The Taking

“Harry, it’s me, Neil Sloan. You in there? Are you all right?”

When he received no answer, he stepped back from the door and kicked it hard. The lock was only a privacy set, not a deadbolt, and three kicks sprung it.

How curious that whatever had wrenched off the sturdier door to the bedroom had not torn this one away, as well.

Neil stepped to the threshold, then recoiled and turned away, the features of his face knocked out of true by a seismic jolt of visceral horror and revulsion.

He tried to prevent Molly from seeing what he had seen, but she refused to be turned away. No sight could be worse than some that she had endured on that terrible day in her eighth year.

Eyeless, his head hollowed out as completely as a jack-o’-lantern, Harry Corrigan sat on the bathroom floor, resting against the side of the bathtub. He had sucked on a short-barreled, pump-action, pistol-grip shotgun.

Sickened but not shocked, Molly turned at once away.

“He couldn’t stop grieving,” Neil said.

For an instant, she didn’t understand what he meant. Then she realized that in spite of all he had thus far witnessed, he remained to some degree in denial.

She said, “Harry didn’t kill himself because of Calista. He retreated to the bathroom and blew his brains out to avoid coming face-to-face with whoever tore down the bedroom door.”

The directness of “blew his brains out” caused Neil to flinch, and his face, paper-pale since he’d seen the dead man, shaded to a penciled gray.

“And when they heard the shotgun,” she continued, “they knew what he had done—and had no further interest in him.”

“They,” he said thoughtfully, and looked to the ceiling as if remembering the enormous descending mass that he had sensed earlier in the night. “But why not use the shotgun on … them?”

Suspecting that the answer might await discovery elsewhere in the house, Molly didn’t reply, but instead led the way back into the hall. A further search of the second floor turned up nothing of interest until they reached the back stairs.

This single narrow flight descended to a mud room adjacent to the kitchen. Molly knew that the lower chamber led also to the backyard.

Apparently Harry Corrigan had first encountered his unwanted visitors down there. He had been armed with the shotgun and had used it more than once on these stairs. Buckshot had gouged and pocked the walls, had chopped chunks and splinters from the wooden stairs.

Backing toward the second floor, firing down on the intruders, he could not have missed any target in that tightly confined space, considering the spread pattern of a shotgun. Yet there were no dead bodies on the stairs or at the foot of it. No blood.

Standing at the top of the stairwell with Molly, sharing her reluctance to enter that narrow flight, Neil wondered, “What was he shooting at—ghosts?”

She shook her head. “It wasn’t any ghost that tore the bedroom door off its hinges.”

“But what could walk through shotgun fire unscathed?”

“I don’t know. And maybe I don’t want to find out.” Molly turned away from the back stairs. “Let’s get out of here.”

They retraced the route they had taken from the front stairs, and as they were stepping around the fallen door in the hall outside the master bedroom, the lights flickered and went out.

11 (#u23f41bf5-c3b4-55ec-ab00-ad9d9c17eaf8)

WINDOWLESS, THE HALLWAY LACKED EVEN the unearthly glow of the luminous rain. Here ruled the absolute black of corridors in death dreams, of final resting places underground.

Still learning the necessary tactics to weather doomsday, Molly had unthinkingly left her flashlight in the Explorer.

In this blind domain rose a rustle separate from the susurrant chorus of the rain, a rustle like the unfurling, flexing, furling of featherless, membranous wings. She insisted to herself that it must be the sound of Neil searching his raincoat.

The sudden beam of his flashlight proved her right. She let out her pent-up breath.

The gloom in the hallway seemed not like ordinary darkness, subject to the laws of physics, but like Darkness Visible, the sooty essence of a palpable evil. The light carved a swath less revealing than she would have liked, and when the beam moved, the murk returned in eager leaps and swoops.

They negotiated the fallen door, but had gone only a few steps farther when a presence in the surrounding shadows recited a line by one of her favorite poets, T. S. Eliot.

“I think we are in rats’ alley—”

He spoke in a stage whisper, not in a shout, but somehow the words carried through the insistent tattoo of the rain, and Molly recognized the voice of Harry Corrigan, dead Harry, who had done to himself what a thug had done to his wife for the gain of only two hundred dollars.

Whipping, darting, arcing, the flashlight beam probed left, right, behind them. No one.

Neil passed the flashlight to Molly, freeing both of his hands for the shotgun.

Wielding light and handgun, she aimed the pistol with the beam. A half-open door to a guest bedroom on her right. The barely cracked door of a study to her left. Another door: a flare of porcelain in a bathroom beyond.

Harry or the grotesquely that had been Harry, or the thing that pretended to be Harry, might lurk in any of the three rooms. Or in none of them.

And now came the line from “The Waste Land” that in fact followed the one already spoken:

“—Where the dead men lost their bones.”

Molly couldn’t deduce the voice’s point of origin. The words twisted around her with serpentine deception, seeming to arise from first one side, then from another.

Her galloping heart stampeded, knocking so hard against her ribs that it seemed fire must have flared in her blood as surely as iron-shod hooves would have struck sparks from cobblestones.

First the palm of her right hand, then the checked grip of the pistol grew slick with sweat.

The stubborn dark, the cloying dark, the inadequate light, doors to both sides poised as tensely as the spring-loaded lids of pop-up toys, and forty feet to the head of the stairs.

Now thirty.

Twenty.

Near the stairs, a figure stepped out of a doorway or out of a wall, or through a portal between worlds; she couldn’t tell which and was prepared to believe anything.

The jittering light first revealed his shoes, the cuffs of his corduroy pants.

On the floor in his splattered bathroom, Harry had slumped in flannel shirt and corduroy pants. Corduroy of precisely this tan shade.

Molly’s knees weakened at the prospect of seeing again the hollow-pumpkin head, the empty sockets of the jack-o’-lantern eyes, the teeth broken jagged by the bucking barrel of the 12-gauge.

Yet what she wanted to see and what her determined hand intended to show her were different things. She raised the flashlight to his knees, belt buckle, flannel shirt, grizzled chin. …

Mercifully, Neil stepped past her, fired his shotgun, pumped a new round into the breach as the funhouse figure blew back, reeled back, into shadows. He said urgently, “Go, Molly, go, get out.”

The concussion had rung off the hallway walls; and still the echo tolled through surrounding rooms, through rooms below, as if the house were a many-chambered bell.