that…”

  Trying to help him, she said, “Death, you mean.”

  “If it comes to that, you want me to give you extreme unction?”

  “Can you?”

  “I don’t hold the office anymore, but I still know the words, and believe them.” He smiled. “I think I’ll be cut some slack.”

  “All right,” she said. “Yes. I’d like it if you would. If it comes to that.”

  “Have you prepared yourself?”

  “Yeah. The first time one of those bright craft hovered over us, pretty much your classic flying saucer, you and me with Johnny and Abby in the street. I expected death rays like something from The War of the Worlds.”

  “In the movie,” he said, “both Gene Barry and Ann Robinson survived.”

  “Earth’s bacteria killed off all the mighty Martians,” Molly recalled.

  She didn’t expect a Hollywood ending this time.

  Remembering how Neil, a film buff, had stood in front of the TV watching moments of favorite old movies for the last time, before they had left home, she knew that he would enjoy a question to test his knowledge.

  “Whatever happened to Gene Barry, anyway?” she asked. “Did he make any other movies?”

  “Several, including a really great one. Thunder Road with Robert Mitchum.”

  Leaving the kids to the care of the other three dogs, Virgil had come to Molly’s side. He chuffed with impatience.

  Stooping before the shepherd, scratching gently behind his ears, giving no indication that her trust of him was no longer complete, Molly said, “All right, boy. I know. Time to do the work.”

  At this, Virgil turned from her and padded away, hurrying south on Main Street.

  They set out again: Molly following Virgil, the six kids and the other three dogs close behind her, Neil guarding the back of the column.

  The wine-dark day, clammy between the sodden earth and the low overcast, said funeral, said cemetery.

  Black-and-gray bunting, shadows and moss, swagged the trees, and along the curb, parked vehicles seemed to be waiting to form a ceremonial procession as soon as the hearse appeared and led the way.

  The shops and houses rose like blank-walled mausoleums, lacking names and epitaphs, as if the dead had been forever forgotten as soon as they had been interred.

  The breathless day lay in throttled silence again. The mimicry of weeping women and sobbing men had ceased.

  No feathered omens of death—no ravens, owls, crows—dared the ominous sky. None sang or hooted in the trees, either, or hopped the wet yards in search of fat earthworms, or gathered to sit shivah on fences or on porch railings.

  Despite a lack of winged portents, Molly sensed that most of the people in Black Lake were dead. Not long ago, she had thought they might be found huddled in their fortress houses, armed with guns and knives and baseball bats, prepared to defend their families, but she knew better now.

  Those who had not been slaughtered had instead been taken and imprisoned to serve as subjects of experimentation or as objects of cruel play. Nothing lived in most of these houses anymore—unless otherworldly vermin crawled the damp rooms, unless unearthly plants rooted in cellars, in rich beds of decaying cadavers, spreading pale leaves and black blooms.

  Molly glanced back at the children and winced when she saw that they regarded her so hopefully, with such evident conviction that she could be relied upon. A few smiled thinly, and their pathetic confidence moved her. She looked forward again to prevent them from seeing the tears that she blinked away.

  Although she was prepared to die for them, she didn’t deserve their trust. In this worldwide holocaust, during which entire armies had perished before one soldier could fire one shot, she was acutely aware that she and Neil were inadequate to the task before them.

  A failed writer with a pistol, a failed priest with a shotgun. In their lives they had succeeded—truly and unequivocally succeeded—at only one thing: love. In their enduring and always growing love for each other, they had found redemption, peac
e.

  Their enemy, however, was impervious to the power of love. Judging by all available evidence, these invaders lacked even the capacity to grasp the concept.

  Virgil turned right at the corner, onto Marine Avenue, and when Molly followed him, she thought for an instant that the humid air and the peculiar light had conspired to play a trick, the equivalent of a mirage or Fata Morgana. It seemed that an enormous mirror filled the intersection a block to the west, reflecting Virgil and the procession that followed him.

  Then she realized that the dog leading the other procession was not Virgil, but an Irish setter. Two armed women, not one, were at the head of the column, and one armed man—shorter and older than Neil—brought up the end. In the middle were a dozen children and half a dozen dogs.

  The other group was proceeding north on the cross street. They paused, staring uphill at Molly. She couldn’t clearly see their faces in this poor light and at the distance of a block, but they must be astonished.

  She waved, and they returned the greeting.

  Their lead dog, the Irish setter, kept moving. After a brief hesitation, they decided to continue following it rather than turn onto Marine Avenue and come uphill to satisfy their curiosity. Their work was not finished.

  Besides, they recognized the task on which Molly and Neil were embarked, as she recognized theirs. The population of children in Black Lake was too large to be rescued by a single team. And if there were two teams, most likely there were three or more.

  This might have lifted Molly’s spirits if she had not come to suspect that they were not rescuers but harvesters.

  The other group moved out of sight on the cross street.

  Virgil led Molly toward a nearby Victorian house that was elegant in its dormers, gables, and gingerbread.

  She glanced at her wristwatch. Almost noon. Ten hours had passed since she’d first seen the luminous rain, the coyotes on the porch. She sensed that they were running out of time and that the final blow of this war, whatever it might be, would be struck soon.

  PART SEVEN

  “In my end is my beginning.”

  —T. S. Eliot, East Coker

  53

  DORMERS DECORATED WITH CARVED FLORAL-THEME pediments, a wealth of millwork applied with exuberance, primrose gardens surrounded by palisades of wrought iron, fluted porch columns with Italianate capitals, a paneled and intricately painted entry door with stained-glass window: This house was the epitome of architectural order, evidence of humanity’s long struggle against chaos and of its search for meaning.

  During Molly’s lifetime, architects had largely championed sterility, which is order bled of purpose, and celebrated power, which is meaning stripped of grace. By rejecting the fundamentals of the very civilization that made possible its rise, modernism and its philosophical stepchildren offered flash in place of genuine beauty, sensation in place of hope.

  All her life, she had watched civilization grow uglier, meaner; now as she followed Virgil up these porch steps, she was overcome by a devastating sense of loss. This beautiful house, on which so much love had been expended in the design and construction, was a symbol of all that would be scoured out of existence by the new ecology and by the brutal new masters of the earth. The destruction that had been wrought in incremental steps by a century of modernism had been exceeded a thousandfold in less than one day; and soon all the works of modernism itself would be obliterated by cold-blooded creatures that embodied the future for which modernism yearned.

  All of humanity’s follies seemed worth embracing if that were the price to preserve everything beautiful in human civilization. Although the human heart is selfish and arrogant, so many struggle against their selfishness and learn humility; because of them, as long as there is life, there is hope that beauty lost can be rediscovered, that what has been reviled can be redeemed.

  Life of the human variety, however, might soon be eradicated as thoroughly as if it had never existed.

  With Virgil at the door, Molly looked back at Neil in the street with their six hostages to fortune. Seven years of marriage had gone by so swiftly; seventy would not have been enough.

  The kids looked excruciatingly vulnerable. Evil seemed always drawn to children, especially to children. To those through whom flow the strongest currents of evil, the corruption and destruction of the innocent is the greatest bliss.

  Virgil made a gruff sound.

  As at the residence where they had found Johnny and Abby, the door opened,