Abarat

by Clive Barker

Three is the number of those who do holy work; Two is the number of those who do lover’s work; One is the number of those who do perfect evil Or perfect good.

“Lady Moon,” she called. “You know we would not call on you unless we needed your intervention. So we do. Lady, we three are of no consequence. We ask this boon not for ourselves but for the soul of one who was taken from among us before she was ready to leave. Please, Lady, bear us all safely through this storm, so that her life may find continuance . . .” “Name our destination!” Joephi yelled over the roar of the water.

Perfect, Candy thought. I live in a town that is otherwise undistinguished. Well, that was Fact Number One. She needed only nine more.

“You want something weird,” Melissa said, putting the meat into the baking tin and thumbing it down. “You’ve got a little morbid streak in you, just like your grandma Frances. She used to go to the funerals of complete strangers—

“Men.” Norma said, “You stay away from them, darlin’. They are more trouble than they’re worth.

“Well, because it’s rather dark,” Norma said. “Tragic, in fact.” Candy smiled. “Well, Mom says I’m morbid, so I’ll probably like it.”

Personally, I think all that stuff about the afterlife is nonsense. You get one life and you’d better make the best of it. My sister got religion last year and she’s shaping up for a sainthood, I swear.”

The story goes that his horse upped and died on him in the middle of the night, so they had no choice but to settle down right here in the middle of nowhere.” Candy smiled. There was something about this little detail which absolutely fit with all she knew about her hometown.

“Love can be the best thing in life. And it can be the worst. The absolute worst.”

“Did he leave a note? I mean, a suicide note?” “Yes. Of a kind. As far as I can gather he said something about waiting for his ship to come in.”

A part of her—the part that her morbid grandmother could take credit for—wanted to ask Norma the obvious question: how had the stains got up there? Had he shot himself, or used a razor? But there was another part that preferred not to know.

“That’s what happens when people realize their lives aren’t what they dreamed they’d be,” Norma said.

“Well, I guess all of us are waiting for our ships to come in, one way or another,”

“Some of us still live in hope,” she said with a half-hearted smile. “But you have to, don’t you?”

This work—like most of your work—is worthless.”

“Why can’t you be normal?”

Her shrill voice was being heard from one end of the school to the other, but the person to whom they were directed was deaf to them.

Those who knew her said they’d never seen Candy Quackenbush looking happier.

as soon as she’d done so she knew that was the decision she was supposed to make.

But walking for a while where nobody (except the Widow White) knew she’d gone was better than going home to listen to her father in the first stages of the day’s drinking, raging on about the injustices of his life.

Her eyes glued to the great swelling mass of the cloud, she walked on, her griefs and humiliations left somewhere behind her, where the road ended and the ocean of grass and flowers began.

So what if John Mischief had seven extra heads; he’d bowed to her and called her lady. Nobody had ever done that to her before.

“Light’s the oldest game in the world.”

I don’t have to hurry. I’ve got all the time in the world. I’ve got you cornered, and there’s no escape for you. You’re mine.

“Well, we can’t leave the lady Quackenbush undefended,” Mischief replied.

This was like something from a nightmare: being hunted down by some hellish beast; some vile creature that wanted to eat her alive, limb by limb, finger by finger.

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.

“I take no pleasure in putting holes in living things,” Mischief said, pocketing the gun.

but what was a promise worth? Not much, in her experience.

“Wherever you all go, I go.”

“Believe me, when I say: There are two powers That command the soul. One is God. The other is the tide.”

But her own advice was hard to take.

She had assumed (naïvely, perhaps) that at least the stars would be constant. After all, hadn’t the same stars she knew by name hung over all the other fantastic worlds that had existed on earth? Over Atlantis, over El Dorado, over Avalon? How could something so eternal, so immutable, be so altered?

It was an odd-looking beast: a cross between a bat and a human being.

There are some people, you know, who are too important to ever be forgotten. I think she’s one of them.”

“Hush!” Mischief said to him. “Don’t you ever talk to my lady that way again!”

There was nothing for her back in Chickentown, or at least nothing that she wanted. She hated her father. And her mother, well, she just made her feel empty. No, there was nothing for her there.

Yeah, exactly this.

she always discovered her own night visions were a lot wilder and weirder than anybody else’s.

This was a New World rising before her, and it was filled with every kind of diversity.

Scarebaby, scarebaby, Where do you run? Out in the graveyard, To have you some fun? Dancing with skeletons Up from the ground? Doing a jig On the burial mound?

The Night is blue and black. The Night is silence, poetry and love. It is the dancers in their grove of bones, It is all transforming things. It is fate, it is freedom. It is masks and silver and ambiguity, It is blood; it is forgiveness; It is the invisible music of instinct.”

In fact there was something almost too intelligent about the way it looked at her.

Why didn’t she ever stick up for Candy—or herself? Why was she so weak?

“Because I only like the company of one person.”

But it was too late for prayers.

You who love the Daylight Hours, and I, who love the Night.

I would rather die unarmed, and in love, than ever pick up another sword.

“I will protect you,” he had written, “from any power that threatens you. I will put myself between you and Death itself. Please, lady, be assured: there is no demon in air, earth or sea that can threaten you.”

It was a test, really, to see how long it would take for jealousy to overcome the once powerful love that the two brothers had borne one another.

“That’s Squiller,” Candy said, looking down. To her distress she realized that in the last few minutes—while she’d been listening to the book-burning nonsenses Rojo Pixler was spouting—the life had finally gone from her little squid. Most likely it had been out of its native element too long.