The Taking

sycamore leaves. A pool of water, six inches deep, churned around their boots, brightened by silver filigrees of dancing eldritch light.
        Neil had unzipped his raincoat to be able to carry the shotgun under it. With his left hand, he clutched the front panels of the garment, holding them closed as best he could.
        A sloped flagstone walkway led from puddled pavement to front steps.
        Sheltered by the porch roof, Molly threw back her hood. She drew the pistol from her coat. Neil held the shotgun with both hands.
        The door of Harry Corrigan's house stood ajar.
        An orange spot of light on the casing indicated the illuminated bell push, but these were not circumstances that recommended the customary announcement. With one boot toe, Neil gingerly nudged the door inward.
        While it arced wide, they waited. Studied the deserted foyer for a moment. Entered the house.
        They had frequently been here as invited guests before Calista's murder in Redondo Beach, and a few times since. When the kitchen had been remodeled four years ago, Neil had built the new cabinetry. Yet now this familiar place seemed strange, nothing exactly as Molly remembered it, nothing quite in its place.
        The first floor offered much evidence of a simple life conducted in longstanding routines: comfortable furniture well used, landscape and seascape paintings, here a pipe left in an ashtray, here a book with the reader's place marked by a candy-bar wrapper, houseplants lovingly tended and lush with glossy leaves, purple plums ripening in a wooden bowl on a kitchen counter…
        They saw no indications of violence. No sign of their friend and neighbor, either.
        In the foyer once more, standing at the foot of the stairs, they briefly considered calling out to Harry.
        To be heard above the fierce cataracts crashing upon the roof, however, they would have to raise their voices. Someone or something other than their neighbor might come in answer to a shout, a prospect that argued for continued silence.
        Neil led the way to the second floor. Molly ascended sideways, keeping her back to the wall, so she could look both toward the top and the bottom of the stairs.
        In the upper hallway, the solid-oak door to the master bedroom had been wrenched off its hinges. Cracked almost in half, it lay on the hall floor. Bright fragments of the lock were scattered across the carpet.
        Each of the two substantial hinges remained anchored to the jamb by its frame leaf, although each leaf-a quarter-inch steel plate-had been bent by the fearsome force that had ripped away the door. The barrel knuckles joining the frame leaf to the center leaf of each hinge were also deformed, as was the steel pivot pin that connected them.
        If Harry had taken refuge behind the locked bedroom door, the barrier hadn't stood for long.
        Not even a steroid-pumped bodybuilder with Herculean slabs of muscle could have torn the door off its hinges without a winch and tackle. The task, accomplished barehanded, would have defeated any mortal man.
        Expecting slaughter or an outrage so inhuman in nature that it could not be anticipated, Molly hesitated to follow Neil into the bedroom. When she crossed the threshold, however, she saw no signs of violence.
        The walk-in closet stood open. No one in there.
        When Neil tried the closed door between the bedroom and the adjacent bath, he found it locked.
        He glanced at Molly. She nodded.
        Putting his face close to the bathroom door, Neil said, "Harry? Are you in there, Harry?"
        If the question had been answered, the reply had been too soft to be audible.
        "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