Dean Koontz - The Taking

The booth benches featured open space under the seats. Molly tucked her legs back-and thought of the missing doll.

In the brief darkness between the loss of public power and the lighting of the candles, the doll could have crawled into this booth, under her seat. Eyeless but all-seeing. Tongueless mouth filled with the breathless silence of a stalking predator.

She resisted the urge to scramble out of the booth and search under it with a flashlight. To do so would be to succumb to the most childish of fears, after which she would find it more difficult to summon the courage to face the real and more serious terrors that surely were coming.

It was just a doll. And if she should feel a small hand on her ankle, it would be only the hand of a doll, no matter how demonically animated, just the hand of a doll.

She wiped at her damp cheeks. "Are they really taking our world from us?"

"The evidence says so."

"Or is that just the way we're reading the evidence?"

"I don't see how else to interpret it."

"Neither do I. That thing in the janitor's closet…" She shuddered.

She could still feel the airborne titan overhead, and now when she turned her attention to the ceiling, she could sense the vessel's movement, too, as it progressed southward through the storm. She seemed to be increasingly sensitized to it.

"But fast-track terraforming is Derek's theory," she said, "and I don't trust him."

"What is it with Derek?" Neil asked. "Why did he act like that with you?"

"I don't know."

"You said maybe Render wasn't only Render."

"And I still don't know what I mean by that."

"Is Derek really Derek but not only Derek?"

"For sure, there's something wrong with him."

Rubbing the nape of his neck with one hand, he said, "I'm back to the alien-parasite movies."

"Then why haven't they burrowed into all of us? Why aren't we all controlled?"

"Maybe we will be soon."

She shook her head. "Life isn't science fiction."

"Submarines, nuclear weapons, television, computers, satellite communications, organ transplants-it was all the stuff of science fiction before it was reality. And the biggest sci-fi theme of all is alien contact."

"But with the power to change a world-why the psychological warfare? They could just crush us like ants, which they seem to be doing anyway, in the cities if not here."

"You mean the doll, the mirror."

"And Harry Corrigan, and this T. S. Eliot weirdness. If they can replace our entire environment with theirs, scour away human civilization in days or weeks, eradicate it more efficiently than a seven-continent nuclear war, they wouldn't bother to screw with our minds like this."

Remembering the doll as it had stared at the ceiling just before it mutilated itself, Molly glanced up again and wondered if increased sensitivity to the storm-sailing leviathan would open her mind to its influence. Perhaps, eventually robbed of her free will, she would mimic the doll and gouge out her eyes.

"We aren't already dead because they have some sort of use for us," she suddenly realized.

"What use?"

"I can imagine several…"

"So can I," he said.

"None of them good."

"Remember the movie The Matrix?"

"Forget movies. That's the way they want us to think, that's how we're being guided to think. But this is nothing like any movie ever made."

She watched Vince Hoyt talking animatedly to a man she didn't know. Unwanted, into her mind came an image from the mirror: the coach with the top of his skull gone.

"Maybe they don't have a use for all of us," she said, "but certainly for some of us. We've been targeted, not for death but for manipulation. That stuff with the doll and the bar mirror-everyone saw it, but maybe it was only meant to influence you and me."

"Maybe only you," he said. "Derek came to you. Render came to you. Harry Corrigan came to you. None of them to me."

Molly rebelled at the thought that their individual destinies might differ radically, and that therefore their paths must sooner or later diverge. "I don't know what it means, but it means something that we were the only ones not reflected in that mirror."

"Not the only ones," he corrected. "The kids weren't there, either."

The six children now stood together near the booth in which they had previously been seated. If earlier they had exhibited some spirit of adventure, it had given way entirely to fear. They appeared to be ready to bolt at the slightest provocation.

Acting on instinct and with natural purpose, the dogs gravitated where they were needed most. While six canines still roamed the room, three-a golden retriever, a German shepherd, and a black-and-tan mutt with the build of a boxer but with the shaggy face of a Scottish terrier-had gathered around the children to soothe troubled hearts as dogs have always done, and no doubt to defend their young charges against any threat.

Watching the kids and the dogs, Molly again felt enlightenment teasing her from just beyond the open fields of conscious thought, a shapeless shape moving in the shadowy woods of the subconscious, both enticing and disturbing.

"Besides the children," she asked Neil, "who else didn't cast a reflection in the mirror?"

"I don't know. It all happened so fast, there wasn't time for a head count. Maybe a couple others. Or maybe just the eight of us-you, me, the kids."

The soundless throbbing in the bones, the blood, the lymph, pulses sympathetic to the rhythms of the magnetic engines powering the behemoth overhead, began to subside.

She sensed the great weight and the malevolent shadow passing off them as the vast ship moved south, and to avoid despondency, she dared not think about the hordes of inhuman creatures that must be aboard it and the cruel irresistible power it represented.

Throughout the tavern, candle flames swelled brighter, as if their light had been oppressed in much the way that the tides of the seas are managed by the phases of the moon.

Molly's mind seemed to function more quickly and clearly, too. She perceived purpose where before she had seen nothing but mists of confusion.

Working it out step by step, she said to Neil, "What is Render, my father?"

"What do you mean?"

"What one word defines the essence of him?"

"Psychopath," Neil said.

"That's a distraction from the truth."

"Murderer," he said.

"More specifically?"

"Murderer… of children."

As Neil spoke, a dog came to their table-the German shepherd that had stood with the group of kids. It stared intently at Molly.

She sat up straighter in the booth as her immediate future, previously all murk and mystery, began to clarify. "Yes-Render's a child murderer. And what am I?"

"To me-everything," he said. "To the world-a writer."

"I love you," she said, "and what we've had together. It doesn't get better. But if this is the last night of the world, if I've no more living left to define myself, then I'm defined forever by the best and worst things I've ever done."

Frowning, Neil followed half a step behind in her series of conclusions. "The best… you saved the lives of those school kids."

"He murders children. Once… I saved a few."

With an anxious whine, the German shepherd drew her attention.

She had thought that the dog wandered to their booth with no more purpose than to explore that section of the floor and to cadge tidbits from them if they had any food to share.

Its gaze was unusually intense, however, and more than intense: strange, compelling.

She considered how the dogs, en masse, had reacted to her when she had first arrived in the tavern. They had seemed to be watching her surreptitiously ever since.

"Neil, we've been thinking pretty much only about ourselves, how to survive. That leaves us with nothing to do but find a hidey-hole, hunker down, and wait."