Abarat - Barker Clive. Страница 24

"We might need Mr. Pixler's help in the future," Houlihan remarked casually.

Carrion chewed on this for a moment. Then he took his hands off Voorzangler. The man dropped to a gasping, sobbing heap at the Lord of Midnight's feet.

"Take him outside."

Houlihan hauled the doctor up and dragged him toward the door, pausing only to pluck the controls to the Universal Eye out of Voorzangler's pocket.

Once he'd deposited him outside the gallery door, he returned to await Carrion's next instruction. When it came, it was simple enough.

"Show me the girl again," Carrion said. "Then you can go."

Voorzangler's device was easy to work. The image of the girl from the Hereafter was soon called up onto the screen again, ready to be replayed and replayed.

"Arrange a glyph to take me to Vesper's Rock," Carrion said as he stared at the images of Candy. "I want five corpses there, waiting for me. The usual place. Get some off the gallows. But they have to be old. I'm going to need dust ."

He stared at the screens.

"Dust for the girl from the Hereafter." He smiled to himself. "It's the least I can do."

G iven how close together the cottages were, Candy had fully expected to find a small crowd outside Izarith's door, drawn there by the noise of their fight with the insect. But there was far more interest in what was going on down at the dock; everybody was headed that way. So Candy made her way up the street, against the flow of the crowd. She was much more aware of the insect population now. Which of the numberless creatures buzzing around was a spy, like the one in Izarith's house? Every now and then something whined past her ear, and she swatted it away. None, she was pleased to see, came back.

The street had broad shallow steps, which made climbing a little easier. Even so, the labor of walking soon began to take its toll on her. The short sleep she'd had in front of the fire in Izarith's cottage had not been sufficient to fully restore her.

What she still needed, she knew, was some food. There were a number of stalls set out to the left and right of her on the steps, and they seemed to be selling a variety of edible goods: dried fish were hanging up on one stall (not her first choice); at another somebody was deep frying something that looked remarkably like a doughnut, especially when it had been dusted with sugar. She dug in the pockets of the little dress Izarith had given her and pulled out the six dollars she had kept. Perhaps it wasn't wise to use them, she thought. They marked her out as an alien here.

That left two options. She could either beg for food or steal it.

Since she was in urgent need of sustenance, in her present situation morality didn't really enter the picture. She looked up the street a little way. One stall seemed to have been deserted by its owner, who'd probably gone down to the dock with the rest of the crowd.

As she started to make her way toward the empty stall there was a surge of noise behind her, and a portion of the crowd, along with a number of police officers, came back, all gathered around three or four people who had clearly been pulled out of the water.

"Make way! Make way !" one of the officers yelled. "We've got injured people here !"

That was, of course, precisely the wrong thing to say. As soon as the words escaped from his lips, more spectators appeared to swell the crowd, eager to see how horrible the injuries were. Many of them clogged the street ahead of the advancing throng. The officer began to yell again. But people wanted to see, and no amount of shouting from a police officer was going to stop them getting a glimpse.

It was a curiously familiar scene. Watching it, Candy flashed on something that had happened four or five years ago, back home—or in the Hereafter, as she now thought of home. The family had been on a midsummer trip to see Grandma Hattie, Melissa's mother's mother, in Pelican Rapids. They'd been on Highway 94, and the trip had been going smoothly until suddenly the traffic had ground almost to a complete halt.

For the next hour and a half they had crawled along. The air conditioning in the car was not working properly so the heat was ferocious. It made everybody bad-tempered.

It had quickly become clear that the problem up ahead was a collision, and Candy's father had started to rage on about the fact that the real reason the traffic had come to a halt was because people were slowing down to see the wreckage.

"Damn lookeeloos ! Everybody has to slow down and take a look! It's sick ! Why can't people mind their own damn business?"

Of course, half an hour of sweat and curses later, when the Quackenbushes' car finally came up to the accident site, Candy's father had slowed down just like everybody else. In fact he had almost brought the line to a complete halt so that he could watch a body being brought out from under one of the seven vehicles—trucks, cars and an eight-wheeler rig—that were involved in the collision.

Candy should have known better, but her tongue had been quicker than her self-protective instincts. "I thought you told us it was sick, Dad?" she'd said.

Without missing a beat, Bill Quackenbush had leaned back between the seats and slapped her hard.

"Don't you give me cheek!"

"I just said—"

He slapped her again, harder.

"Enough, Bill," Candy's mother had said.

"I'll be the judge of that," came the reply, and just to show that he didn't care about his wife's opinion, he slapped Candy a third time, bringing tears to her eyes.

As she wiped them away, she caught sight of her mother in the mirror throwing an accusatory glance up at her husband. Bill Quackenbush had not seen the look: he was still staring at the bloody scene across the highway. But Candy had read the look clearly, and in the confusion of feelings she had for her father, it had given her a kind of sad satisfaction to see the cold loathing in her mother's eyes. But it wasn't enough. Why didn't she ever stick up for Candy—or herself? Why was she so weak?

All of this came back to Candy while she was watching the crowd come up the street, as clear as if it had happened yesterday. The heat of the car; the smell of her brothers' sweat and farts; her own discomfort and boredom. Then the horrible sight of the tangled wreckage; and the moment of regret when she'd spoken but it was too late to take the words back; followed by the slap and the tears and her mother's glacial stare.

That was the world she'd left. Boredom, violence and tears.

Whatever lay ahead of her here, she thought, it had to be better than that. It had to be.

She looked away from the crowd back up the street, to see that more than one stall had been deserted by their owners, who had all hurried down to see what could be seen.

She went up two or three steps, to a stall with a variety of pastries laid out on it. The display looked very similar to some thing she might have found in the supermarket in Chickentown, only tastier. Turnovers, croissants, sticks of bread rolled in dried fruit and a variety of small cakes.

She selected three very quickly: two turnovers and one huge scone; and then, greedily, went back for a croissant. Having got herself more than a meal's worth, she glanced up and down the street, just to check that the vendor wasn't making his or her return. It seemed she was free and clear.

She hurried away, clamping one turnover between her teeth and pocketing the other three pastries. Then she went on up the street and found a low stone wall where she could sit and eat.

The pastry was doughy, perhaps undercooked, but the filling was extremely sweet, with an odd, almost peppery edge, which she didn't like on the first bite but quickly changed her mind about. While she ate, her eyes went to a large advertisement on the opposite side of the street. It showed a deliriously happy boy, drawn in a cartoony style, with baggy striped pants and a big curl of blue hair, like a wave about to break, in the center of his head. He was animated by carefully laid lines of neon light and was walking on the spot, waving as he walked.

Beside him, on the wall, was a sign that read:

The Commexo Kid says:

FOR EVERYTHING THAT AILS YOU,

FROM TOE-ROT TO TAXES,

TRY THE PANACEA.

Candy laughed, her mood—which had been darkened by her memories of the events on Highway 94—lightening again.

And then, from the corner of her eye a figure appeared. A man dressed in a blue coat, wearing a spotted all-in-one suit underneath, stepped into view.

"I saw you," he said.

"You saw me do what?"

"Take the pastries."

"Oh, dear."

"It's okay," the man said, sitting down on the wall beside her. "As long as you share."

He was smiling as he spoke, so it seemed the threat, such as it was, carried no weight. Candy pulled the scone out of her pocket and broke it in half.

"Here," she said, handing one half over to her new companion.

"Most generous," he replied, rather formally. "And you are?"

"Candy Quackenbush. And you are?"

"Samuel Hastrim Klepp. The Fifth. Here." He fished a little pamphlet, printed on coarse brown paper, out of his pocket.

"What is this?"

"Klepp's Almenak; first published by my great-great-grandfather, Samuel Hastrim Klepp the First. This is the new edition."

Candy took the pamphlet and flicked through its pages. It was rather chaotically designed, its illustrations in black and white, but it was packed to the margins with information. There were maps, gaming rules, a page or two of astrology, and a few pages of pictures of what the author described as New Animals , which was an interesting notion. Further pages listed Celestial Events (the times of meteor showers and eclipses), even a collection of recipes. And interspersed between these relatively commonplace pieces were articles with a rather more Abaratian twist: "The Cat's Hair Cathedral: Myth or Reality?""The Dung-Jewels of Efreet: A. Gatherer's Tale." And "The Golden Warrior: Alive or Dead?"

"So you publish this?" Candy said.

"Yes. And I sell it here in The Great Head and in Tazmagor and Candlemas and Kikador. But there's not much of a market for it any longer. People can get all the information they need from him ." He jerked his finger, rather rudely, at the Commexo Kid.

"He doesn't exist, does he? I mean that kid?"