by Lavie Tidhar
His eyes were open and he stared into the flames. “My mother was inside. I was too late to save her.”
“I’m sorry,” the Stranger said.
“Yes.” The thumb-tip was back around his neck. “There was nothing left for me in Bozoburg. There was hardly much left of the town. I picked up a pair of guns, and followed the Rasmussens into the Doinklands.”
“Did you ever catch them?” the Stranger asked.
“No.” A bitter smile twisted the Kid’s face. “I did find them, though, eventually. By then they were incarcerated in the local jail of a town called Soo’s Creek. I was just in time to see them hang. . . .”
The silence settled around them. Insects buzzed around the fire. The horses neighed softly. And the Stranger thought of the Escapement.
It was a land where people lived and laughed and loved and died, a land like any other land. It did not require people for it to be there, but nevertheless people came, and changed it by their being. He thought of the farmhouse, and who might have lived there once, and had they been happy, and whether they had children. It felt like a place that once echoed with the laughter of children. And he thought about his quest.
He did not know if the Escapement were real, for what was real? The world was filled with impossible things, like the joyful laugh of a child. He closed his eyes. Behind them were only white walls, an antiseptic smell, the hum of machines. A doctor whispered something, there was a hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake. Sir? Sir? Visiting times are over.
He shook them away. When he opened his eyes the Kid was there, still, staring into the flames. His hands moved through the old routine, making a handkerchief appear and disappear.
“And the Conjurer?” the Stranger asked. “Did you ever find him again?”
“No,” the Kid said. His hands moved, the thumb-tip hidden. The handkerchief disappeared and reappeared.
“No,” the Kid said. “But I will.”
SEVEN:
CLOCHARDS
When he came out of the hospital gates he just stood there for a good long while and breathed. Cars went past and their smoke filled the air. An ambulance drove by with red lights flashing. A taxi dawdled at the curb, letting out two elderly visitors who paid and disappeared into the gates and the taxi took off. He remembered other, better, days, a walk in the park with the boy when the sun was shining. The sun always seemed to shine, in those days. The boy had held his hand and he said, Daddy, Daddy, a butterfly! and the man nodded, not really paying attention, and he wished now that he’d paid so much more attention, that he’d been fully present for every single, fleeting, precious moment.
We’re going to need to run more tests. The grey light pressing against the smoked glass windows. The whisper of nurses’ shoes on the linoleum floor. Elevators pinging softly. He took a gulp of air and crossed the road to the shop on the corner and bought another fifth. The liquid burned his lips. A fire down his throat. Fog rising in his mind, he needed it like a blanket. He staggered home through dark deserted streets. Traffic lights winked green and red, green and red.
The city like a checkers board with squares of light and dark, the shadows whispering. Near his apartment he saw a group of homeless folk standing in a huddle looking at something on the ground. They seemed transfixed. He pushed near to see what it was. Some were holding bottles in brown paper bags just as he did. He pushed between two figures, a slight man with long curly sidelocks and a girl with wide shoulders and short cropped hair dyed with purple stripes. They made way for him. Their attention was focused downwards. He followed their gaze to the open drain.
A giant carp was lying in the gutter.
How the fish got there was a question none of the observers felt inclined to ask. It just was. It was huge, and the man vaguely remembered reading once how carp were near immortal, that they could die of violence or disease but not of old age.
The fish was still alive. Its glassy eyes stared up at the onlookers and its tail beat against the shallow running water and its gills opened and closed. It was just stranded there. The man felt somehow bad for the fish and yet the creature was too alien to inspire real sympathy. It was just there.
Hey, man, the guy next to him with the long sidelocks said, can you spare some change.
He reached in his pocket, brought out a handful of coins. He handed them over.
Thanks, man.
The fish flopped in the open drain.
Hey, I know you, the guy with the sidelocks said. I’ve seen you, man, here and in that other place.
I don’t know what you mean.
Is it real or is it a shared reflexive manifestation of the subconscious, an endless battleground of Eros and Thanatos, do you think?
Excuse me.
The man left them there. An old word came to him. Clochards. It meant, vagrants. He walked away from them, under awnings, stepping in puddles, and soon he was lost from sight.
The clochard, whose name was Mathieu, looked after him and shook his head. He took out a can of paint and pointed the nozzle carefully and sprayed the wall with a message that was replicated elsewhere, on other walls, in other parts of the city. Then he put the can away and took a swig from his bottle and smiled, and he and the others left there and went through the shadows and into the cracks between the stones of the world, and then they were gone from there and to that other place.
They sat on top of a cliff that, from a distance, looked like an exclamation mark. Mathieu drank from the bottle and passed it to Esther and she in turn passed it to Mikhel, and so on. Their numbers never stayed exactly the same. The clochards never worked, only travelled, and they begged when there was begging to be had and they stole, if there was anything worth stealing. As they moved across the Escapement their numbers sometimes swelled and sometimes dwindled. They were driven only by the desire to keep on moving, and by their need for substance or Sticks.
They were currently out there in the Doinklands. A ghost road glowed white and pale in the distance, snaking across the plains. Mathieu took another glug from the bottle, passed it round again. They’d scored substance a few days’ hike away in Kellysburg. They’d made their way from there across the plains and to the low mountains, though it seemed to Mathieu that they’d spent a part of the way traversing a city in that other place, dodging cars and taking shelter in abandoned buildings or under bridges.
The two places got mixed up in his mind more often than not. It was hard to keep track of what was where, and when. Clocks exploded into birds, shadow battled stone, lizards shed their skin and scuttled on the sands with rattling bones. Now the clochards sat on the big rocks and drank just enough so that the world thinned around them and from time to time, beyond the dark, he could see the glaring lights of shops from that other place. They were sitting like that, quite comfortably, when they saw the approaching storm.
It was not a rare occurrence out there and they were not unduly worried. The clochards continued to drink and watched as the first golden symbols began to dance like fae lightning on the horizon. Tildes and pilcrows and polygons burst and popped as the storm moved across the plains, and in its wake they began to hear the sound of swords clashing and enormous feet slamming against the ground. Esther slumped and curled down on the ground with the bottle of Sticks held in her hand, and it was empty. Mathieu could see her, walking away, crossing the street at a green traffic light as cars waited like beasts of the plains, puffing steam.
Some of the others were slipping away, too. It was only he perhaps who remained mostly there. He thought he saw a small wagon traverse the ghost road, following its crazy curlicues, pulled by donkeys. The donkeys strained to run, and behind them he thought he saw giant stone feet rise and fall, rise and fall, until at last the wagon was forced to abandon the ghost road and travel in a straight line, and then it was engulfed by the storm and he did not see it again.
In the night he heard inhuman laughter
fill the air, and awful silence, and the baying of animals. At last he drank enough of the Sticks that he, too, went to that other place, and there he huddled with the others under the awnings of a shut store, until morning rose about them and a policeman shooed them away.
Then they hopscotched and jump-roped through the cracks of the world and woke up a second time, blinking sleepy eyes at the plains. A snake slithered under a stone and was gone. They drank their breakfast and chewed on dried beef and old bread and then by unspoken agreement they left the high places and went back down to the plains. They were natural scavengers and it was well known one could pick up materiel in the passing of a storm, the incomprehensible leftovers of the battles of the Titanomachy.
But it had not been a battle, Mathieu thought uneasily as they descended. And indeed, when they began to search the ground, they found no transmutations or metamorphosis, not even a cockroach turned on its back. It was only later, when Bill spotted the crater, that Mathieu realised that what he had witnessed in the night wasn’t, indeed, a battle at all. It had been a hunt.
From a distance the crater almost resembled a giant foot. Coming closer, the details faded into nothing and it was just a large hole. Inside the hole, turned on its side, was a wagon that had been crushed by some immeasurable force. Its wood had snapped. Its wheels lay buried in the ground. Of the two donkeys, one was dead, flung against the side of the crater, while the other was still alive. It raised its head and looked at the clochards with large innocent eyes as they approached, and whimpered softly when Esther stroked its neck.
The sun was by then at an angle over the horizon, and the shadows cast by the clochards lengthened into blades. The wagon’s shadow was like a squashed maggot.
Beside the wagon, lying as peacefully as two rag dolls, were the corpses. They were small and rotund, their bodies wrapped in long coats. They could have been brother and sister, but really it was impossible to tell. Whatever force had come down from the heavens and pressed down on them had neatly severed their heads from their necks, and their long scarves had unravelled and fluttered on the ground in some invisible breeze.
There was no sign of the heads.
The sun was low and the shadows long and Mathieu shivered as the temperature dropped, and he took a swig from the bottle for comfort. This was the problem with scavenging, he thought. Sometimes you found things you weren’t exactly looking for.
“Search the wagon,” Davide said. He was a recent arrival to the travelling troupe. A short, compact man who seldom joined them when they went beyond the shadow-play screen to that other place.
“Search it yourself.”
The clochards sniggered. Davide shrugged, and then he went and began removing broken wood and tattered cloth, looking for what lay beneath. After a moment, Esther joined him.
They dug and dug, and Davide cursed, but soon the broken pieces of the wagon were cast in one pile, and out of the rubble they began to pull out dented old pots and pans and other useless junk, and more of the clochards drifted away, from the Escapement into rain-soaked roads and streetlights shining wetly in the night. On the Escapement, the sun dipped farther to the west.
“Hold on,” Davide said. “What’s that?”
Esther tilted her head, birdlike; listening to the hidden sounds of the dusk. Then her fingers moved, gently brushing dirt and wood chips out of the way, and a glint of gold shone through out of the dark ground. Mathieu caught his breath as a metal fin was exposed, burning gold in the dying rays of the sun.
He went to join them, skirting round their shadows. The other clochards awoke to this new discovery. With sounds like chirping birds they all joined in, digging and clearing out the rubbish, until scales were exposed, a long, heavy tail, a body, glass eyes.
It moved.
The tail beat against the ground. The eyes moved, blindly. The thing was immense, a carp or, more specifically, a koi, some sort of mechanical contraption resembling such. Yet it seemed alive.
“What is it?” Mikhel said.
“Materiel,” Mathieu said, quietly.
They dug. It seemed to Mathieu that it was Davide and Esther who dug the hardest, who were most insistent on bringing this monstrosity out into the open, but they were all caught up in it by then. It was the biggest find they’d ever had, if only they knew what it was or what price they could get for it.
The sun had set. The fish was still only half out of the ground and they set fire to the heap of broken wood, and the scales of the fish glinted in the firelight. A wild mood took them. They drank moonshine and danced as the stars came out and the smoke of the bonfire curled upwards, and Davide and Esther tied ropes to the body of the fish and then they all joined forces in hauling it out, until it popped out of the hole with a sudden wet sound and flopped on the ground, moving in some mechanical way like a clockwork automaton, its mouth opening and closing and its artificial eyes reflecting the fire back at them.
They proceeded to get very drunk.
In that other place and a long time before, Mathieu imagined that he was a scholar, and he studied holy texts. He had a wife he imagined he must have loved, and two children that he knew he had. He and his wife had married young, by arrangement of their families. The children he had loved wholeheartedly, but something happened, he no longer knew what, and after that event he was no longer married nor had he any children. It was in that period immediately after the tragedy that he took up drinking. He took to drinking the way he took to books, earnestly and wholeheartedly.
It was at approximately that time that he began to experience delirium tremens, and then merely delirium. After that Mathieu kept to himself and little by little departed wholly from his old life.
In his delirium he was no longer in that other place but in a land called the Escapement. He lived, not sure if he were a scholar dreaming he was a clochard, or a clochard dreaming that he was a scholar.
In that time he had seen all kinds of things he had once thought impossible. He saw the living statue of a woman, turned to granite, the eyes still clear and tracking, trapped within. Flesh-clad skeletons stretched into accordions. A rain of bowler hats.
But after a time the sight of every battleground fatigued him. He withdrew by degrees. Nights in that other place he read cheap books pilfered from drugstores and late-night gas stations. He read by candlelight in the abandoned buildings where clochards sought shelter. Days on the Escapement he spent walking, or riding the hopping cars on the rails, or hitching rides on slow-moving wagons. All he knew was that he had to keep moving.
Gradually, by degrees, he got to know the others. Esther, Bill, others who belonged in neither place. Liminal, they moved like ghosts, unseen by passers-by. They banded together for comfort. They drank by open fires and slept under the clear and distant stars. They had no purpose, no ambition but to simply be.
“Bring it up, bring it up.” The ropes tied round the fish made it easier to drag it along, but it took their combined force to pull it out of the footprint-like crater and back onto the horizontal plains. Finally they brought up the surviving donkey and it was the donkey who was tasked with pulling the fish, and the rest of them took turns helping.
Mathieu didn’t mind the labour. He welcomed the exertion, the fact that with the weight of the fish each step became a world, and there was no room left for anything but the act of pulling. It made him uneasy, the thing, and when he wasn’t pulling alongside the donkey he was troubled by the way Davide and Esther walked close together, and how their shadows trailed behind them, and how the shadows seemed larger than their source. And he was troubled by the fish itself, and how it seemed alive, this elaborate, mechanical contraption, inimical, a mimic, a simulacrum of life.
They walked days across the plains and saw not another storm. On the seventh day they saw an edifice rising far in the distance, a giant structure that jutted out of the ground as though, long ago, it had crashed into it. Cu
rrents of lightning flashed in complicated shapes all across the dark body of the edifice, which cast a long shadow over the plain. It took a two-day hike to reach it, and they were glad, for it was known that substance could often be found near such an edifice.
This close, it almost resembled a passenger ship, buried nose-first in the ground. The metal looked strangely organic, and it occurred to Mathieu, unpleasantly, that it could have been something else entirely, something alive: like an egg. They camped under the edifice that night, and the fish, agitated, kept flopping on the ground where it lay, its mouth opening and closing as though it were trying to bite prey or bait that wasn’t there. All through the night the blue electric lights flashed as they snaked over the body of the edifice like living tattoos.They trudged on across the plains.
The land rose by degrees but the forces of vastation and revel acted upon the Escapement and on the eighth or ninth day after they left the edifice they woke up in the morning with the sun rising from the north and it set that night beyond the mountains. The air was colder and the fish as heavy as before and there were no towns or any sign of human habitation, and Mathieu thought that they must have shifted farther into the Thinning. It was then also that he began to discern the hidden marks of the denizens of this wild land. A squiggle of chalk on the bark of a tree; boot marks in the ground, of long, flat feet; a dollop of rancid custard.
They were deep into the cedar forests at the foothills of the mountain range when the clowns attacked.
They came like pale ghosts out of the trees. Hobos, Augustes. They carried baleros and diabolos and cream custard pies. Long red boots and pale wide faces and red round noses and eyes that reflected your own inhumanity straight back at you.
Leading them all was a boss clown. It was a giant Hobo clown, with hobnailed boots that thudded into the ground with each step it took. The clowns surrounded the clochards, though they avoided the shadows that congealed around Davide and Esther. The clochards were not armed, and it was Mathieu who faced up to the clowns. The giant gestured. Davide replied with gestures of his own.