Abarat: Absolute Midnight

The line was broken and went to black noise.

“He’s no longer in contact,” Voorzangler said. “He’s never done that before. He’s always been listening.”

“Apparently not today, Doctor. Or he would have realized I was here with you. So take me to him.”

“I can only go as far as the door. I’ve never entered the sanctum. It’s his private world.”

“Well, today you will accompany me, Voorzangler. I am your Empress. Serve me, and I will always be with you.”

“Then of course I must obey you.”

Voorzangler proceeded to make his way through the poorly lit rooms. The only consistent illumination was from the hooded lamps above the paintings that lined the walls.

“Pixler has very eclectic taste, Voorzangler.”

“The paintings?”

Mater Motley paused to look at one of them: a very brightly colored canvas, depicting a simple white cottage, some trees, a small shed and a single star.

“Voorzangler?”

“Yes?”

“What is this atrocity?”

“I believe it’s called The Morning of Christ’s Nativity.”

“Decadence. Look at it, showing off its colors. It sickens me.”

“I’ll have it removed.”

“No need,” Mater Motley said.

She raised her hand and the canvas was consumed by an invisible flame, the bright color blackening and blistering until every last fleck of color had been consumed, leaving the antique gilded frame to enclose a view of almost any part of Abarat at that moment.

Just a few paces farther on was another picture, its style and subject as agitated and violent as the first image had been calm and peaceful. It appeared to be a body hung on a grid of barbed wire, but the details were hard to decipher. Again the cremating hand was raised, and Voorzangler flinched. But Mater Motley simply pointed.

“Now that,” she said, “I like.” She looked at Voorzangler. “All right. I’ve had my fill of art.”

She didn’t linger in front of any other painting, but followed Voorzangler to the large room at the end of the passageway.

“You seem to have a problem with your drains, Pixler,” she said as she stepped into the room.

“And with the lights . . .” Pixler replied from somewhere in the darkness. “Everything in here has failed, I’m afraid. Your . . . your . . . forces . . . Empress . . . have . . . taken . . . their . . . toll. My perfect city is no longer perfect.”

“Forget about your city. It’s you I need to see. Are there no lights in here at all?” There was an edge in her voice, more than a touch of suspicion. “Surely the chamber has a window, Doctor? The light from the burning city would—”

“Light . . .” Pixler replied, “would not . . . show you . . . anything your eyes would want to see.”

“You would forbid me?”

“No. Of course nnnnot. How could I? You are the Empressssss.”

“Then what’s going on in here? I demand to know.”

“If that is what the Empresssss wishes . . .”

“It is.”

“Then . . . sssseeeee.”

And suddenly there was light in the chamber, though it didn’t emanate from a lamp. It was Rojo Pixler, himself, who was the source of this frigid light, though his human anatomy was merely the frail centerpiece of a living form that had taken over the entire chamber, an intricate filigree of lacy tissue that covered the walls and hung in lazy decay from the ceiling. A foul stench was in these layers of rotting tissue, which here and there clotted, forming sluggish creatures that were attached by pulsing cords of matter to the body of Pixler himself.

Mater Motley seized hold of Voorzangler, her fingers digging so deep into his body that he cried out in pain.

“A crude trap, Doctor.”

“I had no knowledge of this, Empress,” Voorzangler said.

“She . . . is no Empress,” Pixler replied, his corrupted voice thick with contempt.

He rose up now, although there was little sign that it was the work of Pixler’s limbs that allowed him to do so. It was the creature within whose body he was enmeshed that drew him into a standing position.

“I . . . ammmmm . . . a part of something greater now,” Pixler said. “And I do not . . . ffffearr your DARKNESS, witch.” The light in the lace body flickered. “I . . . have passed eons in a deeperrrr darknesssss than your gray Midnight.”

Again, the light flickered. But it didn’t plunge the room into darkness. Instead it revealed, like a corrupted X- ray, the single vast anatomy of man and monster, exposing with appalling clarity how Pixler’s bones were interwoven with the stinking substance of his possessor. Rojo Pixler, the great architect himself, had become a piece of a piece of something that existed in all its unknowable immensity somewhere in the depths of the Sea of Izabella.

He rose up off the floor, lifted up on fans of fluttering tissue that shimmered as they worked. Rows of wet- rimmed valves twitched and spat; soft spines swelled into clusters of vicious barbs, surges of power passed through translucent ducts from one body to the next, noisily spilling Requiatic liquids onto the marble floor when they brimmed over.

“A Requiax,” Mater Motley said, her lip curling with contempt. “No wonder it stinks like a shore at high tide in here.”

“And . . . what is your stench, Hag?” the Pixler-Requiax said. By now Pixler’s body was ten feet off the ground, lit from below by the flashes of cold luminescence that spilled through the layers of tissue scattered everywhere.

“Tell your master to leash his tongue, Voorzangler, or else I will reach into that foul mouth of his and tear it out by the root.”

Voorzangler attempted to form some response to this, but she was killing him with her grip, and he was losing control of his body. His tongue could only flop about in his mouth, unable to shape a single coherent word. His whole anatomy had been drained of life force, and was now so weak that if the Empress hadn’t had her fingers buried deep in his shoulder he would have dropped to the ground and died where he fell.

But she held on to him, shaking him like a little one-eyed doll.

“Tell him, idiot!” All Voorzangler could do was shake his head in terrorized despair. “You thought to lure me into a trap, didn’t you? With this . . . fish.”

Again, Voorzangler shook his head, his control over his body seeming to become weaker with every passing moment.

“What do you want, fish?” the Old Mother said. “Are you hanging up there to terrorize me? Because you haven’t a hope of doing so! Whatever you assume you have made yourself, you are nothing, fish. Bow down! Do you hear me? Bow down before the Empress of the Abarat!”

As she spoke she let her free hand drop to her side, presenting her open palm to the floor. This simple gesture caused her to rise up into the air, dragging Dr. Voorzangler, his body now in the grip of something very close to a full seizure, with her.

Others had entered the room now, and were witnessing these grotesqueries: Voorzangler’s assistants from the Circular Room had followed him in, as had several seamstresses, but nobody made any attempt to intervene. This was a pitting of Higher Powers; everyone watching knew that. Anyone who attempted to interfere now would only earn themselves a quick death. So they all stayed close to the door in case things took a turn for the apocalyptic. And from there they bore witness.

“Bow down!” Mater Motley said again as she rose. “With your face to the ground.”

There was no response from the Pixler-Requiax, at least at first. Then, very slowly, the creature began to shake its head. The weight of the great architect’s brain distorted the soft bone as it swung back and forth, his