Touching Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page B

Dependability.
    “Yeah, that was me.” The wooden steps bowed slightly under Jessica’s feet as she climbed up onto the porch. She noticed that Jonathan waited until she was all the way up before following, not wanting to test the old planks with their combined weight. He seemed to be limping. What had happened to him on the way home last night?
    “Sorry about my secretary,” Rex said dryly. “He’s a bit distracted lately.”
    “Uh, sure. But he told me you were home. So we came over.”
    Rex took off his glasses, looking into Jessica’s eyes with an intensity that made her look away. Without the glasses, she knew, the world was a blur to Rex in normal time. But the faces of other midnighters were different: he could see them perfectly, daylight or midnight.
    “I thought you were still grounded,” he said.
    “Yeah, but I can see friends once a week.”
    Rex sat down and then glanced at Jonathan. “I’m honored.”
    Jessica eased herself carefully into a lawn chair, half expecting it to collapse. Its aluminum frame was cold even through her wool skirt, and the arms were sandpapery with brown rust.
    “Something happened,” Rex said simply. He knew they hadn’t come by for a chat.
    Jessica looked up at the window next to their heads. It was open, chill gusts sucking the loose mosquito screen in and out as though it were some living membrane.
    “Don’t worry about him,” Rex said, smiling faintly. I keep no secrets from Dad.”
    “We saw something last night,” Jonathan said. He gave the word night the subtle emphasis they all used when they meant the secret hour.
    Rex nodded sagely. “Animal, vegetable, or darkling?”
    “Human,” Jessica said. “Frozen across the street from my house, pointing a camera at my window.”
    Rex frowned, boots scraping along the porch as he drew himself up smaller in the lawn chair. Suddenly he looked the way he did at school: nervous and indecisive. His swagger only appeared in the secret hour or when midnighter business was being discussed. The mention of an ordinary human had deflated him.
    “Like a stalker?”
    “Nothing that normal,” Jonathan said.
    Jessica glanced at him sidelong. Stalkers were normal now?
    “I watched him after the hour ended,” he continued. “The guy was taking pictures exactly at midnight. He had one of those cameras that…” He held up an invisible camera in his hands and sucked his teeth, making a series of hissing noises. “You know, takes a lot of pictures in a row. I think he was trying to see if anything… changed at midnight.”
    “You exposed the film, right?”
    “Um…” Jonathan and Jessica looked at each other.
    “No?” Rex smiled, put his glasses back on, and tipped back in his chair, as though on familiar ground again. “Well, it’s no big deal. The pictures might reveal a shift at midnight. I mean, you probably moved your curtains during the secret hour.” He shrugged. “People tried something called “spirit photography” back in the early 1900s. Especially here in Bixby. But it doesn’t really show anything.”
    “How can you act like this is no big deal?” Jessica cried. “The guy obviously knows about midnight!”
    Rex nodded, rocking his chair slowly. “It’s not unprecedented.”
    “What do you mean?”
    He stood, clumping to the screen door and opening it with a screech.
    “Let me show you something.”
     
    Even with all the windows open, the house had a smell. More than one, in fact. There was old-person smell, like the rest home outside Chicago where Jessica’s grandmother was quietly growing senile. And there was also the distinctive scent of spent cigarettes marinating in water-filled ashtrays. “It’s a safety thing,” Rex said when she raised her eyebrows at a bowl of soggy, disintegrating stogies. “Dad isn’t very good at putting his butts out. The water helps.”
    Under everything else was the insistent smell of cat piss. A big tom splayed across a well-clawed couch watched them