The Taking Part 24

These thoughts raced through Molly's mind even as she kept the children moving along Main Street under the silently hovering craft. Luminous reflections of the fog-veiled vessel played on the pavement as it tracked them step by step to the tavern.

No guards were posted at the door.

As before, the neon beer-company logos in the windows, now all dark, were backdropped by lowered shades. Nothing of the interior could be seen.

The pact Molly had made with Neil-that henceforth they would go everywhere together, would die side by side if death found them, and would never leave each other to die alone-must be amended.

If the two of them went inside to persuade those in the tavern that one form of death or another was breeding in the bas.e.m.e.nt beneath them, the five children would be left outside alone. Easy pickings.

On the other hand, if they took the children inside, they would be exposing them to perhaps the very horror from which they had saved them in the church-or to something worse, considering that something worse, hour after hour, was the specialty of the enemy.

In this instance and in other situations to come, she and Neil would have to split up. If they didn't have the courage to act alone when necessary, they might as well go directly to the bank right now, with the five kids for whom they had made themselves responsible, and forget about the other children who might need them.

Like Ca.s.sie. In the tavern.

Neil wanted to go inside, but they agreed that whoever stayed with the kids ought to have the shotgun.

Indicating the luminous craft hovering in the shrouding fog, Molly said, "Shotgun won't bring that down, but the spread pattern of buckshot ought to stop more big bugs and nasty animals than all the rounds in my pistol."

Neil tried to give her the 12-gauge, but she wouldn't take it. She had never fired a shotgun before. She suspected that the hard recoil would compromise her effectiveness at least until she learned how to compensate for it.

Only a fool or a suicidal depressive would choose to learn the proper handling of a new weapon while in the heat of battle.

Neil would stay in the street, guarding the kids.

Armed with the 9-mm pistol, Molly would go into the tavern, argue the wisdom of evacuation to those inside, and one way or another get Ca.s.sie out of there.

Along Main Street, nothing moved in the moody half-light except the thin violet mist, which eddied lazily in the breathless morning.

The silence of a fly in amber, of a fossil hidden in the heart of a stone, lay upon Black Lake.

Then in the distance a man wept in misery. A weeping woman answered him. And then another.

All three sounded as if they were torn with emotion, convincing, until you realized that the cadences of their grief were identical, one to another.

The morning had grown warmer. Molly took off her raincoat.

The red dragons of the trees might be watching from a distance. Maybe they only hunted in their arbors. Or maybe they came down to kill in the street; it didn't really matter, she supposed, because if not them, something else would.

Fifteen feet overhead, the thick velvet fog was a curtain drawn between dying humanity-which was both the tragic protagonist and the audience-and the last act of Armageddon. Stagehands were moving into place the final scenery of doom.

The luminous craft hovered, attentive. Molly had not grown accustomed to the all-penetrating scrutiny of those aboard it. She felt humbled, curiously ashamed, frightened, and angry.

She nurtured the anger. Like hope, it staved off despair.

Virgil nuzzled her left hand, then returned to his watchful patrol between the children and the dead town.

Molly didn't need to tell Neil that she loved him. He knew. And she knew what she meant to him. They said it as well as it could be said with just a meeting of the eyes, a touch of hands.

With the pistol and a flashlight, she went into the tavern.

45.

FLAMES WORRIED WICKS IN SCORES OF AMBER gla.s.s globes, as before. The walls and ceiling of Russell Tewkes's tavern appeared to tremble like painted curtains in the lambent candlelight.

The air itself seemed luminous, similar to the atmosphere in a dream of angels, and for a moment Molly was relieved to think that those who had been here when she'd left had later left themselves. No one sat in the booths or at the tables. No one stood at the bar, nor was Tewkes stationed behind it.

Derek and the drunks were gone. As were the peace lovers. And the fence-sitters, with Ca.s.sie.

Had she not studied the scene one second longer, had she turned and walked out, she might have thought that the lot of them had gone to the bank, after all, to a.s.sist in preparations for its defense. Lingering, however, she realized that her preferred scenario was not the one that had played out here.

First, the guns. Rifles, shotguns, and handguns had been left behind.

Neither the drunks nor the peace lovers had been armed, but many of the fence-sitters had been prepared to defend themselves if ultimately they made up their minds that self-defense was necessary or desirable. Not all all of them would have gone out into this changed and changing world without weapons. of them would have gone out into this changed and changing world without weapons.

Second, the clothes. Coats and jackets had been left behind on chairs. Then she saw sweaters and shirts draped over some of the coats, and a pair of jeans.

Venturing farther from the front door, deeper into the tavern, she found drifts of discarded clothing on the floor. Slacks, khakis, more jeans, more shirts, blouses, socks, men's and women's underwear. Shoes and boots and belts and rain hats.

Implications of violence: All colors and styles of loose b.u.t.tons littered the floor. Clothes had been torn off in such rage or frenzy that the b.u.t.tons had popped loose. Numerous garments were ripped along the seams.

Yet apparently no guns had been fired.

Silence pooled fathoms deep. She held her breath, listened, but her ears might as well have been stoppled by a mile of ocean.

She kicked gently at some b.u.t.tons. They rattled away from her shoe, across the floor planks, proving that she had not been struck deaf.

Wrist.w.a.tches had been cast away. Sparkling on tables and across the floor were the warmth of gold, the chill of silver: necklaces, lockets, bracelets, rings.

Mystified as to what had happened, Molly could only suppose that the thirty to forty missing people had been forced to strip against their will. Because she had known several of them and because those she'd known had been people of common modesty, she couldn't conceive of any situation in which they would have disrobed willingly.

Yet no guns had been fired.

So...perhaps a shared madness had seized them, resulting from the unwitting intake of a psychosis-inducing toxin.

Certain rarely encountered exotic molds, including one that made its home in corn, could cause visual and auditory hallucinations, and an entire community could be swept up in the resultant ma.s.s hysteria. Some believe this-and not merely religious fanaticism-to be the root cause of the Salem witch trials, for they occurred in the season of the mold.

Molds were a cla.s.s of fungi, and fungi appeared to const.i.tute a more significant phylum of the invading extraterrestrial ecology than they did in Earth's natural order.

Toxins produced by alien fungi might induce delusions, shared hallucinations, and ma.s.s hysteria of a kind and an intensity new to human experience. Temporary psychosis. Enduring madness. Perhaps even homicidal frenzy.

On the tables and on the floor were broken beer bottles. Corona. Heineken. Dos Equis.

Some appeared to have been broken not by accident but with the intent to create weapons. The long neck of a Corona made a serviceable hilt, while the broken body of the bottle provided multiple jagged blades.

On one of these lacerating weapons, Molly found blood. Then on another. And a third. Still wet.

Arterial spatters stained a few articles of discarded clothing, though the modest volume didn't indicate wholesale slaughter or even much of a battle.

As many as forty people were missing. Evidently naked. But...alive? Dead? Where?

Once more Molly held her breath, willed herself to listen through through the adamant knocking of her heart, but again she heard nothing. the adamant knocking of her heart, but again she heard nothing.

At the back of the large public room, past all the tables, lay the hallway to the men's and women's lavatories. To the right of the hallway, in the back wall of this main chamber, waited a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY EMPLOYEES ONLY.

The candlelight in this forward area of the tavern, where the townspeople had been gathered, did not much relieve the shadows at the back of the big room. Yet because of flickering light beyond it, she could see that the door, which had previously been closed, stood a quarter open.

She didn't relish further exploration alone, accompanied by only a host of horrific expectations.

Considering that the rest of her days were likely to be lived in a tangle of enigmas and unfathomables, she could live without knowing the answer to this one mystery. Although she was an inquiring person by nature, it seemed clear that the price of curiosity in this case would be the same for her as for the fabled cat.

One thing kept her from retreating. Ca.s.sie.

If the girl still lived, she was somewhere in peril and great distress. She could not be abandoned.

Perhaps coincidence accounted for the fact that Ca.s.sie's hair was blond, as had been Rebecca Rose's hair, that her eyes were blue, as had been Rebecca Rose's eyes.

All of her life, however, Molly had believed that there were no coincidences. She was not going to start believing in them now.

In all things, she saw design, though often the meaning of it was difficult to discern. Sometimes it was d.a.m.n near impossible. As here, as now.

During the writing of a novel, when she came to trust in the reality of her characters, they began to act of their own volition, doing things that charmed, intrigued, and appalled her. Allowing them free will, she rejoiced in their wise choices and in their triumphs, was saddened by their stupidities, meannesses, and often grieved when they suffered or died. In the interest of their self-determination, she chronicled rather than created the events of their lives, seldom pulled their strings, and generally offered them only gentle guidance through signs and portents that they either understood and acted upon or, to their misfortune, refused to recognize.

Here, alone under the roof of the Tail of the Wolf, she hoped for gentle guidance, and if she failed to recognize it when it was given to her, or misinterpreted it, she hoped for some vigorous pulling of strings on her behalf.

The issue was not whether she should retreat or go forward. She could not retreat. She knew her role. She rescued children; she did not abandon them.

If Ca.s.sie had been a brunette, with no resemblance to Rebecca Rose, Molly still could not have walked away from her. The question wasn't whether or not to rescue the girl but how best to find her and extract her from this place.

At the back of the public area, the EMPLOYEES ONLY EMPLOYEES ONLY door stood ajar. In the room beyond, flickering light seemed to beckon her. door stood ajar. In the room beyond, flickering light seemed to beckon her.

Maybe this was guidance. Maybe it was a trap.

46.

BROODING ABOUT THE DOOR, KEEPING A watch on it, Molly walked to the end of the bar. She opened the gate and peered into the narrow service area where Russell Tewkes had worked the taps and mixed the c.o.c.ktails.

She probed with her flashlight. No one crouched there among the brittle, bristling ruins of the shattered back-bar mirror.

A sludge of darkness filled the hall that led to the lavatories. Her beam washed it away, revealing no one.

She considered investigating the rest rooms. The prospect didn't thrill her.

She worried about what size the black fungus had achieved. What capabilities might it possess?

In the women's room, she had never closed the window following Render's departure. Anything might have crept in from this goblin night. In that tight s.p.a.ce, the three closed stall doors would offer the challenge of three spring-loaded lids on jack-in-the-boxes packed with surprises designed in h.e.l.l.

Besides, the two lavatories together could not have accommodated forty people. She didn't expect to find them in small groups, whether dead or alive, but in one place.

Here again she felt the truth of being at the still point of the turning world, with past and future gathered in the moment.

Although she had resisted this knowledge all her life, had lived determinedly in the future, focused there by ambition, she understood at last that this this was the real condition of humanity: The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simple, self-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future. was the real condition of humanity: The dance of life occurred not yesterday or tomorrow, but only here at the still point that was the present. This truth is simple, self-evident, but difficult to accept, for we sentimentalize the past and wallow in it, while we endure the moment and in every waking hour dream of the future.

What Molly had done thus far in her life was the history of her soul, unalterable, ineradicable. What she hoped to do in the future was of no meaning if she failed to do the wise thing, the good thing, moment by moment by moment, here at the still point, here in the dance of life.

Ca.s.sie. Finding Ca.s.sie. Moment by moment by moment, finding Ca.s.sie, the past would be made, and the future.

With pistol, with flashlight, with trepidation, she cautiously approached the door.

Through the open wedge, she saw six or eight candles in gla.s.s globes, deposited on the floor. Salamanders of apricot light crawled the walls.

She nudged the door with one foot, and it swung smoothly inward on well-oiled hinges.

Candlelight revealed no occupants. Neither did the flashlight when, from the threshold, she swept the s.p.a.ce with it.

Beyond lay what appeared to be a receiving room measuring approximately twelve by fifteen feet. Windowless. Gray tile floor with a drain in the center. Bare concrete walls.

A wide steel door directly opposite the one in which she stood would open to the alleyway behind the tavern. Cases of beer, liquor, wine, and other supplies had been delivered through it.

In the wall to her right, reflections of candle flames purled in the brushed stainless-steel doors of an elevator.

The tavern didn't have a second floor. The elevator transported supplies down to the bas.e.m.e.nt.

In the wall to her left stood another door, ajar. Logic insisted that she would find bas.e.m.e.nt stairs beyond it.

Between the doorway in which she stood and the bas.e.m.e.nt door, the flashlight beam detailed a trail of wet blood on gray concrete: not a river of gore, just patterns of droplets intact and droplets smeared.

With no electrical service, they had not taken the elevator down to whatever madness waited to be discovered below. Whether under duress or of their own accord, though in either case surely in the grip of unimaginable terror, they had descended the narrow pa.s.sage in single file, naked and bleeding.

A chill walked the stairs of Molly's spine as she considered that strange procession and wondered what ceremony or savagery had occupied those people in the cellar.

She glanced back into the deserted tavern. Nothing had changed.

Trying to avoid as much of the blood as possible, she stepped off the threshold and followed the beam of her flashlight along the trail that her neighbors had so recently marked with sanguinary clarity.

The bra.s.s doork.n.o.b, once shiny, was patinaed with blood from uncounted trembling hands. She toed the door open toward her, into the receiving room.