by Lavie Tidhar
“So? And you can put your gun back in the holster. Slowly.”
The Stranger did as she said.
“You put substance in the soup,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “It flavours the meat. What are you getting at?”
“Nothing,” the Stranger said. “This isn’t my business.”
“You’re damn right it isn’t.” She gestured with the sawed-off. The Stranger took a step back from the wagon, and another, and his shadow hastened to match his steps.
He looked at Titania. Her own shadow billowed behind her, a huge, undulating mass that swallowed starlight in its wake. The Stranger took another step back and his shadow hid behind him.
“There was no offence meant,” he said.
“Good.”
Abruptly, she released her hold on the sawed-off, and with that she was gone. The Stranger took another breath and emptied his lungs slowly. When he returned to the fire he saw that both of the tinkerers were fast asleep, entwined in each other’s arms under their heavy coverings. He lay down himself, on his back, and stared at the distant stars.
He had got a good look into the glum interior of the wagon, before Titania caught him. He saw the hanging iron pots and pans, old and bent and blackened by countless fires. He saw the bags of nails, the hammered horseshoes, the beaten copper bowls, the kettles and coal irons, the heaps of badges and buckles, and the spurs with their rowel and chap guards.
It was, then, just as described, a tinkerer’s travelling emporium, cramped and dark, smelling of rust and the road, filled with the debris of everyday life and its mundane demands. Nothing more, nothing out of the extraordinary.
On the floor, in the centre of all that cramped space, a vast object lay partially covered in dirty blankets. From time to time it struggled feebly against the bonds that held it down, and its vast, black-and-gold head would hit the floor with a powerful thump that shook the ironmongery all about it. It had two glass eyes and a mouth with many jagged teeth. It was about the size of a tuna. Its scales, even in that quick half glimpse of the Stranger’s, with the cloth flap only momentarily raised, and but little light coming in, nevertheless shone a bright gold, and its intricate mechanism rattled and whirred as it flopped there on the floor. Behind the glass eyes, a look almost human had stared out at the Stranger in supplication. On the fish’s forehead, above the eyes, there was a nasty-looking dent, perhaps from a recent gunshot.
No more sound came now from the wagon. The giant piece of materiel that he had witnessed moved no further within. The Stranger lay on his back and his limbs grew heavy. The embers whispered with dying fire. The stars streaked across the sky, forming sentences in a language he wanted to but couldn’t read. He felt himself dropping into sleep.
The two impish figures that stood in the moonlight had shed off their protective clothes, and in the broken light the Stranger saw them for what they really were, thin and delicate, with wide, clown-like mouths, mischievous eyes, and near translucent skin, under which their skeletons appeared as though composed of fragile fish bones. In the moonlight, too, the old abandoned chapel and the road both seemed to glow a bright ivory white, while the wagon seemed bigger, near palatial.
The Escapement spread outwards from them in all directions, and the sky seemed never to end over the lit landscape. The road snaked in loops and curves across the land, and far in the distance the Stranger felt, more than saw, the movement of ghostly yet durable troops, marching. The male who had called himself Fledermaus stood there watching the Stranger with the curve of a smile, and his shadow, like his sister’s, grew behind him, immense and cephalopodian. It was as though the shadows were the real body, and the tiny human figures were merely the mouthpieces for the darkness beyond.
And then the Stranger knew them then for two of the pupae umbrarum.
In her hand, Titania held a small, dandelion-like flower. She blew on it, gently, and the tiny florets, startled by her breath, detached from their anchorage and took flight, one by one, until they dispersed to all corners and Titania remained holding only the bald stem of the flower.
“Do not seek the Ur-shanabi,” she said, in a voice melodious and clear. “For the Plant of Heartbeat brings only heartache when it flowers.”
“I need to find it,” the Stranger said. “I have to.”
“Then find a fucking cartographer,” the thing that was Fledermaus said.
The vast shadows behind them coalesced, and bellowed in an invisible gale.
Somewhere, there was the sound of wind chimes.
When the Stranger woke, he found himself alone by the side of the old white road. The sound of the horses raised him from his stupor, their neighing and farting and the patient sound of cloven hooves stamping on earth, of tails swishing, of grass being ripped from the ground and chewed. The fire in its circle of stones was dead, and had been so for some time. He stood up groggily. The day was overcast and the sun was wreathed in mist. Of the tinkerers and their wagon there remained no sign. The Stranger relieved himself and washed sparingly. When he went inside the old clown chapel he saw that only his boot prints were in the thick layer of dust on the floor. And yet when he reached the place behind the dais he saw that the stained glass window with the Harlequin’s visage had been violently broken and the pieces scattered on the floor.
Tucked on the wooden board, behind where the window had been, was a small and naked dandelion.
The Stranger rode out that day along the twisting road, the horses following patiently behind him. By mid-afternoon the road had begun to grow faint at the edges, and soon it had faded away entirely, and when he looked back he could not see a sign that it had ever been there. He rode on and soon he saw the small outpost town of Kellysburg in the distance, its dismal single-storey buildings with their chimneys churning black smoke into the air, and in the distance like a series of hash signs was the railway line.
The Stranger spurred on his horse and rode into town.
THREE:
THE LONG DROP
The town of Kellysburg looked like an ugly spider bite when the Stranger approached it at dusk. An ill-omened wind blew from the east and it stirred the stunted shrubs and sent a brightly coloured scorpion into shelter in the shadow of an upturned rock in the shape of a severed fist. The train of horses, patient, followed behind the Stranger. The town was lit with thieves’ lights, crude torches soaked in diluted substance, casting off a flare-bright glow, and they hissed and fizzed sporadically. In their light, the Stranger could see the ramshackle, lean-to houses, hastily erected constructions built with dark mud, bad wood, rusted nails and spit. But the storms had left their mark on the town, and the Stranger saw a circular staircase rising high into the sky, with no walls around it, until it stopped abruptly in mid-air; and he saw the houses that grew on stalks, and disturbingly reminded him of watching eyes; and he saw the bridges that connected nowhere to nothing and looked like the tentacles of some giant beast. The air was so thick with substance that even the horses began to seem ghostly and translucent, and the Stranger’s senses were assailed with the noises of that other place, the honk of car horns and the sound of engines and a telephone ringing, somewhere nearby, over and over, and a television whispering of things to buy.
This was prospecting country. There was so much substance they were using it for light. As he came closer he saw that a small cemetery had sprouted near the entrance to the town, rows and rows of graves denoted with the slash of a clown smile, and a solitary gravedigger at his work. The Stranger passed by and stopped, contemplating the stooped, skinny man with the worm-white skin who was digging a fresh grave in the hard cracked earth.
He said, “Who’s that for?”
The gravedigger straightened and wiped his face with the back of his hand and shrugged. “Night’s yet young,” he said. “Throw the dice and take your pick, stranger.”
“I don’t play dice.”
The gravedigger grimaced and tilted his head. The ghostly outline of a late-model Ford rose towards them in the darkness, its twin headlights shining as it passed through the gravestones and disappeared back into that other place.
“I hate this fucking town,” the gravedigger said. He stared at the Stranger and the Stranger saw he had one blue eye and that the other was a milky white and made of glass. “You ever miss it, stranger? You ever want to go back?”
“I can’t,” the Stranger said. “I am looking for something. Something precious.”
“I must have been looking for something, too, once,” the gravedigger said. “Now I just dig holes in the ground. Watch your steps tonight, stranger. There’s a bad wind coming in from the Doldrums, and the fresh graves never stay empty for long.”
“I’ll be sure to bear that in mind,” the Stranger said, touching the brim of his hat. He saw that the gravedigger had one bare foot, and the skin on his hands was coarse and rough. The sound of the spade hitting the hard ground came regular as the ticking of a clock now. Then the gravedigger stopped, but the ticking continued, and the Stranger saw that he had unearthed half of a melted clock, with the second hand still ticking, blindly, stuck in the same spot.
“Is it always like this here?” the Stranger said.
“I hate this fucking town,” the gravedigger said again. He pulled the clock out savagely, like a weed, and tossed it aside on a heap which already included the bent front wheel of a penny farthing, the upper half of a storefront mannequin with too many arms and three eyes like tears down one side of its smooth, blandly handsome face, and a typewriter on which all the keys were small round mirrors. The Stranger shook his head and spurred on his horse, leaving the cemetery and its gravedigger behind.
As he approached the town proper he saw a crude wooden sign planted in the ground, and on it, in chalked letters, the legend No Gunfights No Ordnance No Clowns.
Along Main Street the shadows from the thieves’ lights fell at all angles. Furtive figures skulked between the buildings and some lay flat on their backs with their eyes open and unseeing, drunk on Sticks or raw substance. Ghostly figures moved through shop walls and several times headlights once again appeared and disappeared, but the Stranger avoided the ghostly apparitions of that other place until they faded to nothing more than a nuisance at the edge of vision. But the town itself set him on edge.
The street was unpaved and the ground dry and cracked. Horses were tied up along the shopfronts and their dung had been left to steam on the dry ground. At the end of Main Street he could just make out the train terminal and the railroad line running off into the distance, deeper into the Thickening. The wind really did carry a bad smell, of rotten eggs and curdled custard, and the Stranger saw that many of the residents walked with hands ready on their weapons, and looked about them as though spooked by something they could not yet see. Most of the people he saw were prospectors, and he saw them line up before an apothecary shop where two men wearing dirty smocks and double-lens glasses were measuring out the raw deposits and exchanging them for ducats as armed guards watched with shotguns cradled in their arms. This must have been why the railway line extended this far, to this remote outpost on the edge of the Thickening: a chondrite impact that left a rich seam of substance for the prospectors to exploit. The Stranger saw several bars, an ordinary smithy, and a laundry that seemed permanently shut. He saw no church or balloonery but had expected neither. There was also a gaol, and a rotten-looking gallows with not enough height on it for the long drop.
The many coloured lights burned unevenly and cast the town in an oily sheen of smog in which the shadows seemed separate from their sources. The Stranger found the quietest of the bars and, once inside, spoke quietly to the owner, and in short order the horses he had captured from the dead scalp hunters were exchanged for hard ducats, room and board. The owner, a short and muscled woman native to the Escapement, seemed oblivious to the substance fog or to any ghostly apparitions from that other place, and more than happy to acquire good horses cheaply. The Stranger sat down at the bar and ordered moonshine, which was the only other drink they served beside Sticks. He had the feeling that something bad was coming, but he did not know what.
The Kid said, “I see your Magician and I raise you Death.”
The Stranger had the Emperor but not the Empress or the Wheel of Fortune, and though he retaliated with the Moon it was no good and the Kid swept the money to his side of the table with one scrawny arm. There was an old piano in the corner, and a one-eyed woman tickled the ivories, playing a Dibdin piece. She’d flashed the Stranger a grin when he’d come in earlier.
“So you’ve met the Lovers and lived,” she said.
The Stranger inched his head in reply. Then Temperanza went back to her playing. She looked like she was waiting for something; though she was probably just waiting for the train.
“I’m going to take a piss,” the Kid announced, and he strutted across the floor, his spurs making a rasping sound across the scuffed wood. The Kid had been drinking moonshine steadily throughout the game, but he was still beating the Stranger at cards.
The Stranger watched him go. The Kid wore his pistols low-slung on his hips and his hat at a cocky angle, but for all that he just looked like a kid playing at dressing up.
They were almost the only people at the bar. It was not a place that invited confidences or offered comfort. The tables were rough-hewn wood, and tallow candles burned with oily smoke but offered little light. In one corner sat a small man cowled in shadow and now that the Kid had gone to the outhouse the man got up and sauntered over to their table and sat down without being asked.
“New in town, stranger?”
He had an ordinary face and hard black button eyes and his nails and his hair were both cut short. The Stranger looked, but he couldn’t see if there was a dagger hidden up the man’s sleeve, though he rather suspected so all the same. He said, “What’s it to you?”
“Just making conversation.”
The Stranger shrugged. “It’s no secret,” he allowed.
“You rode in from the Doinklands?” The black button eyes turned shrewd. “You didn’t happen to’ve come across the Thurston Brothers, did you? Scalp hunters, there’s a reward out for them. Good money, too.”
“I think that bounty’s claimed,” the Stranger said, and over by the piano Temperanza smirked without breaking melody.
The other man nodded.
“Is that so, is that so. Well, never mind, I’m sure. The world’s a better place for it and so on.”
“Professional interest?” the Stranger said. The other man shrugged.
“Listen,” he said. “Out there, did you see any sign of the war?”
The Stranger nodded. “The Titanomachy rages on. I saw a battle in the distance, but I didn’t go close, and who won it, if any, I don’t know. Why?”
“No reason, no reason,” the other man said. “Only, there’s rumours, see? I am looking for something, yes, yes, there could be a handsome reward in it for a man such as you. A piece of materiel, rumour says. Some sort of weapon. Yes. What it does, no one knows for certain. Something big, though.”
The Stranger thought uneasily about the tinkerers; and about the vast slab of mechanical fish he had caught sight of, for just a moment, hidden under blankets in the back of their wagon. But he shook his head, slowly. It could have been anything.
“You’re a Pilkington?” he said. The other man shrugged.
“We all got a job to do, ain’t we?” he said.
“Bit far from base,” the Stranger said.
“Pilkingtons go wherever they must,” the other man said. At that moment the Kid came sauntering back into the room and sat down, glaring at the Pilkington.
“I thought I told you to keep out of my business, Clem,” he said.
“This ain’t your business, kid.”
&
nbsp; “Fucking Pilkingtons,” the Kid said. The other man glared at him but said nothing.
At that moment, the Stranger felt the wind change. The tinkle of wind chimes began to sound ethereally in the air, and the smell of rotten eggs and custard intensified. Faint on the breeze, the Stranger thought he could hear a demonic laughter, like a distorted echo of the sounds one heard when one came upon the Colossi walking the Escapement. But this was not the inhuman sound of the Colossi but a terrifying, yet very human, sound. He heard two gunshots go off outside, one after the other in rapid succession, coming from two different places.
The three men moved independently but almost in unison. Temperanza alone, unconcerned, remained at the piano, and the music she played was haunting and sad.
The Kid held his pistol and the Pilkington, Clem, had a sawed-off shotgun that seemed to just appear out of nowhere, and the Stranger had the uneasy feeling it had been taped to the underside of the table.
He himself held his revolver. They had all moved to the window, guns drawn, and the Stranger peered out onto Main Street. He saw the shops were rapidly closing, their internal lights extinguished, and the people outside were running for shelter, and in mere moments the street was deserted. Behind them, he heard the owner of the bar loudly pump a shotgun.
“He’s coming,” she said.
“Who?” the Kid said.
But then they heard it. The cries, faint at first, but growing in volume, from one side of Main Street to the other.
“Pogo!”
“Pogo’s coming!”
“Pogo’s coming!”
The Stranger and the Kid exchanged bewildered looks; but Clem, the Pilkington, grinned in savage satisfaction. The Stranger stared out. The burning multicoloured lights cast the street in a non-linear chiaroscuro. Even those prospectors passed out on the side of the road from Sticks were gone now, dragged away by their comrades to safety.