Read Online Abarat: Absolute Midnight by Clive Barker - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Clive Barker
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held Gorgossium in thrall. It was not the darkness of a starless sky. It was something far more profound. This darkness was in the very substance of the island. In its dirt, in its rock and fog.
Over the years many had attempted to find the words to evoke the horrors of Gorgossium. All had failed. The abominations which that island had brought to birth, and nurtured, and sent out often across the islands to do bloody and cruel work defied even the most articulate of souls.
Even Samuel Klepp, who in the most recent edition of Klepp’s Almenak , the standard guide to the islands, had written about Midnight in as brief and offhand a fashion as possible.
There is a great deal more, he had written, which I will not sully the pages of the Almenak by relating, horrors that haunt the Night-Noon Hour that will only go on to trouble our minds the more if their horrid visions are dwelt upon. Gorgossium is like unto a fetid carcass, rotting in its own consumption. Better we do upon these pages what we would do were we to encounter such a thing upon a road. We would avert our eyes from its foulness and go in search of sweeter sights. Then so should I.
There was worse to come, much worse. Whatever the fear-flooded mind might have imagined when it thought of Midnight—the unholy rituals performed there in the name of Chaos and Cruelty, the blank-eyed brutalities that took the sanity or the lives of any innocent who ventured there; the stink out of its gaping graves, and the dead who had climbed from them, raised for mischief’s sake, and left to wander where they would—all this was just the first line in a great book of terror that the two powers who had once ruled Gorgossium, Christopher Carrion and his grandmother, Mater Motley, had begun to write.
But things had changed. In an attempt to track down and finally slaughter Candy Quackenbush (who had caused her endless problems) Mater Motley had stirred up the Sea of Izabella and used their maelstrom to carry her warship, the Wormwood, into the Hereafter. Things had not gone well. The magic she had unleashed in that other world, contained perhaps by laws of matter that had no relevance in the Abarat, had lost its mind. The warship had been torn apart in the water—pieces of the Izabella and countless numbers of her stitchling warriors torn up the same way. Her grandson, Christopher Carrion, had drowned there too. Mater Motley had returned to Gorgossium alone.
Her first edict as the sole power now ruling Midnight was to summon up six thousand stitchlings—monsters filled with the living mud that was only mined on Gorgossium—to begin the labor of demolishing the thirteen towers of the Iniquisit. In their place, she would let it be known, there would be just a single three-spired tower built, far taller than even the tallest of the thirteen. From there she would rule, not only as the Sovereign of Gorgossium, but in time as the Empress of the Abarat.
She was a dangerous potentate.
Even among her hundreds of seamstresses—some of whom had known her for the better part of a century—there were few who trusted her affections. As long as she had need of their services (and at present she did) they were safe from harm, for without seamstresses there were no new stitchlings, and without stitchlings, no new legions to swell her army. But if that situation were to ever change, the women knew, they would be as disposable to the Old Mother as any stitchling.
Her weapon of choice when summarily executing one of her mud-men was her snake-wood rod, a simple but immensely powerful wand made of snake-wood that had been burned, buried, and raised up again on three consecutive midnights. It shot black lightning, destroying its target in an instant.
On several occasions, while surveying the work of demolition, she would catch sight of one of the stitchlings failing to labor as hard as the rest, and would summarily execute the brutish thing where it stood. The lesson: life and death were Mater
Over the years many had attempted to find the words to evoke the horrors of Gorgossium. All had failed. The abominations which that island had brought to birth, and nurtured, and sent out often across the islands to do bloody and cruel work defied even the most articulate of souls.
Even Samuel Klepp, who in the most recent edition of Klepp’s Almenak , the standard guide to the islands, had written about Midnight in as brief and offhand a fashion as possible.
There is a great deal more, he had written, which I will not sully the pages of the Almenak by relating, horrors that haunt the Night-Noon Hour that will only go on to trouble our minds the more if their horrid visions are dwelt upon. Gorgossium is like unto a fetid carcass, rotting in its own consumption. Better we do upon these pages what we would do were we to encounter such a thing upon a road. We would avert our eyes from its foulness and go in search of sweeter sights. Then so should I.
There was worse to come, much worse. Whatever the fear-flooded mind might have imagined when it thought of Midnight—the unholy rituals performed there in the name of Chaos and Cruelty, the blank-eyed brutalities that took the sanity or the lives of any innocent who ventured there; the stink out of its gaping graves, and the dead who had climbed from them, raised for mischief’s sake, and left to wander where they would—all this was just the first line in a great book of terror that the two powers who had once ruled Gorgossium, Christopher Carrion and his grandmother, Mater Motley, had begun to write.
But things had changed. In an attempt to track down and finally slaughter Candy Quackenbush (who had caused her endless problems) Mater Motley had stirred up the Sea of Izabella and used their maelstrom to carry her warship, the Wormwood, into the Hereafter. Things had not gone well. The magic she had unleashed in that other world, contained perhaps by laws of matter that had no relevance in the Abarat, had lost its mind. The warship had been torn apart in the water—pieces of the Izabella and countless numbers of her stitchling warriors torn up the same way. Her grandson, Christopher Carrion, had drowned there too. Mater Motley had returned to Gorgossium alone.
Her first edict as the sole power now ruling Midnight was to summon up six thousand stitchlings—monsters filled with the living mud that was only mined on Gorgossium—to begin the labor of demolishing the thirteen towers of the Iniquisit. In their place, she would let it be known, there would be just a single three-spired tower built, far taller than even the tallest of the thirteen. From there she would rule, not only as the Sovereign of Gorgossium, but in time as the Empress of the Abarat.
She was a dangerous potentate.
Even among her hundreds of seamstresses—some of whom had known her for the better part of a century—there were few who trusted her affections. As long as she had need of their services (and at present she did) they were safe from harm, for without seamstresses there were no new stitchlings, and without stitchlings, no new legions to swell her army. But if that situation were to ever change, the women knew, they would be as disposable to the Old Mother as any stitchling.
Her weapon of choice when summarily executing one of her mud-men was her snake-wood rod, a simple but immensely powerful wand made of snake-wood that had been burned, buried, and raised up again on three consecutive midnights. It shot black lightning, destroying its target in an instant.
On several occasions, while surveying the work of demolition, she would catch sight of one of the stitchlings failing to labor as hard as the rest, and would summarily execute the brutish thing where it stood. The lesson: life and death were Mater