Abarat: The First Book of Hours a-1

by Clive Barker

“Homes?” Wolfswinkel said, his tone incredulous. “Who would give a home to any one of those monsters! The Infernal Regions is the only home the tarries deserve. Anyway, they can’t be caught. They’re too quick. They have to be tricked. Poison! That’s the way. You see that plate of fish on the table by the door? It contains enough scathrassic acid to kill a whole pack of them. If only I could just get them to eat it. But they’re suspicious of me.” He paused, then he snapped his fingers. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Maybe you’d have more luck! Yes. I believe you would.”

  “Me?” said Candy.

  “Yes, you! If they saw you putting out the food—you, whom they don’t really know—they’d be fooled into taking it.” He looked smugly satisfied with his little plan. “You just need to be very casual—” He started to get up from his armchair.

  “Wait!” Candy said. “I don’t want to disappoint you, Mr. Wolfswinkel, especially as you’ve been so kind and all, but I’m not going to poison cats for you.”

  “If they were just cats I’d understand your moral dilemma, Miss Quackenbush. But they’re not. They’re hellspawn. Trust me on this. Hellspawn. After all the harm they’ve done—not just to me, but to poor, innocent people right across Ninnyhammer—scathrassic acid is kinder than they deserve, believe me. If there were any justice in heaven, they’d be struck down by lightning, every last one of them!”

  Before Candy could reply to this outburst from her host, there was a sound from an adjacent room.

  “What was that?” she said.

  “Oh, it was just the wind,” Wolfswinkel replied hurriedly. “Take no notice.”

  “It didn’t sound like the wind,” Candy said, getting up out of her chair. “It sounded like a voice. Like somebody crying.”

  “Oh! Crying! Well, yes. Of course there’s crying! I didn’t want to depress you when you first arrived, but there are several mourners here in the house with me.”

  “Mourners?”

  “One of my friends—a dear, dear friend—was killed by the tarrie-cats just yesterday, and we’re having a wake on his behalf. You know, gathering to toast his memory and tell tales of what a fine fellow he was.”

  “Really?” Candy said. Something about this explanation didn’t quite ring true. “If there’s a wake going on,” she said, “then why are you wearing a bright yellow suit?”

  Wolfswinkel glanced down at his jaundiced ensemble, then feigned a look of surprise. “This is yellow!” he said. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, dear,” he said pitifully. “Poor Kaspar. The blindness is getting worse.”

  “You’re saying you didn’t realize that was a yellow suit?” said Candy, more and more certain that her suspicions were correct, and that this strange little man was for some reason deceiving her.

  “Yes,” Kaspar said, putting his hand to his brow, as though the drama was too much for him. But Candy wasn’t convinced by his hammy theatrics. Her real interest now was to discover who had made the grieving sound she’d heard.

  She got up from her chair and went to the adjoining door, through which the sound of sobbing had come.

  “Where are all these mourners then?” she said, as she went. Kaspar moved to stop her, but he wasn’t quick enough. Candy stepped through the door into the next room.

  Just as she’d suspected, there was neither a casket here, nor a corpse, nor so much as a single mourner. There was simply a dark, cluttered room, one of its walls dominated by a huge portrait of Kaspar sitting on an animal that looked like a cross between a giant armadillo and a camel.

  “There’s no wake going on in this house!” Candy snapped. “You were lying to me. I can’t bear liars!”

  Kaspar had followed her through the door. “So what if I was?” he replied, nonchalantly. “It’s my house. I can lie in my house if I want to. I can run around in the nude yelling hallelujahs if I so desire.”

  “Didn’t anybody ever tell you it was rude to lie?”

  “Maybe I can’t help it,” Kaspar said. “Maybe I’ve got an incurable disease that makes me lie. Poor Kaspar.”

  “Oh,” Candy said. “And do you have such a disease?”

  “Maybe I do. Maybe I don’t.”

  “Oh, stop it,” Candy snapped, her temper stretched to breaking point. “Can’t you simply tell me the truth?”

  “Well… yes, I suppose I could. But where would the fun be in that?”

  “You know what?” Candy said. “This is a ridiculous conversation. And you are a ridiculous little man.”

  She turned on her heel and started to walk back toward the door she’d just walked through.

  “I wouldn’t go out there if I were you. The tarrie-cats are still out there.”

  “So what?” said Candy. “I’d prefer to take my chances with them than stay in here another—”

  Before she could finish, Kaspar stepped into the doorway, blocking her path.

  “What are you doing?” Candy said. “Get out of my way.”

  He didn’t reply to this. He simply raised his arm, put his stubby-fingered hand over Candy’s face, and shoved.

  Candy stumbled backward, her foot catching on a rucked-up rug. Down she went, on her tailbone. It hurt, and she yelped.

  “I think you should stop being so judgmental, little missy,” Wolfswinkel said, every little trace of kindliness abruptly gone from his face. He stood over her and looked her dead in the eye. “Believe me, I’ve done worse than lying in my life. A whole lot worse.”

  “I believe you have,” Candy said softly.

  She started to scramble to her feet. Wolfswinkel neatly kicked the legs from under her, and down she went for a second time. She was beginning to get a little scared of Wolfswinkel now. 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.

  “I want to leave now,” she told him.

  “Do you indeed? Well, I’m afraid you’re not going to. You’re going to stay here with me.”

  “You can’t keep me here. I’m not—”

  “—a child? You are to me. To me you are an infant. A baby with no one to protect you. I’d lay a bet that nobody even knows you’re here.”

  Candy didn’t reply, but her silence was all the confirmation Wolfswinkel required.

  “I didn’t lie about one thing,” Kaspar said.

  “What was that?”

  “I did whisper an incantation when I saw you. I prayed you’d make the mistake of ignoring the tarrie-cats who were trying to warn you about coming up here. Lo and behold, my supplications were answered! Into my hands you came, like a stupid little fish.”

  “One minute I’m a baby, the next minute I’m a fish,” Candy snapped. “Make up your mind!”

  She was feeling more afraid of Wolfswinkel by the moment, but she wasn’t going to show it.

  “My error,” Kaspar said. “You’re not a baby, and you’re not a fish. You’re a hostage.”

  “A what?”

  “You heard me: a hostage. I’ll bet there are people out there who would pay a few thousand zem to have you in their hands.”

  “Well, you can forget that,” Candy said. “I don’t have any friends in the Abarat.”

  “Now who’s lying?” Wolfswinkel said, bending down to poke Candy. “Of course you’ve got friends. A pretty girl like you? You’ve probably got half a dozen boys pining away for you.”

  Candy laughed out loud at the preposterousness of this.

  “Then you have family.”

  “Not here I don’t,” Candy said, thinking, while she spoke, of how quickly she could squirm out from between Wolfswinkel’s legs and get to the door. “My parents are—”

  “—in Chickentown.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm,” said Wolfswinkel. “Well give me time. I’ll find somebody here who wants you. Somebody who’ll pay a price. Malingo? Where are you? Malingo! Present yourself before me right now, or I’ll have your hide for boot leather.”

 
“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.

  27. Words with the Criss-Cross Man

  Candy woke with the worst headache she’d ever experienced in her life, but at least she was no longer in the cell in which KasparWolfswinkel had imprisoned her. She was lying sprawled on a decadently overstuffed velvet chaise lounge, tossed there along with a load of old books. She sat up, her hand going up to her throbbing brow. She felt mildly feverish, and her eyes burned behind her lids when she blinked.

  Wolfswinkel was talking in the next room, sounding half crazy with excitement.

  “Yes… yes… I know what I have, believe me! This is the Pyramid Key, right here in my hand. Somebody had put it in her thoughts, but I’ve got it now.”


  Candy got to her feet, fighting her giddiness, and went to the door between the rooms. As she approached it, however, something dropped into view in front of her. It was Malingo. He was hanging upside down from the rafters, with one long, orange and partially bent finger pressed to his lips. Candy pointed through the door, indicating that she wanted to see Wolfswinkel, but he waved her away. Candy did as instructed. Bizarre though Malingo was, there was something about his gaze that not only endeared him to her, but also made her instinctively trust him.

  He climbed over the ceiling and, still inverted, clambered down the wall, using minuscule cracks in the plaster as toe- and fingerholds. Then he flipped over and dropped lightly to the ground three or four yards from Candy, his expression and his posture tentative, as though he was nervous in case all he earned for his troubles was a blow.

  “It’s all right,” Candy whispered. “I’m not going to hit you. You don’t have to be frightened of me.”

  Malingo sidled up to her.

  “You have to get out of here,” he whispered. “My master’s a very cruel man.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Wolfswinkel yelled from the other room. “Show yourself, child! Now!”

  Candy knew it would be wiser to obey this petty despot rather than argue with him. So she went to the door and stepped into view.

  Wolfswinkel was sitting in his leather armchair with the receiver of an antiquated telephone in his hand.

  “I’m talking to somebody who has some considerable interest in you,” he said.

  “Oh, really?” she replied with a little shrug.

  “It seems you’re quite the celebrity, Candy Quackenbush. At least that’s what I’m hearing.” He returned his attention to the person at the other end of the line. “Yes, I’ve got her here right now. She’s standing right in front of me, as plain as day. Oh, she’s about five-three, five-four.

  “So, what am I to do with her, Otto? What’s she worth on the open market?” Clearly the man he was talking to became agitated at this remark, because Wolfswinkel’s next words were: “Calm down, Otto. That was a joke. I know Carrion wants her. But be reasonable. If he wants both the Key and the girl, then I’m going to be expecting something substantial by way of recompense. That’s only right and proper, isn’t it? Ninnyhammer? No, I don’t want Ninnyhammer. When all this is over I never want to see this wretched little rock ever again. No. I want to be Lord of Babilonium! Or Commexo City! Anywhere but here. I’m sick of living in a place where everybody’s half asleep!”