The Taking

37

THE NARTHEX OF THE CHURCH HAD A SINGLE WINDOW: the stained-glass, multifoliate rose above the front doors. When filtered through red-and-gold glass, the plum light lost all ability to illuminate.

This was a dark place, paneled in mahogany. The air smelled sweet with incense and rank with mold.

The dog sneezed twice, and snorted to clear his nose.

Molly's flashlight found a colony of fungi in a corner, not black and yellow but pure white.

The specimen consisted of two forms growing in an apparently random mix. Round bladderlike structures clustered in many sizes, swollen as if with a barely contained quantity of fluid, glistening with an exuded milky mucus. What appeared to be soft fabric sacs, not quite fully inflated, slowly swelled and subsided and swelled again as though they were lungs.

The colony measured approximately four feet wide, three feet deep, and six feet high. Massive. Malignant. Aware.

How Molly knew it was aware, she could not say, and perhaps she reached this conclusion largely by imagination rather than by reason or even intuition. Yet she remained certain that the interiors of the white bladders, if not the pale lungs, teemed with malevolent and sentient life.

She wished that Abby and Johnny could have waited outside. The kids couldn't be left alone, however, and neither she nor Neil was ready to compromise their commitment to stay together at all times.

Virgil pawed at the door between the narthex and the nave, pawed with such insistence that he seemed to suggest they had little time to do what must be done.

When Molly pushed the door open, she glimpsed a white marble holy-water font immediately to the right, but was more drawn to the sight of scores of candles clustered at the front of the church, toward the extreme right side of the chancel railing.

By habit, she dipped two fingers in that small marble reservoir. Instead of cool water and the usual sense of peace, she felt a damp, spongy, foul something.

Snatching her fingers back, aiming the flashlight more directly at the font, she discovered a severed human hand lying in the water. Palm up. Digits bristling like the legs of a dead crab.

A cry caught in her throat, then issued as half whimper and half wheeze.

A thing as familiar as a hand, in such unexpected and offensive context, seemed alien in the extreme, less grisly than shocking, but grisly enough.

To spare the children from this sight, Molly at once turned the flashlight away from the font, toward the main aisle of the shadowy nave. Twitching on the wooden floor, the beam revealed her state of mind.

"Stay away from the font, don't even look at it," she warned them, and hoped that the poor light would spare them the sight now etched in her memory.

Although fresh, Molly's recollection of the hand was imperfect. She suspected that something about that severed member had been revelatory, premonitory, but the crucial detail eluded her.

She did not turn back to take a second look. The nave ahead of her compelled attention, for three children and two men were gathered in the light of the many candles in the southwest corner, just outside the sanctuary.

From a distance, the posture of that group of five appeared defensive, fearful. Judging by their tense but passive attitude, they had no guns, and they seemed to expect not a group rather like themselves but storm troopers from another world.

Molly suddenly realized that from the perspective of the five among the candles, she and Neil, and their two charges, were embraced by darkness, their true nature indiscernible. Consequently, as she proceeded along the center aisle, she called out a friendly greeting, identifying herself and her husband.

The five remained silent and still, and stiff with tension. Perhaps their experiences of the night just past had led them to expect deception; their response would depend on the evidence of their own eyes.

The candles, though numerous, did nothing to relieve the gloom in the congregational section of the nave. Likewise, the dim purple daylight at the stained-glass windows failed to unravel a single thread of the tightly woven shadows.

As she followed Virgil along the aisle, Molly heard a low voice murmuring what might have been an Our Father, and a second voice even more softly reciting what sounded like the Hail-Mary rhythms of the Rosary.

She realized that others had taken refuge in St. Perpetua's, turning to God in this crisis as she had once expected more of the townspeople might have done. These faithful sat singly and in pairs, sat quietly here and there among the pews, humble shapes in the darkness.

She didn't disturb their prayers and meditations by picking them out with her flashlight, but respected the privacy of their worship and their penance.

As she reached the crossing, that open area between the front row of pews and the chancel railing, a tremor passed underfoot, accompanied by the creak and pop of tongue stressing against groove in the oak planks.

She swept the well-waxed floor around her with the light. A couple of buckled boards, lifting slightly from the subflooring, suggested pressure from below.

Virgil sniffed at them only in passing, making a wide berth around the deformed planks.

The church had a basement. Down there among the supplies and the stored-away holiday decorations, between the furnace and the water heater, perhaps some beast with no Christian purpose had taken up residence.

Every candle in the red glasses on the votive rack was alight. Others, from a box of spares, had been set on the chancel railing and around the base of a life-size statue of the Holy Mother just inside the sanctuary.

In the ruby, gold, and fluctuant radiance, Molly saw that the three children shared freckles, green eyes, and a certain cast of features that identified them as siblings.

The face of the youngest-an auburn-haired girl of perhaps five-glistened with steady, quiet tears. Abby at once took her hand and stood with her, perhaps because they knew each other, or just because she realized that she could lend some courage to the younger girl.

The other children were boys, a pair of identical twins, eight or nine years old. Instead of their sister's auburn locks, they had dark hair, almost black. While they looked scared, they also appeared to be both tense and restless with that healthy rebellious energy that from time to time animates the best of boys. They wanted to do something, take action, even as they recognized that the resolution of their current hated situation was beyond their power.

Neither of the men with the children appeared to be related to them.

The first, tall and thin, had a prominent Adam's apple, and a sharp nose. While he chewed on his lower lip almost vigorously enough to draw blood, his hopping-hen eyes pecked nervously at Molly, then at Neil, then at the kids, then at the worshipers in the pews, then toward the lark altar.

The other was shorter, heavy, literally wringing his pudgy hands with anxiety, and earnestly apologetic. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, but there was no other way."

"Sorry about what?" Neil asked.

"We don't have guns," the heavy man said. "We hoped you would-and you do. But now I'm wondering-how could guns make a difference?"

"I'm not good at riddles," Neil said.

"We could have warned you off, but then what would happen to us? So we let you walk into a trap. I'm so sorry."

Another tremor passed through the floor. The ruby-glass candle holders clinked against the metal votive rack. The flames quivered on the wicks, licked higher, bright tongues in silent screams.