The Taking

persistent dream.
        From elsewhere in the house, a sharp cry sliced through the monotonous drone of the storm. Upstairs. It came again. Neil. Her calm, composed, unflappable husband-crying out in the night.
        With too much experience of violence dating from the age of eight, Molly reacted with alacrity, snatching the handset from the nearby wall phone. She keyed 9-1-1 before realizing that she hadn't gotten a dial tone.
        Over the open line came an audial tapestry of eerie, oscillating electronic tones. Low-pitched pulses of sound, high-pitched whistles and shrieks.
        She hung up.
        They owned a gun. Upstairs. In a nightstand drawer.
        Neil cried out again.
        Molly glanced at the locked door, felt again the desire to flee with the coyotes into the night. Whatever else she might be-insane or as foolish and hysterical as a girl-she was not a coward.
        She went to the knife drawer and drew the most wicked blade from its sheath.

----

    3
        
        MOLLY WANTED LIGHT, A GREAT BRIGHT DAZZLE OF it, but she didn't touch a switch. She knew the house better than any intruder could know it; in these rooms, darkness would be her ally.
        Kitchen to hall to stairs, she cleaved the gloom with the point of the butcher knife and followed in its wake.
        Some of the treads creaked, but the rumble of the downpour masked the sounds of her hurried ascent.
        Upstairs, the storm still painted luminous galaxies on the skylights. Faint images of those patterns crawled the hallway floor.
        Approaching the bedroom, she heard a groan followed by a softer cry than those that had preceded it.
        Her heart clenched tight, knocked hard against its caging ribs.
        As she pushed open the door and entered the dark bedroom, the butcher knife twitched and bobbed like a dowsing rod, as if divining the location of a hostile intruder, seeking not water but bad blood.
        The mercurial light of the radiant rain, eddying through the room with a watery inconstancy, failed to illuminate every corner. Shadows shivered, throbbed; some of them might have been more than mere shadows.
        Nevertheless, Molly lowered the knife. At this close range she realized that her husband's groans and cries resulted from a struggle with nothing more threatening than a nightmare.
        Neil's sleep was usually as untroubled by narrative as it was deep and reliable. When slumber brought him a story, the plot was soothing, even comic.
        She had sometimes watched him smiling in his sleep. On one occasion, without waking, he had laughed out loud.
        As with everything else about the early hours of this Wednesday morning, the past did not serve as a guide to the present. Neil's dream clearly was different from others he had experienced during the seven years that Molly had shared a bed with him. His panicked breathing and cries of dread suggested that he raced desperately through the forests of sleep, pursued by a terror that relentlessly gained ground on him.
        Molly switched on a nightstand lamp. The sudden flush of light didn't wake her husband.
        Sweat darkened his brown hair almost to black. Wrung by anxiety, his face glistened.
        Putting the knife on the nightstand, she said, "Neil?"
        His name, softly spoken, didn't break the spell of sleep.
        Instead, he reacted as if he had heard the close, rough voice of Death. Head tossing, neck muscles taut, twisting fistfuls of the sheet as if it were a binding shroud in which he'd been prematurely buried, he took shallow, panicked breaths, working himself toward a scream.
        Molly put a hand on his shoulder. "Honey, you're dreaming."
        With a choked cry, he sat up in bed, seizing her wrist and twisting her hand away from his shoulder as though she were a dagger-wielding assassin.
        Awake, he nevertheless seemed to see the menace from his dream. His eyes were wide with fright; his face had been broken into sharp new contours by the hammer of shock.
        Molly winced with pain. "Hey, let go, it's me."
        He blinked, shuddered, released her.
        Taking a step backward, rubbing her pinched wrist, she said. "Are you all right?"
        Throwing off the covers, Neil sat up, on the edge of the bed.
        He was wearing only pajama bottoms. Although not a big man-five feet ten, and trim-he had powerful shoulders and muscular