The Taking (15 page)

27

“ALL YOUR BABIES WILL DIE.”

On the repetition of that threat, Molly looked toward the children gathered at the far side of the room. All were on their feet, craning their necks. She wished that they could be spared this psychological warfare, if that was in fact the purpose of the puppeteer behind this bizarre performance.

The doll sat one-eyed, working a finger of its right hand in the empty socket in the manner of a swimmer trying to drain a water block in an ear.

If wet gray wormlike forms had burst in frenzied wriggling from the gouged socket, Molly would not have been surprised.

“All your babies will die.”

The weight of those five words, seemingly a promise of human extinction, pressed as heavily on her as the maximum density of the hovering mystery above Black Lake that, with the rhythmic throb of its engines or its heart, compressed her lungs, oppressed her spirit.

The doll’s right hand rose to the right socket, tore loose the second orb. Always sightless since the day of manufacture, it had now double-blinded itself.

“All your babies, your babies, your babies will die.”

His choking rage expressed in a throttled curse, Norman Ling stepped to the bar, raising his shotgun.

“Norman, God’s sake, no shooting here!” warned Russell Tewkes, the tavern owner.

As the eye fell from the rubbery hand, the sorcery enlivening the figure seemed to subside in power or even to vacate it entirely. The doll sagged, slumped backward on the bar, and lay still, its eyeless gaze turned toward the ceiling, the night, and the gods of the storm.

Pale with fear, hard-faced with anger, Tewkes used one cupped hand to sweep the torn vinyl tongue and the two glass eyes off the bar into a trash can.

As the taverner next reached for the doll, someone cried out, “Russ, behind you!”

Revealing that his nerves were trigger wires, Tewkes turned with snap-quick torque that belied the apparent ponderousness of his beer-barrel body, fisting his hands as if to defend, in classic barroom style, against any looming threat.

At first Molly didn’t see what had inspired the warning.

Then Tewkes declared, “That’s not going to be me. Like hell it is.”

A mirror ran the length of the long bar. Tewkes stared at his reflection, in which the right side of his face was crushed.

In spite of his declaration, half convinced by the testimony of the mirror, Tewkes raised one hand to his face to reassure himself that a catastrophe had not already befallen him. In the reflection, his hand looked twisted, mangled.

Gasps of recognition and thin cries of horror arose from others in the tavern as they realized that Tewkes was not the only one among them whose reflection purported to be a preview of his mortal fate. In the mirror, they saw their friends, saw their neighbors, sought themselves—and in every instance were presented with a cadaver, each the victim of extreme violence.

The lower jaw had been torn from Tucker Madison’s face. The deputy’s upper teeth bit air.

In reflection, Vince Hoyt’s Roman-emperor head lacked the top of its skull, and the phantom Vince pointed out of the mirror, at the real Vince, with an arm that terminated in bristling bone below the elbow.

Here stood a gnarled burnt mass that had once been a man, still smoking, grinning not with humor or menace, but because his teeth had been revealed in dental-chart explicitness when his lips had been seared away.

Molly knew that she shouldn’t look for herself in this gruesome mural. If it was a glimpse of unavoidable destiny, it would foster despondency. If it was a lie, the image of her death-corrupted face and body would nevertheless fester in memory, diminishing her will to action, compromising her survival instinct.

Morbid curiosity may be integral to the human genome: In spite of her better judgment, she looked anyway.

In the premonitory mirror, in that
other
tavern of the standing dead, Molly Sloan did not exist. Where she should have been, there was only vacancy. Behind that vacancy stood the ripped and grisly reflection of the man stationed at her back on
this
side of the looking glass.

Earlier in the night, in her bedroom vanity mirror, where she had glimpsed a future version of that chamber jungled with vines and mold and fungus, she had seen her reflection; she had not appeared therein as a corpse or in any way distorted, but entirely as she looked in reality.

Now, with dread, she sought Neil’s reflection. When she found that he also had no place in that back-bar panorama of animated cadavers, she didn’t know whether she should be relieved by their lack of representation or should assume that it meant their fate involved something worse than the decapitation, amputation, and mutilation visited upon the others.

She glanced at him beside her, in the flesh. Their eyes met, and she knew that he had recognized the absence of their reflections and, like her, was confused about the meaning of it.

The lights failed. Absolute darkness flourished.

This time, no doubt, the loss of power would be permanent.

Prepared for this eventuality, eight, then ten, then perhaps twenty of the gathered citizens switched on flashlights. Sabers of light slashed the darkness.

Many of the beams found the mirror, perhaps evidence of a collective fear that the grotesque Others on the far side of the silvered glass had in the blackness stepped through to this world. The dazzle made it impossible to see the current reflection.

Someone threw a beer bottle. The long mirror shattered, and the fragments rang to the floor in a cascade of ominous notes.

Although the mirror was his property, and though it broke around his feet in a surf of dangerous shards, Russell Tewkes didn’t object.

In the sweep and clash of flashlight beams, in the flares from falling silvered fragments, Molly noticed something that strummed yet another arpeggio of terror from her taut nerves.

The eyeless, tongueless doll had a moment ago been recumbent on the bar. In the brief but total blackness, it had disappeared.

28

IN ANTICIPATION OF THE LOSS OF POWER, groups of candles had been placed on all the tables as well as at various points along the bar. Matches flared, wicks caught flame, and flashlights were extinguished as warm golden light shimmered across faces pale and dark, leafed the mahogany walls, and throbbed in nimbuses across the ceiling.

With the welcome return of light, a memory flared, and for a moment Molly stood transfixed in consideration of it.

Neil said something to her, but she was more in the recent past than in the present, crouching in the janitorial closet, watching the self-repairing fungus knit shut its surface membrane. And listening to Derek Sawtelle…

She surveyed the nervous crowd for the professor.

When Neil put a hand on her shoulder and gently shook her to get her attention, she said, “What the hell’s going on? What’s the truth here, or is there any truth at all?”

She saw Derek across the room, he was staring at her—and smiling as though he knew what she must be thinking. Then he turned from her and spoke to one of his companions.

“Come on,” she said to Neil, and led him toward Derek.

With only a few exceptions, the occupants of the tavern were on their feet, milling around, sharing reactions and reassurances, too shaken to sit down.

More of the dogs were afoot, as well, following their noses on circuitous paths. Perhaps they were still enchanted by the layers of old food and drink stains on the floor, but Molly wondered if they might not be searching for the vanished doll.

When she reached Derek, he was pouring gin from a bottle into a glass of half-melted ice and slices of lime. He turned to her as though he had been monitoring her with a third eye in the back of his head.

“Molly, Neil, dear friends, I assume that bit of Grand Guignol theater has convinced you that Bacchus and Dionysus are the only gods worth worshiping. Let’s pray that Russell’s stockroom is filled with enough cases to keep us well oiled through the final scene of the final act.”

“Cut the bullshit, Derek,” she said. “You’re not as drunk as you pretend to be. Or if you are, you still have enough of your wits about you to play your role in this.”

“My role?” He looked around, feigning bewilderment. “Are there cameras turning?”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I’m afraid I don’t. And I doubt very much that you yourself know what you mean.”

He had scored a direct hit. She didn’t know what was happening here; however, she was confident that it was more complex than she had thought, and she smelled deception.

She said, “In the janitorial closet, when we were watching that damn thing repair its wound…I didn’t tumble to it at the time, but you quoted Eliot to me.”

A shadow passed through his eyes, a shadow and a glimmer, like the rutilant scales of something swimming just below the surface of murky water. This glimpse, whatever it was, whatever it meant, was not something you would see in the eyes of a friend.

“Eliot who?” he asked.

“Don’t play games. T. S. Eliot.”

“Never cared much for old T. S. I prefer novelists, as you know, particularly the macho type. T. S. is too much of a gentleman for me, not a line of bullying in his whole body of work.”

“You said to me, ‘All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.’”

“Did I really?” he asked. If there wasn’t mockery in his voice, it brimmed in his eyes.

“It didn’t entirely flow out of what you said before it,” she remembered, “but I attributed any incoherence to the gin, and didn’t immediately recognize the quote.”

“I wasn’t necessarily quoting, dear lady. Perhaps I am from time to time capable of saying something wise all of my own.”

She wouldn’t let him slip out of it as easily as that. “The following line in Eliot is ‘All our ignorance brings us nearer to death.’”

“Well, that certainly resonates with the situation.”

“Harry Corrigan, my father, you—all quoting Eliot. How are you connected with them? What’s going on here?”

Derek’s smug, sardonic grin was identical to Render’s. “Neil, your lovely wife seems to have cast her lot with conspiracy nuts—the black-helicopter crowd.”

“You spoke those words,” Neil confirmed. “I remember.”

“Be careful, Neil. Paranoia can be contagious. You better grab your own bottle of gin and inoculate yourself.”

“If you think someone’s out to get you, and someone
is
out to get you,” Molly said, “it’s not paranoia. It’s reality.”

Pointing at the ceiling, indicating the leviathan that they could sense without seeing, feel without hearing, Derek said, “
That
is reality, Molly, hanging over all our heads. All of us dead, a whole world dead, and no escaping it, nothing to be settled except the hour when the ax falls on the last of us.”

She saw in Derek Sawtelle no fear, no despair, not even the sweet melancholy that he had touted as the ideal retreat from sharper emotions. Instead, in his suddenly feverish eyes and in the points of his Cheshire-Cat smile, she saw triumph, which made no sense at all, but which was apparent nonetheless and unmistakable.

“Now, dear Molly, stop thrashing about for meaning in silly conspiracy theories, and grab what pleasure can be had. The drinks are on the house.”

Frustrated, confused about so much but not about Derek’s barely veiled hostility and lies, Molly turned away from him. She pushed a few steps through the milling crowd before she realized that she didn’t know where to go or what to do next.

She seemed to have no option but to wait for death and embrace it when it came.

29

NEIL TOOK HER BY THE ARM AND LED HER TO an empty booth along the north wall of the tavern.

She refused to sit. “We’re running out of time.”

“I hear the clock.”

“We’ve got to do something, get ready.”

“All right. But what? How?”

She said, “Maybe the bank is the best idea. Secure the place. Hunker down. At least go out fighting.”

“Then we’ll go there now, with the rest of them.”

“That’s just it. The rest of them. They were all dead…in the mirror. Do they die at the bank? Is that where they get…torn apart like that?”

She shook her head. She looked around the tavern. She could see the barely checked panic in people who, minutes ago, had been talking strategy, tactics, and the possibility of survival. Now they believed the mirror. They expected to die horribly, and soon.

“I’m scared,” she said. “I’ve been handling this pretty well so far…but I’m starting to lose it.”

Neil put his arms around her. He always knew when to say nothing.

Molly trembled against him. She listened to his heart. Steady Neil.

When her heart had begun to time itself to his slower beat, he guided her into the booth and sat across from her.

This table had no candles, and she was grateful for the shadows. She didn’t want anyone but Neil to see her tears. She prided herself on her toughness, her resilience.

Maybe honest pride didn’t matter anymore, but for reasons she couldn’t put into words, she thought it mattered more than ever.

Neil said, “Before we can figure out what to do, maybe we’ve got to ask ourselves what we
know.
”

“Less and less.”

With irony, he repeated the Eliot quote: “‘All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.’”

The booth benches featured open space under the seats. Molly tucked her legs back—and thought of the missing doll.

In the brief darkness between the loss of public power and the lighting of the candles, the doll could have crawled into this booth, under her seat. Eyeless but all-seeing. Tongueless mouth filled with the breathless silence of a stalking predator.

She resisted the urge to scramble out of the booth and search under it with a flashlight. To do so would be to succumb to the most childish of fears, after which she would find it more difficult to summon the courage to face the real and more serious terrors that surely were coming.

It was just a doll. And if she should feel a small hand on her ankle, it would be only the hand of a doll, no matter how demonically animated, just the hand of a doll.

She wiped at her damp cheeks. “Are they really taking our world from us?”

“The evidence says so.”

“Or is that just the way we’re reading the evidence?”

“I don’t see how else to interpret it.”

“Neither do I. That thing in the janitor’s closet…” She shuddered.

She could still feel the airborne titan overhead, and now when she turned her attention to the ceiling, she could sense the vessel’s movement, too, as it progressed southward through the storm. She seemed to be increasingly sensitized to it.

“But fast-track terraforming is Derek’s theory,” she said, “and I don’t trust him.”

“What is it with Derek?” Neil asked. “Why did he act like that with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said maybe Render wasn’t
only
Render.”

“And I still don’t know what I mean by that.”

“Is Derek really Derek but not
only
Derek?”

“For sure, there’s
something
wrong with him.”

Rubbing the nape of his neck with one hand, he said, “I’m back to the alien-parasite movies.”

“Then why haven’t they burrowed into all of us? Why aren’t we all controlled?”

“Maybe we will be soon.”

She shook her head. “Life isn’t science fiction.”

“Submarines, nuclear weapons, television, computers, satellite communications, organ transplants—it was all the stuff of science fiction before it was reality. And the biggest sci-fi theme of all is alien contact.”

“But with the power to change a world—why the psychological warfare? They could just crush us like ants, which they seem to be doing anyway, in the cities if not here.”

“You mean the doll, the mirror.”

“And Harry Corrigan, and this T. S. Eliot weirdness. If they can replace our entire environment with theirs, scour away human civilization in days or weeks, eradicate it more efficiently than a seven-continent nuclear war, they wouldn’t bother to screw with our minds like this.”

Remembering the doll as it had stared at the ceiling just before it mutilated itself, Molly glanced up again and wondered if increased sensitivity to the storm-sailing leviathan would open her mind to its influence. Perhaps, eventually robbed of her free will, she would mimic the doll and gouge out her eyes.

“We aren’t already dead because they have some sort of use for us,” she suddenly realized.

“What use?”

“I can imagine several….”

“So can I,” he said.

“None of them good.”

“Remember the movie
The Matrix
?”

“Forget movies. That’s the way they want us to think, that’s how we’re being
guided
to think. But this is nothing like any movie ever made.”

She watched Vince Hoyt talking animatedly to a man she didn’t know. Unwanted, into her mind came an image from the mirror: the coach with the top of his skull gone.

“Maybe they don’t have a use for all of us,” she said, “but certainly for some of us. We’ve been targeted, not for death but for manipulation. That stuff with the doll and the bar mirror—everyone saw it, but maybe it was only meant to influence you and me.”

“Maybe only you,” he said. “Derek came to you. Render came to you. Harry Corrigan came to you. None of them to me.”

Molly rebelled at the thought that their individual destinies might differ radically, and that therefore their paths must sooner or later diverge. “I don’t know what it means, but it means
something
that we were the only ones not reflected in that mirror.”

“Not the only ones,” he corrected. “The kids weren’t there, either.”

The six children now stood together near the booth in which they had previously been seated. If earlier they had exhibited some spirit of adventure, it had given way entirely to fear. They appeared to be ready to bolt at the slightest provocation.

Acting on instinct and with natural purpose, the dogs gravitated where they were needed most. While six canines still roamed the room, three—a golden retriever, a German shepherd, and a black-and-tan mutt with the build of a boxer but with the shaggy face of a Scottish terrier—had gathered around the children to soothe troubled hearts as dogs have always done, and no doubt to defend their young charges against any threat.

Watching the kids and the dogs, Molly again felt enlightenment teasing her from just beyond the open fields of conscious thought, a shapeless shape moving in the shadowy woods of the subconscious, both enticing and disturbing.

“Besides the children,” she asked Neil, “who else didn’t cast a reflection in the mirror?”

“I don’t know. It all happened so fast, there wasn’t time for a head count. Maybe a couple others. Or maybe just the eight of us—you, me, the kids.”

The soundless throbbing in the bones, the blood, the lymph, pulses sympathetic to the rhythms of the magnetic engines powering the behemoth overhead, began to subside.

She sensed the great weight and the malevolent shadow passing off them as the vast ship moved south, and to avoid despondency, she dared not think about the hordes of inhuman creatures that must be aboard it and the cruel irresistible power it represented.

Throughout the tavern, candle flames swelled brighter, as if their light had been oppressed in much the way that the tides of the seas are managed by the phases of the moon.

Molly’s mind seemed to function more quickly and clearly, too. She perceived purpose where before she had seen nothing but mists of confusion.

Working it out step by step, she said to Neil, “What is Render, my father?”

“What do you mean?”

“What one word defines the essence of him?”

“Psychopath,
” Neil said.

“That’s a distraction from the truth.”

“
Murderer,
” he said.

“More specifically?”

“Murderer…of children.”

As Neil spoke, a dog came to their table—the German shepherd that had stood with the group of kids. It stared intently at Molly.

She sat up straighter in the booth as her immediate future, previously all murk and mystery, began to clarify. “Yes—Render’s a child murderer. And what am I?”

“To me—everything,” he said. “To the world—a writer.”

“I love you,” she said, “and what we’ve had together. It doesn’t get better. But if this is the last night of the world, if I’ve no more living left to define myself, then I’m defined forever by the best and worst things I’ve ever done.”

Frowning, Neil followed half a step behind in her series of conclusions. “The best…you saved the lives of those school kids.”

“He murders children. Once…I saved a few.”

With an anxious whine, the German shepherd drew her attention.

She had thought that the dog wandered to their booth with no more purpose than to explore that section of the floor and to cadge tidbits from them if they had any food to share.

Its gaze was unusually intense, however, and more than intense: strange, compelling.

She considered how the dogs, en masse, had reacted to her when she had first arrived in the tavern. They had seemed to be watching her surreptitiously ever since.

“Neil, we’ve been thinking pretty much only about ourselves, how to survive. That leaves us with nothing to do but find a hidey-hole, hunker down, and wait.”

He understood: “You’ve never lived that way—passive, just waiting for what’s next.”

“Neither have you. There are children tonight, in this chaos, who aren’t being given the shelter and protection they need, they deserve.” She was relieved to have a purpose, to be suddenly filled with the urgency of meaningful commitment.

“And if we can’t save them?” Neil wondered.

Ears pricked, head cocked, the dog turned to Neil.

“Maybe no one can save anyone anymore,” Neil continued, “not with the whole world lost.”

The dog whined at him as it had whined at Molly.

Intrigued by the shepherd’s attitude and behavior, she wondered if something extraordinary might be happening; but then the dog padded away, weaving through the crowd, soon out of sight.

“If we can’t save them,” she said, “then we’ll try to spare them from what pain and terror we can. We’ve got to put ourselves between them and whatever’s coming.”

He glanced at the six children.

Molly said, “I don’t mean them. Their parents are here, and the group is big enough to protect them about as well as anyone can be protected in these circumstances. But how many kids are out there in town? Not teenagers. I mean, younger kids, small and vulnerable. One hundred? Two hundred?”

“Maybe that many. Maybe even more.”

“How many of them have parents who are dealing with this the way Derek and his crowd are dealing with it—getting drunk and worse, leaving their kids afraid and undefended?”

“But we don’t know most of the people in town,” Neil said. “There are—what?—maybe four hundred or even five hundred houses, and we don’t know which families have kids. It’ll take hours and hours, maybe a full day, for just the two of us to go door-to-door. We don’t have that much time left.”

“All right. So maybe we can get a few of these people to help us,” Molly said.

Neil looked doubtful. “They’ve got their own agendas.”

Weaving among the tables and the milling residents of Black Lake, the German shepherd returned. In its mouth, the dog held a red rose, which it brought to Molly.

She couldn’t imagine where it had found a rose in the tavern. She hadn’t noticed any floral arrangements.

The dog seemed to want her to take the flower.

“You’ve got a suitor,” Neil said.

Inevitably, she thought of her father murdering the boy in the rose garden. His voice snaked through her memory in sinuous coils of words:
I buried his little disposable camera at the foot of a rosebush. It was the Cardinal Mindszenty rose, so named because of its glorious robe-red color.

At first inclined to suspect a connection between Render and the dog, Molly hesitated to accept the rose.

Then she looked into the shepherd’s eyes and saw what is to be seen in every dog’s eyes if it has not been broken by a cruel master: trust, strength without arrogance, a desire to give and receive affection—and an honesty so pure that deception, if contemplated, cannot be perpetrated.

The shepherd wagged its tail.

Molly pinched the stem of the rose, and the animal unlocked its teeth to surrender the fragrant bloom.

As she took the flower, Molly saw evidence of a thorn prick, a spot of blood on the dog’s tongue.

She thought at once of Render—although not as he had appeared this night, rather as he had raged maniacally in that third-grade classroom twenty years previously—and not of Michael Render only or even primarily, but also of one of his victims, a girl named Rebecca Rose, with shaggy blond hair and blue eyes, who died that afternoon in Molly’s arms.

Rebecca Rose. A shy girl with a faint lisp. Her last words, whispered in delirium, apparently a meaningless delusion:
Molly…there’s a dog. So pretty…how he shines.

Now the shepherd watched Molly. In his eyes were mysteries to rival any others in this momentous night of enigmas, puzzles, and perplexities.

On a rose thorn, his blood.

Rose of forgetfulness, brought to her by the dog, became the Rose of memory, cut down so young.

By the cock of his head, the shepherd seemed to question whether Molly Sloan—sensible Molly, she with the strong mainspring wound tight, she who always lived less in the moment than in the future, she who strived toward meticulously planned goals and was prudent in all things except her writing, she who avoided drama in her life but poured it out upon the page—could understand the intentions of a flower-bearing Sphinx, this rebus on four paws, which wanted so urgently to be properly read and understood.