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.