THE TAKING

DEAN KOONTZ

This book is dedicated to Joe Stefko: great drummer, publisher of exquisite special editions, dog-lover … three virtues that guarantee Heaven. The bad feet can be overlooked.

“When you’re alone in the middle of the night and you wake in a sweat and a hell of a fright …”

—T.S. Eliot, Fragment of an Agon

Contents

Epigraph Part One Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Part Two Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Part Three Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty One Chapter Twenty Two Chapter Twenty Three Chapter Twenty Four Part Four Chapter Twenty Five Chapter Twenty Six Chapter Twenty Seven Chapter Twenty Eight Chapter Twenty Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty One Chapter Thirty Two Part Five Chapter Thirty Three Chapter Thirty Four Chapter Thirty Five Chapter Thirty Six Chapter Thirty Seven Chapter Thirty Eight Chapter Thirty Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty One Chapter Forty Two Part Six Chapter Forty Three Chapter Forty Four Chapter Forty Five Chapter Forty Six Chapter Forty Seven Chapter Forty Eight Chapter Forty Nine Chapter Fifty Chapter Fifty One Chapter Fifty Two Part Seven Chapter Fifty Three Chapter Fifty Four Chapter Fifty Five Chapter Fifty Six Chapter Fifty Seven Chapter Fifty Eight Chapter Fifty Nine Chapter Sixty Chapter Sixty One Chapter Sixty Two Chapter Sixty Three Chapter Sixty Four Chapter Sixty Five Chapter Sixty Six Chapter Sixty Seven About the Author Also By Dean Koontz Copyright About the Publisher

PART ONE

“In my beginning is my end.”

T.S. Eliot, East Coker

1

A FEW MINUTES PAST ONE O’CLOCK IN THE morning, a hard rain fell without warning. No thunder preceded the deluge, no wind.

The abruptness and the ferocity of the downpour had the urgent quality of a perilous storm in a dream.

Lying in bed beside her husband, Molly Sloan had been restless before the sudden cloudburst. She grew increasingly fidgety as she listened to the rush of rain.

The voices of the tempest were legion, like an angry crowd chanting in a lost language. Torrents pounded and pried at the cedar siding, at the shingles, as if seeking entrance.

September in southern California had always before been a dry month in a long season of predictable drought. Rain rarely fell after March, seldom before December.

In wet months, the rataplan of raindrops on the roof had sometimes served as a reliable remedy for insomnia. This night, however, the liquid rhythms failed to lull her into slumber, and not just because they were out of season.

For Molly, sleeplessness had too often in recent years been the price of thwarted ambition. Scorned by the sandman, she stared at the dark bedroom ceiling, brooding about what might have been, yearning for what might never be.

By the age of twenty-eight, she had published four novels. All were well received by reviewers, but none sold in sufficient numbers to make her famous or even to guarantee that she would find an eager publisher for the next.

Her mother, Thalia, a writer of luminous prose, had been in the early years of an acclaimed career when she died of cancer at thirty. Now, sixteen years later, Thalia’s books were out of print, her mark upon the world all but erased.

Molly lived with a quiet dread of following her mother into obscurity. She didn’t suffer from an inordinate fear of death; rather, she was troubled by the thought of dying before achieving any lasting accomplishment.

Beside her, Neil snored softly, oblivious of the storm.

Sleep always found him within a minute of the moment when he put his head on the pillow and closed his eyes. He seldom stirred during the night; after eight hours, he woke in the same position in which he had gone to sleep—rested, invigorated.

Neil claimed that only the innocent enjoyed such perfect sleep.

Molly called it the sleep of the slacker.

Throughout their seven years of marriage, they had conducted their lives by different clocks.

She dwelled as much in the future as in the present, envisioning where she wished to go, relentlessly mapping the path that ought to lead to her high goals. Her strong mainspring was wound tight.

Neil lived in the moment. To him, the far future was next week, and he trusted time to take him there whether or not he planned the journey.

They were as different as mice and moonbeams.

Considering their contrasting natures, they shared a love that seemed unlikely. Yet love was the cord that bound them together, the sinewy fiber that gave them strength to weather disappointment, even tragedy.

During Molly’s spells of insomnia, Neil’s rhythmic snoring, although not loud, sometimes tested love almost as much as infidelity might have done. Now the sudden crash of pummeling rain masked the noise that he made, giving Molly a new target upon which to focus her frustration.

The roar of the storm escalated until they seemed to be inside the rumbling machinery that powered the universe.

Shortly after two o’clock, without switching on a light, Molly got out of bed. At a window that was protected from the rain by the overhanging roof, she looked through her ghostly reflection, into a windless monsoon.

Their house stood high in the San Bernardino Mountains, embraced by sugar pines, knobcone pines, and towering ponderosas with dramatic fissured bark.

Most of their neighbors were in bed at this hour. Through the shrouding trees and the incessant downpour, only a single cluster of lights could be seen on these slopes above Black Lake.

The Corrigan place. Harry Corrigan had lost Calista, his wife of thirty-five years, back in June.

During a weekend visit to her sister, Nancy, in Redondo Beach, Calista parked her Honda near an ATM to withdraw two hundred dollars. She’d been robbed, then shot in the face.

Subsequently, Nancy had been pulled from the car and shot twice. She had also been run over when the two gunmen escaped in the Honda. Now, three months after Calista’s funeral, Nancy remained in a coma.

While Molly yearned for sleep, Harry Corrigan strove every night to avoid it. He said his dreams were killing him.

In the tides of the storm, the luminous windows of Harry’s house seemed like the running lights of a distant vessel on a rolling sea: one of those fabled ghost ships, abandoned by passengers and crew, yet with lifeboats still secured. Untouched dinners would be found on plates in the crew’s mess. In the wheelhouse, the captain’s favorite pipe, warm with smoldering tobacco, would await discovery on the chart table.

Molly’s imagination had been engaged; she couldn’t easily shift into neutral again. Sometimes, in the throes of insomnia, she tossed and turned into the arms of literary inspiration.

Downstairs, in her study, were five chapters of her new novel, which needed to be polished. A few hours of work on the manuscript might soothe her nerves enough to allow sleep.

Her robe draped the back of a nearby chair. She shrugged into it and knotted the belt.

Crossing to the door, she realized that she was navigating with surprising ease, considering the absence of lamplight. Her sureness in the gloom couldn’t be explained entirely by the fact that she had been awake for hours, staring at the ceiling with dark-adapted eyes.

The faint light at the windows, sufficient to dilute the bedroom darkness, could not have traveled all the way from Harry Corrigan’s house, three doors to the south. The true source at first eluded her.

Storm clouds hid the moon.

Outside, the landscape lights were off; the porch lights, too.

Returning to the window, she puzzled over the tinseled glimmer of the rain. A curious wet sheen made the bristling boughs of the nearest pines more visible than they should have been.

Ice? No. Stitching through the night, needles of sleet would have made a more brittle sound than the susurrant drumming of this autumn downpour.

She pressed fingertips to the windowpane. The glass was cool but not cold.

When reflecting ambient light, falling rain sometimes acquires a silvery cast. In this instance, however, no ambient light existed.

The rain itself appeared to be faintly luminescent, each drop a light-emitting crystal. The night was simultaneously veiled and revealed by skeins of vaguely fluorescent beads.

When Molly stepped out of the bedroom, into the upstairs hall, the soft glow from two domed skylights bleached the gloom from black to gray, revealing the way to the stairs. Overhead, the rainwater sheeting down the curved Plexiglas was enlivened by radiant whorls that resembled spiral nebulae wheeling across the vault of a planetarium.

She descended the stairs and proceeded to the kitchen by the guidance of the curiously storm-lit windows.

Some nights, embracing rather than resisting insomnia, she brewed a pot of coffee to take to her desk in the study. Thus stoked, she wrote jagged, caffeine-sharpened prose with the realistic tone of police-interrogation transcripts.

This night, however, she intended to return eventually to bed. After switching on the light in the vent hood above the cooktop, she flavored a mug of milk with vanilla extract and cinnamon, then heated it in the microwave.

In her study, volumes of her favorite poetry and prose—Louise Glück, Donald Justice, T. S. Eliot, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Dickens—lined the walls. Occasionally, she took comfort and inspiration from a humble sense of kinship with these writers.

Most of the time, however, she felt like a pretender. Worse, a fraud.

Her mother had said that every good writer needed to be her own toughest critic. Molly edited her work with both a red pen and a metaphorical hatchet, leaving evidence of bloody suffering with the former, reducing scenes to kindling with the latter.

More than once, Neil suggested that Thalia had never said—and had not intended to imply—that worthwhile art could be carved from raw language only with self-doubt as sharp as a chisel. To Thalia, her work had also been her favorite form of play.

In a troubled culture where cream often settled on the bottom and the palest milk rose to the top, Molly knew that she was short on logic and long on superstition when she supposed that her hope for success rested upon the amount of passion, pain, and polish that she brought to her writing. Nevertheless, regarding her work, Molly remained a Puritan, finding virtue in self-flagellation.

Leaving the lamps untouched, she switched on the computer but didn’t at once sit at her desk. Instead, as the screen brightened and the signature music of the operating system welcomed her to a late-night work session, she was once more drawn to a window by the insistent rhythm of the rain.

Beyond the window lay the deep front porch. The railing and the overhanging roof framed a dark panorama of serried pines, a strangely luminous ghost forest out of a disturbing dream.

She could not look away. For reasons that she wasn’t able to articulate, the scene made her uneasy.

Nature has many lessons to teach a writer of fiction. One of these is that nothing captures the imagination as quickly or as completely as does spectacle.

Blizzards, floods, volcanos, hurricanes, earthquakes: They fascinate because they nakedly reveal that Mother Nature, afflicted with bipolar disorder, is as likely to snuff us as she is to succor us. An alternately nurturing and destructive parent is the stuff of gripping drama.

Silvery cascades leafed the bronze woods, burnishing bark and bough with sterling highlights.

An unusual mineral content in the rain might have lent it this slight phosphorescence.

Or … having come in from the west, through the soiled air above Los Angeles and surrounding cities, perhaps the storm had washed from the atmosphere a witch’s brew of pollutants that in combination gave rise to this pale, eerie radiance.

Sensing that neither explanation would prove correct, seeking a third, Molly was startled by movement on the porch. She shifted focus from the trees to the sheltered shadows immediately beyond the glass.

Low, sinuous shapes moved under the window. They were so silent, fluid, and mysterious that for a moment they seemed to be imagined: formless expressions of primal fears.

Then one, three, five of them lifted their heads and turned their yellow eyes to the window, regarding her inquisitively. They were as real as Molly herself, though sharper of tooth.

The porch swarmed with wolves. Slinking out of the storm, up the steps, onto the pegged-pine floor, they gathered under the shelter of the roof, as though this were not a house but an ark that would soon be set safely afloat by the rising waters of a cataclysmic flood.

2

IN THESE MOUNTAINS, BETWEEN THE TRUE desert to the east and the plains to the west, wolves were long extinct. The visitation on the porch had the otherworldly quality of an apparition.

When, on closer examination, Molly realized that these beasts were coyotes—sometimes called prairie wolves—their behavior seemed no less remarkable than when she had mistaken them for the larger creatures of folklore and fairy tales.

As much as anything, their silence defined their strangeness. In the thrill of the chase, running down their prey, coyotes often cry with high excitement: a chilling ululation as eerie as the music of a theremin. Now they neither cried nor barked, nor even growled.

Unlike most wolves, coyotes will frequently hunt alone. When they join in packs to stalk game, they do not run as close together as do wolves.

Yet on the front porch, the individualism characteristic of their species was not in evidence. They gathered flank-to-flank, shoulder-to-shoulder, eeling among one another, no less communal than domesticated hounds, nervous and seeking reassurance from one another.

Noticing Molly at the study window, they neither shied from her nor reacted aggressively. Their shining eyes, which in the past had always impressed her as being cruel and bright with blood hunger, now appeared to be as devoid of threat as the trusting eyes of any household pet.

Indeed, each creature favored her with a compelling look as alien to coyotes as anything she could imagine. Their expressions seemed to be imploring.

This was so unlikely that she distrusted her perceptions. Yet she thought that she detected a beseeching attitude not only in their eyes but also in their posture and behavior.

She ought to have been frightened by this fanged congregation. Her heart did beat faster than usual; however, the novelty of the situation and a sense of the mysterious, rather than fear, quickened her pulse.

The coyotes were obviously seeking shelter, although never previously had Molly seen even one of them flee the tumult of a storm for the protection of a human habitation. People were a far greater danger to their kind than anything they might encounter in nature.

Besides, this comparatively dark and quiet tempest had neither the lightning nor the thunder to chase them from their dens. The formidable volume of the downpour marked this as unusual weather; but the rain had not been falling long enough to flood these stoic predators out of their homes.

Although the coyotes regarded Molly with entreating glances, they reserved the greater part of their attention for the storm. Tails tucked, ears pricked, the wary beasts watched the silvery torrents and the drenched forest with acute interest if not with outright anxiety.

As still more of their wolfish kind slouched out of the night and onto the porch, Molly searched the palisade of trees for the cause of their concern.

She saw nothing more than she had seen before: the faintly radiant cataracts wrung from a supersaturated sky, the trees and other vegetation bowed and trembled and silvered by the fiercely pummeling rain.

Nonetheless, as she scanned the night woods, the nape of her neck prickled as though a ghost lover had pressed his ectoplasmic lips against her skin. A shudder of inexplicable misgiving passed through her.

Rattled by the conviction that something in the forest returned her scrutiny from behind the wet veil of the storm, Molly backed away from the window.

The computer monitor suddenly seemed too bright—and revealing. She switched off the machine.

Black and argentine, the mercurial gloom streamed and glimmered past the windows. Even here in the house, the air felt thick and damp.

The phosphoric light of the storm cast shimmering reflections on a collection of porcelains, on glass paperweights, on the white-gold leafing of several picture frames. … The study had the deep-fathom ambience of an oceanic trench forever beyond the reach of the sun but dimly revealed by radiant anemones and luminous jellyfish.

Molly was struck by a disorienting sense of otherness that was familiar from dreams but that had never before overcome her while she remained awake.

She backed farther from the window. She edged toward the study door that led to the downstairs hall.

A creeping disquietude stole through her, nerve to nerve. She was anxious not about the coyotes on the porch but about something she couldn’t name—a threat so primal that reason was blind to it and instinct revealed only its rough contours.

Counseling herself that she was too mature to succumb to the easy fright of childhood and adolescence, she nevertheless retreated to the stairs, intending to return to the bedroom and wake Neil.

For perhaps a minute, she stood with one hand on the newel post, listening to the drumming rain, considering what to say after rousing him from sleep. Everything that occurred to her sounded to one degree or another hysterical.

She was not concerned about looking foolish in Neil’s eyes. During seven years of marriage, each had been a fool often enough to have earned the lasting forbearance of the other.

She nurtured an image of herself, however, that sustained her during difficult times, and she strove always to avoid compromising it. In this self-portrait, she was tough, resilient, tempered by terror at an early age, seasoned by grief, qualified by experience to handle whatever fate threw at her.

At eight, she had endured and miraculously survived an episode of extreme violence that might have left any other child in therapy for decades. Later, when she was just twelve, an invisible thief called lymphoma, with quiet violence, stole the life from her mother.

For most of her existence, Molly had not shied from a truth that most people understood but diligently suppressed: that every moment of every day, depending on the faith we embrace, each of us continues to live either by the merciful sufferance of God or at the whim of blind chance and indifferent nature.

She listened to the rain. The downpour seemed not indifferent, but purposeful and determined.

Leaving Neil to his sleep, she turned away from the stairs. The windows remained faintly luminous, as if with the reflected glow of the aurora borealis.

Although her disquiet slowly gathered the force of apprehension, just as a revolving hurricane spins ever greater winds around its dead-calm eye, Molly crossed the foyer to the front door.

Flanking the door were tall, French-paned sidelights. Beyond the sidelights lay the porch onto which she had looked from her office.

The coyotes still gathered in that shelter. As she drew near the door, some of the animals turned once more to gaze in at her.

Their anxious panting painted pale plumes on the glass. From behind this veil of smoking breath, their radiant eyes beseeched her.

Molly was inexplicably convinced that she could open the door and move among them without risk of attack.

Whether or not she was as tough as she believed herself to be, she was not impulsive or reckless. She didn’t possess the fatalistic temperament of a snake handler or even the adventurousness of those who rode rafts over white-water rapids.

The previous autumn, when a wildfire churned up the eastern face of the mountain, threatening to cross the crest and sweep westward to the lake, she and Neil had been, at her insistence, the first among their neighbors to pack essential belongings and leave. Her acute awareness of life’s fragility had since childhood made of her a prudent person.

Yet when writing a novel, she often shunned prudence, trusting her instinct and her heart more than she did intellect. Without risk, she could get nothing on the page worth reading.

Here in the foyer, in this false-aurora glow, under the anxious gaze of the gathered canines beyond the French panes, the moment had a mystical quality, more like fiction than reality. Perhaps that was why Molly considered hazarding onto the porch.

She put her right hand on the doorknob. Rather, she found her hand on the knob without quite recalling when she had put it there.

The roar of the rain, escalating from a cataclysmic chorus until it became the very voice of Armageddon, and the witchy light together exerted a mesmerizing effect. Nevertheless, she knew that she wasn’t falling into a trance, wasn’t being lured from the house by some supernatural force, as in a bad movie.

She’d never felt more awake, more clearheaded. Instinct, heart, and mind were synchronized now as they had rarely been in her twenty-eight years of experience.

The unprecedented September deluge and everything about the odd behavior of the coyotes, not least of all their uncharacteristic meekness, argued that the usual logic didn’t apply. Here, providence required boldness rather than caution.

If her heart had continued to race, she might not have turned the knob. At the thought of turning it, however, she felt a curious calm descend. Her pulse rate declined, although each beat knocked through her with jarring force.

In some Chinese dialects, the same word is used to mean either danger or opportunity. In this instance, as never before, she was in a Chinese frame of mind.

She opened the door.

The coyotes, perhaps a score of them, neither attacked nor growled. They did not bare their teeth.

Amazed by their behavior and by her own, Molly crossed the threshold. She stepped onto the porch.

As if they were family dogs, the coyotes made room for her and seemed to welcome her company.

Her amazement still allowed a measure of caution. She stood with her arms crossed defensively over her chest. Yet she felt that if she held a hand out to the beasts, they would only nuzzle and lick it.

The coyotes nervously divided their attention between Molly and the surrounding woods. Their rapid and shallow panting spoke not of exhaustion after a long run, but of acute anxiety.

Something in the rain-swept forest frightened them. Evidently, this fear was so intense that they dared not respond to it with their customary snarls, raised hackles, and counterchallenges.

Instead, they trembled and issued soft mewls of meek submission. Their ears were not flattened to signal an aggressive response, but remained pricked, as if they could hear the breathing and the subtle footfalls of a fierce predator even through the crash of rain.

Tails tucked between their legs, flanks trembling, they moved ceaselessly back and forth. They seemed ready, at any moment, to drop as one to the plank floor and submissively expose their bellies in an attempt to forestall an attack by some ferocious enemy.

Brushing against Molly as they swarmed the porch, the coyotes appeared to take as much comfort from contact with her as they did from their pack mates. Although their eyes were strange and wild, she saw in them some of the hopeful trust and need for companionship that were qualities common to the eyes of the gentlest dogs.

Her amazement gave way to astonishment as a humbling flood of emotions never experienced before—or never experienced this strongly—swelled in her. A sense of wonder, childlike in its intensity. An almost pagan feeling of being one with nature.

The humid air thickened with the odor of damp fur and with the smoky ammonia scent of musk.

Molly thought of Diana, Roman goddess of the hunt, whom artists often depicted in the company of wolves, leading a pack in pursuit of prey, across moonlit fields and hills.

A profound awareness of the interconnectedness of all things in Creation seemed to arise not from her mind, not even from her heart, but from the smallest structures of her being, as if the microscopic tides of cytoplasm in her billions of cells responded to the coyotes, the unusual storm, and the forest in much the way that Earth’s oceans were influenced by the moon.

This extraordinary moment was supercharged with a mystical quality so supremely grand in character and so formidable in power, so unlike anything Molly had known before, that she was overcome by awe and trembled with a peculiar exhilaration that was almost joy. Her breathing became quick and shallow, and her legs grew weak.

Then, as one, the coyotes were seized by a greater terror than the fright that had driven them from the woods. With thin, desperate bleats of panic, they fled the porch.

As they swarmed past her, their wet tails lashed her legs. A few looked up entreatingly, as though she must understand the cause of their fear and might be able to rescue them from the enemy, real or imagined, that had chased them from their dens.

Fast down the steps, into the storm, they traveled in a tight defensive pack, not hunting now, but hunted.

Their rain-soaked coats clung to them, revealing lean forms of bone, sinew, and stringy muscle. Always before, coyotes had looked aggressive and formidable to her, but these seemed lost, unsure of their purpose, almost pitiable.

Molly crossed to the head of the porch steps and stared after them. Although irrational and disturbing, the urge to follow was difficult to resist.

As the coyotes descended through the night, the forest, and the queerly luminescent rain, they frequently glanced back, past the house and toward the top of the ridge. Suddenly seeming to catch the scent of a pursuer, they whidded among the pines, as swift and silent as gray spirits. And were gone.

Chilled, hugging herself, Molly let out a pent-up breath that she’d not been aware of holding.

She waited, tense and wary, but nothing followed the pack.

In these mountains, coyotes had no natural enemies capable of challenging them. The few remaining bears foraged on wild fruits, tubers, and tender roots; they stalked nothing bigger than fish. Although bobcats had survived human encroachment in greater numbers than had the bears, they fed on rabbits and rodents; they would not chase down another predator for food and certainly not for sport.

The musky scent of the coyotes hung on the air after they departed. Indeed, the odor didn’t diminish but seemed to ripen.

Standing at the head of the steps, Molly held a hand out past the protection of the roof. In this cool autumn night, the glimmering rain slipping through her fingers proved to be unexpectedly warm.

The phosphoric water limned the wrinkles of her knuckles.

She looked at her palm. Head line, heart line, and lifeline shone brighter than the rest of her hand, suddenly scintillating with mysterious meaning, as if some previously unknown Gypsy heritage had manifested in her, complete with the ability to foretell the future from creases in her skin.

When she withdrew her hand from the rushing rain and sniffed it, she detected even more strongly than before the scent that she had attributed to the coyotes. Although not appealing enough to be called a fragrance, it was not unpleasant, either, and was as rich with subtleties as the air in a spice market.

She had never before experienced such a scent. Yet within the intricate matrix of this unique smell, she detected a tantalizingly familiar substance, simple in its nature. The more determinedly she strove to identify this core odor, the more its slippery name eluded her.

Although it smelled like a complex mélange of essences and exotic oils, the rain had the character and consistency of ordinary water. She rubbed it between thumb and fingertips, feeling nothing unusual.

Gradually Molly realized that she was lingering on the porch in the hope that the coyotes would return. Standing among them, like a lamb among lions, trembling on the brink of some revelation, had been such an awesome experience that she longed to repeat it.

When the coyotes did not reappear, an ineffable sense of loss overcame her. With it arose anew the feeling of being watched that earlier had stirred the fine hairs on the back of her neck.

Sometimes the forest appeared to her as a green cathedral. The massive pine trunks were columns in a vast nave, and the spreading boughs formed groin vaults and fan vaults high overhead.

Now, with the reverential hush of the woods replaced by the din of the downpour, the gloom coiling among the trees seemed to be of a different character from that on any previous night. The god of this cathedral was the lord of darkness.

Disquieted again, Molly backed across the porch, retreating from the steps. She did not for one moment look away from the encircling forest, half convinced that something would fly at her from out of the pines, something that would be all teeth and temper.

Inside, she closed the door. Engaged the deadbolt. Stood there for a moment, trembling.

She continued to be surprised and disturbed by her emotionalism. Driven by a kind of instinct, less of the mind than of the heart, she felt reduced from womanhood to the overwrought reactions of a girl—and she didn’t like it.

Eager to wash her hands, she hurried to the kitchen.

Approaching the open door, she saw that the light above the cooktop was still on, as she had left it when she’d heated the mug of milk.

At the threshold, she hesitated, suddenly expecting someone to be in the kitchen. Someone who had come in the back door while she had been distracted by the coyotes.

More emotionalism. Foolish. No intruder waited for her.

She crossed the kitchen directly to the back door, and tried it. Bolted. Secure. No one could have gotten in that way.

Coruscating curtains of radiant rain silvered the night. A thousand eyes might have watched from behind that sequined veil.

She lowered the pleated shade over the window beside the breakfast table. She dropped the shade at the window above the sink, as well.

After turning on the water and adjusting it to the hottest temperature that she could tolerate, she lathered her hands with liquid soap from the built-in dispenser. The soap smelled like oranges, a gratifyingly clean scent.

She had not touched any of the coyotes.

For a moment she did not understand why she was scrubbing her hands so determinedly. Then she realized that she was washing away the rain.

The curiously aromatic rain had left her feeling … unclean.

She rinsed her hands until they were red, half-scalded. Then she pumped more soap and lathered up a second time.

Within that mélange of subtle but exotic scents had been a vaguely familiar odor, smoky and ammoniac, that Molly had not quite been able to identify. Although she had flushed the smell from her hands, it now returned to her in memory, and this time she was able to name it: semen.

Under that spice-market variety of exotic aromas, the rain had exuded the fecund scent of semen.

This seemed so unlikely, so absurdly Freudian, that she wondered if she might be asleep. Or sliding into a neuropsychotic episode.

The inexplicable luminescence, the seminal rain, the cowering coyotes: From bed to foaming faucet, every step and moment of the experience had a hallucinatory quality.

She turned off the faucet, half expecting silence when the water stopped gushing. But the tremendous roar of the unseasonable rain was there, all right—either real or the soundtrack of a singularly 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 arms.

Molly liked to touch his arms, shoulders, chest. He felt so solid, therefore reliable.

His physique matched his character. She could depend on him, always.

Sometimes she touched him casually, with innocent intention—and passion followed as urgently as thunder in the wake of lightning.

He had always been a confident but quiet lover, patient and almost shy. The more aggressive of the two, Molly usually led him to bed instead of being led.

After seven years, her boldness still surprised and delighted her. She had never been that way with another man.

Even in this unnerving night, in spite of the roof-punishing rumble of radiant rain and the disquieting memory of the coyotes, Molly felt a certain sensual response at the sight of her husband. His tousled hair. His handsome, beard-stubbled face; his mouth as tender as that of a boy.

He wiped his face with his hands, pulling off cobwebs of sleep. When he looked up at her, his blue eyes seemed to be a deeper shade than usual, almost sapphire. Darker shadows moved in the blue, as if a nightmare memory of poisonous spiders still scurried across his field of waking vision.

“Are you all right?” Molly repeated.

“No.” His voice was rough, as though cracking from thirst and raw with exhaustion after a desperate chase across the fields of sleep. “Dear Jesus, what was that?”

“What was what?”

He got up from the bed. His body had a coiled-spring tension, every muscle taut. His dream had been a hard-turned key that left him as stressed as overwound clockworks.

“You were having a nightmare,” she said, “I heard you shouting in your sleep.”

“Not a nightmare. Worse.” With anxious bewilderment, he turned to survey the room. “That sound.”

“Rain,” she said, and pointed at a window.

Neil shook his head. “No. Not just rain. Something behind it … above it.”

His demeanor further unsettled Molly. He seemed to be half in a trance, unable fully to shake off his nightmare.

He shuddered. “There’s a mountain coming down.”

“Mountain?”

Tipping his head back, studying the bedroom ceiling with evident anxiety, the initial roughness in his voice smoothing into a solemn silken tone of mesmerizing intensity, he said, “Huge. In the dream. Massive. A mountain, rock blacker than iron, coming down in a slow fall. You run and you run … but you can’t get out from under. Its shadow grows ahead of you faster … faster than you can hope to move.”

Soft-spoken, yet as sharp as a harpist’s plectrums, his words plucked her nerves.

Intending to lighten the moment, Molly said, “Ah. A Chicken Little dream.”

Neil’s stare remained fixed on the ceiling. “Not just a dream. Here. Now.” He held his breath, listening. Then: “Something behind the rain … coming down.”

“Neil. You’re scaring me.”

Lowering his gaze, meeting her eyes, he said, “A crushing weight somewhere up there. A growing pressure. You feel it, too.”

Even if the moon itself had been falling, she would have been reluctant to acknowledge that its gravitational influence stirred powerful new tides in her blood. Until now, she had been a rider who kept tight reins on life, letting emotion break into full gallop only in the pages of her books, saving the drama for fiction.

“No,” she said. “It was just the sound of the rain getting to you in your dream, and your mind spun it into something weird, made a mountain of it.”

“You feel it, too,” he insisted, and he padded barefoot to a window.

The low amber light from the nightstand lamp was insufficient to disguise the luminous nature of the torrents that tinseled the forest and silvered the ground.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“Unusual mineral content, pollution of some kind,” she replied, resorting to the explanations that she had already considered and largely rejected.

The curiosity and wonder that earlier compelled her to venture among the coyotes had curdled into trepidation. With uncharacteristic timidity, she yearned to return to bed, to shrink among the covers, to sleep away the freak storm and wake by the light of a normal dawn.

Neil disengaged the latch on the casement window and reached for the handle to crank it open.

“Don’t,” she warned with more urgency than she had intended.

Half turning from the window, he faced her.

She said, “The rain smells strange. It feels … unclean.”

Only now he noticed her robe. “How long have you been up?”

“Couldn’t sleep. Went downstairs to write. But …”

He looked at the ceiling again. “There. Do you feel that?”

Maybe she felt something. Or maybe her imagination was building mountains in the air.

His gaze tracked across the ceiling. “It’s not falling toward us anymore.” His voice quieted to a whisper. “It’s moving eastward … west to east.”

She didn’t share his apparently instinctual perception, though she found herself wiping her right hand on her robe—the hand that she had held out in the rain and had later washed so vigorously with orange-scented soap.

“As big as two mountains, three … so huge,” whispered Neil. He made the sign of the cross—forehead to breast, left shoulder to right—which she had not seen him do in years.

Suddenly she felt more than heard a great, deep, slow throbbing masked by the tremulous roar of the rain.

“… sift you as wheat …”

Those words of Neil’s, so strange and yet disturbingly familiar, refocused her attention from the ceiling to him. “What did you say?”

“It’s huge.”

“No. After that. What did you say about wheat?”

As if the words had escaped him without his awareness, he regarded her with bewilderment. “Wheat? What’re you talking about?”

A flickering at the periphery of her vision drew Molly’s attention to the clock on her nightstand. The glowing green digits changed rapidly, continuously, as though racing to keep pace with time run amok.

“Neil.”

“I see it.”

The numbers were sequencing neither forward toward morning nor backward toward midnight. Rather, they resembled the streaming mathematics of high-speed computer calculations rushing across a monitor.

Molly consulted her wristwatch, which was not a digital model. The hour hand swept clockwise, counting off a full day in half a minute, while the minute hand spun counterclockwise even faster, as though she were stranded on a rock in the river of time, with the future flowing away from her as swiftly as did the past.

The mysterious deep pulses of sound—almost below the threshold of human hearing but felt in blood and bone—seemed to swell her heart as they pushed through it.

The mood and moment were unique, like nothing that she had previously experienced, but the atmosphere was as unmistakably hostile as it was unprecedented.

With the coyotes, Molly’s instinct had seemed to divorce itself from her common sense. She had acted on the former, recklessly stepping onto the front porch.

Now instinct and common sense were married again. Both intuition and cold reason counseled that she and Neil were in serious trouble even though they could not yet grasp the nature of it.

In his eyes, she saw the recognition of this truth. During their years together, serving alternately as confessor and redeemer to each other, they had arrived at an intimacy of mind and spirit that often made words superfluous.

At her nightstand, she withdrew the 9-mm pistol from the drawer. She always kept it loaded; nevertheless, she ejected the magazine to confirm that it lacked no rounds. The gleam of brass. Ten cartridges.

After locking in the magazine again, she put the weapon on the vanity, beside her hairbrush and hand mirror, within easy reach.

Across the room, on the dresser, stood a collection of half a dozen antique music boxes inherited from her mother. Spontaneously, a steely plink-and-jangle issued from them: six different melodies woven into a bright discordance.

On the lids of two boxes, clockwork-driven porcelain figurines suddenly became animated. Here, a man and woman in Victorian finery danced a waltz. There, a carousel horse turned around, around.

The cacophony of brittle notes abraded her nerves and seemed to cut like a surgical saw through her skull bone.

These familiar objects, a part of her life since childhood, became in an instant strange, disquieting.

Neil stared at the tiny dancers for a moment, at the circling horse, and appeared to be unsettled by them. He made no attempt to switch off the music boxes.

Instead, he turned to the window once more, but he didn’t crank it open, as he had been prepared to do a minute ago. He engaged the latch that previously he had unlocked.

4

AS THEY HURRIEDLY DRESSED IN JEANS AND sweaters, Molly told him about the coyotes.

The somber drone of the rain, the manic plinking of the music boxes, and the almost subliminal pulsation of unknown source served as a musical score, without coherent melody, that made the adventure on the front porch seem far more ominous in the telling than it had been in actual experience. She tried—but knew that she failed—to convey to Neil the sense of wonder and the reverential awe that had characterized the incident.

Seated on the vanity bench, striving to describe the bond with nature that she had felt as she’d stood among the coyotes, she worked her feet into a pair of waterproof walking shoes. Her hands trembled. She fumbled with the laces, finally managed to tie them.

Still talking, she picked up, by habit, the brush that lay beside the pistol. Although she realized the absurdity of trying to deny the weirdness of the moment by resorting to mundane tasks, she turned to the mirror to assess the state of her hair.

Her reflection was as it should be, but everything else in the mirror was wrong. Behind her lay not the lamplit and cozy bedroom, neat except for the disarranged bedclothes; instead, she saw filth and ruin.

Her voice broke off in midsentence, and she dropped the hairbrush. She swung around on the bench to confirm that the room had changed. It was as it had always been.

In reality, only the bedside clock was out of order. A chaos of radiant green numbers continued to spill across the readout window.

In the mirror, however, stained walls were textured by moss or mold. One lamp remained, the shade cocked and rotting. Across the headboard of the broken-down bed crawled vines too succulent to be native to these California mountains; gray-green and glistening with moisture, the leaves hung like a host of panting tongues.

She was tempted again to believe that she had never risen from bed and gone downstairs, that instead she had been asleep through these events—and still slept. The rain and all the strangeness that began with it—from the coyotes to this mirror—made more sense if they were the fantasies of sleep.

Drawn to her side, Neil reached out to touch the vanity mirror, as though he expected to find that the image in it was not merely a flat reflection, but a three-dimensional reality, a world beyond the mirror.

Irrationally, Molly stayed his hand. “No.”

“Why?”

“Because …”

She had no credible reason to stop him, only a superstitious fear of what would happen when his fingertips met the silvered surface of the looking glass.

With his free hand, he touched the mirror, which proved to be solid.

Then, in that other bedroom, something moved. A shadow proved not to be a shadow, after all, but a figure sinuous and dark, darting so fast across the mirror’s breadth of view and out of sight that it might have been a man in a cloak, a man with membranous wings—or not a man at all.

With a gasp of surprise, Neil snatched his hand back as if the entity on the other side surely had the power to reach through the mirror as he himself could not.

In the same instant, Molly spun off the bench, exploded to her feet, crazily certain that something had crossed over, through the veil of glass and quicksilver. But no unwanted visitor had entered the bedroom.

She glanced at the clock just as the sideways scroll of numbers abruptly halted. The time was 2:44.

Checking her wristwatch, she discovered that the hour and the minute hands had stopped spinning. Her timepiece agreed with the digital clock—2:44.

The music boxes fell silent.

The miniature carousel horse went from gallop to full stop in a plink, and the dancing figurines froze in mid-waltz.

Molly felt suddenly relieved of the real or imagined weight that had been suspended overhead like a giant sword of Damocles.

The half-heard, fully felt, deep pulsations of sound stopped throbbing through her.

“The mirror,” Neil said.

The reflection that it now offered was of the room in which they stood. No ruins, no mold-textured walls, no crawling vine.

Neil shifted his attention from the mirror to the ceiling. Then he went to a window. He peered less at the surrounding forest than at the obscured night sky from which rain poured in great cascades.

“Gone,” he said.

“I felt something,” she admitted. “But … what was it?”

“Don’t have a clue.”

He was not being candid with her, nor she with him.

They had been formed by a culture drunk with the yearning for intergalactic contact, the bedrock of a new faith in which God was but a supporting player. Everyone knew the doctrines of this quasi-religion better than most people remembered the words of the Lord’s Prayer: We are not alone … watch the skies … the answer is out there. … They had been Spielberged and Lucased and Shyamalaned. A thousand movies and TV shows, ten thousand books, had convinced the world that the new magi would be scientists riding not to Bethlehem on camels but to a UFO landing site in mobile labs with satellite dishes on the roofs, and that the salvation of humanity would come from another planet rather than from a higher realm.

Molly knew the signs as prophesied by Hollywood and by science fiction writers. Neil knew them, too.

This September night lay deep inside the Close Encounter Zone. In this territory, alien technology was the only font of miracles.

She didn’t want to put this understanding into words, however, and apparently neither did Neil. A pretense of bewilderment felt safer than candor.

Perhaps their reticence had its roots in the fact that on this subject Hollywood offered two familiar scenarios—one in which the extraterrestrials were benign gods, one in which they were full of wrath and cruel judgment. Thus far, these recent events lacked the sweetness and the twinkle of G-rated family entertainment.

Turning away from the window and from his inspection of the rain-choked sky, Neil said, “Not that we’ll need it … but I’ll get the shotgun.”

Recalling the half-glimpsed, sinuous figure that had flashed darkly across the moldering room in the mirror, Molly retrieved her handgun from the vanity and said, “I’ll get some spare cartridges for this.”

5

ON THE KITCHEN TABLE LAY THE SHOTGUN and a box of shells. Beside it were the pistol, a spare magazine, and a box of 9-mm cartridges.

Pleated window shades in the kitchen and the adjacent family room held back the night and the sight—though not the omnipresent sound—of the luminous rain.

Molly couldn’t shake the feeling that the surrounding forest, previously a friendly woods, now harbored unknown hostile observers. Neil apparently shared her paranoia; he had helped her lower the shades.

They both intuited that the mysterious forces at work in this drenched night were not restricted to these mountains. Simultaneously they reached for the TV remote, and Neil got it first.

They stood in front of the big screen, watching, too agitated to settle into chairs.

Television reception was not what it should be. Some channels were so afflicted with electronic snow that only ghostly images could be seen through the blizzard. Broken voices spoke distorted words.

One of the twenty-four-hour cable-news networks offered better sound and a relatively clear picture that rolled and flickered only occasionally.

The young woman—Veronica something—anchoring the news desk was as lovely as any movie starlet. Her eyes were avaricious, her smile as genuine as that of a mannequin.

She traded unscripted commentary with a young man, Jack, who might have been a successful underwear model for Calvin Klein if he had not gone to journalism school and majored in broadcasting. His smile, quick to come and quick to falter, revealed bleached-white teeth as square as those of a cow.

War, politics, crime, and even the doings of Hollywood royalty had been washed entirely off the news wires by freakish weather of an unprecedented nature and ferocity.

During the night, unpredicted, the largest continuous storm front ever recorded had formed at sea with impossible speed. It had moved ashore along the entire west coast of the Americas—South, Central, and North.

Reports of a curiously scented rain falling at the rate of four, five, and even six inches an hour had been received, corroborated. Within a few hours, low-lying cities all the way from Argentina to Alaska had begun suffering various degrees of flooding.

Live satellite feeds from both exotic and familiar metropolitan areas, sometimes distorted or grainy, showed cars and trucks afloat in city streets that resembled canals. Families on the roofs of their half-submerged houses. Soggy hillsides sliding away in rivers of mud.

Through every image, like pure-silver threads subtly woven in a tapestry, the luminous rain glimmered, so that Argentina and Alaska, and every point between, seemed unreal, revealed by dream light.

Molly had never been a fan of catastrophic news. She found neither enlightenment nor entertainment value in watching disaster befall others. Usually she would have turned away from the TV, half sick with pity. In this case she sensed that her future was tied to the fate of the strangers on the screen.

More recently, torrential rains had begun falling across Europe. Asia. Africa. From the arid Middle East, even from the parched sands of Saudi Arabia, came reports of rain in unprecedented volume. Video was expected shortly.

Nothing in the breaking news warranted a smile. Manning their anchor desk, Veronica and Jack were nevertheless guided by the first rule of electronic journalism: Establish rapport with the audience; ingratiate yourself and make yourself welcome in their homes; be authoritative but nice, dignified but fun.

Neither of them could entirely conceal the excitement of being junior talent, consigned to the graveyard shift, yet suddenly on-air as a huge story began breaking. Minute by minute, their audience was growing from maybe a hundred thousand insomniacs to perhaps millions of riveted viewers. You could almost hear them calculating the boost their careers would receive from this lucky timing.

Although the precise nature and the seriousness of the current crisis remained unclear, field reports compensated with dramatic content for what they lacked in coherency.

Six hours earlier, prior to the arrival of the rain along the coastline of the Americas, the crew of a French marine-research ship had witnessed the sudden birth of a spectacular waterspout three hundred miles southwest of Tahiti. The twister spun down from a cumulonimbus mass about three miles off the ship’s starboard flank, and grew with astonishing rapidity until the funnel point, sucking at the ocean, broadened to an estimated six hundred meters, more than a third of a mile.

Digital video, shot by a crew member and uploaded through the vessel’s satellite link, revealed a formation of daunting size. A scientist aboard the research ship estimated that the tornado-like form measured three miles in diameter where the highest point of the vertical updraft disappeared into the clouds.

“Sweet Jesus,” Neil whispered.

In these scenes, neither the sea nor the massive column of water churning into the sky was touched by the mysterious luminescence.

Nevertheless, the extraordinary rain, now drumming beyond the blinded windows, must somehow be related to this gigantic waterspout videotaped earlier in the far reaches of the South Pacific. Although Molly couldn’t understand the connection, the worldwide character of these events sharpened her anxiety.

On TV, the raging Pacific vortex spun off mean weather. The day darkened rapidly, as if God had applied a heavy finger to a celestial rheostat. Great claws of lightning tore at the ocean.

If the video frame had included any object with which to compare the funnel, the scale of the phenomenon would have been not merely breathtaking but terrifying. She could sense the cameraman’s fear when the twister began to move toward his ship.

As if rocked with anger and pain as the lightning slashed its great dark hide, the sea thrashed and heaved. The ship dropped into a fearsome trough, a chasm.

The bow dug into the floor of the trough. Tons of water broke over the railing and churned across the deck.

Battered by this surge, the cameraman’s legs were nearly swept out from under him. He kept his balance and staggered off the open deck as the ship abruptly shuddered and rose along the steep face of a colossal swell.

The starlet reporter, Veronica, appeared on the screen again to say that following the transmission of the preceding video, the French ship had not been heard from again.

Jack, her co-anchor, expressed concern for the crew and then, with mindless conviction, concluded that they were certainly safe because “those marine-research guys really know their way around the sea.”

Through a smile as constant as that of a ventriloquist’s wooden partner, Veronica revealed that she had spent one semester of college aboard a sailing vessel in an at-sea learning program.

Molly wanted to scream at them, as if her voice might travel back along a microwave path to New York City or Washington, or to wherever they were located. She wanted to rock them out of their self-satisfied journalistic detachment, which always seemed to her to be merely smug superiority and emotional indifference masquerading as professionalism.

Additional video had been recorded and transmitted via satellite by military personnel aboard the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier currently under way three hundred miles due west of Japan. This tape documented the astonishingly swift development of a dense cloud cover out of a previously clear sky.

Subsequently, at three points of the compass, within sight of observers aboard the aircraft carrier, waterspouts had formed. The diameter of their funnels grew rapidly until each was larger than the single twister captured on video by the French. An officer aboard the carrier, unable to keep either the awe or the tremor of fear out of his voice, added narration to the incredible visuals.

Again, neither the sea nor the spinning funnels revealed any trace of the scintillation that characterized the falling rain.

Impossibly, reports of giant waterspouts were also coming in from ships in the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, though these were not supported by video.

Obviously reading from a TelePrompTer, in a pedantic but still ingratiating tone, Veronica said, “Although waterspouts appear to be twisting tubes of solid water, they consist of mist and spray, and are not as formidable as they look.”

“However,” Jack chimed in, “relying on sophisticated computer analysis of Doppler-radar images, technicians aboard the Ronald Reagan determined that the spouts under their observation did not conform to any known models of the phenomenon. These are nearly solid forms, and Dr. Randolph Templeton, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, who joined us in the studio just a short while ago, estimates that each of these funnels is drawing water from the sea at the rate of a hundred thousand gallons per minute.”

“More,” said Templeton when he came on-screen. “Twice that, at least.” He had the good sense not to smile.

In the meteorologist’s eyes, Molly saw the measured fear of an informed intelligence.

Needing to touch Neil, she put a hand on his shoulder, and was less reassured than usual by his solid physique.

With furrowed brow, in a solemn voice, Jack asked Dr. Templeton if these phenomena were the result of global warming.

“The vast majority of meteorologists don’t believe there is any global warming,” Templeton replied with a note of impatience, “at least not any that isn’t natural and cyclical.”

Jack and Veronica both appeared dumbfounded by this statement, and before a producer could murmur a suitable comeback question in their earpieces, they both looked simultaneously at the ceiling of the broadcast studio.

“A very hard rain has just begun falling here in Washington,” said Veronica.

“Remarkably hard,” Jack agreed. Apparently, the producer at last whispered in his earpiece, for Jack turned to the meteorologist. “But Dr. Templeton, everyone knows the effect of greenhouse gases—”

“What everyone knows is bunk,” Templeton said, “and if we’re going to get a handle on this, what we need right now is analysis based on real science, not—”

Neil thumbed the remote control repeatedly until he found one of the three major networks, which had belatedly risen to the crisis like a shark to a swimmer.

The anchorman was older than the pair on cable news, and famous. He preened with self-importance as he interviewed a specialist in satellite-data analysis.

According to the bio line on the bottom of the screen, the expert was Dr. Sanford Nguyen. He worked for the same government agency that employed Randolph Templeton, who was at that moment debating global warming with Jack and Veronica on another channel.

The anchorman was surely being fed questions by an unseen producer and a first-rate team of researchers, but his inquiries rolled off his golden tongue as though he himself were a maven of orbital data-recovery systems.

Dr. Nguyen made the unsettling revelation that three hours prior to the observation of the extraordinary waterspouts, all orbital assets of the National Weather Service and other federal agencies had gone blind. Evidently, industry-owned satellites with high-resolution photographic capability were out of commission, as well. No high-altitude photographic, infrared, or radar images of the waterspouts were available to suggest why and how these phenomena had occurred.

“What about military satellites, the missile trackers?” Molly wondered. “What about spy satellites?”

“They’ll have been blinded, too,” Neil predicted.

On the TV, the anchorman asked Dr. Nguyen if a burst of cosmic radiation or perhaps unusually intense sunspot activity could have fried the circuitry in all those eyes in the sky.

“No,” Nguyen assured him. “That can’t be the explanation. Besides, it’s too coincidental. Neither cosmic radiation nor magnetic pulses could have precipitated the calamitous weather we’re seeing, and I’m sure that whatever blinded our satellites is the cause also of those waterspouts and these storms.”

Puckering his face into his most solemn of all expressions, the network anchorman said, “Dr. Nguyen, are we seeing at last the terrible consequences of global warming?”

Nguyen’s expression suggested contempt but also sudden bewilderment at the unanswerable question he must have been asking himself: What the hell am I doing here?

Molly said, “Why would only observation satellites be out of commission?” She gestured toward the TV. “Obviously, communications satellites are still functioning.”

“Probably they prefer we don’t see them,” Neil said, “but they want us to know what’s happening with the weather because fear debilitates. Maybe they want us frightened, cowering, and pliable.”

“They?”

He didn’t reply.

She knew what he meant, and he knew that she understood. Yet both of them were reluctant to express the truth that they suspected, as if to name the enemy would be to unleash in themselves a terror that they could not tame.

Neil put down the remote control, turned from the TV, and headed out of the family room into the adjoining kitchen. “I’m going to make coffee.”

“Coffee?” she asked with a note of disbelief.

This domestic task seemed to be evidence of total psychological denial, a reaction unworthy of the unshakeable, eternally competent man whom she had married.

“We haven’t had a full night’s sleep,” he explained. “We might need to stay awake, keep our wits about us, for a long time. Coffee will help. I better make it while we still have electrical service.”

Molly glanced at the TV, at the lamps. She hadn’t thought the power might go off.

She was chilled by the prospect of having no light except the eerie luminosity of the unclean rain.

“I’ll gather all the flashlights,” she said, “and whatever spare batteries we have.”

Flashlights were distributed throughout the house, continually charging in wall outlets. They were to provide guidance in the event that an earthquake imposed darkness in rocked rooms filled with avalanched furniture.

He turned to her, paler than he’d been a moment ago. “No, Molly. From now on, neither of us goes anywhere alone. We’ll collect the flashlights later, together. Right now, let’s brew some coffee. And make sandwiches.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“We’ll eat anyway.”

“But Neil—”

“We don’t know what’s coming. We don’t know when we’ll have a chance to eat again … in peace.”

He held out a hand to her.

He was the most beautiful and appealing man whom she had ever known. The first time that she’d seen him, more than seven years ago, Neil had been standing in a complicated geometry of multicolored light, smiling warmly, his face so perfect and his eyes so kind that she briefly mistook him for Saint John the Divine.

She gripped his hand, shivering with fear and inex-pressibly grateful that fate had combed her and him from the tangle of humanity, and that love had braided them together in marriage.

He drew her into his arms. She held fast to him.

One ear against his chest, she listened to his heart. The beat was strong, at first quickened by anxiety, but then growing calmer.

Molly’s heart slowed to match the pace of his.

Steel has a high melting point, but higher still when it is alloyed with tungsten. Cashmere is a strong fabric, as is silk; however, a cashmere-and-silk blend will be more durable and will provide more warmth to the wearer than will either fabric alone.

Alone, she had learned at a young age to carry all the weight the world piled on her. As long as she had Neil, she could endure not just the terrors of this world but also those that might come from beyond it.

6

ALTHOUGH THE KITCHEN AND FAMILY ROOM were redolent of the rich aroma of coffee, Molly thought that she could detect the faint but singular odor of the rain penetrating the walls from the saturated night.

She and Neil sat on the floor in front of the TV, the shotgun and pistol within easy reach, eating chicken sandwiches and potato chips.

Initially she had no appetite. On first bite, however, she discovered that she was ravenous.

No food had ever tasted as delicious as this. The chicken proved juicier, the mayonnaise creamier, the pickles more tart, and the chips crispier than any she had eaten before. Every flavor was exquisitely enhanced.

Perhaps any prisoner on death row, savoring his last meal before being given a lethal injection, experienced the flavors and textures of food this intensely.

On television, silvery-blue snow fell in the French Alps, in the mountains of Colorado, on the streets of Moscow. Each scene appeared to have been dusted with Christmas-card glitter.

The domes and minarets of the Kremlin had never before looked so magical. Every glimmering shadow in those twinkling boulevards and sparkling plazas seemed to harbor elves, pixies, and other fairy folk who might momentarily spring into sight, dancing and performing aerial acrobatics in exuberant celebration.

The ethereal beauty of the sequined blue snow suggested that whatever might be happening could not be entirely without a positive aspect.

In Denver, although dawn had not yet broken, children were frolicking in the streets, tossing snowballs, drawn from their homes by the novelty of a blue, luminous blizzard.

Their delight and their musical laughter inspired a hopeful yet uncertain smile from the on-scene network reporter. He said, “And another remarkable detail about this extraordinary phenomenon—the snow smells sort of like vanilla.”

Molly wondered if the newsman had a sufficiently sensitive nose to be able to detect a far less appealing underlying scent if one existed.

“Vanilla laced with the fragrance of oranges,” he continued.

Perhaps here in the San Bernardino Mountains, the rain no longer smelled as it had when Molly stepped onto the porch with the coyotes. Maybe, as in Colorado, the night now offered the olfactory delights of a confectioner’s kitchen.

Turning, encouraging the cameraman to pan with him, the reporter indicated the wintry panorama: the mantled street, the evergreen boughs laden with fluffy masses of sapphire flocking, the warm amber lights of houses huddled cozily in the blue impossible.

“It’s indescribably beautiful,” he said, “like a scene out of Dr. Seuss, a street in Whoville, the glitter without the Grinch.”

The hundred-eighty-degree sweep of the camera came to a stop, zooming in on a group of children who were bundled for winter play.

A girl of perhaps seven held a snowball in her gloved hands.

Instead of throwing it at anyone, she licked it, as if it were one of those treats made with shaved ice and flavored syrup, sold at carnivals and amusement parks. She grinned at the camera with blue-tinted lips.

An older boy, inspired by her example, took a bite from his snowball. The taste seemed to please him.

This image disturbed Molly so much that if she had not already consumed her sandwich, she would have put it aside, unfinished.

She remembered the unclean feel of the rain. She would never have turned her face to the sky and opened her mouth to imbibe this storm.

Evidently, the sight of the children eating snow dismayed Neil no less than it did Molly. He picked up the remote, surfed for news.

7

UNABLE TO PRESS FROM HER MIND THE IMAGE of the children feeding on the tainted snow, Molly paced and drank too much coffee.

Neil remained seated on the floor, using the TV remote.

Up and down the broadcast ladder, more channels than before were too poorly received to be watchable. And more than previously were out of service altogether.

Twice they encountered signals that manifested on the screen as coruscating patterns in vibrant colors. Although reminiscent of the symmetrical displays that dazzled at the bottom of a kaleidoscope, these designs had no sharp edges; they were all curves and sinuous forms, apparently infinite in variety, yet suggestive of meaning.

Accompanying the patterns were the oscillating electronic tones that Molly had heard on the telephone: shrieks followed by low pulses of sound, followed by piercing whistles …

Government officials were suddenly all over the tube, sounding authoritative—but looking at best disquieted and confused, at worst frightened. The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, various officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency …

Weather-related crises were springing up by the dozens every hour, all because of the unprecedented volume of rain, now estimated at seven inches an hour in many locations. With frightening rapidity, rivers overflowed their banks. Dams filled faster than floodgates could relieve the growing pressure; already, in Oregon, only a few hours after the rains had begun, a dam had burst, and several small towns had been washed away.

Incredibly, when the entire world might be at risk, Molly worried about the stability of their one piece of real estate. “What about mud slides?”

“We’re safe,” Neil assured her. “We’re on bedrock.”

“I don’t feel safe.”

“We’re so high … two thousand feet above any possible flood plain.”

Irrationally, she felt that they might somehow ride out even the end of the world as they knew it if only their home remained intact, as if the Sloan residence were a bubble universe sufficient unto itself.

While they had eaten sandwiches and watched the world falling into tumult on TV, Neil had moved the family-room telephone from the end table beside the sofa, where it usually stood, to the floor at his side. From time to time, he had tried to call his brother, Paul, in Hawaii.

Sometimes he got a dial tone; Paul’s cell phone rang out there on Maui, but no one answered. At other times, when he picked up the handset, he got the oscillating electronic tones that accompanied the colorful patterns on TV.

On the seventh or eighth attempt, a connection was made. Paul answered.

The sound of his brother’s voice clearly lifted Neil’s spirits. “Paulie. Thank God. Thought you might be just crazy enough to catch some waves in this.”

Paul surfed. The ocean was his second passion.

Molly grabbed the remote control, muted the TV.

Into the phone, Neil said, “What?” He listened. “Yeah, we’re okay. Here at the house. It’s raining so hard maybe we need gopher wood and plans for an ark.”

Molly knelt in front of her husband, reached to the phone, and pressed the button labeled speaker.

From the north shore of Maui, Paul said, “—seen a lot of tropical rains, but nothing like this.”

“TV says seven inches an hour.”

“Worse than that here,” Paul said. “Much worse. Rain so thick, you can almost drown on your feet. If you gasp for breath, you get more water than air. The rain—it’s a heavy weight, wants to drive you to your knees. We’ve gathered in the courthouse. Almost four hundred of us.”

“The courthouse?” Puzzlement furrowed Neil’s brow. “Not the church? The church is on higher ground.”

“The courthouse has fewer and smaller windows,” Paul explained. “It’s more easily fortified and defended.”

Defended.

Molly glanced at the pistol, the shotgun.

On the muted television, spectacular video from some far city showed buildings burning in spite of quenching masses of falling rain.

On the phone, Paul said, “First Peter, chapter four, verse seven. Does it feel that way to you, little brother?”

“Truth? It feels like Close Encounters to me,” Neil admitted, at last putting into words the thought that neither he nor Molly had been willing to express. “But where it’s ultimately going—who knows?”

“I know,” Paul said, his voice firm and calm. “I’ve accepted with good will all the anguish, pain, and sorrow that might come.”

Molly recognized his stilted words as a paraphrasing of Acceptance of Death, one of the Church’s evening prayers.

She said, “It’s not going to be like that, Paulie. There’s something … I don’t know … something positive about this, too.”

“Molly, I love your sweet voice,” Paul said. “Always the one to see a rainbow in a hurricane.”

“Well… life’s taught me to be optimistic.”

“You’re right. Death is nothing to fear, is it? Just a new beginning.”

“No, I don’t mean that.” She told him about the coyotes on the porch. “I walked among them. They were so docile. It was miraculous, Paul, exhilarating.”

“I love you, Molly. You’ve been a godsend to Neil, made him happy, healed his soul. That first year, I said hurtful things—”

“Never,” she disagreed.

Neil took her hand, squeezed it gently.

On the TV, in yet another city, no buildings were afire, but looters smashed store windows. The cascades of shattered glass glittered no more brightly than the spangled rain.

To Molly, Paul said, “This is no time for lies, kiddo. Not even the polite kind meant to spare feelings.”

Initially Paul had not approved of their marriage. Over the years, however, he adjusted to it, eventually embraced it. He and Molly had become fast friends, and until now they had never spoken about his early antagonism.

She smiled. “All right, Father Paul, I confess. There were times you really pissed me off.”

Paul laughed softly. “I’m sure God felt the same way. I asked His forgiveness long ago—and now I’m asking yours.”

Her voice thickened. She wanted to hang up. She despaired over the inescapable implications of this conversation. They were saying good-bye. “Paulie … you’re my brother, too. You can’t know … how I treasure you.”

“Oh, but I know. I do. And listen, kiddo, your last book would have made your mother proud.”

“Sweet melody, good rhythm,” she said, “but in the service of shallow observations.”

“No. Stop beating yourself up. It rang with the same wisdom as Thalia’s best work.”

Tears blurred Molly’s vision. “Remember … this is no time for lies, Paulie.”

“Haven’t told any.”

Silently, a rain-drenched, wild-eyed mob raced toward and past the TV camera. They appeared to be fleeing in terror from something.

From the phone, Paul said, “Listen … I have to go. I don’t think there’s much time left.”

“What’s happening there?” Neil worried.

“I finished saying Mass a few minutes before you called. But not everyone gathered here is a Catholic, so they need a different kind of comforting.”

On the screen, the cameraman was knocked over by the panicked throng. The point of view swung wildly, crashed down to pavement level, revealing running feet that splashed up luminous sprays from darkly jeweled puddles.

Holding tightly to the handset even though the speakerphone feature was engaged, as though he were keeping his brother on the line sheerly by the intensity of his grip, Neil said, “Paulie, what did you mean—the courthouse can be more easily defended? Defended from who?”

Interference distorted the reply incoming from Hawaii.

“Paulie? We didn’t hear that. The line broke up a little. Who’re you expecting to defend against?”

Although audible again, Paulie sounded as if he were speaking from the bottom of a deep pit. “These are mostly simple people, Neil. Their imaginations may be working overtime, or they might see what they expect to see rather than what really is. I haven’t seen one myself.”

“One what?”

Static fizzed and crackled.

“Paulie?”

Among the broken, twisted words issuing from the speaker, one sounded like devils.

“Paulie,” Neil said, “if this line goes, well call you right back. And if we can’t get through, you try calling us. Do you hear me, Paulie?”

On TV, in a city now identified by caption—Berlin, Germany—the last of the soundless, running feet chased across the streaming pavement, past the fallen videocam.

Suddenly out of distant Maui, as clear as if originating from the adjacent kitchen, Paul Sloan’s voice once more swelled loud in midsentence: “… chapter twelve, verse twelve. Do you remember that one, Neil?”

“Sorry, Paulie, I didn’t catch the book,” Neil replied. “Say it again.”

In Berlin, captured blurrily through a wet lens, legions of luminous raindrops marched across the puddled street, casting up a spray more glittery than diamond dust.

A prescient awareness of pending horror kept Molly’s attention riveted on the muted TV.

The action seemed to be over, the mob having moved on to other territory, but she assumed that the accompanying audio must be telling an important story. Otherwise, the network would have cut away from Berlin when the camera struck the pavement and was not at once snatched up again.

She still held the remote. She didn’t press mute and summon the sound again because she didn’t want to risk blotting out anything that her brother-in-law might say.

On the phone, Paul’s voice fell into an abyss, but just as Neil was about to hang up, the connection proved intact, and Paul rejoined them briefly again: “‘… having great wrath because he knows that he hath but a short time.’”

The line finally went dead, transmitting not even the click and scratch of static.

“Paulie? Paulie, can you hear me?” Neil pumped the disconnect bar in the phone cradle, trying without success to get a dial tone.

On the TV, as silent as a bubble drifting into frame, a human head, perhaps that of the luckless cameraman, precisely cleaved in half from brow through chin, dropped to the pavement, landing flat-side down, one dead terror-brightened eye peering along the microwave pipeline from Berlin to California.

8

UNTIL NOW, MOLLY HAD NEVER FELT A NEED to take a loaded pistol to the bathroom.

She put it on the yellow ceramic tiles beside the sink, the muzzle toward the mirror. The presence of the weapon gave her no comfort, but made her bowels quiver.

In the quick, when either you had the heart for justice or you didn’t, Molly could squeeze the trigger without hesitation. She’d done it once before.

Nevertheless, the prospect of having to shoot someone half sickened her. She was a creator, not a killer.

On her porcelain prie-dieu with flusher handle, she prayed that regardless of what might transpire in the hours ahead, she would not have to defend herself against other human beings. She wanted only enemies so alien that, after the shooting, there could be no cause for doubt, no reason for guilt.

Although acutely aware of the multiple ironies and absurdities of both her position and her prayer, she sent each word to God with sincerity, in a fever of mind and bone. The humor of the moment was too bitter to tease from her even a wretched laugh.

She had chosen the windowless half-bath off the kitchen. From beyond the door, through the white noise of the rain on the roof, came the clink and clatter of Neil packing two insulated coolers full of provisions to take with them in the SUV.

Each of his two careers had required that he think ahead. These days he worked as a cabinetmaker. He knew the importance of having good plans and precise measurements before making the first cut.

He worried that they would grow hungry before they were ready to come home. Worse, events might prevent them from returning home at all.

More monk than adventurer, Diogenes to his Columbus, Molly regretted the need to leave. Her preferred strategy was to bar the doors, board the windows, press sleep from lidless eyes, and wait for trouble to knock. And hope that it never would.

She knew, however, that Neil’s argument for action was the wiser course. Whatever might be coming in the rain or on the wake of it, they would be more vulnerable alone than they would be in the company of their neighbors.

Before she washed her hands, she lowered her face to the sink and warily breathed the steam rising from the gushing water. She could not detect any trace of the scent of the rain.

The tainted storm had not yet found its way into the public water system. Or if it had found its way, it traveled now in this bland disguise, undetectable.

Before picking up the cake of soap, she transferred the pistol from the counter to the toilet tank—beyond the grasp of anything that might reach through the mirror.

With such bizarre precautions already second nature only hours into this new reality, Molly wondered if she would know when she had gone mad. Perhaps she had already left sanity behind. Perhaps she had journeyed so far from rationality that Neil could never pack enough hampers of provisions to feed her during a return trip.

She washed her hands.

She remained the only presence in the mirror, not stained and ruined and grown over with strange vines, nor cleaved through the face from brow to chin, but still so young, and bright-eyed with a desperate hope.

Coolers filled with food, a case of bottled water, and basic first-aid supplies had been loaded aboard the SUV in the garage. They were prepared for travel where the ways were deep and the weather sharp.

Molly had also packed her mother’s books, and the four that she herself had written, plus her current uncompleted manuscript. Worlds might perish but, in her view, never the written word.

Gathering courage to depart, she and Neil stood side by side in the family room, watching TV.

Channel by channel, chaos had expanded its domain. More than half of the microwave highways were clogged with snow, scintillation, flare, woomp, and third-generation ghosts of people and objects unidentifiable.

Another third carried the pulsing, serpentine, kaleidoscopic patterns of intense color. These were accompanied by the humming, hissing, blurping, wow-wows, squeals, whistles, and birdies that also rendered the telephone useless.

They could find no news, no meaningful information.

A handful of channels continued to broadcast clear signals: sharp pictures, surprisingly pristine sound. Every one of these was devoted to entertainment programming.

For a minute, they watched an old episode of Seinfeld. An audience, real or virtual, laughed and laughed.

Neil changed channels, found a game show. For a quarter of a million dollars and a chance to go on for half a million, name the author of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.

“T. S. Eliot,” Molly said.

She was right, but she suspected that one week from now a quarter of a million dollars might have no more value than last week’s newspaper.

On another channel, in the black-and-white Casablanca night, Bogart said good-bye to Ingrid Bergman as total war descended on the world.

Neil knew the dialogue so well that he could recite it word for word. His lips moved to match those of the actors, though he made no sound.

He switched channels: Here, Cary Grant, with exquisite comic timing, grew increasingly flustered in the face of Katharine Hepburn’s nonstop screwball patter.

And here, Jimmy Stewart wisecracked with an invisible, six-foot-tall rabbit.

At first Molly didn’t understand why Neil watched these old films with such shining-eyed intensity. Only moments ago he’d been determined to seek out the company of their neighbors as quickly as possible.

Soon she realized that he expected never to have the opportunity to enjoy these movies again, or any other, if all of Earth fell under the rule of an alien people clutching their new gods.

Greedily, then, she watched Gary Cooper walk the dusty streets of a Western town under the high-noon sun. Watched Tom Hanks gumping his way through a life charmed by virtue of simplicity. Watched John Wayne sweep Maureen O’Hara off her feet.

Repeatedly she found herself holding her breath, a sweet pain in her breast. What had once been mere time-filling entertainment now seemed inexpressibly beautiful and profound.

Neil surfed out of old movies and into a contemporary program—one of those orchestrated geek fests misla-beled “reality TV,” which celebrated cruelty, championed ignorance, lured viewers with the promise of degradation, and never quite faded from popularity. A female contestant was eating a plateful of pale, squirming slugs.

Here, a more recent film. A beautiful, lithe blonde executed impossible martial-arts maneuvers, wielding a sword, beheading a series of adversaries, stabbing them in the eyes, eviscerating them with delight, prettier than a Barbie doll and just as heartless.

Suddenly the remote control seemed no longer to be an instrument allowing random selection, seemed instead to be programmed to seek out atrocities. Channel after channel, blood burst, blood sprayed, blood spattered across the screen.

Pay-per-view pornography—to which they had not subscribed, and which therefore they should not be able to receive—filled the screen with an explicit scene of violent gang rape. The victim was shown to be enjoying her vicious brutalization.

Shrill comedians telling mean jokes drew meaner laughter from braying audiences.

No crafted piece of propaganda could have mocked the pretensions of humanity more effectively than this apparently random selection of cruel entertainment.

Neil pressed the power button on the remote, but the TV did not switch off. He tried again, without success.

Under the control of some taunting entity, the screen swarmed with rapidly changing scenes of violent sex and horrendous murder. Here unspooled a chilling montage of humanity in its most debased and savage condition.

“This is a lie,” Neil said through half-clenched teeth. “This isn’t what we are. It isn’t all we are.”

The unseen master of the airwaves chose to disagree, and the images of primitive lust and blood hunger surged across the screen, tides of cinematic sewage.

Molly remembered reading about one of the Nazi death camps—Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, or Dachau—in which the Jewish prisoners had been subjected to propaganda that portrayed their heritage as a deformed tree watered with lies, feeding on the labor of others, its branches twisted by greed. Their tormentors wanted them first to embrace this false history of their people and then to renounce it before accepting execution as their proper reward.

Even the architects of genocide, their hearts sold to Evil and their souls already held in the portfolio of Hell, feel the need to justify their abuse of power. They wish to believe that their victims, at the penultimate moment, acknowledge guilt and recognize the justice of mass murder—which suggests that, even if unconsciously, the executioners know how far they themselves have fallen.

Molly turned from the hideous spectacle on the TV. She glanced anxiously at the blinded windows, at the ceiling that seemed to press lower under a roof-crushing weight of roaring rain.

She sensed that death trains, or their equivalent, were being marshaled now in railroad yards. Long chains of cattle cars were waiting to be packed with human cargo and hauled to mass graves where the remains of millions, plowed over, would eventually fertilize vast, lush meadows for the pleasure of creatures that were deaf and blind to the beauties wrought by untold human generations.

High in the house, something thumped loudly. Rattled. Then subsided into silence.

Perhaps a broken tree branch had dropped onto the roof. A loose chimney stone, sluiced from its mortar bed by the rain, might have rolled along the shingles.

Or some unimaginably strange visitor had entered by the attic, and now explored the space under those cob-webbed rafters, searching for the trapdoor and spring-loaded ladder that would give it access to the second floor.

“Time to go,” Neil said.

PART TWO

“Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.”

T.S. Eliot, Choruses from “The Rock”

9

FOR ONCE UNCONCERNED ABOUT NEXT MONTH’S electrical bill, they left lights on rather than allow darkness to take up residence in the house during their absence.

In the utility room, they quickly donned rubber boots and black raincoats. The deep tread of the rubber soles squeaked on the tile floor.

Beyond the utility room, the garage was chillier than the house. The humid air smelled of damp wood, moist Sheetrock; but as yet the rain had not worn a leak in the roof.

The Ford Explorer stood ready, loaded. Although worried about the size of the monthly payments, they had recently traded up from their ten-year-old Suburban. Now Molly was glad to have this newer and more reliable vehicle.

She took two steps toward the SUV before Neil drew her attention to his workbench. Thirty or forty mice had gathered on that surface. Because the rodents were silent and for the most part as still as ceramic figurines, Molly had not at once noticed the infestation.

Field and forest mice, some brown, some gray, had fled their natural habitat for the refuge of this garage. As many of them congregated under the workbench as perched on top of it.

In groups, mice huddled in the corners and along the walls. On the lids of the two trash cans. Atop a row of storage cabinets.

They numbered more than a hundred, perhaps over two hundred. Many stood on their hind feet, alert, trembling, whiskers quivering, pink noses testing the air.

Under ordinary circumstances, the mice would have scattered when Molly and Neil entered. These didn’t react. The cause of their fear lay outside, in the storm.

Although Molly had always been squeamish about rodents and had taken more than the usual precautions to keep them out of the house, she didn’t recoil at the sight of these timid invaders. As with the coyotes, she recognized that men and mice lived under a common threat in this perilous night.

When she and Neil got into the Explorer and closed the doors, Molly said, “If their instinct is to come inside, should we be going out?”

“Paul and his neighbors are gathered in that courthouse on Maui because its architecture makes it more defensible. Our house, with all the windows, the simple locks … it can’t be defended.”

“Maybe no place can be.”

“Maybe,” he agreed.

He started the SUV.

The mice did not react to the noise of the engine. Their eyes shone red and silver in the blaze of headlights.

Neil locked the doors of the Explorer with the master switch. Only then did he use the remote to raise the garage door.

Molly realized that she had not locked the house. Keys and deadbolts no longer seemed to offer much security.

Behind the Explorer, the segmented garage door rolled upward. She could barely differentiate the rumble of its ascent from the unrelenting voice of the rain.

She was overcome by the urge to bolt from the vehicle and return to the house before the crouching night could be entirely let into the garage.

A desperate domestic fantasy gripped her. She would make hot tea and serve it in a mug. Oolong, with its distinctive fragrance, grown in the distant Wu-I Mountains of China.

She would drink it in the cozy parlor, eating butter cookies. Warmed by an afghan. Reading a love story of eternal passion and timeless suffering.

When she turned the last tear-stained page, the rain would have stopped. The morning would have come. The future would no longer be bleak and impenetrable, would instead be revealed by an invisible light too bright for mortal eyes.

But she did not open the passenger door and pursue that fantasy of tea and cookies and easy happy endings. Dared not.

Neil popped the brake, shifted into reverse, and backed out of the garage, into the windless storm. The rain fell straight down with such judgmental force that the Explorer seemed to quiver in every joint, to strain at every weld, from the impact.

Less out of concern for their property than in consideration of the frightened mice, Molly pressed the remote and closed the garage door.

In the headlights, the formerly muted fluorescence of the rain brightened, seething with scintillating reflections.

The cedar siding of the house, quaintly silvered by time, was more brightly silvered by the luminous wet. Along the roof line, from long lengths of overflowing rain gutters spilled shimmering sheets that veiled whole aspects of the structure.

Neil turned the Explorer around and drove uphill toward the two-lane county road. The ascending driveway funneled a descending stream through which slithered great swarms of false serpents, more sinuous luminosities.

When the SUV reached the top of the driveway, Molly peered back and down, through the rush of rain and the steadfast trees. All lights aglow, their house looked welcoming—and forever beyond reach.

The shortest route into town was south on the county road.

The two-lane blacktop remained passable because it followed the ridge crest around the lake, shedding rain from both shoulders. Here and there the pavement was mantled with a thick slippery mush of dead pine needles beaten from the overhanging trees by the storm, but the SUV had all the traction needed to proceed unimpeded.

Even at high speed, the windshield wipers couldn’t cope with the downpour. Sluicing rain blurred their view. Neil drove slowly and with caution.

To the east, the forest—portions burned out in the previous autumn’s fire—descended toward treeless but grassy hills, which in turn gave way to more-arid land and eventually to the Mojave. Only a few houses had been built in that territory.

On the west face of the ridge, residences were numerous, though widely separated. The nearest neighbors to the south were Jose and Serena Sanchez, who had two children, Danny and Joey, and a dog named Semper Fi-delis.

Neil turned right at their mailbox and halted at the top of the driveway, headlights focused on the house below.

“Wake them?” he wondered.

An indefinable quality of the house, something other than the lack of lights, troubled Molly.

If the Sanchez family had been home, surely the unprecedented power of this rain would have awakened them. Curiosity stirred, they would have risen from bed, turned on the TV, and thereby discovered the fate of the world.

Molly recognized the monotonous drone of the rain as the voice of Death, and now it seemed to speak to her not from the heavens but from the house at the foot of the driveway.

“They’re gone,” she said.

“Gone where?”

“Or dead.”

“Not them,” Neil hoped. “Not Jose, Serena … not the boys.”

Molly was a mystic only to the extent that she was a writer, not to the extent that she suffered visions or premonitions. Yet she spoke with the certainty of unwanted intuition: “Dead. All dead.”

The house blurred, clarified, blurred, clarified. Perhaps she saw movement behind the lightless windows; perhaps she did not.

She imagined a sinuous and winged figure, like the mysterious thing they had glimpsed beyond the mirror, flitting now through the rooms of the Sanchez house, from corpse to corpse, capering with dark delight.

Though she spoke in a tremulous whisper, her voice carried to Neil above the chanting rain. “Let’s get out of here. Now. Quickly.”

10

SOUTH OF THE SANCHEZ PROPERTY, THE WID-ower, Harry Corrigan, had lived alone since the previous June, when his beloved Calista had died at the foot of an ATM.

This stone house, with a hipped and gabled roof, stood much nearer to the county road than did Neil and Molly’s place. The driveway was shorter and less steep than theirs.

These were the lights that she had seen when she had first gotten out of bed and gone to the window to assess the violence of the storm. They had looked like the running lights of a distant ship on a mean and swelling sea.

Every pane appeared to be lit, as if Harry had gone room to room, searching for his lost wife, and had left every lamp aglow either with the hope of her return or in her memory. No shadows loomed or swooped beyond the glass.

If Harry was here, they needed to join forces with him. He was a friend, dependable.

At the foot of the driveway, in the turnaround, Neil parked facing out toward the county road. He switched off the headlights.

As Neil reached for the key in the ignition, Molly stayed his hand. “Leave the engine running.”

They didn’t have to discuss the danger or the wisdom of going together into the house. Wise or not, they earlier had established that henceforth they went nowhere alone.

Their raincoats featured hoods. They pulled them up, and were transformed into monkish medieval figures.

Molly dreaded getting out of the SUV. She remembered how vigorously she had scrubbed her rain-dampened hand with orange-scented soap … and had nevertheless felt unclean.

Yet she could not sit here eternally, paralyzed by the weight of fear or by a lack of faith. She could not sit here, shape without form, gesture without motion, waiting for the world to end.

The 9-mm pistol nestled in a pocket of her coat. She kept her right hand on it.

She got out of the Explorer and closed the door quietly, though a slam would not have carried far in the drumming deluge. Discretion seemed advisable even during an apocalypse.

The tremendous force of the downpour staggered her until she planted her feet wide and moved with conscious attention to her balance.

The rain was no longer ripe with the scent of semen. She could identify a faint trace of that odor, but it was now masked by new and sweet fragrances, reminiscent of incense, hot brass, lemon tea. She detected, as well, smoky essences for which she could think of no familiar comparisons.

She tried to avert her face, but rain found its way past the hood of her coat. The pelting drops were no longer warm, as they had been earlier.

Unthinkingly, she licked her lips. The taste proved to be not salty with the memory of the sea, but faintly sweet, pleasant.

When she thought of the children eating blue snow, however, she gagged and spat, only to drink in more rain.

The driveway drain had been blocked by fallen pine needles and wads of sycamore leaves. A pool of water, six inches deep, churned around their boots, brightened by silver filigrees of dancing eldritch light.

Neil had unzipped his raincoat to be able to carry the shotgun under it. With his left hand, he clutched the front panels of the garment, holding them closed as best he could.

A sloped flagstone walkway led from puddled pavement to front steps.

Sheltered by the porch roof, Molly threw back her hood. She drew the pistol from her coat. Neil held the shotgun with both hands.

The door of Harry Corrigan’s house stood ajar.

An orange spot of light on the casing indicated the illuminated bell push, but these were not circumstances that recommended the customary announcement. With one boot toe, Neil gingerly nudged the door inward.

While it arced wide, they waited. Studied the deserted foyer for a moment. Entered the house.

They had frequently been here as invited guests before Calista’s murder in Redondo Beach, and a few times since. When the kitchen had been remodeled four years ago, Neil had built the new cabinetry. Yet now this familiar place seemed strange, nothing exactly as Molly remembered it, nothing quite in its place.

The first floor offered much evidence of a simple life conducted in longstanding routines: comfortable furniture well used, landscape and seascape paintings, here a pipe left in an ashtray, here a book with the reader’s place marked by a candy-bar wrapper, houseplants lovingly tended and lush with glossy leaves, purple plums ripening in a wooden bowl on a kitchen counter …

They saw no indications of violence. No sign of their friend and neighbor, either.

In the foyer once more, standing at the foot of the stairs, they briefly considered calling out to Harry.

To be heard above the fierce cataracts crashing upon the roof, however, they would have to raise their voices. Someone or something other than their neighbor might come in answer to a shout, a prospect that argued for continued silence.

Neil led the way to the second floor. Molly ascended sideways, keeping her back to the wall, so she could look both toward the top and the bottom of the stairs.

In the upper hallway, the solid-oak door to the master bedroom had been wrenched off its hinges. Cracked almost in half, it lay on the hall floor. Bright fragments of the lock were scattered across the carpet.

Each of the two substantial hinges remained anchored to the jamb by its frame leaf, although each leaf—a quarter-inch steel plate—had been bent by the fearsome force that had ripped away the door. The barrel knuckles joining the frame leaf to the center leaf of each hinge were also deformed, as was the steel pivot pin that connected them.

If Harry had taken refuge behind the locked bedroom door, the barrier hadn’t stood for long.

Not even a steroid-pumped bodybuilder with Herculean slabs of muscle could have torn the door off its hinges without a winch and tackle. The task, accomplished barehanded, would have defeated any mortal man.

Expecting slaughter or an outrage so inhuman in nature that it could not be anticipated, Molly hesitated to follow Neil into the bedroom. When she crossed the threshold, however, she saw no signs of violence.

The walk-in closet stood open. No one in there.

When Neil tried the closed door between the bedroom and the adjacent bath, he found it locked.

He glanced at Molly. She nodded.

Putting his face close to the bathroom door, Neil said, “Harry? Are you in there, Harry?”

If the question had been answered, the reply had been too soft to be audible.

“Harry, it’s me, Neil Sloan. You in there? Are you all right?”

When he received no answer, he stepped back from the door and kicked it hard. The lock was only a privacy set, not a deadbolt, and three kicks sprung it.

How curious that whatever had wrenched off the sturdier door to the bedroom had not torn this one away, as well.

Neil stepped to the threshold, then recoiled and turned away, the features of his face knocked out of true by a seismic jolt of visceral horror and revulsion.

He tried to prevent Molly from seeing what he had seen, but she refused to be turned away. No sight could be worse than some that she had endured on that terrible day in her eighth year.

Eyeless, his head hollowed out as completely as a jack-o’-lantern, Harry Corrigan sat on the bathroom floor, resting against the side of the bathtub. He had sucked on a short-barreled, pump-action, pistol-grip shotgun.

Sickened but not shocked, Molly turned at once away.

“He couldn’t stop grieving,” Neil said.

For an instant, she didn’t understand what he meant. Then she realized that in spite of all he had thus far witnessed, he remained to some degree in denial.

She said, “Harry didn’t kill himself because of Calista. He retreated to the bathroom and blew his brains out to avoid coming face-to-face with whoever tore down the bedroom door.”

The directness of “blew his brains out” caused Neil to flinch, and his face, paper-pale since he’d seen the dead man, shaded to a penciled gray.

“And when they heard the shotgun,” she continued, “they knew what he had done—and had no further interest in him.”

“They,” he said thoughtfully, and looked to the ceiling as if remembering the enormous descending mass that he had sensed earlier in the night. “But why not use the shotgun on … them?”

Suspecting that the answer might await discovery elsewhere in the house, Molly didn’t reply, but instead led the way back into the hall. A further search of the second floor turned up nothing of interest until they reached the back stairs.

This single narrow flight descended to a mud room adjacent to the kitchen. Molly knew that the lower chamber led also to the backyard.

Apparently Harry Corrigan had first encountered his unwanted visitors down there. He had been armed with the shotgun and had used it more than once on these stairs. Buckshot had gouged and pocked the walls, had chopped chunks and splinters from the wooden stairs.

Backing toward the second floor, firing down on the intruders, he could not have missed any target in that tightly confined space, considering the spread pattern of a shotgun. Yet there were no dead bodies on the stairs or at the foot of it. No blood.

Standing at the top of the stairwell with Molly, sharing her reluctance to enter that narrow flight, Neil wondered, “What was he shooting at—ghosts?”

She shook her head. “It wasn’t any ghost that tore the bedroom door off its hinges.”

“But what could walk through shotgun fire unscathed?”

“I don’t know. And maybe I don’t want to find out.” Molly turned away from the back stairs. “Let’s get out of here.”

They retraced the route they had taken from the front stairs, and as they were stepping around the fallen door in the hall outside the master bedroom, the lights flickered and went out.

11

WINDOWLESS, THE HALLWAY LACKED EVEN the unearthly glow of the luminous rain. Here ruled the absolute black of corridors in death dreams, of final resting places underground.

Still learning the necessary tactics to weather doomsday, Molly had unthinkingly left her flashlight in the Explorer.

In this blind domain rose a rustle separate from the susurrant chorus of the rain, a rustle like the unfurling, flexing, furling of featherless, membranous wings. She insisted to herself that it must be the sound of Neil searching his raincoat.

The sudden beam of his flashlight proved her right. She let out her pent-up breath.

The gloom in the hallway seemed not like ordinary darkness, subject to the laws of physics, but like Darkness Visible, the sooty essence of a palpable evil. The light carved a swath less revealing than she would have liked, and when the beam moved, the murk returned in eager leaps and swoops.

They negotiated the fallen door, but had gone only a few steps farther when a presence in the surrounding shadows recited a line by one of her favorite poets, T. S. Eliot.

“I think we are in rats’ alley—”

He spoke in a stage whisper, not in a shout, but somehow the words carried through the insistent tattoo of the rain, and Molly recognized the voice of Harry Corrigan, dead Harry, who had done to himself what a thug had done to his wife for the gain of only two hundred dollars.

Whipping, darting, arcing, the flashlight beam probed left, right, behind them. No one.

Neil passed the flashlight to Molly, freeing both of his hands for the shotgun.

Wielding light and handgun, she aimed the pistol with the beam. A half-open door to a guest bedroom on her right. The barely cracked door of a study to her left. Another door: a flare of porcelain in a bathroom beyond.

Harry or the grotesquely that had been Harry, or the thing that pretended to be Harry, might lurk in any of the three rooms. Or in none of them.

And now came the line from “The Waste Land” that in fact followed the one already spoken:

“—Where the dead men lost their bones.”

Molly couldn’t deduce the voice’s point of origin. The words twisted around her with serpentine deception, seeming to arise from first one side, then from another.

Her galloping heart stampeded, knocking so hard against her ribs that it seemed fire must have flared in her blood as surely as iron-shod hooves would have struck sparks from cobblestones.

First the palm of her right hand, then the checked grip of the pistol grew slick with sweat.

The stubborn dark, the cloying dark, the inadequate light, doors to both sides poised as tensely as the spring-loaded lids of pop-up toys, and forty feet to the head of the stairs.

Now thirty.

Twenty.

Near the stairs, a figure stepped out of a doorway or out of a wall, or through a portal between worlds; she couldn’t tell which and was prepared to believe anything.

The jittering light first revealed his shoes, the cuffs of his corduroy pants.

On the floor in his splattered bathroom, Harry had slumped in flannel shirt and corduroy pants. Corduroy of precisely this tan shade.

Molly’s knees weakened at the prospect of seeing again the hollow-pumpkin head, the empty sockets of the jack-o’-lantern eyes, the teeth broken jagged by the bucking barrel of the 12-gauge.

Yet what she wanted to see and what her determined hand intended to show her were different things. She raised the flashlight to his knees, belt buckle, flannel shirt, grizzled chin. …

Mercifully, Neil stepped past her, fired his shotgun, pumped a new round into the breach as the funhouse figure blew back, reeled back, into shadows. He said urgently, “Go, Molly, go, get out.”

The concussion had rung off the hallway walls; and still the echo tolled through surrounding rooms, through rooms below, as if the house were a many-chambered bell.

The unthinkable was there in the darkness between her and the stairs, just a lunge away from her: the dripping thing, the hangman, the eternal Footman, the Stranger who comes to everyone’s door sooner or later, and knocks and knocks and will not go away, now here for her in the impossible form of dead Harry, her lost friend.

She ran behind the wildly leaping light, toward the inconstant light, toward the polished mahogany newel post marking the way down, and she didn’t look to her left, where the resurrected neighbor had fallen backward into shadows.

It must have risen, moved, approached, because Neil fired again. The flare from the muzzle chased a flurry of shadows, like a flock of bats, through the hallway.

Molly reached the stairs, which seemed markedly steeper in the descent than they had been in the ascent. Flashlight in one hand, pistol in the other, she was not able to clutch at the railing, but owed her balance to sheer luck. She plunged down steps as unforgiving as ice-crusted ladder rungs, headlong, stumbling, flailing her arms, and landed, staggered, on both feet in the foyer, in a billow of raincoat.

The front door stood open. As a third shotgun blast rocked the house, she fled those dry rooms for the questionable sanctuary of the radiant storm.

She hadn’t pulled up her hood. Torrents of rain washed her face, her hair, and a trickle at once found its way down the nape of her neck, under her collar, along her spine, into the cleft of buttocks, as if it were the questing finger of a violator taking advantage of a moment of vulnerability.

She sloshed across the flooded turnaround, to the driver’s door of the Explorer. Soft lumpish objects bumped against her boots.

The flashlight revealed dead birds—twenty, thirty, forty, more—beaks cracked in silent cries, eyes glassy, bobbing in the silvered pool, as if they had been drowned in flight and washed down from the flooded sky.

Neil rushed out of the house, toward the idling SUV. Nothing pursued him, at least not immediately.

Climbing behind the wheel of the Explorer, Molly dropped the flashlight in the console cup-holder, put the pistol between her legs, and released the hand brake.

With the Remington smelling of hot steel and expended gunpowder, Neil came aboard as Molly shifted out of park. He pulled his door shut after they had begun to roll.

Out of the feathered pool, up the driveway that appeared to be paved in the glistening black-and-silver scales of serpents, to the county road, they escaped that haunted precinct of the cataclysm and drove into another.

12

IN THIS NIAGARA, ON PAVEMENT AS SLICK AS A bobsled chute, speed was worse than folly; speed equaled madness. Nevertheless, Molly drove too fast, eager to reach town.

Here and there, weak and sodden tree branches cracked loose, fell to the roadway. Layered veils of rain obscured the way ahead, and often she couldn’t see obstacles until she was nearly upon them.

Cold terror made of her an expert driver, and a keen survival instinct improved her judgment, honed her reaction time to a split-second edge. She piloted the Explorer through a slalom course of storm debris, wheeling into every slide, jolting through chuckholes that made the steering wheel stutter in her hands, powering out of a near stall when a flooded swale in the pavement proved to be deeper than it looked.

When she saw a gnarled, clawlike evergreen limb too late to avoid it, those broken fingers of pine tore at the undercarriage, scratched, scraped, knocked, as though some living creature were determined to get at them through the floorboards. The branch got hung up on the rear axle, rapping noisily for a quarter of a mile before it finally splintered and fell away.

Chastened, Molly eased up on the accelerator. For the next quarter of a mile, she glanced repeatedly at the fuel gauge, worried that the gas tank might have been punctured.

The indicator needle held steady just below the full mark. No instrument-panel lights appeared to indicate falling oil pressure or a loss of any other vital fluid. Her luck had held.

At this slower speed, less intently focused on her driving, she could think more clearly about the grisly episode at the Corrigan place. No matter how hard she mulled it over, however, she could not understand it.

“What was that, damn, what happened back there?” she asked, recognizing a scared-girl note in her voice, neither surprised nor embarrassed to hear her words strung on a tremor.

“Can’t get my mind around it,” Neil admitted.

“Harry was dead.”

“Yeah.”

“Brains all over the bathroom.”

“That’s a memory maybe even Alzheimer’s couldn’t erase.”

“So how could he be up on his feet again?”

“Couldn’t.”

“And talking.”

“Couldn’t.”

“But he did, he was. Neil, for God’s sake, I mean, what does something like that have to do with Mars?”

“Mars?”

“Or wherever they’re from—the other side of the Milky Way, another galaxy, the end of the universe.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“This isn’t like ETs in the movies.”

“ ’Cause this isn’t the movies.”

“Doesn’t seem to be real life, either. The real world runs on logic.”

Having fished spare shells from his raincoat pockets, Neil reloaded the shotgun. He didn’t fumble the ammunition. His hands were steady.

Never in her memory had his hands been otherwise, or his mind, or his heart. Steady Neil.

“So where’s the logic?” Molly asked. “I don’t see it.”

Half as big as pineapples, two objects dropped from overhead, bounced off the hood of the Explorer.

Molly braked before she realized they were pine cones. They resembled hand grenades as they ricocheted off the windshield and arced away into the night.

“Parasites,” Neil said.

She brought the Explorer to a full stop, half on the road, half on the graveled shoulder. “Parasites?”

“They might be parasites,” he said, “these things from the far end of the universe or the dark side of the moon, or wherever they’re from. Parasites—that’s an old theme in science fiction, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Intelligent parasites, capable of infecting a host body and controlling it as if it were a puppet.”

“What host body?”

“Anything, any species. In this case, Harry’s corpse.”

“You call that logic?”

“Just speculation.”

“But how does this parasite—I don’t care if it’s smarter than the entire membership of Mensa combined—how does it control a host that’s blown out its brains?”

“The corpse still has a jointed skeleton, musculature, intact nerve pathways below the brainpan,” he said. “Maybe the parasite plugs into all that-and can manipulate the host, brain or no brain.”

Her anxiety ebbed just enough to allow for a small amazement. “You sure don’t sound like a guy who was schooled by Jesuits.”

“Oh, but I do. They value nimbleness of thought, imagination, and open-mindedness.”

“And evidently they watch old Star Trek episodes too much. The parasite theory doesn’t qualify as logic in my book.”

For a moment, Neil studied the dripping, silvered forest, which darkled to a black void in the distance. With evident uneasiness, he surveyed the rain-washed county road ahead and behind them.

“Let’s keep moving,” he said. “I think we’re more vulnerable when we’re sitting still like this.”

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