Abarat: Absolute Midnight Read online

  “Well, well . . .” he murmured. “Look at you.” He tapped her with his finger. “What gives you the right to be such a power? And what business have you got with me?” The girl on the card stared at him from his mind’s eye. “Are you here to give me harm or happiness? Because I tell you I’ve had more than my share of sorrow. I can’t take much more.”

  I Am They watched him with great compassion.

  “Ah,” he said. “It isn’t over. At least now I know. Be kind to me, will you? If it is in your power.”

  It took him another six and a half hours from his speaking to Candy Quackenbush to finally deciding he was done with the Spread. He gathered up all of the cards, counting them to be sure he had them all, and then he went outside, taking them with him. The wind had picked up considerably since he’d been out here with Lupta and her little gang. It came speeding around the corner of the house, buffeting him as he walked toward the cliff edge, the pack of cards trembling in his hand.

  The farther from his doorstep he ventured the more unreliable the ground became, the solid earth giving way to loose dirt and pebbles. The cards were becoming more excitable with every step he took out there beyond the cliff edge. Events they’d been unable to share until now were imminent.

  Suddenly the wind picked up its strength, and threw him forward, as if to cast him into the world. His right foot trod vacant air, and he toppled forward—seeing all too clearly in his mind’s eye the waves of the Izabella below. Two thoughts came into his head at the same instant. One, that he had not seen this (his death) in the cards. And two, that he’d been wrong about Candy Quackenbush. He would not meet her after all, which saddened him.

  Then two small yet very strong hands seized his shirt and pulled him back from the brink. Instead of dropping to his death he toppled backward, landing on top of his savior. It was little Lupta.

  “I knew,” she said.

  “Knew what?”

  “You were going to do something stupid.”

  “I was not.”

  “It looked like you were.”

  “The wind caught me is all. Thank you for saving me from losing my—”

  “The cards!” Lupta said.

  His grip on the cards was too weak. When the wind came gushing again it snatched them from his hand, and with what sounded like a ripple of applause as they slapped against one another, they were carried away, out into the naked air.

  “Let them go,” the blind man said.

  “But how will you make money without your cards?”

  “Heaven will provide. Or else it won’t, and I’ll go hungry.” He got to his feet. “In a way it confirms my decision. My life here is over. It’s time I went to see the Hours one last time before they and I pass.”

  “You mean they’re coming to an end?”

  “Yes. Many things will end soon. Cities, Princes, things foul and things fine. All will pass away.” He paused, looking up sightlessly at the sky. “Are there a lot of stars tonight?”

  “Yes. Lots.”

  “Oh good, very good. Will you lead me down to the North Road?”

  “Don’t you want to go through the village? Say good-bye?”

  “Would you?”

  “No.”

  “No. Just get me to the North Road. Once I have it beneath my feet, I’ll know where to go from there.”

  Part One

  The Dark Hours

  Oh sweet children, my beloveds, time to go to bed.

  Oh sweet children, heavy-lidded,

  you are bathed and you are fed.

  Time for pillows, time for sleeping,

  and fearless dreams to fill your heads.

  Oh sweet children, my beloved,

  time to go to bed.

  —Anon.

  Chapter 1

  Toward Twilight

  CANDY’S GANG OF ABARATIAN friends had plenty of plans laid to celebrate her safe return to the islands after the violence and insanity of the Hereafter. But they had barely finished welcoming her home with kisses and laughter (to which the John Brothers added an a cappella version of an old Abaratian standard) when Deaux-Deaux the sea-skipper, who had been the first friend Candy had made in Abaratian waters, came to find her, to tell her that word was being passed by every means in every direction, demanding her presence at The Great Head of the Yebba Dim Day. An emergency meeting of the Council of the Hours was presently assembling there to fully analyze the calamitous events that had taken place in Chickentown. Given that Candy had a unique perspective on those events, it was vital that she attend to give evidence.

  It wouldn’t be an easy meeting, she knew. No doubt, the Council suspected that she was the cause of the events that had wrought so much destruction. They would want her to give them a full account of why and how she had come to make herself such powerful enemies as Mater Motley and her grandson, Christopher Carrion: enemies with the power to override the seal the Council had put on the Abarat and force the waters of the Izabella to do their bidding, causing it to form a wave powerful enough to wash over the threshold between worlds, and to fill Chickentown’s streets.

  She quickly said her good-byes to those she’d only recently greeted again—Finnegan Hob, Two-Toed Tom, the John Brothers, Geneva—and with her geshrat friend Malingo for company she boarded the small boat the Council had sent and departed for the Straits of Dusk.

  The journey was long, but went without incident. This was no thanks to the temperament of the Izabella, which was much stirred up, and carried on her tide plentiful evidence of the journey her waters had recently taken across the border between worlds. There were keepsakes from Chickentown floating everywhere: plastic toys, plastic bottles, and plastic furniture, not to mention boxes of cereal and cans of beer, pages of gossip magazines and broken televisions. A street sign, drowned chickens, the contents of somebody’s fridge, leftovers bobbing by sealed in plastic: half a sandwich, some meat loaf, and a slice of cherry pie.

  “Strange,” Candy said, watching it all float by. “It makes me hungry.”

  “There’s plenty of fish,” said the Abaratian in Council uniform who was guiding their boat through this detritus.

  “I don’t see fish,” Malingo said.

  The man leaned over the side of the boat, and with startling speed, he reached down into the water and pulled out a fat fish, yellow dotted with spots of bright blue. He proffered the creature, all panic and color, to Malingo.

  “There,” he said. “Eat! It’s a sanshee fish. Very good meat.”

  “No thanks. Not raw.”

  “Please yourself.” He offered it to Candy. “Lady?”

  “I’m not hungry, thank you.”

  “Mind . . . if I . . . ?”

  “Go ahead.”

  The man opened his mouth much wider than Candy had thought possible, revealing two impressive parades of pointed teeth. The fish, much to Candy’s surprise uttered a high-pitched squeal, which died the moment its devourer bit off its head. Candy didn’t want to look revolted by what was probably a perfectly natural thing for the pilot to have done so she went back to looking at the bizarre reminders of Chickentown as they floated by, until finally the little vessel brought them into the busy harbor of the Yebba Dim Day.

  Chapter 2

  The Council Speaks its Minds

  CANDY HAD EXPECTED TO be called into the Council Chamber, questioned by the Councilors about what she’d seen and experienced and then released to go back to join her friends. But it became apparent as soon as she presented herself before the Council that not all of the eleven individuals gathered here thought that she was an innocent victim of the calamitous events that had caused so much destruction, and that some punishment needed to be agreed upon.

  One of Candy’s accusers, a woman called Nyritta Maku, who came from Huffaker, was the first to present her opinion, and she did so without any sweetening.

  “It’s very clear that for reasons known only to yourself,” she said, her blue-skinned skull bound so as to form a series of soft-b
oned sub-skulls of diminishing size that hung like a tail, “you came to the Abarat without invitation from anyone in this Chamber, intending to cause trouble. You quickly did so. You liberated a geshrat from the employ of an imprisoned wizard without any permission to do so. You roused the fury of Mater Motley. That in itself would be reason for a stiff sentence. But there’s worse. We have already heard testimony that you have the arrogance to believe you have some significant part to play in the future of our islands.”

  “I didn’t come here deliberately if that’s what you’re saying.”

  “Have you made any such claims?”

  “This is an accident. Me being here.”

  “Answer the question.”

  “If I was to take a wild guess I’d say she’s trying to do that, Nyritta,” said the representative from the Nonce. It was a spiral of warm dappled light, in the midst of which flakes of poppy and white gold floated. “Just give her a chance to find the words.”

  “Oh, you really like the lost ones, don’t you, Keemi.”

  “I’m not lost,” Candy said. “I know my way around pretty well.”

  “And why is that?” said a third Council member, her face an eight-eyed, four-petaled flower with a bright-throated mouth at its center. “Not only do you know your way around the islands, you also know a lot about the Abarataraba.”

  “I’ve just heard stories here and there.”

  “Stories!” said Yobias Thim, who had a row of candles around the brim of his hat. “You don’t learn to wield Feits and Wantons by hearing stories. I think what happened with Motley and Carrion and your knowledge of the Abarataraba are all part of the same suspicious business.”

  “Let it be,” said Keemi. “We didn’t summon her here to Okizor to interrogate her about how she knows the Abarataraba.”

  She glanced around at the Councilors, no two of whose physiognomies were alike. The representative from Orlando’s Cap had a brilliant coxcomb of scarlet and turquoise feathers, which were standing proud in his agitated state; while the face of Soma Plume’s representative, Helio Fatha, wavered as though he was gazing through a cloud of heat, and the dawning face of the Councilor from six a.m. was streaked with the promise of another day.

  “Look, it’s true. I do know . . . things,” Candy admitted. “It started at the lighthouse, with me knowing how to summon the Izabella. I’m not saying I couldn’t do it, I could. I just don’t know how I did. Does it matter?”

  “If this Council thinks it matters,” growled the stone visage from Efreet, “then it matters. And everything else should be of little consequence to you until the question has been satisfactorily answered.”

  Candy nodded. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do my best. But it’s complicated.”

  So saying, she began to tell them as best she could the parts that she did know, starting with the event from which everything else sprang: her birth, and the fact that just an hour or so before her mother got to the hospital on an empty, rain-lashed highway in the middle of nowhere, three women of the Fantomaya—Diamanda, Joephi and Mespa—had crossed the forbidden divide between the Abarat and the Hereafter looking for a hiding place for the soul of Princess Boa, whose murdered remains lay in the Nonce.

  “They found my mother,” Candy said, “sitting, waiting for my dad to come back with gas for the truck . . .”

  She paused, because there was a humming sound in her head, which was getting louder. It sounded as though her skull was filled with hundreds of agitated bees. She couldn’t think straight.

  “They found my mother . . .” she said again, aware that her voice was slurring.

  “Forget your mother for a moment,” said the representative from Ninnyhammer, a bipedal tarrie-cat called Jimothi Tarrie, who Candy had met before. “What do you know about the murder of Princess Boa?”

  “Boa.”

  “Yes.”

  Huh. Boa.

  “Quite . . . quite a lot,” Candy replied.

  What she’d thought to be the voices of bees, was forming into syllables, the syllables into words, the words becoming sentences. There was somebody speaking in her head.

  Don’t tell them anything, the voice said. They’re bureaucrats, all of them.

  She knew the voice. She’d been hearing it all her life. She’d thought it was her voice. But just because the voice had been in her skull all her life didn’t make it hers. She said the other’s name without speaking it.

  Princess Boa.

  Yes, of course, the other woman said. Who else were you expecting?

  “Jimothi Tarrie asked you a question,” Nyritta said.

  “The death of the Princess . . .” Jimothi reminded her.

  “Yes, I know,” Candy said.

  Tell them nothing, Boa reiterated. Don’t let them intimidate you. They’ll use your words against you. Be very careful.

  Candy was deeply unsettled by the presence of Boa’s voice—and especially unhappy that it should make itself audible to her now of all times—but she sensed that the advice she was being given was right. The Councilors were watching her with profound suspicion.

  “. . . I heard bits of gossip,” she said to them. “But don’t really remember much . . .”

  “But you’re here in the Abarat for a reason,” said Nyritta.

  “Am I?” she countered.

  “Well, don’t you know? You tell us. Are you?”

  “I don’t . . . have any reason in my head, if that’s what you mean,” Candy said. “I think maybe I’m just here because I happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Nice work, Boa said. Now they don’t know what to think.

  Boa’s assessment seemed right. There were a lot of frowns and puzzled looks around the Council table. But Candy wasn’t off the hook yet.

  “Let’s change the subject,” Nyritta said.

  “And go where?” Helio Fatha asked.

  “What about Christopher Carrion?” Nyritta said to Candy. “You were somehow involved with him. Weren’t you?”

  “Well, he tried to have me murdered, if you want to call that involvement.”

  “No, no, no. Your enemy was Mater Motley. There was something else going on with Carrion. Admit it.”

  “Like what?” Candy said.

  She needed to lie now, Candy knew. The truth was that she was indeed aware of why Carrion had been drawn to her, but she wasn’t going to let the Councilors know about it. Not until she knew more herself. So she said it was a mystery to her. And a mystery, she didn’t neglect to remind them, that had almost cost her her life.

  “Well, you survived to tell the tale,” Nyritta remarked, his voice dripping sarcasm.

  “So why don’t you tell it, instead of meandering around explaining nothing at all?” Helio Fatha said.

  “I’ve nothing to tell,” Candy replied.

  “There are laws defending the Abarat from your kind, you know that, don’t you?”

  “What will you do? Execute me?” Candy said. “Oh, don’t look so shocked. You’re not angels. Yes, you probably had good reason to protect yourselves from my kind. But no kind is perfect. Even Abaratians.”

  Boa was right, Candy thought. They were a bunch of bullies. Just like her dad. Just like everyone else. And the more they bullied, the more she was determined not to give them any answers.

  “I can’t help it whether you believe me or not. You can interrogate me all you like, but you’re just going to get the same answer. I don’t know anything!”

  Helio Fatha snorted with contempt. “Ah, let her go!” he said. “This is a waste of time.”

  “But she has powers, Fatha. She was seen wielding them.”

  “So maybe she saw them in a book. Wasn’t she with that idiot Wolfswinkel for a time? Whatever she may have learned, she’ll forget it. Humankind can’t hold on to mystery.”

  There was a long, irritated silence. Finally Candy said, “Can I go?”

  “No,” said the stone-faced representative from Efreet. “We’re not fini
shed with our questions.”

  “Let the girl go, Zuprek,” Jimothi said.

  “Neabas still has something to say,” the Efreetian replied.

  “Get on with it.”

  Neabas spoke like a snail edging along a knife. He looked like irridescent gossamer. “We all know she has some affection for the creature, though why that should be is incomprehensible. She’s plainly concealing a great deal from us. If I had my way I’d call in Yeddik Magash—”

  “A torturer?” Jimothi said.

  “No. He’s simply somebody who knew how to get the truth when, as now, it was being willfully withheld. But I don’t expect this Council to sanction such a choice. You’re all too soft. You’ll choose fur over stone, and in the end we’ll all suffer for it.”

  “Do you actually have a question for the girl?” Yobias Thim asked wearily. “All my candles are down and I don’t have any others with me.”

  “Yes, Thim. I have a question,” Zuprek said.

  “Then, Lordy Lou, ask it.”

  Zuprek’s shards fixed upon Candy. “I want to know when it was you were last in the company of Christopher Carrion,” he said.

  Say nothing, Boa told her.

  Why shouldn’t they know? Candy thought, and without waiting for any further argument from Boa she told Zuprek, “I found him in my parents’ bedroom.”

  “This was back in the Hereafter?”

  “Yes, of course. My mother and father haven’t been to the Abarat. None of my family has.”

  “Well, that’s some sort of comfort, I suppose,” Zuprek said. “At least we won’t have an invasion of Quackenbushes to deal with.”

  His sour humor got a few titters from sympathetic souls around the table: Nyritta Maku, Skippelwit, one or two others. But Neabas still had further questions. And he was deadly serious:

  “What was Carrion’s condition?” he wanted to know.