The Taking Part 15

26.

ALTHOUGH THE UNSEEN ENIGMA, CHARTING its course of conquest through the night sea overhead, compelled attention as nothing before in Molly's experience, the crying of the child grew so eerie that her gaze, and others, settled from the ceiling to the source of that misery.

The crying was not that of a child, after all, but arose from the doll that Molly had s.n.a.t.c.hed from the backseat of the abandoned Lincoln Navigator on the ridge road.

It lay facedown on the bar where she had left it. The head was turned toward the room, eyes closed. From its open mouth issued the bawl and boohoo that were among the sounds and words recorded on its voice chip.

Molly was reminded of the music boxes in their bedroom. The waltzing porcelain figurines. The carousel horse turning, turning.

In her mind's eye, she also saw the twitching cadaver that had been Harry Corrigan. Dead Harry quoting Eliot through broken teeth, out of a blasted mouth that no longer had a roof.

She realized that the corpse-as-marionette was just a different category of the same effect that animated the music-box figures and caused the doll to sob. To the unknown masters of this night, the dead were toys, and the living.

As Molly was about to turn her attention to the ceiling once more, one of the dogs growled softly, and then another. They were watching the doll.

That plastic-and-rubber baby was equipped with flexible joints but featured no batteries-yet it moved. Turned onto its side. Lifted its head off the bar.

Everyone present had seen the impossible this night, and more than once. They had been inoculated against easy astonishment, and they at first regarded this development with more curiosity than fear or wonder.

If the two dogs had not continued to growl low in their throats and bare their teeth, some in the tavern might have looked away, less concerned about this strangeness than about the unknown leviathan plying the currents of the night above Black Lake.

Then the doll stopped crying and levered itself into a sitting position, its legs hanging over the edge of the bar, its arms at its sides. The eyes opened. The head turned.

Injection-molded, machine-made, glued and st.i.tched and painted, this minikin in pink pedal pushers and yellow T-shirt was blind, of course, yet its eyes moved left and right and left again, surveying the people gathered in the tavern as though it could see them with perfect clarity.

In a childlike voice, it said, "Hungry. Eat."

Logic wasn't taxed by the argument that those two words would have been included in the vocabulary on the toy's voice chip.

Yet when the doll spoke, those onlookers standing nearest to it backed away.

Molly moved closer to Neil.

"Hungry. Eat," the doll repeated.

The mouth was hinged at the corners. When the doll spoke, its lips moved, revealing a small pink tongue.

Still surveying the tavern, the minikin cycled through some of the contents of its phrase bank: "I love you...baby's sleepy...nighty-night...my tummy hurts...diaper wet...Mommy, sing for baby...baby likes your song...I will be good, Mommy...I'm hungry...baby needs pudding...yum-yum, all gone..."

The doll fell silent. Tipping its head back, it gazed at the ceiling, as if it felt the behemoth pa.s.sing in the rainy night.

Indeed, something in the doll's att.i.tude-the c.o.c.k of its head, the slight forward lean of its body, the unnerving intensity of its gla.s.s eyes-gave rise in Molly to the thought that it was not merely aware of the leviathan above but was also in communion communion with it. with it.

Lowering its head, shifting its gaze to those in the tavern once more, the doll said, "Diaper...diaper...diaper." Then it dropped the second syllable: "Di...di...di...."

Someone said, "Shut the d.a.m.n thing up," and someone else said, "Wait, let's see."

"Singsing...sing," said the doll, then shortened the word to just the suffix, "...ing...ing...ing." A pause. Then the combined form: "Dying...dying...dying..."

Looking around, Molly saw faces as pale as her own must be.

Lee Ling watched, one fist to her mouth, biting on her knuckles, and her husband, Norman, stood with his shotgun cradled across his arm, as if he wished he could do something with it.

The doll declared, "Dying hurts," and although it had no source of power to facilitate such animation, it raised its right hand to its mouth, as if in imitation of Lee Ling.

The articulated shoulder and elbow joints might have allowed the minikin's arm to bend as it did. Its molded rubber hands were not jointed, however, and should not have been able to commit the self-mutilation that followed.

Reaching between its hinged lips, the doll pinched its pink vinyl tongue and tore it out.

"Dying hurts."

Up went the left hand, which clawed at the left socket, pried out the semispherical eye, and dropped it on the bar, where it bounced, blue and blinkless, along the mahogany, and spent its final energy in a short-lived blind spin.

"All your babies," the doll said, in a cracked cadence that resulted from cobbling words together from various phrases on its voice chip, out of context, "all your babies will die."

27.

"ALL YOUR BABIES WILL DIE."

On the repet.i.tion of that threat, Molly looked toward the children gathered at the far side of the room. All were on their feet, craning their necks. She wished that they could be spared this psychological warfare, if that was in fact the purpose of the puppeteer behind this bizarre performance.

The doll sat one-eyed, working a finger of its right hand in the empty socket in the manner of a swimmer trying to drain a water block in an ear.

If wet gray wormlike forms had burst in frenzied wriggling from the gouged socket, Molly would not have been surprised.

"All your babies will die."

The weight of those five words, seemingly a promise of human extinction, pressed as heavily on her as the maximum density of the hovering mystery above Black Lake that, with the rhythmic throb of its engines or its heart, compressed her lungs, oppressed her spirit.

The doll's right hand rose to the right socket, tore loose the second orb. Always sightless since the day of manufacture, it had now double-blinded itself.

"All your babies, your babies, your babies will die."

His choking rage expressed in a throttled curse, Norman Ling stepped to the bar, raising his shotgun.

"Norman, G.o.d's sake, no shooting here!" warned Russell Tewkes, the tavern owner.

As the eye fell from the rubbery hand, the sorcery enlivening the figure seemed to subside in power or even to vacate it entirely. The doll sagged, slumped backward on the bar, and lay still, its eyeless gaze turned toward the ceiling, the night, and the G.o.ds of the storm.

Pale with fear, hard-faced with anger, Tewkes used one cupped hand to sweep the torn vinyl tongue and the two gla.s.s eyes off the bar into a trash can.

As the taverner next reached for the doll, someone cried out, "Russ, behind you!"

Revealing that his nerves were trigger wires, Tewkes turned with snap-quick torque that belied the apparent ponderousness of his beer-barrel body, fisting his hands as if to defend, in cla.s.sic barroom style, against any looming threat.

At first Molly didn't see what had inspired the warning.

Then Tewkes declared, "That's not going to be me. Like h.e.l.l it is."

A mirror ran the length of the long bar. Tewkes stared at his reflection, in which the right side of his face was crushed.

In spite of his declaration, half convinced by the testimony of the mirror, Tewkes raised one hand to his face to rea.s.sure himself that a catastrophe had not already befallen him. In the reflection, his hand looked twisted, mangled.

Gasps of recognition and thin cries of horror arose from others in the tavern as they realized that Tewkes was not the only one among them whose reflection purported to be a preview of his mortal fate. In the mirror, they saw their friends, saw their neighbors, sought themselves-and in every instance were presented with a cadaver, each the victim of extreme violence.

The lower jaw had been torn from Tucker Madison's face. The deputy's upper teeth bit air.

In reflection, Vince Hoyt's Roman-emperor head lacked the top of its skull, and the phantom Vince pointed out of the mirror, at the real Vince, with an arm that terminated in bristling bone below the elbow.

Here stood a gnarled burnt ma.s.s that had once been a man, still smoking, grinning not with humor or menace, but because his teeth had been revealed in dental-chart explicitness when his lips had been seared away.

Molly knew that she shouldn't look for herself in this gruesome mural. If it was a glimpse of unavoidable destiny, it would foster despondency. If it was a lie, the image of her death-corrupted face and body would nevertheless fester in memory, diminishing her will to action, compromising her survival instinct.

Morbid curiosity may be integral to the human genome: In spite of her better judgment, she looked anyway.

In the premonitory mirror, in that other other tavern of the standing dead, Molly Sloan did not exist. Where she should have been, there was only vacancy. Behind that vacancy stood the ripped and grisly reflection of the man stationed at her back on tavern of the standing dead, Molly Sloan did not exist. Where she should have been, there was only vacancy. Behind that vacancy stood the ripped and grisly reflection of the man stationed at her back on this this side of the looking gla.s.s. side of the looking gla.s.s.

Earlier in the night, in her bedroom vanity mirror, where she had glimpsed a future version of that chamber jungled with vines and mold and fungus, she had seen her reflection; she had not appeared therein as a corpse or in any way distorted, but entirely as she looked in reality.

Now, with dread, she sought Neil's reflection. When she found that he also had no place in that back-bar panorama of animated cadavers, she didn't know whether she should be relieved by their lack of representation or should a.s.sume that it meant their fate involved something worse than the decapitation, amputation, and mutilation visited upon the others.

She glanced at him beside her, in the flesh. Their eyes met, and she knew that he had recognized the absence of their reflections and, like her, was confused about the meaning of it.

The lights failed. Absolute darkness flourished.

This time, no doubt, the loss of power would be permanent.

Prepared for this eventuality, eight, then ten, then perhaps twenty of the gathered citizens switched on flashlights. Sabers of light slashed the darkness.

Many of the beams found the mirror, perhaps evidence of a collective fear that the grotesque Others on the far side of the silvered gla.s.s had in the blackness stepped through to this world. The dazzle made it impossible to see the current reflection.

Someone threw a beer bottle. The long mirror shattered, and the fragments rang to the floor in a cascade of ominous notes.

Although the mirror was his property, and though it broke around his feet in a surf of dangerous shards, Russell Tewkes didn't object.

In the sweep and clash of flashlight beams, in the flares from falling silvered fragments, Molly noticed something that strummed yet another arpeggio of terror from her taut nerves.

The eyeless, tongueless doll had a moment ago been rec.u.mbent on the bar. In the brief but total blackness, it had disappeared.

28.

IN ANTIc.i.p.aTION 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 h.e.l.l'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 rea.s.surances, 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 gla.s.s 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 a.s.sume that bit of Grand Guignol theater has convinced you that Bacchus and Dionysus are the only G.o.ds 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 bulls.h.i.t, 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 d.a.m.n thing repair its wound...I didn't tumble to it at the time, but you quoted Eliot to me."

A shadow pa.s.sed 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."