Scott Westerfeld

by The Secret Hour

  Jessica pulled the sheet up around her sister’s neck and reached out to touch the motionless cheek, shuddering as her fingers met its cool surface.

  The moment ended.

  The boxes and corners faded back into darkness, no longer lit by their own light. Dim streetlights slanted in through the windows, making zigzag shadows on the cluttered floor. The world felt right again.

  Beth’s cheek grew warm, and a muscle in it flicked under Jessica’s hand.

  Her eyes opened gummily.

  “Jessica? What are you doing in here?”

  Jessica pulled her hand away, suddenly remembering that an awake Beth could be just as scary as a frozen one.

  “Hey, I, um, wanted to say something.”

  “What? I’m asleep, Jessica.”

  “I just had to say that I’m sorry for avoiding you. I mean, I know it’s tough here,” Jessica said. “But…I’m on your side, okay?”

  “Oh, Jessica,” Beth said, twisting away and winding herself further into the tangle of sheets. Then she turned her head to stare accusingly. “Did Mom tell you to do this? That is so lame.”

  “No. Of course not. I just wanted—”

  “To be Miss Mature. To show how you’ve got time for me even though you’re Miss Popular here. Whatever. Thanks for the pep talk, Jess. Maybe some sleep now?”

  Jessica started to reply but stopped herself and then had to stifle a smile instead. Beth was back to normal. She had defrosted from the blue time without any visible damage.

  “Sleep tight,” Jessica said, crossing to the door.

  “Yeah, no bedbugs and all that.” Beth rolled over grumpily, pulling the sheet over her head.

  Jessica closed the door. As she stood all alone in the hall, her sister’s last words rattled around in her head. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” she whispered.

  She went to her own room and closed the door tightly, suddenly feeling as if the blue time hadn’t really ended. The light was back to normal, and the sound of the constant Oklahoma wind had returned, but everything looked different to her now. The world Jessica had known—the world of night and day, of certainty and reason—had been completely erased.

  In another twenty-four hours the blue time would come again. If Rex had been telling the truth, it would come every night.

  Jessica Day lay down in her bed and pulled the covers up all the way to her nose. She tried to go to sleep, but with her eyes shut, Jess felt as if something else were in the room. She sat up and peered into every corner, making sure again and again that no unfamiliar shapes lurked there.

  It was like being little again, when night was a time of peril, when things lived under the bed, things that wanted to eat her.

  There were worse things than bedbugs, and they did bite.

  11

  9:28 A.M.

  MARKS OF MIDNIGHT

  Beth was in fine form the next morning at breakfast.

  “Mom, Jessica was sleepstalking last night.”

  “Sleepwalking?” Mom asked.

  “No. Sleep stalking. She was creeping around my bedroom, stalking me while I was asleep.”

  Jessica’s parents looked at her, raising their eyebrows.

  “I was not stalking you,” Jessica said. She dug her fork into the huevos rancheros—cheese and eggs—that Dad had made, wishing this topic of conversation would just go away. She should have known that Beth wouldn’t keep quiet about her visit last night.

  When Jessica looked up, everyone was still staring at her. She shrugged. “I couldn’t sleep, so I went in to see if Beth was awake.”

  “And to give a little speech,” Beth said.

  Jessica felt her face flush. Her little sister always instinctively found the route to maximum embarrassment. She wanted every uncomfortable fact out in the open. Every awkward moment desperately needed her commentary.

  “A speech?” Dad asked. He sat across the table in one of his sleeping T-shirts. The shirt was emblazoned with the logo of some software company he used to work for, the once bright colors faded. His hair was scruffy, and he hadn’t shaved for a couple of days.

  Mom was eating standing up, already dressed for work in a two-piece suit, the collar of her blouse blindingly white in the sunlit kitchen. She’d never dressed up this much for work in Chicago, but Jessica guessed she was trying to impress her new bosses. Mom had never worked on Saturday before, either. “Why couldn’t you sleep?”

  Jessica realized that there was no way to tell the truth on that one. Before she’d showered this morning, the soles of her feet had been almost black, a lot like the feet of someone who had walked a mile on asphalt barefoot. Her hands still had faint red marks on the palms, and she had a bruise on the hand the slither had bitten.

  Of course, there was still the barest chance that it had all been a dream, complete with sleepwalking and sleep-fence-climbing. She would be checking that possibility in a couple of hours.

  “Jessica?”

  “Oh, sorry. I guess I’m kind of tired today. I’ve been having these weird dreams since we moved. They wake me up.”

  “Me too,” Dad said.

  “Yeah, Dad,” Beth said, “but you don’t come into my room and make little speeches.”

  All three of them looked at Jessica expectantly, Beth smiling cruelly.

  Normally Jessica would have made a joke or left the room, anything to escape embarrassment. But she had already fibbed about why she couldn’t sleep. She decided to make amends in the truth department.

  “I just thought that I’d tell Beth,” she said haltingly, “that I knew moving was tough on her. And that I was here for her.”

  “That is so lame,” Beth said. “Mom, tell Jessica not to be so lame.”

  Jessica felt her mom’s fingers lightly on the back of her head. “I think that was really sweet, Jessica.”

  Beth made an ugh noise and fled from the kitchen with her breakfast. The sound of cartoons came on in the living room.

  “That was very mature of you, Jess,” Dad said.

  “I didn’t do it to be mature.”

  “I know, Jessica,” Mom said. “But you’re right—Beth needs our support right now. Keep trying.”

  Jessica shrugged, still a little embarrassed. “Sure.”

  “Anyway, I’ve got to go,” Mom said. “I get to try out the wind tunnel this afternoon.”

  “Good luck, Mom.”

  “Bye, sweethearts.”

  “Bye,” Jessica and her father said together. The moment the front door had closed, they took their breakfasts in front of the TV. Beth scooted aside on the couch for Jessica but didn’t say a word.

  At the first break between cartoons, however, Beth picked up her empty plate to take it away, hesitated, and looked down at Jessica’s dish.

  “You done?”

  Jessica looked up. “Yeah…”

  Beth bent down and stacked up Jess’s plate on her own, then carried them both back, rattling in her hands, to the kitchen.

  Jessica and her father exchanged surprised glances.

  He smiled. “Being lame does work sometimes, I guess.”

  An hour later Dad decided to be Mr. Responsible. He stood up and stretched, then muted the TV. “So, you guys are going to finish unpacking today, right?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Beth said. “Got all day.”

  “We really should get some work done before your mother gets home,” Dad said.

  “Actually,” Jessica said, “I have to go to this museum downtown. The Clovis Museum or something. For homework.”

  “Homework already?” Dad asked. “Back in my day you didn’t get any homework the first week. You were just supposed to hang out for a while, then they’d slowly reintroduce the concept of work.”

  “So not much has changed for you, has it, Dad?” said Beth.

  Dad gave his new, defeated sigh. He didn’t put up much of a fight against Beth anymore.

  Jessica ignored her. “Anyway, Dad, it’s not that far away. I think I’ll just bike it.�
��

  The streets and houses from the night before were still there, recognizable in the daylight. She checked her watch. No chance of being late—she still had an hour to get to the Clovis Museum.

  There were so many questions in her mind. What were darklings and slithers, and where did they come from? How had Dess scared off the giant panther with a hubcap? Why hadn’t Jessica ever seen the blue time before coming to Bixby? And how did Rex and his friends know any of this stuff, anyway?

  Jessica rode slowly, retracing her steps to piece together where everything had happened the night before. The route from her house to the street where she’d first seen the panther was the fuzziest part of her memory. She’d been following the kitty-slither, dreamily looking around and not paying attention. But it was easy to find the corner of Kerr and Division and, from there, the spot where the frozen car had stood.

  Of course, it was gone now. Jessica tried to imagine it jumping suddenly into motion as the secret hour ended, the driver calmly continuing down the road as though nothing had happened. There were no marks in the street, no burned hubcap, nothing to show that a battle had taken place there just eleven hours ago.

  From there she traced her path backward, remembering all too clearly the way she had run while the panther was tracking her. She found the narrow alley and followed it to the backyard fence she had climbed over to escape it. Jessica wasn’t about to climb back over during daylight, and the thought of standing in that high grass still made her nervous, so she circled around to the street side of the house.

  The old willow dominated the block, like a huge umbrella blotting out the hot sun. Jessica dismounted and walked her bike over the unkempt lawn to the tree. In the darkness below its shade she spotted the three gouges in the trunk, the claw marks of the giant panther.

  Her skin crawled as she traced one of the cuts with a quivering finger. It was more than an inch deep, as wide as her thumb. Her finger came out sticky. She teased the trace of sap between her fingers, realizing that the tree had bled instead of her.

  “Sorry about that,” she said softly to the willow.

  “Hey!”

  Jessica jumped, looking around for the voice.

  “What’re you doing on my lawn?”

  She spotted a face in the window of the ramshackle house, barely visible through the sunlight reflected from the mosquito screen.

  “Sorry,” she called. “Just looking at your tree.” Okay, Jessica thought, that sounded weird.

  She pulled her bike back to the main street and climbed onto it, shading her eyes with one hand for a moment as she looked back. The face had disappeared, but Jess recognized the thirteen-pointed star on a plaque mounted next to the door. Dess had been right: they were everywhere in Bixby.

  An old woman emerged from the house, wearing only a wispy nightgown that clung to her frail frame in the light breeze. She was clutching something to her chest, a long, thin object that glimmered in the sun.

  “Get away from my house,” the woman shouted in a voice that was bigger than her tiny body.

  “Okay, sorry.” Jess started to pedal away.

  “And don’t come back tonight either,” a final shout followed her down the street.

  Come back tonight? Jessica wondered as she rode. What had the old woman meant by that?

  Jessica shook her head, checking her watch. The marks on the tree proved that the secret hour was real. She had to face the fact that something really had tried to kill her last night. And she had to find out how to protect herself before the blue time came again.

  Jessica rode fast toward downtown.

  She hated being late.

  12

  11:51 A.M.

  ARROWHEADS

  As they drew closer to downtown Bixby, Rex could feel the car slowing. He glanced at Melissa, whose hands gripped the steering wheel.

  “It’s okay, Cowgirl,” he murmured. He tried to think calm thoughts, hoping it would help.

  It wasn’t a real downtown, like Tulsa or Dallas had, just a handful of five-and six-story buildings that included the town hall, the library, and a couple of office buildings. On a Saturday the workplaces were empty. There would be a few people at the expensive shops on Main and lining up for the first shows at the restored 1950s cinema. That was about it.

  But crowded or not, downtown sat right in the center of Bixby, surrounded by rings of housing developments. As they drew closer, the densest part of the city’s population encircled them. It wasn’t nearly as bad as school, but it always took Melissa a minute or so to adjust to the accumulated weight of those minds.

  Soon her knuckles relaxed on the wheel.

  Rex took a deep breath and leaned back into his seat. He stared out the window, pulling off his glasses to look for signs.

  They were out there. Lots of them.

  Usually it was pretty clean this far from the badlands. With his glasses off, the city should have been one big reassuring blur. But Rex could see marks of visitation everywhere—a house that stood out with strange clarity from its neighbors, a street sign that he could easily read with unaided eyes, a slithering path across the road that shimmered with Focus, the sharp edges that revealed the touch of inhuman hands.

  Or claws, or wriggling bellies.

  The signs of midnight were here, where they shouldn’t be, creeping closer toward the bright lights of downtown. Rex wondered what the darklings and their little friends were up to. Were they testing their limits? Growing in number? Showing a sudden interest in humanity?

  Or were they searching for something?

  “What do you think she is, Rex?” Dess asked from the backseat.

  “Talentwise?” He shrugged. “Could be anything. Could be another polymath.”

  “Nah,” Dess said. “I’m in trig with her, remember? She’s hopeless. Sanchez had to explain radian measures to her three times this week.”

  Rex wondered what radian measures were. “Trigonometry isn’t really part of the lore, Dess.”

  “It will be one day,” Dess said. “Sooner or later arithmetic has to run out of steam. Like obsidian did.”

  “That’ll be a long time from now,” Rex answered. He hoped it would, anyway. Trig was beyond him too. “Anyway, Jessica only just got here. She could take a while to find her talent.”

  “Come on,” Dess said. “You guys tracked me down when I was eleven, right? By that time my mom and dad were letting me do their taxes for them. Jessica’s fifteen, and she can’t handle high school trig? She’s no polymath.”

  “She isn’t a mindcaster either,” Melissa said.

  Rex glanced over at his old friend. Unlike the blurry dashboard and passing background, Melissa’s face was in perfect midnighter Focus. Her expression was grim, and her hands gripped the wheel hard again, as if the old Ford were passing a busload of brawling five-year-olds.

  “Probably not,” he said mildly.

  “Definitely not. I could taste it if she was.”

  Rex sighed. “There’s no point arguing about it now. We’ll find out what she is soon enough. She could be a seer for all I know.”

  “Hey, Rex, maybe she’s an acrobat,” Dess said.

  “Yeah, a replacement,” Melissa joined in.

  Rex glared at her, then put his glasses back on. Melissa’s face went a little blurry as the rest of the world sharpened, and he turned away to stare out the car window.

  “We don’t need an acrobat.”

  “Sure, Rex,” Dess said. “But wouldn’t a full set be better?”

  He shrugged, not taking the bait.

  “Collect ’em all,” Melissa added.

  “Listen,” Rex said sharply, “there’s lots more talents than the four we’ve seen, okay? I’ve read about all kinds of stuff, going back as far as the Split. She could be anything.”

  “She could be nothing,” Melissa said.

  Rex shrugged again and didn’t say another word until they reached the museum.

  The Clovis Period Excavation Museum was a l
ong, low building. Most of the museum was underground, sunk into the cool, dark shelter of the red Oklahoma clay. With its single row of tiny windows it looked to Rex like one of those bunkers that rocket scientists cowered in while they tested some new missile that might explode on the launchpad.

  This was the first weekend of the school year, so the parking lot was almost empty. Later in the day there might be a trickle of tourists, and in a month or so the school trips would start. Every student within a hundred miles of Bixby made the visit at least three times during their school career. It had been on a fifth-grade trip that Melissa and Rex had first come here and begun the process of discovering who and what they were.

  Anita wasn’t at the ticket and info desk. The woman sitting there was new and looked up suspiciously as the three of them walked through the door.

  “Can I help you?”

  Rex fumbled in his pocket, hoping he’d remembered to bring his membership card. He found it after a few anxious moments. “Three, please.”

  The woman took the crumpled card from him and eyed it closely, one eyebrow raised. There was the usual wait as she looked them over, her eyes tracing his black coat and the girls’ clothes, trying to think of a reason to keep them out.

  “Anytime this year,” Dess said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “She said that the membership should be good throughout this year, ma’am,” Rex offered.

  The woman nodded, lips pursed as if all her suspicions had been confirmed, and said, “Well, then, I see.”

  She punched a key, and three tickets emerged from a slot in the desk. “But you-all watch yourselves, y’hear?”

  Dess snatched the tickets and was about to say something, but an older man in a tweed suit came through the staff door behind the desk, interrupting her just in time.

  “Ah, it’s the Arrowheads,” Dr. Anton Sherwood said with a chuckle.

  Rex felt the tension leave him. He grinned at the museum’s director. “Good to see you, Dr. Sherwood.”