Abarat 2: Days of Magic, Nights of War. Clive Barker

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СКАЧАТЬ he’d been asked to write struck him. He very slowly raised his head to look at Candy. “It can’t be,” he breathed softly.

      Candy smiled. “It is,” she said.

      From the corner of her eye, she could see Houlihan was now approaching again. He seemed to have realized something was wrong. At lightning speed, Candy snatched the pen out of the actor’s hand and then swung around behind him, putting her shoulder against his back and shoving him toward the Criss-Cross Man. The padding made him unstable. He stumbled forward and fell against Houlihan, who also lost his balance. Both men fell to the ground, with Legitimate Eddie on top.

      Houlihan roared and raged—“Get off me, you fool! Let me up!”—but by the time he had got himself out from under Eddie, Malingo had already led Candy to a gap in the wall of the tent.

      “You’re not going to escape me, Quackenbush!” Houlihan yelled as Candy slipped away.

      “Which way?” Malingo said when they got outside.

      “Where are the most people?” He pointed off to their left. “Then let’s go!” she said.

      As they made their way toward the crowd, she heard Houlihan’s voice behind her and glanced over her shoulder to see him appearing from the tent, a look of insane fury on his face.

      “You’re mine, girl!” he yelled. “I’ve got you this time.”

      Though there were only about six strides between the pursuer and pursued, it was enough to give Candy and Malingo a head start. They plunged into the throng and were quickly hidden by the parade of people and animals.

      “We should split up!” Candy said to Malingo as they took refuge behind a line of booths.

      “Why?” said Malingo. “He’ll never find us in this chaos!”

      “Don’t be so sure,” Candy said. “He has ways—”

      As she spoke, Houlihan’s voice rose above the clamor of the celebrants. “I’m going to find you, Quackenbush!”

      “We have to confuse him, Malingo,” Candy insisted. “You go that way. I’ll go this.”

      “Where will we meet again?”

      “At the freak show. I’ll meet you there in half an hour. Keep to the crowds, Malingo. It’ll be safer.”

      “We’ll never be safe as long as that man’s on our heels,” Malingo said.

      “He won’t be on our heels forever, I promise.”

      “I hope you’re right. Vadu ha, lady.”

      “Vadu ha,” Candy said, returning the wishes in Old Abaratian.

      With that they parted. For Candy the next few minutes were a blur. She pressed through the crowds, trying all the while to get the sound of Houlihan’s voice out of her head, but hearing him every step of the way, repeating the same dreadful syllable.

       “Mine! Mine! Mine!”

      Hundreds, perhaps thousands of faces moved before her as she proceeded, like faces in some strange dream. Faces masked with cloth or papier-mâché or painted wood; smiling sometimes, astonished sometimes; sometimes filled with a strange unease. There were a few faces she recognized among the masks. The Commexo Kid appeared in a hundred different versions; so did the faces of Rojo Pixler and even Kaspar Wolfswinkel. There were others to which she could put no name that nevertheless drew her attention. A young man danced past her wearing a black mask streaming with bright red dreadlocks. Another man had a face that had erupted into bright green foliage, in which flowers like daisies bloomed; yet another was tattooed from head to foot with golden anatomy but wore on his chest a cleverly painted hole, which seemed to show her his mechanical heart.

      And every now and then among these bright, strange creatures there would be a naysayer: a serpent in this Eden, preaching the Coming Apocalypse. One of them, dressed in a ratty robe that exposed his sticklike legs, even had a fake halo attached to his head and pointed at the people as they passed, saying they would all perish for their crimes, at the End of Time.

      But his bitter words could not destroy the magic of this place, even now. Everywhere she looked there was beauty.

      A swarm of miniature blue monkeys the size of hummingbirds fluttered up in her face and clambered into the sky, up invisible ropes disappearing in a cloud of violet smoke. A dozen balloons floated past her, pursued by a quiverful of needles, which caught up with their quarry and pierced them, liberating a lilting chorus of voices. A fish of elephantine proportions, with bulging eyes that looked like twin moons, floated past, trailing a scent of old smoke.

      In this confusion of wonders Candy had long ago lost all sense of direction, of course. So it came as a total surprise when she turned the corner and found herself in the very backwater that they’d first come down with the zethek in his cage. Straight ahead of her lay the freak show, its brightly colored banners depicting the cast of monsters to be found inside.

      She glanced back down the alleyway, just in time to see Houlihan come into view. Hoping to avoid his eye, she shrank back into the shadows, and for a moment she thought she was going to be lucky.

      But then, just as he was about to disappear into the crowd again, he seemed to sniff her, and with a chilling certainty he turned his head in her direction and peered down the darkened alleyway. There was no more shadow for Candy to shrink into. She could only hold her breath and wait.

      Narrowing his eyes as though trying to pierce the shadows, the Criss-Cross Man began to push his way through the crowd toward the alleyway. The smallest of smiles had appeared on his face. He knew where she was.

      Candy had no choice. Clearly he’d seen her. She had to retreat. And there was only one place to go: into the freak show.

      She broke out of the shadows and started to run. She didn’t bother to look over her shoulder. She could hear how close Houlihan was now: the sound of his feet sticking and unsticking on the garbage-strewn ground, the raw rasp of his breath.

      She parted the canvas curtains and flung herself through them into the backstage area of the freak show. The smell that met her was almost overpowering: the mingled stench of rotting hay and some sickly sweet perfume that had perhaps been splashed around to cover up the other smells. There were three large cages close by, the largest containing a thing that looked like a pony-sized slug. It let out a pitiful mewling at the sight of Candy, and it pushed its eyes between the bars of its cage on fleshy horns. They scrutinized Candy for a long moment. Then the thing spoke, its voice soft and well-educated.

      “Please let me out of here,” it said.

      The creature had no sooner uttered these words than they were echoed from the other two cages (one of which contained what looked like a four-hundred-pound porcupine-woman; the other, one of the creatures Candy had seen advertised on the billboards outside the show: a hybrid boy, with scaly flesh and a pointed tail). The same cry, or a rough variation of the same, escaped them both: “Let us out!”

      It was now rising from other directions too. Some of the voices were high-pitched squeals, some low rumbling, some just scrawls of sound.

      And then, just as she thought the cacophony could not get any louder, she heard Houlihan out in the СКАЧАТЬ