Abarat: Absolute Midnight

gape-mouthed monster simply called the Overlord.

And for every one beast she could name there were twenty she could not: abominations that had passed the ages hiding in the intricate systems of caves and passageways that lay beneath the Hours, or in barrows and pits where they had been buried permanently by those who had fought them and believed them dead. Many had lived out the ages in solitude and darkness, nurturing their rage, emerging only when hunger drove them to risk being exposed and hunted down; others had procreated over the centuries, and emerged from their sanctuaries with immense families, their grotesqueries multiplying over the generations. A few had lived well: worshipped in secret temples by Abaratians who considered them to be the raw stuff from which divinities were made. These fiends, made arrogant by years of worship, rose with their legions of believers all around them: ordinary men and women of the islands who had secretly been paying homage to these bleak-hearted deities over the years.

Almost everywhere Mater Motley’s roving eye traveled it fell upon sights that would have sickened and appalled a compassionate spirit, but that filled her with a venomous joy. It wasn’t only for herself that she felt this joy. There were other eyes watching how her plan to unknit the order of the Abarat proceeded: the eyes of beings ancient and insatiable, whose presence she had only glimpsed as a monumental, limitless shadow thrown across or beyond what was neither space nor substance, presence nor absence. At some time not far from now they would show themselves, she knew. They would descend out of their mystery and be seen, here in the Abarat. And on that day she would be elevated to the highest throne for the services she had done them.

Meanwhile, she had another order of business to observe: the arrests. Her stitchling legions had already reached many of the islands. Already Mater Motley had seen the arrests of hundreds of individuals who would have caused, had they not been arrested, conflict and rebellion in the future. She’d seen the possibility in the visions the Powers That Be had allowed her to witness, and it was a future she had vowed to keep from coming into being. On the dark side of Scoriae she had, many weeks ago, ordered a camp to be built where all these agitators and troublemakers would be kept. It was a rudimentary place. The huts that had been hastily built to have the arrestees stripped of their personal belongings—jewelry, wallets, expensive shoes—and their presence recorded did not keep out the cold wind that incessantly blew so close to the Edge of the World. The camp had very little healthy drinking water, and the supplies the inmates had been given to make soup with were laughably inadequate, but Mater Motley saw no purpose in giving comfort and nourishment to people she was going to have executed within hours.

Meanwhile, the number of arrests continued to grow. Every outsider, every radical, every dealer in visions and hope—in short, anyone who had ever stood against her in word or deed, or that she suspected of one day doing so—was taken from their homes and family without explanation, and interned in the camp at Scoriae.

The Old Mother was well pleased.

Chapter 43

Dark Waters

THE TASK OF RESCUING the survivors from the turbulent waters around The Great Head had quickly degenerated into chaos, as people struggling in the water converged on The Piper from all directions and attempted to clamber aboard. Within two or three minutes of arriving at the scene The Piper was carrying more than its limit of passengers, and listing badly to starboard.

“We have to get out of here, Candy!” Eddie said. “We’re over the limit for passengers, Candy. They’re going to sink us! Are you listening to me?”

Candy stood frozen in place.

“Okay, fine. Then I’ll just go tell some drowned people we’ll be joining them soon.”

Candy continued staring off into the starless, moonless, cloudless sky, her body convulsed by little spasms.

“Malingo?” Eddie hollered. “I think there’s something wrong with Candy. She’s having a vision or a fit or something! Get over here, will you?” As he yelled he shoved his diminutive foot into the middle of the same brutish face of a man he’d shoved back into the water just a few moments before. “Can’t you take a hint, mate?” he bawled, “There! Is! No! More! Room!” He put all the strength in his body into making sure that this time the man stayed down. “Who’s at the wheel?”

“We are!” came a chorus of Johns from the wheelhouse.

“We have to get out of here!” Eddie yelled.

“He’s right!” Gazza shouted. “Much more of this and we’re going to be flipped over.”

“Just get this crawfiddlin’ thing moving,” Eddie said.

“There’s people in the water right in front of us,” Mischief said.

“They’ll get out of the way when they see us coming!” Eddie yelled back.

“We can’t just—”

“Gazza! Get to the wheelhouse and take over from that gaggle of idiot heads that some gene-deficient woman had the misfortune to carry to the tragedy of birth.”

“You are despicable, you know that?” John Mischief said. “Nobody put you in charge here. You’re just an actor.”

“Oh no, that was just a role I was playing!” Eddie said. “I’m a man of action. I get things done. You and your brothers just talk, talk, talk. All the time. Talk, talk, talk.”

The John Brothers said nothing. Except Serpent, of course, who couldn’t help himself.

“Your time will come,” he murmured to Eddie.

“Well?” Eddie yelled.

“I’m in the wheelhouse,” Gazza hollered. “They gave up the wheel.”

“Good,” Eddie said. “Now get us out of this mess.”

“I’m working on it.”

“How’s Candy doing?” Eddie asked Malingo.

It wasn’t Malingo who replied. It was Candy.

“Lordy Lou. She’s still with me!”

“Who?” said Malingo.

“Boa. Who else?”

“She’s here with you now? In your head?”

“No. But we’re still connected somehow. She just pulled me into her head. I don’t even think she meant to. I saw through her eyes for a moment. She was in some place filled with bones. Then—I don’t know how—we moved on.”

“Who’s we?”

“She has Finnegan,” Candy said. She put her hand up to her head. “I saw him right beside me. No, not me, her. Beside her. I’m all backward.”

“You said they moved on?”

“Yes.”

“Where to?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hazard a guess?”

Candy closed her eyes.

“Carrion built her a place to play . . .”

“Play?”

“Magic games. Oh—it’s Huffaker!”

“And you think that’s where she took Finnegan?”

Before Candy could reply The Piper’s engines made a guttural growl, and the boat surged forward perhaps twice its length before the engine made a second sound, far less healthy than the first, and the vessel shuddered to a halt.

“No!” Eddie yelled. “No! No! NO! This is not the place to lose power, Gazza! Get this hog-boned boat moving.”