The Taking

She had never before experienced such a scent. Yet within the intricate matrix of this unique smell, she detected a tantalizingly familiar substance, simple in its nature. The more determinedly she strove to identify this core odor, the more its slippery name eluded her.

Although it smelled like a complex mélange of essences and exotic oils, the rain had the character and consistency of ordinary water. She rubbed it between thumb and fingertips, feeling nothing unusual.

Gradually Molly realized that she was lingering on the porch in the hope that the coyotes would return. Standing among them, like a lamb among lions, trembling on the brink of some revelation, had been such an awesome experience that she longed to repeat it.

When the coyotes did not reappear, an ineffable sense of loss overcame her. With it arose anew the feeling of being watched that earlier had stirred the fine hairs on the back of her neck.

Sometimes the forest appeared to her as a green cathedral. The massive pine trunks were columns in a vast nave, and the spreading boughs formed groin vaults and fan vaults high overhead.

Now, with the reverential hush of the woods replaced by the din of the downpour, the gloom coiling among the trees seemed to be of a different character from that on any previous night. The god of this cathedral was the lord of darkness.

Disquieted again, Molly backed across the porch, retreating from the steps. She did not for one moment look away from the encircling forest, half convinced that something would fly at her from out of the pines, something that would be all teeth and temper.

Inside, she closed the door. Engaged the deadbolt. Stood there for a moment, trembling.

She continued to be surprised and disturbed by her emotionalism. Driven by a kind of instinct, less of the mind than of the heart, she felt reduced from womanhood to the overwrought reactions of a girl—and she didn’t like it.

Eager to wash her hands, she hurried to the kitchen.

Approaching the open door, she saw that the light above the cooktop was still on, as she had left it when she’d heated the mug of milk.

At the threshold, she hesitated, suddenly expecting someone to be in the kitchen. Someone who had come in the back door while she had been distracted by the coyotes.

More emotionalism. Foolish. No intruder waited for her.

She crossed the kitchen directly to the back door, and tried it. Bolted. Secure. No one could have gotten in that way.

Coruscating curtains of radiant rain silvered the night. A thousand eyes might have watched from behind that sequined veil.

She lowered the pleated shade over the window beside the breakfast table. She dropped the shade at the window above the sink, as well.

After turning on the water and adjusting it to the hottest temperature that she could tolerate, she lathered her hands with liquid soap from the built-in dispenser. The soap smelled like oranges, a gratifyingly clean scent.

She had not touched any of the coyotes.

For a moment she did not understand why she was scrubbing her hands so determinedly. Then she realized that she was washing away the rain.

The curiously aromatic rain had left her feeling … unclean.

She rinsed her hands until they were red, half-scalded. Then she pumped more soap and lathered up a second time.

Within that mélange of subtle but exotic scents had been a vaguely familiar odor, smoky and ammoniac, that Molly had not quite been able to identify. Although she had flushed the smell from her hands, it now returned to her in memory, and this time she was able to name it: semen.

Under that spice-market variety of exotic aromas, the rain had exuded the fecund scent of semen.

This seemed so unlikely, so absurdly Freudian, that she wondered if she might be asleep. Or sliding into a neuropsychotic episode.

The inexplicable luminescence, the seminal rain, the cowering coyotes: From bed to foaming faucet, every step and moment of the experience had a hallucinatory quality.

She turned off the faucet, half expecting silence when the water stopped gushing. But the tremendous roar of the unseasonable rain was there, all right—either real or the soundtrack of a singularly persistent dream.

From elsewhere in the house, a sharp cry sliced through the monotonous drone of the storm. Upstairs. It came again. Neil. Her calm, composed, unflappable husband—crying out in the night.

With too much experience of violence dating from the age of eight, Molly reacted with alacrity, snatching the handset from the nearby wall phone. She keyed 9-1-1 before realizing that she hadn’t gotten a dial tone.

Over the open line came an audial tapestry of eerie, oscillating electronic tones. Low-pitched pulses of sound, high-pitched whistles and shrieks.

She hung up.

They owned a gun. Upstairs. In a nightstand drawer.

Neil cried out again.

Molly glanced at the locked door, felt again the desire to flee with the coyotes into the night. Whatever else she might be—insane or as foolish and hysterical as a girl—she was not a coward.

She went to the knife drawer and drew the most wicked blade from its sheath.

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

MOLLY WANTED LIGHT, A GREAT BRIGHT DAZzle of it, but she didn’t touch a switch. She knew the house better than any intruder could know it; in these rooms, darkness would be her ally.

Kitchen to hall to stairs, she cleaved the gloom with the point of the butcher knife and followed in its wake.

Some of the treads creaked, but the rumble of the downpour masked the sounds of her hurried ascent.

Upstairs, the storm still painted luminous galaxies on the skylights. Faint images of those patterns crawled the hallway floor.

Approaching the bedroom, she heard a groan followed by a softer cry than those that had preceded it.

Her heart clenched tight, knocked hard against its caging ribs.

As she pushed open the door and entered the dark bedroom, the butcher knife twitched and bobbed like a dowsing rod, as if divining the location of a hostile intruder, seeking not water but bad blood.

The mercurial light of the radiant rain, eddying through the room with a watery inconstancy, failed to illuminate every corner. Shadows shivered, throbbed; some of them might have been more than mere shadows.

Nevertheless, Molly lowered the knife. At this close range she realized that her husband’s groans and cries resulted from a struggle with nothing more threatening than a nightmare.

Neil’s sleep was usually as untroubled by narrative as it was deep and reliable. When slumber brought him a story, the plot was soothing, even comic.

She had sometimes watched him smiling in his sleep. On one occasion, without waking, he had laughed out loud.

As with everything else about the early hours of this Wednesday morning, the past did not serve as a guide to the present. Neil’s dream clearly was different from others he had experienced during the seven years that Molly had shared a bed with him. His panicked breathing and cries of dread suggested that he raced desperately through the forests of sleep, pursued by a terror that relentlessly gained ground on him.

Molly switched on a nightstand lamp. The sudden flush of light didn’t wake her husband.

Sweat darkened his brown hair almost to black. Wrung by anxiety, his face glistened.

Putting the knife on the nightstand, she said, “Neil?”