by Lavie Tidhar
There was a long terminal building built with wooden floors and a sloping tin roof, and a garage, which was shut, and a convenience store, which was also shut. The Stranger looked to the distance and he thought he hadn’t looked properly before. Somewhere out there on the plain a group of people, ill-discerned, was digging. But what was there to dig?
There were a few isolated buildings dotted around here and there in what passed for a town, homes or sheds it was impossible to say. The only other large building was made of bricks and looked like a factory though there were no workers he could see nor smoke coming out of the chimneys. Attached to the factory building there was a clock tower and its clock kept beating, and the sound of the seconds reverberated through the town and into the ground and into the Stranger’s soul.
He did not like this place. It was hard to look straight at the clock. The hour hand was stuck on twelve and the minute hand on five to twelve and the hand that counted the seconds was the only one moving, but it was trapped against the minute hand and only kept beating out its signal against the same never-ending time, moving in place like a captured moth trying to break free. He looked at the Kid and the Kid shrugged.
“I need breakfast,” the Kid said. He stretched and yawned. “Think anyone’s serving in this dump?”
“Horses first,” the Stranger said. The Kid shrugged again.
They went to fetch their horses, who seemed little affected by the earlier attack. They were creatures of the Escapement, with no ties to that other place and little regard for the affairs of Colossi or pupae. The Stranger’s horse nuzzled his face and the Stranger stroked the horse’s long neck. They had travelled together for some time and were destined to ride together for a time longer. As they came back towards the front of the train, the Stranger saw a solitary figure approach them.
He was a tall, thin man in the uniform of a conductor, with a head too large for his body, and entirely bald, so that he appeared like a marionette whose head would not quite stay on properly.
“What happened here? Who are you? Where is the engineer?”
“We came under attack over the Chagrin,” the Stranger said. “The engineer is in his cabin. He got us this far, but no farther.”
“An attack? But this is most irregular!” the conductor said. He looked at a pocket watch and shook his head mournfully. “This is terrible, the timetables will all be out of tune!”
The Stranger noticed that the pocket watch seemed to bear no hours or minutes and that all its hands were missing, but he kept his thoughts private. The conductor muttered to himself, ignoring them.
“You will arrange for the other passengers?” the Stranger said.
“Yes, yes,” the conductor said. “It is taken care of.”
The Stranger looked back and he saw that the conductor was right. A group of figures in grey, shapeless clothes, perhaps the workers he had seen earlier digging out there on the plain, were now moving lethargically but with purpose across the cars. They helped down the passengers, but what they did with them and where they took them he couldn’t tell. He felt disinclined to ask. They were in the Thickening now and this was a job for the railway company. He followed the Kid towards the long cabin and saw that a sign did indeed say waiting room on the door. They went in.
The floor was clear if unswept. Long benches lined the walls, and he saw with some surprise that there were many people waiting there. They sat with their backs to the walls, the men in worn suits and hats, the women as drab as the men, and all looking down at the ground with dull and listless eyes. They looked as though they had been waiting a long time, and were ready to wait for a long while more. The Stranger himself felt bone-tired and robbed of vitality. He wanted nothing more now than to sit down on those self-same benches and wait. He wondered how long they’d been waiting for. Surely the train came past here often enough?
At the end of the long hall there was a small kiosk. They made towards it. No one looked up at them or observed their passing. He heard no chatting or rustle of pages, nothing but a dull silence. He was somewhat surprised to discover, upon arrival, that the kiosk counter was open for business. A large, pleasant-faced woman stood behind it, though she looked surprised at their arrival.
“Can I help you?”
“What happened to everyone here?” the Kid said. “They look like they’ve given up the ghost.”
The woman looked at him sharply but said nothing. The ticks of the clock reverberated through the building, through the Stranger’s bones. He was keenly aware that something was wrong. He just didn’t know what. There was no substance here, and the walls between this town and that other place were firm.
“Two coffees, please,” the Kid said.
“Coffee?” the woman said. She said it doubtfully, indeed as a woman trying to wake up from a deep and pleasant dream. “There is no coffee.”
“Well, what have you got?” the Kid said. “You must serve something.”
“Porridge,” the woman said.
“Porridge?”
The woman looked at him as though trying to place him.
“Porridge,” she said at last, with finality.
“But I don’t like porridge,” the Kid said, plaintively. The Stranger turned away from them. He took out a tough piece of jerky and chewed on it as he surveyed the waiting room. None of the waiting people stirred. He tried to concentrate but it was hard.
The woman had her back to them then, and was stirring a massive cast-iron pot in which something pleasant-smelling was bubbling. He stared at her. She had pulled back her long sleeves as she worked, and he saw now what it was that he’d instinctively noticed. Her upper arm, between the elbow and the shoulder, had been hollowed out and the skin had turned to glass. Inside the glass were two further glass chambers, linked to each other by a narrow tube. They were filled with ants. The ants kept moving inside the woman’s arm. When she raised her hand, the upper chamber would slowly fill with ants and, when she lowered it, the part nearer the elbow would then fill, as with some forever moving hourglass in which time was suspended in an equilibrium. He said, “You’re a veteran?”
The woman turned to him. She dropped her arm and her sleeve came down and covered it. She shrugged.
“Long ago,” she said.
“Who did you fight for?” the Stranger asked, curious.
The woman seemed torn in indecision. It was not that her look was unfriendly, or not entirely. It was just that the question seemed to have brought her out of some state in which she wasn’t even aware she was dwelling. Some vitality had returned to her face. She said, “We were riding out with General Zavatta to the crystal fountains. It was far from here, at the foot of the Big Rock Candy Mountains. We didn’t really know about the war, you understand. Zavatta promised us stew, all that we could eat, and whiskey, and we were hungry, we were young and we were hungry and we were ready for anything. Or so we thought. We rode out that day, leaving behind us tiny homesteads and work on the mines. Our heads were filled with dreams of glory. But instead we rode out for days through the Doinklands. The little food we had was soon gone and the clowns laid traps for anyone intruding on their territory. We lost two riders to a trampoline and Billy Bob got hit in the face by a pie and his face melted clean off. At last we came upon a clown village. It was us or them. It wasn’t war, it was a massacre. They tried to run. Some tried to fight back but they were no match for us. We were hungry and ruthless and we wanted blood. That day we slaughtered every one of them and burned down their homes and we rode away from there whooping and hollering and with our bellies filled with food. The smoke stung my eyes, I remember that. We rode that way and Zavatta told us of creeks running with whiskey and trees where cigarettes grew. You have to understand, none of us knew that other place, we were all of the Escapement. In a ravine we came upon a giant stone foot lying severed on the dry riverbed, three of its toes blasted off. We didn’t know who we w
ere fighting or why. On the homesteads, some of the old folk spoke of the Titanomachy, but none had been in the war, none but for an old boy, an ex-miner with a parrot for a hand, and he never talked about it at all.
“That night we camped by the giant stone foot and made fires. It was then that I noticed how General Zavatta’s shadow, in that light, seemed so much bigger than him, and when they moved, I could not shake off the awful feeling that it was the shadow that moved first, and the man who followed.
“That night two of the boys got into a fight and killed each other under the big toe. It happened so quickly, it was hard to comprehend when it happened, only by that point none of us cared. It was just more spilled blood, for us. It required neither sense nor rhyme. One moment they were friendly, talking about some girl back home that both of them knew. The next there was a knife out, flashing in the firelight, and the shot of a gun. The smell of gunpowder. Blood spilled on the dry riverbed. Two bodies cooling under the big toe of the broken giant. After that Zavatta made us march from that place. We found other pieces of the Colossus on our way: a finger, an ear. It only dawned on me later that the mountain we were traversing resembled a torso.
“The weather grew cold and snow flurries fell as we snaked our way up the mountains. There were clowns there, too, in the ice. Hobos, mostly. We strung them up when we could. More often they would take potshots at us from the high passes, or trigger an avalanche of bright yellow balls. We lost three riders that way, and ate their horses and were grateful for the meat.
“There was no question of deserting. Zavatta led and Zavatta couldn’t be questioned. There was nowhere to escape to, only the mountains and the clowns and death on every side. Then we were through the mountains at last and away from the clowns, and we were joined on a great plain by other companies, with other commanders and their shadows. The next night the full broken moon shone down and in its light we saw the line of colossal statues lining up on the horizon, silent figures, huge beyond measure, and behind them the stars in the night.
“We charged. Shadows fled and people died. The Colossi had people, too. I shot and I knifed and I bludgeoned. How many I don’t know. My horse was shot from under me. All this time there was awful laughter and it was punctured by pockets of silence that were somehow more terrible in themselves. Back and forth it went, the sound and the lack of sound, and the plain ran red with our blood.
“In the morning the Colossi were gone as though they had never been, and the horizon was empty and clear. There was no sign of Zavatta, and the plain was covered in the dying and the dead. When I came to I was lying under a fallen horse. My shoulder was broken and I had lost two of my toes, and my upper arm was turned into the thing you see now. It itches sometimes, in warm weather. Sometimes I can hear the ants scuttling inside, late at night, but I find their company soothing.
“A few of us, the survivors, banded together. Some had served pupae, some Colossi. It didn’t seem to matter, just as the battle we took part in made no sense to us. The plain seemed to me then to have been a sort of checkers board, and we were the pieces being pushed around. For what benefit, I couldn’t tell you. I don’t think anyone could.
“We wandered the Escapement. Without Zavatta we had no direction. I was affected the least. One man had lost half his body. It did not seem to affect him badly, it’s just that the entire left side of his body was missing, as though it had been erased, yet he was able to move normally, as though that missing part was still somehow there, in ghostly form. Another woman had her head turned into a mirrored helmet, and she could speak only with her hands. One person, Rudy, was half-turned into an organ and when he moved he played sad mournful tunes. In this fashion we wandered searching for a home. We could not return to the lonely homesteads and the mines. We were veterans of a war we didn’t understand, and just as quickly as we had been used we were discarded.
“I don’t know what happened to the others. One day I came here and . . .”
The dull look was back in her eyes and without saying another word she turned and began stirring the porridge again. The Kid and the Stranger exchanged glances.
“I don’t think I want any porridge,” the Kid said.
“No,” the Stranger agreed. The beats of the clock sounded in the still air, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said.
But there was no respite from the oppressive sense of waiting out there either. The sky was grey and the air felt humid and unmoving, and the clock in the clock tower beat louder there, the sound expanding to fill up all that still, unpleasant silence. The Stranger offered the Kid a stick of jerky and the Kid accepted without much grace. They stood there together and chewed.
“There’s something not right with this place,” the Kid said. “Or, for that matter, with that woman.”
“I know,” the Stranger said. He chewed some more, without enthusiasm. “It’s strange,” he said. “I heard that name before. Zapata or Zavatta, something like that at any rate. And I heard about that battle she mentions, at the Big Rock Candy Mountains. It was less a battle than a massacre, by all accounts, and the greatest massing of forces in the Titanomachy for centuries. But that’s just it. Even with the way time flows differently in different places on the Escapement . . . it must have been more than a century ago.”
“But she doesn’t look older than thirty,” the Kid protested.
“I know.”
“I wish that damn clock would stop ticking,” the Kid said.
“I do too,” the Stranger said.
A man came out of the garage then, wiping his hands on a piece of cloth. He wore long blue overalls and had a shock of unruly black hair and the same pleasant yet somehow vacant smile of the kiosk woman.
“Hello, hello,” he said. He looked at them with a polite lack of curiosity.
“Who’re you?” the Kid said, a little rudely. The man blinked at him with a friendly lack of concern.
“I’m Lucas,” he said. He extended a hand for a shake, which both men ignored. “I’m the mechanic.”
“Not much call for a mechanic round here,” the Stranger said.
“Tick tock, tick tock,” the mechanic said, and giggled. “I used to be a chasseur de clown, a bounty hunter,” he said. “We rode in the Doinklands, hunting Whitefaces and Augustes for the reward money from the bank. We always avoided the conflicts of Colossi and pupae. What did we need them for? Our leader was Zebedee, the greatest of the chasseurs. He could read the strength of the enemy in a dollop of dropped custard, could discern the position of our prey in one careless mark of chalk. For a long time we lived like this, in the wild places beyond the Thickening. We only rode into town with our bounty, and then we’d drink moonshine and Sticks, those of us who still had a hankering for that other place. Not me, Chief. All right, sometimes I would succumb, and I would see hazy visions, a time and a place where it seems to me I was a railway engineer, who drank too much and read dime novels, who lived alone. He, that other man in that other place, kept searching for a way out, for a world where he could be something he was not. He was searching for the Escapement, I think. I did not like those visions, which I saw as needless escape into fantasy, and so I eventually stopped drinking Sticks altogether.
“Around that time, Zebedee was caught in a trampoline trap near a Whiteface encampment. Poison custard left half his face mutilated, and he’d broken all the bones in his left leg, but he survived. He changed then, though. And sometimes he carried on conversations with his shadow, and sometimes he would pause at unexpected moments, when peeling an apple for example, and he’d stare at the apple or the knife with a look of complete bewilderment, as though he didn’t know what either of them was for.
“Not long after his recovery, Zebedee pushed us farther than ever before into the Doinklands. We were headed beyond any human presence, far away from the small teardrop that was the Thickening. I had never realised before how
immense the Escapement was, and how little of it belonged to us. I did then, and it frightened me. We were mere trespassers, new arrivals on this vast and shifting landscape. For a while still we hunted bounty, but where was there to claim it? Soon Zebedee grew bored even with that. All we did was ride, along prairies where the wild Harlequinade ran—a sight I had hoped never to see, which made the blood run cold!—and down valleys where the remains of las máquinas de sueños could still be found, and they haunted our sleep.
“Zebedee was searching for something. That became clear eventually, but what it was he never told us. We searched ancient caves dug into the sides of snow-covered mountains. We hunted through brush and forest, in the wild places where the bears still dance. At last we came to a temperate valley below the snow line. Here the air was warm and scented with spring flowers, and there was a brook running through the meadow, where three gnarled and ancient trees cast deep black shadows.
“It was there that we found it, at last. Whatever it was. A piece of materiel, left over from some long forgotten battle of the Titanomachy, I thought then. I am not so sure, now. it was a large and curious object. It was a mechanical-seeming large fish, like a carp, with golden scales—”
“The Dumuzi Device . . . ,” the Stranger whispered.
“Excuse me?”
The Stranger thought of the fish he had seen, for just a moment, in the tinkerers’ cart; and of the aerialists on the train, who were willing to kill to find it. . . .
“What does it do?” he said, in frustration.
The mechanic blinked at him with those guileless eyes. “Do?” he said. “It did nothing, nothing that I could see, beside being heavy. We had to tie ropes to it and it took four of the horses to drag it along. Zebedee was beside himself. It was then that we truly saw his shadow, and how far it covered the ground, even in the weak sun, and how it moved when the man was still. We were afraid then, I think. But he was our chief, and besides, we were too far out: we didn’t know how to get back.
