The Secret Hour m-1

by Scott Westerfeld

  Jessica bolted into her room and shut the door tightly behind her, collapsing in a sobbing heap onto the floor. The first dream had been so beautiful, but this nightmare was completely awful. She just wanted to wake up.

  Fighting back her terror, she tried to think through what the dream must mean. Jessica had been so wrapped up in her own problems, she hadn’t seen the obvious. Beth needed her. She had to stop acting as if her sister’s anger were just an inconvenience.

  She hugged her knees to her chest, her back to the door, promising she’d be nicer to Beth tomorrow.

  Jessica waited for the dream to end.

  Hopefully this time there would be nothing left of it in the real world. No frozen Beth, no soggy sweatshirts. Just morning sun and the weekend.

  Slowly, gradually, Jessica’s tears ran out, and the blue dream wrapped itself around her. Nothing changed or moved.

  The still, cold light shone from everywhere and nowhere; the silence lay total and absolute. Not even the whispering creaks and groans of a house at night could be heard.

  So when the scratching came, Jessica lifted her head at once.

  There was a shape in the window, a small dark form silhouetted against the even glow from the street. It moved smoothly and sinuously, taking catlike steps back and forth across the window frame, then paused to scratch against the glass.

  “Kitty?” Jessica said, her voice rough from crying.

  The animal’s eyes caught the light for a moment, flashing deep purple.

  Jessica stood shakily, her legs all pins and needles. She moved slowly, trying not to scare the cat away. At least something else was alive here in this hideous nightmare. At least she was no longer alone with the lifeless shape in Beth’s room. She crossed to the window and peered out.

  It was sleek and thin, glossy and black. Muscles rippled under its midnight fur; the animal seemed as strong as a wild cat of some kind, almost like a miniature black cheetah. She wondered for a moment if it was even a pet cat at all. Her dad had said that there were bobcats and other small wild felines in the countryside around Bixby. But the beast looked very tame as it paced impatiently on the window ledge, gazing up at her with pleading indigo eyes.

  “Okay, okay,” she said.

  She pulled open the window, giving up on what this part of the dream meant. The cat bumped heavily against her as it leapt into the room, its corded muscles solid against her thigh.

  “You’re a real bruiser,” she muttered, wondering what breed it was. She’d never seen any cat this strong.

  It jumped up onto her bed, sniffing her pillow, ran in a small circle on the rumpled covers, then jumped into one of her boxes. She heard it rummaging through the stuff in the box.

  “Hey, you.”

  The cat sprang from the box and peered up at her, suddenly cautious. It backed away slowly, muscles tense and quivering as if it were ready to spring away.

  “It’s okay, kitty.” Jessica began to wonder if it wasn’t a wild cat after all. It wasn’t acting like any domestic cat she’d ever met.

  She knelt and offered one hand. The cat came closer and sniffed.

  “It’s all right.” Jessica reached out one finger and scratched lightly at the top of its head.

  “Rrrrrrrr.” The low, terrible noise welled up from the creature, as deep as a tiger’s growl, and it backed away with its belly pressed to the floor.

  “Hey, relax,” Jessica said, pulling her hand back to a safe distance.

  The black cat’s eyes were filled with terror. It turned and ran to the bedroom door, scratching plaintively. Jessica stood and took a few careful steps toward it, reaching out to open the door.

  The cat bounded down the hall and disappeared around the corner. She heard it complaining at the front door. It didn’t howl like a normal cat. The high-pitched cries sounded more like those of a wounded bird.

  Jessica looked back at her open window in puzzlement. “Why didn’t you just…?” she started, then shook her head. Wild or not, this cat was nutty.

  Careful not to look into Beth’s room, she followed the creature’s anguished noises down the hall and to the front door. The cat cringed as she approached but didn’t bolt. Jessica gingerly reached out and turned the knob. The second the door was open a crack, the cat squeezed itself through and took off.

  “See you later,” she said softly, sighing. This was perfect. The only other living thing in this nightmare was terrified of her.

  Jessica pulled the door the rest of the way open and went out onto the porch. The old wood creaked under her feet, the sound reassuring in this silent world. She took a deep breath, then stepped onto the walk, glad to leave the lifeless, alien house behind her. The blue light seemed cleaner, somehow healthier out here. She missed the diamonds, though. She looked around for anything—a falling leaf, a drop of rain—suspended in the air. Nothing. She glanced up to the sky to check for clouds.

  A giant moon was rising.

  Jessica swallowed, her mind spinning as she tried to make sense of the awesome sight. The huge half orb consumed almost a quarter of the sky, stretching across the horizon as big as a sunset. But it wasn’t red or yellow or any other hue Jessica could name. It felt like a dark spot burned into her vision, as if she had looked at the sun too long. It hung colorlessly in the sky, coal black and blindingly bright at the same time, merciless against her eyes.

  She shielded her face, then looked down toward the ground, head aching and eyes watering fiercely. As she blinked away the tears, Jessica saw that the normal color of the grass had returned. For a few seconds the lawn looked green and alive, but then the cold blue rushed back into it, like a drop of dark ink spreading through a glass of water.

  Her head still pounded, and Jessica thought of eclipses, in which the sun was darkened but still powerful, blinding people who unknowingly stared at it. An afterimage of the huge moon still burned in her eyes, changing the hues of the whole street. Glimpses of normal colors—greens, yellows, red—flickered in the corners of her vision. Then slowly her headache subsided, and calm blue tones settled over the street again.

  Jessica glanced up at the moon again and with a flash of realization saw its true color: a bright darkness, a hungry blankness, a sucking up of light. The blue light in this dream didn’t come from objects themselves, as she’d thought at first. And it didn’t come directly from the giant moon above. Rather, the cold, lifeless blue was a leftover, the last remnant of light that remained after the dark moon had leached all the other colors from the spectrum.

  She wondered if the moon—or dark sun, or star, or whatever it was—had been in the sky in her last dream, hidden behind the clouds. And what did it mean? So far, Jessica had thought these dreams were adding up to something. But this was just bizarre.

  A howl came from down the street.

  Jessica whirled toward the sound. It was the cat again, this time screeching the high-pitched call of a monkey. It stood at the end of the street, glaring back at her.

  “You again?” she said, shivering at the sound. “You’re pretty loud for such a little kitty.”

  The cat yowled once more, almost sounding like a cat now. An unhappy one. Outside in the moonlight its eyes flashed indigo and its fur was even blacker, as rich and dark as an empty night sky.

  It yowled again.

  “All right, I’m coming,” Jessica muttered. “Don’t get all psychosomatic on me.”

  She walked after the creature. It waited until it was sure she was following, then padded away. As they walked, it kept looking over its shoulder at her, making shrieking or barking or growling noises in turn. It stayed well ahead, too scared of Jessica to let her get close but taking care not to lose sight of her.

  The cat led her through an otherwise empty world. There were no clouds in the sky, no cars or people, just the vast moon slowly rising. The streetlights were dark, except for the uniform blue glow that came from everything. The houses looked abandoned and still, dead silence hovering over them, pierced only by the
weird menagerie of noises from the anxious cat.

  At first Jessica recognized some of the houses from her route to school, but the neighborhood looked alien in this light, and she quickly forgot how many turns she and the cat had taken.

  “I hope you know where you’re going,” she called to the animal.

  As if in answer, it stopped and sniffed at the air, making a gurgling sound almost like that of a small human child. Its tail was high in the air, flicking nervously from side to side.

  Jessica approached the cat slowly. It sat in the middle of the street, shivering, the muscles under its fur twitching with tiny spasms.

  “Are you okay?” Jess asked.

  She knelt next to it and put one hand out carefully. It turned to her with wide, frantic eyes, and Jessica pulled away.

  “Okay. No touching.”

  Its fur was rippling now, as if there were snakes crawling under its skin. The cat’s legs curled up tightly against its shivering body, its tail sticking out stiffly behind.

  “Oh, you poor thing.” She looked around, instinctively searching for help. But of course there was no one.

  Then the change began in earnest.

  As Jessica watched in transfixed horror, the cat’s body grew longer and thinner, the tail thicker, as if the cat were being squeezed into its own tail. Its legs were absorbed into the body. The head began to shrink and flatten, teeth protruding from its mouth as if they couldn’t fit inside its head anymore. It stretched and stretched, until finally the creature was one long column of muscle.

  It twisted around to face her, long fangs glistening in the dark moon’s light.

  It had become a snake. Its sleek black fur still shone, and it still possessed the large, expressive eyes of a mammal, but that was all that was left of the cat she had trustingly followed here.

  It blinked its cat eyes at her and hissed, and Jess was finally released from her paralyzing terror. She cried out and scrabbled away backward on hands and bare feet. The thing was still shivering, as if not yet fully in control of its new body, but its gaze followed her.

  Jessica leapt to her feet and backed away further. The creature began to writhe now, twisting around in circles and making horrible noises that sounded halfway between a hiss and the noise of a cat being strangled. It sounded as if the cat were inside the snake, trying to fight its way out.

  A chill passed through Jessica’s whole body. She hated snakes. Tearing her gaze from the creature, she frantically scanned the surrounding houses, trying to remember where she was. She had to get home and back into bed. She’d had enough of this dream. Everything in it transformed into something horrible and foul. She had to end the nightmare before it got any worse.

  Then another hiss came from behind her, and Jessica’s heart began to pound.

  Black, almost invisible shapes slithered from the grass onto the street around her. More snakes, dozens of them, all like the creature she had followed here. They took up positions in a circle around her.

  In moments she was surrounded.

  “I don’t believe this,” she said aloud slowly and clearly, trying to make the words true. She took a few steps toward where she thought home was, trying not to look at the slithering forms on the street in her path. The snakes hissed and backed away nervously. Like the cat, they were wary of her.

  For a crazy moment Jessica remembered her mom’s lecture about wild animals before they’d left the city. “Remember, they’re more scared of you than you are of them.”

  “Yeah, right,” she muttered. There wasn’t room in a snake’s brain for how scared she was.

  But she kept walking, taking slow, deliberate steps, and the snakes parted for her. Maybe they really were more scared than she was.

  A few more steps and she was out of the circle. She walked away quickly, until she had left the snakes half a block behind.

  She turned and called, “No wonder you taste like chicken. You are chicken.”

  The new sound came from behind her.

  It was a deep rumble, like the elevated train that had passed a block away from their old house. Jessica didn’t so much hear it as feel it through the soles of her feet. The sound seemed to travel up her spine before it broke into an audible growl.

  “What now?” she said, turning around.

  She froze when she saw it at the end of the street.

  It looked like the cat but much larger, its shoulders almost at Jessica’s eye level. Its black fur rippled with huge muscles, as if a hundred crawling snakes lived under the midnight coat.

  A black panther. She remembered Jen’s story in the library, but this creature didn’t look as if it had escaped from any circus.

  Jessica heard the snakes behind her, a growing chorus of hisses. She turned to glance back at them. The wriggling black forms were fanning out, as if herding her toward the cat.

  They didn’t look afraid of her anymore.

  8

  12:00 A.M.

  SEARCH PARTY

  “Something bad is happening.”

  Melissa’s words were spoken softly and filled the silence of the blue time like an urgent whisper. Dess looked to the edge of the junkyard lot where her friends stood. Melissa’s upturned eyes caught the light of the midnight moon. Rex, as usual, hovered close to her, focused on every word.

  Dess waited for more, but Melissa just stared into the sky, listening with her whole being, tasting the motionless air.

  Dess shrugged and returned her gaze to the ground, scanning the pile of metal bits that Rex had picked for her. According to him, all of them were untouched by inhuman hands. If he was right about tonight, there was the possibility of a serious rumble, and she was going to need clean steel to work with.

  Of course, Rex could be wrong. It didn’t feel like a bad night to Dess. Friday, September 5, the fifth day of the ninth month. The combination of nine and five wasn’t particularly nasty: the numbers made four, fourteen, or forty-five (when subtracted, added, or multiplied), which was kind of a cute pattern if you liked fours, which Dess did, but hardly dangerous. On top of that, “S-e-p-t-e-m-b-e-r f-i-v-e” spelled out had thirteen letters, which was as safe as any number could be. What was to complain about?

  But Rex was worried.

  Dess looked up. The dark moon looked normal, rising at its usual stately pace and resplendent with its usual gorgeous, pale blue light. So far, Dess hadn’t heard the sounds of anything big roaming. Nor had she seen too many slithers. Not a single one, in fact, not even out of the corner of her eye.

  That was weird, actually. She looked around the junkyard. There were rusted-out cars, a corrugated iron shack flattened by some ancient tornado, and a jumbled tire pile—plenty of places to slither under and peer out from, but not a flicker of movement anywhere. And even when they couldn’t be seen, the chirps and calls of slithers were usually audible. But none of the little guys were watching tonight.

  “Almost too quiet,” she said to herself in a bad-guy accent.

  Across the junkyard Melissa moaned, and despite the constant warmth of the blue time a shiver passed through Dess.

  It was time to get started.

  She squatted and began to sort through the pieces of metal, looking for bright steel uncorrupted by rust. Stainless was best, unpainted and shiny. The twisted, uneven shapes of the metal also played a part in her selection process. The long trip from factory to junkyard had weathered some pieces to certain proportions, small rods with elegant ratios of length and width, scarred old bolts with harmonious spacings between their dents. Dess arranged her finds happily. Steel came alive here in the blue time. She saw iridescent veins of moonlight streak across the metal and then fade, as if the steel were reflecting a fireworks show in the pale sky above.

  As she chose from the bits of metal, Dess brought each to her mouth and blew a name into it.

  “Deliciousness.”

  Some of the big pieces were beautiful, but she needed to be able to carry all of them easily, possibly while running for her li
fe. She selected a small but perfect washer, rejecting a heavy length of pipe.

  “Overzealously,” she whispered to it.

  Words tumbled through her head, some of which she didn’t even know the meanings of, scraps of language that had stuck in her mind because of the number or arrangement of their letters. Words weren’t really her thing, except when they collided with numbers and patterns, like stretching across a Scrabble board to grab a triple-word score.

  What she wanted tonight was pretty straightforward: thirteen-letter words to boost the power of these pieces of steel.

  “Fossilization,” she named a long, thin screw, the thread of which wound exactly thirty-nine times around its shaft.

  The crunch of Rex’s boots came from right behind her. She hadn’t heard him approach, lost as she was in the pleasures of steel.

  “If you were a slither, you’d’ve bit me,” she murmured. The foul little things didn’t exactly bite, of course, but close enough.

  “Melissa’s found her,” Rex said.

  Dess lifted an old hubcap up to the light. Trapped blue fire coursed around its rim.

  “About time.”

  “But she says we have to hurry. There’s trouble. Something big out there, or just nasty. Whatever it is, it’s giving Melissa a serious headache.”

  Dess brought the hubcap close to her lips.

  “Hypochondriac,” she whispered to it.

  “You ready?” Rex asked.

  “Yeah. This stuff’s all weaponized.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  She stood up, clutching the hubcap in one hand and dropping the smaller bits of metal into her pockets. Rex turned and jogged to the edge of the junkyard where their bikes were stashed. He jumped on his and rode after Melissa, who was already headed down the road toward downtown. Of course, Dess thought. Jessica Day was a city girl. Her parents could afford to live close in, away from the badlands and the smells of oil rigs and roadkill.

  Dess walked over calmly and pulled up her bike, mounted it, and began to pedal after the two. She didn’t rush. Melissa could only move so fast without losing her way as she cautiously felt for the trembling threads in the tenuous psychic spiderweb of midnight. And even with her crappy one-speed, Dess could beat either of them in a race. It would be no problem to catch up before the fireworks started.