Abarat: Absolute Midnight

Chapter 51

Father and Son

EVEN BEFORE THE FINAL syllable was out of the creature’s mouth it flung itself at Mater Motley. She had anticipated that it would do exactly that, because as it reached for her, something that resembled a fan, decorated in purple and gold, snapped open in front of her. She blew on it: the lightest of breaths, motes of purple and silver clouded the air around the Pixler-Requiax’s head.

Innocent though the weapon she had just called into service might have appeared, the innocence was a lie. It was that most guilty of things—a weapon possessed of the power to lay death down wherever its dart went. The purple and golden motes broke against Pixler-Requiax’s face like tiny sparks. As he threw back his pierced visage, finely knotted cords of dark matter flew up out of the many wounds and rose to strike the ceiling. Cobs of plaster came showering down, like brute snow. But their descent merely presaged a far more bizarre descent. The knots of dark matter burst like overripe fruit. Out of their split skins came a rain of the Requiax’s base matter; the raw sea muck from which its elaborate filigree was made. As soon as it fell on Mater Motley, it began to spread like a vine, insane with its own fecundity, coursing over her body in all directions; dozens of trails of the nameless stuff raced down her body, crisscrossing to form a foul-smelling net around her.

But it was her face that the Pixler-Requiax was most concerned to control, its matter wrapping itself around her skull from five or six directions at once.

“Idiot fish!” she said. “I’ve told you already. Why don’t you pay attention?”

She reached up and caught hold of the spreading networks of muck that had already overtaken two-thirds of her face. Her merest touch leached the color from the chaotic network of matter. Then she tore it, ripping it away from her face. There was more of the matter to replace it, of course, and the wrapping and tearing, wrapping and tearing struggle might have continued for a lot longer had a thin, shrill voice, that of a young boy, not said:

“Pops?”

Somewhere in the midst of the Requiax, the remains of Rojo Pixler woke from his nightmare of possession and saw—much to his horror—the only thing he had ever loved, the Kid, his Kid, at the threshold.

“Not now, son!” he yelled.

“What’s happening?”

“Nothing you need to know about. Now turn around and run!”

“Now what kind of cowardly lesson is that teaching the child?” Mater Motley said. She casually dropped Voorzangler, whose body was now inert, and reached out to the Kid. “Come here, Kid. I mean you no harm. Are you the last one standing?”

“No. I’m the First. The Original. The Kid of Kids.”

Pixler moaned to hear his own child condemning himself, but it was too late, the words were said.

“Oh, I think I need you in the Imperial Court, boy.”

“I can’t leave here, sorry. I gotta stay with Pops.”

“I’m afraid your poor father is lost forever.”

The copyrighted smile vanished from the Commexo Kid’s face.

“No,” he said softly. “My pops will live forever.”

“No. He won’t. Because your father has been taken over by something that found him in the deep trenches of the Izabella.”

“Don’t listen to it,” the Pixler-Requiax said. “She’s a liar. Always was. Always will be.”

Mater Motley raised her now-empty hand, proffering it to the boy.

“Come here,” she said, her voice all velvet and honey.

Her hands told a different story. The arm that reached for the Commexo Kid was becoming unnaturally long in its ambition to claim the child, its fingers also lengthening, their shadowy lengths sharpening into black points.

“Run, boy!”

“Pops! Help me!”

“Just go!”

The Kid started to race for the door. But Mater Motley’s hand snatched at his hair, her fingers growing longer, joints multiplying. The Kid lost his balance and fell backward, allowing the Empress to drag him back toward her as he shrieked for his father’s intervention.

“Stop her, Pops. She’s stealing me! POPS!”

It wasn’t his pops who replied, however. Or rather, it wasn’t simply his pops. It was the hybrid creature made of Rojo Pixler and the Requiax. And it wasn’t the Kid they spoke to. It was the woman.

“First you murder poor, stupid Voorzangler, who never did you the least harm. And now you go after my firstborn?”

The whole chamber shook, and the fractured marble on the floor split wider. Water started to pour up through it, its sharp, clean smell unmistakable. It was seawater that was bubbling up into Pixler’s stinking chamber, and it was coming up with such force that it threw over several more slabs of marble.

None of this distracted the Empress from her intentions. Her long-fingered hand closed over his face from which his trademark grin had vanished, and he screamed into her smothering palm.

“Don’t leave me with the bad woman, Pops!”

For those who had ventured over the threshold to watch this confrontation unfold, there was no choice now but to retreat and slam the door. It was either that or drown. The seawater was rising very rapidly in the chamber, the space itself repeatedly being battered furiously by the frenzied waters. The enemies fought with powers that invented some new crazed manifestation with every passing moment. Pieces of the bleached, dead matter fell away from Mater Motley’s face like shreds of a papier-mâché mask, while new, mutated forms of the Requiax’s matter rose up behind the Empress’s head like a black wave curling and curling, preparing to break.

She was too interested in drawing the Kid toward her to even notice. Or perhaps she did notice and, in her supreme arrogance, was simply indifferent to the threat that the riding wave presented. Either way, she had her eyes and her attention fixed upon the Kid. Her arm, impossibly elongated, resembled a long, leafless branch more than a limb of flesh and blood. But there were no diminutions in its strength. With her hand still covering his face she lifted the Kid up, his thin legs with their cartoony shoes dragging through the seawater that was continuing to flood the room, the water rolling up against the walls, taking down the pictures that had hung there.

The waters were merciless with them, as they were with everything else that the room contained: the antique furniture, smashed to tinder; the walls themselves cracking as all that the room contained was caught up in the spiral of foaming waters.

The Kid had been pulled clear of the chaos, but Mater Motley knew that while she held the child—who was still shrieking for his father’s help behind her hand—the Pixler-Requiax could not act hastily against her. One slip, and Pixler’s firstborn went into the vortex. However tough Pixler’s manufacturing methods had made his child, once he was caught in the battering waters he would not long survive.

“Accept me,” she said. “Or the firstborn slips out of my hand.”

She raised her forefinger from the head of the child, leaving him held by only three spiked fingers and her thumb.

The Kid knew his life hung in the balance.

“Please don’t let her hurt me! Pops! Don’t! Let! Her—”

“He’s just a child,” Pixler said.

“He’s no child!” Mater Motley replied. “He’s painted plastic, or whatever you make these toys from.”

“He’s not a toy. He has a fully functioning brain. He’s able to feel love. And fear.”

“Oh, you mean these screams are the real thing?”

She lifted her middle finger from the Kid’s face.

“Don’t struggle, Kid,” Pixler said. “Just be very still. Please, my boy. Very, very—”

Before he could again say still, something burst from the tumultuous waters beneath the Kid. Another portion of the Requiax, formed from its matter in the likeness of a vast double-thumbed hand, rose up out of the water and seized hold of Pixler’s firstborn. The Kid’s shriek became so shrill now that no child born from a womb could possibly have made the sound. This was indeed the shrill shriek of a machine.

The sound momentarily was so sharp and sudden that it made the Empress lose her grip. The Requiax’s double-thumbed hand closed around the boy and quickly carried him away, still holding him up above the tumultuous waters.

“Open that door!” Pixler yelled, his voice—in its sudden, absolute clarity—unmistakably that of a man used to being obeyed.

And obeyed he was. The doors were opened instantly, the presence of the water in the room quickly subsided. The violent rush threw just about all those who’d been watching the confrontation off their feet, carrying them out into the passageway. There was still enough force in the water to give it the power to sweep the Crucifixion and Mater Motley’s “Midnight Nativity” off the walls, dumping them in the same scummy soup in which the witnesses were being thrown around.

From every direction came the din of terror and destruction, as the invading waters of the Izabella carried Voorzangler’s staff into the passageway, mercilessly tossing them about. The weakest of Mater Motley’s stitchlings were simply torn apart by the force of the currents, the rest carried away. The dead doctor’s staff shrieked and begged for mercy, but the waters granted no reprieves.

“Such noise!” Mater Motley complained with the offended airs of some highborn woman who’d never heard the din of suffering in her life. “Enough of this! Enough!” She threw a glance at the doors. “Shut up, both of you!”

The doors did as they were told. It was something of a struggle, but they pulled themselves shut against the power of the departing waters. Then, without further instruction, the forces the Empress had unleashed in the room set about melting the lock, which sent up a column of sulfurous smoke. The job was quickly done. The lock was melted, leaving the chamber sealed shut.

The Empress took a moment to compose herself. Then she said: “Let’s finish this business once and for all.”