The Taking

28

IN ANTICIPATION OF THE LOSS OF POWER, GROUPS OF candles had been placed on all the tables as well as at various points along the bar. Matches flared, wicks caught flame, and flashlights were extinguished as warm golden light shimmered across faces pale and dark, leafed the mahogany walls, and throbbed in nimbuses across the ceiling.

With the welcome return of light, a memory flared, and for a moment Molly stood transfixed in consideration of it.

Neil said something to her, but she was more in the recent past than in the present, crouching in the janitorial closet, watching the self-repairing fungus knit shut its surface membrane. And listening to Derek Sawtelle

She surveyed the nervous crowd for the professor.

When Neil put a hand on her shoulder and gently shook her to get her attention, she said, "What the hell's going on? What's the truth here, or is there any truth at all?"

She saw Derek across the room, he was staring at her-and smiling as though he knew what she must be thinking. Then he turned from her and spoke to one of his companions.

"Come on," she said to Neil, and led him toward Derek.

With only a few exceptions, the occupants of the tavern were on their feet, milling around, sharing reactions and reassurances, too shaken to sit down.

More of the dogs were afoot, as well, following their noses on circuitous paths. Perhaps they were still enchanted by the layers of old food and drink stains on the floor, but Molly wondered if they might not be searching for the vanished doll.

When she reached Derek, he was pouring gin from a bottle into a glass of half-melted ice and slices of lime. He turned to her as though he had been monitoring her with a third eye in the back of his head.

"Molly, Neil, dear friends, I assume that bit of Grand Guignol theater has convinced you that Bacchus and Dionysus are the only gods worth worshiping. Let's pray that Russell's stockroom is filled with enough cases to keep us well oiled through the final scene of the final act."

"Cut the bullshit, Derek," she said. "You're not as drunk as you pretend to be. Or if you are, you still have enough of your wits about you to play your role in this."

"My role?" He looked around, feigning bewilderment. "Are there cameras turning?"

"You know what I mean."

"No, I'm afraid I don't. And I doubt very much that you yourself know what you mean."

He had scored a direct hit. She didn't know what was happening here; however, she was confident that it was more complex than she had thought, and she smelled deception.

She said, "In the janitorial closet, when we were watching that damn thing repair its wound… I didn't tumble to it at the time, but you quoted Eliot to me."

A shadow passed through his eyes, a shadow and a glimmer, like the rutilant scales of something swimming just below the surface of murky water. This glimpse, whatever it was, whatever it meant, was not something you would see in the eyes of a friend.

"Eliot who?" he asked.

"Don't play games. T. S. Eliot."

"Never cared much for old T. S. I prefer novelists, as you know, particularly the macho type. T. S. is too much of a gentleman for me, not a line of bullying in his whole body of work."

"You said to me, 'All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance.' "

"Did I really?" he asked. If there wasn't mockery in his voice, it brimmed in his eyes.

"It didn't entirely flow out of what you said before it," she remembered, "but I attributed any incoherence to the gin, and didn't immediately recognize the quote."

"I wasn't necessarily quoting, dear lady. Perhaps I am from time to time capable of saying something wise all of my own."

She wouldn't let him slip out of it as easily as that. "The following line in Eliot is 'All our ignorance brings us nearer to death.' "

"Well, that certainly resonates with the situation."

"Harry Corrigan, my father, you-all quoting Eliot. How are you connected with them? What's going on here?"

Derek's smug, sardonic grin was identical to Render's. "Neil, your lovely wife seems to have cast her lot with conspiracy nuts-the black-helicopter crowd."

"You spoke those words," Neil confirmed. "I remember."

"Be careful, Neil. Paranoia can be contagious. You better grab your own bottle of gin and inoculate yourself."

"If you think someone's out to get you, and someone is out to get you," Molly said, "it's not paranoia. It's reality."

Pointing at the ceiling, indicating the leviathan that they could sense without seeing, feel without hearing, Derek said "That is reality, Molly, hanging over all our heads. All of us dead, a whole world dead, and no escaping it, nothing to be settled except the hour when the ax falls on the last of us."

She saw in Derek Sawtelle no fear, no despair, not even the sweet melancholy that he had touted as the ideal retreat from sharper emotions. Instead, in his suddenly feverish eyes and in the points of his Cheshire-Cat smile, she saw triumph, which made no sense at all, but which was apparent nonetheless and unmistakable.

"Now, dear Molly, stop thrashing about for meaning in silly conspiracy theories, and grab what pleasure can be had. The drinks are on the house."

Frustrated, confused about so much but not about Derek's barely veiled hostility and lies, Molly turned away from him. She pushed a few steps through the milling crowd before she realized that she didn't know where to go or what to do next.

She seemed to have no option but to wait for death and embrace it when it came.