The Taking

powerless prisoner under the rule of whatever had entered into her and now used her body.
        Snatching her hand back, Molly watched the naked woman sink to chin, to nose, to brow, as though drowning in hardened concrete. Gone.
        If Molly had taken the hand, maybe she would have been dragged along with Angie, slipping through concrete and rebar as easily as mist through moonlight.
        This possibility briefly paralyzed her. She hesitated to move a foot, for fear that the surface tension of the floor might prove to be as fragile as that of a summer pond.
        Then she remembered a salient detail from the radio report about the space station. Inboard of the airlock, before Arturo had started screaming, Lapeer had said that something was entering through the closed hatch: "-just phasing through it, materializing right out of the steel."
        The risk of being taken down into the cellar through the floor might be exceeded by the danger of some menace rising out of there and into this receiving room.
        Floors, walls, and bank-vault doors offered no protection. No fortress could stand against this enemy. No place on this new Earth could provide security, peace, or even privacy.
        Reality isn't what it used to be.
        That had been a favorite aphorism of the dopers who tended to gravitate to the liberal-arts programs and literature courses when Molly had been a student at Berkeley. They were the ones in the writing program who rejected the traditional values of literature in favor of "intellectual freedom through emotional and linguistic anarchy," whatever that meant.
        Reality wasn't what it used to be. This afternoon it might not be what it was this morning.
        Lewis Carroll meet H. P. Lovecraft.
        The inmates of Bedlam, so misunderstood and unable to cope in their own time, might find these new circumstances more in line with their experience and their view of life.
        Molly, on the other hand, felt as though her sanity was in the precarious position of a runaway train rollicking down a mountain on loose tracks.
        If the ET with faces in its hands was master of a technology that allowed it to rise through the floor as easily as Angie had been taken below, if there were no barriers to its movements, then descending the basement stairs now, in search of Cassie, would be no more dangerous than standing here or being out in the street with Neil. Caution had no merit, and prudence no reward. Fortune would favor the bold, even the reckless.
        Again, by candlelight, she followed the blood trail to the cellar door. She was almost to that threshold when movement, glimpsed peripherally, made her halt, turn.
        A dog. The golden retriever-one of the three dogs that stayed behind with Cassie-stood in the doorway to the tavern. Posture tense. Eyes solemn. Then a wag of the tail.

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    50
        
        THE TWITCH OF THE DOG'S TAIL CONVINCED MOLLY to follow it by flashlight out of the receiving room, to the women's lavatory. No dog would wag if he had lost a child entrusted to his care, and especially not one of these dogs, in which seemed to be vested an uncommon intelligence plus a loyalty even greater than their four-footed kind usually exhibited.
        Cassie stood in the rest room, her back pressed in a corner, guarded by the two mixed breeds. Just for a moment, these mutts presented bared teeth to Molly, surely not because they mistook her for a threat but perhaps because they wanted her to see-and to be reassured by-their diligence.
        Someone had closed the window through which Render had escaped. The floor at that end of the room was still puddled with rain, but nothing grew in it.
        Distraught, Cassie came at once into Molly's arms, buried her face against Molly's throat, and trembled uncontrollably.
        Molly comforted the girl, stroked her hair, and determined that she had not been harmed.
        Under the logic of the old reality, getting out of the tavern would have been a priority. Flee first, counsel the child later.
        In the new reality, the world outside would be as dangerous as any room the tavern, including the cellar.
        Any outdoor place was in fact more dangerous than the tavern. In spite of the resident of the janitorial closet and regardless of what spores might be fruiting in the self-mutilated congregation in the cellar, the grotesque:me and hostile life forms of another planet