Days of Magic, Nights of War Page 11

  “At least I’m honest,” said Filth. “Good-bye. It was really nice knowing you.”

  There was a loud crash from the direction of the palace entrance, followed by Houlihan’s voice.

  “Candy Quackenbush,” he yelled. “Show yourself! Give yourself up! Do you hear me?”

  Filth gave Candy a cheesy grin, then fled, bounding through a window that was set too high in the wall for Candy to follow him through.

  “Thanks a bunch, munkee!” she called softly after him.

  Houlihan, meanwhile, was following his nose through the labyrinth of the palace, his voice getting louder all the time.

  “You’ve nowhere left to run,” he shouted. “Just throw yourself down on the ground and wait for me.”

  Candy did her best to put the Criss-Cross Man out of her head and instead concentrated on how to avoid her pursuer. There were plenty of doors, but where did they lead? If she took the wrong turn, the passageway might lead her back into Houlihan’s hands.

  While she was pondering all this, the breeze that had first come blowing along the beach out of the trees came once more against her face, carrying Bilarki’s music. She would follow it, she decided, and hope that it would lead her to safety. Where was it coming from? She held her breath, listening closely. Ah, there! Through the door off to her right, with the clouds carved into the dark frame.

  She didn’t linger. Slipping off her shoes, she hurried to the door and pushed it open. The breeze was waiting on the other side, and so was Bilarki’s music. She followed it, fleet footed, praying to herself that it would lead her to safety.

  One thing was certain: the chase was leading her into rooms which she had so far not discovered; rooms that became more miraculous in appearance the farther she traveled. One room had walls that looked as though they’d been carved from green ice (though the walls were quite warm); another was cunningly decorated with an open window through which a forest could be seen that threw down a shadow made of light. But she had no time to admire any of these places for more than a moment. The sound of Houlihan’s approach was never very far off, and sometimes his stitchlings set up a hellish howling which echoed through the palace as though it were some terrible madhouse. Luckily, she still had Bilarki’s music. Just as she felt certain she had come around in a circle and was going to be delivered into Houlihan’s grip, she would find that the music had led her into a completely new part of this extraordinary labyrinth.

  Her good fortune couldn’t go on forever, however. By degrees the sound of her pursuers became louder, and more than once as she slipped out of one door she saw their shadows crossing the threshold of another.

  “I see you . . .” the Criss-Cross Man called after her. “I told you, Candy Quackenbush. There’s nowhere left to run. . . .”

  She glanced back, and he was there, finally, his face the same sickly yellow she remembered, his eyes fetid with hatred. For a moment his gaze fixed upon her and she was held by it, as though he had somehow rooted her feet to the floor. It took a great effort of will to unglue herself, but she managed it. She turned away from him and scanned the wall ahead in search of an exit. At first she could see no door: only a fresco depicting a purple landscape, its horizon lit by a constellation of lantern stars, where animals that looked like escapees from some gossamer circus paraded and leaped.

  But her eyes were sharp, even in the half-light of the Twilight Palace. There was a door in the wall. It was just so cunningly incorporated into the elegant painting that it was at first not apparent.

  Now she saw it; and ignoring another warning from Houlihan, she fled through it, and into the Twilight Palace’s strangest chamber.

  Chapter 16

  The Wunderkammen

  IN THE MIDDLE OF the room was a tree whose ambitious branches had pierced the roof of the chamber. Sitting at the base of the tree on a large toadstool was the musician whose laments had drawn Candy to this palace of strange wonders in the first place: Bilarki. He was a relatively commonplace-looking individual, except for the tendrils of spiraling matter that grew out of his head and his back, swaying to the rhythm of the music that he played. His instrument was not an oboe, as Candy had first guessed; it was something far more Abaratian, and the notes that arose from it were woven strands of green and turquoise and orange.

  She was loathe to distract him from his music making, but the situation was dire.

  “Excuse me,” she said to him. “Is there a way out of here? Besides the way I came in, I mean.”

  He opened his eyes, which had been closed in pleasure, and looked at her sideways. She could tell by the expression on his face that he understood what she was saying to him, but instead of responding he just continued to play. Or did he? Was the playing somehow a way of responding to her? The music had shrugged off its sadness completely now and was getting increasingly urgent. She attended closely. What was he saying?

  “There is another way, isn’t there?” she said.

  Bilarki played on. He was almost in a frenzy by now. Clearly he wasn’t going to reply to her.

  She glanced back toward the door through which she’d come. On the other side of it she could hear the sound of objects being broken, furniture being overturned. Clearly Houlihan was prepared to trash the entire palace rather than let her slip through his fingers again as she had on Ninnyhammer, Soma Plume, Huffaker and Babilonium. With the music adding fuel to her fire, she began to search along the walls, high and low, looking for some sign of another door.

  The scene painted on the wall—which showed two monkish characters (one human, one Abaratian) carrying staffs that bloomed into leaves and stars—made the search more difficult, its elaborate beauty constantly distracting her from the simple business of finding a handle, or a switch, even a narrow crack that would offer some clue to the location of an exit. Still, she was thorough, keeping her palms pressed to the wall while she systematically moved around the room.

  The music was losing its agitation, she noticed. What was it telling her? That she was getting cold. Yes! Glancing up at Bilarki, she reversed the direction of her search, and sure enough the music from the trees above regained its momentum, urging her on in the direction she was going. She reached the corner of the room, looking along the wall ahead of her. It didn’t look too promising. There was no sign of any crack or fissure along the wall, however insignificant. But still the music urged her on, and she obeyed its urgent instruction, investigating this wall as carefully as she had the last.

  She didn’t waste a moment looking back toward the door. She didn’t need to. She could hear the sound of destruction getting steadily louder as Houlihan and his monsters searched the room behind her. It was only a matter of time before they found the door through which she’d come. A minute or two if she was lucky. Seconds, more likely.

  And then, without warning, the music changed again. The urgent music suddenly gave way to a slow steady chord, which seemed to catch at her heart. She pressed at the wall in front of her with renewed intensity, as the chord Bilarki was playing became more powerful. Was it her imagination, or was there a faint reverberation in the wall? No, she wasn’t imagining it. The painted wall was trembling, as though it knew a secret and it was shaking with the anticipation of sharing what it knew.

  The din from behind her was suddenly terrifyingly loud. And this time she couldn’t help herself: she glanced back. To her great surprise, she saw Filth the munkee ducking through the door, obviously doing his best to look as small as possible as he ran. He kept running until he reached Candy, at which point he did his best to hide behind her skinny legs.

  “You came back,” she said, smiling down at him.

  “Ssh!” he replied, nervously fingering his booger-filled nostrils. “They’re right outside the door.”

  He had no sooner spoken than several things happened at the same moment. First, the tremulous chord that Bilarki had been playing resolved itself into some final state, and the wall beneath Candy’s palm churned and shook and opened up. She
heard Filth gasp, and she looked down to see an expression of awe on his simian face.

  “Will you look at that?” he said.

  Candy followed the line of his gaze. She had perhaps four seconds to marvel at the unveiling of the room. Then she heard the sound of her pursuers squabbling to be the first through the door, and Houlihan’s voice cutting through the argument.

  “I see you, Candy Quackenbush!”

  Again she looked back. Houlihan’s face had grown brighter since she’d looked at him a few minutes before. Now it cast a jaundiced luminosity on the mire-stitchlings who surrounded him with a most unflattering light, revealing them in all their terrible emptiness, like living scarecrows dragging their rotted carcasses through these exquisite chambers in pursuit of her.

  “Bring her to me!” the Criss-Cross Man cried.

  At his instruction the stitchlings came lumbering across the room, all reaching out to be the first to lay their cold hands on her.

  “Quick!” Filth said. “Move yourself before it’s too late!”

  He pulled on her arm and hauled her through the open-ing in the wall.

  The room on the other side wasn’t like any other room that she’d found in the palace. There was nothing in it made for human comfort: no chairs, no table, no bed. There were shelves on three of the four walls, built from floor to ceiling, but there was nothing on those shelves that might have been for the entertainment of the palace’s occupants, such as books. Instead the place was filled, every available inch of it, with objects that had nothing in common with one another.

  Hanging from the ceiling on a web of rusty chains was a stuffed reptile of some kind, which possessed six pairs of petite but brightly colored feathered wings and a seventh, much larger wing, which grew from the crown of its long-snouted head. A mummy sitting in a chair looking thoroughly bored. On the shelves behind the desiccated giant were dozens of jars, urns, flasks and other odd vessels in which were pickled a bizarre cross section of objects both natural and unnatural. In one was a bird with a baby’s head (or a baby with a bird’s body), wearing a pretty pink lace bonnet. In another was a creature with a halo of tentacles, posed against a painted seascape. Many of the objects weren’t even things she could name, odd encrusted forms that might have been the rusted parts of some ancient clockwork machinery or the fossilized remnants of some ancient crustacean or the curious mingling of the two.

  On another wall, a collection of masks had been hung in no particularly artful arrangement; and among them, dolls in wedding dresses, their once-virginal lace yellowed by time.

  “This is the Wunderkammen,” the munkee explained. “I think that’s a word that comes from the Hereafter. It means a Cabinet of Wonders.” It was the oddest collection Candy had ever seen and utterly arbitrary: as though somebody had simply assembled in one room every strange and unusual thing he had ever laid his hands or eyes upon. The centerpiece was an Abaratian totem pole carved of wood and garishly painted: a tribe of creatures sitting one on top of the shoulders of another, some squatting comfortably, others balanced precariously. The pole was too tall to be accommodated by the room. A hole had been cut in the ceiling, and the totem rose another eight or nine feet beyond.

  Despite the need to move on before Houlihan caught up with them, the pole was too extraordinary for Candy to just pass it by.

  “What is it?” she asked Filth.

  “It’s a tribe,” he replied. “A whole tribe, frozen together.”

  “Why?”

  “Punishment. They’re called the Totemix. And they’re troublemakers, let me tell you.”

  Candy’s eyes flicked up and down the Totemix, going from face to face. There were all manner of peculiarities in the assembly: wild men and crazy women, cross-eyed children and face-pulling dogs. She was still looking at this incredible collection when she heard the Criss-Cross Man’s voice behind her.

  “Well, well . . .” Houlihan said. “Look at this! You’ve got a nose for objects of power, Quackenbush!”

  “I do?”

  “First the Key—”

  “That wasn’t me.”

  “Now King Claus’ private collection of astonishments, huh? His Wunderkammen. I would never have found it if I hadn’t had you to follow. Carrion will be very pleased. Very pleased. He might even decide not to have you executed.” Houlihan smiled. “Though I doubt that,” he said, putting on a passable imitation of regret. “Nuth! Yitter! Take her away. But be careful with her, you understand me?”

  The two largest stitchlings growled their response and approached Candy with a strange caution, as though they were afraid of her or something in her vicinity.

  But just as they laid their hands on her, the munkee unleashed a screech so sudden and so loud that it made the stitchlings lose their grip on their quarry. Candy was quick. She ducked past their outstretched fingers and made a rush for the door. Houlihan blocked her way, a smug smile on his checkered face.

  “Not this time,” he said.

  He casually shoved her back into the room, and she fell against a table on which was laid a group of carved, brightly painted Gods and Goddesses. The statues fell to the floor, and Candy went down among them. As she fell, she could have sworn she heard voices nearby, speaking as it were through fixed expressions.

  “Lordy-Lou!” somebody said.

  “Down she goes!” said another.

  “Clumsy, ain’t she?” a third remarked.

  She picked up one of the statues by its wooden legs and peered at it.

  “Did you speak?” she said to it.

  The statue stared back at her with dead eyes. No, it hadn’t spoken. So what had?

  “Take her!” Houlihan yelled to his stitchlings, and the bigger of the two came rushing at her. She attempted to defend herself with the statue, but Yitter—if Yitter it was—simply snatched the carving out of her grip and struck her a blow that flung her halfway across the room. She landed at the base of the totem pole.

  Houlihan sauntered toward her.

  “It’s over, girl,” he said. “You’re mine.”

  He was interrupted by a dark blur that dropped down from the ceiling. It was Filth. The momentum threw the Criss-Cross Man backward as Filth beat him with his fists.

  “Get this ape off me!” Houlihan yelled.

  “I’m not an ape!” Filth screeched. “I’m a munkee! MUN! KEEEE!”

  Candy knew she only had a few seconds’ grace before the stitchlings pulled Filth off Houlihan. She reached up and caught hold of the totem, intending to pull herself to her feet. The moment she made contact with the object, however, she felt a shock in her hand which ran up her arm, through her shoulder, up her neck and into her head, where it erupted in a strangely pleasurable burst of feeling. Though there was chaos everywhere, her thoughts were cool and comfortable. She looked down at the palm of her hand and saw to her astonishment that it was bright, almost golden; in fact, the map of her anatomy—bones and nerves and all the rest—was suddenly visible to her. It wasn’t upsetting to see her hand this way. Quite the reverse. It was wonderful. In a timeless space where there was no Criss-Cross Man, nor stitchlings, she stared down at the intricacies of her palm with sweet wonderment.

  The vision didn’t last long. Not wanting to lose it, she put her hand back on the totem, hoping the renewed contact would ignite that golden fire a second time. And it did! As soon as she touched the carvings, a fresh wave of feeling passed up through her hand and blossomed in her head.

  She felt a rush of energy against her face, like a breath exhaled. And with it the sound of voices—the same voices that had spoken so unflatteringly when she’d fallen down but that now were speaking what sounded like a single multisyllabled word, from which she could pick out only a few recognizable sounds.

  “—camunanotafreexamalesatacpolastafan—”

  She looked up at the pole, and her mind, which had been struggling with the mystery of things half remembered since she’d stepped over the palace threshold, was suddenly granted a rush o
f comprehension.

  Totemix! Filth had said Totemix! That was the name of the creatures who were gabbling right now. They were a tribe called the Totemix! And they were there in the pole, being stirred from their slumbers by the touch of her palm!

  She saw them moving now, shifting in their skin of paint, their eyes flickering, their mouths widening, parting, smiling as the spell of life moved up the pole from the spot where Candy had made contact. With every few inches it crept, a new limb or organ would be granted life. An arm extended itself, a foot wriggled its three-jointed toes, a trio of eyes focused on the world they had woken to. There were none among the Totemix that were completely human; but then there were none that were completely animal either.

  One, she saw, was a long-limbed, round-bodied creature with a single horn on its head; another had three vaguely feline heads, but wore a fancy suit; a third and fourth were joined at the head, their features indistinguishable.

  The first creatures to escape this strange prison were the birds, or those of vaguely birdlike form. They leaped out of their solid state with grateful cries, instantly climbing up to the heights of the chamber and circling the vaulted ceiling. Their voices seemed to be a call to life; it speeded up the waking of the other Totemix. A creature with a serpentine body and vermilion wings flew up to join the congregation of birds; a creature with a nose that could be played like a violin came out making his own strange music. A woman bristling with white fur threw herself at the wall and did a somersault off it. Everywhere there were jubilations and astonishments, whoops of joy and shouts of delight.

  None of the creatures looked angry or ready to do any harm, but the Criss-Cross Man kept his distance nevertheless. Again he ordered the stitchlings to move in and bring Candy to him, but even they were reluctant to get too close to the awakening Totemix.

  Meanwhile the resurrection continued, as living things jumped and flew from every part of the pole. In some places so many creatures had been cunningly woven together that when they came to life it was like upending a jug of living things and letting the contents spill out. Tiny rodents uncurling themselves as they tumbled, piglike animals that possessed squeals out of all proportion to their diminutive size, long-limbed apes no bigger than Candy’s hand. And while this rain of tiny marvels fell, much greater beasts rose up from the column like bathers emerging from a warm bath: sluggish at first, but invigorated by the first gust of cool air that came against their faces.