It was just before noon in Minnesota; even with a thin cloud layer covering the sun, the day was still bright. But the light that now began to spill through the hieroglyphics on the spinning pyramid was brighter still. They were brilliant streams, pouring out in all directions.
She heard a soft, almost mournful, noise from Mendelson Shape. She glanced over at him. He was staring at the device with all the malice, all the intent to do harm, drained from his face. He was apparently resigned to whatever happened next. He could do nothing about the phenomenon except watch it.
“Now look what you’ve done,” he said, very, very softly.
“What exactly have I done?” she said.
“See for yourself,” he replied, and for a moment he unhooked his gaze from the spinning pyramid so as to nod out at the world, beyond the lighthouse.
She didn’t have any fear of turning her back on him now. At least until this miraculous process was over, it seemed, he was pacified.
She went to the door and stepped out, over the hole she’d made, to stand on the platform and see what she, and the game of ball and cup, had brought into being.
The first thing she noticed was the blossom-cloud. It was no longer moving slowly, responding to the gentle dictates of the wind. It was moving speedily overhead, like an immense golden wheel with the tower in which she stood as its axis.
She stood and admired the sight for a few moments, amazed at it. Then she looked down at the John brothers, who had turned their faces from the tower and were all looking out across the wide expanse of open prairie. What were they looking at? she wondered. She knew there was nothing out there for many miles, not so much as a house. For some reason, though the suburbs of Chickentown had spread in every other direction from the heart of the town, they had never spread northwest beyond Widow White’s house. This was empty land; unused, unwanted.
And yet, there was something out there that John Mischief and his siblings wanted to see. Mischief was cupping his hands over his eyes as he stared into the faraway.
Candy could feel the light from the pyramid like a physical presence, pressing against her back. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation. In fact, it was quite pleasurable. She imagined that she could sense the power of the light passing through her body, lending her its strength. She seemed to feel it being carried through her veins, spilling out of her pores and out on her breath. It was just a trick her mind was playing, she suspected. But then, perhaps not. Today she couldn’t be certain of anything.
Behind her, Mendelson Shape let out a plaintive moan, and a moment later, eight throats loosed a chorus of shouts from below.
“What is it?” she called down to them.
“Look, lady! Look!”
She looked, following the brothers’ collective gaze, and all that she’d seen today—all, in fact, that she’d ever seen in her life up to this extraordinary moment— became a kind of overture: and the astonishments began.
There, in the distance, approaching over the rock and grass of Minnesota, rolling out of nowhere, there came a glittering sea.
Candy’s eyes had always been good (nobody in her family wore glasses); she knew her gaze didn’t deceive her. There were waves coming, foaming as they rolled and broke and rolled again.
Now she knew what she’d done up in the tower. She had called this sea out of the air, and like a dog answering the summons of its master, the waters were coming.
“You did it!” Mischief was hollering, jumping up and down and twisting full circle in the air. “You did it, lady! Oh, look! Look!” He turned to stare up at her, his tears of bliss pouring down his face. “You see the waters?”
“I see them!” she shouted down to him, smiling at his joy. Then more quietly, she said: “Murkitt was right.”
The grasslands were still visible beneath the approaching tide, but the closer the sea came, the less solid the real world appeared to be, and the more the power of the waves took precedence.
It wasn’t just her sight that confirmed the reality of the approaching tide. She could smell the tang of the salt water on the wind; she could hear the draw and boom of the waves as they came closer, eroding the world she’d thought until now was the only one that existed, drowning it beneath the surf.
“It’s called the Sea of Izabella …” Mendelson Shape said behind her. Did she hear yearning in his voice? She thought she did.
“That’s where you come from?”
“Not from the sea. From the islands. From the Abarat.”
“Abarat?”
The word was completely foreign to her, but he spoke of it so confidently, how could she believe it did not exist?
The Islands of the Abarat.
“But you’ll never see them,” Shape said, the expression on his face losing its dreaminess, becoming threatening again. “The Abarat isn’t for human eyes. You belong in this world, the Hereafter. I won’t let you go into the water. I won’t, you hear me?”
The brief moment of gentility had apparently passed. He was once again his old, savage self. He pulled himself to his feet, blood running freely from the wound Mischief had made in his leg, and started toward her—
Candy took a stumbling step backward, out of the door onto the broken platform. The wind had suddenly become chillier and stronger, its gusts carrying drops of moisture against her face. It wasn’t rain that the wind carried, it was flecks of sea surf. She could taste their salt on her lips.
“Mischief!” she yelled, taking a careful step back over the hole in the platform, and grabbing hold of the iron railing to keep herself from slipping.
Shape was ducking through the door, his arms so long he was able to reach over the hole. One hand snatched hold of her belt with his fingers, his nails slicing the fabric of her blouse. The other went up to her throat, which it immediately encircled.
She attempted to call for Mischief a second time, and at the same time tried to turn and look for him. But she could do neither. Shape had too tight a stranglehold upon her. She tried again to call out, but seeing what she was attempting to do, Shape tightened his grip still further, till tears of pain sprang into Candy’s eyes and blotches of whiteness appeared at the corners of her vision.
Desperate now, she reached up and grabbed at his vast hand, trying to tear it away from her throat. She was going to pass out very quickly if she couldn’t get him to loosen his grip. But she didn’t have the strength to pry so much as a single finger loose. And now the whiteness was spreading, threatening to blot out the world.
She had one tiny hope. As the incident on the stairs had proved, the tower’s rotting structure wasn’t strong enough to support a creature of Shape’s size and weight. If she could just pull him out from the doorway onto the boards of the platform, which her own weight had cracked, then maybe there was a chance that the boards would collapse beneath him, as the stairs had.
She knew she had seconds, at best, to do something to save herself. His grip was like a vise, steadily closing. Her head was throbbing as though it was going to explode.
She grabbed hold of the railing again, and inched her way along it, in the hope of pulling him after her, but even that was a lost cause. Her body was almost drained of strength.
She looked into Shape’s face as he continued to tighten his grasp on her neck. He was grinning with satisfaction, his eyes reflecting the bright waters that were assembling behind her; his teeth a grotesque parade of