Touching Darkness (8 page)

Dess stole glances at her new toy as they drove. The shifting numbers soothed her nerves, reminding her that every problem had a solution, every missing person a location, and every spot on earth a set of delicious coordinates.

Her mind was still buzzing from the weekend. Whatever the others had managed to get mixed up in, Dess had enjoyed herself. She’d spent all Sunday biking around town, watching Geostationary effortlessly reeling off coordinates, turning Bixby into
numbers.
What could be better?

She’d lived here all her life, but for the first time, Dess felt that she really
knew
the town, could see its patterns, could map its streets and buildings in her mind. The world she’d grown up in was finally inventoried and enumerated; Dess had done the math at last.

Meanwhile the rest of them had spent the weekend being stalked, trying to stalk the stalkers, and getting themselves cornered by darklings. That was what always seemed to happen when she let them out of her sight.

“What’s that thing?” Jonathan said, glancing down at the GPS receiver in her hands.

She jerked it out of his sight. “Nothing.”

He just chuckled, biting into his third sandwich. “Okay.”

They turned onto Rex’s street, which ran almost due east, and Dess snuck a peek at the north-south numbers stabilizing, the east-west value dropping slowly. After this visit she’d have exact coordinates for both her own house and Rex’s. Maybe there was some pattern in the location of midnighters’ homes.

The car halted, and Dess forced herself to shove the receiver into her coat pocket. She would let Rex in on her discoveries soon enough, but she wanted the math firmly in her head before he cluttered it with his messy lore. Math was pure, but history was always full of weird little gaps and contradictions.

The sagging porch was empty, the creepy old dad nowhere in sight. Maybe Rex was keeping him inside these days.

Halfway across the threadbare lawn, a croaking voice erupted from the house. “Don’t you damn kids know it’s a school day?”

She flinched, then spotted Rex’s face through the front screen door. Not a bad imitation of his father, she had to admit. It was good enough to have sent chills down her spine.

He came through the door, laughing at the scare he’d given them. Melissa followed, and Dess peeled her hand off the GPS receiver in her pocket, resolving not to think about it. Amid the clamor of Bixby High, Melissa’s mind reading was almost as useless as a cell phone at the bottom of the Grand Canyon. But here in thinly populated suburbia, Dess would have to watch her thoughts.

“So what brings you two to my humble abode?”

Dess frowned. Rex seemed weirdly upbeat, especially if they’d had a messy rumble last night. And Melissa’s hair was wet, as if she’d just showered. She wasn’t in headphones and was even managing to smile behind her sunglasses. If it were any other two people… Dess shivered and reminded herself that Melissa might be listening. Plus there was no way—as in literally No Possible Way anything like that had happened.

Jonathan wasn’t saying much, of course, so she answered, “We heard you had some trouble last night.”

Rex chuckled and nodded. “It’s already in the rumor mill? Man, I love this town.”

Dess allowed herself to smile back at him. They really were okay. The worry she’d been fighting not to feel, that two of her friends might at last have run out of luck in the secret hour, finally evaporated into relief.

“What the hell were you doing out there, anyway? Dumbasses. Weren’t you supposed to be in town?”

“Yeah,” Jonathan added bravely. “We looked for you all hour.”

Rex smiled and waved them over to a quartet of rusting lawn chairs. They sat there together, like a bunch of old farts on a porch.

“I tasted something on the way,” Melissa said, “and we wound up chasing it.”

“Sounds like it wound up chasing you,” Dess observed.

Melissa nodded, drawing her jacket around her, though it wasn’t that cold out here in the sun. “Yeah, I guess it did.”

“I hope you had some decent metal with you,” Dess said.

Rex shrugged. “Well, they kind of caught us by surprise. But we improvised. And Categorically Unjustifiable Appropriation scared off the last of the bad guys.”

Dess smiled, delighted to hear it. She’d always thought the old hubcap was one of her best. It had fallen off a 1989 (which was 153 x 13) Mercedes-Benz (which was a tridecalogism, if you counted the hyphen) on 1264 Farm Road (1+2 + 6 + 4 = duh, 13). Obviously destined to kick ass.

“Hang on, Las Colonias aren’t on the way to Jessica’s,” Jonathan said, like he’d just realized that Rex and Melissa weren’t telling them everything. Dess could see that much from their faces. The two were grinning like shoplifters who’d made it out the door and around the corner, pockets bulging.

“No. But I smelled this guy from miles away,” Melissa said. “Turned out to be your stalker, Jonathan.”

“Not only that,” Rex added, “but he apparently works for the darklings.”

Dess’s relief beginning to unravel. “He works for them? How?”

Rex took a deep breath, then launched into the whole story—the thoughts about Jessica that Melissa had overheard, Darkling Manor and the dominoes, the stalker and his girlfriend, the retreat across the street (Rex showing off the dinky cut that had produced the famous blood), then the appearance of the gruesome half-thing, and finally the rumble. Melissa added her own commentary and contradictions for the first half, then mostly just sat and shivered, eyeballs twitching beneath closed lids.

As Dess listened, fascinated and faintly sickened, she began to realize why the two of them seemed so giggly today. They were actually still scared, piss-in-your-pants scared, right down to their bones. What they’d seen out in Las Colonias must have kept them up all night—basically too terrified to go to sleep—and finally, after a few fitful hours of unconsciousness, they were as she saw them now: dog tired and still pretty much hysterical.

No wonder they hadn’t showed up at school. Rex was in no shape for the real world, and Melissa… At Bixby High her brain would have melted like the wicked witch in a car wash.

When the story was over, Dess sat back and let her mind wander, stroking Geostationary. Horrifying as it all was, this little tale promised new data for her coordinates project. Maybe these darkling groupies, whoever they were, already knew the shape of the secret hour. They’d been hiding themselves somewhere for the last fifty years…

“We’ve got to tell Jessica,” Jonathan said, car keys already in his hand. “Those two could have orders to go after her today.”

“Relax. It’s not very likely.” Rex had his smug smile on. After a dramatic pause he reached into his pocket, pulled out something, and opened his hand. Resting on his palm was a small rectangle of yellow ivory—it looked like an old domino, just as he’d said, except instead of the dots…

“Huh,” said Dess. It was Jessica’s tag, the lore symbol for flame-bringer.

“I took the liberty of stealing this and a few others. Like a set of dominoes for spelling out human names, which must have been used to tell the groupies who Jessica was.” Rex’s smile got even smugger. “There are hundreds of symbols. It should take the groupies a while to notice that a few are missing. In the meantime the darklings are going to be mighty frustrated if they try to communicate anything about Jessica.”

Melissa rubbed one finger across the domino (perilously close to touching Rex’s bare skin, Dess noticed). “Tastes like darklings and feels old. Maybe fifty years. There’s probably only one set of these, passed down through the generations.”

“Wait a second. If the halfling’s a human, like you said, why doesn’t she just write down what the darklings want to say?” Dess said, the image of the creature that passed through her mind giving her a shudder.

Rex shook his head. “Even through her, the darklings couldn’t think in anything as new as English. The lore symbols are ten thousand years old, older than any language spoken today,” His voice grew soft. “That’s why they had to use a seer.”

Jonathan spoke up, still clutching the rusty arms of his chair. “But who are these guys? Where did they come from?”

Rex shrugged. “That’s what we have to find out. But I think we can assume they’re the same people who did away with our predecessors. I didn’t find any of our symbols besides Jessica’s, so the rest of us should be careful too.”

“But where have they been hiding?” Dess asked. She turned to Melissa. “Why haven’t you tasted this half-thingie before?”

Melissa answered slowly. “There’s something weird about that house. I can’t mindcast in there for crap. The only times I could hear the guy were after he’d left and just before he got back. It’s some kind of psychic dead zone. It’s like the walls eat thought.”

“Location, location, location,” Rex murmured.

At those magic words another shudder passed through Dess, one of excitement. “Take me there.”

Together all three of them said, “What?”

“Take me there, right now.” She pulled the GPS receiver from her pocket, waved it in front of them. “I knew there had to be places like that in Bixby—hiding places. I’ve been having these dreams…”

She came to a halt. They were all staring at her as if her mouth had started to foam.

Dess groaned. “Listen, this little gadget turns places into numbers, coordinates. I’ve been trying to crack the patterns—the way the secret hour is shaped. It’s like topology…” Okay, blank faces on that one. “But better. Oh, screw it. Just take me there and I can figure out how it all works.” She hissed through her teeth at their empty expressions. I just need a paradigm!”

Rex was the first to utter a sound, a low, soft sigh. “Well, you’ve been busy.”

She rolled her eyes. Time for a seer-knows-best lecture.

“But you may not have to go there, Dess.”

I managed to cast around a little bit in the woman’s mind before the”—Melissa’s lower lip trembled—“thing got too close.”

“She’s shared some of what she saw with me,” Rex said. “We may have the numbers you need.”

“Eh?” Dess felt her throat constrict at the expressions on Rex and Melissa’s faces. Shared? Something was weirder about the two than just a little post-rumble hysteria.

No possible way, Dess reminded herself.

“We’ll try to write some of it down for you.” Rex shrugged. “It looks like plans for something being built, something that has to do with the halfling. But it’s mostly a bunch of numbers, so it’s all Greek to me.”

“Arabic,” Dess said absently. Melissa was giving her this look.

“What?” Rex asked.

“Numbers are Arabic, moron.” She tore her gaze away from Melissa. “All the old math is. Al Gebra—as in algebra—was this Arab guy a thousand years ago.” Trying not to think any more about what had passed between the two of them, Dess imagined having a whole branch of mathematics named after her. Dessology? Desstochastics?

“Dessometrics?” Melissa said aloud, a smile playing on her lips.

Dess shivered. Busted.

She waved Geostationary. “I don’t care what you got from her.” Or how you shared it. “This will give me everything I need. Just take me there.”

Rex and Melissa looked at each other, and Dess allowed herself to feel a little burst of triumph as their expressions revealed absolute horror. They really were still terrified, all the way down to the marrow.

Rex shook his head. “Someone might have noticed the Ford. It kind of sticks out in that neighborhood. And we might have left fingerprints…”

Dess snickered at the feeble excuses and gave Jonathan’s thigh a slap. “Come on, Flyboy. We’re going to Darkling Manor.”

He stood, ready to leave, and gave her and Melissa a clueless look. “What’s Dessometrics?”

She smiled. “I’ll tell you on the way.”

“The art of reading Melissa’s mind,” Dess said out of the blue.

“Huh?” Jonathan was passing an eighteen-wheeler, trying to coax his father’s car into doing more than sixty-five on level ground. He was also watching for the turnoff, fairly certain that the directions suffered from mindcaster vagueness. Not that he could blame her, but Melissa had a pretty thin grasp on reality at times.

“Dessometrics. You asked me what it was.”

Jonathan looked at her biting her thumbnail as she stared out the front windshield. She and Melissa had gotten into something back there—a staring contest, it had looked like. “Yeah, right. And you can do that? Read her mind?”

“Well, it helps if Rex is around. He’s the one who gave it away.”

The semi finally gave up drag racing him and slipped behind with an amicable wave from the driver. Jonathan relaxed. “Gave what away?”

Dess squirmed in the seat next to him. “You didn’t notice a certain… smarminess between those two?”

“Hmm.” He decided against passing the next truck up ahead. At this hour the north-south interstate was crowded with Mexican goods coming up through Texas. Even the smallest eighteen-wheeler could crush his father’s car like a cockroach.

Despite how automobile ads tried to make it look, Jonathan had learned this year that driving was not like flying. In fact, driving pretty much sucked compared to flying. Flatland at sixty miles an hour was still Flatland.

And his sore throat from the other night hadn’t gone away entirely. He swallowed gingerly before he spoke. “Actually, those two pretty much set off my smarmy meter twenty-four, seven. I tend not to notice the minor fluctuations.”

Dess chuckled beside him, the low rumble of it bringing a smile to his face. Jonathan hadn’t hung out much with Dess lately, he realized. At least not since Jessica had arrived in town.

“Weren’t they kind of… chummy?” she continued. And chipper.”

He glanced at Dess. Her expectant expression annoyed him. Who was supposed to be the mind reader here? He shrugged. “I think they were just freaked out by what they saw last night. Hell, I’d be.”

The thought that he was driving straight back to where it had all happened wasn’t thrilling Jonathan either. He wondered why he was here instead of getting back to school to tell Jessica what had happened and make sure she was okay.

Maybe because of all of them, he most trusted Dess to help Jessica when she really needed it. Ten days ago he’d seen who had led the other two across darkling-infested desert when he and Jessica had been trapped in the snake pit.

“Sure. The trauma thing was part of it.” Dess was nodding to herself. “But there was more.”

“Like what? What more could there be?”

“So you know what I mean.”

A trucker blasted his horn just behind them, looking to keep up the speed his rig had gathered down the slope of an overpass. Jonathan wrenched the car out of his way, earning a respectful middle finger as the truck roared by. This conversation had become dangerously distracting.

“You’re nuts,” Jonathan said. “No way.”

“True. No possible way. It’s more complicated than that.”

He snorted. “I can’t imagine anything more complicated than that.”

She snickered, then said, “You know they did… once.”

Jonathan looked at her with alarm. “Did what?”

“Not that.” She laughed. “But back when they were kids, Rex touched Melissa by accident.”

“Oh.” Jonathan’s left hand trembled for a moment, a sense memory moving through his body in a wave of dizziness. He gripped the wheel hard, concentrating on the dotted white lines pulsing in front of the car, and managed to keep the vehicle in a straight line until the spell passed.

“Rex told me all about it,” Dess was saying. “Said it was a total head bang, like she was crowding into his mind and he was getting into hers.”

Jonathan nodded. “Yeah. That’s what it’s like.”

“What? How would you know?”

He paused. He wondered why he’d never told anyone about this, not even Jessica. (Especially not Jessica, come to think of it.) Rex must have realized what was going on as it happened, but neither he nor Jonathan had ever brought it up. And of course, Melissa hadn’t said a thing after that one thank-you in the desert.

“Well, it was the weekend before last, when we found out Jessica was the flame-bringer. When you guys were trying to get to the snake pit and you did your amazon thing.”

“That was so cool. Resplendently Scintillating Illustrations kicked that darkling’s ass.”

“Yeah, well. But you may recall that you left Rex and Melissa surrounded by a zillion spiders. And I had to fly back out and save them.”

Dess was silent for a moment, then she let out a long breath. “That’s right! You flew Melissa back to the snake pit. So you must have…”

“Touched her.” Jonathan felt a faint shadow of the dizziness come over him again—the nauseating rush of thoughts and emotions, the despair that permeated Melissa, her revulsion at those few seconds of human contact. Since that night he hadn’t seen her the same way. He could detect something behind her scowl other than her hatred for humanity—something fragile.

Jonathan shuddered. Silent treatment or not, he somehow felt closer to her now. It had been much easier when she’d just been a royal bitch.

“Damn,” Dess said softly. “Rex must hate you for that.”

“What? For saving both their lives?” He shook his head, suddenly hoping Dess wouldn’t answer. He wished this whole conversation hadn’t started. Fortunately the turnoff was just ahead. “Forget I mentioned it.”

But Dess didn’t shut up. “Rex says in the old days, mindcasters could control their ability. They could tolerate crowds, even transmit information through a handshake. They were the ones who passed on the news, who bound everyone together.”

“Really?” Jonathan knew there’d been mindcasters back in Bixby’s history, but he’d never imagined sane ones. “So why’s Melissa such a basket case?”

“Rex doesn’t know. Maybe she’s just a freak. But he’s always wanted to find out if she can learn to tolerate it. Maybe last night was some kind of bonding experience or something. And now they’re trying to hook up.”

Jonathan looked at his left hand; it had always seemed as if Melissa’s searing touch should have left a mark. But his palm bore nothing but a thin layer of sweat.

He swallowed again, his throat still sore.

They exited the main highway, heading toward Las Colonias. Melissa’s directions had turned out to make sense after all. The badlands were ahead of them now, a single tear of sun-leeched white across the horizon.

Jonathan remembered the two of them on the porch, Rex all smiley, Melissa as relaxed as he’d ever seen her in normal time. But then he felt another touching-Melissa flashback trembling at the edge of his mind and shook his head.

“I just hope they know what they’re doing.”

Dess laughed. “Haven’t you figured it out, Flyboy? None of us knows what we’re doing.”

The arched entrance to Las Colonias was guarded by a private security car. Two rent-a-cops slouched against its hood, drinking coffee and turning redder in the sun. One held up his hand, his eyes sweeping across the old car with obvious contempt. Jonathan rolled down his window, the presence of an authority figure bleeding into his stomach like a drink of acid.

“What’s your business here?”

“Just taking a drive, Officer.” Rent-a-cops loved it when you called them Officer.

“Here to see the demon house, huh? Well, I’m afraid it’s residents only today. So why don’t you just turn your vehicle around and head back where you come from.”

Jonathan thought of a few things to say but realized that if he mouthed off, one of the two might figure out it was a school day. So he tipped an imaginary cowboy hat and started to turn the car around.

“Smooth, Jonathan,” Dess started in. “ ‘Just taking a drive, Officer.’ ”

“What would you have said? ‘Just here to investigate the paranormal’?”

Dess snickered and put on her good-old-boy drawl. “How about, ‘Just taking my new girlfriend to meet my daddy? We’re fixin’ to get us married.’ ”

He laughed. “Next time you do the talking.”

“So now what?”

“Now we look for the back door.” Jonathan turned down the dusty service road that skirted the community, his eyes following the ten-foot-high metal fence surrounding it. Even in normal time his acrobat’s brain still worked. He could see the angles—where a foot would go to get a boost up, then a handhold, another within reach of that one…

Finally he spotted a place. A termite mound rose up close to the fence, cutting a couple of feet from its height. Jonathan slowed the car.

“We can’t climb that,” Dess said.

“I can. Just show me how that thing works.”

Dess’s eyes widened, and she pulled away.

He sighed. “Do you want your numbers or not?”

Her face twitched for a moment, but finally she scowled and said, “Okay. But if you lose it, break it, or get arrested and they take it, you’re dead.”

Jonathan just rolled his eyes and listened as she explained how to capture coordinates. As he walked away from the car, he whispered to himself, “You’re welcome.”

On the other side Jonathan dropped to the ground at the edge of an unfinished lot, then paused to shake the termites from his sneakers and the pain from his still-sprained ankle. Construction materials were strewn across the dry, bare soil. There was no frame yet, just a wide driveway leading to a gaping foundation. He moved quickly through the site, figuring he’d be less conspicuous walking down the street than creeping through an empty lot.

At this time on a weekday few cars passed him, and no one seemed to pay him any mind. Half the houses looked unoccupied. He could smell the fresh paint jobs and see the seams in the newly rolled-down lawns.

Spotting Darkling Manor was easy. It was across the street from the demon house, which had a broken window up on the second floor. The front door was sealed with yellow police tape. Jonathan wondered what the family was doing today. Sitting around watching TV and trying not to wonder what had happened last night? Or had they gone to a motel for a while?

Of course, the truly haunted house was on the other side of the street. Darkling Manor looked like every other home in the development. Everything about it—the garage, windows, lawn—was unnecessarily huge. The driveway was empty, and Rex and Melissa said they hadn’t seen a stick of furniture, so it seemed unlikely anyone was home. He walked around it, trying to look interested rather than criminal.

In the back he found the balcony with the sliding glass doors that Rex had described. Standing beneath it, as close as he could get to the house, Jonathan held up the GPS receiver and pressed capture. The shifting numbers froze.

According to Dess, that was it.

Jonathan paused. In daylight the house didn’t give him the chills he’d expected. It was so new, unlike any other darkling place he’d ever seen. He wondered if there were some clue inside, something that would tell him who owned it and who was behind the new threat to Jessica.

Around front again, he spotted the mailbox. Its little red flag was standing up. He crossed the lawn, glancing up and down the still empty street.

His gait slowed when he saw her. Peering at him out of the window of the demon house was a woman. She looked like someone who’d had a sleepless night, her face dark with suspicion.

Jonathan smiled and waved. She didn’t wave back. He opened the mailbox and reached in to find a single letter. Pulling it out, he waved again and turned back toward the house.

“Crap,” he whispered. The front door was probably locked, and the hairs on the back of Jonathan’s neck told him that he was still being watched. He headed around the back of the house the way he’d come, taking one last glance over his shoulder.

The woman’s face was still in the window, but she wasn’t looking at him anymore. She was watching the private security car that was coming up the winding street.

Jonathan crammed the envelope into his pocket and ran, dashing across the backyard, rolling across a low fence and stumbling into another backyard. He passed yet another giant, empty house and crossed the next street over.

He kept going until he was breathless, moving across the streets instead of down them. The overweight rent-a-cops would never catch him on foot, even with his ankle screaming with every step. The screech of tires came from his right as they tried to parallel him in their car.

At the edge of the development, where Jonathan had come in, the houses were still under construction and the ground grew rough. A few workers silently watched him pass, not taking much interest. He dodged piles of dirt and broken bricks, wishing for a ten-second burst of midnight gravity to get him out of here. One hard jump in that direction would carry him all the way back to Dess.

Finally he reached the fence. He could see his father’s car through the bars. But there wasn’t any termite mound on this side, no footholds, no way to climb it.

He spun around. The security car crawled into sight a hundred yards away, leaving the road and growling onto the dirt strip of unsodded backyards, its tires spitting gravel and spinning up a cloud of dust.

Jonathan looked around frantically for something to get a boost from—a pile of bricks, a tree stump, anything. But the fence stretched along flat red soil as far as he could see.

Then his eyes fell on an old tire lying in the sun, its treads choked with dirt, its rubber cracked. He ran to it, lifted it upright, and sent it rolling ahead of him with a solid kick. Mosquito-breeding water sloshed from its innards as it wobbled along. Bracing it sideways against the fence, Jonathan planted a foot on it and pushed himself up.

The tire sagged as he jumped, but his hands managed to grasp the top spikes of the fence. The spitting tires of the car sounded as if they were right under him. Jonathan pulled himself up and over and dropped to the other side, every ounce of his normal-gravity weight landing on his bad ankle.

“Finally,” Dess said as he limped up. “I was getting bored.”