The Secret Hour

“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 thi

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 sca

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 fa

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, sca

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 ru