Scott Westerfeld - Blue Noon

She checked her watch. It had been almost ten minutes since she’d left Melissa behind. Soon the younger darklings would be closing in.

She pulled out her flashlight and whispered its new name: Foolhardiness.

The beam surged through the forest, driving away the violet shimmer of the rip. Jessica heard movement ahead, a slither—or something larger—fleeing before the white light.

“Beth!” she cried. “Where are you?”

Finally an answer came. Not to her ears, but in words that sounded distantly in her mind.

To your right, fast. They need you.

Melissa. The mindcaster’s taste washed across Jessica’s tongue—a strange sensation, given that she’d never thought of Melissa as having a taste before. But there it was, bitter and caustic, like chewing some pill you were supposed to swallow.

Jessica began to run, veering right until a high-pitched scream reached her through the trees. She barreled toward the sound, ignoring the branches whipping at her face and clothes. The rip had cleared the suspended raindrops from the air, but the trees were still heavy with water—dumping gallons on her as she crashed through them.

Another scream came from dead ahead. Close.

She burst out into the familiar clearing, saw the finger of stone thrusting into the air, then stumbled to a halt, eyes wide. A thing was wrapped around the cave entrance, like a great jellyfish attached to its prey, its tendrils sinking into the rock itself. It had no head that Jessica could see, just a tangled knot of stringy appendages, all matted together like hair caught in a bathtub drain.

A small human figure stood just inside the mouth of the cave, pale and shaking, the creature’s tendrils wound around her arms and legs.

Jessica ran toward it, playing Foolhardiness’s white light across the creature.

But its tendrils didn’t burst into flame; instead they sizzled angrily with blue fire, coiling tighter.

Rex had warned them that they might see new things tonight, things born well before midnight had been created, so old that mere white light wouldn’t be enough to slay them.

In which case, he had said, there was always fire.

Jessica pulled a highway flare from her pocket and, in a move she’d practiced all week, flicked its top off, banging the two pieces against each other in a glancing blow.

“Ventriloquism,” she said, and the flare burst to life, its radiance white-hot and blinding.

In its radiance she saw one of the thing’s legs reaching for her, snaking across the ground. She knelt, thrusting the flare at it. The tendril sizzled, a low flame racing across it, bringing up a gagging smell of burned hair and dust.

It retreated, slithering away from her, but another reached through the air.

“Haven’t had enough?” Jessica said, fending it off. The arm darted around her, just outside the reach of the hissing flame. In the corner of her eye she saw another arm stretching its way from the creature.

She swallowed. Since she’d become the flame-bringer, the darklings had been so afraid of her. But apparently these old ones didn’t cut and run.

This was their night, after all.

Jessica lunged forward, swinging the flare into the closest tendril. A gout of flame exploded, bringing a low, mournful scream and another rush of the burned-hair smell.

She looked around for the other arm….

At that moment something wrapped itself around her leg, soft and feathery but bitter cold. The chill climbed through her, shooting up her spine, bringing with it a tidal wave of emotion: old fears and nightmares rose in her, forgotten terrors dredged up to the surface of her mind.

Suddenly Jessica felt lost, filled with the certainly that she was failing out of school, was leaving her old friends forever, going to a place where reality was warped and strange. The panic of finding a new classroom after the tardy bell had rung paralyzed her, cold as the stares of a thousand unfriendly strangers.

Everyone in Bixby hated her, she suddenly knew.

Open your hand, Jess, a distant voice implored.

She obeyed unthinkingly, hoping to please the voice in her head, her fingers releasing the flare. Her only weapon fell from her grasp.

Then, like a phone line going dead, the cold disappeared, all her terrors vanishing in the space of a heartbeat. And again the screaming sound filled the air, slow and piercing and mournful, like the Bixby firehouse’s noon siren.

Jessica looked down; the flare’s burning end had cut the tendril as it had fallen, releasing her from the creature’s spell.

“Thanks, Melissa,” she whispered, kneeling to retrieve the flare. She held it in front of herself, charging toward the thing wrapped around the mouth of the cave.

Tendrils began to writhe as she approached, slithering from the arms and legs of the small, pale figure in the cave’s entrance, abandoning their grasp of the stone spire. A smaller set of extremities whirled around the thing’s matted center like the blades of a helicopter, hissing with the sound of escaping steam. It rose slowly into the air.

Jessica hurled the flare directly at the creature and in the same motion reached into her pocket for another. As she worked to light it, the darkling thing burst into flame above her, the smell of dead rat and rotten eggs filling the air. It unleashed its mournful howl again, still rising, then flying across the sky. The flame seemed to be riding the creature, somehow unable to consume it. And then the burning mass passed over the horizon of trees.

Jessica held the new flare out, lighting the mouth of the cave. The small figure had fallen to the ground and lay huddled and sobbing. Another pale face appeared out of the darkness.

“Beth?” she said, squinting through the smoke of the flare.

“It’s me—Cassie.” The girl took another step into the light, then knelt next to the fallen figure, turning her face up.

It was Beth, so pale she was almost unrecognizable.

Jessica dropped the flare and fell to her knees. “Beth!”

For a moment the only answer was a wild fluttering of eyelids. Then Beth sucked in a sudden, sharp breath, and her eyes opened.

“Jess?” she answered.

“I’m here. Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Sure. What a nightmare. Was I screaming or just…?” Beth’s eyes opened wider as she took in Cassie, the burning flare, the red-tinged blue time all around them. “What the hell, Jess?”

“What are you doing out here?” Jessica cried.

Cassie’s expression was dazed, but she answered calmly. “We snuck out tonight. We figured something was going on out here at midnight.”

“You guys were right about that.”

“What was that thing?” Cassie asked.

“What thing…?” Beth said weakly.

“I have no idea. I mean, it was a darkling, but not the usual kind.”

“A darkling?”

Jessica shook her head. “I’ll explain later. Beth, can you stand up?”

Beth rose slowly to her feet. The highway flare cast wildly jittering light into the cave behind them, and both the girls’ faces looked ghostly in its harsh shadows.

“I remember the flashlight conking out,” Beth said, then looked at Jessica. “Why are you here? What’s going on?” Her voice had regained some strength.

“Later, Beth. Can’t you see we have to go?”

“Go where? I mean, what is all this? Is this what you sneak out to do every night?”

“Beth!” Jessica reached back and grabbed her sister’s hand. “I’ll tell you later! Come on!”

“But you won’t!” Beth planted her feet, not letting Jessica take another step. “You never tell me anything!”

Jessica groaned. Her little sister apparently didn’t remember the creature that had taken hold of her; she didn’t realize how close she’d come to being lunch meat. Even Cassie had folded her arms across her chest.