The Taking

60

HERE WAS THE PHENOMENON THAT CASSIE HAD described: people without eyes, noses, mouths, each face smooth from ear to ear and from hairline to the rounded bottom of the chin, the color of pale clay, as glossy and featureless as fired ceramics.

They should have been dead, for they could not breathe.

Although their chests did not rise and fall with exhalation, inhalation, they twitched perceptibly from time to time, and their throats moved as they swallowed. In two of them, a racing pulse throbbed visibly in their temples. And in every case, their hands, slack at their sides, trembled.

They radiated an anxiety that was almost palpable, almost keen enough to smell. They were without faces, but they were still somehow alive-and profoundly afraid.

Somewhere in the bank were five helpless children, and no doubt with them was a thing with faces in its hands. Because its kind seemed to be omniscient, it would know that she had arrived.

Virgil still would not lead, but he stayed bravely at her side, though visible tremors passed through his flanks.

She opened the low bronze gate to the tellers' enclosure, and stepped into the realm of money, realizing that money had no meaning anymore.

At the back of the tellers' enclosure, a low railing separated that space from a hallway. She opened another gate and led Virgil into the corridor.

Three Coleman lanterns were evenly spaced along this passage. Nothing disturbed the silence except the hiss of gas burning in the mantles, behind the clear heat shields.

Here the floor was carpeted. The dog made no sound.

Five doors were set in the east side of the hall, three in the west side, all with frosted-glass panes in the top half. Some bore the names of bank officers. Another was labeled REST ROOMS. Two were not marked.

The entrance to the walk-in vault waited at the end. Set in a steel architrave, a massive round stainless-steel door, ringed with three-inch-diameter locking bolts, stood open.

Behind the doors with frosted glass, the rooms were dark. She considered them for a moment but then trusted intuition and passed them warily.

Cassie's fearful voice played in memory: They can take your face and keep it in their hands, and show it to you, and other faces

In the vault at least one lantern glowed. She could see no one in the vestibule just beyond the deep jamb.

… faces in their hands… crush them in their fists, and make them scream

Molly was fifteen feet from the vault door when she felt in mind and marrow, in blood and bone, the return of the airborne leviathan. It was cruising in from the north-northeast, seeming to compress the atmosphere below it, so that she felt like a diver deep in a marine abyss with a great weight of ocean on her shoulders.

A few steps from the vault, she heard a drizzle, turned, and saw Virgil urinating against the wall. Bladder emptied, he came to her, tail tucked, shivering, but still game.

"Good boy," she whispered, "brave boy."

At the threshold, fear gave her pause. Mouth dry and hot, hands cold and damp. The checked pistol grip slippery with sweat. She tried to bite back a shudder, but her teeth chattered for a moment like castanets.

She crossed the three-foot-deep, curved steel jamb. Immediately beyond, the day gate stood open.

Directly ahead, past the small vestibule, lay a rectangular chamber lined with safe-deposit boxes. A lantern glowed there, but the room proved to be unoccupied.

To the right of the vestibule, in a steel-framed doorway, a gate stood open. Light beckoned beyond.

Even here in the vault, she could feel the rhythmic throb of the great engines in the mountainous ship making way above the town.

She passed through the gate. To the left lay the money room-shelves laden with cash, coins, and ledgers.

Here, too, were the five children, sitting on the floor, backs against a wall, alive but terrified. And here, as she should have expected, was Michael Render, her father.