The Escapement

by Lavie Tidhar

  “Trust me,” the Stranger said. “No one here’s a hero.”

  “We just want your cargo,” Loretta said.

  “Shut up, Loretta,” Simone said.

  “What cargo?” the Stranger said. “Substance?”

  “If he talks again, shoot him,” Simone said to Loretta. Loretta looked at the Stranger. He had sad eyes, she thought. The train slowed down as it approached the island. Eduardo pressed the arrow’s tip into the engineer’s back. Everything was going according to plan. At least until the stoker went mad and released the ghosts.

  The man had put down the book he had been reading to the boy and now he sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and his head pulsed with pain. The woman moved around with a distracted air as though she simply could not sit still, and the man winced with the bright daylight and with the sound of cars outside, and each time he heard a horn he winced.

  I couldn’t, he said, I couldn’t stay there anymore.

  I know.

  I had, I had this dream that I could do something, that even now, just sitting here, I should be elsewhere, searching for—

  I know, she said. I know. And then she burst out crying. She cried quietly. The tears just ran down her face and she never made a sound or tried to wipe them away. She kept moving, kept pacing the small kitchen from side to side. He rose to her. He put his hand on her cheek, felt her skin wet with tears.

  There’s nothing, she said, savagely. There’s nothing, there’s nothing, there’s—!

  The Stranger came to with a rush of air. Ghosts kept streaming out of the boiler, mouths open in soundless screams. The cab felt freezing. The stoker was on the floor with an arrow through his chest. The drum of substance had rolled and the crystal dust fell everywhere and the cold flames had latched on to it and filled the whole room. The Kid was on the floor, gasping for air. The train’s windshield was broken and the engineer was holding in vain to the instrument panel and cursing, over and over, in an unknown tongue. The island rushed towards them. Of the banditti, the man who had watched the engineer had been thrown through the windshield and was somehow holding on to the broken glass with bloodied hands before he finally let go and was sucked away into nothingness. The girl who had kept watch over the kid was dead with a bullet in the heart. The man who’d guarded the door was gone, and the only one remaining was the girl, Loretta. He tended to remember someone’s name when they were threatening to kill him.

  Loretta looked frightened. She turned, still holding her crossbow, from him to the Kid and back again. “Step back!”

  “What are you looking for, on the train?” the Stranger said again.

  “I don’t know!”

  “Is it the substance?”

  “I don’t know!”

  The Kid got up. The engineer cursed as the train hit the switch on the island and shifted to the loop, slowing down.

  “Don’t brake!” the Stranger said.

  The engineer mumbled something unintelligible.

  “What?”

  “I can’t shift her back!” the engineer said. “There’s a—” He subsided again into furious muttering.

  The Stranger stared out of the windshield. The dark and desolate landscape of the island gave nothing away. The lake gloamed all around them, trapping them in, looping in on themselves. He pointed his gun at the girl and cocked the hammer.

  “Tell me what you are looking for,” he said.

  An explosion tore through the night. The caretaker’s hut was a ball of flame, and the fire snatched at the starlight, casting an eerie glow as the flames danced in a wild tarantella. The Stranger saw a small, lithe figure leap, impossibly, into the air, with unwholesome grace, and then the man was through the broken windshield and inside the cabin with them.

  “Carl!” Loretta said. The Kid trained his gun on the man, who was unarmed. Carl smiled faintly at the Stranger.

  “The Dumuzi Device,” he said.

  Loretta stared at them all helplessly. She knew Carl, knew what he was capable of. He’d once tossed her against the wall with a contemptuous casualness when she’d dared ask for a break from the endless practice, and she’d broken her funny bone in two places.

  A terrible fear squeezed her insides. The others were talking, they thought they had control of the situation. She wanted off the train. She longed to escape, to go anywhere but there. Even, she thought with a shudder, to that other place.

  “What?” the Stranger said. He seemed so slow and dim-witted then. It was happening, she could feel it.

  “A chthonic bomb,” Carl said, carelessly. It was the way he did all things. It was how the others ended up dead, she realised, Eduardo and Simone. Because he never cared, they were all just tokens to him.

  “It’s a large piece of materiel. We have reason to believe it is on this train.”

  “What does it . . . do?” the Kid said.

  Carl shrugged. He brought his hands together, then spread them wide, in slow motion.

  “. . . oh.”

  The train kept going round and round the island. The caretaker’s hut burned bright. It was coming, she could feel it. The Stranger said, “It looks like your plan didn’t work.”

  “How so?” Carl said.

  “Your people are dead. You’re outnumbered. It’s just you, and the girl over there.”

  “Loretta,” she said. “My name is Loretta!”

  But they didn’t listen to her. They were so arrogant, the men. With their useless guns and the casual way they pointed them about, like it didn’t matter! She could hear it, then, that awful laugh from far away, crazed and inhuman and big, so big.

  It was too late.

  They heard it too, now. That scrawny kid and the man who thought he was in charge of things. He said, “What is that?”’

  “But that is it, don’t you see?” Carl said. “You had it all wrong, stranger. It isn’t just me, and Loretta. It’s so much more than us, than any of us. They need it. They need the Dumuzi Device.”

  “Listen to me,” Loretta said. “Listen to me, you have to get out of here, you have to get off the island!”

  But they were so slow, so much without grace. They moved so stiffly. Their faces stupid with incomprehension. She looked out of the windshield and then she saw it.

  It was coming, at last.

  The Colossus.

  From high above the lake, from the pitiless gaze of a Colossus, they all seemed so puny. The little toy train running round and round on the track, trapped on that little baleful island. The bridges shone wetly to either side. They looked like wings, the island like a beetle. The loons chattered nervously on the black rocks and high above on the Erlandson trees the caiques cowered in the leaves.

  No, no, make it stop, make it stop, the Stranger said, but concepts like sound no longer existed. On the hopping cars, uselessly guarding the useless substance, armed men went mad and fired gut-shots into the darkness and mostly succeeded in killing each other.

  It began to snow then, big fat drops of snow, as the great big mountain shook itself from its bond of rock and roots, triggering landslides, bringing down trees, as the Colossus took one giant step and then another, feet of stones slamming into the lake bed, causing the very earth to shake and triggering a miniature tsunami.

  The moonlight caught its face, its terrible and beautiful face with its classical angles of antiquity, and the loons cried on the island and the passengers tried to throw themselves out of the windows of the train, and the Stranger reached desperately into his pocket, for the bottle marked lethe, to swallow the snake oil inside, to somehow stop this awful, unbearable sensation, to block his ears to the dreadful laughter of the Colossus, to find oblivion.

  It was so easy from above for the Colossus to see the humans’ fragile, fleeting thoughts as dazzling fireflies flying in confusion, for they were nothing to it, these . . . people, mere ir
ritants upon the body of the Escapement, ants that crawled through the cracks in the worlds.

  On the train, this limb of the Colossus, this mindless appendage, this Carl, as the humans called it, shuddered as it responded to the Colossus’s demands. The Colossi had to find it, this thing of the pupae umbrarum, this device. But already they felt they had been misled, that it was not, had never been, on the train, and their rage grew and they took another step, and another, detaching themselves entirely from the mountain range, until the Colossus stood up to its chest in the black water of the Chagrin.

  It was Loretta who saved them. She had to. The Kid and the Stranger were shooting at the juddering, inhuman thing that Carl had become. As though its colossal master had reached across the lake and stuck some terrible feast into Carl’s insides, stretching and bending the human material of the host like a sock. Now the thing that was previously Carl barely resembled anything human. The creature launched itself at them, knocking a vial from the Stranger’s hand onto the floor, before it scuttled away, faster than a bullet could follow, into the train, scenting and hunting for its masters’ prey. What made her grab the bottle she didn’t know, but its contents seemed to sing to her, a faint white glow emanated from its inside, offering redemption. She leaped out of the broken windshield, landing near the burning caretaker’s hut. The snow fell over the flames, sparks shot up, she felt her hair singe and her hands grow cold. It was there, just within reach, the lever, and all she had to do was push it, and she could save them.

  Then she turned her head and, under the glow of the moon, she saw it, she saw the face of the Colossus. What sculptor had formed that dark visage? That sneering mouth and that predator’s beak, the taloned hands resting in their opal throne? It never moved, it never lived or breathed, and yet the mountain was no longer in its place but in the water, and when she looked again it was closer, and then closer again. The snow did not fall on its beautiful and ageless face. It crowded her mind, it drove her out of it. There was only room for the Colossi in the world, there was no room for her in it.

  Dark waves raced against the shore. They slammed into the island with the fury of elementals, and perhaps it was that, the spray of Chagrin water and the cold wind blowing in from the peaks that broke the spell, that let her finally, with the last of her power, push the lever.

  In the cab, the engineer had never stopped cursing but now he suddenly went quiet, as the track shifted, and the little toy train circled one more time round the island, but slow, too slow. The Colossus roared then with a laugh that was pure rage. It was so close, another step, two at the most. The Stranger barked at the Kid, who looked at him in mute horror, but had no choice but to obey. He climbed down to the stoker’s cabin and pried the shovel from the dead man’s hands. He began to feed the flames.

  The Stranger sank to the floor. He could no longer hear and there was blood coming out of his ears and his nose. He trained his guns on the open doorway, and waited. The Colossus took one more step, and then it was by the shore. The train gathered power and the engineer cursed one last time and checked his gauges and manipulated his controls and then the train hit the switch and was rerouted from the loop onto the bridge. The Colossus screamed its laugher again and the very rocks of the islands cracked and sinkholes opened everywhere and the caretaker’s burned hut disappeared into the ground. The mad ichorous thing that was Carl burst through the door then and the Stranger shot it, emptying both his revolvers into the creature.

  It was not there, the Dumuzi Device. The Colossi had been fed false information, their ancient enemy had played them once again for fools. In the eternal war that was the Titanomachy, a score for the pupae umbrarum.

  The Colossus yanked the now useless lifeline from its servant-appendage’s form. The creature that was Carl dropped to the floor, black-ink blood staining the walls and the floor as it died. The ghosts in the boiler screamed, soundlessly, and then the train was over the stalk of the bridge. Slow it climbed and then faster as it reached the topmost part and began the descent towards land. By then the Colossus had boarded the island and begun to tear it apart. It cared nothing for the fleeing fireflies on their little toy train. It merely wished to express its displeasure. The train fled— Well, let it flee. The Stranger leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, for just a moment. The memory of that terrible face was etched forever in his mind. Then he forced his eyes open, and his limbs to move, and he climbed down to the stoker’s landing, to help the Kid with the boiler. The engineer, for the first time, smiled with grim satisfaction, and his fingers moved dexterously over the instrument panel. Then the train hit land and raced on, away from the mountains, and the snowfall, away from the Chagrin, and into open space again, and the wide expanse of the Thickening.

  On the shore, Loretta was still alive. She felt the destruction all around her, and the Colossus’s anger, and its image was forever in her mind now, crowding out all others, everything that was her. There was a thing in her hand, a vial of some sort. But even the word for vial now escaped her. Without curiosity or thought, but only instinct, she uncorked it and put it to her mouth.

  She drank the waters of Lethe (bottled by Jefferson & Norvell, of Asclepius Gardens, Jericho). The water was colourless and flavourless, but the relief it offered was immediate and lasting. She felt her mind, everything she was, Loretta of the swift dance and the impossible flying, Loretta of the Fabulous Flying Banditti, she felt her go. Her outline grew faint as rocks flew around her, as the Colossus destroyed the island. All that remained for her now was that schoolteacher in her little apartment with her cats, the woman whose name Loretta no longer even recalled. She did then the last and the most terrifying thing an aerialist could ever do.

  She let go.

  From high above, the little caiques watched the destruction and they were sad, and scared, but they were also creatures of the Escapement, and therefore used to such things. They saw the outline of the woman on the island grow faint and finally fade, and knew that, when she woke up, she would no longer remember them or their song, for she no longer belonged on the Escapement, and the people of that other place had forfeited wonder for the prosaic long ago.

  The train raced away from there, and for a time it would be safe, away from the Titanomachy and the machinations of Colossi and pupae. The Kid paused from shovelling ghosts and looked at the Stranger mournfully.

  “Well, that’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” he said.

  FIVE:

  THE WAITING PLACE

  The room was very bright and the child frail. He was frail in a sort of doll-like way, like one of those anatomical models where you could see the bones drawn onto the skin surface. The boy’s eyes were large and the irises were a guileless blue. It was the blue of waterfalls and deep, clear skies in the late afternoon. How his eyes got their colour the man never knew. His own eyes were green. But he never stopped marvelling at this child, not just from the moment that this tiny bundle first emerged into the world, when the man, for all that he was petrified, was given the scissors to cut the umbilical cord, for all that he tried to protest; but earlier, as the boy grew bone by bone and limb by limb in its mother’s belly, when he could feel it moving there, inside. The boy hiccupped a lot in the womb. And the man talked to him, through that thin membrane of skin, and sang to him, too: he did that a lot, back then.

  But he never stopped marvelling at this, his boy, and those eyes which he had secretly always thought would fade away to grey once the boy passed his first year; but they never did.

  Now the boy lay, patiently, on the sliding table of the machine. He didn’t speak and the man held his hand but said nothing, either. He had run out of words long before. The doctors moved about the room like white ghosts. They were brisk and efficient and gave nothing away. The room was kept very cold. A motor hummed and the tray that the boy lay on slowly slid towards the belly of the machine. The machine kicked into life and the boy disappeared
inside and the man and the woman waited. They had been waiting a long time and were destined to wait for a long time more.

  A cloud of butterflies had engulfed the broken train in the night. The train crawled along the tracks, a wounded, dying beast, and the butterflies hit the broken windows and burst inside and fluttered along the corridors where blood-soaked carpets lay ruined. The Kid and the Stranger were holed up in the engineer’s cabin and the engineer kept muttering and twiddling his instrument panel and in the boiler the ghosts kept fluttering half-heartedly. It was possible that the butterflies were drawn to the ghosts, for it was said that butterflies, on the Escapement, were merely the vessels of spirits from that other place, and who was to say whether it was true or not?

  The butterflies vanished in the dawn light as silently as they had come. The ghosts in the boiler faded away to nothing and the engineer stopped muttering and his hands were still, and the train came to an ungainly halt at the nearest stop: an outpost of the Thickening in the middle of a great empty plain.

  A solitary wooden sign, planted in the hard ground, gave the name of the terminal: lugar de espera.

  As soon as the train stopped the engineer collapsed to the floor and remained there. He was fast asleep. The Kid and the Stranger disembarked. The Kid was covered in ghostly substance and the Stranger in black ink and blood. Now they stood there, in the pale light of dawn, and looked on the terminal.

  It was not really a town, merely a waiting station on a branch line, and it was miles still from any other human habitation. Nothing around. The sky spread over the grey empty plain like a mirror which only served to enhance the place’s isolation. There is nowhere to go, it seemed to suggest. There is nowhere to run. Not from here.