The Taking

36

BENEATH THE FLOATING MYSTERY, IN ITS GOLDEN yet baleful light, under its malevolent influence, the four of them gazed up, afraid but unable to look away.

At first sight of the approaching light, Molly had considered fleeing with the children, hiding, but she had realized that if the pilot of the craft wished to find them, they would be found. Surely these ETs could track ground targets by infrared surveillance, by body-heat profiling, by sound-spoor detection, and by other means beyond the capabilities of human science and technology.

She felt watched, and more than watched: intimately scrutinized, physically and mentally analyzed, her fullest measure taken in ways unknowable and profound. As she became more sensitive to the depth of this analysis, her fear grew more intense and, to her surprise, she was also overcome by shame-her face burned with it-as if she stood naked before strangers.

When she heard herself murmuring the Act of Contrition, she realized that instinctively she expected to die here in the street, in this minute or the next.

Neither the hovering transport's powerful light nor the effect of its silent propulsion system to any degree burned off the fog beneath it. If anything, the mist thickened, conspiring to keep hidden the contours and every detail of the machine.

She expected to be incinerated, reduced to burning tallow in a boiling pool of blacktop, or to be atomized.

Alternately, the prospect of the craft descending to the street, of being taken aboard, of coming face-to-face with their inhuman masters and subjected to God knew what experiments and humiliations made atomization almost appealing.

Instead and unexpectedly, the luminous object moved away from them, receding rapidly. In seconds, every glimmer of its golden glow had been extinguished by the overcast.

The thick mist was empurpled again, and the street cast into false twilight, as before.

After hugging Abby almost too fiercely, Molly rose shakily to her feet. Neil stood with one reassuring hand on Johnny's shoulder. His eyes met hers, and did not blink.

Their mutual sense of relief was palpable, but none of them had a word to say about the event that had just transpired, as though to speak of the craft would be to invite its immediate return.

During the encounter, she had not been aware of the dog. If he had been frightened, he had recovered as quickly as the vessel had vanished in the fog. He stood, alert and apparently undaunted, ready to lead the search for other children.

Molly was eager to follow him-and grateful to have a purpose important enough and difficult enough to prevent her from brooding too intently on the hostile new world they would have to face in the days ahead.

Nonetheless, as Virgil led them farther north along the street, Molly noticed that the radiant lichen crusted a significant number of trees: stone pines, sugar pines, sycamores dressed with the yellow foliage of autumn. The transformation of the earth continued apace.

She saw other sycamores and cottonwoods with beards of gray moss like nothing that previously had grown in Black Lake. Some of this mossy bunting hung in swags as wispy as the mist, but other drapings were dense, conveying an impression of rot and disease.

Two massive trees had toppled, but their fate appeared to have nothing to do with aggressive alien plant forms. They had stood in soil so saturated by the rains that their weight was greater than the power of the sodden earth to hold them erect. One tree had fallen into the street, entirely blocking it, and the other had crashed onto a house, doing serious damage.

Never wandering, never pausing to sniff the ground or the air, Virgil proceeded one block farther north, then turned east and trotted uphill to Chestnut Lane.

Molly expected to be led to another residence, in which the walls would be infested. Perhaps this time the fluttering multitudes would escape their hive and seek whatever sustenance they needed.

The shepherd took them instead toward St. Perpetua's, the church at the corner of Chestnut Lane and Hill Street, the steeple and the roof of which thrust up and vanished into the overcast.

This structure had been built of stone quarried from these mountains. The two oak front doors stood under handsome limestone tympanums that together cradled a stained-glass rose window, all surrounded by a cinquefoil arch.

The north and south walls of the church also featured stained-glass windows. Through two of these, toward the altar-end of the nave, came a constant but slightly quivering light, not nearly strong enough to transform the mosaics of somber glass into bright scenes of grace and miracles, but sufficient to reveal that someone had taken refuge in the building.

Earlier, when Molly and Neil had quickly toured the town in search of neighbors gathered in mutual defense, before finding the crowd at the tavern, they'd cruised past St. Perpetua's. It had appeared to be deserted.

Virgil did not proceed to the front doors of the church. He went to the open gate in the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the adjacent cemetery.

There, the dog exhibited his first moment of trepidation: ears forward, breath held, tail tucked. From rump to stifles to hocks, his back legs trembled.

Yet after only a brief hesitation, the shepherd went through the gate and among the tombstones. Molly, Neil, and the children reluctantly followed.

Two ancient live oaks, growing at maximum altitude and unlikely to have survived higher on the mountain, shadowed the farther reaches of the cemetery. Their massive crowns were for the most part cloaked in the fog, and the aisles of graves under their limbs were obscured by filigrees of blackest shadows worked across a field of purple light.

In those open areas closer to the gate, however, the enduring and anachronistic twilight brightened the yard enough to reveal that some gravestones had been targeted by busy vandals. Simple rectangles of granite, carved angels, two Latin crosses, one cross of Calvary, one Celtic cross, molines and botonees and patriarchals had been toppled and broken.

Graves had been opened. Not most. Perhaps a dozen, fifteen, out of hundreds.

Young Abby sought Molly's hand and squeezed it tightly.

Masses of mud, excavated earth, covered some areas of grass. Scattered across the mud were coffin lids of all varieties: shattered wood, twisted and mangled metal.

The open graves were nearly full of muddy water. In them floated tangled lengths of satin lining from the caskets. A stained and lace-trimmed pillow on which had once rested the head of a cadaver. One black shoe. Scraps of rotting garments. A few small bones, clean and white, mostly phalanges and metatarsals

The dog had brought them here to see this.

Molly had no idea why.

Or perhaps she knew the meaning of this outrage, but lacked the nerve to follow logic where it would take her.