Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

“Catch something?” Rex asked.

“Maybe.”

She took the next left, through a stone gate and into a plantation of McMansions, giant new cookie-cutter houses stamped onto tiny lots just out of the reach of Tulsa property taxes. The thought had come from in here, she was positive.

No one seemed to be awake; half the houses still hadn’t been moved into. She could see the curtainless windows and feel the empty rooms behind them. Ugly as they were, Melissa dreamed of living in a house like these one day—unstained by years of human habitation, no sleepless worries seeping out of the walls, no residue of ancient petty arguments.

Most of the people who’d already moved into the complex were fast asleep, their dreams as smooth and interchangeable as the manicured front lawns.

Then she felt it again and gripped the wheel hard. Melissa knew it was the one, the same mind that had thought so intensely a week ago, We must have Jessica Day.

“What’re you—?”

“Shush!”

It was already slipping away, moving fast across the empty psychic terrain.

“Crap!” It was in a car. (He was in a car—a male, she could tell suddenly.) The tendrils of his mind trailed away like a condensation cloud behind a jet plane. “I tasted him, Rex. But he’s driving.”

“Which way?”

“I… don’t know.” She shook her head; the last traces were fading. She brought the car to a halt. “He was around here somewhere.”

“Same guy?”

Melissa nodded. “And we’re only about a mile from where I heard him the first time. But we just missed him, running off to something he was late for. Want to look around some more?”

“Sure.” Rex’s glasses were off, and he was staring at the overgrown houses. “There are signs here. Focus.”

She took her foot off the brake, eased back onto the road.

“Really? In this place?” Sure, they were close to the desert, but Melissa couldn’t imagine darklings taking an interest in this development, full of shiny new fixtures and stainless steel sprinkler systems. But the marks that Rex could see lingered longer than darkling mind traces, so there was no point arguing. She drove the car slowly along the meandering streets, keeping her mind watchful for cops or private security guards. Her old Ford stuck out here like a helping of dog turd on angel food cake.

It was good to feel Rex’s mind at work, clear and pure as he looked for signs of Focus. In his excitement he had forgiven her slight against his authority, too intoxicated by his seer’s powers to hold a grudge. In some ways he was still the kid she’d rescued from solitude eight years before, enthralled by the mysteries of midnight, driven by his need to know more. Melissa was sure they would hold hands again soon.

“Stop,” he whispered. Melissa halted the car, feeling the buzz of his excitement.

The house he was staring at looked like all the others, two-storied and big-windowed, an overpowering double garage presented proudly to the world.

“I wish you could see this, Cowgirl. It’s so Focused. They’ve been crawling all over it.”

She let her mind drift in through its big front door. The place had hardly any human taste at all. “No one home. And if anyone lives there, they haven’t for very long.”

“Darkling Manor,” Rex said quietly. “Not a clean brick on the joint.”

She looked at her watch. Twenty to midnight. “Well, shall we take a look before the witching hour?”

“What about your friend?”

“He was headed somewhere in a hurry” She tasted the air. “Long gone.”

“Okay. But ten minutes max. We should be back in the car and a couple of miles from here before midnight comes.” He shook his head. “Don’t want to be crashers at a darkling house party.”

The door was unlocked.

“That’s interesting.” Melissa pushed it open, its new hinges utterly silent. The entrance hallway was grand and echoey, no rugs to muffle the sound of their boots across the polished wooden floor. No anything, she realized. The walls were bare of pictures, and no shoes or hanging coats cluttered the foyer. The two large front rooms were empty except for a portable phone. It sat lonely on a windowsill, its cord winding across the blank expanse of carpet, a demonic red eye showing that it was recharging.

And the place tasted completely dead. Not a leftover thought anywhere. Even the dull roar of central Bixby miles away seemed muted by its walls.

“Nothing to steal, I guess,” she said.

“But lots of darkling action.” Rex was looking up the stairs, into corners. “Just like outside, it’s all in Focus.”

“Maybe it’s some kind of darkling frat house.”

“I’ve never seen them set up shop in a human dwelling before. Maybe a tire yard or a vacant lot, but not a house. Of course, nobody lives here.”

“No,” Melissa said, “but the darklings aren’t paying the phone bill…”

Rex chewed his lip. “Good point.”

In the kitchen they found signs of habitation. Or maybe vandalism. The faucet had been yanked out from the sink, the handles of the cupboards torn off, every piece of metal removed. There were no appliances, and the lightbulb hung bare from the ceiling.

“A darkling-friendly kitchen. What do they eat, anyway?”

Rex just looked at her, sending out a stab of annoyance.

“Oh, right. Us.” Melissa didn’t think about it in those terms much, but that was and always had been the prime source of conflict between the two races: the whole foodchain thing. Funny how that could mess up a relationship.

“Let’s check upstairs,” Rex said, having gone through the drawers and cupboards and found them empty.

She checked her watch. “Okay. But five minutes and we leave.”

He turned his head slowly from left to right as they climbed the stairs, his eyes wide with the Focus. “Absolutely.”

Upstairs was divided into three empty bedrooms, the largest with a big balcony that looked out into the dark Oklahoma night. Melissa stared through the sliding door and realized something. She pulled off a glove and put her hand to the cold glass.

“You know, Rex, it’s warm in here.” Outside it was almost freezing, but someone had left the heating on, though they hadn’t bothered to lock the door…

“Look at this!” he cried, his mind flooding the room with delight.

He had pulled something from a closet, a box of small rectangular tiles that glowed white in the darkness. He squatted on the floor and dumped them out with a clatter. As his hands swept through the tiles to spread them out, she recognized the wooden sound.

“Didn’t know you liked dominoes so much,” she said dryly.

“Not dominoes.” Rex was flipping them all faceup. He hadn’t put on his glasses, so they must have been marked with Focus.

She knelt beside him and squinted at the symbols on the tiles. They were the spindly figures of lore, the secret alphabet used to record midnighter history for ten thousand years.

“Oh.” The thought that anyone besides Rex would use the ancient signs left her speechless for a moment.

“But they’re not quite the same,” he muttered. “It’s like a slightly different alphabet…”

Melissa didn’t respond. She steadied herself with one hand on the floor. The feel of him parsing the symbols was dizzying; his mind battered hers with a frenzy of calculation.

“Or maybe some of them are signs I don’t know,” he said, picking through them, lifting one for closer inspection. “Symbols for concepts that don’t exist in the lore.”

Melissa forced her mind to shut out his mental pyrotechnics. “But what are those things for, Rex?”

The question brought his brain to a spinning halt. “I don’t know.”