Abarat: Absolute Midnight a-3

by Clive Barker

  Her father smiled.

  “Finally we agree on something,” he said. He turned his back on her and called out to his followers. “Is the machinery all warmed up and ready to go?”

  “I did it all exactly like you told me to, sir,” one of them said.

  “Good. Very good.”

  Chapter 27

  Interrogation

  AROUND THE TIME GAMBAT was leaving Malingo and Candy on the upper deck of The Sloppy (now the happy owner of two autographs from the hand of the most famous geshrat alive) a convoy of five vessels was about to depart from the harbor at Vrokonkeff, on Gorgossium. The largest of these five, the Kreyzu, was flying a smoke flag in the billows of which the stylized image of a needle and thread had been worked, marking it as the bearer of the presumptive Empress of the Hours, Lady Midnight herself, Mater Motley. The four ships that accompanied the Kreyzu were armed from waterline to crow’s nest with cannons and stitchlings, all in service of protecting the Lady Midnight.

  Her departure had been delayed, of course. She had returned to her tower with the girl, Maratien, to find that Taint Nerrow, the seamstress she’d left to clean the mosaic map of the Abarat that was laid into the floor of her chamber, had been thrown out of one of the chamber windows and lay dead at the bottom. Mater Motley had liked the Seamstress Nerrow; the woman had been loyal and zealous. It didn’t please her that circumstances obliged her to now interrogate the dead woman, which would cause the deceased profound anguish. Mater Motley was certain that, had she been able to offer her opinion, Taint Nerrow herself would have volunteered her suffering in return for the name of her murderer.

  Events many years in the designing were about to come to fruition: events that would transform the islands and all that lived upon them forever. She—who would be the mistress of that transformed world—could not afford to let a force as powerful as Taint Nerrow’s murderer go uncaught. She needed to know who the trespasser had been, and quickly. She bent down and turned Taint’s corpse over. Her face had a crack down the middle. But there was little blood. Ordering the rest of the women to retreat a few steps, Motley threw up a Dome of Diligences around herself, the body, and Nerrow’s spirit, which was hovering over the corpse, attached by a decaying cord of ectoplasm.

  “Calm yourself, woman,” Motley said. “I don’t need more than a minute or two of your time.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “You have no choice.”

  “—to go back—”

  “You have no choice.”

  “—into the flesh.”

  “You have no choice. Hear me, witch?”

  Taint’s spirit, a smudge of a panicked shadow, repeatedly flew against the inside of the Dome of Diligences like a fly trapped in a jar.

  The Empress quickly became weary of Nerrow’s panicked cavorting.

  “Enough,” she said.

  She reached out and caught hold of her seamstress’s spirit. The shadow flailed, desperate to be free. Several of Nerrow’s sisters watched on in silent horror.

  “Neysentab,” said the Old Mother, and with these three syllables she unmade the Dome. “If any of you find necromancy hard to witness, then I suggest you avert your eyes.”

  Several did exactly that, one or two of the sisters even walking away from the body of Taint Nerrow entirely so as not to even hear what was happening. Meanwhile, Mater Motley went down on her knees beside Taint Nerrow’s corpse, telling one of the remaining sisters, “Fathoon? Open her mouth wide and hold her head.”

  Kunja Fathoon, who was a big-boned woman with huge hands, did as she was instructed.

  Mater Motley swiftly placed the spirit between Nerrow’s lips and ordered Fathoon to close the dead woman’s mouth and keep it closed whatever happened. Kunja Fathoon pinched the dead woman’s mouth to stop the spirit from exiting that way. She kept it pinched closed for as long as a minute. Nothing happened. And nothing. And still nothing. Then, suddenly, the woman’s leg twitched. Its motion was followed by an eruption of thrashings and kickings.

  “Calm, Taint Nerrow. Calm,” Mater Motley said. “I know this must be horrible for you coming back into your broken body, but I only need a few questions answered.” She glanced up at Fathoon. “Are you ready?” Fathoon nodded. “Don’t weaken.”

  “I won’t.”

  “No,” Mater Motley said, her certainty confirmed by something in Fathoon’s eyes. “No, you won’t. Then let’s be done with this, shall we?”

  “At your instruction, my lady.”

  “Now.”

  Fathoon uncovered Nerrow’s mouth.

  “Cease this, Taint Nerrow! RIGHT NOW!”

  The woman’s cries became less pitiful. Her contortions dwindled.

  “That’s better,” the Old Mother said. “Now, answer me quickly and truthfully. Then I can let you go, and you can go to your death.”

  Taint drew a second phlegmatic breath and then spoke, her voice unequivocally that of a dead woman: flat, thin, joyless.

  “What did I do to deserve this?”

  “The fault wasn’t yours, Nerrow. I simply want to know who murdered you.” Mater Motley leaned forward a little to catch the answer when it came. “Who was it, sister?”

  “It was the Princess Boa.”

  “Impossible!”

  “I swear.”

  “She’s been dead sixteen years, sister.”

  “I know. Yet it was she.”

  “And you have no doubt?”

  “None. It was she. It was Boa. It was! It was!” Her reanimated body was beginning to defy her control. Her face was riddled with tiny tics and seizures. They seemed to give her pain, even though her nerves had only a ghost of life left in them.

  Mater Motley studied the corpse at her feet without replying. Nerrow’s despairing eyes stared up at the woman who held her spirit hostage. “I’ve told you all I know. Let me go to death. It will be kinder than life was.”

  “Well then . . .” the Old Mother said. “Let go, Fathoon. Peace in the Void, woman. Be gone.”

  She had barely finished her sentence before the seamstress’s spirit had fled its confinement and was rising away from her prison and her imprisoner. Then the shadow-smudge had gone from sight, lightless against a lightless sky.

  Mater Motley’s return to the Needle Tower, and her subsequent discoveries and dealings there, had delayed the departure of the Kreyzu a little over two hours. But once the immense vessel was out in the open waters it moved with extraordinary speed, the engine that blazed in the belly of the vessel—a brutal delirious conjoining of the harrowing with the depraved, the unforgivable with the insane—propelling the Kreyzu through the Izabella, defying every current.

  The Izabella did not protest the vessel’s brutal power. The sea knew what dread influence had wrought the vessel, and had given it authority. She knew the monstrous power the Old Mother wielded. Simply by reading rumors and toxins in the streams that poured down the slopes of the islands into her tides, the Izabella knew how much worse things were soon to get. It would serve the myriad life-forms who dwelt within her waters no good to oppose the Midnight Empress for she was capable, the waters knew, of practically limitless acts of destruction. Not flesh nor wood nor stone nor dust was inviolate. She had it in her, this woman and her allies on high, to do death to every Hour of Day and Night if she did not get her way.

  So for now, the Izabella decided, she must seem to do so. To have her will, however wicked.

  Thus, untroubled by the sea’s enmity, the woman who would very soon change the Abarat out of all recognition speeded toward her destination.

  On board the Kreyzu, the girl Maratien came into the Old Mother’s darkened cabin, her head reverentially bowed. She didn’t dare raise it until the Old Mother murmured, “What is it, child?”

  “We are approaching the pyramids, my lady. You told me to come and tell you.”

  Mater Motley rose from the hovering stone on which she sat and descended the air to come to the place where Maratien stood.

>   “Are you excited, child?”

  “Should I be?”

  “Oh yes. If you have the courage to stay with me today and for the days to come, I promise you that you’ll see such rare sights as will change forever the way you imagined the world to be. And of your place in it.”

  “So I may watch?” Maratien said cautiously, not entirely certain that she had understood the invitation correctly.

  “Of course. Right here at my side. And if you are as wise a child as I believe you to be, then you will take note of everything you see. Every detail. Because there may come a time when someone will ask you what it was like to have been there, and you will want to answer them truthfully.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Now go to Melli Shadder, one of my sisters—”

  “I know her.”

  “Tell her that I ordered you be given my warmest coat. It will be bitterly cold when all the suns go out, Maratien. Go on. I’ll wait for you.”

  “You will?”

  “Of course. I’ve waited for the better part of six centuries for this Hour. I can wait a few minutes more while you find yourself a coat.”

  Chapter 28

  Altarpiece

  CANDY? MALINGO? ARE YOU up there?”

  It was a familiar voice that instantly lifted Malingo’s spirits.

  “John Mischief? Is that you?” Malingo said.

  “Yes—”

  “We knew you’d be on one of these ferries sooner or later—” said John Serpent.

  “A ferryman told us where to find you—” said John Pluckitt

  “And we’re all here!” said John Drowze, eager to share the good news.

  As he spoke, the brothers rose up the stairs from the deck below, followed by Two-Toed Tom and—

  “Even Geneva!” said John Fillet.

  “It’s good to see you all again. But please, keep your voices down. Candy’s still asleep.”

  “Should we wake her up?” said a rather heavily armed Geneva.

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea right now,” Malingo said.

  “Why not?” Two-Toed Tom asked, emerging from behind.

  “There’s something weird about the way she’s sleeping,” Malingo said.

  “What do you mean?” Geneva said.

  “Well, look for yourself. But put your weapons down first.”

  “Why?”

  “They make such noise.”

  “I’d only do this for you,” Geneva said, unbuckling her belt and handing it, with sheathed swords, to Tom. “If anybody but me unsheathes those . . .”

  “We wouldn’t think of it,” Mischief said.

  “No, no, no, no, no . . .” the brothers all murmured. “We’re just concerned for our Candy.”

  “Keep your voices down, please,” Malingo said. “She mustn’t be disturbed. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. She just shouldn’t, I think.”

  “Look at the expression on her face,” Geneva murmured. “She’s in pain.”

  Malingo nodded.

  “Yes. I think she probably is.”

  “If she’s having a nightmare, shouldn’t we wake her?” Geneva said. “Look at how troubled she is! How pained!”

  “I know,” said Malingo. “I don’t like seeing her like this either. But wherever she is right now, and whatever she’s doing, it’s something important. And I think we’re better leaving her to do it. When she dreams like this she goes to Chickentown to see her mother.”

  “She doesn’t seem very happy about it,” Geneva remarked.

  The frown on Candy’s face deepened.

  “Lordy Lou! She looks terrible,” John Serpent remarked. “Are you sure she isn’t dying?”

  “No,” Malingo said after a length of silence, “I’m not.”

  Candy counted eleven people, including her father, but not herself, now assembled within the church. They had emerged from the shadows and they could all see her, a feat no doubt made possible by her father’s stolen magic. Candy recognized almost all of their faces, though she could name only a few. One was Norma Lipnik, who had once (a long time ago, in another life) showed Candy the haunted room in the Comfort Tree Hotel. It was she that had told Candy about Henry Murkitt, the ghost of Room Nineteen. Seeking out his legend was what brought Candy, for better and for worse, to the spot where she now stood. Now, Norma was dressed in all her best Sunday clothes. She even gave Candy a smile as though there was nothing remotely odd about seeing Candy’s dreaming presence.

  Also among the small group were two of Melissa Quackenbush’s friends. One, she remembered, was called Gail, an overweight woman who always wore an excessive amount of sweet perfume in an attempt (which failed) to mask the unpleasant smell that her body exuded. The other was a woman, named Penelope, who lived a few doors down from them on Followell Street. She knew by sight several of the others too; one was the janitor at her school, though like all the others she didn’t know his name. Each one of them in turn locked eyes with her, unblinking, and smiled—puppet smiles, painted on puppet heads.

  “Today is a special occasion. My daughter is here in her dreaming state,” Bill was explaining to the small gathering of his worshipers, “but it should be no more difficult to get what we need out of her in this form as in her real body. Knowledge is shared between the dreamer and the dreamed, after all. They’re still connected. Norma, the curtain please.”

  Norma Lipnik offered Candy one last forced smile, then went to do as her minister instructed, drawing aside the milky blue curtain behind the altar. There was a peculiar kind of machine standing nine feet tall, perhaps ten, behind the altar.

  “I know what you’re wondering, witch,” said Bill. “You’re thinking: who made that impressive piece of machinery?”

  “You’re right,” said Candy, doing her best to fake an appreciative smile. “I mean, who else . . . ? It’s . . . amazing!”

  Behind the flattery, she was all panic. This was bad. Very bad. She had no idea what this monstrous machine did, but if it was Kaspar Wolfswinkel’s brain-child—and it certainly wasn’t her father’s, so that only left the wizard who had stolen the hats her father now possessed—then its purpose could not be benign.

  “I can’t take all the credit,” Bill said. “I was inspired by this.” He stroked his vest of many colors. “But my mind understood it instantly. You know why?”

  Candy shook her head.

  “Because you were born for greatness, lord of lords.”

  The speaker was a woman whose presence Candy had missed until now. Now, however, she stood up. Her head was bowed, but Candy recognized her immediately: it was her former teacher, Miss Schwartz. Oh, how she had changed. Her hair was no longer scraped back from her face and held hostage behind her head. Instead it fell free, long and shiny, framing her pale face.

  “Nicely put, Miss Schwartz,” Bill said.

  The woman looked in the direction of Candy’s father, but did not raise her head.

  “I’m glad it pleases you, sir,” she said.

  Her passivity—her downcast eyes—her pitiful gratitude—were distressing. This wasn’t the Miss Schwartz Candy had despised. Her father had broken her. Broken her and stuck her back together again so that she was fragile and afraid.

  “Mr. Thompson, Mr. Elliot, why don’t you prepare my daughter for our little science experiment? And be quick about it. I want this over and done with.”

  Chapter 29

  Midnight has Wings

  AS MATER MOTLEY ASCENDED the steps of the Great Pyramid at Xuxux, her thoughts turned briefly to her grandson. They had worked for many years devising the plan that was about to come to fruition, and while she’d had no time for sentimentality—it was a spineless, sickly feeling—she couldn’t keep a wave of regret from breaking over her. She’d done her best to warn her grandson about the vicious power of his affections. She’d forced the lesson upon him by sewing up his lips with needle and thread when she’d first heard him use the word love; the scars that her handiwork had
left were still upon his face the last time she’d seen him, which had been on the deck of her death-ship, Wormwood. The scars, however, had failed to inspire contrition in him.

  She let the regret have its useless moment, then let it go. Carrion had been a fine coconspirator, but once the taint of love had touched him, he’d become a danger to himself and to their great enterprise. So she was alone as she climbed the steps to the doors of the Great Pyramid.

  She paused. This was a great moment. She wanted somebody with her to witness.

  “Maratien,” she said quietly.

  “I’m here, m’lady,” Maratien said behind her, but nearby.

  She couldn’t conceal the unease in her voice. The Old Mother sensed it.

  “There’s nothing to fear, child,” she said. “The creatures behind this door—they are the sacbrood—and are all in my service.”

  “There are many?”

  “Numberless, at least.”

  “All in this pyramid?”

  “They are in all the pyramids, and below all the pyramids, beneath the Izabella, spreading out and down great distances.” Mater Motley waited for all this to register with the girl. Then she reached into the fold so her dress, its fabric weighed down by captive souls, and brought out a key. It was a strange, restless form. “Here,” she said. “You open the door. See for yourself.”

  Tentatively, Maratien accepted the key.

  “Take courage, child. There are powers waiting upon you. Look back. See for yourself.”

  Maratien glanced over her shoulder. In the short time since they’d stepped off the Kreyzu and onto the steps of the pyramid, massive numbers of sea creatures had risen to crowd the surface of the Izabella, many of them giving off luminescence from their scales or shells.

  “See how impatient they are?” Mater Motley said, directing Maratien’s attention to the bottom step, where the dozens of monstrous forms were emerging. “You’d better get on with it.”

  Maratien needed no further words of encouragement. She returned her gaze to the door, and slid the key into the lock. She didn’t have to do more than that; the key knew its business. It slid out of her fingers and into the lock, disappearing completely.