Abarat
A dazzling fantasy adventure for all ages, the first of a quartet.Abarat: an archipelago of amazement and wonder. A land made up of twenty-five islands, each one representing one hour of the day, each one a unique place of adventure and danger (and one mysterious place out of time), all ruled over by the evil Christopher Carrion, Lord of Midnight, and his monstrous grandmother, Mater Motley.Candy Quackenbush, a 16-year old from Chickentown, Minnesota, crosses by accident from our world into Abarat, and discovers she has been there many, many times before. She has friends there and she has enemies. As Candy makes her journey between all the islands of the archipelago, she will discover a plot by Christopher Carrion to block out the Sun, Moon and stars to achieve a condition of Permanent Midnight. In order to prevent this disaster, Candy must find the courage to confront the Lord of Midnight; and in doing so come to know who she really is: a revelation which will transform her own understanding of her place in the epic events.The first book of Abarat is a spellbinding adventure for all ages, combining the heartstopping tension of a thriller with the powerful charm of the most enduring fable. And beneath all, it possesses the quicksilver imagination of one of the finest writers at work today. The four books of Abarat have been rightly called Clive Barker’s Narnia, his Wonderland. A sumptuous treat that will capture the imaginations of adults and children alike.
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CLIVE BARKER
Abarat
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in 2002
Copyright © 2002 by Clive Barker
Clive Barker asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006513704
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2009 ISBN: 9780007301690
Version: 2017-11-02
“Above all, this is a deeply lovely catalogue of the strange. Islands carved into colossal heads, giant moths made of coloured ether, words that turn into aeroplanes, tentacled maggot-monsters: they dance past like a carnival, a true surrender to the weird.”
Guardian
“Always creating and always pushing into the farthest reaches of the human mind, [Barker] is an artist in every sense of the word. He is the great imaginer of our time.”
QUENTIN TARANTINO
“Clive Barker is a magician of the first order”
New York Daily News
“Keeps you effortlessly turning the pages”
New York Times Magazine
“A blend of Alice in Wonderland and The Lion, The Witchand the Wardrobe”
Entertainment Weekly
“Clever, but oh so creepy”
People
To Emilian David Armstrong
I dreamed a limitless book,
A book unbound,
Its leaves scattered in fantastic abundance.
On every line there was a new horizon drawn,
New heavens supposed;
New states, new souls.
One of those souls,
Dozing through some imagined afternoon,
Dreamed these words.
And needing a hand to set them down,
Made mine.
C. B.
CONTENTS
2. What Henry Murkitt Left Behind;
20. The World Through Borrowed Eyes
27. Words with the Criss-Cross Man
Appendix: Some Excerpts From Klepp’s Almenak
PART ONE: Freaks, Fools And Fujitives
Three is the number of those who do holy work;Two is the number of those who do lover’s work;One is the number of those who do perfect evilOr perfect good.
—From the notes of a monk
of the Order of St. Oco;
his name unknown
THE STORM CAME UP out of the southwest like a fiend, stalking its prey on legs of lightning.
The wind it brought with it was as foul as the devil’s own breath and it stirred up the peaceful waters of the sea. By the time the little red boat that the three women had chosen for their perilous voyage had emerged from the shelter of the islands, and was out in the open waters, the waves were as steep as cliffs, twenty-five, thirty feet tall.
“Somebody sent this storm,” said Joephi, who was doing her best to steer the boat, which was called TheLyre. The sail shook like a leaf in a tempest, swinging back and forth wildly, nearly impossible to hold down. “I swear, Diamanda, this is no natural storm!”
Diamanda, the oldest of the three women, sat in the center of the tiny vessel with her dark blue robes gathered around her and their precious cargo pressed to her bosom.
“Let’s not get hysterical,” she told Joephi and Mespa. She wiped a long piece of white hair out of her eyes. “Nobody saw us leave the Palace of Bowers. We escaped unseen, I’m certain of it.”
“So why this storm?” said Mespa, who was a black woman, renowned for her resilience, but who now looked close to being washed away by the rain beating down on the women’s heads.
“Why are you so surprised that the heavens complain?” Diamanda said. “Didn’t we know the world would be turned upside down by what just happened?”
