Abarat: The First Book of Hours a-1

by Clive Barker

  As he spoke, he moved toward Knotchek as though to strike him again. The stitchling drew itself up into a little ball of terror and waited to be brutalized.

  But the blow never fell. Houlihan had emerged from the gallery, smiling.

  “She’s found!” he exclaimed.

  Carrion waved Knotchek away. “Go. Tell her,” he said.

  Knotchek fled into the crimson mist and was gone.

  “A problem, sir?” Houlihan said.

  “Only my grandmother. She has too many fancy ideas about herself. One of these days she’s going to go too far. So… you say you’ve found her? Show me.”

  Houlihan led Carrion back inside. The same image was now playing on all sixteen screens of Voorzangler’s device. The white-suited cyclops had a smug smile on his face.

  “She was in the Yebba Dim Day, in a house down on Krux Street, which is in the Fishermen’s Ghetto. I must say, my lord, I can’t see why you would have any interest in her. She doesn’t look like much.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” Carrion said.

  He approached the screens. The images before him were crystal clear. There was the girl, staring straight at the eyes of the spy, which moved to keep her centered and focused whenever she turned or backed away.

  Carrion turned to Mendelson Shape. “Are you absolutely sure that this is the girl who was with Mischief?”

  Shape nodded.

  “No doubt?”

  “No, Lord. None.”

  Carrion returned his gaze to the screens. “So…” he said quietly, staring at the girl. “Who are you?” He continued to stare at the image for several seconds, as though his eyes were attempting to interrogate the screen. Then he glanced around at Voorzangler.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Three hours ago. Maybe four.”

  “So she’s probably still in the Yebba Dim Day. What do you think, Otto?”

  “There have been some troubles there,” Voorzangler said, before Houlihan had a chance to respond. “The dock collapsed. So there have been no boats getting out these last couple of hours.”

  “So she is still there,” Houlihan said.

  “What’s the big deal?” Voorzangler said. “She’s just—”

  Carrion suddenly raised his finger to silence the doctor and stared with renewed intensity at the image on the screens. The stranger from the Hereafter had become angry, and her face—recorded by the very thing that was irritating her—had changed.

  The girlishness had gone out of it. A young woman had been ignited by the fury she felt.

  The change had Carrion entranced.

  “Now what is this?” he said, so, so softly. He narrowed his eyes, taking off his glove and putting his naked hand on one of the screens as if wishing he could reach into it and seize hold of the girl herself.

  “Do I know you?” he said, his voice even more mellifluous. “I do, don’t I?”

  The screen suddenly went blank. Carrion let out a little sob of pain, as though he’d been woken from a trance.

  “It ends there,” Voorzangler said.

  Carrion didn’t speak for a long while.

  He simply continued to stare at the blank screen with an expression of profound bemusement on his face. Voorzangler opened his mouth to speak again, but Houlihan hushed him with a sharp look.

  Finally, after fully two minutes, Carrion said: “Shape?”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  “Go to Vesper’s Rock and wait for me there.”

  “Am I to go after the girl?”

  “Oh yes. You are to go after her. But not by glyph. I’m going to give you something a little more in keeping with the significance of your mission.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Just go,” Carrion said, still staring at the blank screen.

  Shape hurried away.

  “There is something in that face, Otto, that makes me think my enemies are wilier than I suspected. They play with dreams now.”

  “Dreams?” asked the Criss-Cross Man.

  “Yes, Otto. I have dreamed that face. That innocent face. But who…?” He glanced up and met Voorzangler’s strange stare. “Oh, are you still here?” he said to the doctor. “You may go. Thank Mr. Pixler for his kindness, will you?”

  “The Universal Eye,” Voorzangler said. “I have to return to Commexo City with it.”

  “No,” said Carrion, very plainly. “I’ll keep it here for now.”

  “No, no, no, you, you, you don’t understand,” Voorzangler said, panic making his words skip. “The, the science of, of—”

  “—is of no interest to me, Voorzangler. So don’t fret yourself. I won’t be stealing back any of your precious Verities. It’s her I’m interested in. And until I have the real thing in front of me, I will keep your Universal Eye.”

  “It’s, it’s just not, just not—”

  The doctor didn’t get to finish his reply. Carrion was on him in a heartbeat, his hands at the man’s throat. Voorzangler tried to drag Carrion’s huge grasp away from his windpipe, but his own thin little fingers weren’t equal to the job.

  Carrion lifted him off the floor; his feet were dangling in the air.

  “You were saying, Doctor?” Carrion said.

  The life was rapidly going out of Doctor Voorzangler. His conjoined eyes were becoming glassy. His limbs were jangling as though he was having a fit.

  “We might need Mr. Pixler’s help in the future,” Houlihan remarked casually.

  Carrion chewed on this for a moment. Then he took his hands off Voorzangler. The man dropped to a gasping, sobbing heap at the Lord of Midnight’s feet.

  “Take him outside.”

  Houlihan hauled the doctor up and dragged him toward the door, pausing only to pluck the controls to the Universal Eye out of Voorzangler’s pocket.

  Once he’d deposited him outside the gallery door, he returned to await Carrion’s next instruction. When it came, it was simple enough.

  “Show me the girl again,” Carrion said. “Then you can go.”

  Voorzangler’s device was easy to work. The image of the girl from the Hereafter was soon called up onto the screen again, ready to be replayed and replayed.

  “Arrange a glyph to take me to Vesper’s Rock,” Carrion said as he stared at the images of Candy. “I want five corpses there, waiting for me. The usual place. Get some off the gallows. But they have to be old. I’m going to need dust.”

  He stared at the screens.

  “Dust for the girl from the Hereafter.” He smiled to himself. “It’s the least I can do.”

  17. Almenak

  Given how close together the cottages were, Candy had fully expected to find a small crowd outside Izarith’s door, drawn there by the noise of their fight with the insect. But there was far more interest in what was going on down at the dock; everybody was headed that way. So Candy made her way up the street, against the flow of the crowd. She was much more aware of the insect population now. Which of the numberless creatures buzzing around was a spy, like the one in Izarith’s house? Every now and then something whined past her ear, and she swatted it away. None, she was pleased to see, came back.

  The street had broad shallow steps, which made climbing a little easier. Even so, the labor of walking soon began to take its toll on her. The short sleep she’d had in front of the fire in Izarith’s cottage had not been sufficient to fully restore her.

  What she still needed, she knew, was some food. There were a number of stalls set out to the left and right of her on the steps, and they seemed to be selling a variety of edible goods: dried fish were hanging up on one stall (not her first choice); at another somebody was deep frying something that looked remarkably like a doughnut, especially when it had been dusted with sugar. She dug in the pockets of the little dress Izarith had given her and pulled out the six dollars she had kept. Perhaps it wasn’t wise to use them, she thought. They marked her out as an alien here.

  That left two options. She could either beg for f
ood or steal it.

  Since she was in urgent need of sustenance, in her present situation morality didn’t really enter the picture. She looked up the street a little way. One stall seemed to have been deserted by its owner, who’d probably gone down to the dock with the rest of the crowd.

  As she started to make her way toward the empty stall there was a surge of noise behind her, and a portion of the crowd, along with a number of police officers, came back, all gathered around three or four people who had clearly been pulled out of the water.

  “Make way! Make way!” one of the officers yelled. “We’ve got injured people here!”

  That was, of course, precisely the wrong thing to say. As soon as the words escaped from his lips, more spectators appeared to swell the crowd, eager to see how horrible the injuries were. Many of them clogged the street ahead of the advancing throng. The officer began to yell again. But people wanted to see, and no amount of shouting from a police officer was going to stop them getting a glimpse.

  It was a curiously familiar scene. Watching it, Candy flashed on something that had happened four or five years ago, back home—or in the Hereafter, as she now thought of home. The family had been on a midsummer trip to see Grandma Hattie, Melissa’s mother’s mother, in Pelican Rapids. They’d been on Highway 94, and the trip had been going smoothly until suddenly the traffic had ground almost to a complete halt.

  For the next hour and a half they had crawled along. The air conditioning in the car was not working properly so the heat was ferocious. It made everybody bad-tempered.

  It had quickly become clear that the problem up ahead was a collision, and Candy’s father had started to rage on about the fact that the real reason the traffic had come to a halt was because people were slowing down to see the wreckage.

  “Damn lookeeloos! Everybody has to slow down and take a look! It’s sick! Why can’t people mind their own damn business?”

  Of course, half an hour of sweat and curses later, when the Quackenbushes’ car finally came up to the accident site, Candy’s father had slowed down just like everybody else. In fact he had almost brought the line to a complete halt so that he could watch a body being brought out from under one of the seven vehicles—trucks, cars and an eight-wheeler rig—that were involved in the collision.

  Candy should have known better, but her tongue had been quicker than her self-protective instincts. “I thought you told us it was sick, Dad?” she’d said.

  Without missing a beat, Bill Quackenbush had leaned back between the seats and slapped her hard.

  “Don’t you give me cheek!”

  “I just said—”

  He slapped her again, harder.

  “Enough, Bill,” Candy’s mother had said.

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” came the reply, and just to show that he didn’t care about his wife’s opinion, he slapped Candy a third time, bringing tears to her eyes.

  As she wiped them away, she caught sight of her mother in the mirror throwing an accusatory glance up at her husband. Bill Quackenbush had not seen the look: he was still staring at the bloody scene across the highway. But Candy had read the look clearly, and in the confusion of feelings she had for her father, it had given her a kind of sad satisfaction to see the cold loathing in her mother’s eyes. But it wasn’t enough. Why didn’t she ever stick up for Candy—or herself? Why was she so weak?

  All of this came back to Candy while she was watching the crowd come up the street, as clear as if it had happened yesterday. The heat of the car; the smell of her brothers’ sweat and farts; her own discomfort and boredom. Then the horrible sight of the tangled wreckage; and the moment of regret when she’d spoken but it was too late to take the words back; followed by the slap and the tears and her mother’s glacial stare.

  That was the world she’d left. Boredom, violence and tears.

  Whatever lay ahead of her here, she thought, it had to be better than that. It had to be.

  She looked away from the crowd back up the street, to see that more than one stall had been deserted by their owners, who had all hurried down to see what could be seen.

  She went up two or three steps, to a stall with a variety of pastries laid out on it. The display looked very similar to some thing she might have found in the supermarket in Chickentown, only tastier. Turnovers, croissants, sticks of bread rolled in dried fruit and a variety of small cakes.

  She selected three very quickly: two turnovers and one huge scone; and then, greedily, went back for a croissant. Having got herself more than a meal’s worth, she glanced up and down the street, just to check that the vendor wasn’t making his or her return. It seemed she was free and clear.

  She hurried away, clamping one turnover between her teeth and pocketing the other three pastries. Then she went on up the street and found a low stone wall where she could sit and eat.

  The pastry was doughy, perhaps undercooked, but the filling was extremely sweet, with an odd, almost peppery edge, which she didn’t like on the first bite but quickly changed her mind about. While she ate, her eyes went to a large advertisement on the opposite side of the street. It showed a deliriously happy boy, drawn in a cartoony style, with baggy striped pants and a big curl of blue hair, like a wave about to break, in the center of his head. He was animated by carefully laid lines of neon light and was walking on the spot, waving as he walked.

  Beside him, on the wall, was a sign that read:

  The Commexo Kid says:

  For Everything That Ails You,

  From Toe-Rot to Taxes,

  Try the Panacea.

  Candy laughed, her mood—which had been darkened by her memories of the events on Highway 94—lightening again.

  And then, from the corner of her eye a figure appeared. A man dressed in a blue coat, wearing a spotted all-in-one suit underneath, stepped into view.

  “I saw you,” he said.

  “You saw me do what?”

  “Take the pastries.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “It’s okay,” the man said, sitting down on the wall beside her. “As long as you share.”

  He was smiling as he spoke, so it seemed the threat, such as it was, carried no weight. Candy pulled the scone out of her pocket and broke it in half.

  “Here,” she said, handing one half over to her new companion.

  “Most generous,” he replied, rather formally. “And you are?”

  “Candy Quackenbush. And you are?”

  “Samuel Hastrim Klepp. The Fifth. Here.” He fished a little pamphlet, printed on coarse brown paper, out of his pocket.

  “What is this?”

  “Klepp’s Almenak; first published by my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Hastrim Klepp the First. This is the new edition.”

  Candy took the pamphlet and flicked through its pages. It was rather chaotically designed, its illustrations in black and white, but it was packed to the margins with information. There were maps, gaming rules, a page or two of astrology, and a few pages of pictures of what the author described as New Animals, which was an interesting notion. Further pages listed Celestial Events (the times of meteor showers and eclipses), even a collection of recipes. And interspersed between these relatively commonplace pieces were articles with a rather more Abaratian twist: “The Cat’s Hair Cathedral: Myth or Reality?” “The Dung-Jewels of Efreet: A. Gatherer’s Tale.” And “The Golden Warrior: Alive or Dead?”

  “So you publish this?” Candy said.

  “Yes. And I sell it here in The Great Head and in Tazmagor and Candlemas and Kikador. But there’s not much of a market for it any longer. People can get all the information they need from him.” He jerked his finger, rather rudely, at the Commexo Kid.

  “He doesn’t exist, does he? I mean that kid?”

  “No, not yet. But take it from me, it’s only a matter of time.”

  “You are joking?”

  “No, not at all,” Samuel said. “These people over at Commexo City, Rojo Pixler and his gang, have plans for us. And
I don’t think any of us are going to like what they have up their sleeve.”

  Candy looked at him blankly.

  “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  “Where are you from?” Samuel said.

  “Oh… here and there.”

  Samuel put his hand on her arm. “Tell me,” he said. “I can keep a secret.”

  “I guess there’s no reason why you shouldn’t know,” Candy said. “I came over from the other world. You call it the Hereafter.”

  A broad grin came over Samuel Klepp’s face. “You did?” he said. “Well, isn’t that something! I thought when I first laid eyes on you stealing those cakes: there’s something about that girl…” He shook his head, his expression one of delight. “You see, a lot of people think the Hereafter is a myth, but I’ve always believed in it. So did my father and my father’s father, all the way back to Samuel Hastrim Klepp the First. Tell me more, please. I want to know everything about the Hereafter.”

  “Really?” said Candy. “I don’t think it’s very interesting.”

  “Well, it might not be to you, because you were born there. But my readers need to hear about your world. They need to know the truth.”

  “But if people think it’s all just a myth, how will you make anyone believe it?”

  “Put it this way: I think it’s better to try to get them to believe in new things than just to be content to have Commexo run their lives. Curing everything from toe-rot to taxes! I ask you! How ridiculous can you get?”

  There was a new commotion from farther down the street, as more drowned or nearly drowned people were brought in from the docks. Klepp made a face.

  “I’ll never be able to hear you talking over that din and hulla-baloo. Why don’t you come back to the Press with me—?”

  “The Press?”

  “The place where I print the Almenak. I can show you a little of my world, while you tell me about yours. How does that sound?”

  “Sure,” said Candy. She was happy to get off the street, to be away from all the noise and confusion, so that she could gather her thoughts.