Days of Magic, Nights of War Page 29

  “Your grandmother hasn’t even met me.”

  “Oh. Are you suggesting that if she did, she’d change her opinion?”

  “Look at me,” Candy said. “I’m no danger to you, or anyone. I’m just a girl from Chickentown who got lost here by accident.”

  “Is anything really an accident?” he said.

  “Of course. Things happen all the time that . . .” She was going to say weren’t supposed to happen, but she realized as she was about to say it that she no longer entirely believed it to be true. The words trailed away.

  “Finish your thought.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, if it’s any comfort, I’m lost too. Lost and alone.”

  “What about your grandmother?”

  “She’s not much of a comfort to me,” he replied, with a thin smile. “Nor I to her, I suppose. Though we are the last of our line; you’d think we’d have learned to take solace wherever it can be found.” He fell silent for several moments, the creatures in his collar slowing their motion as if matching his melancholy mood. “But no,” he said finally. “I have looked and looked for someone who would understand me. Just a little. That’s all. Just understand, a little. The night is very dark sometimes. And in Gorgossium, of course, it’s endless.”

  Was the sorrow in his voice and expression just an act, Candy wondered? Somehow she didn’t think so. The creature standing on the stairs was confessing something true here. But why? She had her answer in his next words.

  “Perhaps you would understand . . .”

  “Me?”

  “You said you were lost. Perhaps we have more in common than it might seem.”

  She wanted to tell him he was crazy, that there was nobody either in this world or the Hereafter she could imagine having less in common with. But she kept her thoughts to herself. It was safer that way. Instead she tried to return the conversation to the subject of Mater Motley.

  “I thought you said your grandmother wanted me dead.”

  “I’ll change her mind for her,” he replied confidently. “I’ll show her that we’ve nothing to fear from you. That we understand each other.”

  It was strange to hear the Lord of Midnight talking about her as the one people might have reason to fear, not himself.

  “You look perplexed,” Carrion said.

  “Yes . . . well, I guess I am,” Candy admitted. “I just don’t know what it is your grandmother—or you, come to that—see in me. But whatever it is I’m supposed to be . . . I’m not.”

  “No?” he said, very softly.

  He smiled and reached up to take hold of her hand. No doubt it was a perfectly innocent gesture, but there was something about the way that the smile made his face look—like a death’s head, grinning in its rot—that made Candy pull her hand away so that he couldn’t catch hold of it.

  His response to her rejection was instant, and terrifying.

  The nightmares that had been quieted in his collar suddenly became bright as lightning, and he reached for her with a burst of speed. This time she wasn’t fast enough to outmaneuver him. His fingers knitted with hers. And the moment they did so, all was changed.

  The horrors she’d thought she’d glimpsed when he was sloughing off the face of Pius Masper (and which she’d convinced herself she had not seen) appeared in all their repulsive glory around her. A procession of monstrosities—all gloating, glaring, gaping—rose around her the moment Carrion locked his fingers with hers; it was as though the Devil had unleashed every beast in the asylums of hell and put them to dance around her.

  “No!” she yelled, and mustering more strength than she thought she possessed, she pulled her hand free.

  For a terrible instant it seemed their separation would not free her from the infernal dance, and the creatures continued to lope and caper around her. Then the sickening spectacle began to gutter like a dying firework, and finally it went out.

  She was standing on the stairs again, as though nothing had happened.

  But of course it had.

  Now she knew the truth. She had just been granted a glimpse of the real Christopher Carrion. Not with her eyes, but with her mind.

  Carrion knew perfectly well what had happened. His bluff had been called; the rot in his soul had been laid out for Candy in all its vile detail.

  “I . . . am . . . ashamed,” he said.

  “Yes . . .” Candy replied, slowly backing away from him. “I don’t blame you. I’d feel pretty bad if that was what I really looked like.”

  He had one last manipulation to try.

  “It’s terrible,” he said. “To live with this . . . this . . . grotesquerie in me. Until I saw you, I had given up on the hope of ever being healed. But perhaps you can help me change.”

  It didn’t take Candy long to summon up an answer.

  “I’m sorry about that, whatever you called it—”

  “Grotesquerie.”

  “Yes, that. But I can’t help you.” She kept her tone as reasonable as possible, all the while retreating from him slowly, afraid that he’d suddenly rush her, suddenly catch hold of her again, and the parade would return to flood her mind. She couldn’t bear it. Not again. Behind her, however, was a closed door. This house seemed to have so many of them. She’d had her back to a locked door when she’d tried to get into the house, and now here was another when she wanted to get out.

  “Listen to me, Candy,” Carrion said, his tone all comfort and sweet reason. “I know what you’re afraid of. And I swear, I swear, you’ll never again see what you saw a few moments ago. That was unforgivable. And yet—knowing that it was unforgivable—I ask you nevertheless to forgive me. Can you do that? No, I know that you can. The question is: will you?”

  She didn’t answer him. She simply turned and put her shoulder to the door. The lock was rusty, but the wood around it was dark with rot, which gave her the tiny hope that she might still escape him.

  “What are you doing?” he asked her, as if he genuinely didn’t know.

  Candy didn’t waste her breath on replying. Instead she threw her body against the door. There was a cracking sound as the rotted wood around the lock began to give out.

  “Think, please,” Carrion whispered. “Even if you open that door there’s nowhere for you to go. There’s just snow up there. You’ll freeze to death in a matter of minutes.”

  “There are worse things,” Candy said. Then, with one last heave, she threw the door open. The wind carried a stinging wall of ice shards and snow against her face.

  She glanced back at the Lord of Midnight one final time—just long enough to meet his despairing gaze. He looked as though he was about to say something to her, to make one last appeal, but she didn’t give him the opportunity. Squinting against the chilly blast, she stepped out onto the roof and she slammed the door behind her, though she knew of course that it wasn’t going to keep Carrion from following her for more than ten seconds.

  It was even less than that.

  A mere heartbeat later, the door was shoved open, and the foul light that pulsed from his nightmares came pouring out across the snow, catching her in its vivid spill.

  “Candy!” he shouted to her. “Stop this foolishness! You’ll fall and break your neck!”

  She looked ahead. The steeply gabled roof was slick with wet snow. No easy escape route presented itself.

  “Come back here,” said Carrion. “I’m not going to hurt you. On my life, Candy. I would never hurt you. Don’t you see: you’re my salvation? Don’t you understand? My salvation.”

  Candy ignored his contradictions and pushed on through the snow. It became thicker the farther from the door she ran. Soon she was up to her ankles in it. And apart from the spill of light from the nightmares, which brightened and dimmed depending on how far ahead of her pursuer Candy was able to get, there was no illumination to guide her over the treacherous maze of slates and gargoyles and guttering. But what choice did she have? If she stopped for a moment, he’d catch up with
her. She had to move, risking her life with every benighted step.

  Carrion continued to call to her, of course; continued to try and bring her back to him. He’d given up talking about salvation now. He had moved on to naked threats.

  “You want me to leave you out here?” Carrion called to her. “There’s another storm front moving in from the northwest. The snow will be ten feet deep in an hour or two. And you’ll be buried underneath the snow, small and blue and dead. Is that the way you want your life to end, Candy? You, who could have been so much?”

  Still she didn’t reply to him. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of glancing back over her shoulder at him. Nothing he could say—not the threats, not the flattery, not the appeals to sentiment—could put the images she’d seen of his true self out of her head. However civilized his talk might be, he was a monster down to the depths of his soul.

  So she kept running. The roof was like an enormous labyrinth, rising dark against the sky to either side of her, the passageways between them zigzagging crazily. At every other turn she would encounter one of the stone gargoyles, its shape horrible. The gargoyles seemed to watch her as she passed them by, as though at any moment they might pounce on her. It was when she came upon the same gargoyle, its head split open and lined with teeth, that she realized she was running in circles.

  She had hoped that her footprints would keep her from moving in circles, but the snow was coming down so fast now it erased her steps.

  She might have wept with frustration if she’d had the energy, but she didn’t. It was all used up. Her legs were numb with cold. So were her hands and her face. All she could do was stumble on, looking for some way out, with Carrion’s threat—you’ll be underneath the snow, small and blue and dead—echoing in her head.

  A gust of wind raised a strangely brightened cloud of snow, and she was momentarily blinded. She wiped the stinging particles from her eyes and suddenly—there was Carrion! Somehow he’d outmaneuvered her in the darkness, gotten ahead of her or climbed over one of the roofs.

  “The chase is over,” he said. “Come here.” He opened his arms. “Look at you! You’re frozen. I said: come here.”

  He reached out for her again. She had so little strength left in her she could barely draw breath to speak. But she found it somewhere.

  “Once . . . and for all . . . LEAVE ME ALONE!”

  Her voice echoed off the roofs and came back to meet her sounding unlike herself: thin with exhaustion and shrill with fear. The strangeness of the sound saved her from his grip at least for a moment longer. He stared at her in that moment, as though there was something inside her that he wanted to pry out before he put an end to her. There was time, in his hesitation, for Candy to turn from him and look back the way she’d come for some last route of escape.

  There was only one possibility. Off to her left there was a steep roof, with a narrow metal ladder, almost concealed in the snow, laid against it. She called up the final dregs of strength from her numb limbs and made a stumbling run for the ladder, throwing one quick look over her shoulder at Carrion to see if he was giving chase. He was. In desperation she threw herself toward the roof, and seized hold of the iron rungs. Then—trying not to think of what pursued her, or of what choices awaited her when she reached the apex of the roof—she started to climb the frozen ladder.

  Chapter 43

  The Dark Denied

  “MY GRANDMOTHER WAS RIGHT!” Carrion yelled up at her as she ascended. “You are crazy! Crazy and dangerous! Why are you putting off the inevitable? Give in, little girl. This is just adding pain to pain. I’ve told you over and over: there’s nowhere left to run!”

  Candy was a little more than halfway up the ladder, and she could see from here that Carrion was right: once she got to the top, she would have nowhere left to go. All Carrion would have to do was catch hold of her and unleash that ghastly parade of monstrosities so it could invade her head.

  “Are you listening to me, Candy Quackenbush?” Carrion yelled.

  Candy glanced back down at him. From this curious angle, his head looked as though it was floating in a pot of some kind. He stared up at her from the fluid that bubbled around his face like the prize serving in a cannibal’s stew. Exertion, or rage, or a combination of the two, had turned the whites of his eyes a dark purplish color. His irises, by contrast, had become nearly colorless.

  “Give it up, girl,” Carrion said. “You just cause trouble wherever you go. Unhappiness. Suffering. Death. It’s time it ended. You’re better gone, for everybody’s sake.”

  The words stung Candy more sharply than the ice-pricked wind. There was too much truth in them; that was why they hurt so much.

  Back in Chickentown she’d lived a boring but blameless life. She’d done no harm to those she came in contact with, but then neither had she improved their lives in any way. Whereas here in the Abarat, for some reason, whatever she did seemed to carry more significance. Wherever she’d gone on her journey—to the Yebba Dim Day, which stood at Eight in the Evening, to Ninnyhammer, to the Time Out of Time at the Twenty-Fifth Hour, to Babilonium, to Scoriae and even Efreet—the effect of her presence had had some real influence on the lives she had touched. She had no idea why, but things happened in her vicinity: strange, unpredictable things. The established rules of the world into which she’d come were overturned.

  It wasn’t always disastrous. Sometimes she’d helped people, Malingo, for instance. But she feared it was only a matter of time before something truly tragic happened. Not to her, most likely, but to some innocent whose path she had crossed.

  All this went through her head at lightning speed in the time it took Carrion to climb perhaps three rungs of the ladder. He would be able to reach her in a matter of seconds. She could no longer climb with her back to him, she decided. Moving slowly, for fear of losing her footing on the icy rungs, she carefully turned around on the ladder, so that she could ascend the rest of the way with her eyes on her pursuer. If he got too close, she could still kick at him, she thought. In fact, his face looked vulnerable right now staring up at her, despite all she knew about the horrors that lay in wait behind it. Yes, damn him, she would kick hard, if it was the last thing she did.

  He watched her watching him.

  “What are you thinking?” he wondered aloud. “You’re a mystery, girl.”

  She climbed as he talked to her, her feet constantly threatening to slide on the rungs of the ladder. But her caution paid off. She reached the apex of the roof without incident, and looked down the other side. It was her last frail hope that there’d be some way to get back into the house on this side of the roof. But no. The news was bad, all bad. There was just a steep roof awaiting her; and off the roof, straight down to ice-hardened ground below. It would be a quick death, she supposed. But death it would be.

  “What did I tell you?” Carrion said, seeing any remaining glimmer of hope fade from Candy’s face. “Nowhere left to go.”

  He reached up to her. “Come. I’ll make it quick. I promise.”

  “Wait—”

  “What?”

  “Suppose—”

  “What?”

  “Suppose I promised I’d go?”

  “Go where?”

  “Home,” she said. “Back to the Hereafter.”

  “Bargains now?”

  “You don’t want to kill me.”

  “How would you know what I want?”

  “I don’t know how I know, but I do. Maybe you’re right. Maybe we do understand each other somehow. I know you don’t want to kill me, whatever Mater Motley says. You don’t want it on your conscience.”

  “Ha! Listen to her! I’m a Carrion, girl. I don’t have a conscience.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Candy replied with steady certainty.

  “Well then, let me prove it to you,” Carrion said, his face knotted up with so many conflicting emotions Candy couldn’t read it clearly.

  He started up the ladder toward her, but as he did so a gust
of wind came sweeping up the roof behind him, gathering a freight of ice shards as it came. It flew in Candy’s face, and for a moment she was blinded. She flailed, attempting to keep her balance, but the ladder was too slick beneath her feet. Her hold slipped and she started to topple backward. For just a few seconds, she almost managed to regain her equilibrium, but it was a short reprieve. Her left heel slid off the top of the roof, and back she went.

  For a long terrifying moment she fell through empty air, not knowing sky from ground. Then she hit the roof, faceup. The thump knocked the breath from her, and she started to slide down the slates headfirst. Somewhere high above her, she thought she saw something passing between the snow-laden clouds—a bright shape that appeared for no more than a heartbeat and was then obscured again, its coming and going so swift she was not entirely certain that she’d even seen it.

  The moon, was it? No, the moon didn’t move so fast—

  An instant later she hit a waste pipe that had been run across the roof, and the impact swung her around. Her body moved faster than her mind. Without even thinking about it, she reached up and caught hold of the pipe. It creaked, but it didn’t give way. She clung there for several seconds, desperately trying to catch her breath. It was hard to do, stretched out on the roof as she was, hanging on for dear life. And then, as if she didn’t have enough to trouble her, she heard the sound of motion behind and above her, and looked up to see that Carrion had clambered up the ladder onto the apex of the roof and was standing there, his arms spread, as if welcoming the snowstorm in all its killing fury.

  “What a view!” he said. “The sky. You. The drop.”

  He squatted down, balancing on the top of the roof with uncanny ease. Then he reached down toward her.

  “I could practically push you from here,” he said.

  “There!” said Finnegan. “Down there!”