Abarat: Absolute Midnight

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.”

“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.”