Abarat: The First Book of Hours - Barker Clive - Страница 50

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“I’m here,” said a voice from above, and there—hanging upside down from a roof beam—was a creature that resembled a Halloween mask come to life. His skin was a mottled orange, the pupils in his dark-rimmed eyes dark slits. There were four knobbly horns on his head, and two large fans of leathery skin spread from either side of his head, where ordinary folks would have had ears. He was wearing a dirty T-shirt and an even dirtier pair of pants.

He would have made a fearful sight if he hadn’t worn such a pitiful expression on his face. Seeing him, Candy thought back to the weeping she’d heard when she’d first come into the house. This Malingo was surely the source of that unhappiness.

“Come down here and catch hold of this wretched child for me,” Wolfswinkel told him. “Now!”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.”

Malingo began to clamber down out of the rafters.

But before he could reach ground level, Candy was away. She gave Kaspar a two-handed shove in the belly and then she raced back to the door between the rooms, darting through to the front room. Malingo was on the ground now. She could hear the slap of his bare feet as he raced over the tiled floor in pursuit of her. He was fast. She was barely halfway across the room when he caught hold of her. “

“Don’t struggle,” he said softly. “It’ll be worse for the both of us if you fight him, believe me.”

Hearing the delicacy in Malingo’s voice, Candy looked up and met his gaze. There was a sweetness in his eyes she had not expected to find there, the Halloween horror of his face concealing something far gentler.

“Bring her back here,” Wolfswinkel yelled. “And be quick about it.”

Malingo duly pulled Candy away from the front door and into the second room, where Kaspar was standing in front of a long mirror, rearranging the ridiculous tower of hats on his head.

“I suggest you take Malingo’s advice,” Wolfswinkel said. “You really don’t want to be on my bad side.”

Candy ignored him, struggling to free herself from Malingo’s grip. But it was a lost cause. The creature was considerably stronger than she was. And to add to his physical strength, he gave off a dizzying smell, a bittersweet mixture of cloves and cinnamon and rotted limes.

“Now listen, my dear,” Wolfswinkel said, “you have to calm down. You’re only going to exhaust yourself, struggling like that. I’m not going to do any harm to you as long as you behave.”

He turned away from the mirror and walked across to the other side of the room, where a large square of tile on the floor had been painted an eye-pricking blue. At each corner of the square was a short, fat candle.

“Candles, illume,” Kaspar said, and with a little sound like a snatched breath each of the candles ignited itself.

“Brighter!” he instructed them, and the flames grew longer, the illumination they threw up making every other lamp in the room inconsequential.

“Now,” said Kaspar, turning his attention back to Candy. “Let’s see what secrets you’re keeping from me, shall we? Malingo, you know what to do.”

Malingo pushed Candy toward the blue square. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “It doesn’t hurt.”

“I heard that,” Wolfswinkel said. “I don’t know why you’re trying to curry favor with this girl. She can’t be of any use to you.”

“I’m just—”

“Shut up!” Kaspar snapped. “Put her in the light! Go on!”

Malingo gave Candy a second little shove and she stumbled forward into the square. As she did so, she felt her body pass through an invisible barrier. Within the square, she felt a peculiar pressure on her, as though the air inside the design was heavier than the air outside, and it was pressing against her body from every side. It was not by any means a pleasurable sensation. The pressure made it harder for her to draw breath, and her head ached furiously.

Not only that, but being in the painted box sealed her off from the outside world. Now—though she could see Wolfswinkel giving orders to Malingo—she could not hear his voice. Clearly there was now some kind of invisible wall around her. She tested the thesis by extending her hand. It was like pushing her fingers into cold fat. The thickened air congealed against her skin, and the sensation was so disgusting that Candy withdrew her hand before she even reached the limits of her persistence.

Wolfswinkel, meanwhile, was waving his staff around as though he were writing letters in the air.

The candles flickered; the cell convulsed around Candy.

And then, much to her horror, she felt something pulling at her. Not at her hand or arm, but at some place in the center of her head. It didn’t make her headache any worse, but she still felt somehow invaded by the sensation. It was as though Wolfswinkel was reaching inside her to pull something out. She saw strange smears of images appearing in the air at the end of Wolfswinkel’s staff, and as they settled and focused she realized that these images were recognizable to her. Ten, twenty, thirty pictures appeared, all plucked out of her memories. There was 34 Followell Street, where she’d stood so often, dreaming of the far away. There was her bedroom, and her mother’s face, and the schoolyard, and Widow White’s house, with its front lawn covered in colored pinwheels.

Apparently none of these images was of the slightest interest to Wolfswinkel, because he erased them with an irritated wave of his staff.

He gathered his strength for a second summoning, and a new wave of images emerged from Candy’s head, these more recent. First there was the lighthouse, and the ramshackle jetty of Hark’s Harbor. Then there was Mischief and Shape and the turbulent waters of the Sea of Izabella; then the Sea-Skippers, and the Yebba Dim Day.

In the midst of all these familiar sights, however, was one Candy didn’t recognize. It was a shape made of blue-green light that looked like a short length of braided ribbon which had been put in the deep freeze. There were tiny crystals glinting on it, and from one end spilled a trail of brightness that broke into tiny pinpoints of intense luminescence before they melted on the air.

At the sight of it Wolfswinkel paused, the color rising in his already ruddied cheeks. There was a look of shock on his face, of disbelief.

“Will you look at that?” he mouthed.

An ugly, avaricious smile had begun to creep onto his face. He left his staff to stand by itself, and he spat onto his palms, rubbing them together before wiping them on his trouser legs. With his hand thus prepared, he reached forward to take hold of the strange object that he’d conjured from out of Candy’s mind. Though it wasn’t solid (how could it be, when it was made of pure thought?) it nevertheless seemed to gain a measure of solidity as his hands closed around it.

Candy felt a terrible wrenching pain in her skull as Wolfswinkel’s fingers took possession of the object. There were flashes of white at the corners of her eyes, which rapidly spread, so that in a matter of moments they washed out her sight completely.

Her legs grew suddenly weak beneath her. She toppled forward against the invisible wall of her square blue cell, and then collapsed to the tiled floor.

The last thing she remembered was the sound of Malingo’s voice, breaking through from the other side.

He didn’t speak her name. He simply let out a cry of distress. It echoed in Candy’s throbbing head for a moment. Then it faded away, and she was lost to blissful unconsciousness.

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