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      “A song about the sad things in the world,” he’d told her, his voice tinged with a little of his Irish roots. “Lovers parted, and ships lost at sea, and the world full of loneliness from one end to the other.”

      “Why’d you want to sing about sad things?” Candy had asked him.

      “Because any fool can be happy,” he’d said to her. “It takes a man with real heart”—he’d made a fist and laid it against his chest—“to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”

      “I still don’t understand…”

      Grandpappy O’Donnell had cupped her face in his big, scarred hands. He’d worked on the railroad most of his life, and every scar had a story. “No, of course you don’t,” he said with an indulgent smile. “And why should you? A sweet slip of a girl like you, why should you have to know anything about the sorrow of the world? You just believe me when I tell you…there’s no way to live your life to the full and not have a reason to shed a tear now and again. It’s not a bad feeling, child. That’s what a lament does. It makes you feel happy to be sad, in a strange way. D’you see?”

      She hadn’t seen. Not really. The idea that sadness could somehow make you feel good was a hard idea to fathom.

      But now she was beginning to understand. Abarat was changing her. In the brief time she’d been traveling among the Hours, she’d seen and felt things she would never have experienced in Chickentown, not if she’d lived there a thousand years. The way the stars seemed to move when a traveler passed over the boundary between one Hour and the next, and whole constellations fell slowly out of the sky; or when the moon, falling brightly on the sea, called up slow processions of fish from the purple-blue deeps of the Izabella, all showing their sad silver eyes to the sky before they turned and disappeared into the darkness again.

      Sometimes just a face she passed by, or a glance someone would give her—even the shadow of a passing bird—would carry a kind of melancholy. Grandpappy O’Donnell would have liked it here, she thought.

      She was close to the edge of the misty trees now, and just a little way ahead of her a pathway began, made of mosaic stones that depicted a pattern of interwoven spirals, winding into the forest. It was a strange coincidence that her feet should have brought her precisely to the spot where this path began, but then her time in the Abarat had been filled with such coincidences; she wasn’t surprised any longer. And so she simply followed the pathway.

      The people who had laid the mosaic had decided to have some fun with the design. Dancing in and out of the spirals were the likenesses of animals—frogs, snakes, a family of creatures that looked like green raccoons—which seemed ready to scamper or slide away as soon as a foot fell too close to them.

      She was so busy studying this witty handiwork that she didn’t realize how far she’d come. The next time she looked up, the beach had gone from sight behind her, and she was entirely surrounded by the immense trees, their canopy alive with all manner of Night birds.

      And still she heard the lament, somewhere off in the distance, rising and falling.

      Beneath her feet the spiral designs of the pathway were getting stranger by the step, the species of creatures that had been woven into the design becoming ever more fantastical, as though to alert her to the fact that her journey was about to change. And now ahead of her she saw the threshold of that change: a massive doorway flanked by elegant pillars stood between the trees.

      Though the hinges were still in place, and the remains of a hefty iron lock lay on the ground, the door itself had been eaten away by some rot or other. Candy stepped inside. The absent door had guarded a building of exceptional beauty. On every side she saw that the walls were decorated with exquisite frescoes, depicting happy, magical scenes: landscapes in which people danced so lightly they seemed to defy gravity and rise into the sky; or where creatures possessed of an unearthly beauty appeared from the cavorting waters of silver rivers.

      Meanwhile the lament continued to play, its melody as bittersweet as ever. She followed the music through the grandiose rooms, every footfall now echoing off the painted stones. The palace had not been left untouched by the forest that surrounded it. The trees, possessed of a feverish fluidity that gave them greater strength than ordinary trees, had pushed through the walls and the ceiling, the mesh of fruit-laden branches so like the intricately carved and painted panels that it was impossible to see where dead wood ended and living began, where paint gave way to leaf and fruit or vice versa. It almost seemed as if the makers of this place, the carvers and the painters, must have known that the forest would invade at last and had designed the palace so that it would swoon without protest into the arms of nature.

      She could almost bring to mind the people who had worked here. It seemed easy to picture their furrowed faces as they labored at their masterpiece; though of course it was impossible that she could really know who they were. How could she remember something she hadn’t witnessed? And yet the images persisted, growing stronger the deeper she traveled into the palace. She saw in her mind’s eye men and women working by the light of floating orbs like little moons, the smell of newly cut timbers and paint freshly mixed sharpening the air.

      “Impossible,” she told herself aloud, just to be clear about this once and for all.

      After a while she realized somebody was keeping pace with her, nimbly moving from shadow to shadow. Now and again she’d catch a tiny glimpse of her pursuer—a flash of its eyes, a blur of what looked like striped fur. Eventually curiosity overcame her. She called out: “Who are you?”

      Surprisingly, she got an immediate guttural reply.

      “The name’s Filth.”

      “Filth?”

      “Yeah. Filth the munkee.”

      Before she could respond, the creature appeared from between the trees and came to stand, bowlegged, in front of her. He was indeed a monkey, as he had claimed, but he had a decidedly human cast to his crooked face. His eyes were slightly crossed, and his wide, preposterous mouth housed an outrageous assortment of teeth, which he showed whenever he smiled, which was often. He was dressed in what looked to be the remnants of an old circus costume: baggy striped pants held up by a rotting belt, an embroidered waistcoat in red, yellow and blue, and a T-shirt on which was written I’M FILTH. The entire ensemble was caked with mud and pieces of rotted food. The smell he gave off was considerably less than fragrant.

      “How did you find your way in here?” he asked Candy.

      “I—I followed the music.”

      “Who are you, anyhow?”

      “Candy Quackenbush.”

      “Daft name.”

      “No dafter than Filth.”

      The ape-man raised a grimy finger and without any preamble put it in his nose, pressing it into his nostril and hooking it around so that the top came out of the other hole. Candy did her best not to look appalled in case it encouraged him.

      “Well, then we’re both daft, aren’t we?” he said, wiggling his finger.

      Candy was no longer able to disguise her revulsion. “Do I disgust you?” he asked her cheerfully.

      “A little,” she admitted.

      The munkee tittered. “The King used to be most СКАЧАТЬ