Abarat: Absolute Midnight (4 page)

Chapter 4
The Kid

C
ANDY
’
S ESCAPE FROM THE
mob in the Yebba Dim Day had not gone unnoticed. The greatest concentration of eyes spying her jeopardy were at Three O’Clock in the Morning. At the heart of that extraordinary city was a vast round mansion, and at the heart of the mansion, a circular viewing chamber, where the innumerable mechanical spies that were scattered around the Abarat—perfect imitations of flora and fauna so cunningly crafted as to be indistinguishable from the real thing, but for the fact that each carried a miniscule camera—reported what they saw. There were literally thousands of screens in the Circular Room covering the inner and outer walls, and Rojo Pixler would have been there, watching the world he had brought into being—its little tragedies, it little farces, its little spectacles of love and death on full display—but today he was not riding around the room on his levitation disc, surveying the archipelago. The team of island-watchers was currently led by his trusted colleague, Dr. Voorzangler, wearing his beloved spectacles which offered the illusion that his two eyes were one. It was he who was noting any significant comings and goings, one of which was that of Candy Quackenbush. Voorzangler ordered his second, third, and fourth in command to be sure that each reminded the other to remind Voorzangler to report the movements of the girl from the Hereafter to the great architect when he finally returned.

Though the phrase “when he returns” usually carried little significance, today it did. Today the great architect was surveying the site of his next great creation: an undersea city in the deepest trenches of the Sea of Izabella. Why? Voorzangler had asked Pixler more than once to which the answer had always been the same: to put a name to the hitherto nameless, and embrace the wonders that surely existed in the lightless deeps. And when innocent endeavors had been achieved and those creatures had been catalogued, then he would be able to undertake the true objective of this endeavor (one which he had only shared with Voorzangler): to lay in the hidden habitat of these unknown life-forms the foundation of a deep-water city so ambitious in scale and design that the blazing immensity of Commexo City would be as a rough sketch might be to the finished masterwork.

Even now, as Voorzangler watched Candy Quackenbush leave the Yebba Dim Day, Pixler was visible on an adjacent screen climbing into his bathyscaphe, giving the camera a confident wave as he did so. Inside he had only artificial intelligences beside him, but their cold company was all he needed.

His face appeared now in the fish-eye lens that relayed his presence at the master controls of the bathyscaphe. His voice, when he spoke, had a metallic tone.

“Don’t look so worried, Voorzangler,” Pixler said. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Of course, sir,” the doctor replied. “But I wouldn’t be human if I wasn’t a little concerned.”

“Boasting now?” Pixler said.

“About what, sir?”

“About your humanity. There aren’t very many employees of the company who could say such a thing.” Pixler ran his hands over the bathyscaphe’s controls, turning on all the vessel’s functions. “Smile, Voorzangler,” he said. “We’re making history, you and I.”

“I just wish we were making it on another day,” Voorzangler replied.

“Why?”

“Just . . . bad dreams, sir. Every rational man is allowed a few irrational dreams, wouldn’t you say?”

“What did you dream?” Pixler wanted to know. The bathyscaphe’s door slammed closed and sealed with a hiss. An artificial voice announced that the winches were all fully functional.

“It was nothing of consequence.”

“Then tell me what you dreamed, Voorzangler.”

Voorzangler’s single eye dodged left and right, looking for a way to avoid meeting the great architect’s inquiring gaze. But Pixler had always been able to stare him down.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you. I dreamed that everything went perfectly well with the descent except—”

“Except?”

“Once you got into the very deepest place . . .”

“Yes?”

“There was a city there already.”

“Ah. And its occupants?”

“They’d gone, thousands of years before. Great scaly fins they’d had. And beauty in their faces. There were mosaics on the walls. Such bright, ambitious eyes.”

“And what happened to them?”

Voorzangler shook his head. “They left no clue. Unless their perfect city
was
the clue.”

“What kind of clue is perfection?”

“Well, you would know, sir.”

Pixler was not so easily persuaded. “Why did you have to have that stupid dream? You may have cursed my entire enterprise.”

“We’re scientists, sir. We don’t believe in curses.”

“Don’t tell me what I believe in. Find me the Kid.”

“He’s being searched for.”

“And not found?”

“Not so far.”

“Don’t bother. I just thought he’d want to see me off.”

The automatic doors of the bathyscaphe were closing. A flicker of anxiety crossed the great architect’s face. But he would not be commanded by it. The three massive winches—one of them supplying power to the bathyscaphe, the second delivering clean air, the third, and largest, bearing the weight of the immense vessel—were paying out steadily now. Voorzangler looked at the readings on the screens that surrounded the cabin. Hundreds of tiny cameras, like shoals of one-eyed fish, circled the descent column down which the bathyscaphe would be coming, their motion and their iridescence designed to draw out of the darkness every kind of mysterious creature that hunted in their oppressive depths.

“What happens if he never comes back?” said a forlorn voice.

Voorzangler looked away from the screens.

It was the Kid who had spoken. For once his smile had deserted him. He watched the bathyscaphe’s descent with the expression of a genuinely deserted child.

“We must pray he does,” Voorzangler said.

“But I always prayed to him,” the Kid said.

“Then, my child, I suggest you think of another God, as quickly as you can.”

“Why?” said the Kid, his voice tinged with a little hysteria. “Do you think Pops will die down there?”

“Now would I think that?” Voorzangler said, his response unconvincing.

“I heard you two talking about something that lives deep down in the dark. It’s called the Recogacks, isn’t it?”

“They, boy,” Voorzangler said. “They are called the Requiax.”

“Ha!” the Kid said, like he’d caught Voorzangler in a lie. “So they
do
exist.”

“That’s one of the things your father’s gone down to find out. Whether they exist or not.”

“It’s not fair. He’s mine. If he goes down into the dark and never comes up again what will I do? I’ll kill myself. That’s what I’ll do!”

“No, you won’t.”

“I will! You see if I don’t!”

“Your father’s a very special man. A genius. He’s always going to be looking for new places to explore and things to build.”

“Well, I
hate
him!” the Kid said. He took out his catapult, loaded it with a stone, and aimed it at the biggest screen. He could scarcely have failed to miss. The screen shattered when the stone struck it, exploding in a shower of white sparks and Commexo Patent Glass fragments.

“Stop that immediately!” Voorzangler said.

But the Kid had already loaded his catapult again and was firing. A second screen went to pieces.

“I shall have to summon the guards if you don’t—”

He didn’t need to finish. The Kid had already seen something on the screens that made him forget his catapult. There was a girl being watched by the spy cameras: a girl who the Kid knew, at least by sight, because his father had summoned up her image for him the night he’d come back from Ninnyhammer, where he met her.

“Her name’s Candy Quackenbush, my boy,” the Kid said, perfectly imitating his Creator’s voice.

The sight of Candy put all of the Kid’s rage toward Pixler out of his mind. Now he was consumed by curiosity.

“Where are you off to, Candy Quackenbush?” he said too quietly for Voorzangler to hear. “Why don’t you come to the City and be my friend? I need a friend.”

He went to the lowest of the screens that carried her image and, reaching out, he gently put his hand upon her face.

“Please come,” he murmured. “I don’t mind waiting. I’ll be here. Just come.
Please.
”

Chapter 5
Remnants of Wickedness

A
BOUT THREE WEEKS AFTER
the waters of the Sea of Izabella had crossed the threshold between the Abarat and the Hereafter, flooding many of the streets of Chickentown and demolishing in its force and fury the town’s finest old houses along with the courthouse, the church and the Henry Murkitt Public Library, Candy’s father, Bill Quackenbush began to take nightly walks through the town.

Bill had never had any enthusiasm for exercise before now. He’d always been happiest at his most sedentary, slumped in his leatherette throne in front of the television with beer, cold pizza and a warm remote control close at hand. But he no longer watched television. During the early evenings he sat in his chair drinking his way through a dozen cans of beer, smoking until every ashtray was filled, and on occasion eating slices of white bread. As the hours crept on, the members of his family would slope off to bed, not even his wife, Melissa, bothering to say good night.

Only once the house was finally still and silent, usually a little after midnight, would Bill go into the kitchen, brew some strong coffee to wake himself up, and prepare for the trek ahead by putting on his old work boots, still crusted with dried chicken blood, and his dark blue windbreaker. The weather was becoming unpredictable, as autumn’s grip deepened. Some nights there’d be rain in the gusts from the north, even sleet on a couple of occasions. But he didn’t let the drop in the temperature change his rituals.

There was something he needed to do out in the streets of the town where he’d lived all his life: important work that his dulled mind tried to comprehend day after day as he sat in front of the blank television screen, the drapes drawn against the October sky; work that demanded he leave the comfort of his chair and venture out to wander through the town even though he had no idea what, or why, he was seeking. All he had by way of a compass was the deep-rooted conviction that one night he would turn a corner somewhere in the town and find before him the solution to this mystery.

But each night it was the same story: exhaustion and disappointment. Just before dawn he’d come home to the dark, silent house, with his hands empty and his heart aching as it had never ached: not in sorrow, nor in regret, and certainly never out of love.

Tonight, however, there was a strange certainty in him that had him so eager to start his search that he had headed out into the night as soon as he heard Melissa switch off the lamp beside the bed where they had once slept as husband and wife.

In his haste to leave the house he had not only forgotten to make some coffee, but also to put on his windbreaker. No matter. One evil canceled out the other: the cold so bracing he could scarcely have been more awake, more
alive.
Though his fingers rapidly became numb, and his eyes ached in their sockets, the anticipation of joy and the joy of anticipation were so powerful that he pressed on without concern for his well-being, allowing his feet to choose streets to turn into that he would never have chosen, or perhaps even seen, before tonight.

Finally his wanderings brought him to a little cul-de-sac called Caleb Place. The waters of the Izabella had done extremely devastating work here. Trapped within the basin of the cul-de-sac, they had thrown their destructive power around the ring of houses, completely leveling several of them and leaving only three with any hope of being rebuilt. The most coherent of the surviving buildings was the one to which Bill Quackenbush was drawn. It was heavily cordoned off with wide plastic tape on which was repeatedly printed the warning:

Bill ignored the warning, of course. Ducking under the tape, he scrambled up over the rubble and into the interior of the house. The moon was bright enough to spill through the stripped roof to illuminate the interior with a silvery wash.

At the front door he paused for a long moment and listened. He could hear an unidentifiable sound from the interior: rhythmical, muffled. He listened carefully so as to at least locate its source. It was coming from somewhere upstairs, he concluded. He pushed open the front door, and waded through the litter of trashed furniture and bricks between the door and the stairs. The floodwaters had stripped virtually everything off the walls: the pictures, the wallpaper, even much of the plaster, which had fallen away in cobs making some of the stairs difficult to negotiate. But Bill had met and overcome many obstacles since Candy’s time in the Abarat. He wasn’t going to be dissuaded from this journey by a few littered stairs.

He experienced a few clammy moments as he gingerly stepped from one cracked timber to the next. But his luck held. He reached the landing, which was more solid than the stairs, without incident. He paused a moment to get his bearings, then he started down the passage toward the room at the far end, from which came, he was certain, the strange noise that had drawn him up here.

The room still had its door, which was open a few inches. He paused before it, almost reverentially, and then, using the pressure of just two fingers, he pushed. Creaking, the door swung open. The moon’s brightness illuminated half the room. The rest was in shadow. On the moonlit boards he saw scattered the source of the sounds he’d heard. Dozens of birds, common creatures he couldn’t have named even though he saw them on Followell Street whenever he’d gone out back. They were lying on the floor, as though some merciless force was pinning their heads to the boards, leaving them to flutter wildly, beating their wings so violently that the air was filled with flecks of feathers, which the constant updraft from the panicked wings below kept in circulation.

“What is this . . .” he muttered to himself.

In the dark half of the room, something moved. Something that Bill knew wasn’t a bird.

“Who’s there?” he said.

There was a second motion in the dark and something suddenly propelled itself out of the shadows into the wash of moonlight. It landed among the stricken birds no more than a yard or two from where Bill was standing, then leaped up again, so that with its second leap it struck the moonlit wall opposite the door. Bill got only a blurred impression.

It might have been a brightly colored monkey, except that he’d never seen a monkey move so fast. The motion drove the birds into a fresh frenzy, and some, in their terror, found the strength to escape their pinning. They rose into the middle of the room, apparently unwilling, despite the open roof above them, to depart the presence of whatever had attracted them here in the first place.

Their excited circling made it even harder for Bill to get a clear sense of the thing.

What was this strange entity pinned to the wall? It seemed to be made of fabric rather than skin: a patchwork of four, perhaps five, colored materials that ranged from livid scarlet to one of polished black with a dash of vibrant blue.

The beast didn’t appear to have any recognizable anatomy; there was no sign of anything resembling a head or even any of the features a head might have carried: it had no eyes that Bill could make out, nor ears, nor nose, nor mouth. Bill felt profoundly disappointed. Surely this couldn’t be the answer to the mystery of his nightly searches around town. The answer he’d been seeking had to be something more than some formless scraps of stained felt.

However, though there was little about the creature he found beguiling, he was still curious about it.

“What are you?” he asked, more to himself than anything.

The creature’s response, much to Bill’s surprise, was to stretch out its four extremities and draw all its power into itself. Then it kicked off from the wall and flew at Bill as though plucked by an unseen hand.

Bill was too slow, too surprised, to avoid it. The thing wrapped itself around him, blinding him completely. In the sudden darkness Bill’s sense of smell worked overtime. The beast stank! It had the stench of a heavy fur coat that had been put away soaking wet and had been left in a wardrobe to rot ever since.

The stench oppressed him, disgusted him. He grabbed hold of the thing and tried to pull it off his head.

“Finally,” the creature said, “William Quackenbush, you heard our call.”

“Get off me!”

“Only if you will listen to us.”

“Us?”

“Yes. You’re hearing five voices. There are five of us, William Quackenbush, here to serve you.”

“To . . . serve me?” Bill stopped fighting with the thing. “You mean, like, to obey me?”

“Yes!”

Bill grinned a spittle-grin. “Anything I say?”

“Yes!”

“Then stop smothering me, you damn fools!”

The five responded, instantly leaping off his head and back onto the wall again.

“What are you?”

“Well, why not? If he doesn’t like the truth because it sounds crazy, then he’s learned something hasn’t he?” the thing said to itself. Then it addressed Bill. “We were once five hats, belonging to members of the Noncian Magic Circle. But our owners were murdered and the murderer then celebrated his getting what he wanted by having a heart attack. So we were left looking for someone to give our powers to.”

“And you chose me.”

“Of course.”

“Why ‘of course’? Nobody has ever willingly chosen me for anything.”

“Why do you think, lord?”

Bill knew the answer without having to think.

“My daughter.”

“Yes,” said the thing. “She has great power. No doubt it comes from you.”

“From me? What does that mean?”

“It means you will possess greater influence than you ever dreamed of owning. Even in your wildest dreams of godhood.”

“I never dreamed of being God.”

“Then wake up, William Quackenbush! Wake up and know the reality!”

Though Bill was already awake, his instinctive self understood the deeper significance of what he was being told. The expression on his face opened like a door, and whatever was behind it caught the attention of the creature that had once been several hats.

“Look at you, Billy-boy!” it said, its five voices suddenly changed and harmonizing in admiration. “Such a radiance there is out of you! Such a strong, clear light to drive all the fear away.”

“Me?”

“Who else? Think Billy-boy.
Think.
Who can deliver us from the terror that your child is about to call down upon the world if not
you
who made her?”

At the moment when the creature had talked about Bill’s “radiance” the many silent birds Bill had seen rose into the air and circled around Bill in a vortex of bright black eyes and applauding wings.

“What are they doing?” Bill asked the shapeless thing.

“Paying homage to you.”

“Well, I don’t like it.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Stop them.”

“Stop them dead?”

“Sure.”

“Sure,” the creature said, catching perfectly the tone of Bill’s response.

“Are you making fun of me?”

“Never,” came the reply.

A heartbeat later every single bird dropped out of the air and fell lifeless in the debris.

“Better?” the creature said.

Bill considered the silence.

“A whole lot,” he finally replied. He laughed lightly. It was a laugh he’d forgotten he was capable of: that of a man who had nothing to lose and nothing to fear.

He glanced at his watch.

“Almost dawn,” he said. “I’d better be going. What do I do with you?”

“Wear us. On your head. Like a turban.”

“Foreigners wear those.”

“You
are
a foreigner, Billy-boy. You don’t belong here. You’ll get used to wearing us. In our previous life we made very impressive hats. We’ve just come unglued of late.”

“I know exactly how you feel,” Bill said. “But that’s all going to change now, isn’t it?”

“Indeed it is,” said the remnants of Kaspar Wolfswinkel’s five hats. “You’ve found us. Everything changes now.”