Free Taking by Dean Koontz Page B

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 grotesquery 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