The Taking

flashlight, but respected the privacy of their worship and their penance.
        As she reached the crossing, that open area between the front row of pews and the chancel railing, a tremor passed underfoot, accompanied by the creak and pop of tongue stressing against groove in the oak planks.
        She swept the well-waxed floor around her with the light. A couple of buckled boards, lifting slightly from the subflooring, suggested pressure from below.
        Virgil sniffed at them only in passing, making a wide berth around the deformed planks.
        The church had a basement. Down there among the supplies and the stored-away holiday decorations, between the furnace and the water heater, perhaps some beast with no Christian purpose had taken up residence.
        Every candle in the red glasses on the votive rack was alight. Others, from a box of spares, had been set on the chancel railing and around the base of a life-size statue of the Holy Mother just inside the sanctuary.
        In the ruby, gold, and fluctuant radiance, Molly saw that the three children shared freckles, green eyes, and a certain cast of features that identified them as siblings.
        The face of the youngest-an auburn-haired girl of perhaps five-glistened with steady, quiet tears. Abby at once took her hand and stood with her, perhaps because they knew each other, or just because she realized that she could lend some courage to the younger girl.
        The other children were boys, a pair of identical twins, eight or nine years old. Instead of their sister's auburn locks, they had dark hair, almost black. While they looked scared, they also appeared to be both tense and restless with that healthy rebellious energy that from time to time animates the best of boys. They wanted to do something, take action, even as they recognized that the resolution of their current hated situation was beyond their power.
        Neither of the men with the children appeared to be related to them.
        The first, tall and thin, had a prominent Adam's apple, and a sharp nose. While he chewed on his lower lip almost vigorously enough to draw blood, his hopping-hen eyes pecked nervously at Molly, then at Neil, then at the kids, then at the worshipers in the pews, then toward the lark altar.
        The other was shorter, heavy, literally wringing his pudgy hands with anxiety, and earnestly apologetic. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry, but there was no other way."
        "Sorry about what?" Neil asked.
        "We don't have guns," the heavy man said. "We hoped you would- and you do. But now I'm wondering-how could guns make a difference?"
        "I'm not good at riddles," Neil said.
        "We could have warned you off, but then what would happen to us? So we let you walk into a trap. I'm so sorry."
        Another tremor passed through the floor. The ruby-glass candle holders clinked against the metal votive rack. The flames quivered on the wicks, licked higher, bright tongues in silent screams.

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    38
        
        WHATEVER RESTLESS PRESENCE STIRRED IN THE church basement, the heavyset man, like his tall companion, appeared to be less interested in the threat under their feet than in the dark chancel behind them and the worshipers in the pews before them. His nervous stare roved from one knot of shadows to another.
        "Can you get us out of here?" the tall man asked, as though he had forgotten the location of the doors.
        Behind her, Molly heard movement from various points in the church, as if those in the pews had risen in unison, in response to an invitation to Communion.
        Turning, she recalled the hand in the holy-water font. Because of the shock of that repulsive contact, she had blanked on a crucial detail, which no longer eluded her. The severed grotesquely had not been that of a man dismembered in the current conflict, for it had been bloated, discolored, pocked with corruption.
        The hand had belonged to a man dead and buried for some time. Preserved by the embalmer's art, it had only gradually succumbed to the process of decay, but it had not weathered the grave unblemished.
        One by one, her flashlight picked out ten figures standing among the pews: these sham worshipers, these soulless worm-riddled hulks, in their rotting funeral suits and dresses. Blind behind their sewn-shut eyelids. Deaf to truth, incapable of hope. Resurrected in only a physical sense-and perhaps in a spirit of