Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 20

Tomorrow, Today

AS IS TRUE OF all prophets, the prediction merchants of the Abarat were egotistical and combative, contemptuous of any other seers besides themselves. The fact that each of them worked in radically different ways to achieve their results only intensified the antagonism. One might see signs of futurity in the eighty-eight cards of the Abaratian tarot; another found his own vision of tomorrow in the dung of the yutter goats that grazed the golden fields of Gnomon; while a third, having witnessed the way the music of a Noncian reed pipe had induced the lunatics in a madhouse on Huffaker to dance, had then discovered evidence of how the future would unfold in the footprints the patients had left in the sand.

Thus, separated both by their methodologies and by a dangerous sense of their own importance, none of the soothsayers ever compared their predictions with those of others. Had they done so they would have discovered that each of them—however unlike their methods—was receiving the same news. Bad news.

A darkness was coming. A vast and implacable darkness that would pinch out every star and eclipse every moon that lit Night’s skies and extinguish every sun that blazed in the Heavens of Day.

Had the prophets of Abarat put aside their vanities and self-importance when these presentments of darkness had first crept into their minds and shared their fears with one another instead of clinging to them like the lethal possessions they were, they might have avoided the tragic consequences that had come as a result of that envy and covetousness.

The tragedy lay not only in the waste of those prophetic minds, doomed to descend into madness and self-destruction, it lay in the fact that the Abarat was to be plunged into a waking nightmare that would change it forever.