The Escapement

by Lavie Tidhar

  There was a high tower ahead. Below, the Stranger could see wide palatial gardens, a water fountain, mimes . . .

  More mimes.

  The mimes crawled along the walls like spiders. They climbed up, holding knives between their teeth. Their hands were like geckos’ adhesive toes. Their eyes were black and empty holes. They weren’t human, the Stranger realised.

  He said, “Pupae umbrarum.”

  “Those fuckers!” the Conjurer said. “Shit!”

  “Friends of yours?”

  “Just . . . shoot them, will you?”

  “Gladly,” the Kid said, and he took off his rifle and began to fire, picking out the white-skinned creatures one by one. They fell from the walls without sound.

  “I fucking hate mimes,” the Kid said.

  The Conjurer grinned in savage appreciation, but more and more mimes were converging on their trail.

  “We have to go higher!”

  “Where!’”

  “That tower, it’s Mooky’s Spire! If we get to the top we can get away!”

  “How!”

  “Magic,” the Conjurer said, and grinned again.

  The Stranger fired methodically, running, stopping, firing, resuming. So this is what it came to, he thought, chilled. The pupae at last had the device, and it was their agents who’d brought it into the city.

  If so, their opponents would not be far away.

  They reached the tower and he and the Kid leaped after the Conjurer, onto a sturdy metal ladder that rose up to the top. They began to climb and it was then, from high above, that he at last saw the Colossi.

  They were ranged beyond the city, illuminated by the moon. Vast figures carved of stone, with sneering visages of cold command. Behind them came the storm. He heard inhuman laughter, punctuated with awful bursts of opposing silence.

  “Colossi . . . ,” he said.

  “Climb, you idiot! Climb!”

  A hand grasped the Stranger’s boot. He kicked, then fired down, and a mime fell soundlessly through the air. There was no way out, he thought. No way out but death.

  Still, he climbed. They reached the top and fell inwards through a window. Winds howled against the tower walls.

  “Ain’t she a beaut?” the Conjurer said, fondly.

  Standing in the middle of that turret was the deflated envelope, gondola and burner of a hot-air balloon.

  The Stranger took one window and the Kid another. They fired methodically at the mimes climbing the walls. The mimes mimed getting hurt. The mimes fell, hitting invisible obstacles. The Conjurer attended to the Fat Lady. Her envelope inflated slowly. Gas jets hissed from the burner. The roof had fallen down years in the past, and been covered over with a tarp to keep out the elements. Now the Conjurer tore it off (with a flourish that went unnoticed by his audience, who were otherwise engaged) and the envelope expanded outwards towards the dark skies.

  “Come on!” the Conjurer said. He hopped inside the gondola. The other two kept firing. One of the mimes had almost reached the turret. The Kid was out of bullets and with a shout of disgust he pulled out a knife and stabbed the creature in the neck. The mime gave him the finger, then clutched his neck, which was bleeding an unhealthy green.

  “Got something to say?” the Kid screamed. He plunged the knife down again and the mime let go of the wall and fell, hitting two others on his way down. The Kid abandoned the window and climbed into the gondola. The Fat Lady was rising fast.

  The Stranger sighted down the barrel of his gun. He hesitated, his finger on the trigger. Caught in his crosshairs was a human figure rising into the air towards him at some speed. It was the man he had last seen playing “March of the Gladiators” on a piano. The man rose into the air, his mouth open impossibly wide, and his shadow fell down below him like massive entrails spilling from an animated corpse. The shadow congealed and shuddered as it held up the man like a hand puppet, pushing him higher and higher into the sky.

  The Stranger took the shot.

  The bullet caught the man clear between the eyes and went clean through the back of the skull. The corpse shuddered, hanging in the air like the condemned at the end of a rope. But it didn’t stop, and the shadow below opened the corpse’s mouth and a scream of rage, or perhaps it was triumph, burst forth as the shadow operated the dead man’s lungs to produce it. The Stranger took out a stick of dynamite, bit the fuse to shorten it, lit the fuse, and dropped the stick of dynamite without even looking. He ran for the gondola.

  There was a small explosion. Hands reached out for him as he stumbled. The gondola hovered overhead, but the Kid and the Conjurer, working in tandem, got hold of the Stranger and lifted him up. He flopped down to the floor as the Fat Lady rose, higher and higher into the air.

  When he rose to his feet again and looked down, all he could see was a fine red mist falling down. It fell on the mimes and painted their faces crimson. A pool of shadow lay far down below, and as he watched it flowed, like water, down the street. The mimes looked up, wordlessly.

  The hot air balloon rose up into the sky, far above the city.

  They felt rather than heard the second explosion. Somewhere to the east of them, in what had until very recently been the back room of Jefferson & Norvell, Medici, of Asclepius Gardens, the fish had finally detonated.

  It manifested first as the taste of purple. They felt it on their tongues, against their inner cheeks. It set their teeth on edge. The rooftops wobbled like cloth. In the avenues down below, the revellers stopped and stared. A man pushing a food cart looked briefly puzzled and then turned into a pink flamingo. He spread his wings experimentally and took to the air.

  The towers of the city began to melt. A horse-drawn cart swerved sharply to avoid a swirl of tomatoes which had drawn together into a humanoid shape and ran down the street, leaving juicy footprints in its wake. The horse reared back and its legs turned to glass in the air and it remained there, suspended, only the eyes still alive and blinking.

  Mimes spread through the city then, cradling weapons only they could see. Beyond the walls, there arose a terrible laughter, and the sound of giant stone feet treading. They came down on the walls and tore them to the ground. From high above the city, the Stranger could see it all. The rows of Colossi ranged against it, and the awful shadows that fled into the city from the north and west, a sea of dark. Each opponent reached within and animated people like puppets in its war. A water fountain burst and shot up multicoloured streamers. A man’s nose melted down his face and he wiped it clear off with a hand that was turning by degrees into a trumpet. The cats, who knew when things were going bad, slunk into the holes between the city and that other place and vanished. A woman’s head turned into a flower. The flower grew, extending roots deep inside her. It bloomed beautifully, rising as tall as a building. Men turned to ants and lay helplessly on their backs.

  Civilian resistance was bloodied and ineffective.

  Veterans, of which the city hosted many, already transformed by previous skirmishes in the war between pupae and Colossi, took up assorted arms, pistols, rifles, hoes and hammers. They smashed and stabbed and shot the invading materiel. Walls disappeared, opening onto sudden chasms. Ivy with tiny snakes’ heads choked homes and palaces. The Fat Lady rose above them, rose above it all, drifting on the strong cold winds. The Stranger watched the city transform, eldritch lights bursting forth, shadow battling stone. The Colossi moved across the city methodically, treading on people, buildings, carts and horses, flattening trees and anything that stood in their way. The shadows of the pupae umbrarum grew over their own side of the city, snuffing out lives and lights like useless candlewicks. The Stranger watched the city’s destruction. For too long it had stood there, an open sore, an irritant on the flesh of the Escapement: fat, arrogant, elegant, doomed. Now the war had come at last to Jericho, and those who had thought themselves secure, impregnable, discovered too late the a
wful truth. All human life is solitary, brutish, nasty and short.

  Another pink flamingo rose awkwardly into the sky, and then another.

  “I guess the doom really had come to Jericho,” the Conjurer said. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He spat over the side of the gondola, meditatively.

  The hot air balloon drifted away from the city.

  The last the Stranger saw of it, the city resembled the crushed skull of a lizard, crudely drawn in shadow and stone. Then it was gone from sight.

  NINE:

  THE PREACHER

  At night, hospitals feel like shadowy, deserted wastelands inhabited mostly by machines. The man stood alone in the elevator and he pressed the button to go down, over and over, until the machine announced Doors closing! with a sort of unwarranted cheer, and the doors slid shut and the elevator began its descent, like a mine cage going down a shaft. When the doors opened again they did so onto a wide corridor where, in the daytime, numerous visitors, doctors, nurses and patients came and went, not to mention deliverymen and postmen and administrators and attendants and cleaners and cooks, the lifeblood of a hospital, its people. Now there was no one in sight and the lights were dimmed to conserve power, and in this twilight empty world the man walked, his feet treading the parquet floor. They made a little squeaking sound with each step he took, like a clown’s.

  Another corridor connected to this one and it was along it that the various shops and amenities for visitors ran, though most closed down at night and would not be opened again until morning. A janitor mopped the floor by the men’s public bathrooms. The only place open was the café, which like the hospital never closed, and so it was there that the man headed. There was something almost comforting about hospitals at night, he’d discovered. In his long sojourn he had grown to loathe the daytime hospital with its ceaseless movement of people and eternal busyness, the constant babble of voices. People died in the night much as they did in the day but nights were quieter: one could hear oneself think. He ordered a coffee and paid and sat by the window. A wan moon shone behind clouds. It had rained earlier. A dark figure stood and watched him from outside, by the public benches. He could not make out its face. It raised a hand in greeting. Just a random passer-by, a teenager returning from the clubs late, or a homeless person. The hospital offered them a kind of comfort. He tore a sachet of sugar and then another and another. The sugar spilled over the counter. He drew a shape: walls, windows, a roof. A house. He took out his hip flask and poured into the coffee surreptitiously. A word came and went in his mind, something to do with the end of a railway line.

  Terminal.

  He told it to go away.

  Terminal.

  No, he said. There’s a flower and it lies beyond the Mountains of Darkness and—

  Shut up.

  He wondered if he was talking to himself. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t long now. He had the map now.

  A doctor and three nurses came and sat at a table. They spoke in low voices, occasionally glancing at him. He thought they were glancing at him. The doctor laughed. The sound was jarring in the room. It was probably nothing, they had probably just come off a shift, or were taking a break. It didn’t matter. The figure outside whose face he couldn’t see was gone. The Stranger looked over the railing of the hot air balloon.

  They had been sailing over land for days, ever since the deliquescence of Jericho. In that time they had seen the Colossi range across the land, the railway lines broken, towns and hamlets abandoned or grotesquely transformed, and vast shadows congealing like pools of dark ink across the Thickening. They pissed and shat from on high, never touching ground, drinking when it rained and subsisting on a tin of dry old biscuits that the Conjurer uncovered in the Fat Lady’s basket. One night a symbol storm burst overhead and as they passed it St. Elmo’s Fire ranged the gondola, pale luminous plasma taking form as grotesque animated puppets dancing on the railing, blinking at them with huge round eyes. They’d felt the directions change then, and in the morning when the sun rose the landscape was new and the compass needle swayed like a drunk. There were fewer and fewer signs of habitation then, and at last they passed over ground entirely uninhabited and the view changed to low-lying hills, with a smattering of viridescent shrubs and trees, into which no train tracks ran. And they knew then that they were come to the edge of the Thickening.

  They’d passed that invisible boundary in the night and in the morning they were truly into the Thinning. There, where the true Escapement began, the Conjurer’s device for the measurement of time was still and lifeless.

  “It isn’t permanent,” he said, looking sheepish. “It’s just a slipstream.”

  He meant the way time was not neatly homogenous on the Escapement but could flow, like hot and cold currents which sometimes overlaid each other. They’d hit a patch of slow time, that was all. Or perhaps it was that the Conjurer’s clock was merely broken.

  The next day and the next took them into what should have been clown country, but they saw none. Only, here and there, the hidden dwelling places of the clowns would come into sudden and unwelcome sight: funhouses burned, ballooneries trashed, trampolines lying torn and half-buried in the ground. This trail of devastation continued for miles and the three men, uneasy, kept scanning the horizon and held their guns, but there was nothing to shoot at.

  Another day, another night. A storm rose from the east then, a regular yet violent storm. A column of air twisting and turning like a majestic predator, crossing the land. The tornado threatened to swoop them up and carry them elsewhere. The Conjurer cursed and fired short bursts of flame from the burner. The hot air balloon dropped but the edges of the storm had them then and they were helpless in its grasp. It twisted them round and round, high and then low. Below, the Stranger saw a curious procession. A small white chapel stood on the hard ground beside a wide cemetery in which were laid rows and rows of headstones. Beside the chapel stood several figures, and it occurred to him that one man was about to be hanged from a tree, and that another man, astride a horse, was directing this execution. He saw all this in but a moment as the storm brought them up again and then, by what forces of nature he could not tell, decided abruptly to change direction again and violently released them. The Fat Lady hurled downward at speed. The three men were tossed and turned within the Fat Lady’s belly. The Stranger held on to the sides of the basket, which badly shook. The air rushed all about them, and they hit the ground with a terrible cracking sound and a terrified whinny, and the deflated envelope came down on them, burying them in a dank darkness.

  “Screw this lot!” the Conjurer said. He must have reached for a knife, for next thing they knew the envelope had been sliced open and sunlight poured down along with fresh air. The three men emerged through this breach, guns at the ready, but they were not prepared for the scene that greeted their hatching.

  A man’s legs stuck out from under the hot air balloon’s gondola. Over by the dilapidated chapel, several men and women stood like mourners at a funeral, dressed in sombre black clothes and wearing whiteface makeup. They stood peering at them stoically with hands crossed. Standing facing the hot air balloon in an uncertain semicircle were four rough-looking men holding guns. From a thick branch of the solitary tree there hung a thick rope. It, in turn, was looped around the neck of a man.

  The man was desperately pedalling a unicycle to try and stay upright.

  The four armed-men drew their guns, but the Conjurer, the Kid and the Stranger were faster. Three shots rang out, and then three more, and then a final seventh shot, which severed the hanging rope. The man on the unicycle shot forward, hit a trampoline, bounced up into a full aerial cartwheel, and landed improbably on his face in a custard pie that had been lying there.

  The mourners clapped, politely. A murmur of appreciation rose and fell among them like the chatter of crickets. The Stranger stared at the scene: four men lay dead on the ground, and a fifth must h
ave died under the Fat Lady when she’d landed.

  The Stranger climbed down. “Get their weapons,” he told the Kid.

  A woman ran up to him then, sobbing. He saw she wore an eyepatch. She threw her arms around the Stranger’s neck. “We thank you very sweetly for doing it so neatly,” she murmured into the Stranger’s ear. Her breath was hot on his skin. She lingered there a moment longer, as though unsure of protocol. Then she released him abruptly and retreated to be with the rest of her congregation—for that was what they must be, the Stranger saw. He had seen such chapels before.

  The Kid and the Conjurer moved among the corpses, collecting the dead men’s guns. The Stranger went to the fallen man on the unicycle and helped him up to his feet. He was a large, imposing man, the Stranger saw, with broad shoulders threaded with muscle. His grey hair was cropped short, in almost a military fashion, and his deep unsettling eyes were the colour of Tyrian purple.

  “Thank you, stranger,” he said. His voice had the gritty coarseness of broken coral. “I am Jedediah Baily, preacher to this poor congregation.”

  The Stranger looked up at the small chapel. It was a clown ministry, of the sort that dotted the Escapement on the edges of the Thickening and into the Doinklands.

  A stylised Harlequin, garrotted with a diabolo, hung over the steeple. The Harlequin’s eyes, disconcertingly alive, bulged comically out of their sockets as the wire cut into its throat, and a single drop of blood was visible. Gravel neatly covered the ground before the door. The whole place had a neat and well-kept, if worn, appearance.