The Taking

45

FLAMES WORRIED WICKS IN SCORES OF AMBER GLASS globes, as before. The walls and ceiling of Russell Tewkes's tavern appeared to tremble like painted curtains in the lambent candlelight.

The air itself seemed luminous, similar to the atmosphere in a dream of angels, and for a moment Molly was relieved to think that those who had been here when she'd left had later left themselves. No one sat in the booths or at the tables. No one stood at the bar, nor was Tewkes stationed behind it.

Derek and the drunks were gone. As were the peace lovers. And the fence-sitters, with Cassie.

Had she not studied the scene one second longer, had she turned and walked out, she might have thought that the lot of them had gone to the bank, after all, to assist in preparations for its defense. Lingering, however, she realized that her preferred scenario was not the one that had played out here.

First, the guns. Rifles, shotguns, and handguns had been left behind.

Neither the drunks nor the peace lovers had been armed, but many of the fence-sitters had been prepared to defend themselves if ultimately they made up their minds that self-defense was necessary or desirable. Not all of them would have gone out into this changed and changing world without weapons.

Second, the clothes. Coats and jackets had been left behind on chairs. Then she saw sweaters and shirts draped over some of the coats, and a pair of jeans.

Venturing farther from the front door, deeper into the tavern, she found drifts of discarded clothing on the floor. Slacks, khakis, more jeans, more shirts, blouses, socks, men's and women's underwear. Shoes and boots and belts and rain hats.

Implications of violence: All colors and styles of loose buttons littered the floor. Clothes had been torn off in such rage or frenzy that the buttons had popped loose. Numerous garments were ripped along the seams.

Yet apparently no guns had been fired.

Silence pooled fathoms deep. She held her breath, listened, but her ears might as well have been stoppled by a mile of ocean.

She kicked gently at some buttons. They rattled away from her shoe, across the floor planks, proving that she had not been struck deaf.

Wristwatches had been cast away. Sparkling on tables and across the floor were the warmth of gold, the chill of silver: necklaces, lockets, bracelets, rings.

Mystified as to what had happened, Molly could only suppose that the thirty to forty missing people had been forced to strip against their will. Because she had known several of them and because those she'd known had been people of common modesty, she couldn't conceive of any situation in which they would have disrobed willingly.

Yet no guns had been fired.

So… perhaps a shared madness had seized them, resulting from the unwitting intake of a psychosis-inducing toxin.

Certain rarely encountered exotic molds, including one that made its home in corn, could cause visual and auditory hallucinations, and an entire community could be swept up in the resultant mass hysteria. Some believe this-and not merely religious fanaticism-to be the root cause of the Salem witch trials, for they occurred in the season of the mold.

Molds were a class of fungi, and fungi appeared to constitute a more significant phylum of the invading extraterrestrial ecology than they did in Earth's natural order.

Toxins produced by alien fungi might induce delusions, shared hallucinations, and mass hysteria of a kind and an intensity new to human experience. Temporary psychosis. Enduring madness. Perhaps even homicidal frenzy.

On the tables and on the floor were broken beer bottles. Corona. Heineken. Dos Equis.

Some appeared to have been broken not by accident but with the intent to create weapons. The long neck of a Corona made a serviceable hilt, while the broken body of the bottle provided multiple jagged blades.

On one of these lacerating weapons, Molly found blood. Then on another. And a third. Still wet.

Arterial spatters stained a few articles of discarded clothing, though the modest volume didn't indicate wholesale slaughter or even much of a battle.

As many as forty people were missing. Evidently naked. But… alive? Dead? Where?

Once more Molly held her breath, willed herself to listen through the adamant knocking of her heart, but again she heard nothing.

At the back of the large public room, past all the tables, lay the hallway to the men's and women's lavatories. To the right of the hallway, in the back wall of this main chamber, waited a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.

The candlelight in this forward area of the tavern, where the townspeople had been gathered, did not much relieve the shadows at the back of the big room. Yet because of flickering light beyond it, she could see that the door, which had previously been closed, stood a quarter open.

She didn't relish further exploration alone, accompanied by only a host of horrific expectations.

Considering that the rest of her days were likely to be lived in a tangle of enigmas and unfathomables, she could live without knowing the answer to this one mystery. Although she was an inquiring person by nature, it seemed clear that the price of curiosity in this case would be the same for her as for the fabled cat.

One thing kept her from retreating. Cassie.

If the girl still lived, she was somewhere in peril and great distress. She could not be abandoned.

Perhaps coincidence accounted for the fact that Cassie's hair was blond, as had been Rebecca Rose's hair, that her eyes were blue, as had been Rebecca Rose's eyes.

All of her life, however, Molly had believed that there were no coincidences. She was not going to start believing in them now.

In all things, she saw design, though often the meaning of it was difficult to discern. Sometimes it was damn near impossible. As here, as now.

During the writing of a novel, when she came to trust in the reality of her characters, they began to act of their own volition, doing things that charmed, intrigued, and appalled her. Allowing them free will, she rejoiced in their wise choices and in their triumphs, was saddened by their stupidities, meannesses, and often grieved when they suffered or died. In the interest of their self-determination, she chronicled rather than created the events of their lives, seldom pulled their strings, and generally offered them only gentle guidance through signs and portents that they either understood and acted upon or, to their misfortune, refused to recognize.

Here, alone under the roof of the Tail of the Wolf, she hoped for gentle guidance, and if she failed to recognize it when it was given to her, or misinterpreted it, she hoped for some vigorous pulling of strings on her behalf.

The issue was not whether she should retreat or go forward. She could not retreat. She knew her role. She rescued children; she did not abandon them.

If Cassie had been a brunette, with no resemblance to Rebecca Rose, Molly still could not have walked away from her. The question wasn't whether or not to rescue the girl but how best to find her and extract her from this place.

At the back of the public area, the EMPLOYEES ONLY door stood ajar. In the room beyond, flickering light seemed to beckon her.

Maybe this was guidance. Maybe it was a trap.