The Taking

39

PAST THE RACK OF VOTIVE CANDLES IN RUBY GLASSES, over the low communion railing, into the sanctuary, Molly followed the tall man, who followed the children and the dog, who themselves followed the flashlight-wielding fat man and Neil.

The first light swept left to right, right to left, ceaselessly scanning the way ahead, as Neil had instructed.

Molly used her beam to lever stubborn shadows out of suspicious corners, expecting to pry loose an atrocity of one kind or another, sooner or later.

Between them and the altar stood the choir enclosure. Stepped rows of chairs had been knocked askew by the tremors that had shaken the building.

On the inclined ambulatory, they passed beside and then above the choir box and the silent organ. The door to the sacristy lay to the south of the altar, ten feet beyond the top of the ramp, where the floor leveled off.

As they ascended with wariness but also in something of a rush, the abomination that had been Father Dan moved to intercept them.

Molly's light revealed the dead priest's face. Bloated. Livid. Split like the skin of an overripe plum at the corners of the mouth. Left eye sewn shut; right open, torn threads dangling from the upper lid. The blinkless milky eye reflected light with a silver sheen.

Because this, too, was an agent of despair, the sight of which seemed intended to drain hope and dilute courage, Molly wished to look away but could not. Dread and morbid fascination held her-and a sense of pending insight similar to what she had felt in the tavern, shortly after the encounter with Render. Here was death undone and life that was not alive. Here was the insane new world order imposed by princes from some distant star, miracles of darkest design that offended, fascinated, sickened, spellbound.

Abruptly the priest's face blossomed, as though his features and the facial bones they overlaid were a fragile facade-less than a facade, an illusion. What nested within burst out, and the exterior at the same time folded to the sides and inward, so that under the shock of tangled white hair was revealed a mass of crimson tentacular forms stippled with what appeared to be six-and eight-inch thorns, or stingers, the whole of it simultaneously writhing and bristling, a thing suitably demonic to police the tenth circle of Hell if Dante had found more than nine levels.

Quarreling echoes of the shotgun blast chased one another around the groin-vaulted ceiling, vibrated saints and angels in the stained-glass windows.

Chest-slammed, the infested cadaver blew backward, crashed to the floor. It kicked the fallen chalice into a noisy roll and tangled in the rumpled antependium.

Evidently the thing that had taken residence in the corpse would not be dissuaded by buckshot. It thrashed, trying to cast off the altar cloth and regain its feet.

The cold congruence of Molly's cupped hand and the butt of the pistol provided less comfort by the minute. Even an entire magazine of hollow-point 9-mm rounds, well placed at close range, might not stop this hagridden cadaver when the hag was perhaps a resilient life form more plant than animal.

The group kept moving in flashlight flares and swoops of shadow. They had taken only two steps, however, when the floor shook as never before: shook, splintered, cracked open.

Molly stumbled, almost fell.

Between Neil, in the lead, and the man behind him, shattered planks erupted in a jagged bouquet of oak.

A stench breathed out of the basement, and with that reeking exhalation rose a thing less than half glimpsed in the jittering flashlight beams.

Molly thought, Bug.

Quick impressions in bad light. Insectile. Enormous. Polished carapace. Beetle horns. Wickedly serrated mandibles. Armored abdomen. Pedipalpi. Numerous compound eyes, inexpressibly strange and vaguely luminous. Suddenly a yawning maw and a razored gullet to rival that of any shark.

Screaming, the heavyset man was plucked off the sanctuary floor and dragged into the basement.

In an instant the apparition had appeared, and in the next instant had vanished.

By the bucking of the floor, by the fat man's kicking legs, by their own panic, the five children had been knocked together, three thrown to the floor, and one-the freckled girl with the auburn hair-had fallen into the hole. Having grabbed the jagged end of a plank, she hung by both hands, legs dangling in the basement.

From the darkness below the girl, the lost man's tortured cries begged for death and pleaded mercy, for he was not at once broken and sucked dry, but suffered instead an attenuated death that didn't bear contemplation.