Abarat: Absolute Midnight a-3

by Clive Barker

  She was too interested in drawing the Kid toward her to even notice. Or perhaps she did notice and, in her supreme arrogance, was simply indifferent to the threat that the riding wave presented. Either way, she had her eyes and her attention fixed upon the Kid. Her arm, impossibly elongated, resembled a long, leafless branch more than a limb of flesh and blood. But there were no diminutions in its strength. With her hand still covering his face she lifted the Kid up, his thin legs with their cartoony shoes dragging through the seawater that was continuing to flood the room, the water rolling up against the walls, taking down the pictures that had hung there.

  The waters were merciless with them, as they were with everything else that the room contained: the antique furniture, smashed to tinder; the walls themselves cracking as all that the room contained was caught up in the spiral of foaming waters.

  The Kid had been pulled clear of the chaos, but Mater Motley knew that while she held the child—who was still shrieking for his father’s help behind her hand—the Pixler-Requiax could not act hastily against her. One slip, and Pixler’s firstborn went into the vortex. However tough Pixler’s manufacturing methods had made his child, once he was caught in the battering waters he would not long survive.

  “Accept me,” she said. “Or the firstborn slips out of my hand.”

  She raised her forefinger from the head of the child, leaving him held by only three spiked fingers and her thumb.

  The Kid knew his life hung in the balance.

  “Please don’t let her hurt me! Pops! Don’t! Let! Her—”

  “He’s just a child,” Pixler said.

  “He’s no child!” Mater Motley replied. “He’s painted plastic, or whatever you make these toys from.”

  “He’s not a toy. He has a fully functioning brain. He’s able to feel love. And fear.”

  “Oh, you mean these screams are the real thing?”

  She lifted her middle finger from the Kid’s face.

  “Don’t struggle, Kid,” Pixler said. “Just be very still. Please, my boy. Very, very—”

  Before he could again say still, something burst from the tumultuous waters beneath the Kid. Another portion of the Requiax, formed from its matter in the likeness of a vast double-thumbed hand, rose up out of the water and seized hold of Pixler’s firstborn. The Kid’s shriek became so shrill now that no child born from a womb could possibly have made the sound. This was indeed the shrill shriek of a machine.

  The sound momentarily was so sharp and sudden that it made the Empress lose her grip. The Requiax’s double-thumbed hand closed around the boy and quickly carried him away, still holding him up above the tumultuous waters.

  “Open that door!” Pixler yelled, his voice—in its sudden, absolute clarity—unmistakably that of a man used to being obeyed.

  And obeyed he was. The doors were opened instantly, the presence of the water in the room quickly subsided. The violent rush threw just about all those who’d been watching the confrontation off their feet, carrying them out into the passageway. There was still enough force in the water to give it the power to sweep the Crucifixion and Mater Motley’s “Midnight Nativity” off the walls, dumping them in the same scummy soup in which the witnesses were being thrown around.

  From every direction came the din of terror and destruction, as the invading waters of the Izabella carried Voorzangler’s staff into the passageway, mercilessly tossing them about. The weakest of Mater Motley’s stitchlings were simply torn apart by the force of the currents, the rest carried away. The dead doctor’s staff shrieked and begged for mercy, but the waters granted no reprieves.

  “Such noise!” Mater Motley complained with the offended airs of some highborn woman who’d never heard the din of suffering in her life. “Enough of this! Enough!” She threw a glance at the doors. “Shut up, both of you!”

  The doors did as they were told. It was something of a struggle, but they pulled themselves shut against the power of the departing waters. Then, without further instruction, the forces the Empress had unleashed in the room set about melting the lock, which sent up a column of sulfurous smoke. The job was quickly done. The lock was melted, leaving the chamber sealed shut.

  The Empress took a moment to compose herself. Then she said: “Let’s finish this business once and for all.”

  Chapter 52

  Atrocities

  IF A STRANGER HAD wandered into the battle-scarred streets of Commexo City at about that time, they would surely not have been blamed for thinking they had taken a wrong turn somewhere, and found themselves in the clutches of a nightmare. Even though there were fires consuming many of the fine, fancy houses along the brightly lit boulevards, nobody was attempting to extinguish them. There were bodies sprawled on the streets and sidewalks, some apparently the citizens of this noble city, unarmed and dressed for anything but sudden death, killed by shrapnel or bullets and left to lie where they’d fallen.

  There were sights even more terrible, that this wandering stranger would have found it difficult not to see, given how numerous such horrors were. And though they might have tried to look away, the scene and the tragic story it left half-told would be imprinted on their memory forever, so that even at life’s end, when they no longer knew their children from a tree, they would remember being in Commexo City with the death-ship filling the sky, and the buzzing of the innumerable flies.

  Inside the Commexo Building, there was another scene, just as profound. The drowned lay where the draining waters had left them. The Empress’s seamstress attendants waited in the room, idly watching events unfold across the Abarat. The seamstresses were scarcely strangers to things fearful and abhorrent. They had been chosen by the Old Mother to accompany her into Commexo City because they had each in the course of their lives proved as unrepentantly vicious and enthusiastically cruel as she. Or at least very nearly so. But even they, who knew the bellies and bowels of the monstrous as well as heart and head, stood in mute awe and astonishment, seeing what atrocious glories their Empress’s Midnight had called up out of hiding.

  Some of these scenes the seamstresses knew; they were the stuff of nursery horrors. Queen Inflixia Grueskin was one such: she was the monstrous Queen of Efreet according to legend, who tended her blood garden where for centuries she’d attempted to grow the missing anatomy to fill the empty cage of her body. She was a terror to frighten children no longer. She was real. There she was, up on one of the screens, in all her ghastly splendor.

  On another screen, a tree called the Brakzee, which was by reputation the oldest in the archipelago, had become a gallows from which hundreds of ordinary people had been hanged. This was not the work of some vile demonic force. The executioners had been, until the disappearance of the moon and stars, the neighbors of those they’d hanged.

  Nor was the incident at the Brakzee tree an isolated case. All across the islands fear caused ordinary people to do monstrous things. One of the seamstresses, going from screen to screen to screen, thinking each time she’d found the worst horror, but then discovering something still more atrocious said: “This is the End of Everything.”

  It was Mater Motley who set her right.

  “This is the end of their world. The purposeless ones who wanted only to live their lives. Their time is over. Midnight has begun. And out of their hiding places now come the Heirs of the Lightless Hour. See! They come to inherit this broken, bloody world and rule in my name.”

  On screen after screen, beings that the women had never seen before appeared from their sanctuaries: monstrous creatures that had never appeared in any bestiary of the Hours, nor ever would. Now they had a world to rule by the laws of chaos. A slothful slug lay upon a slimy rock with a raw tongue-tail and hooks for hands; a two-legged beast with a quadruped beside it, walked through a place on Obadiah where a deluge of fire rain was falling; two human-headed birds sat on a dead branch, debating the weather—

  Suddenly, from out of the sealed Chamber, the Empress’s command—

  “To me!
Women!”

  A beat, then—

  “NOW!”

  The seamstresses had kept up a fine illusion of indifference for the benefit of Pixler’s storm troopers but they had been ready for this moment.

  Now eight of them, acting as though governed by one mind, returned through the littered passageway, throwing their collective will at the sealed doors. The hardened sealant on the inside cracked, and the doors were flung wide, pushed from behind by the weight of the water. The women were ready for its fall. They threw up a quilt of invisible patches around them, sewn together by their own hands. It was only woven fabric, like any other, but such lattices have strength in their pattern out of all proportion to the mild stuff from which they are woven. The doors smashed against the quilt and broke.

  The seamstresses entered the chamber and saw what the exchange between their Empress and the Pixler-Requiax had come to. The combatants were still high above the ragged hole in the floor through which the waters of the Izabella continued to surge up, their ambition unquelled. The Empress was elevated by a pillar of seething darkness, while the frail form of Rojo Pixler was borne up by the fronds of the Requiax’s continuously regenerating anatomy, which drew up with it countless lengths of woven water. Each carried, within its length, a cord of the Requiax’s matter, through which the desires of its mind were communicated. The mind had one desire above all others: to see the monstrous woman standing in darkness before it dead. She was the enemy—not the greatest of them, to be sure. Other evil, vaster than her by orders of magnitude, was using her to gain a stronghold here in Time. That would not happen! She had to be brought down. The glittering cords of the Pixler-Requiax went about their labors, wrapping themselves around the pedestal of shadows on which she stood, and then rising through the soul-laden folds of her garment, forming a net of knotted sea around her.

  “Get! It! Off! Me!” the Empress shrieked, appalled by this violation.

  She couldn’t get the rest of the words out. The water ropes had climbed her torso, and there was a noose of water around her neck. It tightened.

  “No!” she said, and raised the hand she’d used to seize hold of Voorzangler, its fingers sharp and dark. Only this time it was onto her own flesh that she turned her piercing fingertips, sliding them down between her throat and the noose. She pulled the water rope off her gullet, far enough at least that she could get two words out.

  “Free . . . . . . me . . . . . .”

  The seamstresses were already raising their hands and speaking in old Abaratian the Eight Names of the Creatrix, which would summon to them the means to liberate their Empress.

  “Giathakat.”

  “Juth and Junntak.”

  “Kiezazaflit.”

  “Enothu and Eyjo.”

  “Yeagothonine.”

  “Yuut.”

  “Yuut.”

  “Yuut.”

  Even before all eight had been spoken motes of fire ignited in their hands, forming vicious instruments, far more effective at cutting than any knife. They exchanged no words. They knew their business. They came at the column of darkness on which their lady stood and cut at the silver-green waters of Pixler and the Requiax. The tools that had been the gift of the Creatrix were as efficient as they were strange. They lacerated the waters, like assassins in a world of throats. Back and forth! Up and down! The cords of water, severed, fell back into the churning flood that had produced them.

  Pixler-Requiax roared his disapproval.

  “You should have stayed out of this battle, women,” he roared. “It’s going to be the death of you.”

  The water was still pouring up out of the ground, weaving replacement ropes as it did so. They rose up suddenly—only two of them, but many times thicker than the cords that had climbed the column. They weren’t interested in disarming the women. It was the seamstresses themselves these two ropes of water were eager to claim.

  The ropes did not linger to choose which women to take; they simply took, snatching two of the seamstresses from their cutting and summarily drowning them. The remaining seamstresses were too busy at their cutting to even notice that two of their number had gone. But the Empress did.

  “Sisters! Take care!” she called to them. The meaning of her words was lost in the confusion. The ropes, having drowned two already, rose up to snatch another two.

  “No, Pixler!” Mater Motley cried out, her voice heard at frequencies only living waters heard. “They are just women.”

  Pixler was not a man without compassion. His spirit, in the Requiax’s cold embrace, saw that the seamstresses were indeed only women. They had let go of the instruments they had been cutting with. They wanted only to live.

  We should show mercy on them, Pixler said, exchanging his thoughts with the Requiax.

  Mercy? asked the Requiax, searching the grid of its mind for some clue to the meaning of the word. But it was like a piece of bone, or a flame. It had no need of mercy in its being. I feel nothing in me, Pixler.

  No?

  No.

  Pixler could hardly blame the creature for what it had never known, or needed to know. He was the one who’d baited it with his lights and noise of his heart, drowning in the deep. He was the one who’d caused the Requiax to rise up and meet the sky. So it had no mercy to offer up? Such was its state.

  “Let go of my sisters!” the Empress cried out yet again.

  This time, Pixler and the Requiax spoke with one united voice.

  “This is its Absolute Midnight,” it said. “And in its darkness, your sisters must die.”

  Part Six

  There is No Tomorrow

  Night comes down upon my heart

  And smothers me with grief.

  Let us take comfort before we part,

  That at least our lives are brief.

  —Anon.

  Chapter 53

  Forgiveness

  CANDY WOKE, AS SHE had woken so many times in the months of her travels in the Abarat, not quite sure of where she was at first, or how she’d come to be here, but figuring it out slowly, from the sights and sounds around her.

  She was in the prison ship. She was down here in the bowels of the vessel with a large number, certainly upward of a thousand, of other arrestees. There wasn’t very much light to offer her any details of who these others might be, but what light there was came from two ineffective lanterns that hung high above the mass of huddled prisoners, and swung violently with the pitching of the ship. They were plunging through some very turbulent waters, which caused the ship to creak and roll, and which was in turn causing no little pain to those suffering around her.

  She could hear their minds, restless with fear and pain, letting their questions flow unanswered from their bruised heads.

  Where are they taking me?

  Was it something I did?

  Will I get a trial?

  She wanted to quiet their terrors.

  “It’ll be all right . . .” she murmured.

  Who’s there?

  Who is that?

  I heard somebody say—

  “I’m going to put a light on,” she said.

  What is she talking about?

  There are no lights.

  She’s crazy.

  “Just trust me,” she told them. Then, very softly, she spoke the wielding word for light: “Onazawaar.”

  A soft luminescence entered the air around her head, no more than the brightness of two candle flames. Then she gently willed it from her, and it spread like a pliant mist, lending its subtle brightness to the air. She urged it to be cautious. There was so much pain here; people who would not necessarily welcome the presence of an undeniable reality, however gently it was proffered. Even now, she heard thoughts from unhappy souls who had no desire to see what her kindly light was showing them.

  Put it out! Put it out!

  I’m dreaming. Don’t you understand?

  Put it out!

  It’s her. The girl from the Hereafter. She’s the one who turned th
e light on.

  Put it out!

  “No!” A strong voice now; the first among all those she’d heard so far. “Let the light burn.”

  Candy sought out the speaker, and found him without any difficulty. He had a great cloud of red hair, with streaks of white in it. His square-cut beard was the same mingling of scarlet and white, his skin a bilious green. His voice by contrast with these excesses, was bland, colorless even.

  “Don’t be afraid of anything that your eyes tell you they’re seeing,” he said. His words carried farther than his volume would have suggested; a trick Candy knew from many an encounter with those who wielded magic. “Nothing here is real, children. I promise you that.”

  Even as he made infants of his congregation, somebody nearby whispered his name.

  “It’s Father Parrdar! The Prophet of Map’s Vault.”

  “I am not your Father. I am but a child, like you. Afraid, like you. Fearing sometimes, as you fear.” A murmur of recognition passed through the assembly. “Be calm, children. Our Father in the Hereafter hears our prayers. The Church of the Children of Eden will come to wake us, very soon.”

  Candy couldn’t believe her ears. Once again, a murmur passed through the prisoners’ ranks. This time, however, it was simply the sound of fearful people being granted some much-needed solace.

  “None of this is real. How could it be?” Parrdar went on. “What reason could there possibly be for so much suffering?”

  It came as no surprise to hear affirmation by way of response.

  “Yes, Father, yes! We have suffered in this nightmare!”