Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

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.”

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.”