The Taking Part 18

The mist had no scent. The rain had left no smell behind.

One phase of the taking of the earth had ended.

A new and surely more terrifying phase had begun.

In every end is a beginning-and perhaps in this beginning, for her and Neil, would be the end of all things mortal. The last twist of the knife.

Visibility proved inconstant. Even when she stood still, one moment she could see only five feet, the next moment ten; never more than twenty; sometimes only as far as from eye to hand.

People poured out of the tavern, though many remained behind with their lubricants and illusions. Each took only a few steps before he became a ghostly form with the m.u.f.fled voice of a mummy in its windings.

In this slowly churning, ever shifting purple opacity, a flashlight seemed useful. When Neil probed with his, however, the beam refracted strangely through the murk, revealing nothing and further confusing the eye.

Switching off the flash and pocketing it, he said, "Better to have both hands for the shotgun, anyway."

Molly had drawn her pistol as she'd come out of the tavern door. She felt no better armed than a blowgun primitive cast by some fluke of time onto a modern battlefield contested by armies with tanks and laser-guided missiles.

A ragtag group of the resistance fighters set off for the bank, on foot and closely marshaled. Their footsteps and then their voices quickly faded.

Another group, in a Chevy Suburban and a Ford pickup, drove away, into the lower reaches of town, toward Norman Ling's food market. Although they proceeded at a creep, they soon vanished into the throat of the fog; and a swallow later, their headlights dimmed, damped.

The roar of engines swiftly softened and, with distance, changed into a throaty grumble, as if beasts from the Jura.s.sic period prowled swamps in the purple dimness far below.

She worried that the dog would race ahead of them, vanish in the earthbound clouds, but she hoped that he would obey her when she called him back. The fog might complicate their search, but no more than the pounding rain would have done.

"All right, Virgil," she said, "let's do the work."

The dog seemed to know what she meant, and he started forward at a pace they could match.

They walked the center of the street, their hoods thrown back, but still wearing their raincoats in case the storm returned.

They had not gone far when a forlorn voice called out of the mist: "Help me. Someone help me."

The dog stopped, ears p.r.i.c.ked forward.

Molly scanned the gloom, seeking the source of the cry.

"Where?" Neil asked.

"I don't know."

Then the pleading came again, this time with a thin note of anguish: "Please. Someone please. Oh, G.o.d, please help me."

She recognized the voice. Ken Halleck: the postal clerk with the muttonchops and the wide smile.

With rifle and pitchfork, Ken and his seventeen-year-old son, Bobby, had been guarding the front door of the tavern.

On leaving that establishment, Molly had not realized that Ken and Bobby were missing. The end of the rain, the arrival of dawn, and the purple mist had fully commanded her attention.

"I hear someone," Halleck said, his voice shuddering with pain, with fear. "Please, don't leave me here alone, suffering like this. I'm so afraid."

Virgil deduced Halleck's location and advanced a few steps in that direction before halting. His head lowered and his hackles rose. He growled softly, more to warn his companions than to challenge whatever menace he detected in the dismalness ahead.

Molly hesitated, but when Halleck cried out again, this time in a racked voice even more pitiable than before, she could not turn away from him, even if he might be-as the dog's reaction seemed to suggest-bait in a trap.

"Careful," Neil whispered, moving with her, at her side, into the livid mist, leaving the wary dog behind them.

Foreboding, forbidding, the odorless miasma closed around them, cloyed, so thick it seemed to m.u.f.fle even the beat of her heart in her own ears. But in a few steps it began to draw away, like layer upon layer of opening curtains.

Through lifting veils, Molly saw an object in the street, dark against the darker blacktop. In another step she realized that it was the severed head of Ken Halleck.

In the bodiless head, the eyes opened, filled with impossible life, and with unspeakable misery.

The lips moved, the mouth cracked, and words came forth: "Do you know where Bobby is, my Bobby, my son?"

32.

THE HUMAN IMAGINATION MAY BE THE MOST elastic thing in the universe, stretching to encompa.s.s the millions of hopes and dreams that in centuries of relentless struggle built modern civilization, to entertain the endless doubts that hamper every human enterprise, and to conceive the vast menagerie of boogeymen that trouble every human heart.

Yet there had been discoveries and sights in these momentous hours that Molly could not have imagined and with which her reason wrestled and lost. Not the least was this severed and yet apparently living head, although it had been foreshadowed by the brainless walking corpse of Harry Corrigan and by the self-mutilating doll.

For a moment, Ken Halleck's eyes transfixed her. Pathetic. Pathoformic. Demonic.

The aliens had introduced on Earth some malevolent energy that did not differentiate between vegetable and animal, between organic and inorganic, between the animate and the inanimate. It thrived equally in the living and in the dead, and in what had never lived at all.

In Ken's voice now, a tremor of anguish, of grief: "Where is my Bobby? What have they done to him? I want to see my boy."

The mind not only reeled but rebelled, and not only rebelled but retreated to denial, desperate to refute this abomination no matter how vividly the senses confirmed it.

You might imagine surviving in an environment transformed to match that of a world on the far end of the galaxy, dressed with strange malignant plants, populated by a Sabbat broth of repulsive and vicious animals. You might hope for a hospitable corner in some extreme lat.i.tude, where you could live out your days in mousehole secrecy, with simple food and the pleasures of the timid.

But Molly couldn't imagine wanting wanting to survive in a madhouse world where the dead walked, severed heads conversed, dolls made threats, and every horror of the elastic human imagination might be encountered-and worse. Such a place could offer no moment of peace, no chance of happiness. to survive in a madhouse world where the dead walked, severed heads conversed, dolls made threats, and every horror of the elastic human imagination might be encountered-and worse. Such a place could offer no moment of peace, no chance of happiness.

Here, now, she might have given up the hope of survival, except that she would be left with two options: wait until some nightmare creature found her and tore her to pieces-or kill herself. Either course counted as self-destruction, however, and suicide was not permissible in her philosophy or her faith.

Besides, the children had to be found. What might happen after she had gathered them together under her inadequate protection was something she chose not to dwell upon.

"I love my boy, my Bobby," said Halleck's head, "where is my Bobby?"

Neil raised the shotgun, but Molly stayed him with a touch.

"It isn't Ken," she said. "There's no need to put him out of his misery. Ken's dead and gone."

"I just want to stop the d.a.m.n thing," he said angrily. "Just shut it up."

"You won't. It'll take the blast and keep on talking. And that'll be even worse."

Besides, she believed they should conserve their ammunition. Although a few rounds from a 12-gauge had not deterred whatever had come after Harry Corrigan in his house, there might be adversaries in the hours ahead that would be vulnerable to a well-placed punch of buckshot.

Retreating, they couldn't at once find Virgil in the murk. He barked softly, sought them out, and led them again on the right path.

Before they had gone a dozen steps, a metallic rattle-and-clank challenged the m.u.f.fling mastery of the mist. They approached the racket cautiously.

This time the parting fog revealed a man in the street, near the curb, on his knees, in the lurid light of this strange dawn. He knelt at an opening to a storm drain, his back to them, hunched forward, attempting to pry the heavy steel grate out of its niche in the pavement.

Although the rain had stopped, runoff still fed the gutters. Dirty water, thickened by a jetsam of leaves and litter, surged over his hands.

A low growl from Virgil counseled caution again.

Molly and Neil stopped, said nothing, waited for the man to sense their presence.

His gibbous posture, the intensity of his focus, the curious nature of the task to which he was committed-these things brought to Molly's mind disturbing fairy tales of hateful trolls indulging unholy hungers.

With the hard sc.r.a.pe of metal on blacktop, the grate came loose. The troll slid it aside.

He raised his head, but had no head. He looked over his shoulder at Molly and Neil, but even if he knew they were behind him, he could not see them, because he was Ichabod Crane's nemesis, minus a horse.

The knock-knock-knock of Molly's heart might also have been the fist of madness rapping on the door of her mind.

In this unearthly purplescent morning and sky-shrouding fog, where the laws of nature seemed to have dissolved entirely in some instances and to have been remade in others, Molly half expected that day would not follow dawn. Sunset might swiftly succeed sunrise, without the intervening hope of light, and the next night would then be endless, moonless, starless, and filled with the furtive sounds of a thousand creeping deaths.

The urge to shoot the headless atrocity proved difficult for both Molly and Neil to resist, but if the guillotining blade had not convinced the thing that it was dead, a 9-mm round through the heart wouldn't persuade it to lie down and expire.

The decapitated body of Ken Halleck-manipulated by a parasite puppeteer or by some extraterrestrial power that, based on effect, might as well have been sheer sorcery-lowered itself through the open hole into the storm drain. It dropped out of sight, landing with a splash below.

For an instant the night was still except for the gurgle from the gutters and the drip-drip-drip of sodden trees.

Then Molly heard the sloshing and the hollow thumping of the headless wonder as it slogged through deep water, under the streets of Black Lake, with unimaginable intent. Perhaps it would find a ledge in the storm drain, lie down above the rushing torrents, and offer its flesh as the spore bed for a colony of fungi or another life form of more sinister purpose.

PART FIVE.

"We are born with the dead: See, they return and bring us with them."

-T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding Little Gidding

33.

WAGLESS, ALL BUSINESS, AND AS QUICK AS THE fog allowed, Virgil led them to a residence on La Cresta Avenue, which was neither near the crest of the mountain nor an avenue, but halfway between the lake and the ridge line, a two-lane street not appreciably different from all the others in town.

The single-story house, in the Craftsman style, looked cozy and welcoming, in spite of the fact that the fierce rain had stripped all the leaves from the trumpet vines that climbed its trellises and had battered beds of cyclamens into red-and purple-petaled ruin.

As they approached the front porch along handsome flagstones, Neil suddenly stepped off the walkway, squished three steps across the soggy lawn, and said, "Look at this."

The object of his interest was a stone pine, and not the tree itself so much as what cl.u.s.tered on its fissured bark. Squinting in the bruised light, Molly saw patches of a blackish thallus, flecked with green, growing on the trunk in crustlike forms.

She'd seen lichen similar to this, although no earthly lichen featured luminous elements to equal these. Every emerald-green fleck was softly radiant; the glow pulsed in what she suspected might be a sympathetic rhythm that matched the long, slow throbs of the engines powering the airborne leviathan that had only recently pa.s.sed over them.

Along the perimeter of every thallus, the aggressive lichen grew at a visible rate, outward in all directions, as if she were watching time-lapse photography. During the minute that she and Neil studied it, the crust advanced almost half an inch.

At this rate, the trunk and every branch would be covered in this scaly scab in only a few hours.

Lichen were themselves complex symbiotic organisms composed of a fungus in union with an alga. They frequently thrived without damage to the host tree.

In this instance, Molly suspected that the stone pine would not survive the encrustation. Either it would perish and fall, hollowed out by a species of rot as alien as the organism colonizing its bark, or it would be invaded, mutated, and remade into the genetic image of a plant from another world.

The radiant emerald pulse that stippled the blackish thallus had a jewel-bright gleam. In different circ.u.mstances, the tree might have appeared to be inlaid with a wealth of precious gems, glittering and magical.

No aura of fairyland wonder surrounded the pine, however. Quite the opposite: In spite of its bejeweled aspect, and though the lichen infestation had only recently begun, the tree appeared cancer-ridden, mottled with malignancies.

Virgil had not approached the pine, but had remained on the flagstone walkway, watchful and tense.

Molly shared the dog's wariness. She didn't touch the lichen, fearing that it might transfer to her fingertip and prove able to colonize human skin as readily as it did tree bark.

On the other side of the walkway stood a matching pine, and from a distance, even in this half-light, she could see the luminous lichen thriving on that specimen.

Virgil led them up the porch steps to the front door.

No candles, oil lamps, or other emergency lighting shone inside. The windows were dark except for dim reflections of the purple glow that suffused the lazily stirring mist.

If they entered without knocking, they were inviting gunfire.

On the other hand, if children inside were already in any kind of danger-from Michael Render or from something even less human-Molly and Neil might raise the level of jeopardy by announcing themselves.

Their dilemma was resolved, in part, when the front-door lock clicked and disengaged.

Reflexively, they stepped back and to the side, making less obvious targets of themselves.

Virgil stood his ground.

The door opened in a swift, inward sweep. Although only the influx of fog-filtered morning sunshine illuminated the small foyer, visibility was sufficient for Molly to discern that the s.p.a.ce was deserted, as though they were being welcomed by a ghost.