Abarat: The First Book of Hours a-1

by Clive Barker

  “Keep them for another time,” said Joephi.

  “But I have so many,” Candy said.

  The women were clearly preparing to make a hasty exit, gathering up their robes, glancing around nervously as they did so. Obviously they did not want to encounter this Abraham Hollow.

  “We’ll find one another again” Diamanda said. “Don’t you worry about that. There is so much to tell, on both sides. Thank you for the news about Henry, by the way. You’ve shamed me into an apology.”

  “But… he’s dead,” Candy said.

  “A matter of little consequence here,” said Diamanda.

  “Why?”

  “Because this is the Twenty-Fifth Hour. Everything is Here. Everything is Now. Even Yesterday.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Will you hurry up, Diamanda Murkitt?” said Mespa, catching hold of the old woman’s hand. “I hear Old Abraham coming.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Diamanda. “I’m coming. I just wanted her to understand—”

  “We don’t have time,” said Mespa.

  “No time?” said Joephi, laughing. “That’s the one thing we surely have in abundance. Time and more time and time again.”

  “Don’t get clever,” Mespa snapped. “I don’t want Abraham finding us. Any of us. NOW COME ON.”

  She was pulling on Diamanda’s arm now.

  “I’m sorry,” the old lady said to Candy, “there’s so much more I wanted to show you here. And we won’t get another chance to sneak you in, I’m afraid. Even this little peep took a lot of maneuvering—”

  “Will you stop gabbing?” Mespa said.

  “Yes, yes. Coming.”

  The light that had first revealed the women was brightening all around them. In a few seconds they would be gone. But before the sisters were eroded by the brightness, Diamanda reached out and touched Candy’s arm.

  “I envy you,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “The journey ahead of you… it’s going to be quite something. The things that are out there waiting to be discovered…” She smiled and shook her head. “You cannot imagine,” she said. “Truly…you cannot imagine.”

  Then her fingers drew back from Candy’s arm, and the three women vanished into the flux of light.

  As they disappeared, Candy caught a glimpse of the door slammer: Abraham Hollow, the Keeper of the Time Out of Time. He was no more than ten yards away, standing on the threshold of a door that he had just closed, and staring down at something at his feet. He was dressed in voluminous scarlet robes, and his thin face was possessed of that smoothness and translucence that sometimes comes with extreme old age. He wore tiny round black-lensed spectacles, which concealed his eyes, and had a matted mop of white hair on his head.

  “There you are, Tattle,” he said, addressing a large piebald Abaratian rat, which had appeared from between his feet. With great effort Hollow bent down and offered the sleeve of his robe to the rat. The animal instantly scampered up the sleeve and ran along Hollow’s stooped shoulder to his ear, as though whispering into it. Indeed, perhaps the rat was doing just that, because the old man then muttered to himself:

  “An interloper, eh? I should maybe summon the brothers…”

  He opened the door behind him and called back through it.

  “Tempus! Julius!”

  Time to go, Candy thought, before I’m caught trespassing. But in which direction should she run? There was darkness everywhere except for the light on the threshold where Abraham Hollow and his telltale rat stood. She decided the best thing to do was simply turn her back on the old man and run in the opposite direction.

  She did exactly that, racing off into the darkness, and silently cursing the three sisters for heading off without taking her with them.

  “There!” said Abraham Hollow. “I hear our trespasser’s feet. Over there!”

  Candy glanced back over her shoulder. The door at which Hollow and Tattle stood had been flung wide, as had the door behind it, and the door behind that door. And through them came the Fugit Brothers.

  Candy had been warned, of course, about the dangers of the Twenty-Fifth. She’d been told how all the people who’d ventured here over the years had either disappeared, or been driven mad. One glimpse of the Fugit Brothers and she understood why. They had the faces of clowns: white skin, gaping mouths and pop eyes. But that was the least of it. What was truly distressing was the fact that their features—their eyes, their mouths, their noses, their ears, and even the three little tufts of red hair they sported, were moving around their faces like the hands of crazy clocks. Despite the fact that their mouths were on the move, they still spoke:

  “I see her, Brother Julius!” said one of the brothers.

  “Me too, Brother Tempus. Me too!”

  “I say we tear out her heart, Brother Julius!”

  “I say we make her crazy first, Brother Tempus!”

  So that was the way of it, Candy thought. One vote for lunacy, one vote for murder. Either way, if these two caught her, she would never live to learn from what she’d seen in the Time Out of Time.

  She didn’t wait to hear any more of their chatter. She fled into the darkness, which enveloped her completely. She could see no sign of a way out in any direction: no door, no window. Not so much as a sliver of light from the outside world.

  There was nothing to be lost from yelling for help, she thought. After all, these clock-faced clowns knew where she was. So she called to Malingo, in the vain hope that he would hear her.

  “Malingo? I’m over here!” (Wherever here was.) “Please, if you can hear me, yell back.”

  She got an answer, but it wasn’t the one she wanted. It was an echo of what she’d just yelled, but the walls it had bounced off of had rearranged the words, and made nonsense of them.

  “You can if me. Yell back here, hear? I’m over Malingo.”

  Even the echoes had their own tricks in this place.

  As the words died away, she heard two soft voices, horribly close.

  “I believe we should take her, Brother Julius.”

  “I believe we should, Brother Tempus, I believe we should.”

  They sounded as though they were two or three yards away. She didn’t wait for them to get any nearer. She headed off into the darkness again, not caring where she went, just determined not to allow the Fugit Brothers to catch up with her.

  She couldn’t run forever, she knew. It was only a matter of time before the clowns on her heels caught up with her. And then what? Well, they’d already laid out their options. Even if she escaped their clutches, the echoes, and the memory of her pursuers’ circling faces, would take their toll. Whatever wonders she had witnessed here would be erased by insanity.

  No! She couldn’t let that happen. She ran on blindly, determined she was not going to be numbered among those who’d escaped the Twenty-Fifth too crazy to tell their tale.

  32. Monsoon

  The exhausted survivors of the sinking Belbelo spent their first day on the Island of the Nonce at the beach where they’d been washed ashore. Every time the tide came in it would bring more pieces of the wreckage up onto the sand: splintered timbers and rope, mostly. They didn’t expect to have to build fires on the island (it was warm at Three O’clock in the Afternoon; what need would they have of fire?) so the timber was of very little use. But every now and again a box of supplies was washed up, including a box of emergency rations.

  Unfortunately there was no medication for Mischief and his brothers, who were still in very poor condition. Though their wounds had stopped bleeding, there was no sign of consciousness returning. All Geneva, Tom, the Captain and Tria could do was to work together to build a small shelter out of branches and leaves, and lay the brothers in it, away from the heat of the midafternoon sun.

  Luckily both Tom and the Captain still had their copies of Klepp’s Almenak, and each had a different edition, so they were able to consult the pamphlet on a wide variety of matters.

  “It isn�
�t always reliable information,” Geneva cautioned them, as Tom proposed to make a stew of berries he’d found when he’d ventured a little deeper into the island. “We could very well poison ourselves.”

  “I doubt there’d be a recipe in the Almenak which produced poisonous food,” Tom said.

  “So you say,” Geneva said, plainly unconvinced. “But if we all get sick—”

  While they’d been arguing about this, Tria had been picking up the berries, one by one, and sniffing them. A few, particularly the smaller, greenish berries, she tossed away. The rest she left in the bag in which Tom had collected them, and declared with her usual strange confidence: “These are all right.”

  The stew was duly cooked, and it proved to be delicious.

  “We still could have got sick from the green ones,” Geneva reminded Tom and the Captain, “if Tria hadn’t stopped us from eating them.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake, Geneva,” MeBean said, “let it go. We’ve got more important things to worry about without arguing over stew.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as him.” MeBean glanced in the direction of Mischief. “I mean them,” he said, correcting himself. “I’m afraid they’re slipping away from us.”

  “I don’t know where we go for help,” said Tom. “According to the Almenak, there aren’t any towns on the island, so if there are any doctors around, they’re living in the wild. There are a lot of churches, but Klepp describes most of them as abandoned.”

  “There’s the Palace of Bowers,” Geneva said. “Perhaps there’s still some people there…”

  “How far is the Palace from here?” Captain MeBean asked Tom.

  “See for yourself,” Tom said, proffering his edition of Klepp’s Almenak so that all of them could see it. He pointed to a bay on the north-northwesterly side of the island. “I believe we’re here,” he said. “And the Palace is way over here. It’s probably two days’ walk, maybe more if the landscape between here and there is hilly.”

  “Which it is,” said Geneva. “The whole island is hilly. But we can still carry Mischief between us.”

  “Is moving them a wise idea?” MeBean asked.

  “I don’t know,” Geneva replied, shaking her head. “I’m no doctor.”

  “That’s the problem; none of us are,” said Tom. “If I had to guess, I’d say moving them would be fatal, but maybe waiting here is an even worse idea.”

  At that moment, everybody stopped staring at the map and looked up. The wind had suddenly risen, making the great blossom-filled banks of foliage in whose shadows they sat churn and sigh. And carried on that wind there came the sound of hundreds of voices, all singing a wordless song.

  “We’re not alone,” said the Captain.

  The music was both majestic and serene.

  “Snakes,” said Tria.

  “Snakes?” said the Captain.

  “She’s right,” Tom told him. “There’s a red-and-yellow serpent on the island called the vigil snake. They sing. It says so in the Almenak.”

  “I don’t remember snakes on this island,” Geneva said.

  “Yes you do,” said Tom. “They were requested by the Princess—”

  “For the wedding.”

  “Exactly. Finnegan had them brought over from Scoriae, which is their natural habitat. Apparently they liked it here. Klepp said they all escaped in the confusion after… all that happened at the wedding. And they have no natural enemies here on the Nonce. So they bred and bred. Now they’re everywhere.”

  “Are they poisonous?” Tria asked. It was perhaps the first time that any of them had heard her voice any fear about the natural world.

  “No,” said Tom. “Very mild-mannered, as I remember. And very musical.”

  “Amazing,” said the Captain. “What are they singing? Is it just nonsense?”

  “No,” said Tom. He read from the Almenak. “‘The song that the Vigil Snake sings is in fact one immensely long word; the longest in the ancient language of the species. It is so long that an individual can sing it for a lifetime and never come to the end of it!”

  “That sounds like a Kleppism to me,” Geneva said. “How would they ever learn it?”

  “Good question,” said Tom. “Maybe they’re born with it, like a migration instinct?”

  “Born with a song,” said Geneva.

  Tom smiled. “Yes. Don’t you like that idea?”

  “Liking it and having it be true aren’t the same thing, Tom.”

  “Huh. Sometimes you need to let things strike your heart and not your head, Geneva.”

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?” snapped Geneva.

  “Never mind.”

  “No, tell me Tom,” she said, bristling. “Don’t make sly remarks and then—”

  “It wasn’t sly.”

  “Well, how else would you—”

  “I resent being called—”

  “And I resent—”

  “Stop it,” said Tria. “Both of you.” The girl had sudden tears in her eyes. “Look at them.”

  While the argument between Tom and Geneva had been mounting, Mischief and his brothers had started to breathe in a most terrible fashion, a rattle in their collective throats that did not bode well.

  “Oh Lord…” Tom threw aside the Almenak and went over to the little bed of leaves and blossoms where they’d laid the brothers. “This doesn’t sound good at all.”

  He went down on his knees beside Mischief and laid a hand on his brow. Mischief’s eyes were rolling back and forth wildly behind his lids, and his breathing was getting quicker and shallower with every passing moment.

  At the same time, as though there was some strange synchronicity in the air (the argument, the singing, the wind and now Mischief’s anguish all happening within seconds of one another), the Captain looked skyward and announced: “I think we should get our stuff under cover.”

  He didn’t need to explain why. A vast thunderhead moved over the sun as he spoke, and the wind in the trees grew suddenly stronger, stripping some of the more fragile blooms of their petals.

  There was a sudden burst of activity as everyone did as the Captain had suggested. But fast though they were, they weren’t fast enough to move everything before the rain began. There were a few scattered drops, and then—in a matter of seconds—the drops became a torrential downpour, the rain coming down with such vehemence they had to shout to make themselves heard.

  “You and me, Tom!” the Captain yelled, “We’ll take Mischief together!”

  “Where are we going?” Tom hollered.

  “Up there!” McBean said, pointing up a small slope between the trees. The rainfall was so powerful that rivulets of sandy-brown water, carrying a freight of dead leaves, twigs, blossoms and the occasional dead rodent, were running down the slope. The area around Mischief’s makeshift bed was already an inch deep in water.

  There was a flash of lightning now, followed by a roll of thunder; the rain came on with fresh attack, as though it wanted to wash the world away.

  “Let me carry him!”Tom said, having to yell until his throat was a roar over the noise of cracking boughs and rolling thunder.

  The Captain didn’t have an opportunity for argument. Tom simply picked up Mischief in his arms and, putting his head down so as not to be blinded by the rain, proceeded to climb to higher ground. The others followed, all carrying what they could rescue from their little encampment.

  And still the rain came on, with mounting power, until the world was reduced to a deafening gray-green blur.

  Step by step Tom climbed the slope, until he was two thirds of the way to the top. Then out of nowhere a large log came down the slope carried by the force of the flood. Tom tried to move aside to avoid being struck, but the weight of the brothers slowed him. The log caught him a heavy blow, knocking his legs out from under him. Down he went, and Mischief slipped from his arms. They were both carried back down the slope, knocking everybody else over as they descended.

  When the
y reached the bottom, it was like being thrown into the midst of a fast-flowing river. Geneva caught hold of Tria to stop the child from being swept away down the beach and out into the sea. McBean in turn caught hold of Geneva with his right hand and grabbed a tree with his left, holding on for dear life until the monsoon had exhausted itself.

  And still it mounted, beating down on their heads. It was as if the skies had opened and unleashed a hundred years of rain.

  And then, just as abruptly as it had begun, it all ceased. It was as though a faucet had been turned off. The sun broke through the exhausted clouds, and it illuminated a battered world. Every single blossom had been stripped of its petals by the force of the rain. The smaller leaves had been pulled off the twigs, the larger ones shredded. Bushes had been uprooted and carried down onto the beach and into the surf, which was no longer white but tinted reddish brown by the mud that had been washed into it.

  Weary from the relentless assault of the rain, McBean, Geneva, Tria and Tom stood ankle deep in mud and debris. Unable to speak, they stared up at the sky, watching the patches of blue grow between the thinning clouds.

  As the warmth of the sun pierced the bruised canopy and touched the greenery around the survivors, they were all witness to a phenomenon that Klepp had failed to mention in his Altnenak. Apparently he had never been on the Nonce when a rainstorm had been unleashed, because if he had the ensuing miracle would surely have been reported in his Almenak’s pages.

  Everywhere around them, the wounded plant life was beginning to grow again. Roots, many of which had been exposed by the force of the water, stretched down like gnarled fingers into the muddied ground. From broken twigs and cracked boughs new growth sprang up, healthy and green, buds fattening and bursting in front of their astonished eyes. Vines curled and climbed from the remains of their rain-beaten elders like eager green children, while ferns sprang up, uncoiling their tender shoots at such speed they were grazing the lower boughs of the trees in seconds.

  “Oh. My,” Tom said.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Geneva asked the Captain.