The Secret Hour Read online

Chapter 3

  3

  12:00 A. M.

  THE SILENT STORM

  Jessica woke up because the sound of the rain just. . . stopped.

  It changed all at once. The sound didn't fade away, trickling down into nothingness like rain was supposed to. One moment the whole world was chattering with the downpour, lulling her to sleep. The next, silence fell hard, as if someone had pushed mute on a TV remote control.

  Jessica's eyes opened, the sudden quiet echoing around her like a door slam.

  She sat up, looking around the bedroom in confusion. She didn't know what had woken her - it took a few seconds just to remember where she was. The dark room was a jumble of familiar and unfamiliar things. Her old writing desk was in the wrong corner, and someone had added a skylight to the ceiling. There were too many windows, and they were bigger than they should have been.

  But then the shapes of boxes piled everywhere, clothing and books spilling out of their half-open maws, brought it all back. Jessica Day and her belongings were strangers here, barely settled, like pioneers on a bare plain. This was her new room, her family's new house. She lived in Bixby, Oklahoma, now.

  "Oh, yeah," she said sadly.

  Jessica took a deep breath. It smelled like rain. That was right - it had been raining hard all night. . . but now it was suddenly quiet.

  Moonlight filled the room. Jessica lay awake, transfixed by how strange everything looked. It wasn't just the unfamiliar house; the Oklahoma night itself felt somehow wrong. The windows and skylight glowed, but the light seemed to come from everywhere, blue and cold. There were no shadows, and the room looked flat, like an old and faded photograph.

  Jessica still wondered what had awakened her. Her heart beat quickly, as if something surprising had happened a moment ago. But she couldn't remember what.

  She shook her head and lay back down, closing her eyes, but sleep wouldn't come. Her old bed seemed uncomfortable, somehow wrong, as if it didn't like being here in Bixby.

  "Great," Jessica muttered. Just what she needed: a sleepless night to go with her exhausting days of unpacking, fighting with her little sister, Beth, and trying to find her way around the Bixby High maze. At least her first week at school was almost over. It would finally be Friday tomorrow.

  She looked at the clock. It said 12:07, but it was set fast, to Jessica time. It was probably just about midnight. Friday at last.

  A blue radiance filled the room, almost as bright as when the light was on. When had the moon come out? High, dark clouds had rolled over Bixby all day, obscuring the sun. Even under the roof of clouds the sky was huge here in Oklahoma, the whole state as flat as a piece of paper. That afternoon her dad had said that the lightning flashes on the horizon were striking all the way down in Texas. (Being unemployed in Bixby had started him watching the Weather Channel. )

  The cold, blue moonlight seemed brighter every minute.

  Jessica slid out of bed. The rough timbers of the floor felt warm under her feet. She stepped carefully over the clutter, the moonlight picking out every half-unpacked box clearly. The window glowed like a neon sign.

  When she looked outside, Jessica's fingers clenched and she uttered a soft cry.

  The air outside sparkled, shimmering like a snow globe full of glitter.

  Jessica blinked and rubbed her eyes, but the galaxy of hovering diamonds didn't go away.

  There were thousands of them, each suspended in the air as if by its own little invisible string. They seemed to glow, filling the street and her room with the blue light. Some were just inches from the window, perfect spheres no bigger than the smallest pearl, translucent as beads of glass.

  Jessica took a few steps backward and sat down on her bed.

  "Weird dream," she said aloud, and then wished she hadn't. It didn't seem right saying that. Wondering if she were dreaming made her feel more. . . awake somehow.

  And this was already too real: no unexplained panic, no watching herself from above, no feeling as if she were in a play and didn't know her lines - just Jessica Day sitting on her bed and being confused.

  And the air outside full of diamonds.

  Jessica slipped under her covers and tried to go back to sleep. Unconscious sleep. But behind closed eyelids she felt even more awake. The feel of the sheets, the sound of her breathing, the slowly building body warmth inside the covers were all exactly right. The realness of everything gnawed at her.

  And the diamonds were beautiful. She wanted to see them up close.

  Jessica got up again.

  She pulled on a sweatshirt and rummaged around for shoes, taking a minute to find a matching pair among the moving boxes. She crept out of her room and down the hall. The still unfamiliar house looked uncanny in the blue light. The walls were bare and the living room empty, as if no one lived here.

  The clock in the kitchen read exactly midnight.

  Jessica paused at the front door, anxious for a moment. Then she pushed it open.

  This had to be a dream: millions of diamonds filled the air, floating over the wet, shiny asphalt. Only a few inches apart, they stretched as far as Jessica could see, down the street and up into the sky. Little blue gems no bigger than tears.

  No moon was visible. Thick clouds still hung over Bixby, but now they looked as hard and unmoving as stone. The light seemed to come from the diamonds, as if an invasion of blue fireflies had been frozen in midair.

  Jessica's eyes widened. It was so beautiful, so still and wondrous, that her anxiety was instantly gone.

  She raised a hand to touch one of the blue gems. The little diamond wobbled, then ran onto her finger, cold and wet. It disappeared, leaving nothing but a bit of water.

  Then Jessica realized what the diamond had been. A raindrop! The floating diamonds were the rain, somehow hanging motionless in the air. Nothing moved on the street or in the sky. Time was frozen around her.

  In a daze, she stepped out into the suspended rain. The drops kissed her face coolly, turning into water as she collided with them. They melted instantly, dotting her sweatshirt as she walked, wetting her hands with water no colder than September rain. She could smell the fresh scent of rain, feel the electricity of recent lightning, the trapped vitality of the storm all around her. Her hairs tingled, laughter bubbling up inside her.

  But her feet were cold, she realized, her shoes soaking. Jessica knelt down to look at the walk. Motionless splashes of water dotted the concrete, where raindrops had been frozen just as they'd hit the ground. The whole street shimmered with the shapes of splashes, like a garden of ice flowers.

  A raindrop hovered right in front of her nose. Jessica leaned nearer, closing one eye and peering into the little sphere of motionless water. The houses on the street, the arrested sky, the whole world was there inside, upside down and warped into a circle, like looking through a crystal ball. Then she must have gotten too close - the raindrop shivered and jumped into motion, falling onto her cheek and running down it like a cold tear.

  "Oh," she murmured. Everything was frozen until she touched it, like breaking a spell.

  Jessica smiled as she stood, looking around for more wonders.

  All the houses on the street seemed to be glowing, their windows filled with blue light. She looked back at her own house. The roof was aglitter with splashes, and a motionless spout of water gushed from the meeting of two gutters at one corner. The windows glowed dully, but there hadn't been any lights on inside. Maybe it wasn't just the raindrops. The houses, the still clouds above, everything seemed to be incandescent with blue light.

  Where did that cold light come from? she wondered. There was more to this dream than frozen time.

  Then Jessica saw that she had left a trail, a tunnel through the rain where she had released the hovering rain. It was Jessica shaped, like a hole left by a cartoon character rocketing through a wall.

  She laughed and broke into a run, reaching out to gra
b handfuls of raindrops from the air, all alone in a world of diamonds.

  The next morning Jessica Day woke up smiling.

  The dream had been so beautiful, as perfect as the raindrops hovering in the air. Maybe it meant that Bixby wasn't such a creepy place after all.

  The sun shone brightly into her room, accompanied by the sound of water dripping from the trees onto the roof. Even piled with boxes, it felt like her room, finally. Jessica lay in bed, luxuriating in a feeling of relief. After months of getting used to the idea of moving, the weeks of saying good-bye, the days of packing and unpacking, she finally felt as if the whirlwind were winding down.

  Jessica's dreams weren't usually very profound. When she was nervous about a test, she had test-hell nightmares. When her little sister was driving Jessica crazy, the Beth of her dreams was a twenty-story monster who chased her. But Jessica knew that this dream had a deeper meaning. Time had stopped back in Chicago, her life frozen while she waited to leave all her friends and everything she knew, but now that was over. The world could start again, once she let it.

  Maybe she and her family would be happy here after all.

  And it was Friday.

  The alarm rang. She pulled herself from under the covers and swung herself out of bed.

  The moment her feet touched the floor, a chill ran up her spine. She was standing on her sweatshirt, which lay next to her bed in a crumpled pile.

  It was soaking wet.