Scott Westerfeld - Touching Darkness

“Dess told you about Bixby, right?”

Jessica looked at the stacks and shelves around her. “Maybe not everything about it. What exactly?”

“The signs of midnight. The staircases with thirteen steps, the symbols.”

“Sure.” Dess had hinted about Bixby’s oddities the first time they’d met, before Jessica had realized that the secret hour was anything but a dream. Since then she’d seen the signs everywhere: the thirteen-pointed stars in the town seal, on the high school emblem, on the antique plaques that people hung on their houses. Even the words Bixby, Oklahoma, totalled thirteen letters.

“Did you ever wonder who put all those signs in place?”

Jess frowned. “Haven’t there been midnighters here for a long time? You said they’d been fighting the darklings for ten thousand years. Since the blue time was created.”

“True. But the struggle wasn’t always as secret as it is now. In the old days it wasn’t just us midnighters who knew what was going on.”

Jessica nodded slowly. According to Dess, the whole town had been built to antidarkling specifications. It stood to reason that a handful of midnighters would need help pulling off something like that. Unless there was some sort of architect talent that no one had told her about yet.

Rex continued. “Every small town has its secrets, things that outsiders don’t need to know. A long time ago Bixby was a much smaller town, with much bigger secrets than most.”

“It’s still a weird place, even if you don’t ever see the secret hour,” Jonathan said. “I could tell that the moment I moved here.”

“All you have to do is taste the water,” Jessica said.

Rex nodded and placed one hand on a pile of photocopies. “If you know what to look for in these old papers, it’s easy to read between the lines. It wasn’t just local superstitions that made this town the way it is. The building codes are designed to repel darklings, newspapers report strange animal sightings that could only have been made at midnight, and there are an awful lot of clubs and societies dedicated to ‘the preservation of Bixby.’ This one’s my favorite.”

He lifted a well-worn piece of paper from the top of the stack and handed it to Jessica. She read:

LADIES’ ANTI-TENEBROSITY LEAGUE

ICE-CREAM SOCIAL AND PIE AUCTION

5 CENTS ADMISSION

LEAGUE MEETING TO FOLLOW (MEMBERS ONLY)

Jessica lifted an eyebrow. “What’s tenebrosity ?”

“It’s an old word for darkness.”

“Okay. But an ice-cream social?”

Rex smiled. “It’s one way to fight evil. They had bake sales too. Practically everybody must have known what was going on.”

“There’s always someone who doesn’t know what’s going on,” Jonathan said.

Rex looked at him directly for the first time since they’d arrived, peeking over his glasses to gauge Jonathan’s expression. Then he shrugged. “Yeah, you’re right. For most it was probably just a social thing, like going to church is for a lot of people. But back then midnighters were supported by the community.” He took the paper back from Jessica and muttered, “More than we’ll ever be.”

“But what changed?” she asked. “I mean, how could everyone just forget ?”

“That’s a good question.” He waved his hand at the bookshelves, the stacks of paper. “One I’ve been working on. As near as I can figure, it all changed about sixty years ago. First there was the oil boom, a lot of new people coming in to work the fields. Folks who wouldn’t understand.”

“So the old-timers kept quiet about Bixby’s little darkling problem,” Jonathan said.

“Yeah. Wouldn’t you?” Rex picked up a stack of papers from his bed. “The town went from a few hundred to twelve thousand in ten years. Boom time. Hang on, I’ve got the exact numbers somewhere in here.”

Jessica and Jonathan waited silently while he leafed through the papers. She tried to imagine a town where a hundred or so people knew the truth about midnight while thousands more remained in the dark. Of course, even if someone leaked the secret, it seemed unlikely the newcomers would believe them, except for the few born at the stroke of midnight who could see it with their own eyes.

And sharing the secret with a hundred people would be a whole lot easier than being just one among five…

The tomcat pushed its way into the room and rubbed itself along Jessica’s ankles, slinking through the piles to disappear under Rex’s bed. She wondered where the old man’s spiders had gone, and her bare legs tingled.

Finally Rex shrugged, placing the papers atop a stack on the floor. “Can’t find it, but that’s pretty much what happened. The obvious part.”

Still tingling from imaginary spiders, Jessica asked, “What’s the not-so-obvious part?”

He pulled off his glasses and looked up at her. “The midnighters disappeared.”

“Disappeared?”

He nodded. “There’s no lore after 1956. No marks or recordings of any kind that I’ve found. And when Melissa and I were kids, there were no midnighters older than us, no one to tell us what was going on. She had to find me on her own, back when we were eight years old. Before that night, I thought I was the only one.”

He sighed and lowered one hand almost to the floor. The cat emerged to sniff it, then allowed itself to be scratched.

“In the old days it was different. There was always at least one mindcaster, someone to find the new midnighters. When they got old enough to understand the blue time, there were initiation ceremonies, teachers. You knew you belonged to something.” He put his glasses back on. “But that all disappeared around fifty years ago, as far as I can tell.”

“So something happened to them?” Jonathan said.

Rex nodded. “Something bad, we can assume.”

“But the guy last night…” Jessica said. “Maybe he’s left over from the old days or something. Like he moved out of town way back then and just got back?”

“He looked that old?” Rex asked.

“I don’t think so.” She looked at Jonathan, who nodded.

“Young.” He shifted uneasily on one foot. “He jumped an eight-foot fence a lot easier than I did. Rich, too. His watch had jewels on it.”

“So how does he know?” Rex said softly. “Melissa’s never felt another midnighter besides us five, and she’s never tasted a daylight mind that knew the truth. Of course, she hasn’t been looking out for any lately. But when we were little kids…”

He fell into silence, and Jessica found herself gazing at the four walls of books surrounding them. The room was its own little world, an imaginary slice of the past. Suddenly she understood Rex a little better. No wonder he always seemed misplaced, unhappy with the world he found himself in. He wished he’d been born in the old days, when there were rules and meetings and initiations, even icecream socials. When a seer was probably the boss of the whole thing.

“I got the guy’s license plate number,” Jonathan said.

Rex smirked. “Maybe Sheriff St. Claire can help you with that.”

Jonathan’s face darkened, and he glared down at the cat, which was rubbing its head against his feet. “Well, it’s something, anyway.”

Jessica sighed. “So what are we going to do, Rex?”

“Melissa’s coming by tonight, after I get my dad to bed. I’ll tell her what you saw. Maybe she can do a little mindcasting and find out what’s new in Bixby. We’ll take a drive around your neighborhood tonight, see if we run into any stray thoughts. If your stalker’s there late, when most everyone else has gone to sleep, he should be easy to find.”