Days of Magic, Nights of War

  She drew a deep sigh, her heart brimming with feelings for this farewell. Of regret, that she hadn’t seen more places, of sadness that she hadn’t met more people. And of bittersweet gratitude that at least she had lived to see as much as she had seen . . .

  . . . the stone head of the Yebba Dim Day, filled to capacity with all manner of refugees, snatched from the waves . . .

  . . . the beauty of Odom’s Spire, which had been so haunted by visions of the past and the future she had never quite decided what was real and what wasn’t . . .

  . . . Ninnyhammer, where the night settled in the trees and tarrie-cats pierced the shadows with their all-seeing eyes . . .

  . . . Babilonium, brimming with visions of the freakish and fantastic and the din of happy souls . . .

  . . . Scoriae, where the evening star was always rising and Bilarki’s sad songs wove between the misty trees . . .

  . . . and always, when the sound of sad songs and happy souls was stilled, the wind had been there to bring her the music of the sea: the all-embracing Goddess Izabella, the unfathomed sea, mother of death and mystery. It was the Izabella that had first found her, and it was the Izabella that was delivering her home. She reached over the side of the boat and put her fingers in the water; then she lifted them to her lips. “Thank you,” she murmured. Then—only with the greatest difficulty—she took her eyes off the place she’d been and redirected her gaze toward the place they were going, toward the Hereafter, toward home.

  “Hang on!” McBean hollered.

  The waves were breaking against the solid world that lay ahead, and their backwash struck the Lud Limbo, lifting the vessel up.

  Candy grabbed hold of the railing to keep herself from falling. As she did so, she heard a noise behind her. A kind of chanted music was coming out of the Wormwood, its source, to judge by its shrillness, the women of Mater Motley’s sewing circle. The sound they made was complex and strangely distressing. It made her stomach churn. It made the Izabella churn too. As the rhythm of the chant quickened, the sea became more frenzied, surging even higher beneath the Wormwood as though it were a watery mountain that was being summoned in a great spiral motion from the depths. As below, so above. The same chant that raised the waters brought down a spiraling cloud of slate and lightning, which took as its focus the main mast of the Wormwood. Now everything was in motion, except the great warship itself, which by some tremendous force of its own audacious will held steady while the sea and sky described vast, implacable motions around it.

  “A storm?” Melissa Quackenbush said to herself. She let the dirty plate she was washing slip back into the gray water in the sink. Ricky came in, still sour-faced from having been brought back from the Gages’ house, and took a container of orange juice out of the refrigerator. She glanced around at him.

  “Take that scowl off your face right now,” Melissa said. Ricky chugged the juice. “And for the thousandth time, don’t drink out of the container!”

  “Dad does!”

  “Well, you’re not your—”

  She didn’t finish the sentence. Two lightning strikes came in quick succession, bright against the darkening sky, followed by a loud crack of thunder. She slowly stepped away from the sink, staring down at it as she did so. The plates were rattling against one another, and the dirty dishwater was rippling.

  “What’s going on?” Ricky said.

  “I don’t know, honey. I think you should get away from the windows.”

  There was another flash of lightning that looked like a crack in the sky. The thunder came immediately after, and it was so loud it shook the clock from the kitchen wall.

  “Stay inside,” she said to Ricky, and then defying her own edict, she stepped out into the backyard, her stomach convulsing.

  She could feel the ground reverberating beneath her feet. Could this be an earthquake? They’d never had one before, to her knowledge. But the reverberations were getting stronger. Some old fence timbers propped against the side of the house fell over. There was a crash from somewhere upstairs as a vase or a can of deodorant danced off a shelf and hit the floor.

  “Oh, my God . . .” she said.

  Her eyes had caught sight of something glittering in the distance, at the very edge of town. No, beyond the edge of town. It seemed to roll as it came, turning its silver back to the empty blue sky, like a wave.

  Like a wave.

  “I don’t believe it,” she murmured.

  Like an enormous wave.

  “This isn’t happening.”

  She backed away, toward the house. The reverberations were setting off car alarms all along the street.

  “Bill?” she yelled. “BILL!”

  As she came into the kitchen, Bill came from the other direction and tossed an empty beer can into the trash.

  “What’s all that noise?” he said.

  Melissa pointed toward the window. For once she didn’t need to explain anything to him. He saw.

  “That’s a damn wave,” he said.

  “Yes, Bill, that’s exactly what it is.”

  “Where’d it come from?”

  “Never mind that now. We’ve got to do something.”

  “This is the end of the world,” Bill said, his voice a monotone.

  “No, it isn’t. It’s just a flood, Bill. A dam broke or—”

  “There ain’t no dams around here.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s coming this way.”

  “Then we’ll drive.”

  “We can’t drive. The traffic’s backed up—”

  People have been leaving, she suddenly thought; I’ve been wandering around in a fog, and all the time people have been leaving.

  “It’s too late,” Bill said, still staring at the wave. “We’re all gonna die.”

  “No, Bill. We have to go up—”

  “Into the attic?”

  “Onto the roof! Can we get out onto the roof?”

  “I guess so. Through the attic window. I mean, I don’t know how safe it is.”

  The windows were all rattling now; cups were coming off their hooks; things falling out of the fridge, which Ricky had left open. Eggs smashing, milk spilling and spreading its own little flood.

  Melissa stared at the open fridge. “Food!” she said. “We have to take some food up with us, in case we’re stuck up there for a long time!”

  “Maybe I should get some medical stuff too,” Ricky suggested.

  “Yes! I’ll get that stuff, you get the water. Don, get in here—”

  “There’s a wave—”

  “We know,” said Ricky.

  “I’m getting a gun,” said Bill.

  “Just hurry!” said Melissa.

  Everybody scattered. Melissa went upstairs to the bedroom to get the medical supplies and then went into the bedroom to pick up some warm blankets. The pictures on the wall beside the bed were all rattling. Her eyes went to them for a moment. There was one of the boys, and one of Candy in Florida, with Grandpa and Grandma. Candy was smiling, but not with her eyes. In her eyes there was a strange sadness. Melissa had looked at the picture hundreds, probably thousands of times, but she’d never seen that sadness before.

  She had no time to study it. Ungluing her gaze, she returned to the business of finding blankets, glancing up just once to see that line of silver creeping closer, ever closer—

  At one thirty-eight in the afternoon, the first wave from the Sea of Izabella entered the streets of Chickentown.

  It swept through the streets like a great cleansing river. It uprooted trees and picked up cars like toys. It wasn’t strong enough to level brick houses, but it took off their roofs and it blew in the windows and smashed in the doors, entering without invitation to wash away the remains of the lives that had been lived there. It sluiced the cereal off the kitchen table and the toothpaste oozing from the tube on the bathroom sink. It overturned the unmade beds and pitched the television against the wall. It emptied the closets and the cabinets and the goldfish bowl.

&n
bsp; Street by street the waters of the Izabella took over the town, moving between the houses as though it were solving a puzzle, turning, turning, turning and coming to meet itself as it rounded another corner—

  The noise of this deluge was terrifying. The great roar of water sounded the bass note, of course, but on top of it were a hundred other noises of destruction. Glass smashing, chimneys collapsing, doors splintering, car alarms whooping—

  And in the midst of this chaos of advancing waters, and the damage they were doing, there were people. Not all that many, in fact. The campaign of whisperings that Diamanda and Henry had undertaken had paid off. Most of Chickentown’s inhabitants were watching the inundation from higher ground. But there were still plenty who had not heard the call and were caught up in the flood. Some, like the Quackenbush family, had decided that the roof would be the safest place to be, and had retreated there. Some had hurriedly created makeshift rafts of this and that (crates, the kids’ inflatable swimming pool) and a few actually had boats in their garages, which they climbed aboard as the wave approached.

  There would be plenty of tales to tell, for those who survived this day of days! Stories of last-minute escapes, of people going back into their houses for some sentimental keepsake only to find there were fishes swimming in their living rooms; of folks who’d been carried away in their old mobile homes and deposited miles away. But there would also be many sad stories to tell. Lives lost in a moment of foolishness or indecision; people swept away by the foamy current as they made a dash to their cars, or caught by a surge of white water as they clung to the eaves of their houses.

  And then there were those events that were neither happy nor sad, but instead could be filed only under the category of strange. The greatest of these events happened at one thirty-one, just seven minutes before the waters of the Izabella began their invasion of the Hereafter. An anonymous individual (in fact, Henry Murkitt) masterminded the mass liberation of the chicken coops. The result was not, unfortunately, a mass exodus to freedom and health. The animals had lived in a world of false dawns and excrement all their lives. When liberty came, they had no idea what to do with it. But at least they didn’t drown locked up in their coops. In fact, their semistupefied state was the saving of many of them. When the water came, they let it carry them away and were swept out of captivity forever. It made for a memorable sight. Thousands and thousands of chickens, borne up by the magical water, staring vacantly at a sky that they had not known existed until now.

  As for the Lud Limbo, it was carried into the midst of this maelstrom by the sheer governing force of the sea. The journey—which had been perilous enough so far—became more treacherous still once the boat started to encounter the trashed remains of Chickentown. All kinds of flotsam and jetsam careered around in the turbulent waters: street signs, bicycles, chairs, tables, sinks and fencing, the pulpit of St. Stephen’s on Fuller Street, a truckload of pig carcasses, store signs, shrubs and on and on and on.

  Every time something large struck the boat’s hull, the Lud Limbo shuddered and rolled. “We just have to ride this out!” McBean yelled as the increasingly filthy scum spilled over the gunwales and onto the Lud Limbo’s deck.

  Clinging to the railing so that she wasn’t thrown out if the boat suddenly pitched, Candy made her way, hand over hand, to the bow. Before her lay a panorama of disaster: the roofs and upper stories of buildings emerging from churning gray waters littered with garbage. Tears blurred her sight. This had been her world until eight weeks ago: and there wasn’t a street or store she hadn’t known. Now, in a matter of a few minutes, the waters of the Izabella had washed it all away. Her mind almost refused the truth of it.

  “This can’t be happening,” she said. “This can’t be happening.”

  It was Finnegan who came to her and put his arms around her to steady her. She looked up into his face. There was such a depth of hurt in his eyes—a sadness so inconsolable—that her own pain suddenly seemed something she could bear. The ship pitched and rolled while they held onto each other.

  “My family’s out there somewhere,” Candy said. “And this is all my fault.”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “You didn’t do this, they did.”

  He pointed back toward the warship that was still following the Lud Limbo. A veil of fog, green and gray, was spreading from the Wormwood to port and starboard, as though to cloak it. “Mater Motley brought all this about,” Finnegan said. “She raised the wave. You didn’t.”

  “Yes, but if I hadn’t wanted to come back here, they wouldn’t have followed.”

  “You’ll make yourself crazy thinking like that,” Finnegan said. “You might just as easily say it’s all because you were at the lighthouse that day and you met Mischief. You might as well say it happened because you were born. But then you would never have come to the Abarat, and I wouldn’t have met you.”

  “No . . .”

  “We wouldn’t be here now.”

  “No, we wouldn’t.”

  “So who’s to say what’s for the best? We do what we do and we take the consequences. You just have to know this is not your fault.”

  He sounded so certain of what he was saying that Candy could put no argument up against it. At least not now. Perhaps there’d be another time, another place, where she could think of what he’d said and agree or not agree. Right now her thoughts went back to 34 Followell Street.

  “I just hope my family all got away,” she said.

  “Do you have any idea where your house is from here?”

  Candy turned back and surveyed the desolate scene. “Well . . . that’s the clock tower of the old schoolhouse, which is close to where I used to live.” She pointed to a distant tower, emerging from the water. “Do you see it?”

  “I see it.” Finnegan yelled up to McBean, who was in the wheelhouse. “Captain? Do you see that tower in the distance, with the clock?”

  McBean confirmed that he did.

  “We need to get to it.”

  “It’s going to be difficult in these conditions,” McBean replied. “All this debris in the water. We’re going to get hit by something big sooner or later. Have you seen what’s floating out there?”

  “Candy needs to find her family, McBean!” Finnegan yelled. “Are you going to help, or shall I take the wheel?”

  “All right, all right, don’t get your underwear knotted up! I’ll do what I can. But if we sink—”

  “We won’t blame you,” Finnegan said. “And while you’re in such a happy mood, why don’t you toss down your telescope?”

  “One of these days—” McBean growled, pointing a threatening finger at Finnegan.

  “Yes, yes! You’ll teach me a lesson in courtesy, right? Just give me the spyglass, McBean. You can punch my nose tomorrow.” McBean gave his telescope to Tom, who duly brought it down to Candy. “Or I’ll punch yours!” Finnegan added with a grin.

  Candy put it to her eye, focused it and began a systematic scanning of the water. It was a dreadful sight—the surface was so densely littered with the remnants of people’s lives that it looked almost as though you could walk on it. Every now and again something would appear among the wreckage so personal—a little bicycle with training wheels, a bed floating by with the pillows still in place, an empty kennel—that Candy had to work hard to keep from crying. But the thing she’d feared seeing the most—the bodies of people who’d drowned—were few and far between. Very occasionally she’d catch a glimpse of something grim protruding from the foul waters that made her quickly look away, but there was very little to appall her.

  “So few dead,” she said to Tom.

  “I think they were warned,” Tom replied, and he pointed to the hill off to the port side. There were people up there, Candy saw. Not just a few, but hundreds, perhaps thousands. She could see smoke rising from fires and a sprawling collection of tents.

  “They were warned,” Candy said, feeling the first real surge of hope she’d dared feel since this catastrophe had
started to unfold.

  “Maybe your family is up there,” Finnegan said, nodding toward the city of tents.

  “I hope so,” Candy replied. “But . . .”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “My dad never did anything anybody told him to in his whole life. In fact, the more people said he should do something—”

  “—the less likely he was to do it,” said Tom.

  “Yep.”

  “My other half’s just the same,” said Tom, fondly patting the pocket where he kept a dog-eared photograph of his family.

  “So you think we should search the water, not the hill?” said Finnegan.

  “Keep searching till they catch up with us—” said Tria, who had joined them at the railing. She turned to look back at the Wormwood. “Where’s the ship gone?” she said.

  The Wormwood had disappeared from sight again, totally obscured by an eighty-foot-high wall of mist that had spread to conceal the warship, and a good deal of the Izabella too.

  “I guess they’re going to choose their moment,” said Tom. The mist cloud was still growing, creeping over the littered waters toward the Lud Limbo. It was impossible to guess how far behind that wall the warship was hiding: two hundred yards; a hundred yards; ten.

  “We’ll be ready for them,” Finnegan said. “Whenever they choose to come, we’ll be ready.”

  Chapter 50

  Father and Daughter

  “I CAN SEE MY mom and dad!” Candy yelled up at McBean. “And my brothers! They’re alive!”

  The Captain scanned the scene ahead of the Lud Limbo, trying to fix his gaze upon the Quackenbush residence. But it was hard to do, when there were so many half-submerged buildings in the vicinity, several with small groups of survivors huddled around the chimney or squatting along the eaves like enormous bedraggled birds. Nor was the panorama clear. Several buildings had paradoxically caught fire when the deluge had descended, thanks to an electrical fault or a gas leak, and were now burning fiercely, the smoke they gave off muddying the scene ahead and making identification of the Quackenbush family harder still.