The ET closed its enormous hands, and from within its clenched fingers, she heard her father screaming in agony, and Vince Hoyt.
When it opened its hands, the faces had changed, and now she saw a famous politician in the left, a famous actress in the right. These, too, cried out in misery when it crushed them in its fists.
Molly felt light, without any weight at all, as in a dream, as if she might float out of this place and into another chamber of the nightmare.
The thing's mouth was as ragged as a wound, and when it spoke, she saw teeth like broken glass. 'I'll let you keep your face and walk out of here with four of the lambs. But only four. You choose the one to leave behind.'
Heart knocking hard enough to shake her body and make the pistol jump in her uneasy grip, she looked at the five children, who had heard the creature's proposition. She would die before she left any of them.
She met the crimson eyes, and as strange as they were, she nevertheless could read them, and realized a truth. Like the walking corpse of Harry Corrigan, like Derek Sawtelle in his tweed jacket and hand-knotted bow tie, like Michael Render, like the talking doll and the walking colonies of fungi, like nearly everyone and everything that she had encountered since waking to the sound of rain, this was an agent of despair, intent upon reducing her to hopelessness.
They had used the bloody tragedy of her childhood, the abiding grief at the loss of her mother to cancer, her deepest fears, her greatest self-doubts, and even her love for the work of T. S. Eliot-which had always given her strength and inspiration-to confuse her, to exhaust her, to induce in her a black despondency that would leave her a hollow woman, a paralyzed force, of no help to the innocent.
There were many things about these events that she didn't understand yet, that she might never understand, but she knew one thing for certain, even if she didn't know why it should be true: As long as she had hope, they could not touch her.
'You have no power over me or them. I am their tutelary,' Molly declared, surprised to hear the word escape her, for it was not one she had ever used, though she knew that it meant a special kind of guardian. 'I'm taking them out of here. All of them. Now.'
It reached for her face. Its spread talons extended from her scalp to below her chin, from ear to ear, and its touch was as cold as ice, and greasy.
She did not pull back. Or flinch. Or breathe.
After a hesitation, the thing drew its hand away from her.
The ET stared at her for a moment, and though its expressions were as alien as its face, she knew that it was filled with hate and fury and frustration.
As if it were suddenly weightless, the thing rose from the floor, floating upward as, moments ago, she had feared that she herself might have done. It passed through the ceiling, perhaps drawn up into the colossal ship passing over Black Lake.
62
IN THE MARBLE LOBBY, THE FOUR FACELESS PEOPLE were gone.
With five children in tow, led by a scampering Virgil, Molly joined Neil and his brood in the street as the low fog bank began to lift and dissipate.
Through the shrouds of purple mist, the passing mother ship was visible. So low, just above the treetops. The vessel revealed such a radically different surface from what movies had prepared her to see that Molly stood gazing up in a state beyond astonishment, so far beyond awe and terror that a curious calm befell her.
No metallic sheen as in a thousand films, no festival of lights as in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, no battleship architecture as in Star Wars, but instead something that appeared to be organic and infinitely strange. Here passed a silently gliding leviathan armored in places with chitinous plates similar to those of an insect, but in places scaled, in places smooth and pale and tender and pulsing as if a gargantuan slow heart boomed within, in other areas bristling with rows of spikes or horns, also cratered with what appeared to be wounds, lesions, sores, stippled with writhing knots of tissue resembling snarls of tentacles, deeply crusted with malignant-looking excrescences.
The most incredible features of this corpus malignus were the human faces embedded like blinking eyes throughout its surface, tens of thousands of faces, millions of faces, men and women of all races, revealed and then occluded only to be revealed again as membranes opened and closed over them.
On and on it came, vast in length and breadth, its entire shape too large to be extrapolated from this one aspect, in mass and volume greater than the combined mass and volume of all the ships of sea and air that humankind had constructed throughout its history, a thousand times greater, a thousand times a thousand. Although its propulsion system-and the process by which it defied gravity-continued to produce not one decibel of sound, the leviathan accelerated until the features on its surface began to blur, came faster and faster across Black Lake, mile after mile, and faster still, and then as it continued coming, it began also to rise through the gradually thinning fog, which soon shrouded it again, and rose out of sight.
Seconds after this massiveness vanished, the soundless throb of its engines ceased to wash waves of phantom pressure through Molly. Still in the leviathan's thrall, however, she stood gazing into the purple mist for half a minute, perhaps longer, as did Neil and the children, until a sudden downpour drenched them.
63
WHEN THE STORM BROKE, THEY RETREATED TO THE bank, which was brightened by Coleman lanterns and which seemed to be safe. A search of the rooms turned up no menace, human or otherwise.
Torrents pounded the earth, though perhaps only half as hard as in the first deluge. This rain was not luminous, and it smelled like rain should smell, fresh and clean.
The downpour gradually washed the murk out of the sky, and for a while the day beyond the windows brightened from the unnatural plum-purple gloom to the familiar gray light of an autumn storm.
Some supplies had been transported to the bank before the ETs had interrupted the fortification plans. Molly discovered cases of lantern fuel that for weeks would provide them with well-illuminated quarters. Neil found blankets, cartons of canned meats and fruits, boxes of crackers, cookies, candy, fresh bread and cakes.
They piled blankets three thick to make a series of comfortable beds on the lobby floor. The wealth of dogs would provide additional padding and warmth. A fourth blanket, tied in a loose roll with lengths of cord, made an adequate pillow.
As the day waned, a watery twilight sluiced through the town. The streets were quiet, and except for the rush of rain, so was the sky. Remarkably quiet, considering recent events. Molly did not trust such stillness.
By nightfall, after taking the dogs out for a last toilet, they had checked all the window locks, engaged the deadbolts, and dragged barricades of furniture in front of the doors. The ETs themselves could not be kept out if they chose to phase through ceilings, walls, or floors, but the strange beasts of their home-world ecology would be held at bay.
Molly continued to believe that the children were sacrosanct and that, as their tutelaries, she and Neil were also untouchable, but she wasn't taking any chances. Besides, there might be men like Render still loose in the world, and from monsters of the human kind, they had no protection except guns.
They could prepare only a cold dinner, but the variety and quality of treats qualified as a feast. They sat in a lamplit circle on the floor, thirteen children and two adults, surrounding an array of open cans and boxes, passing one another whatever was wanted.
At first they ate in a silence born half of weariness and half of shock. Soon, however, the comfort of food and the sugar content of warm soft drinks enlivened them.
Quietly, they spoke of their daunting experiences, swapped stories, groped toward an understanding and acceptance of what had happened. And tried to imagine what might happen next.
