“That would be nice. As I said, I think we make a very good team. But it’s your choice. And I think I should warn you that it isn’t always safe being around me. Ever since I arrived in the Abarat, it’s been one thing after another.”

“I won’t let anything happen to you, lady,” Malingo said. “You’re too important.”

Candy laughed. “Me? Important? Malingo, you don’t understand. A few days ago I was a lost schoolgirl from a place called Chickentown.”

“Whatever you were back there, lady, it’s not what you are here. You can make magic…”

“Yes. That is strange,” said Candy, bringing back to mind her strange familiarity with the working of spells. “So many times on this journey I’ve felt as though… I don’t know… almost as though I’d been here before. Yet I know that’s impossible.”

“Maybe it’s in your blood,” Malingo suggested. “Maybe a relative of yours came here, in the distant past?”

“That’s a possibility,” Candy replied.

She pictured the faded photographs lined up on the wall of the Almenak Press: the old jetty of Hark’s Harbor, with its row of stores and the great vessel moored at the quayside. Was it possible that one of the people in that crowd had been a relative of hers?

“Wolfswinkel’s grandfather used to trade with your people all the time. He made a fortune from it.”

“Selling what?”

“Abaratian magic. Copies of Lumeric’s Six. That kind of thing.”

“Surely that must have been forbidden?”

“Oh certainly. He was selling some of the most precious secrets of the Abarat. Anything for profit.”

“Which reminds me,” Candy said. “What was it with the hats? Magic doesn’t always come in the form of headgear, does it?”

Malingo laughed. “No, of course not, it can be in any form: a thought, a word, a fish, even in a glass of water. But you see it was a tradition of the Noncian Magic Circle that you kept most of your power in your hat. I don’t know how it started; probably as a joke. But once it began, it stuck. And then when Wolfswinkel killed all the other magicians and he wanted to transfer their power to something more convenient, he couldn’t. They’d all put their power in the hats when they were a circle, and once the circle was broken—”

“He was stuck with the hats.”

“Exactly.”

“How very undignified for Ol’ Banana Suit.”

“Oh yes, he was in a fine state when he found out. He went crazy for a week.”

“Changing the subject—”

“Yes?”

“Do you have any idea where we are?”

They had entered a patch of dense shadow, cast by mountainous peaks of clouds that were passing overhead. In the sea below them an enormous shoal of fish, possessed of some exquisite luminescence, moved into view. Their brightness seemed to turn the world on its head: light spilling up from below, while darkness was cast down from the sky.

“Where did you intend to take us?” Malingo asked Candy.

“Back to the Yebba Dim Day. I know a man at The Great Head called Samuel Klepp. He could give us some advice about how to—”

Before she could finish speaking, the glyph, which until now had been proceeding forward effortlessly, did a very peculiar thing. It made a sideways motion, as though something was tugging on it. For a moment it zigzagged wildly, and Candy had to use all her willpower to stop it from veering off in another direction.

She finally brought it back on course, but the swerve had unnerved her.

“What was that?” she said. “Is the glyph deteriorating?”

Malingo slapped the side of the vehicle with the flat of his hand. “I don’t think so,” he said. “It feels solid enough.”

“Then, what—oh no, Malingo, it’s happening again!”

The glyph veered a second time, much more violently than it had the first, and for a moment it seemed that they were about to be pitched into the sea. Malingo slid from his seat, and would have fallen had Candy not caught hold of him at the last possible moment and hauled him back to safety.

The glyph, meanwhile, was gathering speed. It seemed to have elected a new destination and was simply racing toward it, all previous instructions forgotten. All Candy and Malingo could do was hang on for dear life.

“Can’t you slow it down?” Malingo yelled to Candy over the rushing of the wind.

“I’m trying!” she hollered. “But it doesn’t want to listen to me. Something’s got hold of us, Malingo!”

She glanced over at her companion, who had an expression of raw astonishment on his face.

“What?” she said.

“Look.” His awed voice was so low she didn’t hear the word; she only saw its shape replied on his lips. She saw too the shape of the words that followed:

“The Twenty-Fifth Hour,” he said.

Candy looked up.

Straight ahead of the hurtling glyph was the vast column of spiraling cloud that Samuel Klepp had pointed out to her. It was indeed the Twenty-Fifth Hour, the Time Out of Time.

“Something in there must be pulling us,” Candy yelled.

“But what?” said Malingo. “And why?”

Candy shook her head. “I guess we’re going to find out very soon,” she said.

There was no doubt of that. The vehicle was moving so fast that the sea and sky were virtually a blur. Candy had relinquished all mental control over the vehicle. There was no purpose in wasting energy fighting a power so much greater than her own.

But as the glyph rushed toward the cloud she could not help but remember the stories she’d been told about the travelers who had entered the Time Out of Time. Most had never returned, Klepp had told her. And those who had come out of the cloud had returned crazy. Not a happy thought.

“Maybe we should throw ourselves out?” she yelled to Malingo over the whistling of the wind.

“At this speed?” he yelled back. “It would be the death of us!”

He was probably right. But then what would happen when they hit the wall of cloud that concealed the wonders—or the terrors—of the Twenty-Fifth Hour? Wouldn’t that be equally suicidal?

And then—all in one sudden moment—it became too late to pitch themselves out.

The glyph threw itself over and over, three hundred and sixty degrees, flipping so fast its passengers remained in their seats. Candy heard poor Malingo yelling in mortal terror beside her, then all the sounds that were filling her head—Malingo’s cries, the rushing of the wind, the crash of the glyph as it came to a violent halt—all of them disappeared.

She was plunged into a sudden and absolute silence, and a darkness just as sudden, just as absolute.

She couldn’t feel the glyph beneath her; nor, when she reached out, could she feel Malingo at her side. She seemed to be floating in blank space, her body removed from all physical contact.

Then, of all things, she heard rain.

It was distant, but it was reassuringly real. Whatever this lightless place was, it rained here. Seconds later another sound came to find her. No, not one sound, two.

Two heartbeats.

Somebody was here in the darkness with her. And whoever it was, they were very close.

She tried to shape a question, a simple: “Who’s there?” But for some reason her mouth wouldn’t obey the instruction. All she could do was wait and listen, while the twinned hearts beat on, and the downpour continued.

For some reason she wasn’t afraid. There was something reassuring about the mingling of heartbeats and rain.

And finally, there came a third sound. The last sound she expected to hear in this mysterious place: her mother’s voice.

“Please don’t be long, Bill,” Melissa Quackenbush said. “I can’t wait long.”

Her voice sounded remote from Candy, dulled not by distance but by something placed between them. A wall of some kind.

“Did you hear me, honey? I don’t like being here on my own.”

Here? Candy thought. What did her mother mean by that? Was Melissa Quackenbush in the Twenty-Fifth Hour with her? Surely not. Besides, there was something about the way her mother sounded that made Candy think that it was a younger woman who was speaking. It wasn’t the tired, sad woman she’d last seen making meatloaf in the kitchen in Followell Street. How long, for instance, had it been since she’d heard her mother call her father honey? Years.