The Escapement

by Lavie Tidhar

  “He led, and we followed. Dragging the thing along behind us. It was not alive but it wasn’t inert, either. Its mechanical gills moved and its tail thrashed the ground and its mouth opened and closed and it blinked its glass eyes. When the sun caught its scales it shone a golden colour, like summer. . . .

  “Through mountain passes that had no name, where not even the clowns went, on and on we went. We lost two men to an avalanche, another we left dying when he fell off his horse in the ice. The horse we kept, the horses to drag the thing were more valuable than our lives at that point. Zebedee’s shadow grew and grew until it engulfed the landscape, and it muttered and whispered in tongues we did not understand. We saw Zebedee for what he was, then: nothing but a sock puppet for the shadow to animate. We were afraid of him and did whatever he ordered, but his only command was ever to push ahead.

  “Wherever we were going, we never got there,” the mechanic said. “We were riding out on the prairies when the first flashes of a storm appeared on the horizon. Crosses, mostly, followed by a shower of asterisms and interrobangs. Zebedee looked concerned at first, then decided to ride on into the storm. The sky looked bruised. There was mud underfoot and the horses struggled onwards, and the fish began to flap excitedly as though the storm had revitalised it in some way. The horses whinnied and tried to run and it was hell to control them. One of the men was hit by a kick to the head and fell instantly dead to the ground.

  “At that moment we heard the oncoming battle. The ground shook as though a giant foot stomped on it far away, sending repercussions across the prairies, and the horses broke away and ran into the night. The storm caught us then in its entirety and swallowed us whole. I felt it happen, then, with the Colossi marching in the distance, as Zebedee’s body shot up into the air, animated from below by its shadow. . . .

  “Flaming hieroglyphs touched my skin, and I felt my abdomen metamorphosing: there were vents in my chest and when I breathed the air came out hot and the vents flapped open and closed. I ran. We all ran, and the fish—the thing—was forgotten in the mud. I saw the shadow race across the prairie holding the thing that had been Zebedee aloft. Then a giant stone foot came down from the sky and crashed it into the ground. It never came back up.

  “I ran, through the storm and the flashing symbols, all through the night. I survived. I don’t know about the others. At last I tripped over a rock and fell. When I woke it was daytime and there was no sign of the war or of the company and I was alone. After that I wandered the Escapement for a long time. Until, one day, I came here.”

  He looked up at them then, kindly. “You’ll like it here,” he said. “You’ll see. Just give it time.”

  “We’re not staying!” the Kid yelled.

  The mechanic looked at him with those same dull, kind eyes.

  “Just give it time,” he said.

  The Kid stormed out. The Stranger shrugged at the mechanic, but Lucas was no longer paying them any attention. He had got up and was happily polishing the pistons of an old broken engine.

  The Stranger followed the Kid outside.

  “We need to get out of here,” the Kid said. “Where are the horses?”

  The Stranger looked, but the horses were no longer where they’d been and, somehow, he wasn’t surprised. The first stirrings of an answer were coming to him. He thought about the broken maze where the Thurston Brothers had hidden, where he’d first met Temperanza. He looked on the town with new eyes. This was a newly built and ramshackle place, but what did it stand on? He had the feeling of ageless time, suspended. . . . The ticks of the clock were like the desperate knocks of a fly trapped in amber, beating against its prison.

  He and the Kid returned to the train. It lay silent on the tracks. When the Stranger looked inside he saw no sign of the passengers, the dead or the wounded. The train rested alone on a single track, and the track terminated at that town. The Stranger said, “Lucas was right, this isn’t a main line.”

  The track extended back the way they’d come. Somewhere there must have been a railroad switch, and they must have hit it on their way, and were side-tracked off the main line to Jericho and onto the spur. Now he looked but all he could see were the grey and featureless plains in all direction.

  He said, “We can’t leave.”

  The Kid said, “Sure we can. We’ll just follow the track.”

  The Stranger shook his head. He knew it for what it was then.

  “It’s a sort of snare,” he said.

  “A what?”

  “It’s like a knot, but in the landscape. In the Escapement itself. Like the mazes you come across, sometimes.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means the way out isn’t out there,” the Stranger said. “It’s in here.”

  “I prefer just shooting things,” the Kid said, morosely.

  “Cutting the knot, yes,” the Stranger said, and he smiled. But the truth was that he liked mazes, their mystery, the fact that they needed to be solved. But he saw the Kid wasn’t interested. The Kid was fighting the malaise of the place but he was doing it badly.

  The Kid said, stubbornly, “I’m going.” Ignoring the Stranger, he began to march back along the tracks, into the featureless plain. His spurs clicked in time with the trapped second hand of the clock, merging with it. He’d never make it, the Stranger knew. But he couldn’t stop him. Instead, he headed to the clock tower.

  The Kid walked for quite a while and for a time, the going was good. He kept having the sense that there was no point in going, that all he had to do was turn back and go into the waiting room and sit down and, well, wait and, sooner or later, there would be a train—there had to be one, right? But he didn’t listen to the voice in his head and kept ploughing on, stubbornly. He was very stubborn.

  The Kid was born in a town called Bozoburg, which sat on the bank of a small river on the Fratellini plains. It was a small, quietly prosperous town on the edge of the Thickening, some three days’ ride away from the nearest clown encampment of Whitefaces, and a week by coach to the nearest train terminus. There was a bank and a general store, and a post office that opened once a week whether anyone needed to send a letter or not. The Kid—the kid—had known, in a vague kind of way, that many of the people in the town, all of whom he knew by name, would sometimes use substance, which was a pale sort of powder quarried far away, in places where las máquinas de sueños fell from the skies in ancient times. And that sometimes they drank Sticks in one of the two saloons, and that then they would visit, or go back—the exact distinction was hazy to him—to that other place. What that other place was he wasn’t entirely sure.

  Once, a travelling entertainer came to the town. He brought with him a machine of sorts, called a praxinoscope, and he’d set it up in the town hall and charged a ducat at a time, and though ducats didn’t come easy to the kid nevertheless he had paid admission, to watch Mercator’s Magical Shadow Show!! as it was billed.

  He’d come in, clutching his ducat, and sit down with the rest of the townfolk and the other children—they sat on the floor, while the adults sat in rough-hewn chairs—but in truth, when it came, it was a disappointment.

  The adults oohed and ahhed at the shadow play: impossibly tall buildings and vehicles that moved between them at jerky speed as Mercator the Magnificent—a small, whiskered man in a faded, once-dapper sequin jacket—rolled the crank. There were flying machines in the skies and all manners of improbable miracles, and there were no horses to be seen. The kid liked horses.

  His mother didn’t come with him to see the shadow show. She had a loathing for all and every manner of entertainer. So the kid went alone. Ultimately, he decided, whatever this other place was it was just that: a shadow on a screen. He was bored.

  Mercator stayed around for a few days but then he left and took his praxinoscope with him. He had a little wagon and a single, patient horse with eyes kinder than its own
er’s. The kid ran into him only once after the shadow show. Mercator was drunk and pissing against the side of the town hall when the kid passed by, after dusk. Mercator’s shadow, like a grotesque extension of its owner, danced beside the man. For some reason the kid did not wish to step on or near it. He skipped around the dancing shadow and hurried away from there. For a moment the shadow felt almost alive.

  The kid read whatever penny books or periodicals came through. His mother was not a voracious reader but she tolerated this habit. He rode horses and he played Hangman’s Bluff and Juggler’s Ball and Ghost in the Graveyard and, of course, they all played at clowns.

  He was quite a happy little kid, for a while.

  This all changed after the Rasmussen Gang rode into town.

  But the Kid did not want to think about that now. In fact, he realised, he did not want to think about much of anything. A pleasant lassitude of thought prevailed on him. The featureless grey plains seemed never to change and the track just led on and on and on into the distance.

  At last he saw something just ahead. He made for it, with that same sort of languor, and soon he saw that it was a small town, really just a collection of several buildings where the track terminated. A train stood at the end of the track with many of its windows broken and heavily sustained damage to its sides, but how it came to that state, or what it was doing there, he had no idea. It was then that a man wearing a conductor’s uniform came in his way, and the Kid looked at him with some surprise. The man held an official-looking clipboard in his hands and he looked at the Kid and he looked at the clipboard and he ticked something off on the page.

  He said, “You’re late.”

  “I am?” the Kid said.

  “Come with me,” the conductor said. The Kid followed him meekly. I must be very late, he thought. There was a clock, somewhere nearby, and it kept ticking and ticking.

  The conductor led him past the clock tower and into the plain beyond the town. As they walked, the Kid saw a group of passengers standing around in a patch of dug earth. He didn’t know why he thought they were passengers. Perhaps it was that they seemed ill-suited for the purpose to which they’d been put. The men wore hats and suits and of the women, some wore dresses and some riding pants, but all of them held spades.

  They were digging in the hard ground.

  They dug without haste and with seeming indifference to the task they performed. Their spades rose and fell mechanically, dislodging earth, shifting it, then back again, until the spades encountered something in the ground and the diggers would stop, and frown, and lay down the spade, momentarily, in order to clear dirt from the object with their fingers. The Kid watched, and he saw that what they dug out, like turnips or yams, were timepieces.

  They were clocks.

  The clocks were half-melted, almost malleable, near two-dimensional in form. The diggers handled them with great reverence, brushing dirt from the clock faces before throwing them without ceremony onto a growing pile of similar objects. It was only when they touched the objects that their countenance changed, however briefly, and they seemed more animated.

  “Here,” the conductor said. He handed the Kid a spade. “Dig.”

  The Kid took the spade. It seemed natural to hold it. He joined the line and began to dig. It seemed to him he could hear something, on the edge of sound, a soft murmur underground, as though the things buried there were squirming around, shifting, trying to burrow deeper. As though they were, in a sense, alive.

  As though, in a way, they were not clocks at all.

  The Kid dug. When the spade hit an object he knelt down and with his fingers began to clear the dirt around the clock. When he touched it, excitement quickened in him. The materiel felt soft to the touch, pliable. The clock was like a disc of rubber in his hands. He felt it pulse against his fingertips, tiny ticks, like a baby’s heart.

  Then he tossed it on the pile and the sensation fled: of being awake, of being alive. He returned to digging, there on the grey and featureless plain, digging in time to the beats of the big clock.

  The Stranger meanwhile had the sense that he couldn’t shoot his way out of this one. He needed another story and he went to find it. He stood under the clock tower, where time was held captive, the second hand fluttering forever in its place, trapped against the minutes. He saw no one around. At last the doors to the factory opened, as he suspected they would, and a man stepped out. He was tall and wiry and a little stooped, with a thick head of greying hair, a grey-white moustache and twinkling eyes, and he moved like a man used to long days of riding.

  He said, “Welcome, stranger.”

  The Stranger hesitated before replying, and the man did not press him. Indeed, it felt as though the man had time—all the time in the world. An air of amused contentedness emanated from him. An air of cheerful goodwill.

  At last, the Stranger said, “May I ask your name?”

  “My name?” The man’s long fingers moved as though playing the piano or itching for a gun. “It has been so long, stranger, since anyone inquired . . . To tell you the truth, I am not sure I would even know it now myself.’

  “Was it Zavatta, or Zapata?” the Stranger asked.

  “It might have been, it might have been,” the man allowed. He frowned. “It seems to me that I had many names, stranger, in my years on the Escapement. But you know as well as most, don’t you, that names are not to be taken lightly. Not here.”

  “That is true,” the Stranger allowed, and the man smiled a thin-lipped smile.

  “You can call me Zebulon,” he said. He offered the name tentatively.

  The Stranger said, “I know who you are.”

  “I . . . see.”

  “One does not often meet one of the Major Arcana,” the Stranger said. “Though I seem to, of late.”

  The man dipped his head in acknowledgement, but refrained from speaking.

  “Tell me,” the Stranger said. “What happened in this place?”

  The man shrugged. “It was so long ago . . . ,” he said.

  “But you remember?”

  “If I try hard enough. Perhaps. Yes. There was a battle, I think. Yes, that sounds right. A battle of some sort.” The man spun in place. He seemed suddenly agitated. “You would not tell so, now. It happened long before the Thickening, long before woman or man set foot upon this place. We were not here, then, or perhaps we were, in a sense, but only in potentia. The land, too, did not look quite as you see it now, for ‘land’ and ‘see’ were not fully formed concepts then. There was only the war.

  “It is a battle not recorded anywhere but in the grooves it’s made in the Escapement. Shadow battles stone; the lizard scuttles from the glare of the sun. There was a battle here, I think, between Colossi and pupae. It created a knot in the land.

  “Time passed; elsewhere. The warring factions moved on. Only their discarded materiel remained, burrowed deep underground. People came and they settled and they built railway tracks and they spread out across the Thickening, but they skirted this place. There was nothing here.

  “Then, one day, I came.

  “I was very tired then, I think. I have been traversing the Escapement for a long time. I have been other people, yes. Those names you mentioned. I was searching for something. Something that seemed important at the time.”

  “A weapon,” the Stranger said.

  “Yes. Perhaps,” the man said, dubiously. “But then, at last I came here, on my travels. And I felt it, then, under the ground. A huge silence, waiting. All that untapped time.”

  Zebulon smiled at the Stranger.

  “Um,” he said, “would you like to see them?”

  Tick, tick, tick, tick, ti . . .

  ck.

  The wide doors opened wide, on hidden springs, in silence. . . .

  Behind them, the dark.

  “Come in, come in,” the Hiero
phant said.

  The clocks filled every available surface. It was not a factory at all, the Stranger saw, but a warehouse: the clocks were piled up from floor to ceiling, while only in the middle was there a long workbench on which individual pieces resided, where other residents of Lugar de Espera worked with gloved hands, cleaning them. There was no sound in that room but for the distant, trapped ticks of the big clock. But there was a sort of expectant hush, as of too much time all kept in one too-small place, the sound of a coiled spring needing desperately to be sprung. There were hundreds, thousands of the things. They made the Stranger think of termite eggs.

  The Hierophant rubbed his hands together. “So you see,” he said. “There really is no way out, stranger.”

  The mechanic, Lucas, and the kiosk woman joined him then. They had a vague blank look in their eyes. Lucas held a wrench and the woman a large metal ladle. They hovered on either side of the Hierophant. The Stranger took a step back, and Zebulon and his minions took one step forward.

  “What’s your rush?” Zebulon said, and he smiled, a little sadly. “We have time, stranger. All the time in the world.”

  The Stranger backed away from them and they followed. He pushed against the doors and they opened. He noticed the quality of the light outside never changed. It was never night or high noon in that town, but an endless suffusion of grey.

  “Ah, I see they’re coming,” the Hierophant said.

  The Stranger turned. And he saw that Zebulon was right. From out beyond the town there came a group of passengers, trudging towards them, and he thought he recognised amidst their number one of the cooks from the train.