Clive Barker - Absolute Midnight

Even now, as Voorzangler watched Candy Quackenbush leave the Yebba Dim Day, Pixler was visible on an adjacent screen climbing into his bathyscaphe, giving the camera a confident wave as he did so. Inside he had only artificial intelligences beside him, but their cold company was all he needed.

His face appeared now in the fish-eye lens that relayed his presence at the master controls of the bathyscaphe. His voice, when he spoke, had a metallic tone.

“Don’t look so worried, Voorzangler,” Pixler said. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Of course, sir,” the doctor replied. “But I wouldn’t be human if I wasn’t a little concerned.”

“Boasting now?” Pixler said.

“About what, sir?”

“About your humanity. There aren’t very many employees of the company who could say such a thing.” Pixler ran his hands over the bathyscaphe’s controls, turning on all the vessel’s functions. “Smile, Voorzangler,” he said. “We’re making history, you and I.”

“I just wish we were making it on another day,” Voorzangler replied.

“Why?”

“Just . . . bad dreams, sir. Every rational man is allowed a few irrational dreams, wouldn’t you say?”

“What did you dream?” Pixler wanted to know. The bathyscaphe’s door slammed closed and sealed with a hiss. An artificial voice announced that the winches were all fully functional.

“It was nothing of consequence.”

“Then tell me what you dreamed, Voorzangler.”

Voorzangler’s single eye dodged left and right, looking for a way to avoid meeting the great architect’s inquiring gaze. But Pixler had always been able to stare him down.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you. I dreamed that everything went perfectly well with the descent except—”

“Except?”

“Once you got into the very deepest place . . .”

“Yes?”

“There was a city there already.”

“Ah. And its occupants?”

“They’d gone, thousands of years before. Great scaly fins they’d had. And beauty in their faces. There were mosaics on the walls. Such bright, ambitious eyes.”

“And what happened to them?”

Voorzangler shook his head. “They left no clue. Unless their perfect city was the clue.”

“What kind of clue is perfection?”

“Well, you would know, sir.”

Pixler was not so easily persuaded. “Why did you have to have that stupid dream? You may have cursed my entire enterprise.”

“We’re scientists, sir. We don’t believe in curses.”

“Don’t tell me what I believe in. Find me the Kid.”

“He’s being searched for.”

“And not found?”

“Not so far.”

“Don’t bother. I just thought he’d want to see me off.”

The automatic doors of the bathyscaphe were closing. A flicker of anxiety crossed the great architect’s face. But he would not be commanded by it. The three massive winches—one of them supplying power to the bathyscaphe, the second delivering clean air, the third, and largest, bearing the weight of the immense vessel—were paying out steadily now. Voorzangler looked at the readings on the screens that surrounded the cabin. Hundreds of tiny cameras, like shoals of one-eyed fish, circled the descent column down which the bathyscaphe would be coming, their motion and their iridescence designed to draw out of the darkness every kind of mysterious creature that hunted in their oppressive depths.

“What happens if he never comes back?” said a forlorn voice.

Voorzangler looked away from the screens.

It was the Kid who had spoken. For once his smile had deserted him. He watched the bathyscaphe’s descent with the expression of a genuinely deserted child.

“We must pray he does,” Voorzangler said.

“But I always prayed to him,” the Kid said.

“Then, my child, I suggest you think of another God, as quickly as you can.”

“Why?” said the Kid, his voice tinged with a little hysteria. “Do you think Pops will die down there?”

“Now would I think that?” Voorzangler said, his response unconvincing.

“I heard you two talking about something that lives deep down in the dark. It’s called the Recogacks, isn’t it?”

“They, boy,” Voorzangler said. “They are called the Requiax.”

“Ha!” the Kid said, like he’d caught Voorzangler in a lie. “So they do exist.”

“That’s one of the things your father’s gone down to find out. Whether they exist or not.”

“It’s not fair. He’s mine. If he goes down into the dark and never comes up again what will I do? I’ll kill myself. That’s what I’ll do!”

“No, you won’t.”

“I will! You see if I don’t!”

“Your father’s a very special man. A genius. He’s always going to be looking for new places to explore and things to build.”

“Well, I hate him!” the Kid said. He took out his catapult, loaded it with a stone, and aimed it at the biggest screen. He could scarcely have failed to miss. The screen shattered when the stone struck it, exploding in a shower of white sparks and Commexo Patent Glass fragments.

“Stop that immediately!” Voorzangler said.

But the Kid had already loaded his catapult again and was firing. A second screen went to pieces.

“I shall have to summon the guards if you don’t—”

He didn’t need to finish. The Kid had already seen something on the screens that made him forget his catapult. There was a girl being watched by the spy cameras: a girl who the Kid knew, at least by sight, because his father had summoned up her image for him the night he’d come back from Ninnyhammer, where he met her.

“Her name’s Candy Quackenbush, my boy,” the Kid said, perfectly imitating his Creator’s voice.

The sight of Candy put all of the Kid’s rage toward Pixler out of his mind. Now he was consumed by curiosity.

“Where are you off to, Candy Quackenbush?” he said too quietly for Voorzangler to hear. “Why don’t you come to the City and be my friend? I need a friend.”

He went to the lowest of the screens that carried her image and, reaching out, he gently put his hand upon her face.

“Please come,” he murmured. “I don’t mind waiting. I’ll be here. Just come. Please.”

Chapter 5 Remnants of Wickedness

ABOUT THREE WEEKS AFTER the waters of the Sea of Izabella had crossed the threshold between the Abarat and the Hereafter, flooding many of the streets of Chickentown and demolishing in its force and fury the town’s finest old houses along with the courthouse, the church and the Henry Murkitt Public Library, Candy’s father, Bill Quackenbush began to take nightly walks through the town.

Bill had never had any enthusiasm for exercise before now. He’d always been happiest at his most sedentary, slumped in his leatherette throne in front of the television with beer, cold pizza and a warm remote control close at hand. But he no longer watched television. During the early evenings he sat in his chair drinking his way through a dozen cans of beer, smoking until every ashtray was filled, and on occasion eating slices of white bread. As the hours crept on, the members of his family would slope off to bed, not even his wife, Melissa, bothering to say good night.

Only once the house was finally still and silent, usually a little after midnight, would Bill go into the kitchen, brew some strong coffee to wake himself up, and prepare for the trek ahead by putting on his old work boots, still crusted with dried chicken blood, and his dark blue windbreaker. The weather was becoming unpredictable, as autumn’s grip deepened. Some nights there’d be rain in the gusts from the north, even sleet on a couple of occasions. But he didn’t let the drop in the temperature change his rituals.