The Secret Hour

26

12:00 A.M.

GAUNTLET

"Looks pretty impressive, Dess."

"Thanks, except I was hoping we'd see it from the inside."

"Come on," Rex said for the tenth time. "The cops were all over the place tonight. We're lucky we made it to your house at all."

"So how are we supposed to get over there?" she asked.

The blue arc over the snake pit shone brightly across the desert. With his midnight vision Rex could see every slender finger of the cold lightning that leapt from the ring of steel Dess had created. He could see the slithers swirling overhead, drawn to the snake pit and its ancient stones, barely smart enough to avoid the deadly forces they attracted from the clean metal. He could also see darklings overhead, hovering wary and patient, waiting for something to happen.

Everything was in readiness.

Unfortunately, it was all happening hundreds of yards away, across open, defenseless desert.

"I have no idea," he admitted.

"They know we're here," Melissa said. "But they don't care about us. Just her."

Rex nodded. He could see two forms inside the barrier of lightning, looking back at him across the plain. Jessica had made it here, had risked her life to meet them.

"So maybe we can just walk across."

Dess looked at him as if he were nuts.

"After you," Melissa suggested.

Dess had created a small protective perimeter around them, clean steel stakes borrowed from her dad's camping tent, carefully arranged and linked with wire to make a thirteen-pointed star. The wires glistened in the moonlight like a spiderweb around them. It was easy to keep away darklings if you could set up defenses, but moving across open terrain was another matter.

"We can't just sit here." He looked up at the moon. "We've only got another forty minutes or so."

"Less than that," Dess said. "The arc is weakening."

Rex stared at her. "What?" he cried. "You said it would last all midnight."

She shook her head. "I know, but you saw those fireworks a minute ago. Something big must have hit it. Like maybe a darkling threw itself against the barrier. I didn't think even a psychokitty would be that stupid."

Rex blinked. He wouldn't have imagined it either. Darklings were very old, and those left alive were, by simple process of elimination, only the very cautious ones. Self-sacrifice was not in their nature. "Then we can't stand around. We've got to help them."

Melissa raised her head and sniffed the wind. "I don't think they're going away anytime soon."

"No," Rex agreed. "But we have to try. We could run that distance in a couple of minutes."

"And get ourselves killed in thirty seconds," Dess said.

He turned to Melissa. "You said they don't care about us."

"They'll care about us pretty quick if we get any closer to her."

Rex clenched his fists. "That's why we have to try. Don't you guys get it? They want to get Jessica because she's important, because she's the key to something. We have to find out what."

"Yeah, I get it," Melissa said. "They hate her. I can taste it like a mouthful of gasoline. But we've never really been enemies with the darklings, Rex. You always said they're like wild animals: stay out of their way and they'll stay out of ours. She's the one driving them crazy."

"So what do you suggest we do?"

"We walk away."

"What?"

"We turn around and go home."

"Melissa," Dess said, "my ring around the snake pit may not last for the whole hour."

Melissa shrugged. "Then all our problems will be solved, one way or another. Maybe Jessica will figure out what her talent is once she really needs it. Or maybe the darklings get what they want, and everything goes back to normal."

Rex looked at his old friend, not believing the words that had just come out of her mouth. "Melissa - ," he started, but found that he didn't know what to say.

A sharp laugh came from Dess. "And everything goes back to normal? I thought you didn't like normal."

"Normal might suck, but it's better than dying for her."

"For both of them," Dess said. She turned to Rex. "I'm not going to get stuck with just you two again. Let's go."

Rex watched as Dess knelt by her duffel bag. She unzipped it and pulled out a yard-long metal pole. She twisted something at one end and gave it a flick. Another shaft of steel slid out like a folding telescope until the whole thing was almost a foot longer than Dess was tall. It was decorated with her usual mathematical signs and symbols, but a lot of them.

"Resplendently Scintillating Illustrations," she said happily.

Dess turned and walked toward the snake pit, stepping over the shining boundary of taut guitar string and onto the open desert.

"Coming?" she asked over her shoulder.

Rex blinked, then followed. He paused to lift up the duffel bag, which clanked reassuringly at his side. After a few steps he heard Melissa sigh and knew that she would be close behind.

They had gone just over halfway when the darklings noticed them.

A few slithers had flown or crawled near, but Dess's weapon had sparked to life at their approach. None of them had dared to test its power. Rex had almost begun to think they'd make it without any trouble.

Then the darkling came. It swept over them from behind, blocking out the moon for a moment, and landed directly in their path.

It didn't look like a cat or like any darkling he'd seen before. Rex wasn't exactly sure what it was. Its globular body was hairy, with uneven patches of fur sticking out all over it. The wings were broad, with skeletal fingers visible through the translucent skin. Four long, hairy legs dangled from the rounded body, waving and softly scraping the desert as it landed. The creature's bloated belly sagged, resting on the sand.

"Old," Melissa said quietly. "Very old."

Rex dropped the duffel bag and reached into it. His hand closed on a paper bag full of small metal objects - washers, safety pins, silverware, and nails, all clinking against each other. He pulled it out and hefted it in his hand, wondering if Dess had really named each and every one of the pieces inside. It felt as if there were hundreds.

"It doesn't want to fight us," Melissa said. "It wants us to go away."

"Not a chance," Rex said.

The wings were shrinking, being sucked into the creature. A fifth leg sprouted from the body, thrusting out and waving in the air mindlessly. Then another, and then two more, until it could finally lift its bulk up from the earth on eight spindly legs.

Rex shuddered as he recognized the shape. It was a tarantula, a huge version of the desert spider.

The monstrous creature illustrated what he'd tried to explain to Jessica back at the museum. The darklings were the original nightmares, the template for every human fear. Black cats, snakes, spiders, lizards, worms - the darklings mimicked them all in their pursuit of terror.

Spiders, it so happened, were Rex's personal nightmare.

Especially hairy spiders.

The thing's legs twitched and trembled, the hair on them threadbare and matted. It shifted its balance almost nervously, one leg lingering in the air as if testing the wind. Eyes seemed scattered across its body at random, flashing purple in the dark moonlight.

"Doesn't look so tough," Dess proclaimed without much conviction.

"There are others," Melissa said.

Two more darklings hovered in the air above, well away, but clearly ready to join in.

"This one first," Rex said, swallowing his disgust and taking a few steps forward. He reached into the paper bag, took a sharp handful of the metal bits, and threw them as hard as he could at the beast.

They sputtered to life in the air, burning a deep blue, like the base of a flame. The metal pieces struck the darkling and burned themselves out against it. Wisps of smoke rose from it, and a foul smell like singed hair and wet dog reached Rex's nostrils. The beast hardly reacted at all, just shivered and twitched, emitting a slow, liquid sigh, the exhalation of huge and infected lungs.

"Leave this to me," Dess said, "and the heavy artillery."

She ran toward it, the metal shaft over her shoulder like a javelin. The beast reared back on six of its legs, the other two waving in front of it to ward her off.

From a few yards away she threw the weapon, which burst into light even as it left her hand, wailing through the air with the shriek of a Roman candle. The metal buried itself in the spider, tearing a gash in the mottled flesh. Blue fire spewed from the wound.

The thing screamed hideously, its bloated body crashing to the ground as its arms waved uselessly in the air.

"Oh, bleah!" cried Dess. She stumbled back from the spider, putting one hand over her mouth.

Seconds later a horrible smell washed across Rex and Melissa, dead rat and burned plastic mixed together with rotten eggs. Melissa coughed and gagged, falling to one knee.

"Run for the pit!" Rex managed to cry. They were no more than a hundred yards away.

He ran toward one side of the shuddering spider, still clutching the bag of metal bits. Melissa stumbled after him. Dess dashed past the tarantula, whose legs still flailed wildly, heading for the blue arc of the snake pit.

As Rex ran, the desert before him seemed to be moving, dark sand flowing across his path. The huge spider was sagging, deflating like a punctured balloon.

"Stop, Rex!" Melissa cried, pulling him to a halt. "It's not dead. Just - "

She didn't finish, choking on the stench.

Now Rex could see them. Things were pouring from the darkling's wound, gushing out in a torrent. More spiders, thousands of them. They swarmed in a black river between the two of them and the snake pit.

Dess was on the other side, still running, only a few seconds from the safety of the still flickering lightning. Rex saw her cross the boundary, falling into Jessica's and Jonathan's arms.

The black river of spiders changed course, flowing toward him and Melissa. It made a harsh roaring sound as it moved, like a truckload of gravel being poured onto a sheet of glass.

Rex emptied the rest of the bag of metal pieces, scattering its contents in a rough circle around their feet, a couple of yards across. The crawling host swept up to the patch of glittering steel and broke against it, flowing around them like water.

In seconds they were surrounded, an island in a writhing sea of spiders.

The bits of metal sparked and sputtered, the outermost pieces glowing bright purple. A few spiders dared to move into the steel. They burst into flame, but more came, crawling across the bridge of burned bodies.

"How long do you think the steel will last?" he asked Melissa.

"Doesn't matter," she said. She was looking upward. Rex followed her dumbstruck gaze.

The other two darklings were coming down.

They were shaped like panthers. One was right above them, its saber teeth protruding from its jaw as it dove, wings billowing like a parachute behind it.

"I'm sorry, Cowgirl."

"At least these things got me," she said, "before all those damn, noisy humans drove me insane."

"Yeah." Rex hoped the panthers arrived before spiders were crawling all over him. He put his right fist up to his lips and finally named the steel skull rings on his fingers. "Understanding. Incorruptible. Anticlimactic."

Then he grasped Melissa's arm, knowing this was all his fault, wondering what he had done wrong.

A second later something barreled into the darkling, and sparks flew.