Abarat: The First Book of Hours

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 imagine why we’d ever do that.”

“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