Touching Darkness (12 page)

“Back in my day, there were maps. You didn’t need to consult a polymath every time you built a house. Do you want tea?”

Dess blinked again, realizing that she hadn’t said a word since crossing the threshold. Her eyes had adjusted quickly to the gloom, but her brain was overwhelmed by the clutter stacked everywhere: rusty tridecagrams, Bixby town seals, steel window guards thirteen bars across, fireplace grates with a fine mesh woven in patterns of thirty-nine. A vast horde of antidarkling antiques were piled against every wall, jumbled together into jagged metal sculptures that begged to have their angles calculated.

She started to reply, but from another room the wail of a teakettle erupted, sweeping from a low moan up to an angry screech.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” the old woman said. “Back in my day, young people didn’t take so long to answer simple questions.”

Dess closed her mouth.

Rex was going to freak when he saw this place. It made his historical collection look like some shabby roadside snake zoo. Here was a whole town’s worth of midnighter heirlooms, the heritage of lost generations quietly rusting away. Dess wondered if there was lore here too, not just a few scraps of information written invisibly onto desert rocks, but a library as extensive as the rummage sale around her. She would have to ask. There was a lot she was going to ask, once she got her mouth working again.

“Milk and sugar?” The barked question and the rattling of a tray preceded the old woman’s return. “Or is that too demanding a question for you?”

“Just milk.” Dess hated tea, but it seemed too late to mention the fact.

“Very sensible,” the old woman said. “Milk coats the stomach, and sugar rots the teeth. I never touch sugar of any kind.” She smiled broadly, revealing two uninterrupted rows of gleaming white. “You wouldn’t guess I haven’t seen a dentist in forty-nine years.”

Dess swallowed. “No, I sure wouldn’t.”

The tea tray rattled to a stop on the table before Dess, and the woman sat across from her, grasping the strings hanging from the pot to bob the tea bags vigorously up and down. “Can’t trust myself when they turn on that laughing gas. Might as well hire the Goodyear Blimp to advertise where I am.”

These words spun in Dess’s brain for a moment, then cohered in a moment of clarity.

“You’re a mindcaster,” she said.

“And you have a fine grasp of the obvious.” The woman pulled the tea bags from the pot and dropped them with a wet slap onto a saucer. She poured two steaming cups, adding milk generously to both.

For a moment, silence descended over the tea party. The old woman sipped delicately, and Dess warmed her hands on her cup, lifting it once to sniff the floral scent of the brew revolted her. The only tea she liked was iced tea, with so much lemon and sugar added that it was basically lemonade with caffeine.

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.”

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.”