Absolute Midnight

He had only got that far when Candy heard somebody nearby murmur her name.

She looked around, and quickly found a friendly face, that of Izarith, who’d taken the trouble to look after Candy when she’d first ventured into the chaotic interior of The Great Head. She’d fed Candy, and given her a warm fire by which to dry herself, even given Candy her first Abaratian garments to wear. Izarith was a Skizmut; her people were born from the deep waters of what Izarith had called Mama Izabella. Now she came through the crowd toward Candy, wearing what looked like a homemade hat, sewn from different kinds of seaweed. She was cradling her baby Nazré with one arm and holding the little hand of her daughter Maiza with the other.

She was very emotional about seeing Candy again. Her eyes filled with silver-green tears.

“I’ve heard so much about you since you first came to my house. About all the things that you’ve done.” She glanced at Malingo. “And I’ve heard about you too,” she said. “You’re the one who worked for the wizard, right? On Ninnyhammer?”

Malingo made a little smile.

“This is Izarith, Malingo,” Candy said. “She was very kind to me when I first got here.”

“I did what anybody would have done,” Izarith said. “Do you have time to come back to the house and tell me whether all the things I’ve heard are true? You both look hungry.”

“Actually, I am a little,” Malingo said.

But in the short time since Izarith had called to Candy the mood of the crowd had changed, influenced by the anger toward humankind pouring from the man with the green beard.

“We should hunt them down, every last one of them humans, and hang them,” he said. “If we don’t it’s only a moment of time before they come looking to steal our magic again.”

“You know, I don’t think we have time to eat, Izarith, much as we’d liked to stay.”

“You’re worried about Kytomini aren’t you?”

“Is he the one saying he’d like me hanged?”

“He hates everybody. Right now it’s your people, Candy. It could be geshrats in five minutes.”

“There’s a lot of people agreeing with him,” Candy said.

“People like to have somebody to hate. Me, I’m too busy raising the little ones.”

“What about your husband?”

“Oh, Ruthus is working on his boat right now. Patching it up for selling. We’re getting out of the Yebba Dim Day as soon as we have the money. It’s getting too dangerous.”

“Is his boat seaworthy?” Malingo said.

“Ruthus says it is.”

“Then perhaps he’d take us to the Nonce, for a price.”

“The Nonce?” Izarith said. “Why are you going there?”

“We’re meeting friends,” Candy said. She reached in her pockets as she talked, and brought out all the paterzem she had. Malingo did the same. “Here’s all the money we’ve got,” she said to Izarith. “Would that pay for the journey?”

“I’m sure it’ll be more than enough,” Izarith replied. “Come on, I’ll take you to Ruthus. The boat’s nothing fancy, just so you know.”

“We don’t need anything fancy,” Candy said. “We just need to get away from here.”

Izarith lent Candy her wide-brimmed hat, to keep anyone in the increasingly agitated crowd from realizing that they had a member of humankind in their midst, then led Candy and Malingo down the quay, past vessels large and small to one of the smallest of the lot.

There was a man on board doing some final work on his vessel with brush and paint. Izarith called her husband away from his work, and quickly explained the situation. Meanwhile Candy watched Kytomini’s audience from the corner of her eye. She had a nasty feeling that she and Malingo had not passed through the crowd entirely unnoticed, a feeling that was lent weight when several of the crowd’s members turned to look in Candy’s direction, and after a moment, started to walk down the quay toward them.

“We’re in trouble, Izarith,” Candy said. “Or least I am. I think it would be better if you weren’t seen with me.”

“What, them?” Izarith said, staring back contemptuously at the approaching thugs. “I’m not afraid of them.”

“Candy’s right, love,” Ruthus said. “Take the children quickly and go around the back of the fish market. Hurry.”

“Thank you,” Candy said. “Next time it won’t be so rushed.”

“You tell my husband to come back to us as quickly as possible.”

“He will, don’t worry,” Candy replied.

The man with the green beard, who had first incited the anger with his speechifying, was now breaking through the approaching little mob of bullies to lead it.

“Are we going?” Ruthus yelled.

“Oh, Lordy Lou, are we ever,” Candy said.

“Then come on!”

Candy jumped into the boat. Its boards creaked.

“If ye’ve cracked her boards and you drown, don’t blame me.” Ruthus grinned.

“We won’t drown,” Malingo said following Candy. “This girl has work to do. Great work!”

Candy smiled. (It was true. What, or how, or when—she had no idea. But it was true.)

Ruthus was racing to the wheelhouse yelling to Malingo as he did so: “Cut the rope, geshrat. Be quick!”

The dock was reverberating as the mob, its numbers increasing, followed Green Beard’s lead.

“I see you, girl!” he yelled, “and I know what you are!”

“Rope’s severed, Ruthus!”

“Hold on, then! And pray!”

“Go!” Candy yelled to Ruthus.

“Your crimes against the Abarat must be punished—”

The last word was repeated by every hate-filled throat in the crowd. “Punished!” “Punished!” “Pun—”

The third time, the threat was drowned out by the raucous roar of Ruthus’s little boat, as its engine came to life.

A cloud of yellow exhaust fumes erupted from the stern of the boat, its density blotting all sight of the mob, just as its din had blotted all sound.

Ruthus’s work was not over. They had got away from the dock, but they were not yet out of the harbor. And there were more opportunistic fishermen bringing in cargos of garbage all the time. If Ruthus’s boat had been any larger, it would have been caught in the confusion. But it was a tiny thing, and nimble-like, especially with Ruthus at the wheel. By the time the smoke trail had cleared, the boat was out of the harbor and into the Straits of Dusk.

Chapter 4 The Kid

CANDY’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

ABOUT 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:

DANGEROUS STRUCTURE DO NOT ENTER

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.”