The Taking

erupted in a jagged bouquet of oak.
        A stench breathed out of the basement, and with that reeking exhalation rose a thing less than half glimpsed in the jittering flashlight beams.
        Molly thought, Bug.
        Quick impressions in bad light. Insectile. Enormous. Polished carapace. Beetle horns. Wickedly serrated mandibles. Armored abdomen. Pedipalpi. Numerous compound eyes, inexpressibly strange and vaguely luminous. Suddenly a yawning maw and a razored gullet to rival that of any shark.
        Screaming, the heavyset man was plucked off the sanctuary floor and dragged into the basement.
        In an instant the apparition had appeared, and in the next instant had vanished.
        By the bucking of the floor, by the fat man's kicking legs, by their own panic, the five children had been knocked together, three thrown to the floor, and one-the freckled girl with the auburn hair-had fallen into the hole. Having grabbed the jagged end of a plank, she hung by both hands, legs dangling in the basement.
        From the darkness below the girl, the lost man's tortured cries begged for death and pleaded mercy, for he was not at once broken and sucked dry, but suffered instead an attenuated death that didn't bear contemplation.

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    40
        
        THE MYSTERY OF EVIL IS TOO DEEP TO BE ILLUMINATED by the light of reason, and likewise the basement of the church, while no more than twelve feet in depth, presented to Molly a blackness as perfect as that you might find gazing outward to the starless void beyond the farthest edge of the universe.
        The heavyset man had dropped his flashlight before being dragged into the chamber below. It had rolled against the ambulatory wall; and now it shone toward the sacristy, revealing little.
        Molly dared not direct her light into the hole, for fear of exciting the creature that had risen from it-or a host of others. Instead, she thrust the flashlight at the tall man, instructing him to sweep the chancel and pinpoint, for Neil, any looming threats that might be checked even temporarily by a shotgun blast.
        She dropped to her knees at the broken-oak rim of the pit and seized the dangling girl by her arms.
        The ghastly screams rising from below did not motivate the girl to give herself to rescue, but froze her. She would not relinquish her grip on the shattered plank.
        "Let go, I'll lift you out, I'll lift you up," Molly promised.
        Containing three greens in striation-apple-green, jade-green, celadon-the girl's eyes were beseeching. She wanted help but had no trust.
        Seeking some connection to break the ice that froze the child's nerve, Molly said, "Honey, what's your name?"
        From below came shuddering, stuttering miseries of sound out of the lost man, a thrashing, a wet sucking noise-and underlying all the rest, a cold whispering as of a thousand voices expressing eager appetites.
        The girl began to sob with terror.
        Her twin brothers bent to the hole, and Molly warned them to get back, but one of them urged his sister to relent: "Bethany, she wants to help you. Let her help."
        Evidently the thing that wore the mortal coil of the dead priest had gotten to its feet again, for the shotgun boomed.
        Through the layered reverberations bouncing back from groin vaults and stained-glass windows, Neil called out to Molly, "Hurry!"
        "Bethany," she implored, "let go of the plank."
        Another crash of shotgun, so soon, suggested that the cleric's cadaver was not the only immediate threat.
        Molly had the girl's eyes now, and she did not look away from them to see what danger loomed, but said with all the passion that her voice could carry, "Bethany, trust me. I'll die for you. If you fall, I'll come in there after you. Trust me."
        A yellow radiance flared behind Molly, the shimmering brightness of thriving flames. The rolling candles must have found combustible material.
        "Trust me!"
        The girl's gaze slid away toward something to the right of Molly, and her sobbing subsided.
        The dog. Good Virgil had come boldly to the splintery edge of the hole.
        Below, the fat man's last cry spiraled into a groan and then into silence.
        Holding fast to Bethany, looking past her, Molly saw nothing more than shades of blackness moving in the basement, different intensities and textures of restless darkness. The many whispering