The Secret Hour (5 page)

“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.

“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, scanning the pile of metal bits that Rex had picked for her. According to him, all of them were untouched by inhuman hands. If he was right about tonight, there was the possibility of a serious rumble, and she was going to need clean steel to work with.

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 running for her life. She selected a small but perfect washer, rejecting a heavy length of pipe.

“Overzealously,” she whispered to it.

Words tumbled through her head, some of which she didn’t even know the meanings of, scraps of language that had stuck in her mind because of the number or arrangement of their letters. Words weren’t really her thing, except when they collided with numbers and patterns, like stretching across a Scrabble board to grab a triple-word score.

What she wanted tonight was pretty straightforward: thirteen-letter words to boost the power of these pieces of steel.

“Fossilization,” she named a long, thin screw, the thread of which wound exactly thirty-nine times around its shaft.

The crunch of Rex’s boots came from right behind her. She hadn’t heard him approach, lost as she was in the pleasures of steel.

“If you were a slither, you’d’ve bit me,” she murmured. The foul little things didn’t exactly
bite,
of course, but close enough.

“Melissa’s found her,” Rex said.

Dess lifted an old hubcap up to the light. Trapped blue fire coursed around its rim.

“About time.”

“But she says we have to hurry. There’s trouble. Something big out there, or just nasty. Whatever it is, it’s giving Melissa a
serious
headache.”

Dess brought the hubcap close to her lips.

“Hypochondriac,” she whispered to it.

“You ready?” Rex asked.

“Yeah. This stuff’s all weaponized.”

“Let’s go, then.”

She stood up, clutching the hubcap in one hand and dropping the smaller bits of metal into her pockets. Rex turned and jogged to the edge of the junkyard where their bikes were stashed. He jumped on his and rode after Melissa, who was already headed down the road toward downtown. Of course, Dess thought. Jessica Day was a city girl. Her parents could afford to live close in, away from the badlands and the smells of oil rigs and roadkill.

Dess walked over calmly and pulled up her bike, mounted it, and began to pedal after the two. She didn’t rush. Melissa could only move so fast without losing her way as she cautiously felt for the trembling threads in the tenuous psychic spiderweb of midnight. And even with her crappy one-speed, Dess could beat either of them in a race. It would be no problem to catch up before the fireworks started.

She just hoped this wasn’t a wild-goose chase, a symptom of Rex’s beginning-of-the-school-year paranoia. Sure, there was a new midnighter in town, but that had happened once before, and the consequences hadn’t exactly been earth-shattering.

Rex had sounded pretty scared on the phone, though. So Dess had worn her sensible shoes. Running shoes.

The hubcap rattled happily in the basket on Dess’s bike. She smiled. Whatever was out there, she wouldn’t have to run right away. The comforting weight of metal clinked heavily in her pockets, and Dess knew without counting how many weapons she had made tonight.

“Lucky thirteen,” she said.

They drew closer to the city, the wide, blank spaces of vacant lots and new developments giving way to strip malls and gas stations and, of course, her favorite store: 7-Eleven, a fraction also known as point-six-three-six-three-repeat-to-infinity.

Up ahead Melissa was going faster now, no longer feeling her way, apparently certain of the direction. Something was really giving off bad vibes tonight. Dess pedaled a little harder, swerving her bike around the occasional motionless cars that hogged the road.

Rex was right behind Melissa, making sure she didn’t crash into a car while she had her nose in the air. Melissa was a lot more functional here in the blue time, but Rex still hovered. Eight years of baby-sitting was a hard habit to break.

Dess saw a shape in the sky. Silent and gliding—a winged slither. Against the almost fully risen moon she could see the fingers in the wing. Like a bat’s, the slither’s wing was really a hand: four long, jointed finger bones spread out like kite struts, with paper-thin skin webbed between them.

The slither made a chirping call, a strangled little noise that sounded like the last cry of a stomped-on rat.

Answers sounded. There were more of them up there, a full flock of twelve. They were headed in the same direction as Dess and her friends.

Dess swallowed. It was probably a coincidence. Or maybe the little guys were just coming along for the ride. There were always some around, curious about the little tribe of humans who visited the blue time. They didn’t usually make trouble.

She looked up. Another flock had swept in to join the first group. She counted the dark, translucent shapes at a glance: twenty-four of them now.

Dess started counting aloud to calm her nerves.
“Uno, dos, tres
…” She knew how to count in twenty-six languages and was working on a few more. The rhythmic sounds of number-words soothed her, and she always found the different ways of dealing with the tricky teens amusing.

She switched nervously to Old English.
“Ane, twa, thri, feower, fif
…”

September the fifth. Nothing big was happening tonight, she was positive. Nine plus five was fourteen. And it was the 248th day of the year, and two plus four plus eight also made fourteen. Not as good as thirteen, but no bad karma there.

There were still more shapes in the sky. Their calls came mockingly from every direction.

“Un, deux, trois, quatre.”
She switched to French, counting louder to drown out the slithers. Dess decided to go all the way to eighty, which was “four twenties” in French.
“Cinq, six, sept
…
”

“Sept!”
she said aloud, skidding her bike to a halt.

Sept
meant seven in French and in a bunch of other languages too. (A septagon has seven sides, her brain uselessly informed her.)
Sept
as in September. She remembered now—way back in the old days, a thousand years ago, September had been the seventh month, not the ninth.

September fifth had once been the fifth day of the seventh month.

And seven plus five was twelve.

“Oh, crap,” Dess said.

She lifted from her bicycle seat, thrusting her right foot down hard against its pedal as she pulled up on the handles, straining to get the bike moving again. Melissa and Rex had gotten way too far ahead. On a night this serious, she and her weapons should be leading the pack.

A long, piercing cry sounded above her, and another thirteen-letter word came unbidden into Dess’s head.

“Bloodcurdling,” she whispered, and kept on pedaling.

The black panther roared again.

The sound felt loud enough to knock Jessica backward, but her feet were frozen in place. She wanted to turn away, to run, but some ancient terror had taken hold of her muscles, leaving them paralyzed. It was fear of the huge cat’s fangs, of its hungry roar, of the thin, cruel line of pink tongue that flickered out from its maw.

“Dreaming or not,” Jessica said softly, “getting eaten would suck.”

The beast’s eyes flashed bright purple in the moonlight. Its mouth began to twist and change shape, the two longest fangs stretching out until they were as long as knives. It crouched, gathering itself into a bundle of muscle, head lowered and tail raised high like a sprinter setting up to start a race. Its muscles quivered, the huge paws kneading the ground. The grating sound of claws scraping asphalt reached Jessica’s ears, sending shivers up her spine. When the cat sprang toward her, it became suddenly as long and swift as an arrow.

The moment it moved, Jessica was released from its spell. She turned and ran back toward the snakes.

Her bare feet slapped painfully against the asphalt, and the arc of snakes was arrayed across the street directly in front of her, so she veered off to one side, onto the softer strip of lawn. The snakes moved to cut her off, slithering into the high, uncut grass in front of a ramshackle old house. Jessica gritted her teeth as she ran, imagining sharp fangs piercing the soles of her feet with every step. When she reached the spot where she guessed the snakes were, Jessica launched herself into a long jump. The air rushed around her, and the leap seemed to carry her incredibly far. She leapt twice more, taking bounding steps until she reached the edge of the next driveway.

Jessica stumbled painfully on the concrete as she landed, but she managed to keep running. The snakes were definitely behind her now, and she realized with relief that she hadn’t been bitten. But the footfalls of the black panther were still closing in. She might be fast in this dream, but the creature behind her was faster.

Images from a million nature specials flashed through her head: big cats taking down their prey, grabbing hold of gazelles with their teeth and disemboweling them with hind claws that spun like the blades of a blender. Cheetahs were the fastest animals in the world; panthers probably weren’t that far behind. There was no way she could beat the beast in a straight line. But she recalled how antelope escaped cheetahs: by twisting and turning, so that the heavier, less agile cats shot past and tumbled to the ground before they could right themselves for another attack.

The problem was, Jessica was no antelope.

She risked a glance over her shoulder. The panther was only a few bounds behind, terrifyingly huge this close. Jessica angled toward a willow in front of the next house, a wide old tree that sheltered the entire yard. She counted down from five as she ran toward it, hearing the cat’s footfalls tearing into the grass closer and closer. At
one,
Jessica threw herself to the ground behind the wide trunk.

The panther’s leap took it over her, a dark shadow blotting out the giant moon for a split second. A ripping sound came with the wind of the creature’s passage, as if the air itself were splitting.

Jessica raised her head. The big cat was scrambling to a stop in the next driveway, its claws drawing a spine-chilling screech from the asphalt. Then she spotted the marks inches from her face and swallowed. The tree trunk bore three long, cruel gouges just above where her head had been, the freshly exposed wood white for a moment before the moon leached it blue.

She stood and ran.

There was a narrow gap between two houses, an overgrown channel of grass and dark shapes. Jessica dashed instinctively for the narrow space. She crashed through the high grass, jumping the rusting shape of an old push mower leaning against one wall, then stumbled to an abrupt halt.

At the other end of the gap was a chain-link fence.

Jessica ran toward it. There was nowhere else to go.

She leapt as high as she could, fingers hooking into the weave of metal, pulling herself up. Her feet scrambled for purchase, toes gripping better than shoes but much more painfully. At least the fence was new, the metal smooth and rust-free.

As Jess climbed, she could hear the rumbling breath of the giant panther behind her reverberating between the two houses. The creature pushed through the high grass with a rushing noise like wind in leaves. She reached the top of the fence and swung over, coming suddenly face-to-face with her pursuer.

The beast was only a few yards away. Its eyes locked with hers. In those deep pools of indigo Jessica thought she recognized an ancient intelligence, remote and cruel. She knew absolutely, beyond any argument, that this wasn’t a mere animal; it was something much, much worse.

Except, of course, that this had to be a dream: that pure evil staring back at her was all in her head.

“Psychosomatic,” she whispered softly.

The creature raised a huge paw to swipe at Jessica’s clinging fingers, still exposed through the holes of the fence. She released her grip and pushed herself backward. As she fell, a shower of blue sparks exploded in front of her, lighting the big cat’s gleaming fangs and the houses rising on either side. The whole fence seemed to ignite, blue fire running along every inch of metal. The fire seemed to be drawn to the paw of the beast, spiraling inward toward the long claws entangled for a moment among the chain links.

Then the creature must have freed itself; the world went dark.

Jessica hit the ground softly, her fall broken by the unkempt grass. She blinked blindly; the weave of the fence was burned into her vision, dazzling blue diamond shapes overlaying everything she saw. The smell of singed fur almost made her choke.

She gazed at her own hands wonderingly. They were unhurt, except for triangular red marks from hoisting herself over. If the fence had been electrified, why hadn’t it burned her as it had the cat? There were no sparks now except for the echoes in her vision, and the fence was whole before her. She was surprised that the panther hadn’t ripped it down with a single swipe of its paw.

Jessica peered through the metal at her pursuer, blinking to clear her vision. The panther was shaking its head in confusion, backing away to the far end of the gap, limping slightly. It held up one paw and licked it, the pink tongue snaking out between the two long teeth. Then the cold indigo eyes locked onto Jessica. The cool intelligence was still there. The cat turned and padded out of sight.

It was looking for another way around.

Whatever the fence had done to the panther, she was grateful. The beast could’ve jumped the fence, which wasn’t more than eight feet high, but the blue sparks had spooked it.

Her respite wouldn’t last long, though. She had to get moving. Jessica rolled over onto her hands and knees and started to stand.

A hissing sound came from the ground in front of her. Through the high grass she glimpsed two purple eyes flashing in the moonlight.

Her hand darted in front of her face just in time. Cold shot through her from palm to elbow, as if long, icy needles had been thrust deep into her arm. Jessica leapt to her feet and stumbled away from where the snake had been hidden.

Her eyes widened with fear as she looked down at her hand.

The snake was attached by black filaments that wrapped around her fingers and wrist, her hand grasped by a spreading cold. The filaments came from the snake’s mouth, as if its tongue had split into a hundred black threads and twisted itself tightly around her. The cold was moving slowly up her arm toward her shoulder.

Without thinking, Jessica swung the snake against the fence. The chain links lit up again, though much less explosively than when the cat had struck it. Blue fire shot toward her hand, then ran down the length of the writhing snake. The creature puffed up for a moment, its sleek black fur standing on end. The filaments unraveled, and the snake dropped lifeless to the ground.

Jessica leaned against the fence, exhausted.

The metal was warm and pulsing against her back, as if the steel had become alive. Feeling rushed back into her arm painfully, along with imaginary pins and needles, like blood returning after she’d slept on it all night long.

Jessica sagged with relief, letting the metal hold her weight for a moment.

Then, from the corner of her eye, she spotted movement. There was a narrow gap under the fence, like a dog would dig. More of the snakes were coming through.

Jessica turned and ran.

The backyard of this house was small, bounded by high fences. She might be safe from the panther within them, but in the uncut grass the snakes could hide anywhere. She climbed over the locked gate in the back, dropping to the ground in a narrow, paved alleyway.

The big cat had headed back the way Jessica had come, so she ran down the alley in the opposite direction. She wondered how she would ever get home.

“Just a dream,” Jess reminded herself. The words brought her no comfort at all. The adrenaline in her blood, the sharp pain in her fingers from climbing the chain-link fence, her heart pounding in her chest—the whole experience seemed absolutely real.

The alley led out onto a wide road. A street sign stood at the next corner, and Jess ran toward it, casting her eyes around for the panther.

“Kerr and Division,” she read. That was on the way to school. She wasn’t so far from home. “If I can just make it past the hairy snakes and the giant predator, I’ll be fine,” she mumbled. “No problem.”

The moon was fully risen now. It was moving much faster than the sun did during the day, Jessica realized. It hardly felt like half an hour since the dream had started. She saw how gigantic the moon was now. It filled so much of the sky that only a strip of horizon remained visible around it. The huge bulk hanging overhead made the world seem smaller, as if someone had put a roof on the sky.

Then Jessica saw shapes against the moon.

“Great,” she said. “Just what I need.”

They were flying creatures of some kind. They looked like bats, their wings fleshy and translucent, slowly gliding rather than flapping their wings. They were larger than bats, though, their bodies longer, as if a pack of rats had sprung wings. Several of them wheeled above her, making low chirping sounds.

Had they spotted her? Were they, like everything else in this dream, hunting Jessica Day?

Staring into the dark orb was giving Jessica a headache again, making her feel trapped under its light-sucking gaze. She turned her eyes back down to earth, watching for the panther as she jogged toward home.

The flying shapes stayed overhead, following her.

It wasn’t long before she felt the rumble of the panther’s growl again.

The black shape slid into sight in front of her a few blocks away, directly between Jessica and home. She remembered the intelligence in the panther’s eyes when they had faced each other through the fence. The cat seemed to know where she lived and how to stop her from getting there. And its little slithering friends were probably already in formation to prevent any escape.

This was hopeless.

The creature started padding toward her, not breaking into its full stride this time. It knew now how fast she could run and understood that it only had to go a little bit faster to catch her. It wouldn’t overshoot this prey again.

Jessica looked around for a place to hide, somewhere to escape to. But the houses here on the main roads were farther apart, with big wide strips of grass on every side. There were no tight spaces to crawl into, no fences to climb.

Then she spotted her salvation, one block in the opposite direction from the panther. A car.

It was sitting motionless right in the middle of the street, its lights off, but she could see that someone was inside it.

Jessica ran toward it. Maybe whoever was at the wheel could drive her to safety, or maybe the panther couldn’t get inside the car. It was the only hope she had.

She looked over her shoulder at the cat. It was running now, still not at full speed, but fast enough to close the distance with every bound. Jessica ran as fast as she could. Her bare feet ached from pounding the concrete, but she ignored the pain. She knew she could make it to the car.

She had to.

The cat’s raspy breathing and padded footfalls reached her ears, the sounds carrying like whispers through the silent blue world, closer and closer.

Jessica dashed the last few yards, reached the passenger side door, and yanked at the handle.

It was locked.

“You’ve got to help me!” she cried. “Let me in!”

Then Jessica saw the face of the driver. The woman was about her mom’s age, with blond hair and a slight frown on her face, as if she were concentrating on the road ahead. But her skin was as white as paper. Her fingers gripped the wheel motionlessly. Like Beth, she was frozen, lifeless.

“No!” Jessica shouted.

A hissing came from below. Snakes under the car.

Without thinking, Jessica leapt up onto the hood. She wound up facing the driver through the windshield, the blank eyes staring back at her like a statue’s.

“No,” Jessica sobbed, pounding the hood of the car.

She rolled over to face the panther, exhausted, defeated.

The beast was only a few strides away. It paused, growling, and the two long fangs glinted in the dark moonlight. Jessica knew that she was dead meat.

Then something happened.

A tiny flying saucer came screaming past Jessica, headed toward the panther. The object left a wake of blue sparks and electrified air. Jessica felt her hair stand on end, as if lightning had struck close by. The panther’s eyes flashed, wide and panicked, reflecting gold instead of indigo.

The projectile burst into a blue flame that wrapped itself around the giant cat. The creature spun around and leapt away, the fire clinging to its fur. It bounded farther down the street, howling a menagerie of pain—lions’ roars and stricken birds, cats being tortured. The beast passed from sight around a corner, its cries finally fading into a hideous, tormented laugh like that of a wounded hyena.