figure to match the voice. She could see no one.
The eight-legged abomination was indeed the mourner, although the quality of its cry was most likely natural to it and not mimicry, a similarity explained sheerly by chance.
To hear it as grief or misery was no doubt to misunderstand it. The cry of a loon pealing across the stillness of a lake on a summer night will sound lonely to the human ear even if loneliness is not the state of mind that the loon intends to express.
Nevertheless, to hear such pitiable human sounds issuing from a creature so alien and repulsive in every regard was profoundly disquieting, chilling.
The thing fell silent-but a moment later, from between or behind the houses across the street, came a faint answering pule.
Another of its kind was out there in the purple morning, and the monstrous crier halted, as if listening to this response.
A second reply rose from a different direction, also faint-but this one was of a deeper timbre and sounded less like a weeping woman than like a weeping man.
When those other voices fell silent, the abomination moved once more, continuing on its original course.
Surreal. Unreal. Too real.
'Look,' Neil said, pointing north.
Another luminosity, like the one that had hovered over them on La Cresta Avenue, appeared in the dense fog layer, traveling soundlessly across the town from the northeast to the southwest.
'And there.'
A second glowing craft brightened out of the west and proceeded eastward on a serpentine course.
Behind the secreting overcast, the masters of the morning sky were attending to the business of conquest.
PART SIX
'But at my back in a cold blast I hear
The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.'
– T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land
43
EN ROUTE FROM ST. PERPETUA'S TO THE TAIL OF THE Wolf Tavern, Johnny and Abby stayed close to Neil, while Virgil trotted behind them, alert to the possibility of attack from the rear or from either flank. The dog seemed to understand that for the moment his primary duty was to guard rather than to lead.
At the front of their small column, traveling with the twins and their sister, Molly learned that the boys were Eric and Elric Crudup, born on New Year's Day ten years ago this coming January. They had been named after Viking heroes, although neither of their parents could claim a single Scandinavian ancestor.
'Our mom and dad like aquavit and Elephant beer,' said Eric. 'They chase one with the other.'
'Aquavit and Elephant beer are made in Scandinavia,' Elric explained.
Their sister-more Scandinavian-looking with her lighter locks than her brothers were with their dark hair-went by her middle name, Bethany, because her first name was Grendel.
Her mother and father had named her Grendel because they knew it to be Scandinavian. The girl was almost four years old before her parents discovered that Grendel was the name of the monster slain by Beowulf. Their knowledge of Scandinavian myth and English literature had not been as complete as their appreciation for Scandinavia's finest alcoholic beverages.
Neither of the two men who perished in the church had been related to the Crudup siblings. The heavyset man, whom they'd known-but not well-as Mr. Fosburke, had taught sixth grade at their elementary school. The tall man had been a stranger to them.
Eric, Elric, and Bethany believed their parents were alive, although they-and the maternal grandmother who lived with them-had 'gone through the ceiling,' during the night, leaving the children to defend themselves.
Later, when the power went off, the three kids had become too frightened to remain at home. They had fled two blocks through the rain to the protection of the church. Where evil found them.
? gone through the ceiling
Under the sea of purple fog, in this dim mortuary light of the drowned sun, with the trolls and menaces of another world set loose in unknowable numbers and forms, Molly had to remain alert to every shadow, which might be simply a shadow or instead a mortal threat. On the move and in a hurry, she couldn't concentrate on conversation intently enough to finesse from Eric, Elric, and Bethany a coherent explanation of exactly what they meant by 'gone through the ceiling.'
The children hurried with her, eager to share what they had witnessed.
'Just floated up out of the family room,' said six-year-old Bethany, who seemed to have rebounded with remarkable resilience from the trauma of having dangled, baitlike, above the basement lair of the insectile horror.
Elric said, 'Floated like astronauts with no gravity.'
'We ran upstairs,' Eric said.
'And we found them in our folks' bedroom, but they kept going up,' said Elric.
Bethany said, 'I was scared.'
'We all were,' said the twins simultaneously.
'Not Grandma. She wasn't scared.'
'She went crazy,' Eric declared.
Bethany took offense. 'She did not.'
'Fully, totally nut-ball,' Eric insisted. 'Laughing. I heard her laughing.'
From a nearby backyard or alleyway came the weeping of a woman, which might have arisen in fact from a grieving mother or a desolate widow, but Molly wouldn't have bet on either.
In normal times, she would have gone at once to investigate these lamentations, to offer assistance, consolation. Now she dared spend her compassion only on the children. These cries of anguish and woe were a lure, and her pity would be repaid with a hook, a gaff, a gutting.
She walked faster, thinking of Cassie at the tavern, in the care of the drunk and the self-deluded, and the Crudup children matched her pace.
'Anyway, whether Grandma went crazy or not, that was later,' said Elric. 'First we ran upstairs and saw how they came through the floor from the family room.'
Eric said, 'And then they floated right up through the bedroom ceiling, too.'
'They grabbed at us,' said Bethany, 'like maybe we could weigh them down, but we were scared, and anyway they couldn't hold us.'
'They could never hold on to us or anything.' Eric sounded angry about offenses committed long before the taking of the earth had begun.
'When it happened again later,' Elric remembered, 'I tried to hold Grandma by the foot.'
Bethany said, 'And I held Elric 'cause I was afraid he'd go right up with her.'
Bewildered by this tale, which on any other night would have sounded like a report of a nightmare or a hallucination and might have been easily dismissed, Molly said, 'What do you mean through the ceiling?'
'Through,' said Eric. 'Like the ceiling wasn't solid at all, just a dream of a ceiling.'
Elric said, 'Like when a magician puts his assistant in a box and saws her in half, and the blade goes right
