The Taking

26

ALTHOUGH THE UNSEEN ENIGMA, CHARTING ITS course of conquest through the night sea overhead, compelled attention as nothing before in Molly's experience, the crying of the child grew so eerie that her gaze, and others, settled from the ceiling to the source of that misery.

The crying was not that of a child, after all, but arose from the doll that Molly had snatched from the backseat of the abandoned Lincoln Navigator on the ridge road.

It lay facedown on the bar where she had left it. The head was turned toward the room, eyes closed. From its open mouth issued the bawl and boohoo that were among the sounds and words recorded on its voice chip.

Molly was reminded of the music boxes in their bedroom. The waltzing porcelain figurines. The carousel horse turning, turning.

In her mind's eye, she also saw the twitching cadaver that had been Harry Corrigan. Dead Harry quoting Eliot through broken teeth, out of a blasted mouth that no longer had a roof.

She realized that the corpse-as-marionette was just a different category of the same effect that animated the music-box figures and caused the doll to sob. To the unknown masters of this night, the dead were toys, and the living.

As Molly was about to turn her attention to the ceiling once more, one of the dogs growled softly, and then another. They were watching the doll.

That plastic-and-rubber baby was equipped with flexible joints but featured no batteries-yet it moved. Turned onto its side. Lifted its head off the bar.

Everyone present had seen the impossible this night, and more than once. They had been inoculated against easy astonishment, and they at first regarded this development with more curiosity than fear or wonder.

If the two dogs had not continued to growl low in their throats and bare their teeth, some in the tavern might have looked away, less concerned about this strangeness than about the unknown leviathan plying the currents of the night above Black Lake.

Then the doll stopped crying and levered itself into a sitting position, its legs hanging over the edge of the bar, its arms at its sides. The eyes opened. The head turned.

Injection-molded, machine-made, glued and stitched and painted, this minikin in pink pedal pushers and yellow T-shirt was blind, of course, yet its eyes moved left and right and left again, surveying the people gathered in the tavern as though it could see them with perfect clarity.

In a childlike voice, it said, "Hungry. Eat."

Logic wasn't taxed by the argument that those two words would have been included in the vocabulary on the toy's voice chip.

Yet when the doll spoke, those onlookers standing nearest to it backed away.

Molly moved closer to Neil.

"Hungry. Eat," the doll repeated.

The mouth was hinged at the corners. When the doll spoke, its lips moved, revealing a small pink tongue.

Still surveying the tavern, the minikin cycled through some of the contents of its phrase bank: "I love you… baby's sleepy… nighty-night… my tummy hurts… diaper wet… Mommy, sing for baby… baby likes your song… I will be good, Mommy… I'm hungry… baby needs pudding… yum-yum, all gone…"

The doll fell silent. Tipping its head back, it gazed at the ceiling, as if it felt the behemoth passing in the rainy night.

Indeed, something in the doll's attitude-the cock of its head, the slight forward lean of its body, the unnerving intensity of its glass eyes-gave rise in Molly to the thought that it was not merely aware of the leviathan above but was also in communion with it.

Lowering its head, shifting its gaze to those in the tavern once more, the doll said, "Diaper… diaper… diaper." Then it dropped the second syllable: "Di… di… di…"

Someone said, "Shut the damn thing up," and someone else said, "Wait, let's see."

"Sing… sing… sing," said the doll, then shortened the word to just the suffix, "… ing… ing… ing." A pause. Then the combined form: "Dying… dying… dying…"

Looking around, Molly saw faces as pale as her own must be.

Lee Ling watched, one fist to her mouth, biting on her knuckles, and her husband, Norman, stood with his shotgun cradled across his arm, as if he wished he could do something with it.

The doll declared, "Dying hurts," and although it had no source of power to facilitate such animation, it raised its right hand to its mouth, as if in imitation of Lee Ling.

The articulated shoulder and elbow joints might have allowed the minikin's arm to bend as it did. Its molded rubber hands were not jointed, however, and should not have been able to commit the self-mutilation that followed.

Reaching between its hinged lips, the doll pinched its pink vinyl tongue and tore it out.

"Dying hurts."

Up went the left hand, which clawed at the left socket, pried out the semispherical eye, and dropped it on the bar, where it bounced, blue and blinkless, along the mahogany, and spent its final energy in a short-lived blind spin.

"All your babies," the doll said, in a cracked cadence that resulted from cobbling words together from various phrases on its voice chip, out of context, "all your babies will die."