Dean Koontz - The Taking

"I knew," the boy said, and the girl clung desperately to Molly.

Neil worked the deadbolt, wrenched at the door with all his strength, but it resisted him.

Surrounded by groans and creaks and cracks and pops, Molly half believed that the house might close around them like a pair of jaws, grinding their bodies between the splintery teeth of its broken beams, tasting them upon its tongue of floors, pressing them against its palate of ceilings, finally swallowing their masticated remains into a basement, where the rustling legions would swarm over them, reducing flesh to fluid and bones to powder.

Neil stepped away from the door. "Move, get back," he ordered, and raised his shotgun, intending to blast loose the recalcitrant lock.

Virgil padded into the line of fire and pawed at the door-which swung inward.

Molly didn't pause to puzzle over whether Neil, always as steady as a ship at anchor, had lost his cool for a moment and had turned the knob in the wrong direction, fighting with an unlocked door, or whether instead the dog possessed major mojo beyond anything they had heretofore witnessed. Holding Abby against her side, she followed Virgil and Johnny out of the house, onto the porch, down the front steps, onto the flagstone walk.

When she turned, she was relieved to see that Neil hurried close behind her and that he had not been imprisoned by animate architecture.

The house looked no different from the way it had been when they'd first seen it. Craftsman style, no Cthulhu.

In the hush of the purple mist, Molly expected to hear the structure creaking, groaning, midway in a performance to match that of Poe's selfconsuming House of Usher, but her expectations went unfulfilled-not for the first time in this bizarre night-because the residence stood as silent, as deceptively serene, as inspiring of convoluted syntax as the stately manor in a ghost story by Henry James.

The front door slowly drifted shut, as though it had been hung with an inward-swinging bias on well-oiled hinges. She suspected, however, that a less mechanical force-one capable of conscious and cruel intent-was at work.

The crusty lichen on the stone pines, flecked with emerald-green radiance, though cancerous in appearance and rapidly metastasizing up the limbs, now seemed to be a benign and almost charmingly festive bit of extraterrestrial vegetation compared to whatever hellish things had been breeding or growing in the walls of the house.

Assuming that the rising sun had not faltered in its ascent, the mist must have thickened overhead even as it had dissipated somewhat here at street level, for the amethystine light had darkened to plum-purple. The promise of morning had already given way to a threatening shadow-land more suitable to a Balkan twilight than to a California dawn.

"Where do we go now?" Johnny asked.

Molly looked at Virgil, who regarded her expectantly. "Wherever the dog leads us."

At once, the shepherd turned away from her and trotted along the flagstone path to the street.

The four of them followed Virgil into a mist that had thinned and lifted until visibility, even in this false dusk, extended about two blocks.

Molly's initial sense that the overhead fog had grown markedly more dense, even as the lower blear somewhat clarified, proved correct on calmer observation.

In fact, the stratification between the ground-level haze and the higher pea soup was so abrupt that a ceiling seemed to have been constructed over Black Lake at a height of fifteen feet. Everything above that line-part of the upper floors and the roofs of two-story houses, the higher limbs of trees-vanished entirely from sight in the livid murk.

She felt oppressed by the impenetrability of the overcast and by its proximity to the ground. The sluggish, clotted fog allowed penetration by only a narrow band of the light spectrum, resulting in this plummy gloom, piling a weight of claustrophobia atop the onerous mood.

Something else about the lowering sky disturbed her, but she could not at once identify the reason for her concern.

They had followed Virgil only half a block, however, before that cause presented itself: Things could move half seen or even unseen in that dismalness.

Out of the west came a light in the overcast. The fog diffused it, obscured the source, but the brightness approached across the besieged town.

The nearer it drew, the more evident its shape became: a disc or perhaps a sphere. At the heart of the surrounding corona burned the more intense light of the object itself, which approximately defined it. She guessed it might be the size of an SUV, although she couldn't accurately discern proportions without knowing at what altitude the vehicle cruised.

She had no doubt that it would prove to be a vehicle. The movies had prepared her for this sight, too, as had decades of news stories about UFOs.

The object traveled silently. No purr of engines. No whoosh of displaced air. From it emanated none of the pulsations that had radiated from the larger ship and that had throbbed in blood and bone.

If the southbound leviathan that had recently passed over was the mother ship-or one of many mother ships-then the approaching UFO had most likely been dispatched from that larger vessel. This might be an observation craft, a bomber or the equivalent, or maybe a troop transport.

Or none of the above. This war bore little or no resemblance to any of the many conflicts of human history, and the usual lexicon of battle had no application to these events.

As the UFO drew near, it slowed, appearing to glide with the gravity-defying ease of a hot-air balloon.

It came to a full stop directly above their little group, where they stood in the street, and there it hovered soundlessly.

Molly's heart swelled with a rush of dread.

Teach us to care and not to care. Teach us to sit still: quoting Eliot to herself now, seeking consolation in the cadence, reassurance in the rhythm.

When Abby cringed against her, Molly dropped to one knee, to be at the girl's level, to pull her close and to help her find the courage to face whatever might come.

BENEATH THE FLOATING MYSTERY, IN ITS GOLDEN yet baleful light, under its malevolent influence, the four of them gazed up, afraid but unable to look away.

At first sight of the approaching light, Molly had considered fleeing with the children, hiding, but she had realized that if the pilot of the craft wished to find them, they would be found. Surely these ETs could track ground targets by infrared surveillance, by body-heat profiling, by sound-spoor detection, and by other means beyond the capabilities of human science and technology.

She felt watched, and more than watched: intimately scrutinized, physically and mentally analyzed, her fullest measure taken in ways unknowable and profound. As she became more sensitive to the depth of this analysis, her fear grew more intense and, to her surprise, she was also overcome by shame-her face burned with it-as if she stood naked before strangers.

When she heard herself murmuring the Act of Contrition, she realized that instinctively she expected to die here in the street, in this minute or the next.

Neither the hovering transport's powerful light nor the effect of its silent propulsion system to any degree burned off the fog beneath it. If anything, the mist thickened, conspiring to keep hidden the contours and every detail of the machine.

She expected to be incinerated, reduced to burning tallow in a boiling pool of blacktop, or to be atomized.

Alternately, the prospect of the craft descending to the street, of being taken aboard, of coming face-to-face with their inhuman masters and subjected to God knew what experiments and humiliations made atomization almost appealing.

Instead and unexpectedly, the luminous object moved away from them, receding rapidly. In seconds, every glimmer of its golden glow had been extinguished by the overcast.