The Taking

voices might have been angry urgent speech or only sound without substance.
        For a moment Bethany seemed to be in communion with the dog. Then she said to Molly, "Help me," whereupon the cloud of panic clarified in her green eyes.
        Gripping the girl's upper arms, Molly lifted, as though curling weights, The girl let go of the plank and, kicking as if something were plucking at her feet, came out of the hole, onto the floor of the ambulatory.
        Reflections of flames now capered on the walls, whipped bright tails in salamander flourishes across the windows, added luster to wooden surfaces. Molly smelled smoke and saw it curling in greasy coils around her legs.
        Urging Bethany and her brothers to move past the shattered floor to safer territory, Molly glanced back and saw real flames, not the reflection of them, in the nave, unfurling and billowing like the flags of a war-mad nation.
        Opening the gate in the communion railing, a corpse in fiery clothes came forward, its hair ablaze, but resolute.
        Molly turned from that walking tallow and followed the tall man, who followed Bethany and her brothers, around the broken planks, toward Neil and Abby and Johnny, toward the sacristy.
        This time the tremors had the power of a seismic event. The floor leaped, fell back, rocked.
        The tall man staggered, almost fell into the hole, windmilled his arms, kept his balance, but-
        -that cousin to earwigs, brother to centipedes, sister to wasps, that beast which might have been the god of all insects thrummed out of the basement, skewered the man's abdomen with a stinger as long as a knight's lance, and took him screaming down into the pit.
        Molly felt sudden blistering heat at her back. In her mind's eye, she saw the fiery hand of the blazing corpse reaching for her hair. She ran.

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    41
        
        TALL MAN SCREAMING IN THE DARK BELOW, CRACKLE of combusting wood, hissing of undetermined origin, excited cries of frightened children, and Neil shouting words broken into meaningless fragments of sound by the pounding hammer of Molly's heart…
        He stepped forward, leveling his shotgun at her. She tucked and rolled into the low smoke, and he fired over her.
        Although she held her breath, she tasted the greasy vapors and scrambled to her feet, gagging, spitting.
        Out of church rows instead of corn rows, across this field where only souls were cultivated, the dead parishioners in their ragged grave clothes approached like scarecrows set walking by sorcery, some on fire and spreading flames as they moved.
        The floor quaked, the walls shook, a stained-glass window cracked along a line of leading.
        Virgil barked as if to say, Time to go.
        Molly agreed.
        The shotgun roared.
        Johnny had retrieved the flashlight dropped by the fat man. He gave it to Molly.
        All energy and instinct, flashlight in her left hand and pistol in her right, she disdained the knob and kicked open the sacristy door.
        Although flapping a dazzle of bright wings behind her, firelight feathered into darkness just past the threshold.
        She shouldered through the rebounding door, thrusting recklessly into the room, chasing shadows with the beam, ready to shoot anything that light alone could not banish.
        The church rocked, cabinet doors flew open, and she fired two rounds into cassocks and chasubles just to be sure that they were only vestments hanging from a closet rod.
        Virgil padded past her, unfazed by the gunfire, quick to the outer door.
        Hollow haunting groans and semi-electronic yowls, reminiscent of the voices of whales, rose from the very bones of the church, as if out of a hundred fathoms. This time the floor both trembled and sagged.
        Turning, shouting for the kids, Molly discovered that all five had already followed her.
        Beyond them, Neil stood in the doorway, facing the sanctuary, prepared to defend their retreat.
        The floor had turned spongy, quivering like a membrane with each step she took. She threw open the outer door, and the dog dashed from the church.
        Alert for hostile forces-known, unknown, and unimaginable-she led the children into the rectory yard, where the purple light had grown no brighter with the progress of the morning. The ceiling of fog still hung low, so dense that the position of the sun could not be