Abarat

  “It’s not much, but—”

  “You drew that so fast! That’s amazing!” There was a pause. Then he said, “What is it?”

  “Just something I see in dreams,” Malingo told him. “It’s a huge baby in a very small boat.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know. I just dream it.”

  “Well, she’s going to flap so hard she’ll fly. Thank you. That is spaf, gesher, totally spaf.” Grinning a grin that was almost as broad as the Kid’s, he studied the autograph and drawing, and went on his way.

  Brief as the exchange had been, it left Malingo with a lot to think about. It was a huge shock to discover that there were members of his beleaguered nation who not only knew of him, but were proud of having him numbered among them. For as long as there’d been books written, the Geshrat nation had been judged to be a lower order of being. They were menials, tradition stated: scrawny, dull-witted creatures without a maker of trinkets, trousers or trouble, in their tribe’s history.

  Was it possible that he, who had come to believe over the years that his father’s lack of grief when he sold him had been perfectly understandable? He was a worthless thing that no one, not even his own father, would be sorry to lose. Perhaps he judged himself too harshly, and too soon.

  Candy groaned in her sleep, shaking Malingo out of his stupor. What was he doing thinking about himself, when Candy was still lost in slumber? For the first time in this journey at Candy’s side he felt the need of some of the others. Two-Toed Tom, Geneva Peachtree or Finnegan Hob. Someone he could talk this problem through with. Anyone but the John Brothers. They just had too many opinions.

  But wishing he had their company wouldn’t make it so. He was on his own, in the silent company of the person who meant more to him than anyone ever had. Suddenly, he was afraid for her.

  Bill told Ricky to stay outside the church and keep watch. He then led Candy inside the church which was as unremarkable on the inside as it had been on the outside. The pews were rows of cheap wooden chairs, the altar a table covered with a plain white cloth. There was no cross.

  “As you can see,” Bill Quackenbush went on, leading his dreaming daughter down toward the altar, “we don’t go in for anything fancy here. The message is what’s important.”

  “And what is the message, Dad?”

  “Don’t call me that anymore. There’s nothing between us.”

  “Like love, you mean? Because I don’t think you’ve felt that for any of us. Maybe Mom once, before you had us to hit—”

  “Enough,” he said, his voice thick with old rage.

  They were just a few yards from the altar now, and Candy saw six or seven other people in the darkened corner of the church. Her father had seen them too. That, she thought, was why he wanted to end their conversation.

  “I’ve no interest in going over old errors, old sins.”

  “Whose errors, Dad? Whose sins?”

  She went on, pressing her father in the hope of getting him to really show his temper. Maybe some of the members of his congregation would think twice about their smiling Reverend if they saw the real Bill Quackenbush. The one she knew. The one that was vicious and violent.

  Bill stepped in between the folks gathered in the corner, and very quietly said, “You’ve changed. I can feel the stench of your corruption, and it sickens me to my soul. I will do anything in my power to protect the good people who worship here from your perversions and abominations, the filth that you brought from that Other Place—”

  “The Abarat, Dad. You can say it.”

  “I won’t soil my tongue!”

  He wasn’t quiet any longer. His fury echoed off the plain whitewashed walls.

  “Listen to yourself, Dad!” Candy said.

  “Don’t call me—” He stopped himself, as his rant came to meet him from the far wall of the church. He stopped, and once again dropped his voice. “Clever little witch, aren’t you? You still know how to anger me. But I’m not falling for it.” He took a deep breath. “If you defy me one more time I will make your mother suffer. Do you understand me? Look at me, girl, when I’m talking to you. I want you to know who I really am.”

  “The enemy,” Candy said.

  Her father smiled.

  “Finally we agree on something,” he said. He turned his back on her and called out to his followers. “Is the machinery all warmed up and ready to go?”

  “I did it all exactly like you told me to, sir,” one of them said.

  “Good. Very good.”

  Chapter 27

  Interrogation

  AROUND THE TIME GAMBAT was leaving Malingo and Candy on the upper deck of The Sloppy (now the happy owner of two autographs from the hand of the most famous geshrat alive) a convoy of five vessels was about to depart from the harbor at Vrokonkeff, on Gorgossium. The largest of these five, the Kreyzu, was flying a smoke flag in the billows of which the stylized image of a needle and thread had been worked, marking it as the bearer of the presumptive Empress of the Hours, Lady Midnight herself, Mater Motley. The four ships that accompanied the Kreyzu were armed from waterline to crow’s nest with cannons and stitchlings, all in service of protecting the Lady Midnight.

  Her departure had been delayed, of course. She had returned to her tower with the girl, Maratien, to find that Taint Nerrow, the seamstress she’d left to clean the mosaic map of the Abarat that was laid into the floor of her chamber, had been thrown out of one of the chamber windows and lay dead at the bottom. Mater Motley had liked the Seamstress Nerrow; the woman had been loyal and zealous. It didn’t please her that circumstances obliged her to now interrogate the dead woman, which would cause the deceased profound anguish. Mater Motley was certain that, had she been able to offer her opinion, Taint Nerrow herself would have volunteered her suffering in return for the name of her murderer.

  Events many years in the designing were about to come to fruition: events that would transform the islands and all that lived upon them forever. She—who would be the mistress of that transformed world—could not afford to let a force as powerful as Taint Nerrow’s murderer go uncaught. She needed to know who the trespasser had been, and quickly. She bent down and turned Taint’s corpse over. Her face had a crack down the middle. But there was little blood. Ordering the rest of the women to retreat a few steps, Motley threw up a Dome of Diligences around herself, the body, and Nerrow’s spirit, which was hovering over the corpse, attached by a decaying cord of ectoplasm.

  “Calm yourself, woman,” Motley said. “I don’t need more than a minute or two of your time.”

  “I don’t want—”

  “You have no choice.”

  “—to go back—”

  “You have no choice.”

  “—into the flesh.”

  “You have no choice. Hear me, witch?”

  Taint’s spirit, a smudge of a panicked shadow, repeatedly flew against the inside of the Dome of Diligences like a fly trapped in a jar.

  The Empress quickly became weary of Nerrow’s panicked cavorting.

  “Enough,” she said.

  She reached out and caught hold of her seamstress’s spirit. The shadow flailed, desperate to be free. Several of Nerrow’s sisters watched on in silent horror.

  “Neysentab,” said the Old Mother, and with these three syllables she unmade the Dome. “If any of you find necromancy hard to witness, then I suggest you avert your eyes.”

  Several did exactly that, one or two of the sisters even walking away from the body of Taint Nerrow entirely so as not to even hear what was happening. Meanwhile, Mater Motley went down on her knees beside Taint Nerrow’s corpse, telling one of the remaining sisters, “Fathoon? Open her mouth wide and hold her head.”

  Kunja Fathoon, who was a big-boned woman with huge hands, did as she was instructed.

  Mater Motley swiftly placed the spirit between Nerrow’s lips and ordered Fathoon to close the dead woman’s mouth and keep it closed whatever happened. Kunja Fathoon pinched the dead
woman’s mouth to stop the spirit from exiting that way. She kept it pinched closed for as long as a minute. Nothing happened. And nothing. And still nothing. Then, suddenly, the woman’s leg twitched. Its motion was followed by an eruption of thrashings and kickings.

  “Calm, Taint Nerrow. Calm,” Mater Motley said. “I know this must be horrible for you coming back into your broken body, but I only need a few questions answered.” She glanced up at Fathoon. “Are you ready?” Fathoon nodded. “Don’t weaken.”

  “I won’t.”

  “No,” Mater Motley said, her certainty confirmed by something in Fathoon’s eyes. “No, you won’t. Then let’s be done with this, shall we?”

  “At your instruction, my lady.”

  “Now.”

  Fathoon uncovered Nerrow’s mouth.

  “Cease this, Taint Nerrow! RIGHT NOW!”

  The woman’s cries became less pitiful. Her contortions dwindled.

  “That’s better,” the Old Mother said. “Now, answer me quickly and truthfully. Then I can let you go, and you can go to your death.”

  Taint drew a second phlegmatic breath and then spoke, her voice unequivocally that of a dead woman: flat, thin, joyless.

  “What did I do to deserve this?”

  “The fault wasn’t yours, Nerrow. I simply want to know who murdered you.” Mater Motley leaned forward a little to catch the answer when it came. “Who was it, sister?”

  “It was the Princess Boa.”

  “Impossible!”

  “I swear.”

  “She’s been dead sixteen years, sister.”

  “I know. Yet it was she.”

  “And you have no doubt?”

  “None. It was she. It was Boa. It was! It was!” Her reanimated body was beginning to defy her control. Her face was riddled with tiny tics and seizures. They seemed to give her pain, even though her nerves had only a ghost of life left in them.

  Mater Motley studied the corpse at her feet without replying. Nerrow’s despairing eyes stared up at the woman who held her spirit hostage. “I’ve told you all I know. Let me go to death. It will be kinder than life was.”

  “Well then . . .” the Old Mother said. “Let go, Fathoon. Peace in the Void, woman. Be gone.”

  She had barely finished her sentence before the seamstress’s spirit had fled its confinement and was rising away from her prison and her imprisoner. Then the shadow-smudge had gone from sight, lightless against a lightless sky.

  Mater Motley’s return to the Needle Tower, and her subsequent discoveries and dealings there, had delayed the departure of the Kreyzu a little over two hours. But once the immense vessel was out in the open waters it moved with extraordinary speed, the engine that blazed in the belly of the vessel—a brutal delirious conjoining of the harrowing with the depraved, the unforgivable with the insane—propelling the Kreyzu through the Izabella, defying every current.

  The Izabella did not protest the vessel’s brutal power. The sea knew what dread influence had wrought the vessel, and had given it authority. She knew the monstrous power the Old Mother wielded. Simply by reading rumors and toxins in the streams that poured down the slopes of the islands into her tides, the Izabella knew how much worse things were soon to get. It would serve the myriad life-forms who dwelt within her waters no good to oppose the Midnight Empress for she was capable, the waters knew, of practically limitless acts of destruction. Not flesh nor wood nor stone nor dust was inviolate. She had it in her, this woman and her allies on high, to do death to every Hour of Day and Night if she did not get her way.

  So for now, the Izabella decided, she must seem to do so. To have her will, however wicked.

  Thus, untroubled by the sea’s enmity, the woman who would very soon change the Abarat out of all recognition speeded toward her destination.

  On board the Kreyzu, the girl Maratien came into the Old Mother’s darkened cabin, her head reverentially bowed. She didn’t dare raise it until the Old Mother murmured, “What is it, child?”

  “We are approaching the pyramids, my lady. You told me to come and tell you.”

  Mater Motley rose from the hovering stone on which she sat and descended the air to come to the place where Maratien stood.

  “Are you excited, child?”

  “Should I be?”

  “Oh yes. If you have the courage to stay with me today and for the days to come, I promise you that you’ll see such rare sights as will change forever the way you imagined the world to be. And of your place in it.”

  “So I may watch?” Maratien said cautiously, not entirely certain that she had understood the invitation correctly.

  “Of course. Right here at my side. And if you are as wise a child as I believe you to be, then you will take note of everything you see. Every detail. Because there may come a time when someone will ask you what it was like to have been there, and you will want to answer them truthfully.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Now go to Melli Shadder, one of my sisters—”

  “I know her.”

  “Tell her that I ordered you be given my warmest coat. It will be bitterly cold when all the suns go out, Maratien. Go on. I’ll wait for you.”

  “You will?”

  “Of course. I’ve waited for the better part of six centuries for this Hour. I can wait a few minutes more while you find yourself a coat.”

  Chapter 28

  Altarpiece

  CANDY? MALINGO? ARE YOU up there?”

  It was a familiar voice that instantly lifted Malingo’s spirits.

  “John Mischief? Is that you?” Malingo said.

  “Yes—”

  “We knew you’d be on one of these ferries sooner or later—” said John Serpent.

  “A ferryman told us where to find you—” said John Pluckitt

  “And we’re all here!” said John Drowze, eager to share the good news.

  As he spoke, the brothers rose up the stairs from the deck below, followed by Two-Toed Tom and—

  “Even Geneva!” said John Fillet.

  “It’s good to see you all again. But please, keep your voices down. Candy’s still asleep.”

  “Should we wake her up?” said a rather heavily armed Geneva.

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea right now,” Malingo said.

  “Why not?” Two-Toed Tom asked, emerging from behind.

  “There’s something weird about the way she’s sleeping,” Malingo said.

  “What do you mean?” Geneva said.

  “Well, look for yourself. But put your weapons down first.”

  “Why?”

  “They make such noise.”

  “I’d only do this for you,” Geneva said, unbuckling her belt and handing it, with sheathed swords, to Tom. “If anybody but me unsheathes those . . .”

  “We wouldn’t think of it,” Mischief said.

  “No, no, no, no, no . . .” the brothers all murmured. “We’re just concerned for our Candy.”

  “Keep your voices down, please,” Malingo said. “She mustn’t be disturbed. Don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. She just shouldn’t, I think.”

  “Look at the expression on her face,” Geneva murmured. “She’s in pain.”

  Malingo nodded.

  “Yes. I think she probably is.”

  “If she’s having a nightmare, shouldn’t we wake her?” Geneva said. “Look at how troubled she is! How pained!”

  “I know,” said Malingo. “I don’t like seeing her like this either. But wherever she is right now, and whatever she’s doing, it’s something important. And I think we’re better leaving her to do it. When she dreams like this she goes to Chickentown to see her mother.”

  “She doesn’t seem very happy about it,” Geneva remarked.

  The frown on Candy’s face deepened.

  “Lordy Lou! She looks terrible,” John Serpent remarked. “Are you sure she isn’t dying?”

  “No,” Malingo said after a length of silence, “I’m not.”


  Candy counted eleven people, including her father, but not herself, now assembled within the church. They had emerged from the shadows and they could all see her, a feat no doubt made possible by her father’s stolen magic. Candy recognized almost all of their faces, though she could name only a few. One was Norma Lipnik, who had once (a long time ago, in another life) showed Candy the haunted room in the Comfort Tree Hotel. It was she that had told Candy about Henry Murkitt, the ghost of Room Nineteen. Seeking out his legend was what brought Candy, for better and for worse, to the spot where she now stood. Now, Norma was dressed in all her best Sunday clothes. She even gave Candy a smile as though there was nothing remotely odd about seeing Candy’s dreaming presence.

  Also among the small group were two of Melissa Quackenbush’s friends. One, she remembered, was called Gail, an overweight woman who always wore an excessive amount of sweet perfume in an attempt (which failed) to mask the unpleasant smell that her body exuded. The other was a woman, named Penelope, who lived a few doors down from them on Followell Street. She knew by sight several of the others too; one was the janitor at her school, though like all the others she didn’t know his name. Each one of them in turn locked eyes with her, unblinking, and smiled—puppet smiles, painted on puppet heads.

  “Today is a special occasion. My daughter is here in her dreaming state,” Bill was explaining to the small gathering of his worshipers, “but it should be no more difficult to get what we need out of her in this form as in her real body. Knowledge is shared between the dreamer and the dreamed, after all. They’re still connected. Norma, the curtain please.”

  Norma Lipnik offered Candy one last forced smile, then went to do as her minister instructed, drawing aside the milky blue curtain behind the altar. There was a peculiar kind of machine standing nine feet tall, perhaps ten, behind the altar.

  “I know what you’re wondering, witch,” said Bill. “You’re thinking: who made that impressive piece of machinery?”