The Taking

35

OUT OF THE KITCHEN, ALONG THE HALL, TO THE foyer, they were accompanied by a rising chorus of frenzied fluttering within the walls, a rustle, a bustle, an urgent quickening, as if the horde sensed that its tender prey were escaping.

"They talk," Abby confided to Molly as they hurried out of the kitchen, behind Virgil.

"Who, sweetheart?"

"The walls. Don't they, Johnny? Don't they talk?"

"Sometimes you can hear voices," the boy confirmed as they arrived at the foyer closet.

In the event that the storm resumed, the nearest thing to rain gear that the kids had were nylon jackets with warm lining.

As Abby and her brother shrugged into their coats, Molly said, "You don't mean-voices in English."

"Sometimes English," Johnny confirmed. "But sometimes another language. I don't know what it is."

Throughout the house arose a subtle creaking from floorboards, wall studs, ceiling joists. The structure sounded like a ship at sea, riding out the steep swells of a storm fringe.

Virgil, thus far not given to barking, barked. Just once. As if to say, Let's go!

The creaking house abruptly creaked louder and with a greater number of complaints from floors, ceilings, doorjambs, window frames, walls. The bone-rattle of plumbing. The wheeze and whistle of hot breath in torquing ducts. Suddenly the place groaned like a tired old behemoth waking from the sleep of ages.

When Neil tried the front door, it seemed to be locked.

"I knew," the boy said, and the girl clung desperately to Molly.

Neil worked the deadbolt, wrenched at the door with all his strength, but it resisted him.

Surrounded by groans and creaks and cracks and pops, Molly half believed that the house might close around them like a pair of jaws, grinding their bodies between the splintery teeth of its broken beams, tasting them upon its tongue of floors, pressing them against its palate of ceilings, finally swallowing their masticated remains into a basement, where the rustling legions would swarm over them, reducing flesh to fluid and bones to powder.

Neil stepped away from the door. "Move, get back," he ordered, and raised his shotgun, intending to blast loose the recalcitrant lock.

Virgil padded into the line of fire and pawed at the door-which swung inward.

Molly didn't pause to puzzle over whether Neil, always as steady as a ship at anchor, had lost his cool for a moment and had turned the knob in the wrong direction, fighting with an unlocked door, or whether instead the dog possessed major mojo beyond anything they had heretofore witnessed. Holding Abby against her side, she followed Virgil and Johnny out of the house, onto the porch, down the front steps, onto the flagstone walk.

When she turned, she was relieved to see that Neil hurried close behind her and that he had not been imprisoned by animate architecture.

The house looked no different from the way it had been when they'd first seen it. Craftsman style, no Cthulhu.

In the hush of the purple mist, Molly expected to hear the structure creaking, groaning, midway in a performance to match that of Poe's selfconsuming House of Usher, but her expectations went unfulfilled-not for the first time in this bizarre night-because the residence stood as silent, as deceptively serene, as inspiring of convoluted syntax as the stately manor in a ghost story by Henry James.

The front door slowly drifted shut, as though it had been hung with an inward-swinging bias on well-oiled hinges. She suspected, however, that a less mechanical force-one capable of conscious and cruel intent-was at work.

The crusty lichen on the stone pines, flecked with emerald-green radiance, though cancerous in appearance and rapidly metastasizing up the limbs, now seemed to be a benign and almost charmingly festive bit of extraterrestrial vegetation compared to whatever hellish things had been breeding or growing in the walls of the house.

Assuming that the rising sun had not faltered in its ascent, the mist must have thickened overhead even as it had dissipated somewhat here at street level, for the amethystine light had darkened to plum-purple. The promise of morning had already given way to a threatening shadow-land more suitable to a Balkan twilight than to a California dawn.

"Where do we go now?" Johnny asked.

Molly looked at Virgil, who regarded her expectantly. "Wherever the dog leads us."

At once, the shepherd turned away from her and trotted along the flagstone path to the street.

The four of them followed Virgil into a mist that had thinned and lifted until visibility, even in this false dusk, extended about two blocks.

Molly's initial sense that the overhead fog had grown markedly more dense, even as the lower blear somewhat clarified, proved correct on calmer observation.

In fact, the stratification between the ground-level haze and the higher pea soup was so abrupt that a ceiling seemed to have been constructed over Black Lake at a height of fifteen feet. Everything above that line-part of the upper floors and the roofs of two-story houses, the higher limbs of trees-vanished entirely from sight in the livid murk.

She felt oppressed by the impenetrability of the overcast and by its proximity to the ground. The sluggish, clotted fog allowed penetration by only a narrow band of the light spectrum, resulting in this plummy gloom, piling a weight of claustrophobia atop the onerous mood.

Something else about the lowering sky disturbed her, but she could not at once identify the reason for her concern.

They had followed Virgil only half a block, however, before that cause presented itself: Things could move half seen or even unseen in that dismalness.

Out of the west came a light in the overcast. The fog diffused it, obscured the source, but the brightness approached across the besieged town.

The nearer it drew, the more evident its shape became: a disc or perhaps a sphere. At the heart of the surrounding corona burned the more intense light of the object itself, which approximately defined it. She guessed it might be the size of an SUV, although she couldn't accurately discern proportions without knowing at what altitude the vehicle cruised.

She had no doubt that it would prove to be a vehicle. The movies had prepared her for this sight, too, as had decades of news stories about UFOs.

The object traveled silently. No purr of engines. No whoosh of displaced air. From it emanated none of the pulsations that had radiated from the larger ship and that had throbbed in blood and bone.

If the southbound leviathan that had recently passed over was the mother ship-or one of many mother ships-then the approaching UFO had most likely been dispatched from that larger vessel. This might be an observation craft, a bomber or the equivalent, or maybe a troop transport.

Or none of the above. This war bore little or no resemblance to any of the many conflicts of human history, and the usual lexicon of battle had no application to these events.

As the UFO drew near, it slowed, appearing to glide with the gravity-defying ease of a hot-air balloon.

It came to a full stop directly above their little group, where they stood in the street, and there it hovered soundlessly.

Molly's heart swelled with a rush of dread.

Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still: quoting Eliot to herself now, seeking consolation in the cadence, reassurance in the rhythm.

When Abby cringed against her, Molly dropped to one knee, to be at the girl's level, to pull her close and to help her find the courage to face whatever might come.