[Midnighters 02] - Touching Darkness

by Scott Westerfeld - (ebook by Undead)

  These words spun in Dess’s brain for a moment, then cohered in a moment of clarity.

  “You’re a mindcaster,” she said.

  “And you have a fine grasp of the obvious.” The woman pulled the tea bags from the pot and dropped them with a wet slap onto a saucer. She poured two steaming cups, adding milk generously to both.

  For a moment, silence descended over the tea party. The old woman sipped delicately, and Dess warmed her hands on her cup, lifting it once to sniff the floral scent of the brew revolted her. The only tea she liked was iced tea, with so much lemon and sugar added that it was basically lemonade with caffeine.

  She wondered if the woman could sense her distaste or if the dampening effect of the house was too strong.

  How long had she said? Forty-nine years… the number Rex always gave for when the last lore had been recorded. But she couldn’t have been sitting here in this run-down house all that time, could she?

  The woman seemed to be waiting for her to say something.

  “Um, my name’s Dess.”

  “Of course it is,” the woman snapped. “I know all your names. But it’s polite of you to say so, Desdemona. I’m Madeleine.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Dess said. She felt her manners creaking into gear under the woman’s sharp gaze.

  “And you. Although I know you all quite well, of course.

  “Of course…” Dess frowned. “So you can taste us from in here? You can mindcast, even though it’s a dead zone?

  “Dead zone? What sort of chicken-fried baloney is that?” Madeline lifted her spoon and stirred her tea forcefully. “This is a crepuscular contortion, the finest in Bixby. As I said, we had maps in my day. There’s one around here somewhere. You might want to see it, my dear.” She stood and strode from the room, her teacup rattling on its saucer.

  Dess let out a long sigh and leaned back, her brain spinning again. She pulled out Geostationary to confirm exactly where she was, soothingly expressed as raw numbers rather than words, chicken fried or not. A few moments of staring at the coordinates began to settle her thoughts, and she finally allowed a smile to creep slowly across her face.

  She had made her discovery, and it was a doozy. All their lives there had been another midnighter, a hidden remnant of a previous generation right under their noses. While they had stumbled around blindly, a living witness to Bixby’s secret history had been right here in town.

  It was time to start asking questions. If Rex were here, he’d want to begin at the beginning: What happened forty-nine years ago? Why had she hidden all this time? And how had she managed to disappear so completely? Did she really never leave the house?

  “Ah, here it is!” Madeleine’s voice echoed through the house. There was a rustle and then a thump as something fell in the next room. She returned, a long roll of paper in one hand, the rattling teacup and saucer in the other.

  She sat with a noise of contentment, handed the roll of paper to Dess, and poured herself more tea.

  As the map unrolled, the questions that Dess had meant to ask evaporated. Laid out on the worn paper was Bixby, but not the Bixby familiar from the usual gas station map or her father’s oil-drilling elevations. Printed in faded ink and cluttered with antique decoration was the bright grid of midnight, the minutes and seconds tangled around each other into dead zones and vortices. The pattern suggested by the coordinates of Darkling Manor was spelled out here in comprehensive detail. This map showed Bixby in the secret hour, the Bixby of her dreams.

  Dess swore softly, realizing that she recognized these lines and swirls and shapes. “You’ve been mindcasting this to me while I was asleep.”

  “I expect that you must earn top marks at school, young lady.” Madeleine smiled as she stirred her tea. “There are always rewards for those who state the obvious frequently and with conviction.”

  Dess took a deep breath. One question had been answered in full—the woman could seriously mindcast from inside this dead zone, or crepuscular conundrum, or whatever it was. The dreams that had led her to her father’s GPS receiver and finally this house had been in crystalline, insistent Technicolor. She’d been pulled here like a dog on a leash.

  “You wanted me to find you.”

  “I had rather hoped you would sooner, but I suppose with your lack of education, you did as well as could be expected.”

  Dess’s eyes narrowed. “Lack of education? I’m in advanced trig!”

  Madeleine smiled. “I would hope so, being a polymath. But I don’t refer to your education at Bixby High, inadequate as that may be. I mean all of you, poor orphans, struggling to make sense of the secret hour.” She lifted the cup to her lips, voice fading. “So alone.”

  Dess dropped her eyes from the woman’s expression and stared into the piles of scrap that surrounded the little tea table. The metal looked as if it had been stacked in haste, without rhyme or reason, but not recently. Rust had joined the pieces together, and a coating of dust obscured every surface. Madeleine had been here for a while. And, as she’d said, so alone.

  “Do you stay in here… all the time?” Dess asked.

  The old woman smiled to herself. “I used to get out more. Before Melissa was born, the days were not a problem, as long as no one recognized me.” She chuckled. “When I was young, I had a wig and a terribly ugly pair of glasses. Of course, these days I can only leave when Melissa is in school. Poor girl.”

  Dess frowned. Madeleine’s answer had only raised more questions. Wigs? Who was she hiding from?

  At least the last part had made sense.

  “That’s why Melissa’s never tasted you, right?”

  “Of course. Normally she could spot another mindcaster like an oil field fire on a dark horizon. If it weren’t for Bixby High, I’d be stuck in here all day long.” The old woman shook her head. “And mind you, Dess: she must never know. Everything in Melissa’s mind will eventually make its way out into the desert. At midnight, no one’s thoughts are her own.”

  Silence fell over them again. Dess realized she should be finding out more and almost wished that Rex were here. He was fond of timelines, ordered sequences of events. Begin at the beginning, he would insist. But what was the beginning here? History was so messy, like some endless equation where every step only led to another batch of variables. She sat still for a moment, trying to pull the right question from the tangle of her mind.

  “So… what happened?” she finally said.

  The woman sighed. “They won.”

  Dess blinked and took a sip of tea. It was lukewarm and bitter, but it cleared her head.

  “It was the oil boom that did it,” Madeleine continued. “Bixby was a family before all those people arrived, all that money. We knew who could be trusted and who couldn’t.”

  Dess tried to imagine Bixby back then, but all she could conjure was a grainy, black-and-white music video with a lot of just-plain-folks drinking lemonade, quilting, and waving to each other from fire trucks. But somebody must have been doing trig, making weapons, and kicking darkling ass. And they’d have worn sunglasses, wouldn’t they? Midnighters eyes couldn’t deal with full-strength sunlight. Did they even have sunglasses back then?

  She shook the vision from her head. “Sixty years ago, right? Rex always says that’s when it changed.”

  “A clever boy, your Rex.” Madeleine smiled. “Bixby had survived the dust bowl and the Great Depression; it was ready money that brought us low. Of course, as a young girl, I thought it was exciting. New faces, clothes from a store, our own movie theater. But after a time, we didn’t know our neighbors anymore.” She clenched her teeth. “I remember the summer when it happened.”

  A cool and invisible finger traced Dess’s spine. “When they came and got everyone?”

  The old woman lifted an eyebrow. “Oh, no, not that. I’m talking about air-conditioning.”

  “Huh?”

  “In the summer of 1949, I had just turned eleven. We played all day until it grew dark, which in summer
was very late. Young children and teenagers together, while the adults sat on the porches, visiting. Everything was in the open, everyone could see each other.” Madeleine drew her arms around her shoulders. “But then one evening we were playing, and we looked up and all the adults had vanished.”

  Dess swallowed. “Darklings?”

  “No.” The old woman shook her head sadly. “Air-conditioning. It was the first really hot night that summer, and they’d all gone inside, shutting up the doors just as tight as they could. Instead of our parents and neighbors, all that remained to watch us was a faint blue glow coming from the windows.”

  “A blue glow? Like midnight?”

  “No. Television.”

  “What?”

  “Try to pay attention, dear,” Madeleine snapped. “That summer, all that oil-boom money had been spent on air conditioners and televisions. It was the beginning of the end.”

  Dess cleared her throat. “Hang on—you’re saying you lost to the darklings because of air-conditioning?”

  Madeleine lifted a finger sternly. “And television. You can’t discount television. You see, Dess, after that first evening the adults stayed inside, watching Mr. Jack Benny instead of looking after our childish games.” She raised her eyes and looked directly into Dess’s, a thin smile on her lips. “The games changed that summer. Certain children had always wanted to play a different kind of game. Do you know the kind I mean?”

  Dess swallowed. For a moment Madeleine’s face had looked exactly like Melissa’s, changing the way hers did when the silence of midnight descended, suddenly cool and remote.

  “Um, I don’t think so.”

  “I think you do. The games certain children enjoyed were of cruelty and dominance and, most importantly exclusion. Now they had their chance.”

  Dess said softly, “Sounds kind of like Bixby High.” She leaned back and took a drink of the bitter tea, wondering if the old woman was kidding, or crazy, or actually telling the truth. Air-conditioning?

  Madeleine nodded. “That was the beginning of Bixby High as it is now. On school days I can hardly taste anything but that place.” She sighed. “That poor girl Melissa. It’s a Wonder she hasn’t done worse things than she has.”

  Dess leaned forward, her voice firm, trying to get Madeleine back to her story. “But that’s not all that happened. I mean, Rex says the lore just ends. You guys didn’t stop fighting the darklings because you were busy watching TV, did you?”

  Madeleine shook her head slowly. “It happened seven years later, but the end had already begun that summer. Three children learned the secret. In one of the unseen games we played, a young midnighter revealed the truth.”

  “Why?”

  She seemed to want to shrug, but it came out as a trembling of her shoulders. “To curry favor, to be included, I suppose. Thousands of years of secrecy lost because no one was watching.

  “In any case, once these three daylighters knew the truth, they started a new game. They went out into the desert every night and arranged stones, hoping to send messages to the beings they knew were out there.”

  Dess nodded. “Kids still do that. They try, anyway.”

  “The tradition is an old one. Even I can feel them. Sometimes, their terror or disappointment coming across the desert just after midnight. But these three were more determined than most. They wanted to play this game to the end. For years they tried to learn what meaning the moving stones had, and when that failed, they brought a young seer out into the desert with them one night. A gift for the darklings.”

  Dess put her teacup down sharply, and the lukewarm liquid sloshed over the rim, staining her fingers. “The halfling.”

  Madeleine nodded. “An appropriate term, I suppose. There was never a name in the proper lore for what she became. I knew her as Anathea.”

  “But you’re a mindcaster. Why didn’t you know what was going on?”

  “None of us did. Early on, the three had moved to Broken Arrow—outside the range of our powers. They never came to Bixby, just as I fear to leave this house. They made their plans in secret and became very rich.”

  “Rich? The darklings pay well?”

  “In a way, yes. The oldest of them know what lies in the desert, the veins of rock, and the ancient hollows of water. Like a metallurge.” She smiled at Dess’s confusion. “A talent you’ve never heard of—there are many others, poor girl. Suffice it to say that the darklings can taste the earth, just as they taste your clever little mind at midnight.” Madeleine narrowed her eyes, and Dess felt a chill pass through her. “So the three were paid. Oil for blood.”

  “Oh.” The word oil sent a chill through her. She remembered the name on the letter that Jonathan had found at Darkling Manor. “Were any of those kids called Grayfoot, by any chance?”

  “Very good.” Madeleine’s excellent teeth appeared in the dying light of the afternoon. “You may have a chance yet, young lady.”

  Dess frowned. “But I thought the darklings hated oil wells.”

  “They do. But the darklings also tell the Grayfoots not to drill. They use their human allies to preserve their own places.”

  Dess nodded slowly. “And eventually these… allies came and got you.”

  “With their hired help. It only took one night, in the wee hours after midnight, and we and our closest daylighter allies were all but finished.” She swept her eyes around the cluttered room. “We were prepared for an attack from darklings, not from men. All this metal… useless.”

  “At least you escaped.”

  Madeleine nodded. “I had snuck out of my parents’ house that night to play some of those games I mentioned earlier. We came here, knowing this was the safest place in the secret hour, a contortion so deep that the darklings didn’t know of its existence.” She rapped a bony knuckle sharply against the grain of the table. “And still don’t, knock on wood.”

  “We? There are more of you?”

  Madeleine shook her head slowly. “There were. One left Bixby a few days later at high noon, and we never heard from him again. The others grew old and died, one by one. Here in this house.”

  Dess took a deep breath, the musty smell of the room suddenly taking on a disturbing flavor. She had expected to find a mystery here, some strange new terrain of midnight amid the tangled minutes and seconds. But this place held only tragedy, isolation, and lingering death.

  Madeleine smiled, her expression reminding Dess of Melissa again. “You did ask, my dear. I can’t be blamed for answering.”

  Dess snorted. “Hang on, you called me.” She frowned. “Why did you call me, again?”

  “Because I’m tired of hiding.” Madeleine took a sip of her tea. “And I have also become quite sure that without my help, none of you shall survive.”

  18

  10:42 p.m.

  CONSTANZA

  Constanza Grayfoot led a busy life.

  In one afternoon she’d led them to the veterans’ hospital on I-35, on a long visit to the stores of downtown Bixby, and through the tempest of the Tulsa Mall. And now, nine dollars in gas money later, they had wound up where they should have started—down the street from her house, waiting for midnight to fall.

  Only one problem: they were practically unarmed. Rex stared out the front windshield at a stunted, gnarled mesquite tree, the most immediate sign of the nearby badlands.

  “This is not good.”

  “I thought you said the house was clean,” Melissa said.

  “It is.” In a few slow drive-bys Rex had determined that Constanza’s house didn’t have a lick of Focus on it. If her family was working with the darklings, they were doing it somewhere else. “But won’t they feel us out here?”

  Melissa shrugged. “If they’re looking for us, they will.”

  “Yeah, well, I blew all my weapons on Sunday night. This is not a great time for a rumble.”

  “We can always do another brilliant improvisation,” she said. “And Categorically Unjustifiable Appropriation is in the trunk
, as yet untouched by inhuman hands. By the way, I’m still waiting for you to stick it back on my tire. Any day now would be fine.”

  “We should wait,” Rex said. “Drive back into town now and come back after we get some more weapons from Dess.”

  “From Dess?” Melissa laughed. “Haven’t you noticed? That girl’s too busy with her own projects to make anything for us. She’s about as useful as Jonathan these days.”

  Rex shook his head. “Dess’ll be pitching in soon enough. We’re going to need her to find whatever’s out in the desert. Until then, she can play with all the maps she wants.”

  “You think Dess can turn the pictures I got from Angie’s mind into coordinates?”

  “That might be complicated.” Rex looked at her and frowned. “You might have to…” He didn’t bother to finish. They were miles from the mind noise of central Bixby, it was late at night, and the emotion was strong in him; Rex knew she could read the thought.

  She smiled and reached over to touch his arm with a gloved hand.

  “Don’t worry, Loverboy. I wouldn’t think of besmirching your honor that way.”

  He smiled back at her but felt his face flush. There was no point in denying the stab of jealousy he felt at the thought of Melissa touching Dess, sharing her mind as she’d shared it with him. It had been bad enough that time with Jonathan out in the desert. But there was no choice, Rex reminded himself. If she hadn’t, they’d all have been darkling meat.

  Speaking of which… He looked at his watch. Over an hour.

  Enough time to get back to home and safety before midnight. “Maybe we should come back with Jessica. We wouldn’t need weapons with her around.”

  “Ah, the mighty flame-bringer. Too bad she’s grounded.”

  Rex sighed, wondering if any seer in history had ever had to deal with such a motley crew of midnighters.