Abarat: Absolute Midnight

by Clive Barker

  “What we?”

  “We have a strange . . .”

  “Go on. Say whatever it is you were going to say.”

  “Friendship. We have a strange friendship.”

  “That we do,” he said. “Are you ashamed of it? Of me?”

  “No. It’s just . . . when people talk about you—”

  “You don’t need to go on. I know my reputation. After all, I earned it.”

  “Please,” Candy said. “Go. I’m going back to—”

  “Wait. Before you rush off. You need to know something.”

  “Well, be quick.”

  “Go back to the Hereafter. Now. And go quickly. Take your friends if you want to save their lives.”

  “Why?”

  Carrion sighed.

  “Why can’t you just take my word this once?”

  “I’m me. I ask questions. And try to stop you from getting killed.”

  “And now I’m returning the favor.”

  “Are you saying that if I stay in the Abarat I’ll be killed?”

  “Not just you. Most of the Abarat is about to change forever.”

  “How? Why?”

  Carrion drew an aching breath and spoke.

  “You may as well know, I suppose, if it’ll persuade you to go.” He took another breath, deeper still. Then came the answer to her question. “I’ve reconnected with a few of my spies. I used to pay them to inform on my grandmother. The Old Hag has a few tricks up her sleeve. She’s creating something called a stormwalker.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “No. You shouldn’t. Second, an army of stitchlings has been assembled. Enough to provide ‘a knife for every heart,’ was the phrase my employee used.”

  “Lordy Lou,” Candy whispered.

  “And—”

  “There’s more?”

  “Much. Absolute Midnight, Candy. That’s what my grandmother calls it. She plans to block out the light. No moons, no suns, no stars. The sky will be dark over land and sea. And it will be cold.”

  Candy felt dizzy. This was a lot of information to process in far too short a time.

  “She has enough power to blot out the suns?”

  “Not personally. She’s unleashed a living darkness. A species called the sacbrood, who’ve been growing in number for years. Now there are millions of them. Enough to cover the heavens from one end of the Abarat to the other.”

  “And you were part of this?”

  “She raised me to release them. I was to be the one she knew she could trust. After the fire, there was only she and I. Everything I had I owed to her, starting with my life. And she never let me forget it.”

  “So the sacbrood cover the skies? There’s no light? No warmth? It’s like the end of the world?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But they can’t stay up there forever, can they?”

  “No. They’ll die off after a time. But it’ll only take a few days of darkness for the real trouble to show itself. There are fiends all across the Hours who have been waiting for this Midnight. Enemies of the light, waiting for a chance to strike down those who loved the sun, moon, and stars. These enemies are monsters of every kind, but they have hatred in common. They’re all outcasts, pariahs; fiends who’ve escaped the gallows or the guillotine, and want revenge. Ghouls, Malefics, Wrathaki, Babelites; fifty kinds of monsters you could maybe name, and three times as many you could not. They’ve been out of sight for so long, living with the dead, or in thunderheads, or in places where the waters of the Izabella are all bruise and blood. So they’ve been hiding. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting until this Midnight, when they will finally get their chance to slaughter everything that smells of happiness.”

  “A plot like this can’t have been completely unseen. What about the Council? Or people who see the future?”

  “If anyone saw the truth and spoke it, then that was the end of them. My grandmother has never needed the law to get a judgment. She is her own judge, and her seamstresses her executioners. One needle, driven into the eye, or one knife—”

  “All right,” Candy said. “I get the idea. I wish I knew you for a liar.”

  “But I’m not.”

  “No. You’re not. They’re coming out of the west, aren’t they?”

  “How did you know?” Carrion said.

  “The birds,” Candy replied.

  It wasn’t much of an answer, but it seemed to be all that Carrion needed.

  “Well, now it’s no longer a secret. There’s no need for anyone to move carefully. So it’ll spread quickly.”

  “So what’s to be done? How do we defend ourselves?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. There is no defense, Candy. Just go back home while you still can. And be grateful that you’ve got Chickentown to go back to.”

  “Back to Chickentown? No. I love the Abarat. I won’t give up on it.”

  “So love it from afar. Sometimes it’s better that way.”

  “There you are!”

  She looked back down the alley. The John Brothers were heading toward her.

  “Go,” she murmured to Carrion.

  “Who’s your friend?” John Drowze wanted to know.

  Carrion gave her one last puzzled look, then he started to stumble back away down the alley. She watched him take a few steps, then she turned back to face the brothers.

  “Who was that?” Mischief said.

  “It doesn’t matter, at least not now. We have more urgent problems. Where is everyone?”

  Half the brothers were still looking back into the shadows where Candy’s mysterious friend had gone, while the rest were trying to follow Candy and there was an absurd moment when they went neither one way nor the other.

  “Mischief, will you get your brothers in order? We have to ready ourselves.”

  “For what?” Mischief said.

  “The End of the World,” she replied.

  Chapter 35

  stealing away

  THERE WERE TIMES, CANDY knew, when it was best to be honest. But not always. Sometimes telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth brought nothing but trouble. And truth, like lies, often just got worse if you tried to clean up the mess with more of the same. She was in that very situation now.

  When she’d emerged from the alleyway following her conversation with Carrion, and found her gang of friends, she had something very urgent to tell them: information given to her by Carrion. Midnight was on its way: a darkness that was clearly designed to kill everything in its path. But she couldn’t tell them such news and not expect them to ask her how she’d come by it. They’d want to know. She could scarcely blame that. In their position, faced with the same news, she’d want to know its course too. But that’s where the lies had to be told.

  If she told them she’d spent the last few minutes in conversation with Christopher Carrion, they’d be debating whether he could be trusted until Midnight came and blacked out everything. So she reported the story as Carrion had explained it, but told them the information had come from one of the women of the Fantomaya. It was difficult enough reporting such bizarre news in the midst of the market crowd, doing her best to make herself heard over the din of the stall-owners yelling their prices. Candy told them only of the sacbrood. For once, John Serpent believed her. The rest thought this woman from the Fantomaya was either crazy or an impostor.

  “I don’t believe it,” John Mischief said. “You can’t plague the whole world with darkness. It’s not plausible.”

  “Why not?” Candy said. “Because it hasn’t happened yet?”

  “Do you trust these women?” Betty Thunder asked her.

  “Yes. I think what I’m telling you is the truth. It doesn’t help much”—she looked at Mischief—“to say it can’t be done because it’s being done. Right now. It certainly explains the birds.”

  “Oh, Lordy Lou,” Malingo murmured. “The birds.”

  Now the doubt began to melt.

&
nbsp; “We saw them too,” Legitimate Eddie said. “All flying east . . .”

  “Away from the sacbrood,” Tom said. “That makes sense. I’ve certainly never seen a migration like that before.”

  “There’s never been one,” Malingo said.

  “All right,” John Mischief said, “so this thing is happening: what do we do?”

  “As much as I hate to say it, I think we should go to the Yebba Dim Day,” Candy said, “to that Council that hates me so much.”

  “My mother’s on Babilonium,” Betty said. “I’ve got to go to her.”

  “I’m going with you,” said Tom. “My Macy is there. We should be together if the world is going to end.”

  “I think Babilonium might already be in the dark,” Candy said.

  Silent tears ran down Betty’s cheeks. Clyde hugged her.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “We’re going. The three of us.”

  “Why is Mater Motley doing this?” Tom wanted to know.

  “Because she’s a venomous piece of work,” John Serpent said. “And yes, I do realize a man called Serpent shouldn’t be tossing words like venomous around, but I’ve plenty more. She’s a vicious, loathsome, life-hating monster. I vote we skip the trip to the Yebba Dim Day and go straight to Gorgossium and call her down from her tower.”

  “And what do we do if she comes down?” John Slop said.

  Serpent didn’t offer up a reply.

  “I think we should start walking down to the harbor while we talk,” Candy suggested. “We have to find a boat.”

  “We should get three boats, then,” Geneva said. “I’ll go to the Nonce and find Finnegan.”

  They had emerged from the market by now, and on the quieter street that took them back down toward the harbor. They were about to talk at a more natural volume, though Candy dropped her voice to a whisper and shared the other piece of information regarding Mater Motley’s plans: the part about the beasts.

  “Lordy Lou,” Geneva said. “This is very bad.”

  “And the part about the darkness wasn’t?” Mischief said.

  “Are there a lot of creatures hidden away in the darkness?” Tom said.

  “Oh yes,” said Eddie.

  “How do you know?” Candy said.

  “I wasn’t always a great actor,” Eddie said. “Before I took to the stage I made a nice business out of tracking down the Ziaveign and putting them out of their misery.”

  “Zia-what?” Candy said.

  “Ziaveign. Eight Dynasties’ destroyers and fiends.”

  “This gets worse and worse,” said John Slop, looking rather pale.

  “Did you say you put them out of their misery?” Mischief said.

  “I worked with my two brothers,” Eddie said, “and yes, we did kill them when we were able to do so. Of course that was much more expensive. Much too expensive in the end. It cost my brothers their lives.”

  A heavy silence fell on the company.

  “I’m sorry,” Candy said finally. “That’s terrible.”

  “They were fine, brave men. But the Eight Dynasties are strong. They may have been in hiding a long time, but that doesn’t mean they’re dead. They’ll rise up. That’s what Mater Motley is counting on.”

  “She didn’t do all this alone,” John Mischief said. “She had help from that wretched grandson of hers.”

  “Well, at least he’s dead and gone,” Geneva said.

  Candy couldn’t bring herself to keep the truth from these people, who had done so much for her, any longer.

  “Actually . . . he’s not,” she said.

  “You know this for a fact?”

  Candy nodded.

  “How?”

  “It’s complicated,” Candy said.

  “What’s complicated about a man who lives in a fishbowl, pickled with his own nightmares?” Mischief replied. “And who has almost taken your life on several occasions? He’s dreck, dirt, excrement.”

  Candy remembered her first glimpse of him in the alleyway. She’d thought something very similar: that Carrion was indeed made of filth. But in the end that was the fate of all flesh, wasn’t it? Everything decayed, went back to dirt, to the earth. But that wasn’t the whole story. People weren’t just walking sacks of meat. Unlike Carrion, she’d started to understand that there was something eternal, underlying, in everyone, perhaps even everything. A soul, for want of a better word, which—even when time had dimmed her sight and dulled her memories—would burn as brightly as it burned now.

  Even if her memories seeped away, the sweet and sour of her life stolen from the meat of her mind, her soul would know its way to the net of remembrance that was being cast out over her life and all that touched it, gently retrieving the details of every moment. Cast out over and over, world without end. It wasn’t so surprising that these thoughts were being discussed in the room at the back of her head, while in the front of her mind the part of her that was in the here and now continued to talk with her friends. If ever there was a time in her life that she needed the comfort of this faith in the Eternal, it was Here and Now. She was part of a struggle that was older than life: the battle between Light and Darkness.

  She was certain she belonged in this moment, in the company of these loving friends. She was here, in this world she loved so much, to play a part in its future. She didn’t understand, nor even particularly care to, how she had come to have a part in the approaching struggle. But everything she’d done since she’d first come here—her meeting with Malingo; with Wolfswinkel; her visit to the Time Out of Time; her pursuit of her own secret history that she’d pieced together from many sources; her strange relationship with Carrion; and her final liberation from the Princess Boa—all of it had been a preparation, an education, for being alive at this moment.

  “What are you thinking about?” Malingo inquired.

  “Everything,” she replied.

  The atmosphere down at the harbor, which had been so odd when they’d got off the ferry, was even odder now. Some of the seabirds were still there, sitting in silent rows like bored jurists awaiting the beginning of a trial. But most of the people had left, and those who remained were gathered around a makeshift pulpit from which a crazed minister with long white hair and one ragged wing was preaching to them.

  Candy listened to the creature talk about how the righteous would find their way to the light and the rest go into darkness; that was all she could stomach. She blocked its voice out, and looked in the opposite direction only to find that the missing seabirds had also found themselves a spiritual leader. Having forsaken their perch along the harbor wall they were now gathered in front of one of the shuttered restaurants, attending with many a beady black eye to a very large but very antiquated bird that looked like an albino vulture with a touch of pterodactyl in its blood. It was addressing its congregation in a language of crawings and chitterings, which was a great deal more complex, even eloquent, than the screech of a seagull.

  As for the captains and crews of the small fishing boats that were tied up alongside the quayside, they had all departed, presumably to be with their families at this troubling time, or to drink in solitude.

  “So now what do we do?” said Malingo, surveying the deserted dock.

  “We choose boats that look sturdy and are fueled up, and we take them,” Eddie said.

  “Just take them?”

  “Yes! Lordy Lou, this isn’t the time to be arguing the moral niceties of the thing. There’s nobody here to barter with anyway.”

  “Do we have to take boats?” Clyde said. “What about one of your glyphs?”

  “I think we could probably conjure up a glyph between us but trust me, we don’t want to be in the air right now. Not with those things up there.”

  “We’re safer on water,” Tom said.

  “I trust Mama Izabella,” Candy said. “She’s not afraid of the dark. So we take some boats, yes? We can apologize when the lights go on again!”

  “I wish there were some weapons we
could lay our hands on too,” Geneva said.

  “Maybe some harpoons?” Eddie suggested.

  “It’s worth a look . . .” Geneva said. “I’ll take whatever we can find. We don’t know what we’re going to be up against.”

  “The worst of the worst,” Eddie said grimly. Since he’d confessed his monster-trapping past, and the grim price it had cost his brothers, Candy realized that Eddie had nothing left to lose. The sight of his pain made her speak up.

  “We’re all going off in different directions,” she said, “and who knows when we’ll see one another again. Or even if. So I just want to say that I love you. And I’ve been blessed to have this time with you. I want you to know you’re the best friends anyone could have.”

  She looked from face to face as she spoke, not even attempting to put on a smile. If she’d understood Carrion correctly, then this Midnight would mark the end of the Abarat as they’d all known it. And what would be left? An archipelago ruled over by the monstrous Empress, Mater Motley? Or simply a wasteland, destroyed by the poisonous work of the fiends this darkness would unleash?

  As Malingo and Clyde searched for weapons, boats were chosen. Geneva, who was traveling in search of Finnegan, chose a small, sleek vessel that looked to have been designed for sport rather than commercial fishing. It was called The Loner. Two-Toed Tom took the helm of a vessel called simply Big Boat, which he, Betty, and Clyde chose for its size, given that they were hoping to evacuate more than just one person. Candy chose for sentiment’s sake a boat that reminded her of the harrowing journey on the Parroto Parroto: Malingo, Legitimate Eddie, and the Johns agreed to join her. John Mischief instantly had his brothers democratically vote him the Captain.

  All three boats had lanterns hanging from their masts and from the eaves of their wheelhouses, but at Candy’s suggestion they went aboard several other vessels moored in the vicinity and borrowed their lanterns too. If they were truly going to meet a wave of darkness out there then they needed to be carrying as many light sources as possible. There was some debate as to whether they should go back to the market and get some provisions to sustain them, but before they could come to a conclusion on the matter it was taken out of their hands by the fact that six or seven of the potbellied minister’s righteous congregation had noticed Candy and her friends. They broke away from the assembly, yelling: “Thieves! You get away from those boats!”