Ash and Darkness (Translucent #3) (9 page)

Chapter 10

I slammed my
front door, locked it, deadbolted it, backed into my bedroom, shaking. My eyes darted across the dark rectangle of the doorway, the empty hallway beyond. I wheezed from exhaustion, gasping, throat tight with fear.

Had it followed me?

I pictured its smoky body marching through the deserted streets, passing right through walls, making a beeline straight for me.

What was it? What did it want?

Ashley’s diary. The answer. I still had it. By now my frozen knuckles had turned white from gripping the book so tightly.

Light. I needed light.

I set down the diary, fumbled around for a candle, and held a trembling match up to the wick. It took several tries. Finally, the wick caught and a flickering orange filled the room. I lit another candle, and another. Every candle I had—twenty-four in all—until the room glowed like a church. 

I still didn’t feel safe.

I would
never
feel safe. Not here, not in this nightmare world.

Why had she hidden her diary in the sewer? Why the riddle? Why not just leave it in her room? Thoughts flashed in and out of my brain, still wired off adrenaline. Maybe because she didn’t want someone—or some
thing
—to find it.

I cracked the diary open under a candle, read from the first page.

December 26

Dad came back from South Carolina today and gave this to me, so, here goes my lame attempt at keeping a diary . . .

A creak sounded in the living room. My gaze snapped to the doorway, my pulse drummed. Nothing.
I’ll hear the door open, I’ll hear it come in.

I went back to reading.

He said he bought it for me because he was gone for Christmas, but I know why he really got it. It’s my stupid sleepwalking. He treats me like I’m fragile and I might break at any moment. He didn’t get Emory anything. Wow, three lines in and I’m already confessing my sob story. This is going to get really morbid. Okay, I know I’m being ADD, but this sticky stuff on the pages is getting really annoying.

I couldn’t focus. My gaze kept flicking back to the hallway, thinking something was there. Just the flickering candlelight. I rose to shut the door, then collapsed again and continued reading the diary of the girl I’d murdered. At the reminder, an uncomfortable sensation stirred deep in my stomach.

December 29

I woke on the beach this morning with blood on my hands and no memory of how it got there. They took me to the hospital because I had hypothermia. I hate my life. Why can’t I just be normal?

The pages were rumpled, and the ink had bled into splotches. I recognized the pattern. Dried tears.

A lump formed in my own throat.

January 1

Something really weird happened last night. I made a New Year’s resolution to learn how to control my sleepwalking, and then a voice spoke in my head and said, “I can fix you, Ashley.” I don’t believe in ghosts, but I swear something really weird is going on. I think it’s this sticky stuff.

I stared at the page.

Dark matter had spoken to Ashley just like it had spoken to me. It had preyed on her weaknesses, her vulnerabilities.

The next entry gave me chills.

January 2

It says if I put it on, it will heal me.

A loud thump startled me, and I jolted back from the pages, eyes wide. Outside. It came from outside. Heart slamming, I peeked out into the hallway.

The front door was still shut.

I hesitated, then tucked the diary into the back of my shorts—I was
not
losing it. My fingers closed around the nearest candle, and I crept toward the foyer, all my nerves on high alert. Any moment, that creepy four-foot midget shadow would pop into view and stride toward me, I was sure of it.

The hardwood floor creaked underfoot. I was so fucking sick of sneaking through dark houses.

Another bump pricked my ears, and my eyes honed in on the windows. Movement beyond. I blew out the candle, so whatever was out there couldn’t see in. Blackness. Gradually, as my night vision acclimated, the dim blue windows separated from the darkness. I crept forward, pressed my forehead to the glass.

Where the hell was the moon? I hadn’t seen it once.

The driveway glowed a ghostly silver in the starlight. A strange lump drew my gaze, and I strained to make it out. A trashcan lay on its side, spilling garbage bags. The cause of the thump.

As I stared, the trashcan rolled to the side and something stood up behind it, what at first looked like a gigantic praying mantis. I recoiled as the animal stepped out of the shadow.

No, just a pelican. A
pelican?

What was a pelican doing this far inland?

It waddled around the spilt trash and began stabbing the bags with its shovel-like beak. Feasting on my trash, apparently. Like I cared. Go ahead.

But as it gorged itself with savage ferocity, I felt my upper lip curl. It didn’t move right, like there was something very wrong with it. And there was a hole in its wing.

Enough of this. Everything freaked me out at night, and I was burning through my candles by staying awake. I could figure all this stuff out in the morning when I could actually
see
.

I was about to turn back to my room when out of the corner of my eye, a glimmer of light winked between two tree branches. I spun back to the window, scarcely breathing.

C’monnn, where’d you go?

Then it winked again, a tiny blue-white dot nestled up against the dark mountains. This time I could pinpoint where it was coming from—the Riviera, floating among the sea of blacked out mansions overlooking Santa Barbara.

I’d seen a light up there yesterday, too.

It took me
forever to find the light again through my telescope—row after row of dark houses, it was like finding a needle in a haystack—and when I did I scarcely believed my eyes. Slowly I lifted my hands off the device, careful not to bump it and ruin my delicate adjustments.

I’d set up the tripod on my roof, and I had the anomaly centered perfectly in the field of view.

It was a house.

A Mediterranean-style house with red tile roofs, balconies, wrought iron railings. But the house itself was dark. It was the garage. Set into the garage door, a row of grimy windows exuded a harsh, sputtering blue light which spilled into the street in blinding ribbons.

I stared into the eyepiece, mesmerized.

In an abandoned city without power, where nothing at all worked, there was a random garage on a random street on a random hill that housed an inexplicable source of blue light.

I had to find out what it was.

The eerie sight brought a sinister chill, though, and I let out a shiver. My gut told me to wait until morning, that it would be safer to go in daylight.

But what if the light was gone when I woke up? What if I couldn’t see it during the day? What if that
thing
got me first? This could be my only chance.

I was already climbing down the ladder, drawn to the light like a mindless moth.

Up close, the
light was even more sinister. I stood in the driveway, the dark city at my back, panting from my bike ride up the switchbacks of Loma Media Road.

Light poured from the garage windows, bathing me in an unearthly blue. A deep rumbling emanated from inside, rattling the windows, quaking the ground beneath my feet, shaking bits of dust from the roof.

I surveyed the mansion, considering my options. It was an attached garage, windows too high to look through, door made of an impregnable slab of oxidized copper. Not even a handle to try. Probably a lineup of Lamborghinis and Porsches inside. The easiest entrance would most likely be through the house.

The humming grew louder, buzzing the cartilage in my knees. Like machinery.

I couldn’t even hear myself think.

Maybe that was why I ignored the fear stabbing my gut and walked right up to the house’s front door and tried the handle. Unlocked. I pushed the door in and slipped inside.

A dark living room. Empty. Light from the garage spilled in through the huge windows and lit a plush living room, pearl-white leather furniture, glass coffee table piled with magazines. I glanced at them as I passed.
Airman Magazine, Guardian, The Combat Edge.

Military and Air Force magazines. Huh.

In the dark kitchen—all modern stainless steel and granite countertops—a glowing, flickering blue rectangle outlined the door to the garage. Bingo.

I opened it, and stepped over a pair of black combat boots into a foyer-like space lined with coat hangers and shelves. The light came from beyond, and I shielded my eyes, slunk forward into the hazy odor of smoke and burnt electricity. As the rest of the garage came into view, my heart pounded at the back of my throat. I swallowed, then peeked around the corner.

At first, squinting into the glare, I had no idea what I was looking at. Then, one by one, the details registered.

Fully decked out in suit and helmet, a human being—a
real
human being—crouched over a boxlike contraption, wielding the dazzling, crackling blue-white flame of an arc welder. Anchored to the cement nearby, a propane generator growled and rattled like a monster trying to escape its cage.

Unable to stop myself now, I drifted forward, emerging into the light. The person glanced up, face inscrutable behind the visor, then jumped back in a wild flurry of shrieks and curses. 

The arc welder clattered to the ground and went dark, leaving only the dim glow of a battery-powered lantern. Slowly the person stood up, slid off the helmet, and shook out a tangled mane of red hair.

It was a girl.

“Jesus fucking Christ you scared me,” the girl croaked between gasps. “So it finally got you too, huh, Leona?”

I gaped at her, jaw slack.

It was Sarah Erskine, the grad student Megan and I had first shown dark matter to.

Chapter 11

“Yeah, I tried
to get your guys’ attention that night,” said Sarah, wiping sweat off her forehead as she uncapped a bottle of Fiji water and drank deeply, belching out a satisfied gasp when finished, “but I was stuck in that invisible state where I could only observe the world but couldn’t interact with anything, which should have been impossible since you can’t observe something without changing it—an innate feature of quantum mechanics—but whatever. I did manage to write
help me
on the fogged up mirror. Fat lot of good it did.”

I couldn’t tell if it was elation or shock. I stared at her with a dumb expression, too stunned to speak.

I wasn’t alone.

“I remember it was a Saturday . . . September twenty-sixth, I think,” she continued, recounting her version of the night. “That was smart of your friend Megan to bring out the Ouija board. The little wood piece was easier to push.” She took another long swig. “Not that it mattered in the end. We both wound up here anyway.”

“That night in Megan’s room . . . your journal . . .” After days of not talking, my words came out raspy.

“Yeah, I wanted it back. Had all my notes in there.”

“But I thought you were dead,” I stuttered. “We went to your grave, Megan and I—you have a grave, you know?”

“A niche at Forest Glade Cemetery, I saw that too.” Seeing my eyes widen, she added, “I was floating around for a while after I went completely invisible.”

“So you’re not buried there?”

“Nope.” She tilted the bottle back again, clearly thirsty after her welding work.

“Then who is?” My eyes lingered on the bottle, the water splashing around inside. I licked my dry lips.

“No one,” she said. “It was a cover-up.”

“But I . . . we thought you’d . . . we thought you’d killed yourself,” I whispered.

Her expression darkened. “I tried. When I realized I couldn’t get it off . . . believe me, I tried. I got out the note, even managed to force down a bottle of sleeping pills, but it didn’t take. I threw it all up. I swear, the stuff knew
I was trying to take it down with me. It fought back. And after that, I couldn’t touch anything, couldn’t try again.” She pressed her lips together. “Guess I missed my chance. It got me.”

My hand went to my mouth. “I’m so sorry,” I breathed.

Her gaze grew distant. “They went with that story—suicide. This Air Force guy came by to quarantine my apartment. A bunch of other guys too—CDC, NASA—all of them. They told people I’d been infected with a deadly virus and had committed suicide, and they had to cremate my body to prevent an outbreak. They even told my parents. It wasn’t that far from the truth, except I was still alive. I was there. I watched the whole thing. It was bullshit.” 

“Was it Major Rod Connor?”

Her eyebrow cocked. “You know him?”

“Not intimately,” I said.

“Yeah, he was the guy. Air Force Space Command, or some crap like that. I followed him for a while. This is his house, actually.” She gestured around the garage.

“Really? This is Major Connor’s house?” I surveyed the garage—the flickering lantern, the tangled heap of pipes she’d been welding, the now quiet generator clicking and radiating heat behind her. “He has power. How does he have power?”

“Portable generator.” She drained the last of her bottle and tossed it into a recycling bin overflowing with empty Fiji bottles.

“No, I mean . . .
how?
How are you burning gas? The rest of the city . . . nothing else works. And water. You have drinkable water?”

She grinned. “Want some?”

I nodded.

“Come on, I’ll show you.” She grabbed the lantern and waved me back into the house, and I followed her through the kitchen and down a staircase into a subterranean hallway. We reached a massive steel door. Like some kind of blast door.

“Bomb shelter?” I guessed.

“He’s crazy paranoid. You’ll see.” She pulled the door open and raised the lantern, lighting the room beyond.

I gasped.

Stacked floor to ceiling, a dozen pallets of Fiji bottles gleamed in the darkness, a pyramid of five-gallon water jugs, rows and rows of oil drums, propane tanks, power tools . . . and food. Boxes and boxes of food. Cans and grains and ready-made meals, all freeze-dried and vacuum sealed.

“Is it real?” I breathed.

“All real,” she said. “A year’s supply for him and his wife. Been here three weeks and I’ve barely made a dent.”

I wasn’t listening. I flung myself to an open pallet and wrestled a bottle loose from the plastic, twisted off the cap, and downed the whole thing in a single chug, then gasped for breath.

“Thirsty?” she said, amused.

“God yes.” I went for a second bottled and finished that one too. The sudden intake of fluid left me woozy and drunk. “How . . . how did he get it here?” I panted, liquid euphoria spreading outward from my stomach. “All the other water . . .”

“You can’t drink it, I know. I tried tap water, bottled water, creek water, swimming pools, I even tried desalinating seawater. Nothing. It’s the entire city. This is the only supply.”

“How did he get it here?” I asked again.

“Same way we got here, I’m guessing. By wrapping it in dark matter.”

“So he knew about that part,” I said, my thoughts clearer than they’d been in days now that I was properly hydrated. “He must have thought he was going to get stuck here . . . like us.”

“Like I said, paranoid.”

I glanced around. “You wouldn’t have, like, a granola bar or something?”

“Here.” She tossed me one.

I tore into it like an animal, scarfed it down. “By the way, where is this?” I mumbled, mouth full of granola. “Where are we?”

“Pardon?”

I swallowed too large a bite, and it almost got stuck in my throat. “This place . . . what is this place?”

“Eat. Take your time.”

“Sorry . . . hungry,” I garbled, ripping off the wrapper and stuffing the rest of the bar in my mouth. “There was another girl, she had a stash of food too, I mean, not like this—this is amazing—but she had food too, but I used it all up. What are you making?”

She leaned forward. “
What?
”

I swallowed again. “Sorry. In the garage. What are you making?”

“Oh, what am I
making?
” Understanding flashed in her eyes. “It’s a machine. I’ll show you later.”

“You like building stuff, huh?”

“Relax. Just eat. Here, I’ll make you some mac ’n cheese. You want some mac ’n cheese?”

I nodded vigorously.

She busied herself at a tiny camp stove, emptying another Fiji bottle into a pot.

“Can I stay with you?” I blurted out. “My house kind of freaks me out. I think it’s haunted. But if I could stay with you . . . I won’t bother you, I promise . . .
Pleeease?
”

“Ooh, I don’t know,” she said, sucking in through her teeth. “I kind of like my privacy.”

“Oh.” My heart fell. “Okay.”

“I’m kidding.”

“Uh . . .” 

“That was a joke. You know, where you laugh? Ha ha ha.”

“I know what a joke is,” I muttered. “I just didn’t think it was that funny.”

She peered sideways at me. “Don’t push your luck, kid—”

“I’ll get my stuff from my house,” I said, running for the door before she could change her mind. “Be right back.”

“No—” She spun away from the stove and grabbed my arm. “Don’t go out there. Not at night.”

“What? Why not?”

“Not at night,” she warned, all the humor gone from her eyes. “Wait until morning.”

“But my stuff—”

“Forget about your stuff.” Her hand squeezed my arm tighter.

“Ow,” I yelped, jerking away from her.

She let go, startled. Her fingers left red marks. “Sorry,” she mumbled, looking shaken. “Just . . . just sleep here tonight. You can get your stuff in the morning. In fact, we should be turning out our lights and getting to bed. I didn’t realize how late it was.”

“Why can’t I go out at night?” I said, my voice a little hurt as I rubbed the welts on my arm.

Eyebrows low and brooding, she turned back to the pot, which had started to boil. “Because that’s when it feeds.”

Curled up in
a sweaty nest of blankets in the corner of the bomb shelter, I didn’t sleep a wink. Sarah had brought everything down from the garage, extinguished all the lights, and bolted the steel blast door, checking and double-checking everything. I watched her lockdown routine with growing unease and thought of the boarded up windows in Ashley’s bedroom.

That’s when it feeds.

When what feeds?

The thing I’d seen in the sewer?

The house creaked and settled overhead, each tiny squeak pressing a knife against my already frayed nerves. Sarah snored next to me on an air mattress.

Escape. We needed to escape. Leave this godforsaken planet.

The lump pressing against my lower back reminded me I still had Ashley’s diary. Giving up on sleep, I rolled onto my stomach and propped the diary open under Sarah’s lantern.

January 12

I slept with it on for the first time last night. I was so scared I didn’t fall asleep until really late. I had no idea what wearing it for eight hours would do to me. I didn’t sleep well, either. I had horrible nightmares, and I woke up before dawn with my heart beating really fast and frantic to get it off. I’m not going to try that again.

February 14

I have a secret admirer! There was a single red rose sitting on my desk when I got into English class. I’m pretty sure it was Tommy. He was acting all sketchy and cold to me today, like not meeting my eyes or anything in class. Why are boys so weird? I had butterflies in my stomach for the rest of the day. Guess what? My birthday’s only two weeks away! Then my parents will let me date!

The corner of my lips nudged upward. Yeah, I remembered crushes in freshman year. Nothing but puppy love.

No sooner had the thought formed than my mind fixated on Emory, sending a wave of heat down my front.

Oh, and that was true love?

I read on, distracted by a medley of conflicting emotions.

I’d probably never even see him again.

March 21

I woke up on Foothill Road this morning. My wrist was covered in blood and really hurt, and when I washed away the scab, I found the words I AM DARK carved into my skin. I think I did it myself. I’m really scared.

A chill bristled the back of my neck.

“I am dark,” I whispered. Like the Ouija board, and the message that had come from my cell phone after it was taken.

“Huh . . . wha’?” said Sarah, stirring next to me. “You say something?”

“Nothing, sorry,” I said, very much grateful that she was next to me. My eyes darted back to the page, hungering for more.

April 1

I think the voice is acting through me when I sleepwalk. I’m doing things during episodes I didn’t used to do.

April 6

I woke up in the backyard this morning three feet away from the cliff. It’s getting worse. I’m debating whether or not to tell my parents. I know they would want me to tell them, but if they knew how bad it was, they would officially freak. I’m sick of them worrying about me. I’m going to put it on again tonight, like the voice told me to.

April 7

I put it on again last night, and the strangest thing happened. The world faded away and I was floating in this white place for a while, then I reappeared in my own bed and it was daytime even though I knew it had to still be night. Emory’s bedroom was empty, and my parents’ bedroom was empty, and Carter wasn’t on his dog bed either. I went outside, and there was no one on the streets. At first I was scared, but after a few hours, everything faded again and I was back in my bed, and the sun had only just risen, and I realized I’d actually been teleported to a different universe for the night, like a dreamworld. And the voice told me it could all be mine as long as I didn’t eat or drink anything.

My sweaty fingers smudged the pages. I leaned closer, scarcely breathing.

It had tricked her.

It had tricked her into wearing dark matter for a prolonged period of time so she would be transported here.

Like me.

May 1

I went to that other place again last night. But it was really weird because when I got back, Emory told me he had come in to check on me during the night. I was like uh-oh at first, thinking he probably saw my empty bed and that was what he was going to talk to me about, but then he said I was fast asleep just like I was supposed to be. I didn’t know what to say. So while I was hanging out in my dreamworld, my body was actually asleep in my bed. I guess it kind of makes sense. It’s like the part of me that sleepwalks is teleported to a place where it can do whatever it wants without hurting itself, while my body is finally allowed to rest in the real world. The voice says if I promise to go back there every night I can be cured of sleepwalking forever. As long as I don’t eat the food.

May 6

I ate the food, and as punishment the voice didn’t let me back into the real world for a whole day. I waited on the beach the whole time, feeling so hungry and thirsty I thought I would die. The food tasted gross, anyway. But it was really creepy because when I got back and apologized to my teachers for missing school, they didn’t know what I was talking about. They said I hadn’t missed any school.

I stopped reading.

What happened to Ashley Lacroix was clear.

Dark matter had used her, manipulated her, exploited her deepest vulnerability—her sleepwalking—and offered her a safe haven as bait, urging her to put it on for longer and longer periods of time to escape her reality. Instead, it had trapped her here.

Just like me.

Dark matter had exploited my own guilt and shame, offering me invisibility as a way to face what I had done, to atone for it. It had preyed on my weakness. I’d gotten wary of it before it had time to abduct me, so it had conjured up a dark matter copy of Ashley and unleashed her on me, forcing me to continue wearing it as defense . . . just long enough for it to take hold and fuse to my skin.

I remembered thinking invisibility was all I had.

The horror of my fight with Ashley came rushing back, making me wince. Had that all been to distract me while dark matter mounted the real attack from under my skin? I shuddered, horrified.

Just like Ashley Lacroix, I’d become trapped in its invisible web.

Never before had I felt such kinship with her than now, reading her private thoughts in a diary, her fears, her insecurities . . . her clueless crushes. We were the same—deeply flawed, ashamed, wounded creatures—and in a weird way, it bound us together. We could be friends.