The Taking
discerned.
Except for their little group, there were no signs of life, Earthborn or otherwise. Black Lake lay bound in stillness, wrapped in muffling mist, as ready for eternity as a pharaoh embalmed for the tomb.
As Neil backed out of the sacristy into the yard, a storm seemed to break inside the church. A hard clap of thunder shuddered the building, as violent as any lightning-chasing crash that ever shook the heavens.
Crumblings of loose mortar rattled out of the stone walls. Dust and paper debris plumed from the open sacristy door.
Surely the floor had collapsed into the basement. The roiling fire damped suddenly, briefly, then flared higher and brighter than before, flamboyantly illuminating the sacred geometries of the colorful windows. Even this roar brought no citizens into the street. They were huddled in their homes with baseball bats and handguns, or gone to other redoubts-or dead. Or worse than dead: living farms for alien fungus, living egg cases for the entomological wonders of another world.
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42
THE DRAMA OF THE BURNING CHURCH PLAYED bright upon the gloom, but Molly was surfeited with spectacle. Trusting that the collapsed floor and the storm of fire would eradicate the pestilence in the basement and reduce the hag-ridden cadavers to ashes and knobs of charred bones, she turned away and urged the children across the yard, toward the street.
Looking shaken but grimly determined, Neil joined them. "Where now?"
"If Virgil has more places to lead us," she said, "we'll follow him, but not until we've gone back to the tavern."
"Why there?"
Molly remembered Cassie, the nine-year-old girl with sapphire eyes, daughter of fence-sitters, left behind.
She recalled, as well, how the nine dogs had roamed the tavern end to end, assiduously sniffing the well-worn floor. She had assumed they were savoring the fragrant stains of dropped food and spilled drinks.
Her assumptions had changed.
"If the tavern has a basement, there's something in it, sure as hell. We've got to get those people out of there before it's too late."
They were just twenty feet from the street when a refugee out of an LSD-inspired hallucination moved in the purple half-light, approaching from their right across the rectory lawn. They halted but didn't at once retreat.
A colony of white fungi, smaller than but otherwise identical to the one they had seen in the narthex of St. Perpetua's, was on the move: round bladderlike structures in various sizes, glistering with a milky ooze, and soft veiny sacs that continuously swelled and partially deflated and swelled again, as though the creature had been turned inside out, revealing clusters of internal organs. It progressed on eight short legs that reminded Molly of those on a Jerusalem cricket-insectile but thick and tough.
The children crowded close to Molly. She discovered that their trust gave her courage in return for whatever strength her presence imparted to them.
Neil fished shells out of his coat pockets, pumped one into the chamber of the shotgun, and loaded three more in the tubular magazine.
Asymmetrical, about twice the size of Virgil, low to the ground, the thing proceeded at a measured pace. Although it didn't seem to be built for speed and had no apparent visual apparatus to guide it, Molly didn't discount the possibility that it could move much faster when necessary, guided by some sense other than-but as reliable as-eyesight.
Well fed and content, crocodiles also appeared to be slow and ungainly. When hungry or irritated, however, they could outrun most dogs or any human.
If this too-solid apparition was a mere fungus or another more sophisticated phylum of plant, it wasn't likely to be a dangerous predator in the tradition of the potted carnivore in Little Shop of Horrors. On the other hand, innocuous plant life didn't sprout legs and travel.
Behind them, church windows burst from the heat. Showers of bright glass rained down and puddled into darker mosaics on the wet lawn.
Like cloud-fluttered moonglow in a dream rich with psychosis, orange firelight rippled across the rain-soaked lawn, over the loathsome bulbous fungus that now seemed obscene in its slimy tumescence.
She remembered her certainty, at first sight of the larger specimen in the narthex, that it was malignant,
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