The Taking

help you, but I don't understand what's going on here."
        "The cuts are an invitation. They cluster at the cuts. They come in through the blood by invitation."
        Fungus, Molly thought. Spores.
        "Thousands of them," Angie said, "coming through the blood. They want to be in the flesh, in the live flesh for a little while, before I'm dead."
        Even if the bolero of shadows and candlelight had not flung distortions across Angie's features, the woman's dementia would have prevented Molly from reading her emotions and inferring her intentions.
        "Angie, honey, you've got to put down the bottle and let me help you." Molly didn't have to fake compassion. In spite of her fear, she was shaken by sympathy for this distraught and confused woman. "Let me take you out of here."
        This offer was met with agitation, anxiety. "Don't bullshit me, you bitch. That's not possible, you know it's not. There's nowhere for me to go, nowhere to hide, nowhere, ever. Or you, either. You'll be told what to do, you'll be told, and you'll do it or suffer."
        The cold concrete wall against Molly's back pressed its chill through her clothes and into her flesh, her bones, brought winter to her spirit. She was shivering and couldn't stop.
        "I've got to obey." A long harrowing groan came from her, and she struck her breasts with one fist. "Obey or suffer."
        With growing desperation, Molly tried again: "Cassie. A nine-year-old girl. Blond hair. Blue eyes. Where is she?"
        Angie glanced toward the basement stairs. Her voice was sharp, urgent: "They're all below, they made the invitation, they cut, they cut, they opened their blood."
        "What's happening down there?" Molly demanded. "Where will I find the girl if I go down there?"
        Holding out her left hand, palm up, Angie said, "I bit. I bit so hard, and there's blood."
        Even in the shimmering deceptions of candlelight, the teeth marks were clearly visible in the meaty part of the woman's hand, and thick clotted blood.
        "I can bite, but I can't cut. I can bite, and there's blood, but that's not acceptable, because I was told to cut."
        Stepping between the candle globes, she moved toward Molly, and Molly backed off, circled away.
        Offering the broken bottle, the jagged end still first, Angie said insistently, angrily, "Take this and cut me."
        "No. Put the bottle down."
        Sorrow welled in those mad eyes. A warm salty tide brimmed, spilled. Anger instantly became despair and self-pity. "I'm running out of time. He's going to come up those stairs, he's going to come back for me."
        "Who?"
        "He rules."
        "Who?"
        Her eyes burned red in scalding tears. "Him. It. The thing."
        "What thing?" Molly asked.
        Hot tears washed years off Angie Boteen's face, and rendered it the countenance of a terrified child. "The thing. The thing with faces in its hands."

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    48
        
        THE HOSPITAL OF ST. MARY OF BETHLEHEM, WHICH opened its doors in London in the fifteenth century, served as an asylum for the insane, was known as Bedlam, and closed its doors to that purpose in an age distant to this one, but now Bedlam existed again, and it was the entire world, pole to pole.
        Maybe a creature with faces in its hands stalked the tavern cellar, something that Goya might have imagined and painted in his darkest hours, or maybe this menace existed only in Angie Boteen's mind. Whether real or not, it was real to her.
        "Afraid of sharpness. I'm weak," she said. "Always been weak. I want to obey, they expect obedience, but I can't cut myself. I can bite, but I can't cut."
        Molly retreated, circled, stepping cautiously among the candles, like a conjurer trying to stay within her protective pentagram.
        Circling, advancing, holding out the broken bottle, Angie said, "Take this. Do me, slash me. Before he comes back." A glance at the stairs. Then at Molly. "Slash me, before he comes back angry."
        Molly shook her head. "No. Put it down."
        Simultaneously imploring and furious, Angie advanced: "Whatever you hate, see that in me. Whoever you envy, everything you fear, see all that in me-then cut, cut me, CUT ME!"
        Tough as she was, tough as she always had been, boiled in terror at a young age, Molly nonetheless felt something cracking in herself, a barrier that must hold if she was ever to find