Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

“Damn,” he said. Still twelve knives. He’d turned the door into a darkling magnet! How could he have been so—?

Thunk.

Rex blinked, staring at the knife trembling in the wood beside his head. Its blade was etched with snakes and frogs, its hilt cast like two scaly lizard tails, and its pommel, a tiny metal skull with glass eyes, seemed to be smiling at Rex. He’d never seen the knife before and found himself realizing that he wasn’t the only midnighter who had a few weapons put aside for a rainy day.

“Magnificently Instantaneous Gratification,” Melissa said.

He turned to face her. She was still on the other side of the room—she’d thrown it past Rex’s head.

Melissa had wiped the tears away, and her expression had returned to its usual midnight sneer. “I’m okay now.”

He let out his breath and started to nod, but movement out the window caught his eye. He crossed the room.

“Don’t look, Rex. You don’t want to—” But he’d already seen it.

The thing came down on undulating wings, two leathery sails that billowed from long, multijointed arms. Its hands, long-taloned and grasping the air with compulsive little twitches, must have been thirty feet apart. Its spiked tail whipped through the wind with every beat of the wings, as if to counterbalance the beast’s grotesque cargo.

Its body was thin, the darkling part of it anyway, ribs showing through its leathery flesh. The thing’s spindly hind legs stumbled, trembling feebly as it landed on the rooftop across the street, and its wings took one steadying stroke as it gained its footing.

Melissa, still facing away from the window, made a choking noise.

It had no head. Not a darkling head, anyway. A human torso seemed to be submerged into the creature’s flesh, and a half-visible human face stared glassily from its emaciated chest. Two secondary arms thrust from the sunken torso, ending in the hands and fingers of a person—a child, Rex now saw—which were clenched as if in pain.

“It thinks…” Melissa rasped, “…like us.”

Something burst through the window, an explosion of broken glass, fluttering wings, and ratlike squeaks. Needles of ice shot through Rex’s chest as the winged slither struck, and a sudden tangle of black filaments seemed to clutch his heart.

Blue sparks blinded him, the metal chains swinging from Melissa’s fist knocking the slither to the ground. Rex gasped for breath through frozen lungs, watching as she casually tipped the silverware drawer over onto the still-fluttering beast. The metal spat more sparks as the thing sizzled underneath the pile.

“You do the window,” she ordered, kicking the glowing forks, spoons, and knives around on the floor to prevent any crawling slithers from sneaking up on them.

Rex nodded and reached into the duffel bag. He tossed two handfuls of Dess’s nails and screws out the window, bringing screams and blue fire from the things that hovered or slithered just outside. A swing with Arachnophobia, the ball-peen hammer, dislodged something large that had taken hold of the sill.

“Help me with this,” he shouted, ice from the slither strike still grating in his lungs. The pegboard full of computer cables came down easily from the wall. Some of the cables were filled with useless copper and gold, Rex knew, but some would also contain advanced alloys, insulating plastics, and hopefully some fiber optics, all of which would bedevil their attackers. They leaned it against the window, and Rex began to empty the duffel bag, naming the pots and pans with the last tridecalogisms from his tattered Scrabble dictionary page.

“I got it,” Melissa said, pushing him away when his list ran out. She named the last few bits of metal, calling on the memorized emergency words they all kept in their heads.

“Unintelligent,” she murmured.

Rex leaned against the wall and shuddered. Every breath was icy from the slither strike. His shoulders were numb and his fingers moved slowly, like after a snowball fight without gloves. A few inches higher and the slither would have gotten him on the neck. The lore said that a few midnighters had actually died that way—suffocating, their windpipes choked with ice.

He’d been so awestruck by the… thing they’d seen, he’d almost been killed by a mere slither.

“Irresponsible,” Melissa named a frying pan.

“What was it?” he croaked.

She turned to him, shook her head. “It thinks like us.”

“A human, you mean?”

“A midnighter. I think she’s… she was one of us.”

“Mixed with one of them.”

Melissa stared at the meat thermometer in her hand and whispered, “Indescribable.”

Something big hurled itself against the pegboard. The coiled computer cables turned into flickering circles, like Christmas lights still in their boxes. A long tendril snaked from behind the flimsy board, wrapping itself around Melissa’s waist. She thrust the point of the meat thermometer into it, and the tendril retreated with a shriek.

“Just a lower darkling,” she said.

Rex sank to the floor. Melissa shoved the last of their defenses into place and crouched next to him, holding his hand, protected by her thick woolen glove.

“I’ll show you what I felt,” she said. “From the thing and that woman. After we get out of here. Tomorrow we’ll touch again.”

“After we get out of here?” He looked at the door with its thirteen knives, the pegboard full of glowing metal. Maybe it would hold, maybe not. Of course, after what he’d seen, death was relative.

Better eaten than… changed.

“Yes, Rex. After we get out of here.”

A fluttering and shrieking came from the blocked window, a slither beating its wings as it died, the pegboard trembling.

“They’re unhappy about us seeing that thing, aren’t they?”

Melissa nodded thoughtfully. “You said it. They aren’t going to give up easily.”

Another slither launched itself through the window, the smell of its burning flesh making Rex gag. The darklings’ mindless peons were sacrificing themselves to deplete the room’s defenses. Rex smiled grimly; it would take more than slithers to get through that pile of space-age metal and tridecalogisms.

Noises came from inside the house now, the beating of frantic wings filling the hallway outside. The thirteen knives began to glow.

A black snake head squeezed under the door, then another—crawling slithers testing them. The first few burned up in the clutter of silverware and fallen nails, but more came. Melissa stomped on their writhing forms, the anklets around her boots glowing blue, then white. Rex wielded Arachnophobia, crushing slithers with the hammer until his arm ached.

After long minutes the slither attacks subsided. The fluttering of wings died away, the metal scattered around the room losing its wild glow.

Rex sank to the floor, wiping sweat from his eyes. His lungs were full of the reek of burned slither flesh, his muscles completely exhausted.

“They’re giving up?” he croaked.

Melissa stood unmoving, eyes shut.

Then Rex heard it. Something coming up the stairs. He couldn’t imagine the half-human thing moving through the house, so it was probably a normal darkling, a brash young one to invade this modern place. Melissa didn’t say what she tasted, just stared at the door with blank-faced fatigue. The stairs creaked under its weight, and the thirteen knives began to glow again.

Terror threatened to paralyze him, but then Rex’s mind went back to what she’d said: Tomorrow we’ll touch again. His head swam at the thought. Finally there was some promise of something more between him and Melissa. They were not going to die tonight.

He pulled the hubcap from the duffel bag.

“Come and get it,” he said softly.