by Lavie Tidhar
When they came at last near to the place—to Hole—they began to see tracks in the ground, looping and twisting on each other. The tracks led to giant warehouses built of stout wood—all the wood that had been chopped off for miles in every direction. As they came near they saw a mining cart emerge just ahead. It was being pulled by four Whitefaces, whose legs were shackled by chains. The cart was laden with bags and bags all filled with substance, the white crystals spilling out as the cart shuddered and was jogged forward, one step at a time. The clowns never made a sound and their faces were impassive. Only their eyes showed the strain.
“What is this?” the Stranger said, aghast.
“Hold on, wait,” the Conjurer said, as the Stranger reached for his rifle. “Don’t be hasty—hello, what do we have here?”
The Stranger let go of the rifle. The clowns, he saw, were not alone, for ambling behind them came a ferret-faced individual, and he held a long and nasty-looking whip which he let whistle through the air idly as he walked. He saw them, and winked. It was then that the Stranger realised they had not been alone for some time. Out of the haze of substance the men came sliding like tightrope walkers, from all directions, and they surrounded the three travellers.
They wore oversized striped blazers with too many pockets and too many buttons sewn on them. They wore straw hats that looked like plum cakes, and large bow ties, and bright yellow fake gerberas in their lapels. They carried knives up their sleeves and guns on their belts, under the blazers, and they wore sharpened spurs on their boots. Their faces were uniformly gaunt. In their eyes, the pupils were mere pinpricks of black swallowed within a dirty-pink iris. They looked like they always spoiled for a fight.
The Conjurer groaned. “Oh, no . . . ,” he said. “Not fucking carnies.”
“Friends of yours?” the Kid said.
“No one’s friends with a carnie, Kid,” the Conjurer said. “They ain’t got no friends and they ain’t got no moral compass and they’d knife you as soon as look at you. I don’t know what they’re doing this far into the Doinklands. They live on the edges of the Désert de Soleil and war with the strongmen tribes and their bearded ladies. Shit, Kid. Nobody likes a carnie.”
“Keep your hands nice and loose where I can see them.”
The man who stepped forward was taller and lankier than the others and his hair was long and dirty, and a scar ran down the left side of his face. The four clowns went past with their cargo of substance. Behind them the Stranger could see the next cart, and the one behind it, already emerging out of the mist.
“And who might you three gentlemen be?”
“Just travellers, passing through,” the Stranger said, pleasantly enough.
“Armed like this?”
The Conjurer barked a laugh. “Wouldn’t you be?” he said.
The carnie inched his head, acceding the point.
“Jericho is fallen,” the Stranger said. “Colossi and pupae are battling once more in the Thickening. We had no desire to become embroiled in the war, so we headed as far away as possible. . . . We’re looking for work.”
“Work? What sort of work?”
“The sort a man can do with a gun in his hand,” the Conjurer said, and laughed.
“Or a pack of cards,” the Kid said.
“There ain’t no work here,” the carnie said, and spat. “Not unless you’re a carnie . . . or a clown.” He laughed. His teeth were white and even.
“Just what is this place?” the Kid said. “It’s not on any maps.”
“Hole,” the carnie said.
“Hole?”
“Hole,” the carnie said, with finality.
The carnies edged them along. The three travellers had no choice but to be led. They moved deeper into the territory. More and more carts arrived and more and more clowns. Some pulled the loaded carts and others ferried rocks and others carried large planks of wood, and all this while the air was thick and hazy with fine powdery substance, and it was not long before the men came to the ledge and then they finally saw it.
The hole gaped out of the broken land like a giant wound in the Escapement. Even the Colossi would have been dwarfed inside it. The walls on the far side were visible only as a hazy, unreal cliff-face. It looked as though a giant’s fist had come out of the sky and punched clear through the abdomen of the Escapement, tearing it open and bleeding.
The hole was filled with clowns.
There were more clowns down there in that crater than the Stranger had ever seen. Whitefaces, Augustes and tramps, Grotesques and Pierrots, Bozos and Dinks and jesters and Fools.
Boss clowns, shackled like the rest, moved among them, shoulders slumped in mute defeat. The clowns trod the white earth with their long red feet. It was hard to tell them apart. Fine substance clung to their clothes, their arms, their faces. They held drills and spades and shovels. Tracks led down the slope into the hole and came back with cargo, and every few seconds, in the distance, the Stranger could hear a carnie shout, “Fire in the hole!” and this was followed by an explosion, and then another. Drifting through the floor of the mine he could see ghostly cars, ghost men walking, and cats that slunk between the mine and the streets of that other place. Planted in the ground down below he could see a traffic light. It was not ghostly but solid, firm. He realised with horror that it must have somehow slipped from that other place to the Escapement and there it remained, an impossible relic. Somehow, the sight of that traffic light, in all its ordinariness, was worst. It did not belong here, its presence was a wrong, it was like a splinter in a pussing wound. The sight of the enslaved clowns filled the Stranger with rage, but he controlled it with an effort, and the face he turned on his captors was bland and pleasant, as though he had not a care in the world.
“A mine, eh?” the Conjurer said. He rubbed his white-gloved hands together, as though to keep them warm.
“Not just any mine,” the carnie said. “This is the mother lode.”
It had to be. The Stranger had been traversing the Escapement for a long time, and was destined to travel for a little while more, but in all this time he had never seen a mine such as Hole. It should not have existed, it was more than a hole in the ground, it was a breach between the Escapement and . . . other places. The man woke with a shudder in the hospital room and looked about him helplessly, spooked by some nameless night terror, and when he looked out of the window he saw not the city streets but the white dusty plains of a crater like something on the moon, and it was full of clowns.
The Stranger looked around the rim of the crater, and he saw the carnies positioned in their little booths, with rifles pointed down at the slaving clowns like shooters at a duck gallery. He said, “You seem to have everything very much under control round here.”
“Pride ourselves on it,” the head carnie said, and spat again. A cat materialised a few feet away, slunk to the carnie and purred against his leg, then vanished. “Now get a move on.”
The Stranger was keenly aware of how close they were to the edge. How easy it would be to topple down there. One push . . .
“Where are you taking us?” he said.
“Up to the mansion,” the carnie said. “Let the General decide what to do with you.”
“Can’t we just shoot them, Charlie?” a younger carnie, face scarred with acne, said.
The head carnie shot him an angry look. “We don’t shoot shit without the General’s say-so,” he said. “You know what he’s like. And you lot, move it. Ain’t got all day.”
The Stranger and the Conjurer exchanged a glance, and the Conjurer gave him a wary grin. The Conjurer didn’t have an ace up his sleeve . . . but he did have the dynamite. The Stranger gave him a tiny shake of the head. Not yet. Instead, they let the carnies lead them on.
They walked, through the haze of substance. It burned in furnaces scattered all about the place, ghost faces forming out of the smok
eless emanations of the cold fires, mouths open in silent screams. They walked, past shackled clowns on the chain gang, past carnies holding rifles and a boss clown being whipped against a spinning wheel of death, but never uttering a sound. They walked, along white-smudged dusty trails that resembled the paths slugs make as they pass. They walked, past cranes that dipped and rose, dipped and rose, lifting up rocks and chunks of crystal substance from the mine. They walked past tents where the carnies lived, past older, abandoned excavations, past the severed giant foot of a Colossus, past a broken dream machine half-buried in the ground. And the Stranger began to realise just how old this place was, how long this part of the Escapement had been worked. The flesh of the Escapement was at its most tender here, it had been prodded and poked and dug out since long before humanity’s arrival. A Cadillac drove towards them, its lights burning. It passed harmlessly through the carnies’ bodies and disappeared into thin air. Something else, at the edge of vision, was less easy to quantify. For a moment he had a dizzying sense of wrongness, as though he were beyond the atmosphere, in outer space, and something vast and balloon-like and semi-dead floated like a mote of dust in a giant eye. . . .
They walked, and they walked some more, until they reached at last a hill that must have formed in millennia past from the debris of earlier, more primitive digs, and on top of that hill there stood Hole Manor, and it was to its doors that they wended their way.
The men were very tired and very thirsty by the time they reached Hole Manor, and their clothes were dusty white from the substance, and though they kept their weapons about them they could not use them for the carnies always had them under watch. The carnies were well organised and moved with easy purpose, and there was a practical viciousness in their eyes and in their casual contempt for the three travellers. This was their claim, they seemed to say, and they ran it as they saw fit. It could not have been easy enslaving the clowns, for clowns are not naturally given to obedience or order.
There is nothing funny about a clown, but there is perhaps something funny about seeing a clown fall, or so some say. Be that as it may, the men came to the doors of the mansion and there they paused, as the head carnie disappeared nervously inside. On his return he was accompanied by three young girls, in summer dresses, and these apparitions descended on the travellers with cries of delight.
“Look, Constance, he has a top hat! Oh, mister, mister, can you do magic? Show us a trick, make a ducat disappear!”
“With pleasure,” the Conjurer said, for he was a man not so much given to vanity as with rightful pride in his skills, and he charmed the girls with all manner of card flourishes and coin vanishes until they clapped in delight.
“Oh, look, Florence, look how handsome he is!” and the Kid blushed as the girls pulled at his shirt and admired his necklace with the silver thumb-tip, which they pronounced “Divine!”—and took out his pistols with not a care in the world and spun their chambers round and ooohed and aahhed, “But where did you find them, Charlie?”—with delighted amazement.
“On the perimeter, miss. Intruders, miss.”
“Oh,bishbosh, Charlie! Look at them, Boo, real men. I bet they’ve been to the city, and know all the latest songs!”
The Stranger watched them warily.
“Oh, stranger, what a frown!” said Florence. Boo and Constance held his arms and pushed their trigger fingers at his cheeks, lifting the corners of his lips—“Turn that frown upside down!”cried Constance in delight, and Boo squealed as the Stranger smiled, for all that he itched to lift up his pistol and shoot them. The carnies watched but kept their distance, and seemed relieved to be dismissed, though the head carnie, Charlie, did put up token resistance—“But the General . . .”—to which Constance said “But of course Daddy must see them at once!” and that was that.
They were led or dragged inside. It was a very stately home, Hole Manor. The three girls led them down corridors where the carpets were as thick and black as layers of ancient mould. The wainscoting was mottled with spider-web cracks so fine they looked like artisan etchings. The corner posts were crusted with crystals of substance. The ghosts of men in suits and ties walked the corridors holding briefcases. They vanished into closed doors and in the midst of conversation, as though, in that other place, this grand mansion held a bank or some other large seat of commerce. The corridors were lined with doors of different makes and colours, but all were closed. On and on they went, deeper into Hole Manor, until the Stranger began to despair of ever reaching a destination. The mansion was just another snare in the Escapement, he realised. Like the maze where he had first met Temperanza.
Which made him wonder where Temperanza herself was. She’d be somewhere out of sight, yet close. The three men had discussed their strategy before reaching Hole, and they had chosen to ride in openly. “You can catch more flies with honey than you can by skulking like a clown in a mine, as the saying goes,” the Conjurer had argued, and when they’d looked at him, confused, he’d said, “Whatever it is we’re facing, we won’t be able to take all of them by force.”
So here they were. Another corridor and another turn and another, and just when the Stranger thought they would never escape, that they were doomed to wander endlessly down the maze of corridors, they reached the reception hall.
Glittering chandeliers hung from the high ceiling. A warm, cloying breeze blew through the hall. Wan sunlight pierced the haze on the far side, and bookshelves lined one long wall, reaching from floor to ceiling, though all the spines had warped and the letters ran down the leather like smudged tears. The marble floor was dusty with substance and marked with countless footprints. A long table sat in the northwest corner, laid with plates and cutlery for twenty-odd. It was unoccupied but for a solitary figure at the head of the table, and it was to this man that the three girls led the travellers.
“Papa, we have guests,” announced Boo.
“Guests? I’ve invited no guests, not in centuries,” the man said. He took out his left eye and polished it on a napkin before popping it back in its socket. He was short and thick-armed and with a neat, trimmed black beard. He stood at their arrival.
“What new playthings have you found, daughters?”
“A stranger and a conjurer, and one is all but a kid!” Florence said.
“Aren’t they fetching?” said Constance.
“Sir, we are but poor travellers passing through—” the Conjurer began, but the old man waved away his explanation.
“Save it,” he said. “It matters not whether you’re saps or schemers. You’re here. The girls do like new toys to play with. Be welcome, for a time. Will you be joining us for dinner?”
“Sir?” The Stranger did not like the implications in the old man’s speech.
“Dinner,” the old man said. “You do eat, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“My name is General Barnum. You may address me as General.”
“Yes, General.”
“In your journey, have you encountered a preacher, some days’ ride from here?”
“We did. There was a battle. He is dead, but so are his killers.”
“Ah. I wondered why my men did not return. Very well.” He waved his hand. “It does not matter, for all that he was my brother. No doubt he’ll pop up again, sooner or later. He always does.”
“But sir—I mean, General—the man is dead.”
The General smiled. His teeth were white and even.
“Yes, yes,” he said. “But this is Hole.”
In the white corridors with the parquet floors the man walked, to and fro, to and fro. The early morning shift had come and dawn broke outside the windows. The hospital felt livelier, awake. The kitchen workers were preparing meals and the shops on the ground floor had all opened, and visitors began to crowd to the elevators, some to see the new babies born throughout the night, others to visit those relatives who had only just de
parted. In all this world only the boy was still and unchanged. The machines monitored his heart rate and his blood pressure, fed him liquids, evacuated waste. The nurses came and went with brisk if compassionate efficiency. Nothing had changed throughout the night. The man paced, his old routine dictating the same unchanging movements as the mechanism of a clock. Which stall to use in the public bathroom, which sink to wash his hands in, which nurse was at the duty station, which elevator rose and which went down. He counted windows, people, plastic plants. He counted airplanes passing in the sky. He counted shoes, how many black, how many brown, how many sneakers, what colour socks. He counted two pairs of flip-flops. He counted seven hats.
The clock on the wall was a cheap plastic clock and the hands moved so slowly but they moved all the same. Then it was noon and the ward was busy, and he retreated to the café and had a sandwich. He went down and up the elevators. He paced the corridor. He sat by the boy’s bed and tried to read to him, but the words soon stopped making any kind of sense and he ceased in his futility. Time! He was running out of time. He had to find the Ur-shanabi or the boy will—
“More candyfloss?” Florence said. Overhead the chandeliers shone, bathing the dining room in soft yellow light. A ghostly truck passed through the wall and disappeared down the other end. “Is the food to your liking, stranger?”
“It is very nice,” the Stranger said. “And thank you.” He stared at his plate of bone-white china, and the soft pink cloud of candyfloss that sat on it. He turned the stick forlornly between his fingers. Across from him, the Kid was very close with Constance, sharing strands of spun sugar between them. The Conjurer entertained Boo with card tricks.