The Escapement

by Lavie Tidhar

  “Have you word of the war?”

  “The Titanomachy rages on,” Mr. Norvell said, complacently. “What more is there to say?”

  “I met a man in Kellysburg,” the Stranger said. “I think he was looking for something. A sort of new weapon one side or the other had got hold of.”

  Mr. Norvell’s eyes hardened but he shook his head. “Of that I do not know,” he said. Then his look turned shrewd and he said, “Do you, stranger?”

  The Stranger drew his gun and cocked it, under the table. Mr. Norvell registered the sound and his lips pursed but he said nothing.

  “I don’t think I like you,” the Stranger said.

  Mr. Norvell shrugged.

  “Take off your glasses.”

  Mr. Norvell reached up carefully and removed his glasses. He placed them on the table. The noise of the drinkers was all about them, engulfing them in a bubble of silence. In the galley the two cooks continued to work, oblivious to them. The Stranger did not look directly into Mr. Norvell’s eyes. He turned his head, looking at the galley, at the woman rolling dough and the man stirring and stirring the gun stew, and he looked at the snake oil man sideways, from the corners of his eyes, and as he looked the man’s eyes seemed to become two black tunnels—

  At that moment the lights in the dining car dimmed and went out. The cook swore, softly. The train hit a switch and then the mountains filled the windows of both sides of the train as it entered the mountain pass. The Stranger’s free hand shot across the table but all he caught hold of was Mr. Norvell’s soft felt hat. The train rocked from side to side and a moment later the lights came back on.

  Mr. Norvell’s black suit remained in the seat but his hat, which the Stranger had grasped, was nevertheless gone, as was the man himself. Of his briefcase of medicinal samples there was, likewise, no trace. Only the suit remained, as though mocking the Stranger, with its starched white shirt and its black formal jacket, and on the table, he now saw, wedged under a single, stoppered whalebone vial, was a little visiting card. The Stranger slid the card from under the bottle and turned it over. Under a stylised snake curled round a wooden staff, it said, jefferson & norvell, medici, and, below that in smaller letters, an address: asclepius gardens, jericho. The Stranger turned it in his fingers thoughtfully, then slipped it into a pocket. He picked up the small bottle and saw that it was marked lethe. He unstoppered it and sniffed, then made a face. He stoppered the bottle again and put that, too, in his pocket.

  The train thundered through the mountain pass. Fat drops of snow fell beyond the windows, and the escaping light from the dining car caught them as they fell. On the other side from the Stranger, a fight broke out between the card players, and they were now short one player.

  Temperanza was gone.

  And the Stranger had a bad feeling, a feeling that something bad, very bad, was coming.

  A large, sweating prospector roared in anger as he tossed cards in the air, and he pulled out a gun on the Kid, who was sitting with his back to the galley. The Stranger rose with one easy motion and his own revolver pressed against the man’s thick neck.

  The man froze.

  “Is there a problem?” the Stranger said.

  The man slowly shook his head. The Kid grinned, swiped the ducats on the table towards him and began to put them away. “No problem,” he said, cheerfully. “Me and Chalky here were just having a misunderstanding about the lady’s chips, she seems to have vanished and we’ve just been, err, debating, the fairest way to split them, isn’t that right, Chalky?”

  “S’right, kid,” the large man said. There were white traces of substance all over his overalls, and now and then he seemed to go in and out of focus, and the Stranger could see, fleetingly, bits of the room and the furniture through his skin. “S’right.”

  The Stranger removed the gun from the big man’s neck. The Tarocchi cards lay everywhere, on the table and the floor, and the Magician had fallen by the Stranger’s feet. He looked at it for a moment before slipping back into his seat and, a moment later, the Kid came over, carelessly pushed off the discarded black suit of clothes, and sat down opposite, still grinning.

  “Thanks for that,” the Kid said.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “That dame was nice, you know. Too bad she’s vanished.”

  “Too bad,” the Stranger said.

  The Kid, chatty, said, “He’s not a bad guy, is Chalky. No hard feelings. Has three claims down in Kellysburg and environs. When he sells his shipment of substance in Jericho he’ll be set for life. Eh, Chalky?”

  “S’right, kid,” the large prospector said, stopping by their table. He scratched his pale forehead and a thin shower of white substance fell down gently to the floor. “I’m just going to use the jakes.”

  “You do that, Chalky.”

  The Stranger watched him walk away. He could see the door through Chalky’s back, and the vestibule beyond. The big man went through and shut the door. The train rocked on its bogies. The night and the darkness pressed against the glass. The train’s horn sounded, a desperate, forlorn sound. The Stranger said, “Come with me,” and rose from his seat.

  “What? Why?”

  “Because the train’s going to be attacked.”

  The Kid looked at him but said nothing. He got up too, and followed the Stranger out of the dining car and into the vestibule. The door to the jakes hung open, and rattled on its hinges. The Kid drew his gun but the Stranger shook his head, no, and pushed it open the rest of the way. The prospector, Chalky, was sitting slumped over the open hole in the floor. The track rolled below. Chalky’s eyes were wide open, his breathing even, but most of him was gone now, had become translucent and ethereal, and through the thick frame of his body the Stranger could see, as through a screen, into that other place. On that screen, images flickered incessantly, showing a lit city, moving cars, garbage bins, people walking, shop windows, a cat that stopped and glared at them through Chalky’s skin before slinking away, a boy furtively spraying the walls of an overhang with paint, a drunk in a clown costume urinating at the egress of an alleyway. They could see Chalky, or a version of him, walking down that city street, in a suit and a tie, holding a briefcase. The Kid wrinkled his nose and the Stranger quietly closed the door on the passed-out man.

  “Ever since we left Kellybsurg I’ve had a bad feeling,” the Stranger said. “There’s something going on, behind the walls of the world. Tiny forms in huge empty spaces. I saw . . . something, out there in the Doinklands, and I think people are searching for it. A sort of weapon. . . .” He shrugged. “This train’s carrying too much substance,” he said. “I think we’re going to get robbed.”

  “OK,” the kid said.

  “OK?” the Stranger said. “That’s it?”

  The Kid grinned and drew his gun. “Sure,” he said. “Why not.”

  “OK, then,” the Stranger said. He pushed ahead and the Kid followed, into the next car and past cabins half-empty, and into the next car again. In the last compartment the window was open. He thought he saw a sleeping figure, a pool of darkness deeper than the surrounding gloom; the snow that blew in ringed the figure with a crown of spinose structures, like thorns. But he did not linger, and at the next vestibule they had reached the engine. The door here was polished mahogany. The Stranger pushed against the door but it wouldn’t budge. The Kid joined him and together they pressed with their combined force against the door until at last it gave way.

  They staggered in.

  The first thing the Stranger noticed about the engineer’s cab was how very cold it was.

  It was a clean, surgical sort of cold, and it soaked into the very essence of the room, into its clean white walls and its beige parquet floor. As he became aware of his surroundings he noticed the following in quick succession: the engine room down below and the stoker, working, the large windows in the nose through which he co
uld see the tracks running ahead between the two mountains, and finally the small and irritable man who turned from the board of shining metallic instruments with a frown and said, “What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here.”

  The man had tufts of hair sticking out from behind his ears and a bald dome of a head and he wore double-lens glasses, like the apothecary men had worn in Kellysburg. He only looked at them momentarily before returning to his instruments, muttering under his breath figures and measurements of a geometrical nature. But what arrested the Stranger’s attention, and made his skin turn cold, was the sight of the firebox and of the stoker beside it, methodically shovelling ghosts.

  The car was divided into two levels. They stood in the engineer’s upper level, but to their left the floor dropped directly onto a second level, and it was there that, within a small, iron boiler, a cold white fire burned. It was not so much a fire as the antonym of one, an icy vapour that emanated from some mechanical freezer agent deep within the iron firebox. Next to the box stood the stoker, a tall and gangly figure with a skin as white as a Pierrot’s. Despite the intense cold the man was nearly naked, and in his hands he held an old and blackened shovel, and beside him there was a large and open drum containing pure crystalline substance. The man methodically reached into the drum with the shovel and hefted up substance and threw it into the firebox. When the material connected with the cold flame it came alive with all the stored and possible permutations of that other place, and the Stranger saw faces and torsos and arms emerge out of the firebox, mouths open in speech or cries, eyes looking—looking at him, now, noticing him—before they vanished, so quickly he could have almost imagined it. There were so many of them that men merged into women and faces became the fantastical representation of phoenixes and sphinxes and all were consumed in the freezing hungry flames that had to be kept fed, over and over. The stoker never wearied from his task and his skin resembled marble and he kept shovelling ghosts into the furnace of the train.

  “Great Harlequin,” the Kid said. “Is that. . . ?”

  “There’s enough raw substance there to blow a hole from here to the underworld,” the Stranger said.

  The engineer turned on them again. “Get out! Get out!” he said. ”What are you doing here? You are not supposed to be here.”

  “Look!” the Kid said. He pointed, but the Stranger didn’t need prompting. The train shot through the dark and suddenly the mountains to either side disappeared as it cleared the saddle, and ahead of them, and lit by the broken moon, was the approach to the Chagrin.

  The true and wild Escapement opened up before them then. In a blue-black sky floated the broken moon, wreathed in a milky veil of clouds. The mountains loomed in the distance, fencing in the mighty Nikulin and half-encircling the dark body of water into which it flowed. Straight ahead, the train tracks reached an embankment over the shores of Lake Chagrin, but they did not stop. Rising over the body of the lake was a bridge, mounted on spindly stilts that rose out of the water, and beyond it the Stranger could make out the next pier, where the bridge connected to a small island floating like a dismembered eye in the northeastern part of the lake. There the bridge sloped down before rising again from the pier on the distant bank, linking the island back to the mainland, beyond, at last, the oppressive reach of the mountains.

  The train thundered toward the bridge.

  The aerialists gathered against the side of the mountain. Carl had pressed his palms to the black rock and communed silently with what he called the esprit de corps. Then he nodded and, seemingly satisfied, returned to their group.

  He was not himself, that was all it was, Loretta tried to tell herself. She just had to do what he wanted and then everything would be all right.

  Loretta watched the dark island in the lake. The two bridges rose out of it like some sort of malignant growth, not human-made at all but a natural part of the Escapement, overlaid with the train tracks, which seemed puny and fragile in comparison.

  Long, taut aerial rope slides ran down from the mountainside and over the lake, terminating on the black rocks of the island. Loretta held on to the pulley and slid down, following Carl and Simone. Charlie and Eduardo followed her in turn. The small human shapes glided through the air over the dark water as the train emerged from between the Grand and Petite Philippes.

  A rush of exhilaration filled Loretta as she rappelled away from the mountain. She filled her lungs and screamed, and in her scream there were all her hopes and fears and dreams, from the moment she was a little girl and first saw a woman do something impossible: leaping gracefully into the air and, for just a brief moment, flying. Her dreams were filled still with that other place and the doppelgänger of hers there, the schoolteacher, whom she barely remembered or knew. But it was her fears she was truly leaving behind her, for her fears had taken on a dark shape and a face, ever since she had followed the others to the mountains. She felt it now, its gaze at her back, the terrible thing that was neither human nor of that other place but truly of the Escapement. And as the distance grew she felt more and more herself again.

  They landed softly, like seeds, one after the other on the inhospitable black rocks. There were only a few common loons roosting on the island, and the only habitation, beside the train interchange, was a caretaker’s hut, really not much more than a booth. They moved soundlessly, and the unkempt old man who stood holding a lantern and watching the distant lights of the approaching train never even noticed them. Carl, with one graceful motion, drew a knife and threw it at the caretaker, burying it in his neck. Loretta watched the man die, and the blood that was so dark in the moonlight. She didn’t want this, she realised, she didn’t want to be here, all she had ever wanted was to fly.

  They went to retrieve the stilts that had been hidden by the black rocks.

  Loretta wanted to flee. Then she looked up, and saw the stern face of the watching mountain, and she did nothing.

  Carl motioned for her. He took hold of the caretaker’s lantern and gently extinguished it. At Carl’s bidding, Loretta went and pushed the switch that would shift the train onto the island’s internal loop. Please, she thought. I don’t want anyone else to get hurt.

  The others returned with the stilts and she donned a pair too. They began to move with purpose, as graceful as storks, across the shallow water past the island.

  “What was that?” the Kid said.

  “What?”

  “That!”

  The Stranger peered ahead. The train rushed toward the lake and then with a bump it hit the switch and was onto the bridge. The water fell on either side of them as they rose over the bent stalk structure of the bridge. He caught a glimpse of the mountains on their left, ringing that side of the lake which led on to the wild Doinklands. A dark rock face, for one awful moment, resembled an austere patrician’s physiognomy. He turned his gaze from it with an effort. A cold dread clutched at his heart.

  “There it is again!”

  And now he could see it. The shifting shadows rose over the water, moving with unexpected poise. At first he thought them huge birds of some kind. As they came closer they separated, two to either side of the train, and he saw that they weren’t birds at all but stilt walkers.

  Then they disappeared, their legs dropping into the black water, and he felt more than heard the dull impact of bodies on the roof. He drew his gun and the Kid did the same. The engineer cursed under his breath and the stoker kept feeding ghosts to the flames.

  At that moment a flare burst up into the sky over the island. The engineer cursed again as he adjusted his instruments.

  “What is that?” the Kid said.

  “An emergency flare,” the engineer said. “Why are you two still here?”

  “We think the train’s about to be robbed,” the Stranger said.

  The engineer didn’t respond, but his shoulders tensed. The Stranger said, “What does the flare mean?”r />
  “The caretaker wants us to go onto the loop,” the engineer said. “It’s an emergency measure in case the train needs maintenance or there are concerns about the bridge ahead. But I was not aware . . .”

  “Kid, cover the entrance,” the Stranger said.

  The Kid nodded. He moved quietly and stood guard, guns drawn. His cheerful grin was back on his face, the same one he wore when he won at cards.

  “Can you take her straight on?” the Stranger said.

  “Override the switch? It’s too dangerous,” the engineer said. He touched the controls and the train began to slow as it rose and then began its descent towards the island. He barked a command in a language the Stranger didn’t know. The stoker didn’t pause from his job but he began to feed the flames more slowly, and in half measures, and the ghosts seemed to last longer in that fashion, and their faces lingered in the Stranger’s mind, and their lips formed silent words he did not wish to interpret.

  At that moment the door to the cab exploded inwards.

  The Kid was thrown back and the door slammed against the floor with a heavy thump. The Stranger’s gun pointed at the invaders but the engineer shouted, “No shooting!” and he withheld his fire.

  There were three of them who streamed in, and one standing guard outside. They did not hold guns but rather small and lethal-looking mechanical crossbows, which had been strapped to their backs but now pointed at the Stranger and at the engineer’s back. The Kid was on the floor and a small woman stood over him pointing her weapon at his heart. He remained lying.

  “Bring her down slow,” the woman said. “This is a robbery.”

  “No shit,” the Stranger said, wearily.

  The engineer cursed softly, under his breath, but he did as he was told.

  “No one has to get hurt,” Loretta said, more in hope than in confidence. Simone had her crossbow aimed at the kid on the ground and Eduardo now moved to cover the engineer, making sure there would be no surprises. Charlie stood guard outside, and it left Loretta to cover the tall gangly stranger who wasn’t even supposed to be there. No one paid attention to the stoker. “Just don’t try to be a hero,” she said.