by Clive Barker
Meanwhile, the architect of Commexo City rode the Ring, around and around, studying the screens, watching for some sign of movement in the uncharted depths of Mama Izabella…
It was snowing in Chickentown. Or so it seemed.
Candy stood in the backyard of 34 Followell Street while fat flecks of white swirled around her and carpeted the brown dirt and the gray grass.
But there was something odd about this blizzard. For one thing, it seemed to be happening in the middle of a heat wave. Candy’s hair was pasted to her forehead with sweat, and her T-shirt glued to her back. For another thing, the snow was spiraling down out of a perfectly blue sky.
Strange, she thought.
She reached up and caught hold of one of the snowflakes. It was soft against her palm. She opened her hand. The flake had a drop of blood on it. Suspicious now, she examined the snowflake more closely. Despite the warmth of her hand, the flake wasn’t melting. Before she could examine it more closely however, a gust of wind came along and carried it away, leaving a fine trail of scarlet across the middle of her palm.
She reached out and snatched at another flake. Then at another, and another. They weren’t snowflakes, she now realized. They were feathers. Chicken feathers. The air was filled with a blizzard of chicken feathers.
She felt them brushing against her face, some of them leaving little trails of blood. Horrible. She tried to wipe them off with the heels of her hands, but the storm of feathers seemed to be getting worse.
“Candy?”
Her father had come out of the house. He had a beer bottle in his hand.
“What are you doing standing out here?” he demanded.
Candy thought for a moment, then shook her head. The truth was that she didn’t know what she was doing out here. Had she come to look at the snow? If so, she didn’t remember doing so.
“Get back inside,” her father said.
His neck was flushed, and his eyes were bloodshot. There was a mean expression in his stare that she knew to be careful of: he was close to losing his temper.
“You heard me,” he said. “Go back in the house.”
Candy hesitated. She didn’t want to contradict her father when he was drunk, but nor did she want to go inside. Not with him in his present mood.
“I just want to take a little walk,” she said softly.
“What are you talking about? You’re not taking no walk. Now get the hell inside.”
He reached out and caught hold of her, gripping her neck close to her shoulder so tightly she let out a yell.
As though in response to her cry there was an eruption of din in the yard around her: the clucking of countless chickens. The birds were everywhere, filling the yard in all directions. She felt a kind of revulsion at the sight of so many chickens. So many beaks, so many bright little eyes; so many heads cocked so that they could look up at her.
“How did they get here?” she said, gently reaching up to free herself from her father’s grip.
“They live here,” he said.
“What?”
“You heard me!” her father said, shaking her. “God, you are so stupid. I said: they live here. Look.”
Candy turned her sickened gaze toward the house. He was right. There were chickens on the roof, carpeting it like beady-eyed snow; chickens at the windows, lining the sills; chickens squatting all over the kitchen. On the table; on the sink. She could see her mother standing in the middle of the kitchen with her head bowed, weeping. “This is crazy,” Candy murmured.
“What did you say?”
Her father shook her again, harder this time. She pulled herself free of him, stumbling backward as she did so. Somehow she lost her balance and fell down on the hard dirt, the bitter stench of chicken excrement filling her nostrils. Her father started to laugh; a mean, joyless laugh.
“Candy!” somebody said.
She had covered her face with her hands to keep the chickens’ claws from scratching her, so she didn’t see who it was, but somebody was calling her. Somebody in the house, was it? She peered between her fingers.
“Stupid girl,” her father said, reaching down to catch hold of her again.
As he did so, the voice came a second time.
“Candy?”
Who’s voice was that? It obviously wasn’t her father. She cautiously let her hands fall from her face, and looked around. Was there somebody else in the vicinity? No. Just her father, laughing. And her mother, weeping in the kitchen. And the chickens. The endless, ridiculous chickens.
None of this made any sense. It was like some horrible…
Wait, she thought.
Wait! This is a dream.
As she formed this thought the voice that had been calling to her called again.
“Please, Candy,” he said. “Open your eyes.”
That’s all I have to do, she thought to herself. All I have to do is open my eyes.
The idea was so simple it made her weep. She could feel the tears pressing between her locked lashes and running down her cheeks.
Open your eyes, she told herself.
“You’re a great disappointment to me,” her dream-father was saying to her. “Did you know that? I wanted a daughter who’d love me. Instead I get you. You don’t love me. Do you?” She didn’t reply to this. “ANSWER ME!” he yelled.
She had no answer to give—or at least none that he wanted to hear—so she simply looked up at him and said:
“Good-bye, Dad. I gotta go.”
“Go?” he replied. “Where the hell are you ever going to go? You’re going nowhere. Nowhere.”
Candy smiled to herself.
And smiling, she opened her eyes.
She was back in the single-sailed boat that had carried them away from the shore of the Twenty-Fifth Hour. It was rocking gently, like a cradle. No wonder she’d been lulled to sleep. Malingo was kneeling beside her, his leathery hand laid lightly on her shoulder.
“There you are,” he said, when her eyes focused on him. “For a minute I didn’t know whether to wake you or not. Then I decided you weren’t enjoying your dream very much.”
“I wasn’t.”
She sat up, and the tears she’d shed in her sleep ran down her cheeks. She let them fall. They seemed to have washed her sight clean, in a curious way. The world around her—the Sea of Izabella, and the sky filled with light-shot clouds, even the round-bellied sail—looked more beautiful than she had words to describe.
She heard what she thought was laughter from the side of the boat, and looked over to see that a school of fish the size of small dolphins, only covered in scales that had a golden sheen to them, were swimming beside the vessel, taking turns to leap into the bow wave and feel its foam seethe over their backs.
The noise they were making was like laughter. No, she thought, it was not like laughter. It was laughter. And it was a sound that went well with the whole bright world that she’d woken to: sea, sky and sail. There was laughter in all of it at that moment.
She got to her feet, the wind at her back. Its insistence reminded her of being in the lighthouse, what seemed an age ago; feeling the light pressing against her back as it summoned the Sea of Izabella.
“I’m here, aren’t I?” she said to Malingo, holding onto the mast to steady herself.
Malingo joined the laughter now. “Of course you’re here,” he said. “Where else would you be?”
Candy shrugged. “Just… somewhere I dreamed about.”
“Chickentown?”
“How did you guess?”
“The tears.”
Candy wiped the last of the wetness from her cheeks with her free hand.
“For a minute—” she began.
“You thought you were stuck back there.”
She nodded.
“Then when I woke up I wasn’t sure for a moment which one was real.”
“I think they probably both are,” Malingo said. “And maybe one day we’ll catch the tide and go back there, you and me.”
“I can’t either,” Malingo said. “But you never know. There was a time, I daresay, when you couldn’t have imagined being here.”
Candy nodded. “It’s true,” she said.
Her eyes had gone again to the laughing fish. They seemed to be competing with one another to see which of them could leap the highest, and so gain her attention.
“Do you think maybe a part of me has always been here in the Abarat?” Candy asked Malingo.
“Why do you say that?”
“Well… it’s that this place feels as though it’s home. Not that other place. This.” She looked up. “This sky.” Then at the water. “This sea.” Finally she looked at her hand. “This skin.”
“It’s the same skin here as it was there.”
“Is it?” she said. “It doesn’t feel that way somehow.”
Malingo grinned.
“What are you laughing at now?”
“I’m just thinking what a strange one you are. My heroine.” He kissed her on the cheek, still grinning. “Strangest girl I ever did meet.”
“And how many girls have you met?”
Malingo took a moment or two to make his calculations. Then he said: “Well… just you, actually—if you don’t count Mother.”
Now it was Candy who started to laugh. And the leaping fish joined in, jumping higher and higher in their delight.
“Do you think they get the joke?” Malingo said.
Candy looked skyward. “I think today the whole world gets the joke,” she said.
“Good answer,” Malingo replied.
“Look at that,” Candy said, pointing up into the heavens. “We must be moving toward a Night Hour. I see stars.”
The wind had carried all the clouds off toward the southwest. The sky was now a pristine blue, darkening to purple overhead.
“Beautiful,” she said.
Staring up at the pinpricks of starlight, Candy remembered how she had first noticed that the constellations were different here from the way they were in the world she’d come from. Different stars; different destinies.
“Is there such a thing as Abaratian astrology?” she said to Malingo.
“Of course.”
“So if I learned to read the stars, I’d maybe discover my future up there. It would solve a lot of problems.”
“And spoil a lot of mysteries,” Malingo said.
“Better not to know?”
“Better to find out when the time’s right. Everything to its Hour.”
“You’re right of course,” Candy said.
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.
Journey to the end of day,
Come the fire-fly,
Come the moon;
Say a prayer for God’s good grace
And sleep with lore upon your face.
So Ends
The First Book of Abarat
Appendix.
Some Excerpts from Klepp’s Almenak
For a traveler in the Abarat there can be few documents as useful, or as thorough in their contents, as Klepp’s Almenak.
It was first published some two hundred years ago, and it is a stew of fact and fiction, in which the author, Samuel Hastrim Klepp, writes one moment as a practical explorer, the next as a mythologist. There are significant errors on every page, but there is some reason to believe that Klepp knew that he was playing fast and loose with the truth. He speaks at one point of his “leavening the flat bread of what we know, with the yeast of what we dream may come to pass.”
However questionable its value as a work of truth, there is no doubting the hold Klepp’s Almenuk has on the hearts of the people of the Abarat. The Almenak is updated yearly by the current descendant of Klepp, Samuel Hastrim the Fifth. He has kept the contents of the pamphlet much the same as it always was: it chronicles holy days around the archipelago; carrier tables of tides and stars; lists all manner of event, mythical and actual. It carries the rules of two of the Abarat’s favorite sports: Mycassian Bug Wrestling and Star-Striking. It also lists Celestial Events, both Benign and Apocalyptic, carries news of appearing islands, and for those with a taste for grim inevitability, it chronicles the- steady_if infinitesimal_sinkage of other islands. Besides these, contained within the Almenak’s pages are news of Extinctions, Migrations, Emancipations, and Redefinitions of the Infinite, while for those seeking more practical information it contains maps of every major city, including those that have been destroyed by time or calamity.
It is, in short, the essential guide to the archipelago. Even if (as one Jengo Johnson once calculated), no less than fifty-seven percent of its information is for some reason or other questionable, every sailor and traveling salesman who crosses the Abarat, every pilgrim and pig farmer about the business of worship or gelding, has a copy of the Almenak within reach, and each finds in its contradictory pages something of value.
I would, if I could, reproduce it all here. But that’s of course impossible. I will limit myself instead to Klepp’s eloquent descriptions of the major Hours, including the Twenty-Fifth, with a few references to what the author dubs “Rocks of Some Significance” (though it is necessarily incomplete; small islands appear and disappear in the Sea of Izabella all the time; a complete listing would be out of date the moment it was printed).
I will list the Hours, as Klepp did, beginning at Noon.
However, I strongly urge anyone tempted to use the information that follows as a literal guide to the islands to proceed with extreme caution. It is worth remembering Samuel Klepp the First died having become lost on one of the Outer Islands. He was found, dead from exposure, with a copy of his own Almenak in his hand. According to a detailed map in the Almenak that he himself had drawn, there was supposed to be a small town that bore his name on the very spot where he had perished; he had no doubt been looking for the town when exposure overtook him. As it happened, no such town existed.
But since his death a town has been founded at that place, to service the sightseers who come to see the spot where the great Almenak maker perished. And yes, it is called Klepp.
His map, then, was correct. It was simply premature.
Such things happen often in the archipelago, especially on those islands closest to the Twenty-Fifth Hour. So be warned.
Here, then, are some brief excerpts from Klepp’s descriptions of the Twenty-Five Islands of the Abarat.
“Of the island of Yzil, which is Noon, let me say this: it is a place of exceptional beauty and fruitfulness. Furthermore it does a soul good (sometimes) to stand with the sun directly over his head. Here at Yzil, a man hoping for fame might be reminded to live in the moment and not care too much where his shadow may fall tomorrow, but rather concern himself with where it lies today.
“The island is temperate and lush. A gentle breeze passes constantly through the thick foliage, and there are creatures of every shape and size being wafted through the greenery. It is said their singular source is a Creatrix of very ancient origins, called the Princess Breath, who makes her home here on Yzil, and is in the infinite and rapturous process of conjuring life-forms from her divine essence, which the breeze carries through the canopy and out across the Sea of Izabella. There caught by this tide or that, they are carried out across the islands to populate them with new kinds of life.
“At One O’clock, which lies to the south-southeast of Yzil, is the island of Hobarookus. Traditionally this has been a haunt of sea bandits and buccaneers. One O’clock being my lunching hour I have many times sought a healthy repast upon this island, and may happily report that whatever fiendish piratical types haunt the island, their presence has not deterred the cooks of Hobarookus from becoming fair geniuses of their craft. I will tell you plainly, there is no better food
to be had at any Hour.
“The topography of the island of Hobarookus is unattractive. It’s mostly rocky, though there are areas of the interior where the ground becomes unpredictably swampy. These areas, which the Hobarookians call the Sinks, are the habitats of kalukwa birds, which species reportedly hatch downy human babies from their eggs every ninth year. These children—if saved from being pecked to death by juveniles of the previous year’s hatching_are often saved by the pirates and raised as their children. This means the island, far from resembling a vile enclave of thieves and murderers, resembles instead an island of wild children watched over fondly by that aforementioned vile enclave of thieves and murderers, like mothers watching over their errant (and occasionally lightly feathered) children.
“At Two lies Orlando’s Cap, which is not an island I know well. An asylum for the insane is located here—so placed because its founder, Izzard Coyne, believed Two in the Afternoon to be an Hour that promotes a healing balm in the soul.
“The island, however, is so ill-favored that it’s hard to imagine those prone to irrationality being much comforted there. The island’s name, by the way, comes from its caplike shape. I can find no evidence of who Orlando was, nor, I suppose, do the sorrowful occupants of the island much care.
“It should be noted, for those interested in either the products of the insane mind or in art (and how often are those things one and the same!), that Coyne’s healing methodologies included allowing his patients the means to create. Thus, scattered across Orlando’s Cap are artifacts that his patients fashioned. Some are of humble ambition, but others seem to be entire fantastic worlds carved from stone or wood and often painted in hallucinatory colors.
“When we look at the way the islands are arranged in the Sea of Izabella, there seems to be a designing hand at work, which conspires with nature to unseat our expectations. Thus close beside the island of Orlando’s Cap, which is a place of dour scenery (albeit enlivened by the creations of Coyne’s patients) there lies the Nonce, which is to my eye the most beautiful of all the islands. How is it that they can be so different from one another, when they are divided by a passage of water so narrow you might skip it with a stone?