Клайв Баркер - Abarat

"At Seven lies Autland , which is joined to Efreet by the Gilholly Bridge. There is a palace on Autland, built for Queen Muzzel McCray, to a design that appeared to her in a dream, or so local legend dictates. The Queen's husband was a creature called Nimbus, Lord of the tarrie-cats. He still lives in McCray's Palace, inside the dream—so to speak—of the woman he loved.

"Just a few islands remain to be described. At Eight O'clock , as the day brightens, stands Obadiah , an island of extraordinary flora. Here a visitor will find strange and sometimes aggressive plants growing in virtually inexhaustible profusion. Some have called Obadiah the Elegiac's Garden, and suggested it may have been a kind of laboratory in which the mythic Creators of Abarat, A'zo and Cha, experimented with life-forms. Some even claim to have seen the one-eyed A'zo wandering the plant thronged slopes of Obadiah, his presence causing the flowers to open long dormant eyes and reach toward him as if to catch his gaze and share some secret of the earth.

"At Nine in the– Morning we arrive at the island of Qualm Hah . It is a puzzling place to explore, because it has two distinct faces. At the western edge of the island stands the busy seaport of Tazmagor , where the food is good, the people happy and the air filled with the din of extemporized songs. (Tazmagorians hold festivals regularly, in which competitors create epic songs on the spot, from subjects chosen by the crowd. Its reigning champion is one Sally Sullywart, who at the last festival beguiled the audience with a nine-minute song on the subject of fish gutting.)

"Outside the bounds of Tazmagor, toward the eastern end of the island, the land is empty. Nobody builds there; not so much as a shack. This is peculiar, given how crowded Tazmagor has become of late. But nobody I spoke to would tell me why.

"Onward, then, to Spake , which is an island I always take the greatest pleasure in visiting. It is a splendid, green place, with many cypress trees on its lower slopes. On its heights, above the trees, stands a simple stage, which has been used for performances of every kind circuses, slapsticks and High Tragedy since the beginning of known time.

"It may seem curious to a visitor that a drama would he performed in the open, at Ten in the Morning. But in fact the actors who first performed here, Norta Geese and Arlo Godkin, chose well. By a strange miracle of the island's location, Geese and Godkin's Theater is every three days shrouded in a mist that blows from the southeast, and surrounds the hill in a dark blanket. Tiny flameslike the sloughings of stars—litter this dark fog, and magically illuminate the dramas that are performed on the heights of the hill.

"Onward, then, to Nully , at Eleven . Topographically speaking, the island merits little study, but it is the location of one of the Abarat's most extraordinary buildings: the Repository of Remembrance . From the outside the Repository is a large but commonplace building. Inside, however, it is anything but commonplace. Its rooms (which number over a hundred) are filled to capacity with objects that were once loved by the mighty. The toys of emperors, the rag dolls of queens; the stuffed crocodile which the great warrior Duke Lutherid of Skant was devoted to in his old age; the seventeen thousand porcelain mice Prince Drudru played with as a child. Room after room, cabinet after cabinet, shelf after shelf: the Repository is filled with bric-a-brac loved to distraction by people whose devotion at times suggests a touch of madness.

"I have described some twenty-four Hours and twenty-four islands, plus, of course, the occasional Rock. Only the Twenty-Fifth Island remains to be described, though I know already that its mysteries will outwit my pen in a heartbeat. I will therefore keep my description simple.

"The Twenty-Fifth Hour lies at the center of the archipelago. It is called, among other things, Whence and Lud and the House of the Fantomaya. But it is most frequently referred to as Odom's Spire . When it comes to the history and purpose of the island's spireor to an evocation of its undeniably sentient mists, or the strange music the Sea of Izabella makes when she breaks upon its shores, utterly unlike any other sound her waters make, breaking on sand or stone all this is beyond me. No doubt the claims of the Righteous Bandy (a criminal who ended up on the shores of the Twenty-Fifth by chance, and who escaped a poet) are correct. 'Every mystery of the Abarat,' he said, 'has its solution here; every enchantment its source, every prayer its destination."

"Beyond that neither he, nor I, can say much more. There are no books about the Spire, for no writer that I know of—except Bandy—has gone there and returned. There are, however, innumerable paintings, though not one of them resembles any other. Odom's Spire, it seems, possesses a very particular glamor: no two witnesses, sailing past it, will see quite the same sight. What this may indicate about the nature of the island's interior may only be imagined."

Here, then, is a brief taste of Klepp'sAlmenak . As noted at the beginning of this Appendix, the information offered here should not be taken as definitive, but may be usefully consulted both by those who wish to explore the Abarat on foot, and those braver adventurers who wish instead to close their eyes and dream their voyages.

S. H. K.