Last time, lots of stalling.

Now,

Four chapters in a row set during the secret hour. I feel the plot is finally upon us, thus making the unnecessary stalling just barely tolerable instead of infuriating. Let’s see how it goes.

7
12:00 A.M.
DARK MOON

“That night the blue dream came again.

[…]

She must have been more tired than she’d realized. Sleep stole up on her so
quietly that dreaming seemed to collide with consciousness. It was as if she
blinked, and everything changed. Suddenly the world was blue, the low hum of the
Oklahoma wind swallowed by silence.”

Fffff! Not a good start. We are still in the “it’s all a dream” stage, which makes me want to punch Jessica. Let’s see if the plot will do it for me.

“The light was exactly the same as in her dream the night before, a deep
indigo that shone from every surface. There were no shadows, no dark corners.
She peered into one of her moving boxes and could see everything inside it with
equal and perfect clarity. Every object seemed to glow softly from within.”

In good news, the narration does a passable job of showing the world Jessica explores as alien and mysterious. It’s no Umineko or even Higanbana with their sharp contrast between the daylight world of humans and the alien world of night defying common sense, but still, the frozen world cloaked in a blue light is a cool setting.

Jessica makes her way to the room of her sister, Beth. Sitting on Beth’s bed, she thinks about how little time she was spending with her recently. Beth didn’t take the move to Bixby well and resisted it all the way, so eventually the family got into a habit of mostly avoiding her. Jessica admonishes herself for not thinking about her sister’s problems.

It’s a nice enough moment on its own, and then it turns creepy when Jessica puts her hand on Beth over the covers and feels how hard and unmoving her body is. She removes the covers and…

“Her sister’s face was chalk white, as motionless as a statue. The half-opened
eyes glimmered like green glass marbles. One white and frozen hand clutched the
tangled sheets like a pale claw.”

Naturally scared, Jessica runs away to her parents. She couldn’t bring herself to open the door into their room, however, afraid she would find them the same as Beth. She calls them a few times, but there is no response.

“Jess backed away from the door, suddenly terrified that it would open, that
something might come out. This nightmare might have anything in store for her.
The unfamiliar house seemed completely alien now, blue and cold and empty of
anything alive.”

The reference to dreaming aside, it’s pretty cool.

You know, it occurs to me that the first draft of the book probably was solely from Jessica’s perspective. The information flow feels right for it. Jessica arrives into a new town, meets a kinda weird boy who stares at her too intently and whom she probably notices following her around (it’s not mentioned in the book, but seriously, all-black attire, dyed-black hair), then meets a weird girl talking about funny dreams (and of course it’s clear they are not just dreams). She then has a funny dream, though it’s filled with wonder. After another two cryptic conversation, she has this: a nightmare where her whole family is dead.

But bits from the SEES perspective rather undermine the tension here. We know more or less what’s going on: the world freezes for an hour, there are people capable of acting during that hour, Jessica is one of them, though she didn’t know it yet. As such, it’s kinda hard to worry about Jessica’s family since we know they’ll be fine soon.

So, anyway, Jessica locks herself inside her room and tries to rationalize the events by thinking about the meaning of her “dream” and deciding it’s about Beth needing her. She resolves to be nicer to her sister tomorrow.

Then she hears scratching at a window. It’s some kind of wild cat. She lets it in and carefully tries to pet it, but the cat is terrified of her. It scratches at the door of her room, so she openes it, then follows it to the entrance and lets out of the house, wondering why it didn’t just go back through the window.

She steps out of the house, too, and sees a giant moon rising.

“Jessica swallowed, her mind spinning as she tried to make sense of the
awesome sight. The huge half orb consumed almost a quarter of the sky,
stretching across the horizon as big as a sunset. But it wasn’t red or yellow or
any other hue Jessica could name. It felt like a dark spot burned into her
vision, as if she had looked at the sun too long. It hung colorlessly in the
sky, coal black and blindingly bright at the same time, merciless against her
eyes.”

Yeah, the imagery so far is the strongest part of the book. Still doesn’t make much sense, though, as

 “Jessica glanced up at the moon again and with a flash of realization saw its
true color: a bright darkness, a hungry blankness, a sucking up of light. The
blue light in this dream didn’t come from objects themselves, as she’d thought
at first. And it didn’t come directly from the giant moon above. Rather, the
cold, lifeless blue was a leftover, the last remnant of light that remained after the dark moon had leached all
the other colors from the spectrum.”

Pretty sure something like that won’t make objects glow in the dark as was established earlier.

Jessica hears the cat again, waiting for her, and follows it. The cat leads her away from home, then stops and turns into a furred snake.

“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.”

More snakes emerge and form a circle around Jessica. She, however, tries to not lose her composure and walks out of the circle, snakes parting before her. She turns back to taunt the snakes:

“She turned and called, “No wonder you taste like chicken. You are
chicken.”

This is instantly punished by a growl behind her. Here’s a free tip, kids: no one-liners unless you have a boomstick. If you do, however, it’s all of the one-liners, all the time.

Jessica turns around and sees a panther. Snakes behind her move closer, cutting off ways to escape.

8
12:00
SEARCH PARTY

This chapter is from Dess’ perspective. Melissa is scanning to locate Jessica and senses some trouble. Rex is with her. Dess, meanwhile, is busy preparing weapons. Rex gathered a bunch of steel details “untouched by human hands.” Dess is breathing names into them. Each name is a random word with exactly thirteen letters in it. As far as magic rituals go, it’s pretty neat. I like that use of modern stuff made mythical by ascribing it unusual properties and creating rules according to which some random junk can be a powerful artifact.

Dess likes the process too:


“She hadn’t heard him
approach, lost as she was in the pleasures of steel.”

That sounds dirty.

So, the three ride their bikes towards Jessica. Dess is still skeptical about there being any trouble, in part because it’s September, 5, which has no bad karma attached since the sum of 9 (September being the ninth month) and 5 is 14, the subtraction would be 4 and multiplication – 45. The number of letters in ‘September five’ is thirteen, which is good luck.

Still, as they make their way towards their destination, they see more and more “slithers” – the name of those furred snakes. Only those ones have bat wings and fly above them. Dess then remembers that once upon a time September was seventh month, not ninth, hence its name with “septem” root, so, combined with that being fifth day of the month, that amounts to twelve, which doesn’t bode well.

How does it work, though? I mean, yes, September was once seventh month, but since then two month were added to the calendar, pushing dates around. Wouldn’t Dess need to track which day it is according to Roman calendar as if it was never modified to see if there are any ominous signs? Or is the presence of “septem” root enough to count for the purposes of her numerology?

I sure hope the rules of it would be explained.

9
12:00 A.M.
RUMBLE

Jessica runs from the panther, jumping over the line of snakes. Apparently, in this world she is faster than normal, and her jumps carry her farther than she would expect. The panther is still faster, however, and soon Jessica finds herself in a dead end. The only way for her to proceed is over a chain fence, so she crawls it quickly. For a moment, she hangs on the other side, her eyes locked with that of the panther.

“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.”

She keeps using that word, saying stuff like, “Don’t get all psychosomatic on me” and such. I don’t think it means what she thinks it means.

But that works to her benefit. As you may notice, the word contains thirteen letters, so Jessica breathes it into the fence, and the panther, who leaped at it, is electrocuted with blue sparks flying everywhere.

The panther isn’t dead, but it does get spooked and limps away to find another way in.

Jessica is then attacked by a slither. It aims for the eyes, as is right and proper, so I’m going to call it Boo, a miniature giant space snake. Jessica manages to cover her face with her hand from Boo, though.

“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.”

That’s nicely creepy, though I would be disappointed if there are no lingering effects.

Jessica smashes Boo against the fence, which seems to have lost some of its power, but still has enough mojo to fry poor Boo dead. Rest in peace, Boo.

More slithers come from a hole below the fence, so Jessica runs, trying to go in an opposite direction from where the panther was headed. She makes her way on a street and finds a familiar landmark. She sees flying slithers in the sky, but they don’t approach her. She heads home, but the panther is waiting for her, blocking her way.

There is nowhere to hide, so Jessica panics. She notices a car motionless on the road and runs to it, thinking of getting inside. But of course the car is frozen, same as its driver. She jumps on it, getting away from the slithers crawling around, and the panther draws near.

Then SEES arrive, Dess in front. She hurls a metal disc at the panther, burning it and scaring the beast away. She also makes slithers scatter by tossing a coin at them.

I should note that Dess spouts One-liners all the time during this scene, mostly basing them on names she gave her weaponry:

“Wow,” came a familiar voice, “Hypochondriac killed the cat.”

“Whatever it was, it turned out to be no match for the mighty power of
Hypochondriac.”

“They departed somewhat overzealously,” Dess said, giggling. Her eyes were
wide, as if the encounter with the panther had been some exciting fairground
ride.”

Well, since she actually does have a boomstick, if a bit unorthodox, I can’t really complain.

Rex comforts Jessica, asking her if she’s fine, telling her not to worry as everything is over and getting her off the car, explaining that it’s actually moving pretty fast and will unfreeze soon enough.

Wait, again, how does it work? The raindrops unfreeze at Jessica’s touch, but the car remains motionless? It couldn’t be that objects remain utterly motionless even when touched and just have an ability to gain impulse. That would mean they have zero kinetic energy, and on molecular level that means absolute zero temperature, which would just freeze our protagonists faster than they could realize what’s happening. Is it the size of an object that matters? But cars are not solid, so wouldn’t that just send parts of it flying forward?

Ah yes.

We also learn that SEES calls the panther ‘darkling.’ And it’s a good place to talk about how I feel about the monsters here. So far… it’s kinda eh. It may be just my preference, but I always thought that the most creepy monsters have some human traits. Either they are humanoid figure twisted and broken, or they look almost human but something is wrong with them, or they combine animal and human traits in a grotesque amalgamation. The panther… It’s scary, but it’s not creepy. I don’t really have a visceral reaction to it, it’s just something that presents a challenge to the protagonists rather than something that can truly affect the readers. Snakes are a bit better, mostly because of that first transformation from a cat and because of their attack method, but I do think monsters here lack the “oomph” appropriate for that alien frozen world. Something like Shadows from Persona (their basic black blob version, I don’t like many of the battle designs much) would probably work better.

The chapter ends with Melissa ominously proclaiming that Jessica’s eyes are wrong.

Well, that’s it for now. Initially I wanted to do the whole secret hour sequence in one go, but it’s running long as it is, and the post is late anyway. Plus, the chase is over. See you next time for some exposition chapters.