Abarat: The First Book of Hours a-1

by Clive Barker

  “It’s going to be all right,” she murmured to the trembling creature. “I promise I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  It helped her to have another life besides her own to protect in this terrible situation. She had made a promise to Squiller. Now it was up to her to make good on that promise and bring them both through the adventures ahead alive, however dangerous the journey became, and however terrible the destination.

  21. The Hunt

  Under more pleasant circumstances, Candy might have enjoyed the journey that took her away from the towers of Yebba Dim Day. She had never suffered from vertigo, so she didn’t mind the fact that they were a thousand feet up. The view was spectacular: the patchwork of glittering sunlit sea where the Hours of Daylight fell, and the dark waters where the Night Hours held sway.

  But she could scarcely play the blithe sightseer in their present precarious position. Though the moth’s hold on her was reasonably secure, it was clear to her that she was a burden that the creature’s anatomy was not designed to support. Every now and again there would be a breath-snatching moment when its spindly legs scrambled to secure a better hold on her. Whenever this happened, Squiller automatically clamped himself more tightly to her head, like a climber clinging for dear life to a rock face.

  Nor was her fear of being dropped her only concern. Worse, in a way, was the threatening chatter of Mendelson Shape.

  “I’m sure you thought you’d never see me again, eh?” he said.

  She didn’t reply.

  “Well, you should know,” he went on, “I’m not the kind of man who gives up easily. If Lord Carrion wants you, then Lord Carrion will have you. He is my prince. His word is law.”

  He paused, plainly hoping to get some fearful response from her. When none came, he continued in the same confident vein.

  “I daresay he’ll reward me for delivering you. He’ll probably give me a piece of the Abarat when his Night of Victory comes, and Darkness takes everything under its wing. You realize that’s what’s going to happen? There’s going to be an Absolute Midnight. And everyone in The Sinner’s Emporium will be raised up on that Night, you’ll see.

  Candy had kept her silence thus far, but now her curiosity overcame her.

  “What in God’s name is The Sinner’s Emporium?” she said.

  “A place God’s name is not written,” Mendelson said, amused by his own joke. “It’s a book, penned by my Lord Carrion’s grandmother, Mater Motley, in which she lists the seven thousand greatest sinners in the Abarat.”

  “Seven thousand sinners. And are you one of them?”

  “I am.”

  “It doesn’t sound like much to be proud of,” Candy commented.

  “What would you know?” Mendelson Shape snapped. “You outrun me once and you think you have all the answers! Well, you don’t, missy! I could have you dropped in an instant!” He leaned forward, and said: “Cafire!”

  In response to this instruction, the moth twitched, and let Candy go.

  She loosed a shriek as she slipped out of the creature’s grasp and started to fall—

  “Jazah!” Shape yelled. “Jazah!”

  With a heartbeat to spare, the moth caught hold of her again, though its hold was precarious. Shape seemed to realize this. He barked out a third incomprehensible order, and this time the moth responded by gathering Candy back to its upper body and drawing her closer than ever; so close that the stiff black hairs of its thorax pricked her, despite the padding on the jacket Samuel Klepp had given her.

  She felt a trickle of fluid running down the side of her face. Poor Squiller had obviously thought they were going to fall to their doom and had lost control of his squiddish bladder in his panic. She reached up and stroked him. “It’s all right,” she whispered.

  Her heart was beating furiously, her whole head throbbing. She glanced up at Shape, wondering if she shouldn’t try to make some kind of peace with him, to prevent his playing that kind of lethal game again. Next time, the moth might not be quick enough to catch her.

  But Shape’s attention was focused upon something ahead of them. She followed the line of his gaze and saw a fleet of five or six air balloons appearing from a bank of moonlit cloud, perhaps a quarter mile away.

  “What the Nefernow is this?” she heard Mendelson mutter to himself.

  Nefernow, she thought; I think I just learned my first Abaratian curse word.

  Apparently someone in the fleet had seen the moth, because the leading ship was changing direction and heading toward them.

  “Skill! Skill!” Mendelson yelled.

  The moth obeyed the instruction and began a vertiginous descent. It was so steep that Candy feared she and Squiller would slip right out through the loop of the moth’s legs, so she reached up over her head and grabbed hold of the creature’s thorax with both her hands, indifferent to the pricking of the hard hairs.

  An island had come into view below them. If they fell now they would be dashed to death. She had to hold on. Her abductor was her only hope.

  She glanced up again toward the fleet of balloons. They obviously had some other means of propulsion beside the wind, because in the ten or fifteen seconds since the moth had begun its descent, the ships had halved the distance between themselves and their quarry.

  Candy heard a high-pitched whistling sound and something flew close to her face. A moment later came a second whistling, followed by a stream of Abaratian curse words. Shape had flattened himself against the body and head of the moth. It took her a moment to work out why. Then she understood: they were being fired at. There were hunters in the balloons, and they were obviously intent on bringing down the moth. Either they hadn’t seen its rider and its captive, or else they didn’t care what happened to Shape and Candy if their missiles hit home. Whichever it was, it scarcely mattered. The consequence for Candy and Squiller would be the same. She heard a third whistling now, which was followed by a thud. Then a traumatic shudder ran through the body of the moth.

  “Oh, please…” she murmured. “Please don’t let this be happening.”

  But it was too late for prayers.

  She looked up at the insect’s head to see that a crossbow bolt, fired by someone in one of the balloon’s gondolas, had struck the insect directly between its huge eyes.

  There was no blood spilling from the wound. Instead there came a spiraling stream of fragmented color that rose up into the darkened air. Apparently the insect was some kind of magical creation, which went a little way to explaining why it didn’t die instantly, though it had surely been mortally wounded. Instead, it struggled to climb skyward again, its immense wings beating with a slow majesty as it attempted an ascent.

  But it didn’t get very far. A new round of shots came from the balloons, and the vicious bolts tore hole after hole in the delicate membrane of the moth’s wings. Again, color streamed from the wounds, and as it discharged its myriad hues, the desperate beating of its wings began to falter. Then they stopped.

  Their descent began a second time.

  Candy looked back up at Shape. He was still bent close to the moth, desperately whispering to it in a panicked attempt to bring it out of its dive. But it was a lost cause.

  Shot from the sky, the moth fell and fell and fell.

  All Candy and her pursuer could do was hold on as the insect gathered speed and raced toward the unforgiving earth below.

  Part Four.

  Wicked Strange

  A soul of water,

  A soul of stone.

  A soul by name,

  A soul unknown.

  The hours unmake

  Our flesh, our bone.

  The soul is all;

  And all alone.

  A verse, inscribed by an anonymous hand, on a boulder on Vesper’s Rock

  22. In Gallows Forest

  Nobody—not even Christopher Carrion himself—knew every last secret of the Midnight Island. The place was a labyrinth, with its columns of black rock and its fathomless lakes, its
mines, its forests, its steeps and its plains. It was the hiding place of countless ancient mysteries. Indeed he’d heard it said that every fear that had ever chilled the human heart was here on Gorgossium. All assembled at that terrible Hour when the past slips away from us and we are left in dark, not knowing what will come next. If anything.

  Tonight, Carrion was out walking among Gorgossium’s horrible splendors, meditating on what he had seen through the eyes of the moth he’d conjured out of human dust on Vesper’s Rock.

  He’d witnessed the flight to the Yebba Dim Day, and of course he’d seen the girl standing there on the tower of The Great Head, studying the islands. He’d taken pleasure in the look of terror on her face as his creation, guided by Shape, had swooped down to catch hold of her and carry her off. The journey back to Midnight had begun. Things had been going very well.

  Then had come the appearance of the balloons and the attack on the moth. Carrion had watched the approach of the vessels in a state of impotent fury, listened in horror as their bolts flew. He’d heard Mendelson ordering the moth to descend, presumably in the hope of outmaneuvering their pursuers. But it was a lost cause. One of the bolts had struck home, wounding the moth’s telepathic powers. The images in Carrion’s mind’s eye had gone blank.

  He didn’t care about the fate of the moth—it had been raised from dust and light and would now to dust and light return. Nor did Mendelson Shape’s survival matter to him. All that concerned him was the moth’s freight: the girl it had abducted from the towers of the Yebba Dim Day.

  Though he’d only caught a brief glimpse of her—and her face had been obscured by some device she was wearing over her eyes—he had felt an extraordinary rush of recognition at the sight of her. She was somebody special; somebody important. Perhaps even somebody for whom he could feel love.

  But even as his heart had quickened at the sight of the girl, his head had cautioned him to be careful. He had not had pleasant experiences where love was concerned. It could break your heart, if you weren’t careful. It could make you feel so lost, so confused, and so worthless that life didn’t seem worth living. This wasn’t something he knew from books; these were the bitter lessons of his life.

  He decided to think further on this, so rather than return to the Twelfth Tower he went walking, taking his favorite path through Gallows Forest. As he proceeded, his thoughts inevitably turned from the girl that he’d seen on the towers of the Yebba Dim Day to that other special one, the one who had caused him so much grief: his Princess Boa.

  Though it was many years since she had hurt him, he still wore on his heart the scars she had left there.

  In his eyes she had been beautiful beyond words, a creature of infinite charm and sweetness of nature. She had also been the daughter of King Claus, who ruled at that time an alliance of the Islands of Day. As such, she had been a perfect match for the Lord of Midnight. So he’d told her, in his letters to her.

  “What a time of healing there would be,” he’d written, “if you would consent to marry me. You who love the Daylight Hours, and I, who love the Night. Wouldn’t we be perfect together? For centuries the islands have been at war, sometimes secret hostilities, sometimes open struggle; but always a conflict that ended in a terrible loss of life, and in a stalemate which advanced the cause of neither side.

  “An end to all of that. An end to war, forever! If you would marry me, we would announce on our wedding day that all enmities between the Islands of Night and Day would henceforth cease; and that the old wounds would be healed away by the example of our love, and a new Age begin: an Age of Everlasting Love. The war-makers would be stripped of their weapons and made to turn their hands to some loving labor. On that day too I would intend to free all my many stitchlings, who have worked to defend Midnight from attack. This would be an act of faith on my part. In doing this, I would be announcing to the world that I would rather die unarmed, and in love, than ever pick up another sword.

  “And I would name you, my darling, as my inspiration. You, my sweet Princess, would be the loving soul that the Abarat would thank for your power to quell the anger in the heart of Night.”

  There had been many such letters, and many to him from the Princess Boa, in which she’d told him how beautiful his sentiments were, and how much she wanted to believe that Carrion’s Age of Love Everlasting was something that could indeed be brought about.

  “My father, King Claus, and my brother Quiffin have both advised me to accept your noble entreaties” the Princess had written, “but my lord, I am far from certain that I can do as you all desire me to do. If 1 fail to feel in my heart the depth of love that a union of our souls surely demands, things would never go well between us. Please understand that I wish you no discourtesy in speaking this way. I only desire to speak truthfully so that there be no misunderstanding”

  Her letter, full of doubt (there was no outright refusal, at least not at the beginning) had hurt him. For long nights after receiving it he could not bring himself to eat, or to speak to anyone.

  Finally, he had penned a response, begging her to reconsider.

  “If you are concerned about my appearance, lady” he had said, “please be reassured: my grandmother Mater Motley has promised to use her skills in the magical arts to erase the marks that a life of grief and loneliness have left upon me. Should you agree to a union between us—and though you say your soul is not touched by love for me, I yet dare hope I may earn that love—theny your Midnight Prince would be made new again, as any lover should be: new in your eyes, new in my own, and new, finally, in the eyes of the world.”

  But all his reassurances could not persuade the Princess Boa to change her mind. She wrote back to him with great tenderness, but there was always uncertainty in what she wrote. She wasn’t saying no, outright, because her father agreed with Carrion and saw a great opportunity for peace between Day and Night if his daughter and the Lord of Midnight were to marry. But for her to say yes, she would have to be rid of all the questions that haunted her.

  She had dreams, she had written, that did not reassure her.

  He had written back, asking her what dreams these were.

  The Princess Boa had not been specific in her response. She’d only said that the dreams frightened her, and though she did not doubt Carrion’s good and honorable intentions toward her, she could not put these visions out of her head.

  As he walked through Gallows Forest, the vultures and the ravens kept pace with him, the ravens flying from tree to tree overhead, the vultures hopping at his feet, fighting between themselves for the place closest to his heels. He remembered how he had labored over the letters he had written back to her, determined to convince her that the dreams she was having were of no significance, and that she should take comfort in his undying devotion to her.

  “I will protect you,” he had written, “from any power that threatens you. I will put myself between you and Death itself. Please, lady, be assured: there is no demon in air, earth or sea that can threaten you.”

  Whenever he had sent a letter to her there had always been a trial by hope while he had waited for her reply. And then a terrible moment when that reply had finally arrived and his fingers had become thick and fumbling with unease as he struggled to open the envelope.

  The answer never satisfied him.

  He pressed her, over and over, to stop punishing him with indecision. And finally, after much importuning on his part, the Princess had given him a clear answer. It could not, indeed, have been clearer. She did not love him, could not love him, and would never love him.

  He’d almost drowned in the wave of self-hatred that had broken over him when he read that final reply. He knew why she was telling him no, and it had nothing to do with her nightmares. It was something else; something far simpler.

  She hated him.

  That was the terrible truth of the matter. However tenderly phrased her refusal, he could read between the lines of her letter. She thought he was an ugly, scarred, nightmare-rid
den grotesque, and she hated him with all her heart.

  That was the beginning, the middle and the end of the matter.

  His long, meditative amble through the trees had brought him into the heart of the forest now, where the great gallows of the past had been planted. Some still had rotted nooses tied to their beams, and a few of those nooses still supported the remains of executed men and women, mummified in their last, ghastly poses, mouths stretched grotesquely wide. Some had had their tongues plucked out by hungry ravens, and many of the birds in this vicinity had come to possess the voices of those whose tongues they ate. Now they chattered like men as they hopped around on the bloodred branches that had sprouted from the gallows.

  “What a night to be hanged, eh?”

  “I was hanged on a night like this. How my wife cried!”

  “Mine didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “She was the reason I had a noose around my throat!”

  “You killed her?”

  “I surely did! She cooked the worst bread-pudding in Tazmagor!”

  The Lord of Midnight put the absurdly grim gossip out of his head and let his thoughts go back to the girl he had seen through the moth’s eyes on the towers of the Yebba Dim Day. Though she had fallen out of the air when the moth was killed, she was still alive; of that Carrion was irrationally certain. And sooner or later he would find her and speak to her.

  Did he dare believe that perhaps this girl had come from the Hereafter as fortune’s way of compensating him for what he’d suffered at the hands of the Princess Boa? Perhaps that was why he thought he recognized the girl: because she was a gift to him from circumstance.

  The thought lifted his dark mood somewhat. He walked on through the trees, toward the cliff edge, where he would have a view toward the islands of the west. Including, of course, the Yebba Dim Day.