Touching Darkness (16 page)

Beth Spaghetti Night returned unexpectedly.

Back in Chicago, Beth had made dinner for the family every Wednesday night for the last four years. Since she was nine years old, she’d made the same sauce, used the same gauge of spaghetti (no. 18), and enforced the same simple rule: others were allowed in the kitchen, but only Beth could touch the food before it was time to eat.

When the familiar scent of long-simmering tomatoes slunk into Jessica’s room, she stared at her desk calendar for a puzzled moment, then threw down her physics book and ran down the hall. Her little sister turned from the bubbling pot and shot her a look to inform her that the rule was still in force.

Jessica leaned against the door frame and smiled. Beth Spaghetti Night had been one of the small, important things lost in the move, like the VCR manual or her father’s windshield scraper, almost forgotten among all the other dislocations.

But somewhere inside, Jessica now knew, she’d missed it.

“Smells good,” she said.

“Is good,” Beth replied.

Jessica wanted to cross the kitchen and hug her sister, but the smell and sight of Beth at work seemed too fragile to disrupt. Besides, getting that close to the stove might imply an infraction of the rule.

“Don’t pretend you’re in a bad mood, Beth.”

“I’m not.”

“Not pretending or not in a bad mood?”

“Not either.” Beth turned to glance at Acariciandote on Jessica’s wrist, as if to reassure her that no amount of pasta should imply she’d been forgiven for the closet incident.

Jessica sighed. “I said I was sorry.”

Beth didn’t respond. Two days of silent treatment had been her only retaliation for the night before last, but it was slowly starting to get to Jessica. This was the supreme advantage held by little sisters who screamed a lot: it made their silence all the more terrifying.

But a moment later Beth turned and said the unthinkable: “Want a taste?”

Jessica was paralyzed for a moment. But when her sister extended her arm, she forced her feet to cross the kitchen, trying to suppress a suspicion that the spoon was actually coated in extra-strength Tabasco, or battery acid, or worse. She blew softly, and a tiny drop of red rolled off to spatter the white tile floor. It certainly looked and smelled like spaghetti sauce. Jessica closed her eyes and wrapped her mouth around the hot, thickly coated wooden spoon.

It wasn’t finished yet, but the familiar buttery flavor of almost-too-many reduced onions filled her with relief. This hadn’t been an elaborate revenge plot after all.

“It’s great.”

Beth nodded. “Told you.” She turned back to the pot. “So can I meet this guy?”

Jessica blinked. “Jonathan?”

“Duh.”

“Sure. Of course. You could’ve today. He drove me home from school.” The last words brought up a momentary image of Ernesto Grayfoot, but Jessica forced it from her mind, not wanting to wreck the moment.

“Next time he comes by, have him say hi. You know, if I’m not locked in a closet or something.”

She smiled. “Okay, Beth.” Forgiven at last.

The tinkle of keys in the front door caught both their ears, and the subject was dropped. But Jessica felt it between them, a shared secret after all.

The sounds of approach stopped short at the kitchen door, and Jessica turned to enjoy her mother’s look of surprise. A grocery bag slumped against her hip, jutting celery stalks suggesting some planned meal now being hurriedly abandoned in Mom’s head.

“Oh… I bought…”

“Not on the counter.”

Jessica lifted the offending groceries from her mother’s grip and removed them to the safety of the living room.

* * * * *

“Mom, could I spend the night at Dess’s this Friday?”

“Who’s Dess?”

Beth turned from her cooking. “You have a friend called Dess, Jess?”

“Yeah, it’s a mess,” she said with a grin. “Her real name’s Desdemona. She’s in my trig class, and it would be really great if we could hang out and, you know, study?” Jessica leaned both elbows on the kitchen table and smiled, wondering if her emphasis on the last word had been too obvious. The study angle was the easiest way to work her mother’s guilt. It had been her idea to sign Jessica up for all advanced classes after the move.

But Mom’s engineering side took over. “Didn’t you already spend Sunday studying with Rex?”

“Yeah, that was history.”

“Yes, but you used up your ungrounded day to go over there, Jessica.”

“No, ‘history’ as in last week.”

“I thought your father said it counted as this week’s.” She pointed at the calendar on the kitchen wall, where the weeks started on Sunday and ended on Saturday.

Jessica squinted at it. “No way! Sunday is the weekend, so that week ended and now it’s this week.”

Her mother opened her mouth but only an exhausted sigh emerged. She spread her hands. “Sure. Fine.”

Jessica felt a forward jolt inside, as if she were in a car that had braked too quickly, her arguments piling up on each other like unbelted kids in the backseat. (First law of motion, her new physics lobe informed her.) Beth turned from the not-yet-boiling water to deliver a steely glare. Mom never would have given up so easily on a technical point back in Chicago, before the long days at Aerospace Oklahoma had begun to wear her down. Instead of a flush of victory, Jessica just felt sorry for her.

She tried to smile. “Oh, great. Cool. So, how’s work?”

A soft sigh. “Workable.”

“That’s it? Come on, Mom. You’re there like twelve hours a day. There must be something to tell.” Jessica shrugged. “How’s that runway doing?”

Her mother looked up, a little puzzled. “The runway?”

“Yeah, aren’t you on some kind of committee?” Jessica tried to sound casual, as though she always had conversations about emergency runways. “It’s just that these kids were talking at school”—not technically a lie—“about how some people in town don’t want you to build it?”

Her mother nodded tiredly, then leaned back until her head rested against the kitchen wall. “At school too? Christ. That’s what I’ve been dealing with all day. Suddenly the whole town’s gone nuts over this thing. I thought being on the committee was going to be a breeze.”

“So, tell me all about it.”

“Well…” Her mother frowned. “I’ve told you about air brakes, right?”

“Yeah, that was right after the birds and the bees,” Beth spoke up.

“Sure, Mom,” Jessica said, ignoring her sister. “That loud, scary noise right after you land, which is the engines reversing to slow the plane down.”

“Exactly. Well, and don’t get scared about this, because it almost never happens…”

“Safer than driving. Right, Mom?”

She ignored Beth. “But sometimes the air brake mechanism fails in midair. A light goes on in the cabin, so they know before landing, but they have to fly the plane to a special runway that’s really, really long. They put them all over the country but mostly in the middle. And they’re building more now because extra runways are really important if… well… if you suddenly have to land every plane in the country all at once. You know?”

“Yeah, Mom,” Jessica said reassuringly. “Beth and I know about boys, we know about drugs, and we know about terrorism.”

Her mother smiled tiredly. “Well, okay, I guess. As long as you’re saying no.”

“Two out of three,” Beth mumbled.

Jessica shot her a look, but the pot had burst into a boil, and the rasp of spaghetti sliding from its box promised that Beth would be busy for another few minutes. She turned back to her mother.

“So how could anyone be against it?”

“No one was. And then suddenly there are all these ads in the Register. We think the whole movement’s an invention of this Broken Arrow oil family who want to drill out there. They must be crazy, though.” She kicked her leather-work satchel on the floor next to her. “Our geologist says there’s nothing out in the salt flats worth drilling, mining, or even looking at.”

Jessica’s eyes drifted toward the satchel. “Geological reports? Cool.”

“Pardon me?”

“I mean, um, they might be interesting to look at,” she said. Maybe not for any normal person, but Dess would die for a glimpse of something both maplike and numberish that had to do with the runway. She and Jonathan could fly over there tonight, and Dess would have half an hour or so to devour them. “It’s just that everyone’s talking about it at school. Maybe I could do a report or something.”

Her mother laughed and gave the satchel another contemptuous kick. “Knock yourself out. But the Grayfoots aren’t admitting that this is about oil. They’ve got city hall worked up about sonic booms and experimental crashes, like we’re building the runway to test transorbitals or something.”

“Sure, I think I heard that too. Hey… transorbitals?” Jessica said softly, her fingers lifting from the table one by one.

Her mother nodded. “Yeah, I told you about those. Airplanes that go into low orbit? They can fly from New York to Tokyo in just—”

“Thirteen!”

“What?”

Jessica’s triumphant smile faded, and she saw that Beth had turned around to stare as well. “Uh, it’s just that ‘transorbitals’ has… um, thirteen letters.”

“What?” they both asked.

“What is that fantastic smell?” Donald Day boomed from the kitchen door, dropping his golf bag to the floor with a clatter.

“I’ll set the table” Jessica said quickly. “Let me get this out of your way.”

She pulled the heavy satchel from the floor and hauled it into the living room, setting it beside the exiled non-spaghetti-related groceries. She noted its exact location for later reconnaissance and hoped that her mother would suspend all homework in celebration of the first Oklahoma edition of Beth Spaghetti Night.

“Ada,” Dess said.

She saw the knowledge go. One moment the crumpled house held fascination and promise, the sight of it filling her with intrigue and the thrill of secrecy. A few seconds later it was just another house, its curtained windows signifying nothing, like the scores of other run-down places she’d ridden by on the way here without a second glance.

Except that standing there, not remembering anything, Dess did give it a second glance. The exact geometry of its broken eaves and sagging porch triggered something inside her, a sudden, inexplicable need to speak a name aloud.

“Lovelace,” she whispered.

The door in her mind reopened, and Dess wavered on her feet. The secret history of Bixby flooded back into her mind—the kidnapped seer and hidden survivors, the crepuscular convolution and the battle lost to air-conditioning—along with memories of maps and charts she’d studied here, everything she’d learned from the veiled archive. And rising from this flood of knowledge was the pleasure of remembering that all of it had been revealed to her and her alone.

Dess smiled. Opening and closing the door in her mind was cool. Maybe one more time…

“Quit fooling around out there! You’re giving me a headache.”

Dess jumped at the booming call from the house. What was it about grumpiness and mindcasters?

She walked up the leaf-strewn path and through the screen door without knocking. Getting yelled at counted as being invited in.

“Be careful not to bump your head,” Madeleine said, pulling on a rope that hung from the ceiling. The attic stairway descended, like the gangplank of a flying saucer belonging to aliens who were really into rusty springs. When the bottom step touched the floor, the old woman climbed up with quick, confident steps.

Dess looked dubiously at the loaded tea tray she held.

“Well, come on. Don’t let it get cold! If I can make it up here, surely a young person like you can.”

Dess scowled at the unfair comparison. She hadn’t seen Madeleine carrying anything heavier than a scrolled-up piece of paper. But she placed one foot on the wobbly stair, bringing a tiny complaint from the ancient springs. Another step up and she found her balance, the objects on the tray beginning to chatter like windup teeth.

“Come on, girl! Don’t dawdle.”

Why anyone would want to build a house with an attic here in Oklahoma, Dess didn’t know. It would be a killer heat trap in summer and relentlessly fill up with dust year round. She kept climbing step by step, reaching the top with only one moment of blind terror when her center of gravity shifted, the tray pushing her backward like a heavy hand before relenting and allowing her to proceed.

Once Dess had cleared the hatch, Madeleine lifted the burden from her arms and said, “Been a very long time since I’ve had my tea up here.”

“Gee, I wonder why,” Dess muttered.

But as she took in the attic, her annoyance turned to surprise. Dess had expected a junkyard, like the rest of the house, multiplied by its atticness. But it was almost empty up here, no furniture, nothing except a stack of cushions in one corner. A few shafts of afternoon sun lit the dusty air, shining through chinks in the small, painted-over windows. The beams of the roof met overhead, leaving barely enough space to stand.

With a crouching walk, Madeleine carried the tea tray to the corner with the cushions and began to arrange the dishes, calling out, “This may explain things.” She tossed the rolled-up piece of paper to Dess.

Unscrolling it, Dess immediately recognized the angles of the house, a three-quarter plan drawn back before the place had started to sag. It was like Madeleine’s map of Bixby, marked with the eddies and swirls of midnight, but scaled to show incredible detail. Dess frowned and pulled out Geostationary, checking the digits with the highest precision, effortlessly converting the plan’s quaint feet and inches to the device’s meters and centimeters.

She looked around the attic again, seeing its dimensions clearly now, and her eyes fell on the corner occupied by the tea tray. Of course, just there, where Madeleine had placed her own cushion…

“This is where you mindcast from!” Dess cried.

“I knew your grasp of the obvious wouldn’t fail you.”

Dess ignored the jibe and stared at the diagram, sinking into its geometries. No wonder they had built an attic onto the house! This was the spot from which the crepuscular contortion opened onto the rest of midnight, a one-way mirror behind which Madeleine was hidden but from which she could observe without revealing herself and maybe even…

“Hey, did you help out my friends night before last? Put something in their heads?”

Madeleine paused, a cup half poured before her, and shot a cold glance across the attic. “It couldn’t be avoided.”

Dess raised her eyebrows. “Uh, I think they appreciated it, actually. Or would have if they’d known what the hell was going on. Rex and Melissa were dead meat until Jess showed up.”

“Agreed. Come here and sit down.” Madeleine poured out more tea. “Milk, no sugar, correct?”

“Sure,” Dess said, making her crouching way to her cushion, the scent of tea turning her stomach. Some mind reader. Madeleine didn’t even know she hated tea, even up here in mindcaster heaven, the mother of all psychic duck blinds. Although maybe because Dess was up here herself, her mind was shielded too. Which was a reassuring thought.

“To reach out that far, during midnight…” Madeleine shook her head. “They’ll have tasted me.”

“Melissa sure did. Jonathan and Jessica too.”

“Not them, you simpleton. The old ones in the desert.”

“Jeez, sorry.” Grumpier and grumpier.

“They’ll be looking for me now.” Madeleine looked up and caught her eye, deadly serious.

Dess nodded. No wonder she was in such a crappy mood. Rex and Melissa’s little foul-up at Constanza’s had cost Madeleine her psychic cover. Forty-nine years of secrecy blown because they hadn’t bothered to leave a clear phone message.

“Yeah, those two don’t have their heads screwed on very tight these days,” Dess said. “They’ve been doing the psychic nasty with each other, which has got them acting all… weird.”

Madeleine shot her a glance. “I know about that too, of course. And thinking there’s something wrong with a mind-caster touching another midnighter is a bunch of old chicken-fried baloney. It’s helping Melissa gain control.” She shook her head. “If only I could have guided them, they might have begun long ago.”

Dess frowned, remembering that Madeleine had touched her as well, reaching out casually as she’d left here Tuesday night. A few seconds contact between fingers and cheek was all it had taken, and the mental garage-door opener that hid her new knowledge from Melissa had been installed.

Dess watched the milk swirling into her tea—a collision of two galaxies, one light, one dark. “Well, you weren’t guiding anyone; you were hiding.”

She looked up, expecting a tongue-lashing.

“Indeed,” was all Madeleine had to say.

Dess took a drink of tea: a burst of acid combined with an unsettling hint of flowers. She pursed her lips. Why did she always wind up drinking the stuff? Darn peer pressure.

Madeleine stirred her tea, the tinkle of metal and porcelain filling the attic. “They’ll be much more fearful of you now, if they suspect you’re no longer orphans. They may move against you sooner than I had expected.”

“Move against us,” Dess repeated dryly. Rex kept saying that too, like this was a chess game.

“Yes, that’s why I called you here today.”

“Called me…?” Dess snorted. “I had the wacky notion that coming here was my idea.” Last night Jessica and Jonathan had shown up during the secret hour with a stack of Aerospace Oklahoma geology reports, including a detailed map of the planned runway. During study period this morning Dess had suddenly realized she should cross-reference Jessica’s information with the archive here.

But maybe Madeleine had put that inspiration in her mind, just like she’d shown Jonathan the route to Constanza’s.

Dess frowned. If this was a chess game, she had just been demoted to pawn. Which sucked. The whole reason she’d worked so hard on coordinates and midnight was to have her own thing, a piece of midnight separate from the other four, just as they had their private couple realities.

She took a long drink of tea, its acid taste suiting her mood.

“Are all you mindcasters so manipulative?”

Madeleine raised an eyebrow. “Manipulative?”

“Uh, yeah. Maybe the darklings don’t even care about you anymore. Maybe you just hang out up here because you enjoy pulling people’s strings. And occasionally—reluctantly—reaching out to help us.”

“Help you? I don’t merely help you, young lady. I made you.”

Dess blinked. “Come again?”

Madeleine placed her teacup and saucer firmly onto the tray, with a look so intimidating that Dess shifted on her cushion. Could a mindcaster really do anything to you with her touch? she wondered. Madeleine had installed a mental block in her brain with a brush of her fingers—could she just reach across the tray and hit the erase switch, leaving her a dribbling idiot? Dess’s fingers flexed, reaching for the comforting weight of Geostationary in her jacket pocket.

“How many seconds in a day, Dess?” Madeleine said softly.

“Eighty-six thousand, four hundred,” she replied automatically. “Duh.”

“And how many new students at Bixby High in the last three years?”

Dess shrugged. “I don’t know… ten?”

“And how many of those happen to have been midnighters?”

A shock went through Dess. Two… Jessica and Jonathan.

“Oh my God.” Her head began to spin, calculating the odds. It all depended on how close you had to be born to straight-up midnight to see the secret hour. But even if a person born within a full minute on either side became a midnighter, there’d still be only one in every 720 people, not two out of ten. And if you had to be born within a second or so, the odds went soaring to about forty thousand to one, which made the chances of two midnighters showing up in a row around 1.6 billion to one, in which case two out of ten was… pretty darned unlikely.

Dess realized with growing horror that she’d done the thing she hated most, ground her teeth over every day, and constantly railed against whenever anyone would listen…

She hadn’t done the math.

“So much for my famous grasp of the obvious,” Dess muttered.

She thought of Jessica’s mother and her lucky new job at Aerospace Oklahoma, Jonathan’s father and his trouble with the police that had forced him to move from Pittsburgh… like anyone would move to Bixby to get away from cops.

She glared across the tea tray. “You’ve been jerking people around.”

Madeleine smiled.

“And what about us three?” Dess continued. “All born in Bixby within a year of each other? That must be a stochastic fluke right up there with the dinosaurs getting beamed by a meteor!”

“I have to be very quiet at midnight,” Madeleine said softly. “But years ago I could cast freely during the rest of the day. When a woman is in labor, her mind is very open to suggestion. If she pushes at just the right moment…”

Dess felt sick to her stomach. Pawn didn’t even cover it. She took every mean thing she’d ever thought about Melissa back because right here, right now, she was sitting and having tea with the biggest queen bitch of all time.

“It only works one time in a hundred,” Madeleine said. “After my successes, I was exhausted.”

“But Jonathan and Jessica moved here from hundreds of miles away… Are you saying you can mess with people all the way in Chicago?”

“From within this contortion I can feel potential midnighters all over the continent, so I knew Jessica was special. And at my age I no longer need to touch daylighters to change their minds. But I did the real work here in Bixby, making sure that certain executives at Aerospace Oklahoma formed a good opinion of Jessica’s mother.”

Dess narrowed her eyes. “Didn’t her father lose his job about the same time?”

“He was about to.” Madeleine snorted. “It doesn’t take a mindcaster to make a company called sockmonkeys dot com go out of business.”

Dess’s skin was still crawling; the feeling of being manipulated… created by someone made her want to flee right down the rickety stairs and out the door. But she had to ask one more question: “Why?”

“To save Rex and the lore.”

“What do you mean, save Rex?”

“He’s older than you and Melissa, and he was born naturally at midnight, a seer. He was my chance to create a new generation. Alone, Rex would have drifted off into insanity and irrelevancy. He needed the rest of you to lead and to protect him from the darkness.”

Dess remembered Rex’s tales of seeing marks that no one else could see, thinking he was crazy and that the frozen blue world was a dream. She recalled her own awful isolation before Melissa had finally found her. A whole lifetime of being a lone midnighter would have been terrible.

Of course, Madeleine would know all about facing the secret hour alone…

“So you yanked around the rest of us just for Rex?”

“Mindcasters have always recruited midnighters from far away, Dess,” she said. “It has been done this way for thousands of years. The ancient tribes would send war parties to kidnap young children with the gift. And in the last century there would be telegrams with offers of employment. My own mother was brought here as a schoolteacher when I was an infant. This is a dust bowl, Dess. It has never been a populous place.”

“Oh.” She sipped, her mind still reeling. “I just hadn’t… done the math.”

There was a long silence, in which Dess concentrated on not feeling like a puppet. Bixby was so small—of course they’d have to bring in midnighters from outside. Otherwise you’d never have more than one every few decades, feebly poking around the secret hour alone, unsure if any of it was real or not.

Letting her mind drift, Dess found herself disturbed by the faint but growing possibility that she was starting to like hot tea. She wondered if Madeleine was reaching out with her mind right now, changing the neurons in Dess’s head one by one until her taste buds fit the right configuration.