The Taking

32

THE HUMAN IMAGINATION MAY BE THE MOST ELASTIC thing in the universe, stretching to encompass the millions of hopes and dreams that in centuries of relentless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper every human enterprise, and to conceive the vast menagerie of boogeymen that trouble every human heart.

Yet there had been discoveries and sights in these momentous hours that Molly could not have imagined and with which her reason wrestled and lost. Not the least was this severed and yet apparently living head, although it had been foreshadowed by the brainless walking corpse of Harry Corrigan and by the self-mutilating doll.

For a moment, Ken Halleck's eyes transfixed her. Pathetic. Pathoformic. Demonic.

The aliens had introduced on Earth some malevolent energy that did not differentiate between vegetable and animal, between organic and inorganic, between the animate and the inanimate. It thrived equally in the living and in the dead, and in what had never lived at all.

In Ken's voice now, a tremor of anguish, of grief: "Where is my Bobby? What have they done to him? I want to see my boy."

The mind not only reeled but rebelled, and not only rebelled but retreated to denial, desperate to refute this abomination no matter how vividly the senses confirmed it.

You might imagine surviving in an environment transformed to match that of a world on the far end of the galaxy, dressed with strange malignant plants, populated by a Sabbat broth of repulsive and vicious animals. You might hope for a hospitable corner in some extreme latitude, where you could live out your days in mousehole secrecy, with simple food and the pleasures of the timid.

But Molly couldn't imagine wanting to survive in a madhouse world where the dead walked, severed heads conversed, dolls made threats, and every horror of the elastic human imagination might be encountered-and worse. Such a place could offer no moment of peace, no chance of happiness.

Here, now, she might have given up the hope of survival, except that she would be left with two options: wait until some nightmare creature found her and tore her to pieces-or kill herself. Either course counted as self-destruction, however, and suicide was not permissible in her philosophy or her faith.

Besides, the children had to be found. What might happen after she had gathered them together under her inadequate protection was something she chose not to dwell upon.

"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.