“Do any of these… jump out at you?” he asked.
Jessica looked over the points carefully, her brow furrowed in concentration. Rex felt his breath catch. Last night he had allowed himself to wonder what it would be like if Jessica were another seer, someone else who could see the signs and read the lore. At last Rex would have someone to help him sift through the endless troves of midnighter knowledge, to compare interpretations of confusing and contradictory tales, to read alongside him.
Someone to share responsibility when things went wrong.
“This one’s kind of different.”
Jessica was pointing at a digging trowel, a stubby hand tool that wasn’t a spearhead at all. Rex let his breath out slowly, not wanting his disappointment to show, not wanting to feel the entire weight of it yet.
“Yeah, it is different. They used it to dig for root vegetables.”
“Root vegetables?”
“Big fans of yams, Stone Agers.” He put his glasses back on.
“So it’s a yam digger. That’s not what you brought me over here for, is it?”
“No,” he admitted. “I wanted to know if you could see something.”
“You mean, see the secret hour like you can?”
Rex nodded. “I can tell which of these spearheads killed a darkling. The touch lingers. I can see it.”
Jessica stared into the case and frowned. “Maybe my eyes are wrong.”
“No, Jessica. Different midnighters have different talents. We just don’t know what yours is yet.”
She shrugged, then pointed. “That’s a darkling skeleton up there, isn’t it?”
He was surprised for a moment, then nodded, realizing that she’d seen a creature like it in the flesh.
“Wow. So these things really were around ten thousand years ago,” she said. “Shouldn’t they be extinct by now or something? Like dinosaurs?”
“Not in Bixby.”
One of her eyebrows raised. “Rex, there aren’t any dinosaurs in Bixby, are there?”
He had to smile. “Not that I’ve seen.”
“Well, that’s something.”
Rex silently led her back toward the table. It could have changed everything if Jessica had turned out to be a seer. He swallowed, unable to speak for a moment, then found part of last night’s speech on the tip of his tongue.
“Darklings almost went extinct, Jessica, but instead they hid themselves in the blue time. It’s been a long time since they lived in the world with the rest of us.”
“That must have been exciting, being chased around by those things twenty-four seven.”
“Twenty-five seven,” Rex corrected her. “Humans weren’t the top of the food chain back then. People had to deal with tigers and bears and dire wolves. But the darklings were the worst. They weren’t just stronger and faster, they were smarter than us. For a long time we were completely defenseless.”
They sat back down at the table, the darkness of the unused corner of the museum surrounding them. Melissa looked up at Rex, her satisfied expression showing that she could taste his disappointment.
“How did anyone survive?” Jessica asked.
Dess leaned forward. “The darklings are predators, Jessica. They didn’t want to wipe human beings out, just take enough to keep themselves fed.”
Jessica shivered. “What a nightmare.”
“Exactly,” Rex said. A small group of tourists was descending the ramp, and he lowered his voice. “Imagine wondering every night if they would be coming to feed. Imagine having no way to stop them. They were the original nightmares, Jessica. Every monster in folklore, every mythological monster, even our instinctive fear of the darkness, they’re all based on ancient memories of darklings.”
Dess’s eyes narrowed as she leaned forward, also lowering her voice. “Not all darklings look like panthers, Jessica. You haven’t even met the really scary ones yet.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Jessica said. “And they all live in Bixby now?”
“We’re not sure about that,” Dess said. “But Bixby’s the only place with midnight that we know of. Even up in Tulsa, twenty miles from here, the blue time doesn’t come.”
“For some reason, Bixby’s special,” Rex said.
“Great,” Jessica said. “Mom wasn’t kidding when she said moving here would require some adjustments.”
She slumped in her chair.
Rex tried to remember the threads of his speech. “But don’t forget, we humans won. Gradually we discovered ways to protect ourselves. It turned out that new ideas scared the darklings.”
“Ideas? Scared that thing?” She looked across the room at the darkling skeleton.
“New tools, like forged metal and alloys,” Dess said. “And new concepts, like mathematics. And the darklings were always afraid of the light.”
“Fire was the first defense,” Rex said. “They’ve never gotten used to it.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” Jessica said. “I’ll make sure I’ve got a flamethrower next time the secret hour comes around.”
Dess shook her head. “It won’t help you. Fire, electronic stuff, car engines, none of those technologies works in the midnight hour. You think we rode bicycles halfway across Bixby last night for the exercise?”
“That’s why the blue time was created,” Rex said. “A few thousand years ago, when the darklings were being pushed into the deepest forest by steel weapons and fire, they created it as a sanctuary for themselves.”
“They made the blue time?” Jessica asked.
Rex nodded. “The lore says that they took one hour from the day and collapsed it down to an instant so that human beings couldn’t see it anymore.”
Jessica said softly, “Except those who were born at exactly that instant.”
“You got it,” Dess said. “It has to happen to some people, you know? Only so many seconds in the day.”
Dess was looking at Jessica expectantly.
“What?” Jess asked.
Rex sighed. “She wants you to tell her how many seconds are in a day.”
Jessica shrugged. “A lot?”
“Sixty seconds per minute,” Dess supplied. “Sixty minutes per hour. Twenty-four hours per day.”
“That would be…” Jessica looked up at the ceiling in rapt concentration. “A whole lot?”
“Eighty-six thousand, four hundred,” Dess said quietly. “I thought maybe you were, you know, really good at math. You are in trig, after all.”
Jessica snorted. “That was my mom’s idea. When we changed schools, she decided to promote me to misunderstood genius.”
“Tough luck,” said Dess. She shrugged at Rex.
Melissa giggled again, singing along softly with her headphones. Rex barely caught the words.
“Tastes like… vanilla.”
13
11:55 P.M.
ACROBAT
Last year at PS 141 there’d been this really gross experiment in biology….
Jessica’s class had raised two bunches of flatworms in terrariums, which were basically aquariums but full of dirt instead of water. The flatworms really were flat, with little triangular heads kind of like the spear points that Rex was so fond of. They had two little spots that looked like eyes but weren’t. They could detect light, though.
In one terrarium the class always put the worm food in the same corner, under a little light that they switched on at feeding time. The light was like a restaurant sign: Come In, We’re Open.
In the other terrarium the class just sprinkled the food randomly on top of the dirt.
The flatworms in the first terrarium weren’t stupid. Pretty soon they figured out what the light meant. You could point a flashlight at any side of that terrarium, and the worms would come looking for food. They would even follow the light around in circles, if worm racing was what you were into.