Abarat: Absolute Midnight

by Clive Barker

  “Hush!” she said sharply.

  “What?”

  “We have visitors.”

  The monotone in which she spoke was a voice Carrion had learned to despise—no, to dread. It was worse than anger, that voice. Anger had a beginning and an end. Even if it went on for weeks it would run out of fuel eventually. But the nullity from which this voice arose was his grandmother’s permanent state of being. It was her speaking from the grave into which she had been born, as she was fond of saying; the hole of dirt, worms and despair, which was the lot of all living things.

  This was the harsh, unforgiving law that Carrion had been raised on. And every time he saw that look on his grandmother’s face, and heard the almost metallic harshness in her voice, the brutal lessons of his childhood came back to him as though her needle had only pierced his lips yesterday.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well what?”

  “Are you going or not?”

  Christopher had drifted further into memory than he’d realized. He’d missed a piece of the conversation, it appeared. He knew from childhood it wasn’t wise to lie.

  “I was distracted. Memories. Nothing important. You have all my attention now.”

  “Good. Because we have a problem and you’ll have to fix it. I need to stay here in case they make a move.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “Don’t you feel it?”

  “No.”

  “Look.”

  She pointed to the ground, and threw down one of the wieldings he especially loathed. This was one of the Nephauree’s specialties, Carrion suspected: a violation of spatial geometry and physics alike. Though he had not moved a step, he now felt the ground shift beneath him. When his eyes dropped to the bare marble he was no longer standing on solid ground. But everything had shifted. The place where Carrion was standing now dropped away steeply, as it did on the opposite side, where his grandmother was standing on a steep slope, staring down into the depths of the ship. The floors and walls between the battle floor and the hold had been erased, essentially, by the power of the Nephauree’s magic.

  There was chaos down there. Pigs were running around, squealing wildly. And in the midst of the pigs were two stitchlings. One of them was grievously wounded, a machete buried in its face. Mud continued to leap up out of the wound, its matter creating a gathering on the chest of the second stitchling, who lay sprawled on the ground.

  The Empress took a steep step down the chaotic wall of the pit.

  “You!” she said.

  It was neither Shaveos or Lummuk who replied to her. It was the third entity down there: the one squatting on Shaveos’s chest, that looked up and spoke. Its face was still a work in progress, invisible fingers pushing the mud of its features around two holes for eyes—a slash of a mouth. But for all its crudity, it knew how to make words.

  “What do you want?” it said, its voice a raw rasp.

  “I want some respect from you, to start with! Do you know who you are addressing?”

  “What makes you think I’d care?” the mud replied.

  “Carrion?” the Hag said. “Go down and fetch me that skinless piece of filth. Carrion?”

  Only now did she look up at the place where she’d last seen her son. He was no longer standing there.

  “Carrion?”

  “Carrion!”

  “CARRION!”

  Chapter 65

  Lullaby

  CANDY DIDN’T SEE ZEPHARIO ahead of her at any time during her pursuit, but her instincts told her she was on the right track. They also told her that she needed to pick up her pace otherwise she was going to lose him, even though he was the blind one and she the sighted. Luckily the old man had left a trail of air tinged with magic: drifts of color like chalk dust the color of his robes, falling away through the murky air. They weren’t, she thought, accidental. They only appeared at places where she might very well have made a wrong decision: turned right instead of left, or chosen the wrong one of several doors.

  But even with the assistance he was giving to her, the space between them was getting bigger. And she certainly would have lost him eventually if help hadn’t come to her from a most unexpected source.

  Mater Motley.

  It was the Hag herself whom Candy heard call out:

  “Carrion? Carrion! CARRION!”

  Candy halted for a moment, and waited for the voice of the Hag to echo off the walls all around her. When they finally died away she heard the sounds of footsteps. It was Zephario she thought she heard, his running slowed by fatigue, but still moving fast. He was nearby too, just above her.

  She risked everything, and called to him: “Wait for me, Zephario,” she said. “I’m coming. Just let me catch up with you.”

  She had found the flight of stairs he had climbed—the pastel dust that he’d left behind him was still in the air, fading as it fell—and she went after him, climbing the stairs two or three at a time. Half way up she met a cloud of spice-and-honey smoke rolling down the stairs to meet her as she ascended. By now, she reasoned, the Hag was fully alerted to Candy’s presence. Stitchling troops were being sent to arrest her; and given her ignorance of the vessel’s layout, and the stitchlings’ familiarity with it, she had little hope of evading them.

  She was almost at the top of the stairs. The atmosphere up here was very different from the atmosphere below. The lights in the hold had been the Commexo Company’s version of utilitarian supermarket lighting. It simply made things blandly visible. But the light that was illuminating the air at the top of the stairs was something else entirely: a blue-gold haze that dropped in lazy loops from a kind of ziggurat of candles in the center of a room so large that even thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of candles burning could not illuminate the walls of the room. It was some sort of altar. A place of worship for some thing Candy had no knowledge of. It was really only then that Candy understood how truly vast the craft that they had entered actually was; and the inconceivably immense orders of power that were being generated to keep it in the air.

  “Zephario?” she said, her voice apparently never reaching the walls of the space, because no echo came back to her. “Zephario, where are you?”

  “I’m here,” he said, and her eyes, following the sound of his voice, found him standing no more than thirty yards from her, standing so still in the flickering light of the temple that her gaze had slid past him several times without noticing him. “But you don’t need to stay with me any longer, Candy. You got me here. You did what you said you’d do.”

  “I said I’d get you to him,” she said.

  “To who?” Christopher Carrion asked.

  For the second time she followed the sound of a Carrion’s voice in this place. And for a second time, found the one she was searching for just a short distance away. Candy couldn’t help but notice his startling transformation. He looked nothing like the festering alley urchin she’d encountered in Tazmagor.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Candy. This is a sacred place. At least the Hag thinks so.”

  “Sacred to whom?” Zephario asked him.

  “The ones who give her the power she’s got. Who helped her build this Stormwalker,” Carrion replied. “Those Who Walk Behind the Stars.”

  “The Nephauree?” Zephario said very softly.

  “Yes . . .” Carrion said, his voice carrying a fresh measure of respect for this knowledgeable stranger. “Do you also have dealings with them?”

  Zephario didn’t answer the question. Instead he said:

  “She deals with the Nephauree?”

  “Yes. What does it matter to you?”

  “You have to stop her. The Nephauree? They’re at the heart of this?”

  “What?” Carrion said, faintly irritated now. “What are you talking about?” He didn’t give Zephario time to fail to reply. He looked directly at Candy. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “But you brought him here.”
>
  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he had to see you.”

  “All right. Again: why?”

  “He’s your father, Christopher.”

  There was a long, brutal silence when everything that eyes could express flickered in Carrion’s gaze. “That’s not possible,” he said. “My father is . . . not . . .” The words slowed as they emerged. “Not . . .”

  “Not a blind, broken old man dressed in filthy rags?” He sighed. “I would have preferred to have come before you in a more noble state, I will admit. But we take what we are given, when it comes to the clothes upon our backs. And I trusted you had enough of your mother’s heart in you to look past the rags to the spirit.”

  He lifted his hand, as though to touch his son’s face, even though they were ten strides or more apart. Despite that distance, Carrion flinched behind the wall of glass and the circling nightmares as though he’d felt the touch.

  Zephario sensed his response.

  “You’re angry,” he said.

  “No,” Carrion replied. “Just doubtful.”

  “I wouldn’t have brought him here if I wasn’t certain,” Candy said.

  Christopher turned his baleful gaze on Candy. “Speaking of bringing him here, how did you do that? My grandmother thinks she saw you die on Galigali. And I saw the place where you were standing erupt moments later. So why aren’t you dead?”

  Though Carrion asked the question of Candy, it was Zephario who replied.

  “We left the mountain before the death sentence could be delivered. You don’t need to know how. But you can be certain the power she used to carry us away wasn’t got from a bargain made with destroyers of worlds, like the Nephauree.”

  “How do you know what they’ve done, old man?”

  “You still don’t believe me, do you?”

  “That you’re my father? No. I’d know you. Even after all these years . . .”

  “Why? You never saw me. We three survived the fire. But you were so small, and so traumatized by being in the middle of all that death . . . hearing them all.” The strength in his voice began to falter. He drew several quick, shallow breaths, but they failed to carry him through the terrible truths that awaited utterance.

  “Your brothers and sisters, your own mother . . . burning alive . . .” His voice was shaking, but so was his entire body. Candy wanted to somehow help him tell this terrible story, but how could she? There was nothing in this vast burden that she could carry for him. It belonged solely to this tragic father, who could only pass it on in his own anguished fashion to his already wounded son. “I sometimes wondered when I looked at you, how or why you even held on to life. Why?”

  “Wait!” Carrion said. “Now I know you’re lying. You said I never saw you just a moment ago. Now you say you looked at me.”

  “Oh, I looked at you, child,” Zephario said. “Many times. But only when you slept. I wanted to get my fill of you, as any father would.”

  “The fire didn’t blind you?”

  “No. I blinded myself,” he said. “She made me crazy, your grandmother, and I poured poison in my eyes to kill my sight.”

  “Why did she make you crazy?”

  “Because she found me one night in your nursery, holding you sleeping in my arms, singing to you.”

  “Nobody ever sang to me.”

  “The ‘Lullaby of Luzaar Muru.’ You don’t remember it?”

  He began, in that shaking voice to sing:

  “Coopanni panni,

  Coopanni panni,

  Luzaar Muru.

  Copii juvasi

  Athemun yezoo.

  Coopanni panni,

  Coopanni panni

  Luzaar Facheem

  Mendonna quasi

  Wemendee bazoo . . .”

  Candy had no idea what the words meant, but she had no doubt that she was indeed listening to a lullaby. The simple melody, even sung by a voice so close to breaking, was still calming.

  She allowed her eyes to stray, very cautiously, toward Christopher. The look of triumph on his face, having caught Zephario out in a lie, had vanished. So had the doubt. Very softly he said what might have been the two most important words Candy had heard him say. Perhaps that he had ever said.

  “I remember.”

  Something essential had changed in him, Candy saw, the greatest evidence of which was the behavior of his nightmares, which no longer circled his head, but lay acquiescent at the bottom of his collar. Not dead, but simply robbed of any belligerent purpose.

  “Why didn’t you show yourself to me, Father?” he said. “Why only hold me when I slept?”

  “I wasn’t a pretty sight, believe me. The doctors told me if you even saw me, so badly burned, it might be too much for you. That you’d just give up on life. So I only held you when you slept. But that stopped after she caught me. No more singing ‘Luzaar Muru’ to my baby. I should have left that night, because in my heart I knew she would win the battle for your soul. She wanted a true servant of her will, whose mind she knew as well as she knew her own, because she’d shaped it. And she couldn’t afford to have anyone else taint her perfect apprentice. So she had to rid herself of me.”

  “But you knew—”

  “Of course I knew.”

  “Still you didn’t leave.”

  “You were all I had. All that was left from a tragedy I thought I’d caused. It never occurred to me that my own mother would kill her own grandchildren. No, I thought it was me. All me. And the only sacred, beautiful thing that had been saved from what I’d done, was you. So how could I abandon you? How could I give up my times holding you while you slept? I couldn’t. So even though I knew she would try to take my life sooner or later, so that she could own you completely, I stayed close. And I was always ready for the moment when her assassin came. I knew how to defend myself against any blade she might hire to dispatch me. What I didn’t consider was that there might be no blade. That she would be poisoning me slowly. Sewing seeds of madness in my head, so that the assassin who almost took my life was myself.”

  He stopped. His voice had become so thin, so insubstantial, that it was barely louder than the sound of the candle flames gathering.

  “You know the rest,” he said.

  “How did you live?”

  “I somehow found my way back to myself, when I began to read the cards. Piece by piece I put my memories back together, though I’d forgotten almost everything.”

  “Even me?”

  Zephario finally began to walk toward his son, and this time Carrion didn’t flinch. He simply stood there, waiting for his father to approach.

  Candy searched Carrion’s features, looking for some sign of what he was feeling. But he was either letting nothing show or was not certain what he felt. Either way his face was blank, his eyes as empty as those of his father’s.

  Candy had learned to become aware of how the feeling in the air changed when magic was at work, and it was at work now. Its source was Zephario. He was wielding the same power that he had wielded in those terrible moments on Mount Galigali, when he’d done something that had plucked them from certain death.

  But what was he using it for now? What purpose was the magic serving?

  She got her answer as Zephario came within reach of his son, and lifting his right hand, touched the collar. His fingers didn’t pause upon contact with the glass. They passed through it, their motion not slowing even an instant as they slid through the divide and into the mysterious fluid that Carrion and his nightmares lived upon and within. The nightmares raised their heads a little at the intrusion of the fingers, but quickly seemed to decide that, since their master saw no harm in them, then why should they, and lay their heads down again.

  Zephario’s fingers reached out and touched his son’s cheek.

  It seemed to Candy that in that moment, in that touch, all the suffering Zephario had spoke of—all the waste, all the anguish, all the death—poured out of the father and into the son. Mem
ories Carrion had kept hidden all these years, even from himself, finally surfaced; and he remembered what it had felt like to be in the heart of the fire—

  Features, which had moments before betrayed nothing, suddenly wore every agony carved on a living face. His mouth was drawn down, his brow became a mass of anguished forms, the traces of veins across his temples began to swell and throb, while the muscles of his jaws clenched.

  “Oh, Father . . .” Carrion said. “. . . this hurts . . .”

  “I will let you be,” Zephario said.

  He broke his contact, and withdrew his hand from the collar, leaving the place where he had entered and exited unmarked.

  “It all makes sense now,” Zephario said. “I never understood why the cards wanted to look for a child I knew would never care for me. And now I see why. The idea of seeing him again strengthened my heart. But it wasn’t the real reason I took this last journey. It was so that the blind man might see a terrible hidden thing.”

  “The Nephauree,” Carrion murmured.

  “You knew all along?”

  “That she worked with them?” He looked up at his father out of the maze of pain he had discovered and Candy knew that the Christopher Carrion who was watching the world now would never have been able to make sense of his father’s fears until he had been made to remember the fire. Now he was reconnected to the horror of the burning of the Carrion Mansion, in all its terrible particulars. It wasn’t some ancient tale of a cruel thing done in a cruel time. It was living memory of the dying. The stench of burning hair and flesh and bone. The sound of screaming silenced as those who were crying out inhaled fire. It was a crime committed by the woman who taught him not to feel, that could never be forgotten or forgiven.

  But what he knew, she knew. It had always been like that between them.

  “I’m sorry, Father,” Christopher said.

  “There’s nothing to apologize for, son.”