Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

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.”