"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 werewavescoming, 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. Iwon'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 herownweight 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 gray points, like the arrowheads she'd found sometimes lying in the long grass as a child.
That was the last thought that passed through her head before unconsciousness overtook her: Shape had a mouthful of chiseled arrowheads—
Then she seemed to feel the world crack beneath her and his hand slid off her throat as the platform folded up beneath them. There was a great eruption of splintered wood and a shout of alarm from Shape. His hand slipped off her neck. And suddenly she was falling through the broken platform, dropping to the ground in a rain of broken planks.
Had she been conscious when she fell, she would have done herself very considerable damage. But luckily she passed out as she fell, and thus landed with every muscle in her body relaxed.
And there she lay, lost to the world, sprawled in the grass at the foot of the lighthouse, while the waters of the Sea of Izabella came rolling in to meet their summoning light.
8. A MOMENT WITH MELISSA
S everal miles away from the place where her daughter lay unconscious in the grass, Melissa Quackenbush was out in the backyard of 34 Followell Street, cleaning the barbecue after work. It was a task she hated: scraping pieces of burned-to-charcoal chicken meat off the grill, while the armies of ants that had been devouring the remains scattered in all directions.
Of course, it was always her job, never her husband's. The Lump, she called him behind his back, and not fondly. Right now he was sitting inside, slumped in front of some game show that he was only half watching through a haze of beer. In the early days after his being laid off, his lack of motivation to get up and find himself a new job had angered her. But now she was resigned to it, just as she was resigned to scraping off the remains of last week's barbecue from the grill. It was her life.