The Taking

disgust. "Tequila and pills, like usual. Before the TV went out, he pissed himself watching the news and didn't even know it. He was talking crazy about making a fortress, went into the garage to get tools, nails, I don't know what."
        "We heard what happened to him," Abby said softly. "We heard him scream." She anxiously surveyed the room, the ceiling. "The things in the walls got him."
        As if the teeming hosts behind the plaster understood the girl's words, they thrashed with greater fury. Entomologic. Polymorphic. Pandemoniac.
        "No," Johnny disagreed. "Something else must've got hold of him, something bigger than whatever's in the walls."
        "He screamed and screamed." Abby's eyes widened at the memory, and she crossed her arms on her chest as if those frail limbs might serve as armor.
        "Whatever got him," the boy said, "screeched and snarled like a cougar, but it wasn't any cougar. We could hear it real good. The door was open between here and the garage."
        That door was currently closed.
        "Then it shrieked like nothing I ever heard," Johnny continued, "and it made this sound… something like a laugh… and there were… eating noises."
        The boy shuddered at the memory, and the girl said, "They're gonna eat us alive."
        Resting the flashlight on a counter, still holding the pistol, Molly went to Abby, drew her to the edge of the table, and put an arm around her. "We're taking you out of here, sweetheart."
        "Where's your mother?" Neil asked.
        "Left us two years ago," the boy explained.
        His voice broke more raggedly than before, as though abandonment by his mother still shook him more deeply, two years after the fact, than did any extraterrestrial horrors that they had encountered here in the past few hours.
        Johnny bit hard on his lower lip to repress this emotion, then turned to Molly: "Me and Abby, we tried to leave a couple times. The doors won't open."
        "They opened for us," Neil assured him.
        Shaking his head, the boy said, "Maybe coming in. But going out?"
        He snatched a small pot from the cooktop and flung it hard at one of the kitchen windows. It struck the glass with a solid crack and a reverberant clang, but bounced off, leaving the pane intact.
        "Something weird's happening to the house," the boy said. "It's changing. It's like… almost alive."

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    35
        
        OUT OF THE KITCHEN, ALONG THE HALL, TO THE foyer, they were accompanied by a rising chorus of frenzied fluttering within the walls, a rustle, a bustle, an urgent quickening, as if the horde sensed that its tender prey were escaping.
        "They talk," Abby confided to Molly as they hurried out of the kitchen, behind Virgil.
        "Who, sweetheart?"
        "The walls. Don't they, Johnny? Don't they talk?"
        "Sometimes you can hear voices," the boy confirmed as they arrived at the foyer closet.
        In the event that the storm resumed, the nearest thing to rain gear that the kids had were nylon jackets with warm lining.
        As Abby and her brother shrugged into their coats, Molly said, "You don't mean-voices in English."
        "Sometimes English," Johnny confirmed. "But sometimes another language. I don't know what it is."
        Throughout the house arose a subtle creaking from floorboards, wall studs, ceiling joists. The structure sounded like a ship at sea, riding out the steep swells of a storm fringe.
        Virgil, thus far not given to barking, barked. Just once. As if to say, Let's go!
        The creaking house abruptly creaked louder and with a greater number of complaints from floors, ceilings, doorjambs, window frames, walls. The bone-rattle of plumbing. The wheeze and whistle of hot breath in torquing ducts. Suddenly the place groaned like a tired old behemoth waking from the sleep of ages.
        When Neil tried the front door, it seemed to be locked.
        "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