The Taking (24 page)

49

AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL SPECIES, HUNDREDS OR
thousands of years more advanced than us, would possess technology that would appear to us to be not the result of applied science but entirely supernatural, pure magic.

That was what Neil had said, quoting some science-fiction writer after the events at the Corrigan house.

In the hours since, Molly had seen ample evidence of the truth in that contention, not least of all the transit of Angie Boteen through the receiving-room floor.

Concrete is what
concrete
means. Real. Actual. Solid—as in “an artificial stonelike material made by mixing cement with various aggregates.”

Yet this slab of steel-reinforced, poured-in-place concrete, the stuff of bomb shelters and ammunition bunkers, seemed to adjust its billions of atoms to precisely fit the interstices between the atoms of the woman’s body. The floor did not appear to soften. It did not part like the jaws of a shark eager to swallow. It did not blossom outward in concentric circles as does water that has accommodated a dropped stone. What it
did
do was accept Angie Boteen as if she were a spirit—less than ectoplasmic vapor, the merest apparition—and pass her through in smooth descent from the receiving room to the cellar.

Angie was not a ghost. Her flesh was as solid and as vulnerable as Molly’s. She had thrown the Corona bottle, which had shattered on the elevator doors. Her bare feet had left prints in the blood trail leading to the basement stairs. Her tears had dripped from her jaw line, leaving tiny dark spots of moisture on the concrete, each more of a mark on the floor than she had made by passing through it.

She didn’t vanish as instantly as a message cylinder sucked down a pneumatic tube; neither did she offer any resistance nor meet with any. Perhaps she took six seconds to precipitate from ground floor to the lower realm, beginning with the soles of her feet and concluding with a final wisp of trailing hair.

Considering how frightened she had been of the thing with faces in its hands, and assuming that this entity must have had something to do with drawing her through the cement and various aggregates, Angie made surprisingly little noise during her departure. She didn’t scream. She didn’t cry out to God for help or to well-respected Billy Marek with his knives.

She said softly, “Oh,” not in surprise but in recognition—of what, Molly could not guess—and looked down at her legs vanishing through concrete. Her eyes widened, but she appeared less afraid than at any moment since she had stepped into the receiving room.

When Molly held out a hand, Angie reached for it, saying,
“Sauvez-moi, sauvez-moi”
—which was what the astronaut Emily Lapeer had cried out aboard the International Space Station when coming face to face with the uninvited visitors. “Save me, save me,” Angie repeated in French, in the very voice of Emily Lapeer, and something in her eyes was different than before, hostile and mocking.

She wasn’t afraid, because she wasn’t Angie anymore. Angie was a powerless prisoner under the rule of whatever had entered into her and now used her body.

Snatching her hand back, Molly watched the naked woman sink to chin, to nose, to brow, as though drowning in hardened concrete. Gone.

If Molly had taken the hand, maybe she would have been dragged along with Angie, slipping through concrete and rebar as easily as mist through moonlight.

This possibility briefly paralyzed her. She hesitated to move a foot, for fear that the surface tension of the floor might prove to be as fragile as that of a summer pond.

Then she remembered a salient detail from the radio report about the space station. Inboard of the airlock, before Arturo had started screaming, Lapeer had said that something was entering through the
closed
hatch: “—just phasing
through
it, materializing
right out of the steel.
”

The risk of being taken down into the cellar through the floor might be exceeded by the danger of some menace rising out of there and into this receiving room.

Floors, walls, and bank-vault doors offered no protection. No fortress could stand against this enemy. No place on this new Earth could provide security, peace, or even privacy.

Reality isn’t what it used to be.

That had been a favorite aphorism of the dopers who tended to gravitate to the liberal-arts programs and literature courses when Molly had been a student at Berkeley. They were the ones in the writing program who rejected the traditional values of literature in favor of “intellectual freedom through emotional and linguistic anarchy,” whatever that meant.

Reality wasn’t what it used to be. This afternoon it might not be what it was this morning.

Lewis Carroll meet H. P. Lovecraft.

The inmates of Bedlam, so misunderstood and unable to cope in their own time, might find these new circumstances more in line with their experience and their view of life.

Molly, on the other hand, felt as though her sanity was in the precarious position of a runaway train rollicking down a mountain on loose tracks.

If the ET with faces in its hands was master of a technology that allowed it to rise through the floor as easily as Angie had been taken below, if there were no barriers to its movements, then descending the basement stairs now, in search of Cassie, would be no more dangerous than standing here or being out in the street with Neil. Caution had no merit, and prudence no reward. Fortune would favor the bold, even the reckless.

Again, by candlelight, she followed the blood trail to the cellar door. She was almost to that threshold when movement, glimpsed peripherally, made her halt, turn.

A dog. The golden retriever—one of the three dogs that stayed behind with Cassie—stood in the doorway to the tavern. Posture tense. Eyes solemn. Then a wag of the tail.

50

THE TWITCH OF THE DOG’S TAIL CONVINCED Molly to follow it by flashlight out of the receiving room, to the women’s lavatory. No dog would wag if he had lost a child entrusted to his care, and especially not one of these dogs, in which seemed to be vested an uncommon intelligence plus a loyalty even greater than their four-footed kind usually exhibited.

Cassie stood in the rest room, her back pressed in a corner, guarded by the two mixed breeds. Just for a moment, these mutts presented bared teeth to Molly, surely not because they mistook her for a threat but perhaps because they wanted her to see—and to be reassured by—their diligence.

Someone had closed the window through which Render had escaped. The floor at that end of the room was still puddled with rain, but nothing grew in it.

Distraught, Cassie came at once into Molly’s arms, buried her face against Molly’s throat, and trembled uncontrollably.

Molly comforted the girl, stroked her hair, and determined that she had not been harmed.

Under the logic of the old reality, getting out of the tavern would have been a priority. Flee first, counsel the child later.

In the new reality, the world outside would be as dangerous as any room in the tavern, including the cellar.

Any outdoor place was in fact
more
dangerous than the tavern. In spite of the resident of the janitorial closet and regardless of what spores might be fruiting in the self-mutilated congregation in the cellar, the grotesque and hostile life forms of another planet roamed open places in increasing numbers.

The masters of this magical-seeming alien technology were able to extract their prey from any sanctuary, through walls or floors or ceilings, and surely they themselves could pass through solid matter in the same fashion. The lower life forms, however—the equivalent of Earth’s mammals, reptiles, insects—had no such ability; walls were barriers to them.

The frenzied fluttering horde in Johnny and Abby’s house had been struggling to find a way out of their nest behind the lath and plaster. The insectile behemoth in the church basement would not have torn violently out of the oak floor if it had been able to phase through that planking with ease.

Consequently, although the tavern provided no safe haven against the powerful lords of this invasion, it offered some protection from the venomous creatures of their ecology.

“They’re all dead, aren’t they?” Cassie asked.

Because the girl’s mother and father were among the missing, Molly said, “Maybe not, honey. Maybe they—”

“No.” The girl didn’t want to be coddled. “Better dead…than with one of those things inside you.”

This seemed to be a reference to something other than spores entering the body through lacerations. Most likely, Cassie had never seen what grew in the janitorial closet or the white colonies that now crawled the half-light of the purple morning.

“What things?” Molly asked.

“The things with faces in their hands.”

Angie had mentioned one such being. The girl spoke of
things,
plural.

The three dogs stirred and made thin anxious sounds and growled softly, as though they remembered the entities of whom she spoke.

“What does that mean, Cassie—faces in their hands?”

The girl’s voice fell to a whisper. “They can take your face and keep it in their hands, and show it to you, and other faces, and crush them in their fists, and make them scream.”

This explanation failed to dispel Molly’s confusion. The answers to a few more questions gave her a somewhat better idea of what had happened to Cassie’s parents and to others in the tavern, but left her with an inadequate image of the things with faces in their hands.

Three of them had risen through the tavern floor, into the midst of the people gathered there. They were humanoid in form—between six and seven feet tall, with two legs, two arms—but far from human in appearance.

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 submission, 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.