Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 31

The Flock

EXACTLY WHEN DID I get to be so appetizing? Candy asked herself. She seemed to be on a lot of menus lately. The first clue, now that she thought about it, was the attack of the Zetheks, who would definitely have bitten a sizeable chunk out of her if she’d not kept out of his way. Then, of course, Boa, who’d been determined to get a new body out of Candy’s energies. And now, the unlikeliest thief of all: her own father.

The machine, she could see from the corner of her eye, was devouring her visions. No, not visions—visions were simply sights, passively admired—no, it was experiences she was having leeched from her: glorious experiences.

All her beautiful experiences, and the memories of these experiences, were being stolen, drained into large phials that sat in the center of the machine. And it wasn’t just one life the device was sucking out of her, it was all the lives that she’d seen or felt in the Abarat. Her ever-inquisitive soul had touched them all in its way, made them her spiritual kin. They had stayed with her long after their physical forms had gone from sight: the dream-bedecked occupants of Marapozsa Street, Jimothi leading an army of tarrie-cats in battle against the bone beasts on Ninnyhammer, the Sea-Skippers on the tide of the Izabella. She’d confronted Zetheks, the Beasts of Efreet, not to mention Carrion and his grandmother.

Some of the memories had been nightmarish visions but she had kept hold of them in her mind for a reason. They were hers, for better or worse, and she wanted them all back. Experiencing them, in all their strangeness, she had come to better understand herself. If her father took them from her, then the Candy she had become—the true Candy—would also disappear.

“ . . . not . . . going . . . to happen,” she said.

“Reverend?”

“What is it, Norma?” he said as he studied the readouts from the Thieving Machine.

“The girl said something, Bill.”

“You are to call me Reverend, do you understand, Norma? And I heard her. I just didn’t care.”

“I think you should.”

“I told you, I couldn’t care—wait. Wait! These readings aren’t right!” He looked up at Candy. Her body pulsed with light as the Silters flailed about riotously in her etheric body. “Stop! You can’t do this!”

“You’d . . . be . . . surprised . . .

“. . . what I can do.”

“Look! She looks better. I think whatever was happening to her before . . . she has it under control,” Malingo said.

“You’re supposed to die now,” her father said. “Stop fighting it!”

“My memories of the Abarat don’t belong to you!”

“She’s getting agitated again,” Geneva said. “Look how wildly her eyes are moving behind her lids. She’s watching something.”

“Yes,” Malingo said. He watched the motion of her eyes closely. “It looks like she’s looking down.”

“At her hands, maybe?” Betty said.

Candy, asleep on the boat, continued to clutch at nothing. The sinews in her fingers taut like harp strings.

“Lordy Lou, what is that monster doing to her?” Tom said.

“I was born with a piece of Abarat inside me,” Candy shouted. “I was meant to be in the Abarat.”

“Well, you can take comfort in this: soon you won’t even remember the word.”

“I’ll remember it forever,” she said defiantly. “Abarat. Abarat. You’ll never take it from me! Abarat. Abarat. Abar—”

Her recitation of the three syllables was interrupted by a yell from the other end of the church.

“Dad! I’m bored! Nothing’s happening outside,” Ricky said as he entered the church and walked down the center aisle toward the altar.

“Ricky, I told you to stay outside. Get the hell out! Why have I been cursed with idiotic children?”

Ricky stopped short at his father’s insult. His eyes welled with tears.

“Dad?”

“I said get out of here, boy! This isn’t for your eyes.”

It was then that Ricky saw Candy, strapped to the machine, the slimy Silters creeping up her arms and into her chest, draining her of life and essence.

“What are you doing to her?” An expression of profound disgust came over his face. His question became an outraged yell. “What are you creeps doing to her?”

“It’s none of your damn business, boy!”

“Look at her! Oh, God. You’re torturing her!”

“Go home, boy!” Bill said, a dangerous growl in his voice. “If you don’t, you’ll be sorry.”

“I already am. I thought you’d changed, but you haven’t. You’re . . . bad. Rotten inside! That’s what you are.”

“Thompson, grab him!”

The burly Thompson pushed through the other witnesses to go and grab Ricky. But Ricky had no intention of being caught. He backed up along the center aisle, picking up one of the folding wooden chairs from the end of the row and throwing it at Thompson, who was quick enough to swat it away before it struck him, but not fast enough to see the second chair coming. It struck him hard, and it was he who folded up, not the chair, taking several more chairs with him when he went down.

Candy knew she would not get another chance to undo the harm her father had done. She let her head loll as though she was barely conscious, and the ruse seemed to work. She caught a sideways glimpse of her father glancing up at her and—apparently deciding she was in no state to cause him problems—turning his back on her and starting to clamber over the litter of overturned chairs to get Ricky.

“I need some help here!” he yelled to his little congregation. “He’s just a kid! He can’t hurt you!”

He’d no sooner spoken than Ricky made a liar of him, picking up one of the folded chairs in both hands and swatted at Miss Schwartz with it. She was thrown off her feet by the blow, knocking over the man called Elliot on her way to the ground.

Candy needed to pull the wretched Silters out of her, she knew, and be quick about it. Bill wouldn’t be distracted for long. In a matter of seconds he could be back to finish his work. She lifted her hand up toward her mouth as far as the restraints allowed, and bent so that she could remove the invading Silters with her teeth. But she had to be quick. There was no time to be squeamish.

Do it! she told herself, and giving her mind no chance at second thoughts, she bit down, taking off their heads.

They tasted like rotting, slimy flesh, but as soon as she bit into them, the flowing tentacles shrieked and withered. She pulled them out with her teeth and spat them onto the ground.

The machine was not happy with this sudden change in events. In the few seconds it took Candy to remove the Silters she’d glanced back to see that just about every element of the device capable of motion was registering this unexpected reversal; its gauges fluttering, its warning lights ticking, and the phials in which the loot of Candy’s mind was stored, rattling in their metal cages. Her luck could not hold for very much longer. It was only a matter of time before her father took his eyes off the messy struggle going on in the pile of folded chairs, and saw her escaping.

It was not Bill Quackenbush who raised an alarm, however. It was Mr. Futterman, who had been crying, forgotten on the ground in his faint until now. When he opened his eyes he saw Candy biting into the slimy Silters and spitting them out.

“I’m going to be sick!” he said, his comment by chance finding a window in the general racket of shouts and chairs that echoed around the church.

Candy slid off the edge of the altar and by the time the soles of her feet were on the ground the clatter of conflict died away almost entirely. She looked up. Her father was turning, his eyes already fixed upon her. Candy couldn’t make any sense of the string of curses he then unleashed, but there was no doubting the raging fury that fueled them. Bill drew back his right arm, at belly level, to the side of his body, his hand raised, palm out, fingers bent. He made a quick counterclockwise flick of his wrist, then reversed the motion. As a result, the overturned chairs that lay between father and daughter divided. The chairs squealed on the polished boards and were whipped away by an invisible force, thrown up and over one another by the power of Bill’s gesture.

There were shrieks from several of the minister’s flock (the shrillest from Mr. Elliot) as they apparently decided that they’d witnessed quite enough for one day. They started to walk, then race toward the front door. They weren’t fast enough. Bill turned his back on the altar and threw the force of his attention at the exits. Candy did not know if he made another gesture or if it was simply his will that caused the huge doors to slam shut and the bolts to slide noisily home to seal the contract.

Norma Lipnik had been closest to the doors when they closed. Now, shaken by the noise, she retreated from the entrance, calling to her minister as she did so.

“Please, Reverend!” she said, putting on the warm, unflustered voice she always used when things went awry at the hotel, “I really have to go.”

“It doesn’t work that way, woman!”

“But you don’t understand . . .”

That’s it, Candy thought, keep talking, Norma. Every second that Norma Lipnik wasted distracting Bill Quackenbush was another second Candy could devote to figuring out how to undo the theft of her treasured knowledge.

She stumbled, her legs weak and aching, around the altar to the device itself. The phials that contained her memories seemed to already know that she intended to reclaim them, as though some tenuous thread of thought between her mind and these stolen experiences still existed. The substance in the phials—was it liquid or gaseous? Perhaps both—sensed her proximity and it raced around the glass. It had been colorless, but it had darkened in its agitated state, until it was the purple-gray of a thunderhead, in the belly of which multicolored lightning rods bloomed.

She was still staring at it in dazed wonder when she heard the voice of her father from across the church: “If you touch my machine, I’ll kill you where you stand!”