Abarat

There was a dark energy that flickered in the delicate veins of her face and hands.

The women who stood to the right and left of her were somewhat younger than the old lady, but there was nothing fixed about any of the trio. Their faces, despite the welcoming expressions they offered Candy, seemed to be full of subtle hints of transformation.

The youngest of the three—her black hair cropped to her skull—carried a glimpse of something feral in an otherwise benign expression, a beast that was just out of sight behind her lovely bones. The other woman, who was black, had the strangest gaze of the three. When her long hair—which was filled with hints of bright color— parted and showed Candy her eyes, they had the glory of a night sky in them.

So there they were, three protean souls: one carrying lightning, one carrying sky, one touched with wilderness.

Candy felt no fear in the presence of these three: just mystification. By now, of course, she was used to experiencing that particular feeling here in the Abarat. And she'd learned what she should do in the face of mystery. She would watch and listen. The answers to her questions would probably make themselves apparent, after a time. And if they didn't , then she wasn't meant to know those answers. She'd learned that too.

The women now started to identify themselves. 'I'm Diamanda ,' said the old woman. 'I'm Joephi ,' said the wild one.

'And I'm Mespa ,' said the one with the night sky in her eyes. 'We are Sisters of the Fantomaya,' said Diamanda.

'The Fantomaya?'

'Ssh! Keep jour voice down ,' said Joephi, though it hadn't seemed to Candy that she'd spoken any more loudly than the other three. 'By law we shouldn't have brought you into the Twenty-Fifth. But one day you'll be coming here with work to do of your own. Great work —'

'So we felt you should get a taste of it —'said Mespa.

'That way' said Diamanda, 'when you come back you'll be prepared. You'll know what it's like .'

'You sound very certain that I'm coming back,' Candy said.

'We are,' Diamanda said. 'You will have things to do here, in the future—'

'If we are reading the future right,' said Mespa. 'Sometimes it's hard to be sure.'

Now Candy thought about it, the idea didn't seem so very unlikely. If the Twenty-Fifth Hour had let her in once, then why not again, when she better understood who she was, and what purpose she had in this strange world?

'I want to see more of this place,' Candy said, staring into the darkness that surrounded them.

'Do you indeed?' said Mespa.

'Yes.'

The three women exchanged tentative looks, as though to say, are we ready to do this, or not?

It appeared that they were, because the air suddenly quickened with life around Candy, and in it, like tiny silver fish being carried in a fast-flowing river, she saw glimpses of extraordinary things. At first the images moved past her so fast she could make only the most rudimentary sense of them: a white tower, a field of yellow blossom, a chair sitting on the blue roof of a house, and a man in gold sitting upon it. But as her eyes grew accustomed to the way the shoal of pictures were flowing past her, she in her turn became more able to snatch hold of one for a few moments; like a hot coin, caught in the palm of her hand, that she had time to turn over and examine on both sides before the discomfort obliged her to let it go.

And there was an undeniable discomfort in seeing many of these images. They were so powerful, their shapes and their colors so full of strangeness that it hurt her head to catch them and hold them, even for a moment.

It wasn't just the intensity of each image that ached, it was the fact that there were so many of them. For every coin that she caught and flipped, there were a thousand, no ten thousand, that tumbled by, glittering and unexamined.

What did she see?

A woman walking upside down, fish in the sky above her, birds at her feet.

A man standing in a moonlit wasteland, his head flowering like an oasis of thoughts.

A city of red towers, under a sky filled with falling stars; another city, made in perfect miniature, and raised up on legs, with a blue bird—surely vast, even monstrous, to the city's inhabitants— wheeling overhead.

A grotesque mask singing as it floated in midair; a creature the size of a lion, with the head of a human being, vast and bearded, sitting on the lip of a volcano. A shore of some tropical island, with a tiny red boat in the bay, and a single star hanging over the horizon.

And so on. And on. And on. The images kept flying.

Sometimes there would be a sound attached to the scene, though it didn't always seem to fit, as though— just like lightning preceding thunder—the images came more quickly than the sounds, so that they were out of step with one another. Sometimes she glimpsed things that she recognized, albeit briefly. The Yebba Dim Day, rising from the misty waters of the Straits of Dusk. The Gilholly Bridge being crossed by an army of people with bright white fire springing from their heads. Even Ninnyhammer, in the midst of a storm so violent that its young trees were being plucked from the earth and carried away.

At last—just as the flow of images came close to overwhelming her—the shoal of fish began to thin out, and between the occasional flash of strangeness, the relatively reassuring vision of Diamanda, Joephi and Mespa began to reappear.

Candy was left breathless.

'What… ?' she gasped.

'What was all that ?' Mespa said.

'Yes.'

It was Diamanda who replied.

'An infinitesimally small piece of a tiny fragment of a virtually invisible fraction of what is here at Odom's Spire. The past and the present-past and the future-present. They're all in this place, you see. Every particular of every thing in every moment of forever.'

'And you?'

'The Fantomaya?'

'Yes. What do you do with the images?'

'We study them. We immerse ourselves in them. We protect them.'

'From who?' said Candy.

'From any and all. These are not things a common soul needs to see.'

Candy laughed.

'What's so funny?' said Joephi.

'Well… aren't I a common soul?' said Candy.

'Good question' said Diamanda. 'The fact is you are many things, my dear. Many, many things. One of them is Candy Quackenbush of the town of Murkitt —'

'You mean Chickentown?'

'Oh. Yes, of course. I mean Chickentown. Back when I was there, it was called after my