Abarat

by Clive Barker

Do you think a soul like hers would sleep quietly, with so much life left to live? So many dreams that she never saw come true?”

Life is short, And pleasures few, And holed the ship, And drowned the crew, But o! But o! How very blue The sea is!

and the astonishments began.

Mischief nodded. “It’s true,” he conceded. “You’re in the company of eight world-class thieves,” he said, not with-out a little touch of pride. “Saints we are not.” “But then,” said Deaux-Deaux, “who is?” He thought on this. “Besides saints.”

This was not the same heaven that hung over Minnesota.

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?

Candy didn’t ask for the details on Inflixia Grueskin; the name was descriptive enough.

“Don’t be so sure you won’t meet this lady again,” Mischief said to the company. “I believe she’s in your lives forever now. And we’re in hers. There are some people, you know, who are too important to ever be forgotten. I think she’s one of them.” Candy smiled; it was a sweet speech, even if she didn’t quite believe it.

But coming here, entering this strange New World, was like being born again. A new life, under new stars.

Filled with a kind of terrible relief that he was getting what he deserved,

“This is a ridiculous conversation. And you are a ridiculous little man.”

He might look like a clown, with his stupid hats and his yellow suit, but then she’d always been a little afraid of clowns.

“Don’t blame yourself. It’s a waste of energy.”

Even the stars were different here, she remembered. Lord, even the stars.

Whatever this world was—a waking dream, another dimension, or simply a corner of Creation that God had made and forgotten—she was going to have to find herself a place in it and make sense of why she was here. If she didn’t, her loneliness would grow and consume her in time.

It was remarkably easy, once she’d done it one time through. In fact, it was eerily easy, like a dance step she’d forgotten but remembered again immediately the music began, though where she’d heard the music of this magic before she could not possibly imagine. This was not a dance they danced in Chickentown.

“He thought I went to Philadelphia, but why would I do a thing like that, when I knew about the Abarat?

“I’m somebody else. I just don’t know who that somebody else is yet.”

Perhaps a wiser eye than hers would be able to read tomorrow in tonight’s stars, but where was the fun in that? It was better not to know. Better to be alive in the Here and the Now—in this bright, laughing moment—and let the Hours to come take care of themselves.