The Taking

38

WHATEVER RESTLESS PRESENCE STIRRED IN THE church basement, the heavyset man, like his tall companion, appeared to be less interested in the threat under their feet than in the dark chancel behind them and the worshipers in the pews before them. His nervous stare roved from one knot of shadows to another.

"Can you get us out of here?" the tall man asked, as though he had forgotten the location of the doors.

Behind her, Molly heard movement from various points in the church, as if those in the pews had risen in unison, in response to an invitation to Communion.

Turning, she recalled the hand in the holy-water font. Because of the shock of that repulsive contact, she had blanked on a crucial detail, which no longer eluded her. The severed grotesquely had not been that of a man dismembered in the current conflict, for it had been bloated, discolored, pocked with corruption.

The hand had belonged to a man dead and buried for some time. Preserved by the embalmer's art, it had only gradually succumbed to the process of decay, but it had not weathered the grave unblemished.

One by one, her flashlight picked out ten figures standing among the pews: these sham worshipers, these soulless worm-riddled hulks, in their rotting funeral suits and dresses. Blind behind their sewn-shut eyelids. Deaf to truth, incapable of hope. Resurrected in only a physical sense-and perhaps in a spirit of mockery. Mockery. Travesty. Desecration, profanation.

Here again was that unearthly power that did not differentiate between the living and the dead, or even between the organic and the inorganic. It seemed that Earth was being taken and remade not by ETs from another spiral arm of the Milky Way or from another galaxy, but by beings from another universe, where all the laws of nature were radically different from those in this one.

Humanity's reality, which operated on Einsteinian laws, and the utterly different reality of humanity's dispossessors had collided, meshed. At this Einstein intersection, all things seemed possible now in this worst of all possible new worlds.

In rising to their feet, the dead stirred within themselves the gases of decomposition. What had seemed to be the reek of the white fungus grew more pungent and could be identified more accurately.

With a sense of smell at least ten thousand times more acute and more sophisticated than that of any human being, Virgil must have known what had been sitting in those shadowed pews, but he'd sounded no alarm as he had led her past them. He stood now among the five children. His dedication to their rescue exceeded even the most extraordinary canine behavior that Molly had ever seen before, and she was reminded that in some way she couldn't understand, the dog was more than he seemed to be.

The mortician's stitches had not in every case held, and one among these nightmare parishioners had both eyes open. The beam of the flashlight did not reveal cataracted or corrupted eyes; instead, the contents of the skull bulged from the sockets-a familiar black fungus spotted with yellow.

As effectively as a leech taking blood, fear suckled on Molly's hope. As her heart raced once more, however, she took courage, if not comfort, from the fact that these expatriates of the grave frightened her less than the encounter with Render at the tavern.

Another cadaver, short on flesh and long on bone, caged a mass of the black-and-yellow fungus in its open ribs. Another colony wound its right arm, from shoulder to wrist, like an entwining serpent.

The floor of the church shuddered again, planks creaked, planks cracked, as if something below had awakened in hunger, preparing for its hour to devour.

Three candles fell off the communion railing. One extinguished itself, and Neil stamped out the other two.

The dead began to move. They didn't shamble, didn't snarl or hiss, didn't thrash with rage, made none of the standard movie moves. They headed toward the aisles-north, south, central-blocking all the public routes out of the church, stepping slowly but with a strange stately dignity.

To return to the narthex and escape by the front doors, Molly would have to confront at least three of these mock Lazaruses, which she would not-could not-do, especially not when she had the kids to think about, perhaps not even if she'd been alone, not with a pistol, not with a flamethrower.

In sync with his wife's thoughts, Neil suggested an alternative: "There's another way. Through the sacristy, out the back door into the rectory yard."

"That's no good," the tall man said in a voice thick with dour certainty.

As if in confirmation, a clatter came out of the sanctuary beyond the communion railing, from the chanceled darkness past the reach of candle glow.

Although she was loath to turn her flashlight away from the ten cadavers in the nave, Molly swung the beam toward the sound. A priest stood at the high altar.

No. Not a priest. The remains of one.

Father Dan Sullivan, who had served this parish for almost three decades, had died in August of the previous year. Now he had returned to the altar, as if the daily rituals of his life were encoded in the cells of his embalmed body, still compelling him to his work.

From this angle, Molly had a view only of his profile, but she knew who he must be. He wore the black suit and Roman collar in which he had been buried thirteen months ago. His white hair-once red-was tangled with filth, his clerical suit streaked with mud.

A moment after the light found him, the dead priest gripped fistfuls of the antependium, the embroidered cloth that draped the front of the altar, and jerked violently on it. The tabernacle crashed to the floor and burst open, scattering pyx, paten, and chalice.

They would have to pass by this specter to get to the sacristy. One such adversary, however, was less daunting than ten of them.

More tremors in the floor, more violent than before, shook the columns, climbed to the ceiling, made the extinguished chandeliers arc through darkness on the ends of chains that creaked and clinked, link to link.

The remaining candles on the railing fell off, rolled under pews, flames licking floor wax and brightening as they turned.

Neil switched on his flashlight and handed it to the heavyset man. "I'll lead the way, you follow close on my right and keep the light ahead of me."

Virgil bounded over the low chancel railing, and the five kids scrambled after him.

In the nave, the macabre parishioners approached unhurriedly, as if they could see the future and knew that their malicious intentions would be fulfilled whether they made haste or not.