Abarat: Absolute Midnight a-3

by Clive Barker

  “What’s happening?” Candy said, looking past Mespa and Joephi at the boats just outside the harbor. The water there was seething and bubbling, she saw, the motion so violent that it overturned many of the boats.

  “This is his work!” Candy said, looking up at the figure on top of the tallest of the towers. “Gan Nug!”

  “How do you know—?”

  As she spoke the tentacles of what was perhaps a leviathanic Abaratian sea monster rose up out of the frenzied waters. The massive tentacles uncurled and instantly proceeded to demolish The Great Head.

  “Oh no . . .” Mespa murmured. “All those people.”

  “We have to go,” Joephi said. “Save who we can.”

  “We’ll go together,” Candy said.

  “No,” said Mespa. “If you want to be useful, stop Boa.”

  “How?”

  “Use what you know,” Joephi said. “And what you don’t know, learn.”

  There was a great roar of destruction from The Great Head as tentacles, which had quickly curled around the towers that had been The Head’s crowning glory, pulled them down. Now it all curled like a vast, breaking wave, stones and people raining seaward as the towers toppled. Any attempt at escape was a lost cause. What boats had not been overturned by the churning waters were now crushed by falling debris. None were saved.

  The waters around the Yebba Dim Day were very quickly littered with the remains both of vessels and their passengers, all rolling in the bloody surf while the rain of stones continued to beat down upon them. As for Gan Nug, the summoner of this monstrosity, he and his uncanny bonfire still stood, hovering on the darkness, exactly where they’d been when they’d had the tower beneath them.

  “Oh my . . .” Candy whispered. “I knew a woman and her two children who were in there.”

  The Great Head continued its collapse, as the tentacles of the beast searched the rubble, their huge scale not denying them an atrocious delicacy. They picked over the rubble carefully, plucking here and there some poor creature clinging to life.

  Mespa suddenly looked up.

  “Get back to your boat!” she screamed. “Run. Run!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “The seamstresses! They’re here!”

  She pushed Candy away from her.

  “Go!” they shouted, and the two women of the Fantomaya raced away in the opposite direction.

  Candy turned and looked toward The Piper. She could see Malingo, Eddie, and Gazza by the swaying lanterns hanging at the stern. Malingo was beckoning to her, and Gazza started to do the same. Candy looked back at the women, intending to say good-bye, but they had already gone. The only clue to their whereabouts was the sight of their pursuers: five women, their long hair streaming behind them, standing astride juggernauts of almost white-hot iron, easily three times as tall as their riders. Weaving between one another they chased their unseen quarry off over the Izabella. Candy watched a second or two then started to run toward the boat.

  The same violent message was spreading out from the remains of The Great Head in all directions. It made the water beneath Candy’s feet shake as she ran, the worst tremors so powerful she was afraid the sea was going to open up beneath her. It was the continuing destruction of The Great Head that was causing the tremors, she knew, but she refused to look at the horrors there. She kept her eyes fixed on The Piper. Malingo was beckoning to her, as was Gazza. It was his voice that she heard from above the rubble.

  “Come on! Don’t look back! Keep your eyes on me.” He reached toward her, as though he had the power to stretch out and gather her back into the same arms from which he’d released her. “Just run, Candy!”

  There was another sound now, audible above Gazza’s voice and the noise of dying and destruction. She could hear the rising whine of the fever wheel, and the insane scream of the monster who was riding it.

  She knew Gazza was right. She shouldn’t look back. But she made the error anyway.

  It was a smear of a sight, but it was enough to know she was in very serious trouble. The fever wheel was no more than ten yards behind her, its proximity making every bone in her body vibrate. On the seamstress who rode the fiery wheel, was an obscenely distorted face, her mouth a gaping black shriek, her hair streaming behind her like white paint thrown against a starless sky.

  “Run! Run!” Gazza said.

  Candy threw everything she had into it: her strength, her anger, even her fear that this fast dash was a lost cause, that she’d never again feel around her the arms of those who loved her, or say to Gazza the words she’d knew she felt but didn’t yet know how to say.

  How cruel and stupid was that? To finally lay her eyes on a face she knew from some other sweet dream of life, sweet dream of love, but never get to say: I know you, don’t I? I’ve always known you.

  She. Would. Never. Tell. Him.

  The wheel was going to kill her. A spray of scalding water caught her neck. It hurt. But nowhere near as much as the thought that she’d—

  Never—

  Ropes of unraveled fire arced past her and set the water ablaze where they fell, boiling it to columns of steam—

  Never—

  And now the seamstress’s shrieks were added to the sum of terrors closing on her. There were fragments of words she’d either heard or even used herself, all dissolved in the vile torrent of noise pouring out of the virago:

  “Sheeeeaaanammaaashinigajjanda-jamdannamandasighaphipheeenuuuurrrephriidddeaajardadchalajicfloatakaiemamamee—”

  The consonants and vowels so unendurable—like needles being driven into Candy’s head—that it was all she could do not to add her own sum of screams to the cacophony—

  “Never!”

  The word came from Gazza.

  Candy stared at The Piper through her agony and saw that he had lifted Eddie up onto his shoulders.

  “NEVER!” he said again.

  Then Eddie threw the machete. Candy saw it catch the light as it left his hand, then it was gone into the shadows, and all she caught was the noise of its approach—a quickening breath that for some reason surfaced through all the other noise—until it briefly appeared again as it passed over her head.

  She couldn’t help but see where it went, turning in time to see the expression on the seamstress’s face change as she understood what she had raced with such eagerness to meet. The machete cut through her neck, and her head was thrown up toward the lightless heavens on a surge of scarlet.

  Candy didn’t linger to see it fall. Though the fever wheel had lost its rider it was still on the move.

  She fixed her eyes upon The Piper—or more truthfully upon one of the faces among the many—and ran. There was a raw shriek from the wheel, and then a crash as it keeled over. Candy felt freezing water splashing against her back. She didn’t look to see if the wheel had in fact fallen over. She just ran and ran until she was there at the boat, gasping. She reached up and found that the arms that had let her go were the first to catch hold of her again, and wrap her up tighter than anybody had ever held her before.

  Chapter 40

  Bones and Laughter

  FINNEGAN HAD BEEN ON the Nonce for a day, searching for a place that he had endeavored to find ever since the death of his Princess. He had finally discovered it, beneath the mountains of that Hour: the place where, according to the myth of the dragon families, their dying members went to pass the last portion of their lives. There they had perished, leaving their bodies to decay among the numberless bones of the worms who had come here to die over the centuries.

  Now he was standing in that most secret of secret places, a cavern that had been fashioned over the millennia by the genius of water and stone into the likeness of a cathedral so big the city of Commexo could have comfortably fitted within it three or four times over. It was illuminated by the phosphorescence given off by a fungus that flourished on the bare architecture of the dead. They had spread to every corner of the caverns, laying a gray pallor on the air, which only served to
add to the immensity of the space. But the

  scale of this vast cathedral was barely large enough to contain the immense numbers of dragon’s bones that had collected here over the centuries, some laid here by mourners, carrying the corpses of dragon kings or common soldiers; some laid down by those who had owned them, and had made their final journey dressed in meat and scales, so as to lose them at least among the remnants of those who had gone before.

  In places they were heaped like stained snowdrifts against the hundred-foot walls, in others simply littering the floor, broken by the passage of the centuries into splinters, the splinters into crumbs, and the crumbs to dust.

  “That’s a fine sight,” Finnegan murmured to himself.

  “Is that all it’s about, Hob?” said a voice of age and pain. Its vibrations, breaking the bleak silence, brought tiny changes among the bones. Dust ran hissing from eye sockets of dragons dead in their mothers’ wombs.

  “Deetha Maas?” Finnegan said. He already had his sword and dagger drawn. “Show yourself.”

  “I’m right here,” the ancient voice told him. “Look.”

  Indeed, something directly in front of him did move. It was so uncannily slow that it was several seconds before he could make sense of the form. When he did so he recognized instantly that he was looking at a creature that was, like himself, the child of a forbidden union. Finnegan had been born of a Father of Day and a Mother of Night. But Deetha Maas, the keeper of this ossuary, had been made from a far stranger marriage: that of dragon and man. For sixteen years Finnegan had been slaughtering members of the Dragon Nation, but he had always let Maas see that in some secret place he knew that he was taking the lives of innocents. And that in allowing their corpses to be recovered and brought to this place was his way of making peace with that fact.

  Once, perhaps, Maas had been an intimidating figure. He stood eleven or twelve feet tall, even stooped. His head was a calamitous mismatching of the infernal reptile—the long snouted skull, the slitted eyes, the gold-green scales, the teeth in a barbed array in rotting gums—with the humanish parts, the most significant part the fact that he was standing upright on his crooked back legs. He had fashioned a primitive walking aid out of bones bound with strips of cloth, on which he leaned his entire weight only advancing with the greatest difficulty, each step exacting its price in pain. There were other subtler signs of his human aspect: small places where his scales gave way to areas of translucent skin under which a network of dark blue veins was visible, pulsing against his pale purple sinew, his dirty white hair, which grew down to his waist, and here and there portions of a beard in the same wretched condition, which sprouted from pieces of flesh between the scaly patches beneath his snout.

  “I’d expected you to be younger,” Finnegan said.

  “I’m alive,” Deetha Maas said. “That’s some kind of triumph surely. I got to be one hundred and thirteen. And now I presume you have come to make sure I don’t see a hundred and fourteen.”

  “You were the one who called me here,” Finnegan reminded him.

  “Yes. Well, we go back sixteen years, Finnegan. I thought with what’s going on above we might never have another opportunity to meet face-to-face. So I seized the offer while it was there in the dust, so to speak.”

  “What offer?”

  “From the true dispatcher of the message I sent.”

  “If not you, then who?” Finnegan said, raising his sword. It was a heavy blade, hard to wield with any great ease. Much broader, fuller, stronger men than Finnegan had attempted to use it and found it virtually impossible to wield. But Finnegan had its measure. It made him feel lighter on his feet to have it in his hand.

  If—as he suspected—that this summons from Deetha Maas was a last attempt by the surviving dragons to kill him, he would not go easily. This was, after all, the night of Midnight’s Empire. He’d seen all the stars go out as he’d made his way here. If this was not the end of the world he would be surprised—in truth, disappointed. He wanted an end to his loneliness and to his rage. And if it was going to be anywhere, where better than here? And who better to cure him of life than one of the very species who’d also cured him of hope and happiness? One last battle then, fought to the death, his own.

  “I’m ready,” he told Maas.

  “I doubt that,” Maas said.

  “Death holds no fears for me,” Finnegan replied.

  “I didn’t imagine for a moment that it did. But it isn’t death that’s waiting for you.”

  “What then?”

  “Your love.”

  “I have no love!”

  A spring of clear, sweet laughter appeared from behind a litter of bones and echoed around the ossuary. An elegantly dressed woman emerged from the shadows. Finnegan let his raised sword sink down under its own tremendous weight.

  “Hello, Finn.” Boa smiled.

  Chapter 41

  Dragon Dust

  “YOU CAN’T BE HER,” Finnegan said. There was a tremor in his voice. “She was dead. I held her in my arms.”

  “I know. I was there.”

  “No!”

  “I thought you’d be happy—”

  “If you were real—”

  “Do you remember the letter you found? Written by your grandfather from the battlefield of the Nonce, during the last war? The letter to your grandmother? You read a part of it to me.”

  “Go on,” Finnegan replied. His voice was hushed now.

  “I remember there was a part of it that made you angry because it was your grandfather’s story about what happened after death. You thought he was wrong. It was a selfish letter, you said. Because your grandfather wasn’t thinking about how it would affect someone who read it. You were so furious, you wanted your grandfather to know how you felt.”

  “Yes. I remember. I couldn’t tell him, though, because he was dead.”

  The smile came back to Boa’s face, bright as ever.

  “You’re trying to trick me, Finnegan Hob. You’re trying to catch me out, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “You know he wasn’t dead. He was alive when you read that letter to me.”

  Both members of her audience, man and dragon, gazed at her in astonishment.

  “All right,” Finn said. “It’s you. I don’t know how, but it is.”

  “I thought you’d be happier to see me.”

  “Well . . . you know . . . you were dead. I’ve lived thinking you were dead. Buried in that royal mausoleum on the Nonce. And you weren’t.”

  “No. I was a prisoner. But I escaped.” Her smile became laughter. “I escaped, Finn! And I’m back, to love you.”

  Finnegan tried to put on a smile but it didn’t quite stick. “It just seems so impossible.”

  “Of course it seems that way. But then yesterday you wouldn’t have thought you’d be seeing the stars go out, would you?”

  “Is that why you’re here? Are you responsible for that?”

  “For murdering the stars?” she said. As she spoke there was a subtle change in her very being. Something caught fire in her, and threw off a garish light. It was in her skin, in her eyes, in her throat. “Do you think I’m capable of that, Finn? Of throwing the world into darkness?” She had lowered her head, like a wild animal preparing to charge. “Well . . . do you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re capable of,” Finnegan said. “How could I?”

  “Because I’m your Princess.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “But it’s the truth. Look at me, Finn! Look! Am I not the same woman you were about to marry?”

  “Too much the same,” he said, half turning his face from hers, as though he might better break the spell of her perfection if he looked at her askance, and in breaking it, might see what hid behind her beauty. But it didn’t work. He still had to ask her: “How can I believe what I see if I don’t understand how it happened?”

  “Touch me, Finn, and I’ll tell you.” She offered him a playful
little smile. “I promise I won’t turn into a monster when you touch me.” She walked toward him raising her arm to proffer her hand. “Please, Finn. I’m begging you. I’ve waited a long time.”

  “Waited where? Who was holding you prisoner?”

  “Touch me and I’ll tell you. Go on. I came back so I could be with you, Finn. Where’s the harm in a little touch?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There is none,” she said. “Here. Look.” She took hold of his hand. “I’m real. I’m warm.”

  Finally, Finn smiled, his hand moving up over the back of her hand, his thumb tenderly brushing the bone of her wrist. He could feel her blood pulsing through her veins. And, as promised, Boa told him everything, more or less. She told how while the wedding guests had been watching the struggle between Finnegan and the dragon, the women of the Fantomaya had reached into her dead body and claimed her soul, how they’d carried it across the divide between the Abarat and the Hereafter, and hidden it in the womb of a woman who was very close to giving birth.

  “So this was all planned out?” Finnegan said.

  “I really don’t know, to tell you the truth. I don’t see how it could have been. The Fantomaya just wanted to protect my soul, and when they saw a chance to hide it—somewhere no one from the Abarat was going to look—they took it. The child was born a few hours later. But you had already worked most of it out for yourself, hadn’t you?” Boa said. “I saw the confusion on your face several times. You felt something for the girl but you didn’t know what or why. I’m right, aren’t I?” She took a half step toward him, her hand going up to his face. “There’s nothing to feel guilty about,” she said. “You weren’t seeing her. You were seeing me through her. I was her prisoner. I had no defense against her. All I could do was stay locked up in that head of hers and watch her despicable little life go by year after year. Wondering what was happening here. Always, always thinking about you. Wondering who you’d married now that I was dead.”

  “Finn, it’s all lies,” Maas insisted.

  “Then none of it can do any harm, can it?” Finnegan replied.