Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 39

Looking Forward, Looking Back

“THERE’S A LOT TO tell,” Joephi said, “and we don’t have much time. We don’t want the seamstresses trailing us here, to you.”

“Why did you have to come here in person?” Candy said. “You were putting thoughts in my head when I was on the boat. Couldn’t you have done that from a distance?”

“Believe me, we tried,” Mespa said. Her once close-cropped hair had grown out since Candy had last seen her, and the severity of her features had been mellowed by a profound sadness. “But your thoughts were busy dreaming.”

“I’m sorry. I had some family problems.”

“Your father?” said Joephi.

“Yes,” Candy said.

“The father,” Joephi said. “Of course. The father.”

It seemed Candy’s reply had provided an answer to a vexing problem.

“Why didn’t we think of him earlier?”

“Because he’s a drunken half-wit,” Mespa said bluntly.

“Was it my father you came to talk to me about?”

“Now that you raise the possibility, yes. We’re looking for pieces of the big picture, and we’re not doing very well. It’s possible your father’s important.”

“Who to?”

“To the future,” Mespa said.

“Are you sure there’s going to be one?”

“Why would you doubt it?”

“Because Carrion said—”

“Wait,” said Joephi. “Christopher Carrion spoke to you?”

“Yes. He was in Tazmagor when we passed through. It was he who told me to leave before things got any worse.”

“What form did he take?”

“He’s a mess.”

“Is he dead?”

“No. He’s alive. But only just. He said his nightmares saved him. They must have caught him at the last minute because I’ve never seen anybody look so sick and so broken before.”

“Well, that’s something to be grateful for,” Joephi said.

She looked at Candy, expecting some echo of this sentiment, but Candy couldn’t bring herself to celebrate Carrion’s wretched state. The significance of her silence wasn’t lost on either of the women.

“Ah, Janda, Janda,” Joephi said, digging her fingers into her long, red hair, which was wet, and pulling it away from her face. “B’yetta, B’yommo. ’Kathacooth, Monyurr—”

“Calm down, sister.”

“You say calm down as though our problem was the house catching fire. The fall of the Abarat is upon us, Mespa!”

“We will do our best to save it,” Mespa said. Her eyes went back to Candy. “With the only weapon we have.”

“A weapon against what? Who?”

“Christopher Carrion for a start.”

Candy looked away from the women’s faces down at the spiral that came to an end between them. A tiny luminous fish leaped clear of the water and turned three somersaults in the air before plopping back into the water to begin its long descent.

“You’re wrong about Carrion,” Candy said. “He’s no real danger. In fact, he was trying to get me to go back to the Hereafter. He was afraid for me.”

“You two have always had a strange relationship,” Mespa said.

“We three,” Candy said. “He loved her. And she used him.”

“Carrion’s incapable of love.”

“Again, you’re wrong,” Candy said. She felt anger suddenly rise up in her, too fierce to be silenced. “You’re very quick to make judgments, but you’re not always right.” The women said nothing, which was fine by Candy. “Boa is one of the real monsters,” she said. “But you didn’t see that. You were too busy accusing the Bad Man. The poor little Princess, the woman couldn’t be the wicked one, right?”

“That is so pitifully simpleminded—” Joephi said.

“Yes. It. Is,” Candy said. “You should have known better.”

“That’s not—”

“What you meant. I know. But it’s the truth. You put that vile creature in me and left me to deal with her.”

“We kept watch over you,” Mespa said. “And we saw your unhappiness. But it was no worse than the unhappiness of your contemporaries.”

“Where are the rest of your friends, by the way?” asked Joephi.

“Betty, Clyde, and Tom went to Babilonium. Geneva is going to look for Finnegan Hob. He’s somewhere on the Nonce.”

“He won’t be there for long,” Mespa said. “We see him traveling to Huffaker with—”

“Princess Boa,” Candy said, despondent.

“So it is true?”

“That we separated? Oh yes. I threw her out once and for all.”

Before either of the women could respond there was a fresh escalation in the shrieks and prayers that were emanating from The Great Head.

“What’s happening?” Candy said, looking past Mespa and Joephi at the boats just outside the harbor. The water there was seething and bubbling, she saw, the motion so violent that it overturned many of the boats.

“This is his work!” Candy said, looking up at the figure on top of the tallest of the towers. “Gan Nug!”

“How do you know—?”

As she spoke the tentacles of what was perhaps a leviathanic Abaratian sea monster rose up out of the frenzied waters. The massive tentacles uncurled and instantly proceeded to demolish The Great Head.

“Oh no . . .” Mespa murmured. “All those people.”

“We have to go,” Joephi said. “Save who we can.”

“We’ll go together,” Candy said.

“No,” said Mespa. “If you want to be useful, stop Boa.”

“How?”

“Use what you know,” Joephi said. “And what you don’t know, learn.”

There was a great roar of destruction from The Great Head as tentacles, which had quickly curled around the towers that had been The Head’s crowning glory, pulled them down. Now it all curled like a vast, breaking wave, stones and people raining seaward as the towers toppled. Any attempt at escape was a lost cause. What boats had not been overturned by the churning waters were now crushed by falling debris. None were saved.

The waters around the Yebba Dim Day were very quickly littered with the remains both of vessels and their passengers, all rolling in the bloody surf while the rain of stones continued to beat down upon them. As for Gan Nug, the summoner of this monstrosity, he and his uncanny bonfire still stood, hovering on the darkness, exactly where they’d been when they’d had the tower beneath them.

“Oh my . . .” Candy whispered. “I knew a woman and her two children who were in there.”

The Great Head continued its collapse, as the tentacles of the beast searched the rubble, their huge scale not denying them an atrocious delicacy. They picked over the rubble carefully, plucking here and there some poor creature clinging to life.

Mespa suddenly looked up.

“Get back to your boat!” she screamed. “Run. Run!”

“What’s wrong?”

“The seamstresses! They’re here!”

She pushed Candy away from her.

“Go!” they shouted, and the two women of the Fantomaya raced away in the opposite direction.

Candy turned and looked toward The Piper. She could see Malingo, Eddie, and Gazza by the swaying lanterns hanging at the stern. Malingo was beckoning to her, and Gazza started to do the same. Candy looked back at the women, intending to say good-bye, but they had already gone. The only clue to their whereabouts was the sight of their pursuers: five women, their long hair streaming behind them, standing astride juggernauts of almost white-hot iron, easily three times as tall as their riders. Weaving between one another they chased their unseen quarry off over the Izabella. Candy watched a second or two then started to run toward the boat.

The same violent message was spreading out from the remains of The Great Head in all directions. It made the water beneath Candy’s feet shake as she ran, the worst tremors so powerful she was afraid the sea was going to open up beneath her. It was the continuing destruction of The Great Head that was causing the tremors, she knew, but she refused to look at the horrors there. She kept her eyes fixed on The Piper. Malingo was beckoning to her, as was Gazza. It was his voice that she heard from above the rubble.

“Come on! Don’t look back! Keep your eyes on me.” He reached toward her, as though he had the power to stretch out and gather her back into the same arms from which he’d released her. “Just run, Candy!”

There was another sound now, audible above Gazza’s voice and the noise of dying and destruction. She could hear the rising whine of the fever wheel, and the insane scream of the monster who was riding it.

She knew Gazza was right. She shouldn’t look back. But she made the error anyway.

It was a smear of a sight, but it was enough to know she was in very serious trouble. The fever wheel was no more than ten yards behind her, its proximity making every bone in her body vibrate. On the seamstress who rode the fiery wheel, was an obscenely distorted face, her mouth a gaping black shriek, her hair streaming behind her like white paint thrown against a starless sky.

“Run! Run!” Gazza said.

Candy threw everything she had into it: her strength, her anger, even her fear that this fast dash was a lost cause, that she’d never again feel around her the arms of those who loved her, or say to Gazza the words she’d knew she felt but didn’t yet know how to say.

How cruel and stupid was that? To finally lay her eyes on a face she knew from some other sweet dream of life, sweet dream of love, but never get to say: I know you, don’t I? I’ve always known you.

She. Would. Never. Tell. Him.

The wheel was going to kill her. A spray of scalding water caught her neck. It hurt. But nowhere near as much as the thought that she’d—

Never—

Ropes of unraveled fire arced past her and set the water ablaze where they fell, boiling it to columns of steam—

Never—

And now the seamstress’s shrieks were added to the sum of terrors closing on her. There were fragments of words she’d either heard or even used herself, all dissolved in the vile torrent of noise pouring out of the virago:

“Sheeeeaaanammaaashinigajjanda-jamdannamandasighaphipheeenuuuurrrephriidddeaajardadchalajicfloatakaiemamamee—”

The consonants and vowels so unendurable—like needles being driven into Candy’s head—that it was all she could do not to add her own sum of screams to the cacophony—

“Never!”

The word came from Gazza.

Candy stared at The Piper through her agony and saw that he had lifted Eddie up onto his shoulders.

“NEVER!” he said again.

Then Eddie threw the machete. Candy saw it catch the light as it left his hand, then it was gone into the shadows, and all she caught was the noise of its approach—a quickening breath that for some reason surfaced through all the other noise—until it briefly appeared again as it passed over her head.

She couldn’t help but see where it went, turning in time to see the expression on the seamstress’s face change as she understood what she had raced with such eagerness to meet. The machete cut through her neck, and her head was thrown up toward the lightless heavens on a surge of scarlet.

Candy didn’t linger to see it fall. Though the fever wheel had lost its rider it was still on the move.

She fixed her eyes upon The Piper—or more truthfully upon one of the faces among the many—and ran. There was a raw shriek from the wheel, and then a crash as it keeled over. Candy felt freezing water splashing against her back. She didn’t look to see if the wheel had in fact fallen over. She just ran and ran until she was there at the boat, gasping. She reached up and found that the arms that had let her go were the first to catch hold of her again, and wrap her up tighter than anybody had ever held her before.