And now—astonishment upon astonishment—she heard her father’s voice replying.

Like Melissa’s voice, Bill Quackenbush’s speech was muted. But again, it was a gentler, more loving version of her father Candy was now hearing.

“I promise I’ll be quick, sweetheart. You just hold on. I’ll be back in just a few minutes.”

“Maybe I should come with you… “Melissa said.

“In your condition, baby?” Bill Quackenbush replied lovingly. “I don’t think that would be too smart. It’s cold out here. You stay in the car and keep that blanket wrapped up tight around you, and I’ll be back so fast you won’t even know I’ve gone. I love you, Lambkins.”

“I love you too, Nachos.”

Lambkins? Nachos? Candy had never heard her parents exchange pet names, not even when she was very young. Perhaps she’d forgotten, but she doubted it. Lambkins and Nachos she would have remembered. She felt slightly uncomfortable, as though she was spying on a secret part of her mother and father’s life. A part that belonged in some distant Once Upon a Time when they’d both been young and happily in love. Probably before—

“Before I was born,” Candy murmured to herself.

This time, for some reason, her mouth obeyed her instruction, and the words came out.

She even got an answer.

“That’s right,” said a woman, somewhere in the darkness ahead of her. It wasn’t her mother who replied to her. This woman had subtle Abaratian inflections in her words, her tone warm and reassuring. “You haven’t been born yet,” she said to Candy.

“I don’t understand.”

“We just wanted to give you a hint of your past,” said a second woman, her voice slightly lighter than that of the first speaker. “You need to know who you were before you became who you’re going to be.”

“How do you know who I was?” Candy said. “Or who I’m going to be? Who are you, anyway?”

Questions.

Questions.

“Questions.”

A third woman laughed along with the other two, and as they did so there was a gentle blossoming of light in Candy’s vicinity. By it she saw all three women. In the middle of the trio, standing a little closer to Candy than her companions, was a woman who looked to be extraordinarily old. Her face was deeply etched with lines, and her hair—which was woven into navel-length braids—was pure white. But she still carried herself with great elegance, even in her antique phase. Nor did she seem weakened by age.

There was a dark energy that flickered in the delicate veins of her face and hands.

The women who stood to the right and left of her were somewhat younger than the old lady, but there was nothing fixed about any of the trio. Their faces, despite the welcoming expressions they offered Candy, seemed to be full of subtle hints of transformation.

The youngest of the three—her black hair cropped to her skull—carried a glimpse of something feral in an otherwise benign expression, a beast that was just out of sight behind her lovely bones. The other woman, who was black, had the strangest gaze of the three. When her long hair—which was filled with hints of bright color—parted and showed Candy her eyes, they had the glory of a night sky in them.

So there they were, three protean souls: one carrying lightning, one carrying sky, one touched with wilderness.

Candy felt no fear in the presence of these three: just mystification. By now, of course, she was used to experiencing that particular feeling here in the Abarat. And she’d learned what she should do in the face of mystery. She would watch and listen. The answers to her questions would probably make themselves apparent, after a time. And if they didn’t, then she wasn’t meant to know those answers. She’d learned that too.

The women now started to identify themselves. “I’m Diamanda,” said the old woman. “I’m Joephi,” said the wild one.

“And I’m Mespa,” said the one with the night sky in her eyes. “We are Sisters of the Fantomaya,” said Diamanda.

“The Fantomaya?”

“Ssh! Keep jour voice down,” said Joephi, though it hadn’t seemed to Candy that she’d spoken any more loudly than the other three. “By law we shouldn’t have brought you into the Twenty-Fifth. But one day you’ll be coming here with work to do of your own. Great work—”

“So we felt you should get a taste of it—”said Mespa.

“That way” said Diamanda, “when you come back you’ll be prepared. You’ll know what it’s like.”

“You sound very certain that I’m coming back,” Candy said.

“We are,” Diamanda said. “You will have things to do here, in the future—”

“If we are reading the future right,” said Mespa. “Sometimes it’s hard to be sure.”

Now Candy thought about it, the idea didn’t seem so very unlikely. If the Twenty-Fifth Hour had let her in once, then why not again, when she better understood who she was, and what purpose she had in this strange world?

“I want to see more of this place,” Candy said, staring into the darkness that surrounded them.

“Do you indeed?” said Mespa.

“Yes.”

The three women exchanged tentative looks, as though to say, are we ready to do this, or not?

It appeared that they were, because the air suddenly quickened with life around Candy, and in it, like tiny silver fish being carried in a fast-flowing river, she saw glimpses of extraordinary things. At first the images moved past her so fast she could make only the most rudimentary sense of them: a white tower, a field of yellow blossom, a chair sitting on the blue roof of a house, and a man in gold sitting upon it. But as her eyes grew accustomed to the way the shoal of pictures were flowing past her, she in her turn became more able to snatch hold of one for a few moments; like a hot coin, caught in the palm of her hand, that she had time to turn over and examine on both sides before the discomfort obliged her to let it go.

And there was an undeniable discomfort in seeing many of these images. They were so powerful, their shapes and their colors so full of strangeness that it hurt her head to catch them and hold them, even for a moment.

It wasn’t just the intensity of each image that ached, it was the fact that there were so many of them. For every coin that she caught and flipped, there were a thousand, no ten thousand, that tumbled by, glittering and unexamined.

What did she see?

A woman walking upside down, fish in the sky above her, birds at her feet.

A man standing in a moonlit wasteland, his head flowering like an oasis of thoughts.

A city of red towers, under a sky filled with falling stars; another city, made in perfect miniature, and raised up on legs, with a blue bird—surely vast, even monstrous, to the city’s inhabitants—wheeling overhead.

A grotesque mask singing as it floated in midair; a creature the size of a lion, with the head of a human being, vast and bearded, sitting on the lip of a volcano. A shore of some tropical island, with a tiny red boat in the bay, and a single star hanging over the horizon.

And so on. And on. And on. The images kept flying.

Sometimes there would be a sound attached to the scene, though it didn’t always seem to fit, as though—just like lightning preceding thunder—the images came more quickly than the sounds, so that they were out of step with one another. Sometimes she glimpsed things that she recognized, albeit briefly. The Yebba Dim Day, rising from the misty waters of the Straits of Dusk. The Gilholly Bridge being crossed by an army of people with bright white fire springing from their heads. Even Ninnyhammer, in the midst of a storm so violent that its young trees were being plucked from the earth and carried away.