Читать книгу Abarat - Clive Barker, Clive Barker - Страница 18

“WHERE ARE YOU, CHILD?” Shape growled as he ascended.

The sound of his voice, and the thump and drag of his limping step, froze Candy for a moment. This was like something from a nightmare: being hunted down by some hellish beast; some vile creature that wanted to eat her alive, limb by limb, finger by finger.

No!

She shook herself from her trance of terror. She wasn’t going to let this abomination take her!

She looked around the room for a door that led out onto the narrow balcony that encircled the room. The door in question was directly behind her. She went over to it and turned the handle. It was locked, but that presented no problem to her, not in her present panicked state. She put her shoulder to the rotted wood and forced it open quite easily. Then she stepped out onto the balcony. The boards had been more exposed to the extremes of Minnesota’s summers and winters than the interior floors—and they instantly gave way beneath her weight. She threw herself forward and grabbed hold of the rusted iron railing. Her speed probably saved her life, because two heartbeats later the whole patch of floorboards beneath her right foot crumbled away. Had she not had the support of the railing, she would have surely fallen through the hole and probably dropped to her death.

Very gingerly, she hauled her foot out of the hole and sought out a more reliable place to stand. She could still hear Shape in the tower behind her, calling out singsong threats to her as he climbed. It was some horrible little nursery song he was singing. The kind only a monster like Shape would have had sung to him in his cradle.

“O little one,

My little one,

Come with me,

Your life is done.

Forget the future,

Forget the past.

Life is over:

Breathe your last.”

Doing her best to blot out the sound of Shape’s obscene little lullaby, she scanned the landscape around the lighthouse.

“Mischief!” she yelled. “Where did you go?”

She only had to call once. Then he was there, racing toward the tower through the grass. There was blood on his hands, she saw. Had he wounded Shape? She dared hope so.

“Lady Candy? Are you all right?”

“I can’t find any light up here, Mischief! I’m sorry.”

“He’s coming, lady!”

“I know, Mischief. Believe me: I know. But there’s no light—”

“There should be a cup and ball up there. Isn’t there a cup and ball?”

“What?”

“The oldest game, Candy. Light is the oldest game —”

Candy glanced back inside. Yes, there was a cup, of sorts, sitting on top of the inverted pyramid.

“Yes! There’s a cup!” she yelled back down to the brothers.

“Put the ball in it!” Mischief replied.

“What ball? There isn’t any ball.”

“There should be a ball.”

“Well there isn’t one!”

“So look!” yelled John Serpent.

Candy didn’t waste time telling Serpent to be more polite. She had only seconds to spare before Shape made an entrance into the round room, she knew. So she stopped talking and did as Mischief suggested, stepping over the hole she’d made in the platform and returning to look for the ball.

She listened as she scoured the room. To judge by the sound of his feet, Shape was close to the top of the stairs. Then—just as she was certain he was about to open the door—she heard the welcome sound of splintering timber, and her pursuer loosed a shout of alarm. His weight had apparently been too much for the staircase. She heard a series of crashes as broken portions of the steps fell away into the stairwell. A moment of silence followed, when she dared hope that perhaps Shape had fallen down the stairwell along with the broken stairs and was lying at the bottom of the flight. But instead of the distant moans she’d hoped to hear, there came an outburst of words in a language she had never heard before. She didn’t need a translator to recognize them as curses.

She crossed to the door and glanced down, just to see what had happened. A large portion of the staircase —five or six stairs—had indeed collapsed under Mendelson Shape’s weight. But he had somehow managed to avoid the full fall by jumping back down the stairs before they had collapsed beneath him. This left a sizeable gap for him to get across before he could continue his ascent. She was disappointed that he wasn’t dead or comatose at the bottom, but this was better than nothing.

Looking up at her, he made horns of his forefinger and smallest finger, which he jabbed threateningly in Candy’s direction. No doubt had he possessed the power to strike her dead on the spot, dead she would have been. But all he could do was curse and point, so she left him to it and went back to search for the missing ball.

As she did so, she heard Mischief yelling up at her from outside. Obviously he’d heard the din.

“I’m coming in, Lady Candy!”

She went to the outer door and called down to him.

“No! Stay where you are. You can’t get up here anyway. The stairs have collapsed!”

She saw him looking through the holes in the tower wall to confirm what she’d told him. He was aghast.

“How will you get down?” he said, apparently more concerned with her safety now than with the oldest game in the world.

“I’ll find a way when the time comes,” Candy said. “First I’m going to find this stupid ball.”

“We’re coming in!” he said again.

“Wait!” she told him. “You just stay there. Please.”

Without waiting for an answer, she went down on her haunches and started a systematic search of the floor, looking for the missing part of this bizarre puzzle. It was not immediately visible, but there were several places where the boards had rotted completely, leaving holes in the floor. She went to each one, pulling up the worm-eaten boards to get a better look at what lay beneath. They came away easily, in showers of splinters, dust and dried beetle corpses.

The first hole revealed nothing. The second, the same. But the third was the charm. There it was: rolled away under the boards. A small turquoise-and-silver ball. She had to tear away a little more of the rotted boards before she could fish it out between her fingers. When she finally succeeded, she discovered that it was surprisingly heavy for its size. It wasn’t wood or plastic; it was metal. And elegantly engraved on its blue-green surface was a design she knew! There it was, etched into the metal: the doodle she’d drawn so obsessively in her workbook.

She didn’t have any time to wonder at this. Behind her she heard a series of fierce grunts from the stairwell, followed by another crash. She knew in an instant what was going on. In his ambition to get to her, Shape had dared to try and jump the gap in the stairs.

She glanced up at the door, which stood open a few inches. Through it she could see Shape. He had succeeded in leaping over the gap, and he was coming up the remaining stairs two at a time, his razor claws making a horrid squeal on the timbers that lined the stairwell.

Candy looked at the small, simple cup that sat on the pyramid. Mischief’s words echoed in her head.

Light’s the oldest game in the world—

Shape was at the door, staring with one pinprick pupil through the crack at Candy, his jaws wide, dripping foam like the maw of a mad dog. He started to sing his lullaby, again, but more softly now, more liltingly.

“Forget the future,

Forget the past,

Life is over:

Breathe your last.”

As he sang he pushed the door, slowly, as though this was some game.

Candy didn’t have time to cross to the pyramid and put the ball in the cup. If she wasted those three or four seconds then Shape would be through the door and tearing out her throat, no doubt of it.

She had no choice: she had to play the game.

She took a deep breath and threw the ball. It wasn’t a good throw. The ball hit the edge of the cup instead of landing in it, and for several seconds it circled the rim, threatening to topple out.

“Please,” she willed it quietly, staring at the ball like a gambler watching a roulette wheel, knowing she had this throw and only this throw; there would be no second chance.

And still the ball rolled around the rim of the cup, undecided where to fall.

“Go on,” she murmured, trying to ignore the creak of the door behind her.

The ball made one last, lazy circle of the rim, and then rocked back and forth for a moment and toppled into the cup, rattling around for a few seconds, before finally settling.

Shape let out a sound that was as far from human as any throat that was fashioned like his could make: a profound din that rose from a hiss to the noise of a creature tormented to the edge of madness. As he loosed this unearthly sound, he pushed open the door, threw Candy aside and reached for the ball so as to snatch it out of the cup.

But the tower was having none of that. Some process beyond Candy’s comprehension had begun with that simple throw of hers. An invisible force was in the air, and it pitched Shape back, its power sufficient to carry him out through the door.

Outside, Candy heard Mischief and his brothers whooping like a pack of ecstatic dogs. Though they couldn’t possibly see what she’d done, they knew she’d succeeded. Nor was it hard for Candy to understand how they knew. There was a wave of pure energy emanating from the pyramid. She felt the fine hairs at the base of her skull starting to prickle, and behind her eyes the design of the ball burned blue and green and gold.

She retreated a step, then another, her eyes fixed on the ball, cup, and pyramid.

And then, to her astonishment, the pyramid began to move on its pinpoint axis. It quickly gathered speed, and as it did so a fire seemed to be ignited in its heart, and a silvery luminescence—flickering tentatively at first but quickly becoming solid and strong—flowed out through the designs on the sides of the device.

It was just before noon in Minnesota; even with a thin cloud layer covering the sun, the day was still bright. But the light that now began to spill through the hieroglyphics on the spinning pyramid was brighter still. They were brilliant streams, pouring out in all directions.

She heard a soft, almost mournful, noise from Mendelson Shape. She glanced over at him. He was staring at the device with all the malice, all the intent to do harm, drained from his face. He was apparently resigned to whatever happened next. He could do nothing about the phenomenon except watch it.

“Now look what you’ve done,” he said, very, very softly.

“What exactly have I done?” she said.

“See for yourself,” he replied, and for a moment he unhooked his gaze from the spinning pyramid so as to nod out at the world, beyond the lighthouse.

She didn’t have any fear of turning her back on him now. At least until this miraculous process was over, it seemed, he was pacified.

She went to the door and stepped out, over the hole she’d made, to stand on the platform and see what she, and the game of ball and cup, had brought into being.

The first thing she noticed was the blossom-cloud. It was no longer moving slowly, responding to the gentle dictates of the wind. It was moving speedily overhead, like an immense golden wheel with the tower in which she stood as its axis.

She stood and admired the sight for a few moments, amazed at it. Then she looked down at the John brothers, who had turned their faces from the tower and were all looking out across the wide expanse of open prairie. What were they looking at? she wondered. She knew there was nothing out there for many miles, not so much as a house. For some reason, though the suburbs of Chickentown had spread in every other direction from the heart of the town, they had never spread northwest beyond Widow White’s house. This was empty land; unused, unwanted.

And yet, there was something out there that John Mischief and his siblings wanted to see. Mischief was cupping his hands over his eyes as he stared into the faraway.

Candy could feel the light from the pyramid like a physical presence, pressing against her back. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. In fact, it was quite pleasurable. She imagined that she could sense the power of the light passing through her body, lending her its strength. She seemed to feel it being carried through her veins, spilling out of her pores and out on her breath. It was just a trick her mind was playing, she suspected. But then, perhaps not. Today she couldn’t be certain of anything.

Behind her, Mendelson Shape let out a plaintive moan, and a moment later, eight throats loosed a chorus of shouts from below.

“What is it?” she called down to them.

“Look, lady! Look!”

She looked, following the brothers’ collective gaze, and all that she’d seen today—all, in fact, that she’d ever seen in her life up to this extraordinary moment— became a kind of overture: and the astonishments began.

There, in the distance, approaching over the rock and grass of Minnesota, rolling out of nowhere, there came a glittering sea.

Candy’s eyes had always been good (nobody in her family wore glasses); she knew her gaze didn’t deceive her. There were waves coming, foaming as they rolled and broke and rolled again.

Now she knew what she’d done up in the tower. She had called this sea out of the air, and like a dog answering the summons of its master, the waters were coming.

“You did it!” Mischief was hollering, jumping up and down and twisting full circle in the air. “You did it, lady! Oh, look! Look!” He turned to stare up at her, his tears of bliss pouring down his face. “You see the waters?”

“I see them!” she shouted down to him, smiling at his joy. Then more quietly, she said: “Murkitt was right.”

The grasslands were still visible beneath the approaching tide, but the closer the sea came, the less solid the real world appeared to be, and the more the power of the waves took precedence.

It wasn’t just her sight that confirmed the reality of the approaching tide. She could smell the tang of the salt water on the wind; she could hear the draw and boom of the waves as they came closer, eroding the world she’d thought until now was the only one that existed, drowning it beneath the surf.

“It’s called the Sea of Izabella …” Mendelson Shape said behind her. Did she hear yearning in his voice? She thought she did.

“That’s where you come from?”

“Not from the sea. From the islands. From the Abarat.”

“Abarat?”

The word was completely foreign to her, but he spoke of it so confidently, how could she believe it did not exist?

The Islands of the Abarat.

“But you’ll never see them,” Shape said, the expression on his face losing its dreaminess, becoming threatening again. “The Abarat isn’t for human eyes. You belong in this world, the Hereafter. I won’t let you go into the water. I won’t, you hear me?”

The brief moment of gentility had apparently passed. He was once again his old, savage self. He pulled himself to his feet, blood running freely from the wound Mischief had made in his leg, and started toward her—

Candy took a stumbling step backward, out of the door onto the broken platform. The wind had suddenly become chillier and stronger, its gusts carrying drops of moisture against her face. It wasn’t rain that the wind carried, it was flecks of sea surf. She could taste their salt on her lips.

“Mischief!” she yelled, taking a careful step back over the hole in the platform, and grabbing hold of the iron railing to keep herself from slipping.

Shape was ducking through the door, his arms so long he was able to reach over the hole. One hand snatched hold of her belt with his fingers, his nails slicing the fabric of her blouse. The other went up to her throat, which it immediately encircled.

She attempted to call for Mischief a second time, and at the same time tried to turn and look for him. But she could do neither. Shape had too tight a stranglehold upon her. She tried again to call out, but seeing what she was attempting to do, Shape tightened his grip still further, till tears of pain sprang into Candy’s eyes and blotches of whiteness appeared at the corners of her vision.

Desperate now, she reached up and grabbed at his vast hand, trying to tear it away from her throat. She was going to pass out very quickly if she couldn’t get him to loosen his grip. But she didn’t have the strength to pry so much as a single finger loose. And now the whiteness was spreading, threatening to blot out the world.

She had one tiny hope. As the incident on the stairs had proved, the tower’s rotting structure wasn’t strong enough to support a creature of Shape’s size and weight. If she could just pull him out from the doorway onto the boards of the platform, which her own weight had cracked, then maybe there was a chance that the boards would collapse beneath him, as the stairs had.

She knew she had seconds, at best, to do something to save herself. His grip was like a vise, steadily closing. Her head was throbbing as though it was going to explode.

She grabbed hold of the railing again, and inched her way along it, in the hope of pulling him after her, but even that was a lost cause. Her body was almost drained of strength.

She looked into Shape’s face as he continued to tighten his grasp on her neck. He was grinning with satisfaction, his eyes reflecting the bright waters that were assembling behind her; his teeth a grotesque parade of gray points, like the arrowheads she’d found sometimes lying in the long grass as a child.

That was the last thought that passed through her head before unconsciousness overtook her: Shape had a mouthful of chiseled arrowheads—

Then she seemed to feel the world crack beneath her and his hand slid off her throat as the platform folded up beneath them. There was a great eruption of splintered wood and a shout of alarm from Shape. His hand slipped off her neck. And suddenly she was falling through the broken platform, dropping to the ground in a rain of broken planks.

Had she been conscious when she fell, she would have done herself very considerable damage. But luckily she passed out as she fell, and thus landed with every muscle in her body relaxed.

And there she lay, lost to the world, sprawled in the grass at the foot of the lighthouse, while the waters of the Sea of Izabella came rolling in to meet their summoning light.