by Clive Barker
“This is a private funeral,” she said to him.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, sounding genuinely contrite. “I really didn’t wish to intrude on your grief. It’s just that back there you said something very interesting.”
“I did?”
“When you told me that you came from Minnesota.”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes, that. Were you telling the truth?”
“Why?”
“Because I would be extremely thankful to you if you would lead me back there.”
“To Minnesota?”
“Yes. To Minnesota.”
Candy looked incredulous. “You wouldn’t like it,” she said.
“Oh but I think I would. I’m always looking for new markets for the Commexo Kid and his Panacea.”
Candy didn’t reply. She finished covering up Squiller and gently patted down the earth. Pixler had meanwhile squatted beside her.
“Here,” he said. He had made a small cross of two pieces of twig, tied together with a length of grass.
Candy was a little taken aback by the simple gentility of the gesture, but then she thought, Well, he’s trying to be civil, so she took the cross from Pixler and pushed it into the soft earth at the head of the grave.
“Thank you,” she said.
“No problem. I want us to be friends. What’s your name again?”
“Candy Quackenbush.”
“Candy, I’m Rojo. I won’t beat around the bush. The fact that you’ve come from the Hereafter is of the greatest possible importance to me.”
“I don’t see why,” said Candy. “It’s not as interesting there as it is here.”
“Well, maybe not to you,” Rojo replied. “But you’re used to it. To me it’s… new territory to explore. A new frontier. I’ve done all I can here. I need somewhere new to—”
“Conquer?” Candy said, standing up and looking down at Pixler.
“No,” he protested mildly. “Do I look like a conqueror? I’m a civilized man, Candy. I build cities—”
“And burn books,” she said.
He looked pained to have been caught in a lie. Before he could come back with another response, she had more to say: “And shoot down defenseless creatures.”
“I didn’t see you being carried by the moth, I swear. If I had, I wouldn’t have fired.”
“There was a rider on the moth too.”
“Really?”
“Yes. His name was Mendelson Shape. He fell to his death.”
Rojo looked genuinely distressed. “That’s a tragedy. I am completely culpable. In the heat of the hunt I did something I shouldn’t have done. Did you know him? The rider, I mean? If he has family I’ll make whatever reparations I can.”
“I don’t know if he had any family. He worked for someone called Christopher Carrion.”
“Carrion? Really?” Rojo glanced away from Candy toward the moth, which Doggett’s men were seconds away from bringing down out of the trees. “So that was Carrion’s handiwork, eh?” he said, his voice touched by awe. “Very impressive.”
Candy followed his gaze toward the moth. Light and color were still pouring from it, dissipating on the air, illuminating the trees: blue and purple and yellow and red.
“So tell me—” Pixler said, “—what were you doing, taking a ride on Carrion’s moth?”
“If you must know I wasn’t taking a ride. Shape abducted me.”
“Abducted?”
“Yes.”
Rojo gave a little self-satisfied smile. “Well then,” he said. “I saved you from some very serious trouble. You wouldn’t have wanted to be Carrion’s prisoner, believe me. He has the morals of the very Devil, that man. And if he ever found a way to get over to the Hereafter…”
“It’s not that difficult,” Candy said.
“To get there, perhaps. But to gain a foothold…” He passed his hand through his hair. “That’s the challenge. Please listen to me. Candy. I truly believe we could be very useful to one another.”
Candy was not convinced. “How?” she said.
“Think it through. I’m in need of somebody with a good working knowledge of the Hereafter, and you need somebody here to protect you from Carrion.”
“I don’t need protection.”
“Oh, my dear, you don’t have the first clue what this man will do to you if he takes it into his head to be cruel. He is a law unto himself, believe me.”
“Even so, I don’t care to tell you about the Hereafter,” Candy said, backing away from him.
“Oh, now don’t be difficult,” Pixler said. “I realize we met under difficult circumstances. But I’m genuinely sorry about the moth. It was just an accident. It could have happened to anyone.”
“Anyone who was out hunting,” Candy said.
“I realize not everybody approves of it. But it relaxes me. And I have a huge collection of stuffed animals in Commexo City. Nineteen thousand specimens, from fleas to Kiefalent whales. I’d really like you to see it.”
“Some other time, maybe,” Candy said.
Pixler shrugged. “Believe me or not,” he said, his tone hardening, “I don’t really care. In the end, you’re going to come begging to me, when Carrion’s on your tail. Begging for me to hide you from him.”
“Yes, well maybe…” Candy said. “But right now I’d prefer to take my chances.”
“Please,” Pixler said, making one last desperate attempt to convince her, “let me bring you back to Commexo City. It’s not safe on half these islands. The inhabitants are savages. Totally uncivilized.”
“I am not going back to Commexo City with you. That’s final,” Candy said.
In truth there was a little part of Candy that wanted to accept Pixler’s invitation. He was polite enough, after all; he seemed more like an ordinary human being than many of the creatures she’d met on her travels, which right now she found reassuring. She was feeling very much alone, and very tired. She’d lost count of the time that had passed since she and Mischief had plunged into the Sea of Izabella (though she’d reset her watch when Mischief had told her to, it had stopped); now she felt the way travelers in the Hereafter felt when they’d traveled around the world and their body clocks had become confused. Her thoughts were sluggish and her limbs ached. The thought of going with Pixler to some civilized place where the showers were probably hot and the beds were surely soft was not without its attractions.
But then she’d effectively be in Pixler’s control, wouldn’t she? In his city, as his guest. Or his prisoner.
“I can see you’re having second thoughts,” Pixler said, reading the confusion on Candy’s face. “You’re thinking about a comfortable place to lay your head, no doubt.”
Candy tried to block out his seductions by concentrating on something else. She turned her attention to the moth.
Off between the trees, Doggett’s team was close to bringing down the creature’s body. There was much shouting and a flurry of orders, then—sooner than any of the workmen had anticipated—the moth’s corpse came crashing down out of the trees. As it struck the ground, it erupted in a brilliant shower of light and color.
But there was something else in the substance of the creature that was also set free as it flew apart. Candy saw four or five skeletal faces rise up out of the blazing remains of the moth and weave their way skyward.
The spectacle didn’t just draw her attention. It drew that of Pixler and Birch too. Candy seized her moment. She cautiously retreated a step, then another, then another. Birch and Pixler hadn’t noticed: the disintegration of the moth was like a fireworks display; it claimed all their attention.
After five backward steps Candy turned and ran.
It didn’t take her long to get to the other side of the copse, and there she paused to take a backward glance. She could see Birch and Pixler, silhouetted against the brightness of the moth. By now they had both realized that she’d gone. They were looking around, obviously trying to locate her. But apparently they’d been staring into t
he blaze of the disintegrating moth for too long, and it was still blinding them. Or perhaps the darkness simply concealed her. Whatever the reason, when they looked in her direction—as now and then they did—they failed to see her.
Pixler yelled something at Birch, who immediately went back to the balloon’s gondola.
He’s gone for more men, Candy thought. I’d better get out of here.
She turned her back on the men and the moth and surveyed the starlit terrain in front of her. Ninnyhammer was an island of gentle hills; on top of one of those hills, perhaps two miles from where she was standing, was a building with a large dome upon it. There was light in its windows, so if it was a house, then somebody was at home, and if it was a religious building of some kind (which the dome made her think perhaps it was), then it was open for worship. Or sanctuary, which was what she needed right now.
She didn’t look back now at Rojo Pixler, or the moth with its colors and its weaving ghosts. She simply started down the gentle slope that led away from the trees. Very soon, the copse was out of sight, and the men’s voices had been carried away by the wind.
She was alone for the first time since she’d arrived in the Abarat. There were no hunters, no Sea-Skippers; no Izarith, no Samuel Klepp, no John Mischief and his brothers.
Just her, Miss Candy Quackenbush of Chickentown, under a heaven filled with alien stars.
From somewhere deep inside her a great—and unforeseen—surge of joy appeared.
Out of sheer pleasure she started to sing as she went. It wasn’t a song from the Hereafter that came to her lips. It was the absurd little ditty she’d heard the Sea-Skippers sing.
“O woe is me!
O woe is me!
I used to have a hamster tree.
But it was eaten by a newt
And now I have no cuddly fruit.
O woe is me!
O woe is me!
I used to have a hamster tree!”
For some uncanny reason she remembered it perfectly, as though she’d known it all her life, which was of course impossible. Yet here it was, coming to her lips as easily as some rhyme she’d been taught at kindergarten.
Oh, well, she thought as she gave the song full throat, there’s another mystery.
And content that somewhere on the journey ahead she would find the answer to that mystery—along with something to eat—she went on her way, singing of newts and hamster trees.
24. Digger and Dragons
John mischief hadn’t been making an idle boast when he spoke of himself—or more correctly, of themselves, the brothers—as master criminals. During their long felonious career, they had stolen from all manner of places, coming away with all kinds of hauls. Only once had they been arrested, and slipped custody while being transported back to the Yebba Dim Day by throwing themselves overboard.
There were too many thefts for the brothers to remember every one, but there were some that they still liked to revisit in those idle moments of happy self-congratulation. Their burglary of the chateau of Malleus Nyce on Huffell’s Hill, for instance, had been extremely profitable. They’d come away with every costume Nyce had ever worn to the Cacodemonic Carnivals on Soma Plume: sixty-one outfits, all set with precious jewels and sewn with Thread of Sirius. Just a year or so later, they had broken into the prison on Scoriae and stolen all the tattoos off the body of the gangster Monkai-Monkai, leaving him as naked as the day he was born.
Then there had been their picking of the locks on the door of the Repository of Remembrance, that contained one hundred and thirty-one rooms of treasures that had once belonged to the great and the good of the Abarat, going back to the time when the islands were twenty-four Tribal Territories.
Nothing in the Repository had been of any real value. There had been no jewels, no precious metals. But the rooms had contained objects of infinitely more value than wealth. Here, collected and cataloged on the Repository’s shelves was a hoard of the heart: the nursery toys of kings, the playthings of princes, the mud pies that potentates had dreamed would one day be palaces. The potential purchasers of all these objects of lovely inconsequence were the people across the archipelago who still idolized their one-time owners; and the brothers had anticipated making so many millions of zem they would never have to steal another fork.
But it was not to be. Monkai-Monkai had broken out of prison two days later and had come after the brothers and the only way Mischief and his siblings had escaped with their lives was by handing over their booty from the Repository to him.
But the treasure the brothers had been most proud of stealing, because stealing it had proved so difficult, was a painting known as The Beautiful Moment.
It had hung in what was known as the Stone House, the possession of the sometime lord of the Islands of Day, King Claus. Since the death of his daughter, Claus had become an obsessive eater, and weighed over a thousand pounds. He ate and slept in a vast clockwork car, and had chased the thieves in it when he’d awoken to find his painting being stolen.
That had been a close call. But the brothers had been proud of the job. And indeed so enamored of what they’d stolen that they had almost considered keeping it.
The Beautiful Moment was a lovely thing. Or more correctly, three things; for the artist, a man called Thaddeus George, had painted a triptych that, when laid side by side, portrayed the entire archipelago, immortalized in oils at a time when everyone had had high hopes for the future. King Claus had commissioned the work from Thaddeus six weeks before his daughter’s wedding, taking him up in an air balloon so that he might see the Abarat spread out “at this beautiful moment.”
The world Thaddeus had painted was very different from the Abarat of today. The islands had been very different sixteen years ago. There had been no Commexo City on Pyon. Babilonium had been a modest little collection of tents and fun-fair entertainments (a Ferris wheel, a hall of mirrors, a geek in a cage). The air traffic above the islands had been little more than a few million birds, and the odd balloon, and the sea traffic had consisted chiefly of sailing ships.
In the interest of his art, Thaddeus had also taken some liberties with the size and complexity of the islands. He had left out most of the towns and villages, and the smaller outcroppings, which did not count as Hours, like Vesper’s Rock, had also been omitted.
But even in this much simplified form, Thaddeus’s last known work had been his most ambitious achievement: to look at it was to feel as though you were a bird, hovering over the islands, borne aloft by a balmy wind.
The Johns had made a small fortune from that theft. They had sold the picture to Rojo Pixler. He had paid many thousands of zem, which Mischief assumed he had borrowed, for at the time Pixler had still been a traveling salesman, selling gaudily painted windup toys for children.
The fact that Pixler had probably used The Beautiful Moment as a way to plan his slow but apparently irrevocable takeover of the islands was not lost on the brothers. In the years since Pixler had bought the painting, Pixler’s judgment (and his luck) had been flawless. He was now undoubtedly the most powerful nonmagical creature on the Abarat. Besides Commexo City, which was so vast it was practically a world unto itself, the sometime salesman also owned a controlling share of Babilonium, and was now planning the construction of a pleasure dome, as he described it, at Five O’clock in the Evening. There was even talk of his buying the Great Zigurrat at Soma Plume and deconsecrating it, then turning it into a second city the size of Commexo.
Despite the fact that his public face was the ever-smiling Commexo Kid, Pixler was by no means a sweetheart. Indeed, he had made it known when he purchased the painting that if John Mischief or any of his brothers ever whispered to anyone that the transaction had taken place he would arrange for the whisperer and his brothers to be silenced.
That was the real Rojo Pixler speaking.
So, Mischief and his brothers had kept their mouths shut, and the fact that the painting had gone missing didn’t even make it into the news sheets. St
ill, there were plenty of other crimes for which the Johns were responsible which continued to be the talk of coffeehouse and mothercake stalls alike, years after they had taken place. It was widely thought that when Mischief and his brothers were finally tracked down and brought to trial, the punishment would be death.
All of which goes to explain why Mischief, exhausted by his travels though he was, and badly wanting to stay close to Candy so as to retrieve the Key she still carried, did not dare remain near the Yebba Dim Day.
Rather than enter The Great Head in pursuit of Candy and risk being recognized inside, he waited instead in the water close to the jetty until all the dramas there were over, and then dragged himself back onto the quay (or what was left of it) in the hope of finding a boat that would carry him away to a less busy island. Somewhere the brothers could relax for a few days and plan their next move.
He was in luck. He was sitting feeding flakes of buttered coa fish to Slop when he heard a woman clap her hands to get the attention of all who were on the dock and announce that: “We need someone who can dig!”
With one voice, his brothers all said: “He can dig!”
And not for the first time, Mischief found himself volunteered.
Five minutes later a two-masted sailing ship called Belbelo left the Yebba Dim Day and headed into the currents of the Straits of Dusk.
The man in charge of the vessel was one Captain Hemmett McBean, a bear of a man who had sea salt in his blood. There were four other occupants of the Belbelo, besides the eight brothers. First there was the person who’d called for a digger, a black woman-warrior by the name of Geneva Peachtree, who was obviously in charge of this mission, whatever its purpose. Besides her and the captain, there were two other diggers: one a creature who hailed from the Island of Spake, called Two-Toed Tom; the other a large, brutish fellow, bald but for three black curls, called “Kiss Curl” Carlotti. He had been a gambler of some notoriety, but had lost his tongue and his middle toes in a bet many years before and had sworn off gambling thereafter. The last member of this unlikely band—but by no means the least important—was a waif-like girl, no more than thirteen, with long, white-blond hair and dark, eloquent eyes. Her name was Tria, and she sat at the bow of the Belbelo most of the time, staring out over the waters of the Izabella.
