“We’re knocking at your door!” he said aloud, his voice inhuman. “We’ve found you at last. We’ve come for you!”
A single choked scream of terror came from Madeleine’s lips, darklings from a thousand nightmares shredding her mind; her hand jerked once, then slipped from Melissa’s.
Suddenly the mass of mindcasters was silenced, Madeleine’s mind gone; Melissa found herself alone with Rex in the blackness behind closed eyes. The darkling thoughts moved through him, still powerful, still hungry. Melissa watched in horror as her oldest friend transformed, the darkness consuming still more of his humanity.
She wondered if she was next.
Rex, she pleaded. Come back to me.
“Unconquerable,” he said softly, his voice dry.
The storm began to subside, and what remained of Rex’s humanity settled over the boiling darkness. She felt his sanity return.
With a snap her muscles were her own again. Melissa pulled her hand from his and opened her eyes.
Madeleine lay on the attic floor unmoving, shards of her shattered teacup strewn about her. Her face was locked in an expression of horror.
“It worked,” Rex said, his voice calm.
Melissa stared at the stricken woman on the floor. She was still breathing, but her eyes were glazed over, her fingers twitching.
Melissa looked up at Rex, and his eyes flashed violet. “You call that working?”
“I remember now.” His lips curled into a smile. “I know what Samhain really was.”
Melissa tried to gather her wits and tore her eyes from Madeleine’s twisted face. The darklings were coming, and thousands of lives were at stake. “Can we stop it?”
Rex shuddered for a second, as if one last memory remained fugitive in his mind. But then he nodded slowly.
“We can try.”
21
11:56 P.M.
SAMHAIN
Every night it seemed like the secret hour took longer to come.
Jonathan drummed his fingers on his windowsill, waiting for the cold wind to be silenced, for colors to blur together into blue, for weightlessness to pour into him. He didn’t look at the clock, which never worked. Knowing how many minutes of Flatland were left only made the torture worse.
These stretches right before midnight were always the hardest. Jonathan wanted to be out there now, soaring over the still cars and softly glowing houses, feeling his muscles propel him across town.
To pass the time—to force the time to get moving—he counted off the coming days on his fingers. It was Thursday night, tomorrow was Friday, exactly two weeks until Halloween. If Dess was right, he would only have to endure this wait fifteen more times, including tonight.
And then he would be free of gravity altogether.
His eyes closed. Jonathan realized, of course, that the weakening of the blue time was a disaster; it would give the darklings free rein to hunt down thousands of people, maybe a lot more than that. His father, his classmates, everyone he knew was in terrible danger.
But he couldn’t keep his mind off one fact: for however long the frozen midnight lasted, Flatland would be erased, and the world would have three dimensions. For a guilty moment Jonathan let himself feel the pleasure the thought gave him—being able to fly for days on end, however far the blue time expanded.
Maybe it would swallow the whole world.
At last midnight came, almost surprising him in his reverie. The earth shuddered, dropping its claims on his body, the chains of gravity finally falling away. He drifted upward, sucking in a deep, rib-cracking breath. Only at midnight did his lungs feel like they filled completely, no longer constrained by the suffocating weight of his own body. The weight of Flatland.
It was crazy to feel guilty about the joy this gave him. It wasn’t his fault the world was ending.
Jonathan launched himself out the window, passing over his father’s car and up onto the neighbor’s roof with one well-practiced bound. There his right foot landed on its usual spot, a circle of cracked shingles marking where so many nightly flights began.
Then he pushed off toward Jessica’s and—as he watched for flying slithers and power lines, calculating the best course down empty roads and across newly harvested fields—his mind kept returning to one thought… Only two more weeks of gravity, and then I’m free.
“Okay, everyone,” Rex said. “Madeleine went into my mind last night.”
Jonathan frowned. The five of them were meeting in Madeleine’s house, seated around her scuffed dining table surrounded by the clutter of tridecagrams and other tangled shapes. But the old woman hadn’t appeared tonight, and Rex had started talking as if she wasn’t coming down. Wasn’t she home?
Where else could she be at midnight?
“You actually let her touch you?” Dess asked.
“Melissa was there to protect me,” Rex said.
Jonathan glanced at Jessica, and they both flinched, waiting for the nasty response they knew was coming, but Dess just coughed into her fist and rolled her eyes. Eerily, the scar the darkling had left over her eye was shaped just like one of Melissa’s.
Jonathan was glad she kept quiet. Tonight Rex was scary enough without anyone provoking him. His expression seemed vacant somehow, as if there were some other creature inside him, showing off the Rex mask it was going to wear while trick-or-treating.
He looked weird enough in daylight, but in the secret hour the new Rex was almost too much to face.
“The darklings remember Samhain,” Rex said.
“So that goth holiday is the real thing, huh?” Dess asked, shaking her head.
“It isn’t a Gothic holiday,” Rex answered. “The Goths were from Asia. Samhain was Celtic.”
“From Asia?” Dess said, then groaned. “No, Rex, not the guys who conquered Rome. I mean the kids in black.”
“Um, Dess?” Melissa said. “Mirror check.”
“This dress is charcoal,” Dess said.
“Probably the Goths had something like Samhain too,” Rex kept going. “A lot of cultures have festivals at the end of October. The Feast of Souls. Something called Shadowfest. The Death of the Sun.”
Jessica raised an eyebrow. “Shadowfest? That sounds… festive.”
Dess let out a long sigh. “Why are we even talking about this? All that pagan stuff is from the Old World, but here in Oklahoma, Halloween is just an excuse to sell a bunch of candy and costumes to little kids. Like Angie said, the darklings hid themselves way before any Europeans got here.”
Jonathan cleared his throat. “Actually, Dess, it’s not just a European thing. You know the Day of the Dead down in Mexico? Even though it’s the same day as All Hallows’ Eve, the natives already had a holiday around then.”
Rex nodded. “And some Native Americans had festivals celebrating the Old Crone around this time.”
Dess laughed. “Excuse me, Rex. The Old Crone?” She looked around at the others. “And what were those other ones? Shadowfest? Death of the Sun? Dawn of the Dead? Is it just me, or do all these holidays have a trying-too-hard-to-be-creepy ring to them?”
“Of course they do,” Rex said, his scary mask unruffled by her teasing. “Look at the bare trees outside, the gray sky, the dead grass everywhere. The word Samhain is Celtic for ‘summer’s end.’ The beginning of winter.” Suddenly Rex’s voice sounded dry, like he’d been out in the desert without water for a few days. “The dying of the light, when warmth turns to cold.”
Everyone was silent for a moment, even Melissa looking a little spooked by Rex. Jonathan heard a creaking noise above his head. So Madeleine was here. But why was she hiding upstairs?