The Taking. Dean Koontz

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