Abarat: The First Book of Hours a-1 Read online

  Scarebaby, scarebaby,

  Where do you run?

  Not out to the morning,

  Not out in the sun. Y

  ou live in my nightmares,

  You hide from the day;

  And there, little—

  “Shape?”

  The one-footed man turned.

  The voice had come out of the shadows, across the room. No door had opened to let the speaker in. He’d been here all the time, watching Mendelson. Listening to him practice his growls.

  Mendelson didn’t move. He simply studied the shadows, waiting for the appearance of the person who had addressed him. He knew of course, who that somebody was. It was the Lord of Midnight himself: Christopher Carrion.

  “Sit,” the voice said. “Please, Shape, sit. Are you fond of books?”

  The voice was deep and—even in the simplest of questions—was somehow tinged with despair. It was the voice of someone who had walked in the abyss.

  Mendelson could see him now, faintly. He was an imposing figure, six foot six or more, his long robes black, which was why he had blended so well with the shadows.

  He walked toward Shape, and the candles on the table illuminated him a little.

  He had the most piercing eyes of any man Mendelson had met. They glistened in his bald, pale head. As always, he wore a collar of translucent material that resembled glass, which had been devised to cover the lower half of his head. It was filled with a blue fluid, which was now suddenly lit up by the presence of several snaking forms. They flickered in their fluid—some white as summer lightning, some yellow as sliced fat—weaving bright patterns around the Lord of Midnight’s head. Plainly he took pleasure in their proximity, perhaps even a kind of comfort. When one of them brushed against his skin, he smiled, and that smile was so ghastly it made Mendelson want to run from the room.

  He knew from what Naw had told him why Carrion smiled that smile, and what those bright shapes were. Carrion had found a way to channel every nightmarish thought and image out of the coils of his brain and bring them into this semiphysical form. He breathed the fluid, the flickering forms ran in and out of his mouth and nostrils, soaking his soul in his own nightmares.

  His voice, reverberating through this soup of dark visions, was tinged with the power of those nightmares; their terror touched every syllable he spoke.

  “The books, Shape…”

  “Yes? Oh yes, the books. I have books. A few.”

  “And what else do you have?” Carrion said.

  The serpentine lights flickered around Midnight’s head. His eyes fixed on Mendelson.

  “Or don’t have?”

  “You mean the Key?”

  “Yes, of course. The Key. What else would I mean?”

  “Lord, please forgive me. I don’t have the Key.”

  Mendelson waited, fearing that Carrion would come at him; strike him, perhaps. But no. He just stood there, piercing Shape with his hollow gaze.

  “Go on,” he said quietly.

  “I… I found the men who stole it from you.”

  “John Mischief and his brothers.”

  “Yes.”

  “He escaped with the Key to Efreet and took a boat to the Hereafter. I went after him, and I sank the boat, and thought I would have him—”

  “But?”

  “The tide was with him. It carried him all the way to the other side.”

  “All the way to the Hereafter?” Carrion said, with a little touch of yearning in his voice.

  “Yes.”

  “How is it there?” he said, almost conversationally.

  “I saw very little of it. I was trying to catch Mischief.”

  “Of course you were. You were doing your honest best, but he kept avoiding you. Eight heads are better than one, eh? You were outnumbered.”

  “I was, Lord,” Mendelson said, beginning to dare think that his master understood the hazards his servant Shape had endured to get all the way to the Hereafter and back.

  Carrion went to the largest of the chairs in the Chamber. He sat down in it and knitted his hands together lightly in front of him, as if in prayer.

  “So?” he said.

  “So…?”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Oh. Well… I almost caught up with him, at Hark’s Harbor.”

  “The Harbor? I thought it was destroyed.”

  “There are some minor portions remaining, Lord. A lighthouse. A jetty.”

  “No ships?”

  “No ships. I think those that were scuttled are buried in the earth. Anyway, I saw none.”

  “So, go on. You went to the Harbor and—”

  “He had an accomplice.”

  “Besides his brothers?”

  “Yes. A girl. A girl from the Hereafter.”

  “Ah! He had an accomplice. And a girl, to boot. Poor Shape. You didn’t stand a chance.”

  “No, Lord.”

  “So he gave her the Key?”

  “Did he? I don’t know. Yes. Possibly.”

  “Did he or did he not give her the Key?” Carrion asked, his voice subtly gaining in volume and menace.

  Mendelson looked at the floor. His teeth had begun to chatter, though he’d promised himself he would not let them.

  “Look at me, Shape.”

  Mendelson was afraid to do so. He kept his eyes downcast, like a man confronted by an enraged animal.

  “I said: look at me!”

  Shape seemed to feel something catch hold of his head and jerk it back, so that he was forced to look at the man sitting before him. An instant later that same power pressed on his shoulders, driving him down onto the mosaic floor with such force that his knee bones cracked like whips.

  Carrion’s face looked skeletal, the marks around his mouth (where, according to rumor, his grandmother Mater Motley had once sewn up his lips) like the teeth of a skull; the arid flesh above the line of the fluid close to mummified. Only his eyes had any real life. And that was an insane life, crazed beyond recall.

  There was nothing in the world Mendelson Shape wanted more than to be out of the Library at that moment.

  “You failed me,” Carrion said.

  His voice seemed to resonate in Mendelson’s head, so that Shape was suddenly and sickeningly aware of the form of his own skull, of the death’s head he carried just out of sight behind his skin.

  “I’m sorry. I did all I could. I swear.”

  “What was the name of this girl?”

  “I heard only one name. Candy.”

  Carrion’s upper lip curled at the very idea of sweetness. “Would you know her again if you saw her?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “Then it seems I must let you live, Mendelson. You have dealt with this girl. Presumably you know something of her nature?”

  “Yes. I believe I do,” Shape said, through his chattering teeth. He wanted desperately to look away from Carrion’s face, but the Lord of Midnight held him there.

  “I think she probably has the Key, don’t you?”

  “But Mischief—”

  “Gave it to her.”

  “I didn’t see such a thing, Lord.”

  “But he will have done so.”

  “If I may ask… what makes you so sure?”

  “Because he’s like you. He’s tired of the chase. He wants somebody else to be the object of my eye, at least for a while.” Carrion paused for a moment and looked up at the ceiling. The cherubic beasts, roused from their roosts by the sound of the torment below were circling in the Library vault, enjoying the spectacle.

  Finally, Carrion said: “You have to go back and find me this girl.”

  “But, Lord—”

  “Yes?”

  “She came here.”

  Carrion rose from his seat. “You saw her, here?”

  “No. I saw the tide carry her away.”

  “So she could have drowned! She could be in the belly of a mantizac!”

  He came at Mendelson finally, his hands raised.
Filled with a kind of terrible relief that he was getting what he deserved, Shape felt himself lifted up, though Carrion made no contact with him. He was thrown across the nearest table and the books—including Pincoffin’s Rhymes—went flying. Mendelson was held down by an invisible force, so strong it kept his breath from coming freely. He heard his breastbone creak.

  “Listen to me, Shape,” Carrion said. “Your brothers are dead for their failures, and you will join them in the lime pit if you do not succeed in this last venture. Do you understand?”

  Mendelson could barely manage a nod.

  “Find me this… Candy. If she’s dead, find me her body. I can interrogate the dead if I need to. I want to know what kind of creature she is. The tide carried her, you say?”

  “It seemed that way,” Mendelson said.

  “That’s strange. After all that happened, I’m sure Our Lady Izabella would drown most souls, rather than carry them here.”

  Carrion took his eyes off Shape for the first time in several minutes, and Shape felt the weight of the power upon him relax somewhat. “There is something strange here,” Carrion said, half to himself. “Something mysterious.”

  “How will I find her, Lord, in all the islands?”

  “You will have help for that,” Carrion said, his wrath apparently quenched. “Go down to the kitchens. Eat. Wait for word from Naw. I will see you again when I have some clue…”

  “Yes, Lord.”

  “A girl, eh?” Carrion said, as though amused at the notion.

  Then he moved away, and was enveloped by the darkness.

  The bone-cracking weight removed from his chest, Shape rolled off the table, gasping for breath.

  In the vaulted ceiling above, the vile cherubs were still circling, chattering to one another as they went, excited by the violence they’d just witnessed.

  Mendelson ignored them. He hauled himself up to his foot and stump, and waited a few moments until the ache in his chest subsided.

  Then he hobbled to the door and headed away down to the kitchens, promising to himself he would burn his few books when he went home, for fear they would put him in mind of the terrors he had just endured.

  Part Three.

  Where is When?

  “The Day is words and rage.

  The Day is order, earth and gold.

  It is the philosophers in their cities;

  It is the map-makers in their wastelands.

  It is roads and milestones,

  It is panic, laughter and sobriety;

  White, and all enumerated things.

  It is flesh; it is revenge; it is visibility.

  The Night is blue and black.

  The Night is silence, poetry and love.

  It is the dancers in their grove of bones.

  It is all transforming things.

  It is fate, it is freedom. It is masks and silver and ambiguity,

  It is blood; it is forgiveness; It is the invisible music of instinct.”

  Fasher Demerondo

  15. Bug

  Maybe it was the warmth of the fire, maybe it was the strange scent of the dress she’d been given, maybe it was simply the fact that she was exhausted; whatever the reason, Candy slipped into a pleasant doze in front of Izarith’s fire, while little Maiza played singsong games beside her. It wasn’t a deep enough sleep to bring dreams, just a few flickering memories of sights she’d seen in the last few hours. The lighthouse, in all its ragged glory, standing in the long grass, neglected, but waiting. The turquoise ball, etched with the very same design she’d drawn on her workbook. The Sea of Izabella rolling out of nowhere, like a foaming miracle—

  She opened her eyes suddenly, her heart jumping. Maiza had suddenly stopped her singing and had gone from the spot on the ragged rug beside her. She had retreated to the corner of the room, close to her brother’s cot, her eyes fearful.

  Behind her, Candy heard a whirring sound. Something told her to move very cautiously, which she did, turning her head oh-so-slowly to discover what was making such a peculiar noise.

  Hovering in the middle of the room was a creature that looked to Candy like a cross between a very large locust and a dragonfly. Its wings were bright green, and it had uncannily large eyes, beneath which lay a design on its head that looked at first glance like a smile.

  She glanced back at Maiza. Plainly the poor child didn’t know what to make of this thing any more than Candy. She was gripping hold of the edge of the cot as though she was ready to climb in and hide with her brother if the creature made a move toward her.

  Candy didn’t have any time for bugs, big or small. Back in Chickentown they often had plagues of flies, because of the factories, and there was nothing she hated more than to go into the kitchen and find a host of big blue insects crawling on the dishes her mother had left caked with food in the sink before she went to work. Candy had no sentimentality about flies. She’d take a cloth and whip at them, catching them in mid-flight and killing them when they hit the ground.

  She knew where they’d been: in the coops, eating chicken excrement, or feeding on the caked blood that stank in the gutters around the slaughterhouse. They were flying diseases as far as she was concerned. The only good fly was a dead fly. The same with roaches, which periodically invaded the Quackenbush house on Followell Street. Again, no mercy.

  But this was a bug of a different order, and Candy wasn’t sure how to treat it. For one thing, it was so big; more like a bird than an insect. She wasn’t afraid of it stinging or biting her; she was quite ready to risk that. But she was afraid of enraging it and then having it turn on the children. She decided rather than swatting it like a very large wasp, she’d treat it as if it were a bird and try to coax it out it through the door.

  “Maiza?”

  “I want Muma.”

  “She’s coming back soon. I want you to sit very still, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  Having instructed the child, Candy tried to position herself so that she could shoo the insect through the door. But wherever she moved around the room, the creature repositioned itself, so that it was always staring directly at her, like an eager photographer determined to get a shot of her. When she approached it, the thing made no sign of retreating, but instead extended its neck so that its bug eyes seemed to get even bigger.

  All this maneuvering gave Candy plenty of time to study the thing and appreciate its intricacies.

  She should not have been surprised that a world which contained such a strange species as the Sea-Skippers should have insects as bizarre as this, but the more she looked at it, the more unusual it seemed. Its eyes had an unnerving depth to them, as if behind the layer of blue-green sheen was something more than insectoid intelligence.

  In fact there was something almost too intelligent about the way it looked at her. Weren’t bugs supposed to be stupid? Why then did this thing study her as though it had a mind of its own?

  She tried everything to usher the creature out of the door, but it wouldn’t go, so she decided to try Plan Two. When a bird got into the house (a rare event, but one that made Candy’s mother become panicky), it always fell to Candy to get it out. She applied the same method now.

  She went to the narrow pallet against the far wall, where apparently Izarith, her husband and Maiza slept, and picked up a sheet. When she turned, she found the creature had followed her across the room. Before it had time to work out what she was doing, she snatched up the sheet, threw it over the creature, and pulled it to the ground.

  The dragonfly instantly began to flap wildly and give off what sounded remarkably like a baby sobbing, rising scales of complaint which the sheet did very little to muffle. Candy held on tight, attempting to capture the creature without hurting it. She gathered up the sheet beneath the insect and gently transported it to the door. But she had not counted on the violence of the creature’s motion. It flapped so wildly—and its wings were so strong—that it began to tear the thin fabric open as if it were no more than a paper bag.
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  Candy hastened her trip to the door, but the creature was too quick for her. It tore out of the sheet and rose into the air again, hovering and turning on the spot seven or eight times. Plainly it wanted to ascertain who’d played this trick on it. When it fixed upon its captor, it defiantly flew closer than ever, and Candy saw the darkness behind its eyes close up like a mechanical iris.

  “You’re not real,” she said to it, amazed and annoyed at the same time. Amazed because she’d been fooled by its perfection for so long, and annoyed for exactly the same reason.

  The thing was spying on her.

  “Damn thing!” she said, whipping the sheet around, as she would have done in the kitchen at Followell Street if she’d been in pursuit of a bluebottle.

  The creature was so big (and perhaps a little dizzied by its own maneuvers) that she quickly caught it in the sheet and brought it down. It struck the ground very hard.

  As soon as it hit the floorboards, she knew that her guess about its true nature was correct. The sound it made was undeniably metallic.

  She pulled off the sheet. The thing was lying on its side, one of its wings flapping weakly, the other entirely still, and its six legs pedaled slowly as though somebody had just snatched a bicycle from between them.

  But even now, wounded and dizzied, it turned its bug eyes toward Candy, and she heard a humming sound that the noise of its wings had hitherto disguised.

  It was the noise of the creature’s mechanism she could hear, and it was clearly badly damaged.

  Even so, Candy didn’t trust it. She’d seen roaches she was sure were dead and gone push themselves up off the ground and nonchalantly walk away. As long as this strange beast had life in it, it presented a danger.

  She went to the hearth and picked up the iron rod that was used to poke the fire. Then—keeping her distance from the thing—she touched the creature with the end of the poker.

  What happened next came so fast that it caught Candy completely off guard. The creature suddenly flipped itself over, and crawled up the poker with the speed of a striking snake.

  Before Candy had time to let go of the poker, the design beneath the bug’s eyes opened up like the mouth of a crab, and a spike, about five inches long, emerged and jabbed Candy’s hand in the cradle of flesh between her forefinger and her thumb. Blood ran out of the wound. Yelping, Candy dropped the iron poker.