Abarat: Absolute Midnight a-3

by Clive Barker

  Candy saw Mater Motley’s iron hand reach into her body. But the vision was short-lived. Her gaze quickly went where her body had already gone, leaving the Hag to grasp vainly at the space where Candy’s body had been only moments before. Candy had only time enough left to see Motley’s rage: her gray-white face suffused getting paler still, while the black of her pupils spread to extinguish every last gleam of whiteness in her eyes.

  She’d lost again. Candy was gone. Small though the fragment of the Abarataraba was, it was big enough to reverse the route that had carried her aboard the vessel in the first place, melting all that lay in the way of her escape: ceilings and floors, creatures and cargo, all parting like smoke when Candy approached.

  The Abarataraba pulled her out of the vessel, and for ten, eleven, twelve seconds Candy was held in the air, suspended only a few feet clear of the Stormwalker’s speeding underbelly, as it continued to hurtle toward destruction. The ground was a jagged grid of lightning, discharged by the Stormwalker in a desperate attempt to slow the vessel down. If she landed in its midst, it would have been the death of her.

  So the Abarataraba kept her in the air until the vessel had passed overhead completely. Only then did it guide her down to the ground. And now, as she looked back across Scoriae to the island’s northern shore (her sight sharpened by the power blazing in her cells), she saw a reason to smile. There was a large crowd of people—she knew it to be around seven thousand—all running in her direction, from the Edge of the World. Beyond them, the last remnants of the glyph were losing every last glimmer of solidity as its final passengers disembarked. It had done its work, and now dissipated, back to the ether from whence it had been borne.

  The moment of calm was indeed brief, interrupted almost instantaneously by a din of destruction that shook the ground on which Candy was standing. She turned so quickly she had time to see the Stormwalker plow nose first into the crater where the peak of Mount Galigali had once been, now a ragged wound spitting fire and stone hundreds of feet into the air.

  There the vessel came to rest. In a happier world all would have been put right. The evil-doers delivered into an all-consuming fire, and those who had been saved from execution free to return to their homes, lives and loved ones unharmed.

  But this was not that happier world.

  Chapter 69

  For Every Knife, Five Hearts

  INSIDE THE STORMWALKER, ZEPHARIO lay in the darkness and listened without fear to the steady slowing of his pulse. He was dying. Very soon his laboring heart would start to miss beats entirely, until finally, it ceased. There would be light then, and in that light he would see his family again, whose innocent souls had preceded him by many years into paradise. He had always imagined that place to be a garden—a garden where no flower ever withered, nor was any fruit corrupted by an invading worm. There his beloveds lived in bliss, beyond the reach of any hurt or harm. And he would be there with them soon. Very soon.

  But even as he lay in the darkness, and the time of his deliverance from life drew closer, so too did the Nephauree. And it was not about to let him slip away into that peaceful place where his children played, at least not without one final violation. It prodded him with pushing until he rolled over onto his belly. He moaned. The slivers pressed against his back, but this time their intention was not to move him but to weave their substance into his cells, to press their presence into him, in four or five places.

  He could not resist them. There was no strength left in him. What did this last cruelty matter, anyway? It would only quicken the approach of death to have his body invaded with such alien matter. Or so he had imagined. But no. The deeper the Nephauree’s matter invaded his flesh the more strongly his heart beat. And further from him the bright, beautiful image of the garden receded.

  “No . . .” he murmured. “Let me go to them. Please I have no wish to live.”

  “What you wish is of no importance to us,” the Nephauree replied. “We have need of you alive. So you will live.”

  There was pressure exerted on him now, raising him up, his body’s weight causing him to sink back upon the spines, until they transfixed him completely, and emerged from his chest and abdomen. He was helpless, more puppet than self-willed being.

  Thus, carrying him before it, the Nephauree departed the temple in search of worshippers, leaving Christopher Carrion in darkness.

  Mater Motley could taste her own blood. She had caught her tongue between her teeth when the Stormwalker struck the volcano. But apart from that minor harm, she was unhurt. She got to her feet. The vessel was apparently lying on its side, because the closest she could find to a horizontal surface was what had been one of the walls of the passageway a few seconds before. She walked to the nearest door, sick with rage that the girl had once again slipped away. No matter. They were at the Edge of the World. There was nowhere now for the little witch to go.

  The nearest door, she found, was above her. It was heavy, but it took only a flick of her will to tear it off its hinges. Then she spoke—

  “Yet—

  -ha—

  -si—

  -ha.”

  —and ascended the smoke steps that formed in the air before her. What lay on the other side of the door was a spectacle of destruction so widespread that she might have taken pleasure in it had it not been her own Stormwalker that had been so demolished. She didn’t linger, however. There were noises that might have been death-moans of wounded giants coming from all directions, the last complaints of the vast machine as it sank into the melting pot of Mount Galigali’s crater.

  There would be other death-machines in time, she knew. The Stormwalker had been but a hint of the glorious engines of destruction the Nephauree were capable of conceiving. She had seen some of them with her own eyes when she’d first ventured beyond the Starrish Door to find them, risking soul and sanity in doing so. But thinking of them now, of their power, and how many of their secrets they had shared with her, gave her weary limbs fresh strength. She climbed on, turning her back on the source of heat, and watching for a glimpse of the sky to appear through the smoke. There was cooler air coming from somewhere nearby. She followed it, her trek finally bringing her out of the carcass of the broken vessel and out onto the steep flank of Galigali.

  She discovered that she was not alone. Dozens of stitchlings had escaped the conflagration, and were standing under the night sky, a sizeable number of them on fire, apparently indifferent to the flames. They certainly felt no pain. None of them even moaned.

  She began to roughly assess their numbers, but it was a lost cause. They continued to emerge from every part of the wreckage, their will to live—even in the face of traumatic maimings—unquenchable. Many had horrendous wounds; some even crawled out of the Stormwalker without legs to bear them up. But though these gashes gave the Todo mud the opportunity to escape its confinement in these crudely sewn bodies, it seemed to be loyal to the form it had taken, to the individual each had become.

  They clearly knew that they had their Empress in their midst, for when she emerged from the wreckage, they were waiting for her, standing around the lava pit, indifferent to the blistering heat. When she rose with the air above the wreckage, they let out a moan she had not known they were capable of making; a low note of celebration as though to lift her to Divinity.

  “You good loyal soldiers,” she said. “You will have countless proofs of my love in return for this moment. I will lift you higher than any creature that calls itself alive, for you, though made of mud, are worthier.”

  The stitchlings’ great moan rose up again.

  “Now listen all. This Night is not yet lost. Look at them, down there! They are trapped. Oblivion is at their backs, Galigali’s fires at their front, and us in between.” She laughed. “Now, we are no longer eight thousand strong. So you will have to take four, maybe five hearts instead of just one. So, five hearts it shall be! March, my soldiers, march!”

  A voice, far quieter, yet infinitely more disquieting t
han Mater Motley’s, spilled forth from within the wrecked vessel. It said only one word:

  “Wait.”

  Although Candy was at the very bottom of the slope of Galigali, she could, thanks to Zephario’s magic, plainly see and hear the events taking place at the volcano’s turbulent crest. The Nephauree was emerging from a tear in the side of the Stormwalker; it looked like a fluid stain spilling forth through the gaping hole. As it moved, the air it trod upon trembled; as it spread, it parted like two enormous pieces of torn smoke. And to her horror, Candy saw that the entity was carrying before it a living trophy, Zephario Carrion. He was wounded. Blood soaked the front of his robes. And yet as the Nephauree moved, Zephario continued to show faint signs of life. Despite all that his body had plainly endured, he was still alive.

  The Nephauree emerged from the wreckage entirely, and Mater Motley bowed her head before it. The clotted, textured forms within the being responded by assembling at its core, their heads coming together in the midst of the alien’s amorphous stain, so that collectively they resembled a black sun, from which hundreds of frayed tentacles seemed to sway in the grip of the Nephauree’s abstracted energies.

  Having paid her respects to the creature, Mater Motley turned from her ragged army—its numbers still swelling as more burning stitchlings appeared from the wreckage—and whispered one simple order to them. Candy heard the Old Hag’s imperative all too clearly.

  “Kill everything.”

  Chapter 70

  Nothing But Stones

  CANDY WATCHED THE BURNING, muddled army shambling down the slopes of Mount Galigali, with their Empress wearing her gown of souls leading, and the drifting form of the Nephauree both behind them and above, the nearly dead body of Zephario hanging in the shadowy air like a terrible trophy. Unsummoned, fragments of a song she’d heard first in Babilonium came to her head. A meaningless little nonsense, which she sang quietly to herself as she watched the army coming:

  “I got a cold in my nose,

  But it comes and it goes.

  I got a cold in my brain,

  Which nearly makes me insane.

  I got a cold in my toe,

  That I can’t get to go,

  I got cold,

  Cold,

  Cold . . .”

  And while the monsters came, she stood there, watching, knowing that she had no hope of stopping them. She looked back at the crowd that had emerged from the glyph, and saw that Malingo and Gazza had started to walk toward her. Gazza beckoned to her. She glanced one more time at the approaching enemy. They were still five minutes away, perhaps. But no more than that.

  She turned and started to run toward Malingo and Gazza. Gazza was close enough to call to her now.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

  He opened his arms as he approached her, and hugged her tight. She gave as good as she got, which only made him hug her more. Malingo put his own arms around them both, which nobody objected to.

  “What do we do now?” Malingo said.

  “We have to defend ourselves,” Candy said. “We’ve no other choice.”

  “I’m all for a good fight,” Gazza said, “but we don’t have a hope against those things. Look at them! They’re burning and they still keep coming. No legs, so they crawl.”

  Candy looked back toward the volcano. The approach of the stitchlings was indeed terrifying. Though a few of the most traumatically wounded creatures had finally perished on the slope, the greater number continued their shambling descent.

  “The Abarataraba’s all used up,” Candy said. “There’s still some magic in me, but there’ll be no more glyphs, I’m afraid.”

  “What about getting off the island by water?”

  “There’s no chance of that,” Malingo said. “Izabella just pours away over the Edge of the World. If we got into the water, we’d go with it.”

  “There’s going to be a lot of killing,” Candy said grimly. “We have to make a stand here.”

  “We were all brought here to die anyway,” Malingo reminded her. “At least this way we have a chance.”

  There was another eruption from the heart of Galigali: this one so violent it blew the front half of the Stormwalker apart. It did not draw Mater Motley’s gaze off the condemned, however. She simply kept walking down over the smoking slope.

  “I wonder what happened to Christopher?” Candy wondered aloud.

  “He’s there,” Malingo said.

  “I don’t see him.”

  “I did, I swear. He was a little way back from all the rest, but he was there.”

  Candy looked up at the approaching army with fresh interest.

  “You’re sure?” she said.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Huh,” Candy said. “Three generations of Carrions.” She looked at Gazza and Malingo. “I guess we’ll go meet them together.”

  Chapter 71

  An Execution

  CARRION HAD THROWN UP a low-resolution Distraction Shield to keep the stitchlings he was moving among from noticing him, but it scarcely mattered. They had their attentions entirely fixed upon those they were about to execute. So after a while he simply let the wielding lapse, knowing that they neither saw him nor would have cared if they had. It was only when Carrion realized that the girl from Chickentown had started to walk back toward his grandmother’s army—the expression on her face completely defying interpretation—that he repowered the shield and once again slipped out of sight.

  In his invisible state he had a little time to get his thoughts in some kind of order. He no longer knew where his loyalties lay, or even whether there were any advantages to having loyalties. He had obeyed his grandmother’s instructions for many years, doing servile work much of the time, and what had that got him? Death and a bitter resurrection on a stony beach. And love? Ha, love! That had been even more cruel than loyalty. True, it hadn’t killed him. It might have been kinder if it had. Instead it had left him looking like a fool, having been tricked out of every piece of magic he’d ever learned and then left without so much as a kiss by way of compensation. He’d grieved. Oh, Lordy Lou, how he’d grieved. But more, he’d raged, the anger blazing about his heart, so that he’d had to stoop to murder in order to extinguish it.

  But even that hadn’t been the end of the anguish. Fifteen years or so later, the girl from Chickentown had come into his life, their paths crossing by accident, or so he’d thought. She’d been washed into the arms of Mama Izabella, carrying—again by chance; again, so he’d thought—only to find that Candy Quackenbush of Chickentown, Minnesota, carried inside her the soul of the Princess whose manipulations and infidelities had left him stripped of power and love. Now Boa’s soul no longer occupied the girl, but it seemed not to matter. She still acted as though she could stand up against his grandmother! But she was wrong. This wasn’t the same Hag of Gorgossium any longer; the vicious old woman she’d faced on the Wormwood. The Empress was a different order of power. Why didn’t the girl understand that? Why didn’t she see with her own eyes the scale of his grandmother’s ally, the Nephauree? Didn’t she comprehend how incendiary a place this had become? Not because there was a volcano spitting air and earth around them, but because three generations of the Carrion dynasty were assembled for the first time since the fire that had wiped the future of that dynasty away, and returned all the power to the oldest surviving member of that family, in whose shadow he, the youngest, had been doomed to live?

  Right now this was the most volatile place in the Abarat. And however much Candy might have learned about magic from Boa, she was still, at root, an ordinary creature of the Hereafter, strong of will, no question, perhaps even extraordinary in some regard. But she was still merely human, the shadowy places at the back of her mind still haunted by the beasts that had stalked the apes from which her kind had risen up. She would never be free of that fear, Carrion thought. And that would always leave her weak when facing Midnight.
r />   And yet still she stood there, defying his grandmother, defying her own fear. Perhaps, just perhaps, she was something new. The next kind of woman, this girl.

  Such a pity, if that was so, that she was going to die.

  k

  The two armies met. The Empress looked at Candy without any visible emotion.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “I came because I saw Zephario in pain,” Candy said. “He’s your son. Doesn’t that make you a little merciful?”

  “No, girl. I cleansed myself of mercy before I went to meet the Nephauree. I knew they would smell it upon me.”

  “So you feel nothing for him?” Candy said.

  She had no conscious notion of why she was even asking questions, but there was a reason, of that she was dimly certain. This was family business, and like all families the Carrions had their secrets. Whenever the members of her own family had got together, it had always ended with curses and fistfights. Perhaps there was some secret here that might yet change the way this fatal game ended.

  “Oh, I do feel something for him,” Mater Motley admitted. “Something like maternal affection,” she went on. “Or as close as I could ever get.”

  “Really?” Candy said. Now she was confused. What was the Old Mother admitting to?

  “Yes, really,” the Hag replied. She reached down and caught hold of one of the ragged dolls that hung from the front of her dress. “I want his soul here,” she said. “Close to my heart.”

  Candy said nothing. The Hag hadn’t finished, she sensed. So she still had something of significance to say. When she finally spoke, it was only to say five words: