Dean Koontz - The Taking

"The cuts are an invitation. They cluster at the cuts. They come in through the blood by invitation."

Fungus, Molly thought. Spores.

"Thousands of them," Angie said, "coming through the blood. They want to be in the flesh, in the live flesh for a little while, before I'm dead."

Even if the bolero of shadows and candlelight had not flung distortions across Angie's features, the woman's dementia would have prevented Molly from reading her emotions and inferring her intentions.

"Angie, honey, you've got to put down the bottle and let me help you." Molly didn't have to fake compassion. In spite of her fear, she was shaken by sympathy for this distraught and confused woman. "Let me take you out of here."

This offer was met with agitation, anxiety. "Don't bullshit me, you bitch. That's not possible, you know it's not. There's nowhere for me to go, nowhere to hide, nowhere, ever. Or you, either. You'll be told what to do, you'll be told, and you'll do it or suffer."

The cold concrete wall against Molly's back pressed its chill through her clothes and into her flesh, her bones, brought winter to her spirit. She was shivering and couldn't stop.

"I've got to obey." A long harrowing groan came from her, and she struck her breasts with one fist. "Obey or suffer."

With growing desperation, Molly tried again: "Cassie. A nine-year-old girl. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Where is she?"

Angie glanced toward the basement stairs. Her voice was sharp, urgent: "They're all below, they made the invitation, they cut, they cut, they opened their blood."

"What's happening down there?" Molly demanded. "Where will I find the girl if I go down there?"

Holding out her left hand, palm up, Angie said, "I bit. I bit so hard, and there's blood."

Even in the shimmering deceptions of candlelight, the teeth marks were clearly visible in the meaty part of the woman's hand, and thick clotted blood.

"I can bite, but I can't cut. I can bite, and there's blood, but that's not acceptable, because I was told to cut."

Stepping between the candle globes, she moved toward Molly, and Molly backed off, circled away.

Offering the broken bottle, the jagged end still first, Angie said insistently, angrily, "Take this and cut me."

"No. Put the bottle down."

Sorrow welled in those mad eyes. A warm salty tide brimmed, spilled. Anger instantly became despair and self-pity. "I'm running out of time. He's going to come up those stairs, he's going to come back for me."

"Who?"

"He rules."

"Who?"

Her eyes burned red in scalding tears. "Him. It. The thing."

"What thing?" Molly asked.

Hot tears washed years off Angie Boteen's face, and rendered it the countenance of a terrified child. "The thing. The thing with faces in its hands."

THE HOSPITAL OF ST. MARY OF BETHLEHEM, WHICH opened its doors in London in the fifteenth century, served as an asylum for the insane, was known as Bedlam, and closed its doors to that purpose in an age distant to this one, but now Bedlam existed again, and it was the entire world, pole to pole.

Maybe a creature with faces in its hands stalked the tavern cellar, something that Goya might have imagined and painted in his darkest hours, or maybe this menace existed only in Angie Boteen's mind. Whether real or not, it was real to her.

"Afraid of sharpness. I'm weak," she said. "Always been weak. I want to obey, they expect obedience, but I can't cut myself. I can bite, but I can't cut."

Molly retreated, circled, stepping cautiously among the candles, like a conjurer trying to stay within her protective pentagram.

Circling, advancing, holding out the broken bottle, Angie said, "Take this. Do me, slash me. Before he comes back." A glance at the stairs. Then at Molly. "Slash me, before he comes back angry."

Molly shook her head. "No. Put it down."

Simultaneously imploring and furious, Angie advanced: "Whatever you hate, see that in me. Whoever you envy, everything you fear, see all that in me-then cut, cut me, CUT ME!"

Tough as she was, tough as she always had been, boiled in terror at a young age, Molly nonetheless felt something cracking in herself, a barrier that must hold if she was ever to find Cassie, if she was to be the rescuer of children that so many children needed her to be.

Incipient tears welled in her eyes. She blinked them back, fearful that they would blur her vision. In the blur, she would be vulnerable to Angie, to whatever had driven the forty people into the basement, to the thing with faces in its hands if it existed.

"Angie…" Molly's voice broke, speaking to the wounded child at the heart of this woman. "What've they done to you?"

Even in her madness, Angie Boteen recognized the tenderness that wrung tears from Molly. Understanding the finality of those words, she threw the bottle aside. It shattered on the elevator doors.

"Wish I was dead already." Angie began to shake as though she'd only now become aware of being naked in a cold room. "Wish I was."

Lowering the pistol, Molly said, "Let me take you out of here."

Angie stared with dread toward the cellar stairs. "It's coming."

Edging closer to the door to the tavern, Molly also aligned herself with the cellar door and raised the pistol once more.

The woman cared nothing for Cassie, only for her own plight, but Molly persisted: "A nine-year-old girl. You must have seen her. She was the only child left here."

Angie Boteen began to sink into the floor as if she were standing in quicksand.

AN EXTRATERRESTRIAL SPECIES, HUNDREDS OR thousands of years more advanced than us, would possess technology that would appear to us to be not the result of applied science but entirely supernatural, pure magic.

That was what Neil had said, quoting some science-fiction writer after the events at the Corrigan house.

In the hours since, Molly had seen ample evidence of the truth in that contention, not least of all the transit of Angie Boteen through the receiving-room floor.

Concrete is what concrete means. Real. Actual. Solidas in "an artificial stonelike material made by mixing cement with various aggregates."

Yet this slab of steel-reinforced, poured-in-place concrete, the stuff of bomb shelters and ammunition bunkers, seemed to adjust its billions of atoms to precisely fit the interstices between the atoms of the woman's body. The floor did not appear to soften. It did not part like the jaws of a shark eager to swallow. It did not blossom outward in concentric circles as does water that has accommodated a dropped stone. What it did do was accept Angie Boteen as if she were a spirit-less than ectoplasmic vapor, the merest apparition-and pass her through in smooth descent from the receiving room to the cellar.

Angie was not a ghost. Her flesh was as solid and as vulnerable as Molly's. She had thrown the Corona bottle, which had shattered on the elevator doors. Her bare feet had left prints in the blood trail leading to the basement stairs. Her tears had dripped from her jaw line, leaving tiny dark spots of moisture on the concrete, each more of a mark on the floor than she had made by passing through it.

She didn't vanish as instantly as a message cylinder sucked down a pneumatic tube; neither did she offer any resistance nor meet with any. Perhaps she took six seconds to precipitate from ground floor to the lower realm, beginning with the soles of her feet and concluding with a final wisp of trailing hair.

Considering how frightened she had been of the thing with faces in its hands, and assuming that this entity must have had something to do with drawing her through the cement and various aggregates, Angie made surprisingly little noise during her departure. She didn't scream. She didn't cry out to God for help or to well-respected Billy Marek with his knives.