Touching Darkness

Melissa ran with him across the asphalt, finally shaken out of her panic. But when he looked back at her, the cold light of the rising blue moon glimmered from a single tear on her cheek.

She was crying. Melissa was crying.

Rex swallowed hard. We’re dead.

The front door was locked, so he swung Stratocumulus through the little stained-glass window at its center, stuck his arm in, and searched for the knob on the other side. Broken glass stabbed at the crook of his elbow, but his fingers found the dead bolt and spun it. As the door swung inward, Rex heard the sound of tearing cloth coming from his sleeve.

“Kitchen,” he said. Always the best tools there.

Melissa ran ahead as Rex paused to check his arm, spreading the ripped cloth to reveal torn flesh. As the blood welled up from the wound, the red color leeched away, turning to a steely blue-gray before his eyes.

“In here!” Melissa shouted from the back of the house.

He tore his gaze from the cut and ran, wondering for a moment if darklings were anything like sharks. Could they be driven into a frenzy by the smell of blood?

The kitchen was huge, bigger than Rex’s living room, with long stretches of counter space and two full range tops. The ambient blue light of the secret hour glowed from metal appliances and a block of knives.

Rex smiled. They weren’t dead yet.

He pulled open drawers until he found the silverware and brought a spoon up to his sharp eyes.

“Stainless Korean,” he read happily, and thrust the whole drawer into Melissa’s arms. “Find a room upstairs with no stiffs.”

She nodded mutely, her face still blank with shock.

Rex ransacked the kitchen, filling his duffel bag with nonstick ceramics, high-temperature alloys, all the spaceage materials that always started out in jet fighters and wound up in frying pans. After thirty frantic seconds he hoisted the heavy, clanking bag over one shoulder and grabbed the knife block with his free hand—the knives looked fearsome if nothing else. He headed for the stairs.

Melissa had found the perfect room. It was a study, with only one small window that looked out across the street at Darkling Manor. A computer dominated a small desk, and a pegboard full of cables filled one wall. More clean metal for the taking.

She was staring out the window, shuddering again.

“They’re almost here.”

Rex dropped the bag and slammed the door shut. Drawing a knife from the block and peering closely, he smiled.

“Somebody likes to cook.”

The knives were Japanese and gorgeous, bearing the magic words, Never needs sharpening. That meant high titanium content and laser shaping, the modern-day equivalent of a late-solutrean spear point—the Stone Age technology that had finally driven the darklings into the secret hour.

He pulled the slip of paper from his boot strap and unfolded it, then turned to the door and thrust the knife hard against it. The wood split with a satisfying thunk.

“Abnormalities.” Rex pulled another knife from the block. “Aboriginally,” he read from the piece of paper. Thunk. Pulled another knife…

He smiled grimly. This was one little resource Dess had never thought of (not that she needed help finding tridecalogisms).

“Acceptability.” Think.

The piece of paper was the second-to-last page of a Scrabble dictionary, the only kind of lexicon Rex had ever found that listed words by length.

“Accidentalism.” Whatever that was. Thunk. The door would be rock solid once he got to thirteen…

The knives ran out at twelve.

Rex squeezed his eyes shut tight. Why hadn’t he counted before starting? Nine would have been good enough. And anything would have been better than twelve.

He whirled around and grabbed a butter knife from the silverware drawer, turned back, and propelled it against the door with all his strength. The blunt tip skated off, taking his wrist a few inches from the serrated edge of a beautiful Japanese carving knife.

“Damn,” he said. Still twelve knives. He’d turned the door into a darkling magnet! How could he have been so—?

Thunk.

Rex blinked, staring at the knife trembling in the wood beside his head. Its blade was etched with snakes and frogs, its hilt cast like two scaly lizard tails, and its pommel, a tiny metal skull with glass eyes, seemed to be smiling at Rex. He’d never seen the knife before and found himself realizing that he wasn’t the only midnighter who had a few weapons put aside for a rainy day.

“Magnificently Instantaneous Gratification,” Melissa said.

He turned to face her. She was still on the other side of the room—she’d thrown it past Rex’s head.

Melissa had wiped the tears away, and her expression had returned to its usual midnight sneer. “I’m okay now.”

He let out his breath and started to nod, but movement out the window caught his eye. He crossed the room.

“Don’t look, Rex. You don’t want to—” But he’d already seen it.

The thing came down on undulating wings, two leathery sails that billowed from long, multijointed arms. Its hands, long-taloned and grasping the air with compulsive little twitches, must have been thirty feet apart. Its spiked tail whipped through the wind with every beat of the wings, as if to counterbalance the beast’s grotesque cargo.

Its body was thin, the darkling part of it anyway, ribs showing through its leathery flesh. The thing’s spindly hind legs stumbled, trembling feebly as it landed on the rooftop across the street, and its wings took one steadying stroke as it gained its footing.

Melissa, still facing away from the window, made a choking noise.

It had no head. Not a darkling head, anyway. A human torso seemed to be submerged into the creature’s flesh, and a half-visible human face stared glassily from its emaciated chest. Two secondary arms thrust from the sunken torso, ending in the hands and fingers of a person—a child, Rex now saw—which were clenched as if in pain.

“It thinks…” Melissa rasped, “…like us.”

Something burst through the window, an explosion of broken glass, fluttering wings, and ratlike squeaks. Needles of ice shot through Rex’s chest as the winged slither struck, and a sudden tangle of black filaments seemed to clutch his heart.

Blue sparks blinded him, the metal chains swinging from Melissa’s fist knocking the slither to the ground. Rex gasped for breath through frozen lungs, watching as she casually tipped the silverware drawer over onto the still-fluttering beast. The metal spat more sparks as the thing sizzled underneath the pile.

“You do the window,” she ordered, kicking the glowing forks, spoons, and knives around on the floor to prevent any crawling slithers from sneaking up on them.

Rex nodded and reached into the duffel bag. He tossed two handfuls of Dess’s nails and screws out the window, bringing screams and blue fire from the things that hovered or slithered just outside. A swing with Arachnophobia, the ball-peen hammer, dislodged something large that had taken hold of the sill.

“Help me with this,” he shouted, ice from the slither strike still grating in his lungs. The pegboard full of computer cables came down easily from the wall. Some of the cables were filled with useless copper and gold, Rex knew, but some would also contain advanced alloys, insulating plastics, and hopefully some fiber optics, all of which would bedevil their attackers. They leaned it against the window, and Rex began to empty the duffel bag, naming the pots and pans with the last tridecalogisms from his tattered Scrabble dictionary page.

“I got it,” Melissa said, pushing him away when his list ran out. She named the last few bits of metal, calling on the memorized emergency words they all kept in their heads.

“Unintelligent,” she murmured.

Rex leaned against the wall and shuddered. Every breath was icy from the slither strike. His shoulders were numb and his fingers moved slowly, like after a snowball fight without gloves. A few inches higher and the slither would have gotten him on the neck. The lore said that a few midnighters had actually died that way—suffocating, their windpipes choked with ice.