Somewhere in the bank were five helpless children, and no doubt with them was a thing with faces in its hands. Because its kind seemed to be omniscient, it would know that she had arrived.
Virgil still would not lead, but he stayed bravely at her side, though visible tremors passed through his flanks.
She opened the low bronze gate to the tellers' enclosure, and stepped into the realm of money, realizing that money had no meaning anymore.
At the back of the tellers' enclosure, a low railing separated that space from a hallway. She opened another gate and led Virgil into the corridor.
Three Coleman lanterns were evenly spaced along this passage. Nothing disturbed the silence except the hiss of gas burning in the mantles, behind the clear heat shields.
Here the floor was carpeted. The dog made no sound.
Five doors were set in the east side of the hall, three in the west side, all with frosted-glass panes in the top half. Some bore the names of bank officers. Another was labeled REST ROOMS. Two were not marked.
The entrance to the walk-in vault waited at the end. Set in a steel architrave, a massive round stainless-steel door, ringed with three-inch-diameter locking bolts, stood open.
Behind the doors with frosted glass, the rooms were dark. She considered them for a moment but then trusted intuition and passed them warily.
Cassie's fearful voice played in memory: They can take your face and keep it in their hands, and show it to you, and other faces
In the vault at least one lantern glowed. She could see no one in the vestibule just beyond the deep jamb.
? faces in their hands? crush them in their fists, and make them scream
Molly was fifteen feet from the vault door when she felt in mind and marrow, in blood and bone, the return of the airborne leviathan. It was cruising in from the north-northeast, seeming to compress the atmosphere below it, so that she felt like a diver deep in a marine abyss with a great weight of ocean on her shoulders.
A few steps from the vault, she heard a drizzle, turned, and saw Virgil urinating against the wall. Bladder emptied, he came to her, tail tucked, shivering, but still game.
'Good boy,' she whispered, 'brave boy.'
At the threshold, fear gave her pause. Mouth dry and hot, hands cold and damp. The checked pistol grip slippery with sweat. She tried to bite back a shudder, but her teeth chattered for a moment like castanets.
She crossed the three-foot-deep, curved steel jamb. Immediately beyond, the day gate stood open.
Directly ahead, past the small vestibule, lay a rectangular chamber lined with safe-deposit boxes. A lantern glowed there, but the room proved to be unoccupied.
To the right of the vestibule, in a steel-framed doorway, a gate stood open. Light beckoned beyond.
Even here in the vault, she could feel the rhythmic throb of the great engines in the mountainous ship making way above the town.
She passed through the gate. To the left lay the money room-shelves laden with cash, coins, and ledgers.
Here, too, were the five children, sitting on the floor, backs against a wall, alive but terrified. And here, as she should have expected, was Michael Render, her father.
61
RENDER HAD KILLED FIVE CHILDREN IN HER SCHOOLroom, twenty years ago, and here were five more at risk.
As if he knew what she was thinking, he said, 'The magic number are present, aren't they?'
She would have expected the vault walls to cast his voice back in metallic echoes, but they muffled, softened. Although his words were mocking, he sounded like a funeral director, murmuring in respect of the lead.
Molly held the gun in both hands, pointed at his handsome face. 'I'm taking them out of here.'
'Dead, maybe.'
'Nobody dead but you,' she said, 'if it comes to that.'
' 'If it comes to that,' ' he repeated mockingly. 'You're too morally confused to do the right thing, Molly dear. You could have shot me at the tavern, but you let me go. Let me go to commit what horrors?'
She shook her head. 'You're underestimating me.'
Quaking, tail tucked, head low, Virgil slipped past Render to join the children.
Render produced one of his killer smiles, of the intensity and warmth that had charmed her mother into marriage. 'What do they call it when you murder your own father? Patricide, I think.'
'I have no father,' she said.
'You tell yourself you don't, but you aren't convinced. You know that I came to your school that day because I loved you and didn't want to lose you.'
'You've never loved anyone but yourself.'
'I loved you so much that I killed to get you that day, killed whoever stood in my way, just to have a chance to raise you as a good father should.'
He took a step toward her.
'Stay back,' she warned. 'Remember, I shot you twice that day.'
'And in the back,' he agreed. 'But you were innocent then, and less aware of the complexities of right and wrong.'
He took another step and reached one hand out to her, palm up, as if in a plea for an emotional connection.
She backed away from him.
Still approaching, he said, 'Give Daddy a hug, and let's sit down and talk about all of this.'
Molly backed into the open gate between the money room and the vestibule. She could retreat farther only if she left the room-and left him with the children.
He kept coming, hand out. 'Your mother always believed in the power of love, the wisdom of discussion. She said anything can be accomplished with good will, with compromise. Didn't she teach you those values, Molly?'
She shot him in the chest. The vault did not muffle the clap of the gun, but rang with it, as if they stood inside a giant bell.
She heard the children scream and was peripherally aware that some of them covered their ears with their hands; some covered their eyes.
The slug jolted Render. And his eyes widened. And he smiled.
She shot him again, a third time, a fourth, but he did not go down. Four bullet holes marked his chest, but no blood spilled from him.
Lowering the gun, she said, 'You were dead already. Dead when you came to the tavern.'
'When everything began to fall apart, some of the guards at the sanitarium would have turned us loose,' he said. 'Out of pity, out of compassion, rather than leave us caged like animals, to starve or worse. But there were two who wouldn't have it-and shot us in our cells before they left for home.'
What stood before her was not her father, but a simulacrum of exquisitely convincing detail. Now it changed, and became what it really was: a mottled black-and-gray thing with a face that seemed to have once imploded and been badly reconstructed. Eyes as large as lemons, protuberant, crimson with elliptical black pupils. From shoulders ridged with spiky plates of bone, leathery wings hung folded along its sides.
She knew that she stood now in the presence of a prince from another star, one of the species that had come to take the earth.
When it showed her its big, taloned, and powerful hands, she saw a face in each. Unlike the faces in the fungi, these had some dimension, and looked even more real, more disturbing than those she had seen earlier. In the left hand, the face of Michael Render. In the right hand, the face of Vince Hoyt, the football coach standing faceless now in the lobby of the bank.
