The Taking

night, at their house, she had not been aware of this phenomenon at all until Neil had spoken of it. Even after he had drawn her attention to it, she hadn't felt it a fraction as strongly as she did now.
        Perhaps these throbbings were akin to magnetic pulses produced by colossal engines of unimaginable size, based on a technology as incomprehensible to her as the internal-combustion engine would be incomprehensible to any tent-dwelling native wandering the cityless plains of America a thousand years before the birth of Christ.
        She looked at her wristwatch. The hour hand spun toward next year, while the minute hand whirled perhaps sixty times faster toward last year, as if to rob time of its power and to encourage those with timepieces to consider the moment, and to realize that it is all they ever have.
        Throughout the tavern, a palpable anxiety had drawn people to their feet. They, too, consulted their watches if they had them, or looked toward the Coors clock on the back wall.
        With the mysterious pulses came the impression of a looming mass in transit through the rain: Neil's mountain descending, Lee Ling's falling moon.
        "Coming in from the north," Neil said.
        He continued to be more sensitive than Molly to the nuances of this phenomenon.
        Others, too, had sensed the point of approach. Several among the drunkards, the peace lovers, the fence-sitters, and the fighters-none of whom had yet left on their various missions of resistance-also faced north, staring at the ceiling at that end of the room.
        Conversation had ceased. No glassware clinked.
        Most of the dogs gazed up, as well, but still a few sniffed the floor, their instinct for danger blunted by their fascination with the scents of old beer and food stains.
        "Bigger than I thought before," Neil whispered. "Bigger than any mountain or three mountains. And low. Very low. Maybe just… ten feet above the highest treetops."
        "Death," Molly heard herself say, surprised by her own voice, but she sensed, by virtue of a gift more profound than instinct, that the word she spoke was not adequate and that the traveler in the storm was something both more impossible and less mysterious than she had heretofore imagined.
        Toward the front of the tavern, a child began to weep. Her sobs were thick and miserable, but so rhythmic that they seemed false, and strange.

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    26
        
        ALTHOUGH THE UNSEEN ENIGMA, CHARTING ITS course of conquest through the night sea overhead, compelled attention as nothing before in Molly's experience, the crying of the child grew so eerie that her gaze, and others, settled from the ceiling to the source of that misery.
        The crying was not that of a child, after all, but arose from the doll that Molly had snatched from the backseat of the abandoned Lincoln Navigator on the ridge road.
        It lay facedown on the bar where she had left it. The head was turned toward the room, eyes closed. From its open mouth issued the bawl and boohoo that were among the sounds and words recorded on its voice chip.
        Molly was reminded of the music boxes in their bedroom. The waltzing porcelain figurines. The carousel horse turning, turning.
        In her mind's eye, she also saw the twitching cadaver that had been Harry Corrigan. Dead Harry quoting Eliot through broken teeth, out of a blasted mouth that no longer had a roof.
        She realized that the corpse-as-marionette was just a different category of the same effect that animated the music-box figures and caused the doll to sob. To the unknown masters of this night, the dead were toys, and the living.
        As Molly was about to turn her attention to the ceiling once more, one of the dogs growled softly, and then another. They were watching the doll.
        That plastic-and-rubber baby was equipped with flexible joints but featured no batteries-yet it moved. Turned onto its side. Lifted its head off the bar.
        Everyone present had seen the impossible this night, and more than once. They had been inoculated against easy astonishment, and they at first regarded this development with more curiosity than fear or wonder.
        If the two dogs had not continued to growl low in their throats and bare their teeth, some in the tavern might have looked away, less concerned about this strangeness than about the unknown leviathan plying the currents of the night above Black