“They’ve all been very kind to me,” Candy confirmed. “Nobody’s laid a finger on me.”

The Johns were not convinced. They were all exchanging fiercely suspicious glances.

“If it was a joke,” John Drowze said fiercely, “then it was an extremely asinine joke.”

“I would have drowned without their help,” Candy said, attempting to cool the situation down. “I swear. I was starting to panic.”

“But you’re right,” Pux said. “It was an imbecilic stupid joke. So, please, in the name of peace let us carry you both to the Abarat. The Izabella can be rough, and we would not wish to see two such significant personages drown.”

“You would carry us?” said John Mischief, smiling his unruly smile. “Truly?”

“Truly,” said Tropella. “It’s the least we can do.”

It certainly sounded like a good idea to Candy. Despite the fact that she’d done as John Mischief had suggested, and relied on Mama Izabella to bear her up, she was still extremely tired. The icy water and the pummeling of the waves—not to mention the pursuits that had preceded this aquatic adventure—had taken their toll.

“What do you think?” Candy said to the Johns. “Should we accept the ride?”

“I think it’s up to you,” Mischief said.

“Good,” Candy said. “Then I say yes?

“Yes?” Pux said to Mischief.

“If the lady says yes, then yes it is,” Mischief replied.

“Splendid,” said the fourth card player. “I’m Kocono, by the way. And I just want to say what a delight it is to meet Mr. Mischief. Tropella was right, we don’t care about the law of the land. So they say you’re a criminal, so what? You’re a master. That’s what counts.”

The Johns erupted into a chaotic din of denials and explanations at Kocono’s little speech. Candy only caught fragments of their defenses in the uproar, but they sounded distinctly contradictory. She was very amused.

“Is it true?” she said, laughing, as the protestations grew wilder. “Are you all master criminals?”

“Put it this way…” John Slop began.

“Be careful now,” John Moot warned his brother.

“We’re not saints.”

“So it is true,” Candy replied.

Mischief nodded. “It’s true,” he conceded. “You’re in the company of eight world-class thieves,” he said, not without a little touch of pride. “Saints we are not.”

“But then,” said Deaux-Deaux, “who is?” He thought on this. “Besides saints.”

With this matter settled, Candy and Mischief were each lifted up between two of the Sea-Skippers, their legs propped up on the creature skipping ahead of them, and supported by those skipping behind. If it wasn’t the most comfortable way to travel, it was certainly preferable to being immersed in the cold water, in fear of drowning or being nibbled at by Great Green Mantizacs.

“Which island are you going to?” Pux asked Candy.

“I don’t know,” she replied. “This is my first visit.”

The Sea-Skippers looked at the Johns for an answer.

It was John Drowze who replied. “I say we go to the Yebba Dim Day, in the Straits of Dusk.”

There was a general consensus from the brothers.

“TheYebba Dim Day it is,” Kocono announced.

“Wait,” Candy said. “Don’t forget your table.”

“Oh, Mizza will find her own way home,” Kocono said. “Mizza!”

A head with large, rather woebegone features—and a square cranium almost as flat as the shell on which the Sea-Skippers’ cards and liquor glass still stood—appeared from the water.

“You want me to wait for you at Tazmagor?” the creature said.

“Yes, please,” said Kocono.

“It was nice playing on you,” Deaux-Deaux said. “As always.”

“Oh, think nothing of it,” the Card Table replied, and paddled off through the swell.

Candy shook her head. For some reason, out of the back of her skull came the memory of her beloved uncle Fred, her mother’s elder brother, who’d worked in a zoo in Chicago, cleaning up after the animals. Once, he’d been taking her around the place, pointing out his favorite animals, who were all oddities. The two-toed sloths, the anteaters, the mules.

“If you ever doubted that God had a sense of humor, all you’d have to do is look at some of these guys,” he’d remarked.

Candy smiled to herself, picturing Uncle Fred’s round, bald face as he looked fondly down at her. No doubt the sight of Mizza the Floating Card Table would have had him laughing until the tears trickled down his face.

“What are you smiling at, lady?” Mischief asked Candy.

But before she had a chance to explain, the Sea-Skippers took off at a breath-snatching speed, and they were on their way to the Yebba Dim Day.

It was a bizarre journey for Candy. For John Mischief too, she suspected. Even though the noise of the sea and the slap of the Sea-Skippers’ feet on the waters prevented them from conversing, Mischief and his brothers would occasionally erupt in laughter, as though they were revisiting their recent adventures and were suddenly hugely amused by the fact that it was ending in this comfortable but faintly absurd fashion.

For her part, Candy found the rhythm of the travel quite relaxing after a while and was so lulled that she let her eyes close. Sleep quickly overtook her strangely fatigued body. When she opened her eyes, an hour and twenty minutes later, according to her watch, the sky was darkening overhead.

She was by habit a great sky watcher, and she knew the names of many of the stars and constellations. But though a sprinkling of stars had appeared as the darkness deepened, she found she could recognize none of the configurations ranged above her. At first she assumed she was simply looking at the sky from a different angle, and so was failing to recognize what was in fact a perfectly obvious constellation. But as she continued to study the heavens as they darkened to night (an unnatural night, by Minnesotan standards: it was barely two in the afternoon), she realized that she was not mistaken. There were no recognizable arrangements of stars up there.

This was not the same heaven that hung over Minnesota.

For some reason she found this much more disquieting than the fact of the Sea of Izabella appearing from nowhere, or the prospect of some hitherto unvisited archipelago of islands awaiting her somewhere ahead.

She had assumed (naively, perhaps) that at least the stars would be constant. After all, hadn’t the same stars she knew by name hung over all the other fantastic worlds that had existed on earth? Over Atlantis, over El Dorado, over Avalon? How could something so eternal, so immutable, be so altered?

It distressed her, and yes, it made her a little afraid of what lay ahead. Apparently the Abarat wasn’t just another part of the planet she knew, simply hidden from the sight of ordinary eyes. It was a different world entirely. Perhaps it had different religions, different ideas about good and evil, about what was real and what wasn’t.

But it was too late to turn her back on all of this. After all, something here had called her, hadn’t it? Wasn’t that why she’d been drawing on her workbook the same design she’d found on the ball in the lighthouse: because for some urgent reason the ball had been sending out a portion of its power (a power to summon seas), and her mind had been ready to receive it? She’d done so without any conscious thought: drawn, and redrawn the design in a dreamy state. She’d even walked away from the principal’s office without giving what she was doing any deep thought, simply going where her feet and her instincts had led her.

Though this all had looked accidental at the time, perhaps none of it was. Perhaps, as Tropella had said, Candy had business in the Abarat. Was it possible?

She was just a schoolgirl from Chickentown. What business could she have in a world she hadn’t even seen?