Last time, metaphor for sex so open, I’m not even sure it counts as a metaphor. Now, two long chapters in a row. Pretty full of events and new information, too.
7
11:24 P.M.
DARKLING MANOR
That just makes me think about a murder mystery among darklings, set in a proper closed circle manor.
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| I wouldn’t put it past Grandfather |
In any case, the chapter begins where the last one ended, with Rex being shocked at melissa not telling him about someone being after Jessica and Melissa pondering how Rex just won’t understand. It’s hard being a teenage telepath unable to touch anyone without invading their mind and losing herself, and only being free from the pressure of all foreign thought during the secret hour normal people are unable to perceive. It’s hard and nobody understands.
To be specific, here is her reasoning for not telling Rex:
“Why hadn’t she told him? The reasons all seemed to splinter as she thought of them, dividing into more and more . . . because she hadn’t been really sure she’d heard it. Because you couldn’t get upset about every stray thought. Because Jessica Day wasn’t her problem anyway.”
Basically, she didn’t really think about it properly. She just… went with what felt right for her, which meant dismissing the potential danger to Jessica.
Her thoughts drift away from the issue, contributing to my theory that she doesn’t really consciously think about the issues of morality and such and just goes with the flow of her misery, and she contemplates for a bit how it sucks for her to always be able to hear people’s thoughts, especially when they synchronize over many people watching the same programs, laughing at the same jokes, being excited at the same moment. You know, what we call “shared experience.”
“Didn’t any of these brainless wonders ever notice that TV shows were called programs? The same word that meant a bunch of numbers stuck into a computer to make it dance for its masters?”
Basically, she is this close to calling them sheeple. Which is certainly realistic, she is a teenager whose powers make her think she knows people better than themselves. Still, passages like that probably contribute the most to making her unsympathetic. I’m not exactly fond of TV myself and honestly don’t remember when was the last time I actually watched it, but she consistently dismisses the majority of people based on rather shallow reasoning and seems to be unable to see her own pettiness.
Again, it’s pretty realistic, given her situation, but the end result is a person I don’t care to meet. Well, let’s see where the book will take her from there. There is certainly potential in her to be utterly terrifying, as I discussed in the previous book, and there is a potential for her to be sympathetic as well, depending on how her development is handled.
Anyway, Melissa catches a stray thought – “We can’t be late.” – which flavor she doesn’t like, and follows its source.
“She took the next left, through a stone gate and into a plantation of McMansions, giant new cookie-cutter houses stamped onto tiny lots just out of the reach of Tulsa property taxes. The thought had come from in here, she was positive.
No one seemed to be awake; half the houses still hadn’t been moved into. She could see the curtainless windows and feel the empty rooms behind them. Ugly as they were, Melissa dreamed of living in a house like these one day – unstained by years of human habitation, no sleepless
worries seeping out of the walls, no residue of ancient petty arguments.”
Huh, you know, with that talk of living somewhere else, a thought struck me: why doesn’t Melissa just move out of Bixby? I mean, most midnight talents would go unnoticed outside of Bixby: Rex wouldn’t be able to see traces of darklings because there aren’t any, Jonathan can fly only during the secret hour, Jessica’s talent is about imposing normal laws inside abnormal territory. Dess is a polymath, which would be noticed, but can be chalked up to her being a genius. But telepathy is different. Melissa can read people’s minds even during normal time.
Yet, it doesn’t appear like the world at large has telepaths, even though Midnighters can be born outside of Bixby, as evidenced by Jonathan and Jessica. That rather heavily implies the talents, or at least telepathy specifically, manifest only inside areas with the secret hour. It is consistent with Midnighters awakening to the secret hour over a couple of days instead of instantly as well as them developing photophobia only inside Bixby.
So, wouldn’t moving away fix Melissa’s problems? She kinda hates being constantly pressured by all those foreign thoughts, but wouldn’t they disappear once she leaves the area?
I guess it’s possible that once a talent is awakened it never goes away, but still, you’d expect it to be addressed at least in passing.
Anyway, the guy Melissa felt was the same guy she felt before, the one who thought “We must have Jessica Day.” He is driving, however, so Melissa soon loses him. It’s not a total loss since they are close to the first location where she felt him, so they figure there must be something interesting somewhere nearby.
They drive around, with Rex focusing on finding traces of Focus, and soon locate a house covered in marks of darklings’ presence.
‘Darkling Manor,’ Rex said quietly. ‘Not a clean brick on the joint.’
Is it just me, or do those title drops seem more blatant in this book than in previous one?
They go to investigate, even though it’s close to midnight and they don’t want to be here during the secret hour.
Inside they find more of the same: the house is marked so completely, Rex can see clearly without his glasses. All metal is removed from the kitchen, too, making it friendly to darklings. They go upstairs and find a room with a heater on, indicating someone was there for a prolonged period of time. On a shelf Rex finds a set of something looking like domino, though under closer examination signs of lore similar to what he reads are revealed. They are slightly different, however.
‘But they’re not quite the same,’ he muttered. ‘It’s like a slightly different alphabet. . .’
Melissa didn’t respond. She steadied herself with one hand on the floor. The feel of him parsing the symbols was dizzying; his mind battered hers with a frenzy of calculation.
‘Or maybe some of them are signs I don’t know,’ he said, picking through them, lifting one for closer inspection. ‘Symbols for concepts that don’t exist in the lore.’
How did he learn the lore signs, anyway? Was there a dictionary in English somewhere? But that would defeat any point of writing the lore in another language. Does his talent allows him to understand the language? But then seeing signs he can’t understand would provoke a greater reaction, one would think, especially since he’s stated to hate not controlling the information.
Basically, what is lore signs and why are they used instead of normal languages?
Well, the actual answer is that the author wanted to draw some pretty pictures:
These are the talent signs, though I don’t remember which one is which, except that the central one is Jessica’s.
That’s pretty much the only reason I can see so far for lore being written in made-up hieroglyphs instead of actual languages, so I hope you enjoy it. Also would make nice designs for Command Seals.
In any case, Melissa speculates if maybe those signs are used to communicate with darklings, but Rex objects on the grounds that darklings hate written language along with every other idea new to them (though presumably they are used to it, unlike the number thirteen and steel). Melissa points out the signs were definitely touched by darklings since Rex can see them clearly.
The argument is interrupted by the man returning to the house. He’s still outside, but approaching fast.
“We’re just going to make it, no thanks to you, Angie.”
Gah!
I didn’t comment on it before, but the thoughts Melissa hears are unmarked in the text – no italics, no quotation marks, nothing. So, suddenly encountering this name in an otherwise unrelated narrative was pretty damn jarring after my Umineko joke.
Between that and the first chapter ending with “Tails,” I’m convinced the book knows what I’m doing and actively fucks with me. If I were to suddenly disappear, you know what to blame now.
Anyway, naturally Rex and Melissa don’t manage to escape before the man arrives.
“She stood, still dizzy. For some reason, mindcasting in this house was like walking through syrup.”
Probably why Melissa noticed him too late.
They quickly put dominoes in place and hide in another bedroom, in a big wardrobe, gambling on the man not bothering to check the rooms since he’s in a hurry.
“Rex’s mind calmed, and she could feel now that there were two of them downstairs, the man and . . . Angie. The woman radiated only calm; no wonder she’d been invisible to Melissa before now.”
Yeah, after jumping from a skyscraper, I imagine not much fazes Angie anymore. And yeah, I’m totally running with her being Umineko Angie until I see some heavy contradiction.
“‘Like you could handle this on your own,’ the woman said in a voice so soft that it mostly reached Melissa as thought. She had a lock on Angie’s mind now: it was saturated with a sickly sweet contempt for the man. Angie didn’t need him here in the first place – he could barely
interpret lore symbols, couldn’t see the big picture, was always lugging around his stupid camera, which of course never captured the spooks anyway. If he wasn’t related to the patriarch . . .”
So totally running with Umineko…
Anyway, Angie and the unnamed man go into the master bedroom and throw dominoes on the floor right before midnight. The secret hour starts with Rex and Melissa still undiscovered.
8
12:00 A.M.
HALFLING
…Seriously? I mean, OK, quite a few character titles so far were silly and rather contrived, but… seriously?
Anyway, Rex wants to run, while Melissa is more interested in Angie’s mind and refuses to leave without touching it. Rex leaves her and runs outside to the car to get some supplies. There isn’t much, since they didn’t expect a serious fight, so he breaks out an emergency weapon: a hubcap of Melissa’s car is enchanted by Dess with thirty nine symbols and given a powerful name. Rex hopes that that, along with lesser weapons, would be enough for whatever they are going to face.
He runs back to melissa, finding her whimpering over feeling something really sick coming their way.
Together they run outside, Melissa still shaken and crying openly, and break into an occupied house across the street, hoping to find some tools they can use. And indeed, in a kitchen they find knives of stainless steel.
They find a room without people inside, and Rex erects an improvised defense by sticking knives into the door and naming each of them. He uses a page from Scrabble dictionary, since it lists words by length. That is a good way to engage with the supernatural rules of this book. Pretty simple, but still good, I approve. Though Rex really should have thought about it earlier and spread the idea around.
He runs out of knives at twelve, which is a bad number for defenses, since it turns the door into a darkling magnet. Melissa comes to the resque with her personal knife named with three words thirteen letters long each.
Thus, the defenses on the door are complete.
They look out of the window to see the approaching darkling.
“The thing came down on undulating wings, two leathery sails that billowed from long, multijointed arms. Its hands, long-taloned and grasping the air with compulsive little twitches, must have been thirty feet apart. Its spiked tail whipped through the wind with every beat of the wings, as if to counterbalance the beast’s grotesque cargo.
Its body was thin, the darkling part of it anyway, ribs showing through its leathery flesh. The thing’s spindly hind legs stumbled, trembling feebly as it landed on the rooftop across the street, and its wings took one steadying stroke as it gained its footing.
Melissa, still facing away from the window, made a choking noise.
It had no head. Not a darkling head, anyway. A human torso seemed to be submerged into the creature’s flesh, and a half-visible human face stared glassily from its emaciated chest. Two secondary arms thrust from the sunken torso, ending in the hands and fingers of a person – a child, Rex now saw – which were clenched as if in pain.
‘It thinks . . .,’ Melissa rasped,’. . . like us.’”
Yay! Creepy humanoid monsters! At last, my wish came true!
…
Wait.
Doesn’t that mean that the book continues to fuck with me?
…
Damn it.
So, their horror over seeing the new abomination is interrupted by a slither breaking the window and biting Rex into his chest. The slither is quickly killed by Melissa, though Rex still suffers from his chest being frozen, which constrains his breath.
They erect defenses on the window, using the remnants of their supplies and cables from a computer located in the room. Slithers and some lesser darklings try to attack them, but they manage to hold them at bay.
In a moment of calm they briefly exchange words about the abomination, coming to a conclusion (supported by Melissa’s reading) that it’s some kind of hybrid between a darkling and a Midnighter.
Then they are attacked in full force. Defenses hold against darklings, and Melissa and Rex kill slithers that manage to crawl inside under the door. For a moment it seems like monsters are giving up and retreating, but then Rex hears a noise from the rooftop: a darkling is coming. Melissa, of course, hears its thoughts and just faces the door grimly.
“Terror threatened to paralyze him, but then Rex’s mind went back to what she’d said: Tomorrow we’ll touch again. His head swam at the thought. Finally there was some promise of something more between him and Melissa. They were not going to die tonight.”
Ah yes, getting to touch a girl. The thought that motivated many warriors through history.
It doesn’t come to a battle, though, as Rex names his hubcap, making it burn with blue flame (I guess we are going with metal being activated upon naming now instead of naming it beforehand and then just using. It’s more dramatic, sure, but consistency suffers.), the darkling feels the weapon appearing and retreats.
Soon, the “halfling” (seriously, calling a creepy abomination that?) leaves as well as the secret hour draws to a close.
A few minutes before it ends, Rex and Melissa make their way downstairs, realizing that people living in the house won’t appreciate their actions.
‘They’re all leaving. The entourage too.’ Melissa smiled. ‘We’ll have a couple of minutes, but I don’t think our motionless friends are going to like what we did to their house.’
He looked around the room. ‘Could be you’re right.’
‘Damn kids with their senseless vandalism,’ she said.
Rex sighed, thinking of the broken window downstairs. ‘They might have an alarm system, come to think of it.’
I would appreciate a bit more remorse. I mean, sure, the situation was dire, so I can’t hold their actions against them, but they still invaded someone’s home, broke their window, demolished a computer, stuck knives inside a door, leaving a rather creepy picture behind, etc.
Melissa grabs her knife, and they make their way outside. The house does have an alarm, but they manage to drive away before the security arrives, as well as avoid said security. Not sure I like it. With an emphasis on human opponents this time, you’d think security and the police would make for nice antagonists. Well, maybe they are going to play a role later.
Once Melissa sure they are safe, she suggest Rex gets some quick-acting poison. At first he thinks she asks it for herself, but she corrects him:
‘Not for me, moron.’ She shook her head. ‘You know the midnighter inside that monster?’
‘Yeah?’
‘She’s still alive in there, somewhere. I could feel her. They keep her mind alive so they can use the human part of her to think in signs and symbols. But she knows what’s happened to her.’
That’s suitably horrifying. Ah, fates worse than death. Didn’t think I’d encounter them in this book. I guess the author wanted to top the previous one or thought he could get away with more now that he had an established fan base. Either way, it’s some nice horror.
Rex then thinks the poison is for the girl inside the darkling, but Melissa corrects him again: the darklings keep her alive to think in signs and symbols for them, since apparently they can’t do it themselves, but she’s dying. Soon, they would need a replacement, and since she’s a seer, Rex is an obvious candidate.
On that cheery note, the chapter ends. Tune in next time for some breather chapters.