The Taking

Lake.
        Then the doll stopped crying and levered itself into a sitting position, its legs hanging over the edge of the bar, its arms at its sides. The eyes opened. The head turned.
        Injection-molded, machine-made, glued and stitched and painted, this minikin in pink pedal pushers and yellow T-shirt was blind, of course, yet its eyes moved left and right and left again, surveying the people gathered in the tavern as though it could see them with perfect clarity.
        In a childlike voice, it said, "Hungry. Eat."
        Logic wasn't taxed by the argument that those two words would have been included in the vocabulary on the toy's voice chip.
        Yet when the doll spoke, those onlookers standing nearest to it backed away.
        Molly moved closer to Neil.
        "Hungry. Eat," the doll repeated.
        The mouth was hinged at the corners. When the doll spoke, its lips moved, revealing a small pink tongue.
        Still surveying the tavern, the minikin cycled through some of the contents of its phrase bank: "I love you… baby's sleepy… nighty-night… my tummy hurts… diaper wet… Mommy, sing for baby… baby likes your song… I will be good, Mommy… I'm hungry… baby needs pudding… yum-yum, all gone…"
        The doll fell silent. Tipping its head back, it gazed at the ceiling, as if it felt the behemoth passing in the rainy night.
        Indeed, something in the doll's attitude-the cock of its head, the slight forward lean of its body, the unnerving intensity of its glass eyes- gave rise in Molly to the thought that it was not merely aware of the leviathan above but was also in communion with it.
        Lowering its head, shifting its gaze to those in the tavern once more, the doll said, "Diaper… diaper… diaper." Then it dropped the second syllable: "Di… di… di…"
        Someone said, "Shut the damn thing up," and someone else said, "Wait, let's see."
        "Sing… sing… sing," said the doll, then shortened the word to just the suffix, "… ing… ing… ing." A pause. Then the combined form: "Dying… dying… dying…"
        Looking around, Molly saw faces as pale as her own must be.
        Lee Ling watched, one fist to her mouth, biting on her knuckles, and her husband, Norman, stood with his shotgun cradled across his arm, as if he wished he could do something with it.
        The doll declared, "Dying hurts," and although it had no source of power to facilitate such animation, it raised its right hand to its mouth, as if in imitation of Lee Ling.
        The articulated shoulder and elbow joints might have allowed the minikin's arm to bend as it did. Its molded rubber hands were not jointed, however, and should not have been able to commit the self-mutilation that followed.
        Reaching between its hinged lips, the doll pinched its pink vinyl tongue and tore it out.
        "Dying hurts."
        Up went the left hand, which clawed at the left socket, pried out the semispherical eye, and dropped it on the bar, where it bounced, blue and blinkless, along the mahogany, and spent its final energy in a short-lived blind spin.
        "All your babies," the doll said, in a cracked cadence that resulted from cobbling words together from various phrases on its voice chip, out of context, "all your babies will die."

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    27
        

    "ALL YOUR BABIES WILL DIE."
       On the repetition of that threat, Molly looked toward the children gathered at the far side of the room. All were on their feet, craning their necks. She wished that they could be spared this psychological warfare, if that was in fact the purpose of the puppeteer behind this bizarre performance.
        The doll sat one-eyed, working a finger of its right hand in the empty socket in the manner of a swimmer trying to drain a water block in an ear.
        If wet gray wormlike forms had burst in frenzied wriggling from the gouged socket, Molly would not have been surprised.
        "All your babies will die."
        The weight of those five words, seemingly a promise of human extinction, pressed as heavily on her as the maximum density of the hovering mystery above Black Lake that, with the rhythmic throb of its engines or its heart, compressed her lungs, oppressed her spirit.
        The doll's right hand rose to the right socket, tore loose the second orb. Always sightless since the day of manufacture, it had now double-blinded itself.
        "All your babies, your babies, your babies