Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

Rex scrambled the other way, pulling himself through the narrow gap between aluminum siding and earth, his head and upper body plunging into the cold, damp world beneath the house. This had been his father’s constant threat, exiling young Rex into this shadow place where old, sick Magnetosphere had crawled away to die, this place where tarantulas bred and multiplied in the darkness.

He felt naked, as if he were about to grasp a biting, hairy spider with every desperate handful of dirt. Even his midnighter’s vision was useless in the utter blackness. Brittle dead things scratched his face, leaves and branches that had blown here to rot. He was almost all the way under the house. They wouldn’t waste time following him down here with the dog next door going crazy… would they?

Then he felt strong hands take his ankles.

Rex lashed out, trying to connect again. But more hands took hold, two on each foot, pulling him back out so fast that his coat and shirt rode up, his bare stomach sliding across the dirt. His fingernails skittered across the hard earth uselessly. Twisting half around, he reached up to grasp the floor beams of the house, but they were covered in a damp mold, as slick as algae-coated rocks in a stream.

He gave up, thrusting his hands into his pockets to grasp and scatter the darkling dominoes into the blackness.

And then he was out, the sudden moonlight shining on their sweating faces, at least four of them huddled around him, one reaching a hand down toward his face. But the Guddersons’ dog was still barking. Maybe all he needed to bring out the whole neighborhood was a single, bloodcurdling scream.

Rex took a deep breath.

Chemicals filled his lungs—a dentist-office, mortuary smell that overwhelmed him, his cry instantly silenced, his mind set floating. But in the brief transit between wild panic and blank unconsciousness, Rex felt a feathery and drugged satisfaction: they wouldn’t find the dominoes. Jessica was safe. No one else but he would dare crawl into that dark space, still haunted by Magnetosphere’s ghost, the cold and dank and vile domain of spiders…

Melissa couldn’t wait to get to Rex’s and taste his calm presence beside her in the car. Friday nights were the best time to drive out toward the desert, leaving behind the collective frenzy of Bixby wondering why it wasn’t having fun. At least on school nights most of them would be headed for bed by now, not driving around half drunk looking for distractions that didn’t exist.

But when Melissa pulled up outside the run-down house, she couldn’t feel Rex inside.

She glanced at her watch and honked the horn.

“Come on, Loverboy. It’s not that cold.” Usually he was Outside waiting, five minutes early or not.

The black, sagging bulk of the house remained motionless.

She honked again. Christ, it’s dark on this street.

The risen moon glimmered across the shingled roof, but there wasn’t a single light on inside, and some redneck had shot out the streetlight overhead. Had Rex fallen asleep?

“Loser,” she muttered, switching off the engine and opening her door.

Walking up the path, Melissa caught the flicker of a TV inside. Great, the old man was awake. She’d thought Rex was going to ice him, like he usually did for important expeditions. Stalkers, mysterious runways, and the halfling—they had enough on their plate without aging psychos getting in the way.

She reached for the bell but paused. The knob hung slackly from the door, as if the last shred of the house’s spirit had finally fled, leaving behind only broken bones. It spun loosely in her hand, the door swinging inward at the slightest pressure.

A chill began to crawl up Melissa’s spine. The cold metal tasted of nervous excitement, acrid as the smoke of a charcoal fire laced with too much lighter fluid.

“Hello?”

Her midnighter eyes could see perfectly in the TV flicker. Rex’s dad was sprawled grotesquely in his chair, mouth open and drooling. There was an odd smell coming from him—a real one, not in her mind. It was sharp and chemical, like paint thinner. She could hear the old man snoring softly.

Melissa walked quickly past, toward Rex’s room, keeping her hands in her pockets. The bathroom window was open at the other end of the darkened hall, filling the house with damp cold and the icy glint of moonlight.

“Rex?” she called hesitantly. If the old man wasn’t dosed, she didn’t want to wake him. But she wanted an answer, some sort of noise from Rex before she opened his room door. She still couldn’t feel him yet, which was wrong. His taste should be on her tongue now that she was this far inside the house. His mind always came through clearest, as if he had his own channel.

Unless he was in a deep, dreamless sleep. Or else was… Melissa pushed at his bedroom door with her foot, hands balled into fists in her pockets.

The room was a jumble of black shapes, piled papers, and mounds of clothes, bookshelves pressing in at her from every wall.

But the bed was empty, a tangle of white sheets glowing in the darkness, and Rex’s backpack was gone from where it always hung on the back of his desk chair.

Maybe he’d already split, some frantic phone call from him just missing her. But what emergency could have dragged him away from the work they had to do tonight? And in whose car?

She stepped into the room, pulling her hands out into the cold air, spreading her fingers to feel the cluttered resonances of the space.

A plaintive whine came from the doorway behind her, a blur of soft, inquisitive thoughts carrying hunger and annoyance.

“Come here, Dag.” Melissa knelt, her long dress gathering in a velvet pool around her, and reached out her hand. Daguerreotype padded to just within reach and then began licking her fingers. The cat’s mind tasted uneasy, as if his tiny kingdom had been invaded, and recently enough that his fuzzy little brain hadn’t yet smoothed over again.

Melissa rose from her crouch, tasting the air. Something biting and anxious came from the desk. She made her way through the disorder, spotting the source of the taste glimmering in a patch of moonlight.

Spontaneously Machiavellian Deceitfulness waited for her there, splitting the wood of the desk. She’d given it to Rex the week before school started—a letter opener, that silly inter-section between knives and office supplies.

Her hand closed on it, and a shadow cast of his mind rushed into hers—panicked and fearful, hunted in his own home, certain of an awful fate if he were caught. They were here, already inside, creeping through the darkness to surround and take him. The emotions boiled off the thin piece of metal quickly, and then it was cold again, but they left no doubt in her mind.

Melissa pulled her hand away and moaned.

The groupies had him, her Rex, and tonight the darklings would turn him into one of them.

“What’s base sixty again?”

“It’s like base ten, except the ones place goes up to fifty-nine, and a hundred’s worth thirty-six hundred.”

“Huh?”

“Thirty-six hundred,” Dess repeated. “Sixty squared, silly.”

Jessica looked down at the shield, an elegant spiral snipped from the side of a trash can and shaped to wrap around the wrist. It was for Jonathan, a sort of wing to help him with midair maneuvers. Numbers ringed the edge, but not the normal Arabic kind. They were Phoenician numerals, simple strokes like l’s clustered with sideways V’s, organized into something that Dess kept calling “base sixty.”

Jessica pushed a pencil toward her. “Just write it down; I’ll copy.”