Abarat: The First Book of Hours a-1 Read online

  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 jour 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.

  8. A Moment with Melissa

  Several miles away from the place where her daughter lay unconscious in the grass, Melissa Quackenbush was out in the backyard of 34 Followell Street, cleaning the barbecue after work. It was a task she hated: scraping pieces of burned-to-charcoal chicken meat off the grill, while the armies of ants that had been devouring the remains scattered in all directions.

  Of course, it was always her job, never her husband’s. The Lump, she called him behind his back, and not fondly. Right now he was sitting inside, slumped in front of some game show that he was only half watching through a haze of beer. In the early days after his being laid off, his lack of motivation to get up and find himself a new job had angered her. But now she was resigned to it, just as she was resigned to scraping off the remains of last week’s barbecue from the grill. It was her life. It was not what she’d wanted, nor what she’d dreamed for herself—not remotely—but it was all she had: the Lump, and the kids, and a barbecue grill caked with carbonized chicken.

  And then, just as she was finishing with the task, she felt a gust of wind coming from somewhere far, far off. She’d worked up quite a sweat as she scraped at the caked meat, and the wind was welcome, cooling the beads of perspiration on her forehead and the back of her neck, where her graying hair had stuck to her skin.

  But it wasn’t the temperature of the wind that made her close her eyes and luxuriate in it. No, it was the smell that it carried on its back.

  Absurd as it was, she could smell the sea. It was impossible, of course—how could the wind be carrying a smell over a thousand miles? But even as half her mind was saying: This can’t possibly be the sea that I’m smelling, the other half was murmuring: But it is, it is.

  Another gust came against her face, and this time the smell it brought, and the feelings the smell evoked, were so strong they almost overwhelmed her.

  She dropped the can of cleaning spray. She dropped the metal spatula she’d been using to scrape off the meat.

  As they hit the paving stones, a memory came into her head from some long ago. It was a memory she wasn’t even sure she was pleased to be conjuring up. But she had no choice in the matter. It came into her mind’s eye so powerfully, so clearly, that it might have happened yesterday.

  She remembered rain, battering down on the top of the old Ford truck she and Bill had owned when they’d first been married. They’d run out of gas in the middle of the rainstorm and Bill had gone off to fetch enough gas to get them running again, leaving her alone in the middle of the downpour that had come out of nowhere. Alone in the dark and the cold.

  Well, no, that wasn’t altogether true. She hadn’t been completely alone. There’d been a baby in her belly. As Melissa had sat in that cold truck waiting for Bill to come back, Candy Francesca Quackenbush had been just an hour from being born. It was two in the morning and Melissa’s water had just broken, and so, it seemed, had the waters of heaven itself, because to this day she could not remember being in a rainstorm so sudden and so intense.

  But it wasn’t the rain or the cold or the kicking of the unborn child in her womb that she was remembering now. Something else had happened; something that the smell of seawater now pricking her nostrils had brought back into her head. The trouble was, she couldn’t remember precisely what that something had been.

  She stepped away from the barbecue—away from the smell of burned chicken and cleaning fluid—to get a breath of purer air.

  And as she did so—as she inhaled the sea air that could not be sea air—another piece of the vision snapped into focus in her mind’s eye.

  She’d been sitting there in the truck, with the rain beating a crazy tattoo on the roof, and suddenly, without warning, there had been light everywhere, flooding the old Ford’s interior.

  Melissa didn’t know why, but this memory—the vehicle filling up with pure white light—was somehow connected to the smell in the air. It didn’t make any sense. Clearly her mind was playing tricks with her. Was she going crazy? Crazy with sadness and disappointment. Her eyes had started to sting, and tears now ran down her cheeks; ran and ran. She told herself not to be silly. What was she crying about?

  “I’m not crazy,” she said to herself softly. Nevertheless, she felt suddenly lost, unanchorcd.<
br />
  There was an explanation for this, somewhere in her memory. The trouble was that she couldn’t quite reach it.

  “Come on…” she said to herself.

  It was like having a name on the tip of her tongue, but not being able to bring it to mind.

  Frustrated with herself, and more than a little unnerved (maybe there was something wrong with her, smelling the ocean in the middle of Minnesota; maybe her life was making her nuts), she turned her back on the open sky and returned rather deliberately to the cloud of sour but familiar smells that hung around the barbecue. They weren’t pleasant, but at least she understood them. Wiping her tears away with the back of her hand, she told herself to forget what she thought she was smelling, because it was a trick her nose was playing on her, no more nor less than that.

  Then she picked up the spatula and the can of cleaning fluid that she’d dropped, and she went back to her weary and unhappy work.

  9. Events on the Jetty

  Candy heard a chorus of voices, all speaking the same word.

  Lady, they were saying; lady, lady, lady…

  It took her several moments to realize that these many voices were all addressing her.

  It was the Johns speaking: Mischief, Fillet, Sallow, Moot, Drowze, Pluckitt, Serpent and Slop. They were all calling to her, trying to get her to wake up. She felt herself tentatively shaken. And—just as tentatively—she opened her eyes.

  Eight concerned faces were looking down at her: one large one and seven smaller.

  “Anything broken?” John Fillet said.

  Candy made a very cautious attempt to sit up. The back of her neck hurt, but it was no worse than the ache she sometimes woke with when she’d been sleeping in an odd position. She moved her legs and her arms. She wriggled her fingers.

  “No,” she said, somewhat surprised at her good fortune, given the distance she’d fallen. “I don’t think anything’s broken.”