The Escapement Read online

  Then he saw it.

  The figure materialised at the end of Main Street, near the railway terminal, and began to progress in an easy saunter down the road. It seemed Goliath-like in size, as the light behind sent its shadow sprawling until it touched the fronts of shops like a rising tide. But as it came closer, the Stranger saw that it was a figure of medium size, almost slight, and for one terrible moment he thought that it was a clown.

  “Pogo!”

  “Pogo’s coming!”

  The face was deathly pale and a jagged, bloodied red mouth had been painted over it. The eyes were jagged triangles. Pogo wore a red hat and a striped suit and his hands were empty. He carried a suitcase in one hand. The Stranger saw a hanging rope and a machete on his hips.

  “A clown . . . ,” the Kid whispered.

  “He’s not a clown,” the Stranger said. “He’s just a thing painted to resemble one.”

  “He comes out when the winds blow heavy out of the Doldrums,” the bar owner said. She had her shotgun pointed steadily at the door. “Every time he claims his fill of victims and disappears again. Three times we hired hunters to go after him, but none came back, and each reprisal inflicted on the town was worse than the last. Now we just hide, and hope it’s not our turn.”

  “He’s not a clown,” the Stranger said again. “He’s a grotesque mockery of one.”

  “Nobody cares, stranger,” the Pilkington said, and licked his lips. “What are you, some clown lover?”

  Watching, the Stranger saw Pogo stop outside the shut apothecary shop. The clown-impostor laughed again then, and the sound was very human and very chilling, and it was the only sound in the whole town. Then he bounded at the windows and smashed them as easily as a child playing with toys, and he leaped inside, and then there were screams. When Pogo emerged, he was dragging one of the white-smock-wearing apothecary men by the scruff of the neck and he threw him on the ground and lifted his machete. The smile painted on his face never reached his lips or his eyes. He sniffed over his victim, lovingly, as though scenting a meal.

  Someone—someone bold, or stupid, or still high on Sticks—stepped out of the shadows then with a gun raised and he fired at Pogo. The thing in the clown costume lifted the apothecary man one-handed and the bullets landed in the soft flesh of this human shield, and Pogo laughed and threw the machete at his attacker. He dragged the apothecary man with him and reached his attacker and the Stranger saw the machete was buried in the man’s chest and his blood stained the dry ground. Pogo laughed and pulled out his machete and raised it high in the air and screamed out in rage or defiance or joy, and then he brought it down and chopped off the man’s head with one strike, and he began to march down Main Street again using the head for a kicking ball. The head rolled ahead of him and the air smelled of cupcakes as the wind blew harder through the town.

  “Will no one stop him?” the Stranger said, and the bar owner said, “No one dares,” and the Kid said, “Then I will.”

  The Kid and the Stranger looked at each other and they were in agreement, and they made to move to the door.

  “Hold up,” the Pilkington man, Clem, said. He turned to the bar owner. “Is there a reward?”

  “The mayor offered one, before he was taken,” the woman said. “That was back when we still had hope. Now there are only the empty graves in the cemetery, waiting.”

  “What was the last reward?” the Pilkington man said.

  The bar owner named a figure, and Clem whistled, then laughed. “Triple it, and I’m in.”

  “You can claim anything in this town, if you kill him,” the bar owner said.

  Clem shrugged. “Not much of a town,” he said. He pumped his shotgun and joined the other two. “But I was getting restless anyway.”

  The Kid and the Stranger exchanged glances again, and the Stranger nodded.

  He looked to the piano, where Temperanza sat.

  “You coming?” he said.

  She sent a trail of notes his way and shrugged.

  “I’ll mop up the mess if you can’t finish,” she said. “Have fun playing Dead Man’s Bluff.”

  She kept playing.

  “Come on!” the Kid said. He pushed the door open and the three men stepped outside, guns drawn. Pogo was still up-road from them. He had captured a victim outside of one of the bars and the man was convoluting in his arms as he died. The three men began to march, wordlessly. They fanned out, with the Stranger in the middle and the other two flanking him, a little behind, on either side of the street.

  “I see you!” the Stranger called, and he said a name. It was the name of a murderer who once lived in that other place. “I know what you are!”

  Pogo turned his head sharply. He dropped his victim on the ground with a careless shove and stepped over him as the man died. His face filled with an animalistic fury that only seemed to animate his painted grin.

  “I . . . am . . . Pogo!” he bellowed.

  The Stranger fired a shot in the air. “You died once,” he said. “Now you’re just a bad dream, Gacy.”

  “I . . . am . . . Pogo!” the thing howled in rage, and the Kid muttered, “All my dreams are gonna be bad dreams after this.”

  The three men progressed, Clem and the Kid in the shadows, the Stranger right in the middle of the street. The faux clown stood facing them now. He looked from side to side, as though not quite believing anyone would dare come after him.

  “Fire,” the Stranger said.

  The three men shot at the faux clown. The Kid squeezed out a round of shots and methodically reloaded. The Stranger fired more sparingly, alternating his two revolvers as he let off shots. The Pilkington man, Clem, fired steady bursts of shotgun explosions. The air filled with the smell of gunpowder and smoke and, still present, that smell of rancid custard.

  It was hard to see through the smoke. The Stranger advanced, but now he withheld his fire. The other men’s shots halted too, as both advanced and reloaded. As the smoke cleared there was no sign of the faux clown.

  The Stranger whirled around, but it was almost too late. Pogo stood behind them, his entire face leering and his eyes dead as he raised his machete to strike. It came down just as the Stranger slid to the ground and it missed his head by a hairbreadth. Pogo roared then, in hatred and frustration, and his oversized red boot stomped down hard on the prone Stranger. The Stranger raised his hands protectively and managed to fend off the worst of the blow, but his gun fell away and a thrum of pain vibrated through him like the chime of a struck bell. Just then the blast of a shotgun filled the air and he saw Pogo thrown back, but the faux clown soon gained his footing again and he screamed in an awful mockery of laughter, and reached into his pocket. When his hand emerged it held a small glass canister, and with a sharp movement, he threw it on the ground between him and the three men.

  The glass shattered against the hard ground.

  The shotgun fired again and the Kid’s gun went off but it was accompanied by a scream of pain as Pogo’s machete cut into his side with savage force. The air filled with hexagrams, crosses, and obeli, and the Stranger fought to rise but there was so much substance in the air that it was hard to hold on and he found himself slipping once again into that other place.

  Somewhere a telephone was ringing and had been ringing for a long long time, but the man didn’t get up to answer it and it finally went quiet. The darkness outside gradually turned to light, and the man could hear the sounds of early morning, the garbage trucks outside and a police siren in the distance and shop shutters opening, and then someone was knocking on the door, saying, Are you in there, let me in, over and over. The man didn’t want to rise and he held on to the child’s stuffed toy and he said, You don’t understand, I have to find it, I have to find the Ur-shanabi, it flowers only beyond the Mountains of Darkness. But the person knocking wouldn’t go away and at last the man rose to answer them.

&n
bsp; “Come on, stranger!”

  He staggered to his feet. The Kid was bleeding from his side and the Pilkington man was binding the wound. Pogo, leaping and somersaulting, was getting away from them, down Main Street, towards the railway terminal. The Stranger retrieved his gun.

  “Can you walk, kid?” he said.

  “I can shoot,” the Kid said, grimly. The makeshift bandage stemmed the flow of blood. “I’ve been hit worse.”

  “If you say so . . . ,” Clem said. He checked his shotgun and nodded to himself. “So, do we go after him?”

  “You want that reward money, don’t you?” the Stranger said.

  The Pilkington man grinned, then spat on the ground. ”Right now,” he said, “all I want to do is fill this fucking clown with holes.”

  “He’s not a clown!” the Stranger said, exasperated.

  They tracked Pogo down Main Street; past doors hammered shut from the inside, with eyes that tracked them behind heavy blinds and offered no help. Pogo had slowed down. He kept turning his head, staring back after them. There was something hungry and cunning about his face. He reminded the Stranger of a wild, captive animal, of something that had been locked up inside its own head for so long that it had gone mad with it long ago, and all that it wanted to do now was hurt and maim and kill. Pain was his only joy.

  Pogo led, and the three men followed. Outside the railway terminal, heavy bags were placed in orderly rows, waiting for loading. Powdery substance spilled at their edges. Beyond lay only the Escapement, and the railway tracks disappeared into the distance. The broken moon hung in the sky. The stars shimmered and danced in the black night ceiling of the world. Pogo stood on the wooden platform and raised his arms in the air, glaring down on them. The Stranger raised his gun and the others followed suit. It had the air of a well-ordered execution.

  The men opened fire.

  The faux clown’s body danced like a marionette on invisible strings. The gunshots tore off his striped clown suit and blew away his jaunty cap and shredded his wig but still he stood glaring down on them in defiance. Behind him there opened a great blackness and the Stranger knew it was the substance in the air, showing him that other place, but Pogo no longer existed there, and the bullets seemed to offer him no harm.

  Pogo had disappeared from view as though he’d dropped underground, and a rope whispered through the air and looped around Clem’s neck and tightened. Clem could not cry out and he was dragged out with inhuman force, and he disappeared down the hole. The Stranger and the Kid exchanged weary glances and the Kid shrugged and his face twisted in pain from his wound. The Stranger said, “Stay up here and cover me.”

  The Kid nodded. They approached the hole and the Kid trained his guns on the entrance and the Stranger dropped down into the ground. The fall was shorter than he expected. He could see seams of white substance in the walls, faintly glowing in the dark.

  Something crunched underfoot when he landed. When he looked down he saw part of a human femur, a caved-in rib cage, delicate frond-like finger bones. He followed the tunnel ahead. Human skulls looked up at him from the floor, their empty eye sockets beseeching him without words.

  As he went deeper he began to see more recent victims, body parts rotting, and he covered his mouth and nose with a cloth. Drag marks on the ground marked where Pogo had taken the Pilkington man.

  The tunnels twisted and branched, but he followed the drag marks and the sporadic patches of blood, and just when he thought he was lost he found Clem.

  The Pilkington man was sitting bound to a chair that stood in the middle of a circular opening in the rock. His mouth was gagged with a bright red ball. His nose was bloodied and his eyes stared with unholy horror at the Stranger.

  The eyes moved. The Stranger followed their gaze. He stepped through as the false clown’s machete swung at him. The Stranger grabbed hold of Pogo’s wrist and it was like holding an iron bar. The false clown bared his teeth at him. With his costume shredded and his makeup running he was something feral and sick. There was nothing in his eyes the Stranger could understand. He kicked, hitting Pogo between the legs, and stepped around him as the false clown howled in pain and rage. He twisted Pogo’s arm behind his back and pushed, hard, until there was the sickening sound of breaking bone, and Pogo cried again.

  The Stranger pulled out his gun and put it to the back of Pogo’s head, intending to put him down, but he had underestimated the thing. With a howl of rage, Pogo wrenched his broken arm free and with the other he shoved the Stranger, with such inhuman force that the Stranger flew off his feet and hit the far wall. His head rang with the pain. Then Pogo was on him, kicking and screaming, and the large red rubber boots hammered against the Stranger’s ribs until he felt his own bones break. Desperately he reached for the knife strapped to his leg and he pushed the blade up, burying it with the last of his strength in the false clown’s belly.

  Pogo didn’t cry now. Blood trickled out of his mouth and onto the Stranger, and his lips moved without clear speech, but only an inane mumble. He took one step back, and then another. He stared dumbly at the knife buried in his stomach. Then he turned on his feet and half-stumbled, half-ran into one of the dark tunnels.

  The Stranger rose, groaning, and he went and untied Clem. The man could not stop shaking. There were meat hooks on the walls and a sort of leather harness, and there was a smell in that cavern that was hard to describe, an old, sweet, awful smell of decay, of butterscotch and rot. Clem licked his lips and then he was sick all over the floor and over his pants and boots.

  “Can you walk?” the Stranger said.

  Clem wiped his lips with the back of his hand. “I’ll manage,” he said.

  “Here,” the Stranger said, and he passed him one of his guns. Together, they followed into the tunnels.

  Blood and snot and detached pieces of entrails led them and soon they could hear Pogo’s laboured breathing and that mutter again, never ceasing, a mumble of syllables that repeated without rhyme or reason, and the Stranger held tighter to his gun, and wished that it would be enough. The tunnel sloped upwards here and as they burst through into the next cave they saw that it was another shaft, and an old ladder led back up to the surface. Overhead, he heard gunshots, and as he emerged up into the moonlight he saw the Kid coming through with guns blaring. The gibbering thing that was Pogo ran at him and knocked him down, and began pawing at him and trying to bite the Kid’s face. It was then that the Stranger saw the lights.

  The Kid rolled and he tried to strangle Pogo, his hand round the creature’s neck, but Pogo kicked him off and he scampered again. The lights seemed to confuse him. He stood between them and the two men, unsure which way to run. The Stranger felt rather than saw Clem emerge from the shaft and stand beside them.

  And now they were three. He cocked his gun.

  “Fire.”

  The hail of bullets decided it, and the half-blind, insane thing turned tail and ran at the oncoming lights of the train. They could hear it now, the slow, unstoppable chug-a-chug of the pistons and the belch of the engine, and for one moment, the man who had called himself Pogo was perfectly framed in the twin headlights, caught like an animal, before the train rushed along the tracks and hit him.

  Even then, Pogo didn’t quite die.

  Somehow, he was still alive, and he glared at them out of one remaining eye, offering crazed hatred to his hunters. On seeing him, Clem was sick again, and the Kid sagged down to the ground, holding the wound in his side.

  “Enough,” the Stranger said, tiredly. Then he pulled out his gun and shot Pogo in the back of the head.

  Pogo’s body shuddered and fell and yet even then, in the throes of death, he tried to crawl on, hand by laborious hand, leaving bloodied palm prints on the ground. Just then the Stranger felt the wind change, and the smell of rancid custard which had been in the air all this time was suddenly gone.

  Pogo crawled one la
st, exhausted length, and then he fell. A shadow leaked out of him and vanished into the dark.

  In death, he was just a man, the Stranger saw.

  The Stranger sank down to the ground to join his comrades, and then he began to laugh: an exhausted, heartfelt, relieved belly laugh, a true and clean sound that echoed through the night and cleared away the horror, until the two other men, first the Kid and then, at last, even Clem, began to laugh with him; and that sound, like the peals of old struck bells, was heard that night all across Kellysburg and beyond, and reached Colossi and pupae umbrarum both.

  On the other side of town, the gravedigger looked up at the sound of laughter and shook his head, for he disapproved of such frivolities. He hefted his spade and began again to dig, for the world was forever in need of fresh graves, and it was his job to both dig them and fill them.

  FOUR:

  THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY

  From the high-above perspective of a flying caique, or other clown bird, the railway line appeared more like a sort of tangled mandala, following not a straight path but the twisting contours of the landscape; and it often doubled back on itself, crossing the former line with a new one, creating a series of curious knots. The terminus point of Kellysburg appeared as a smudged thumbprint in the distance. Ahead, the tiny engine puffed out a steady plume of smoke as it pulled the passenger cars and hoppers behind it. The hopping cars were loaded with sacks of crystalline substance from the pits and quarries of the Kellysburg claims. A couple of cattle cars held horses, including the Stranger’s horse, who was munching sedately on hay.

  From high above the Escapement, the train was nothing but a toy set, huffing and puffing its slow way along the narrow tracks. A flock of caiques, birds uneasy with flight at the best of times, settled themselves onto the branches of a tree high above the railway, where they chattered animatedly and mimicked the whistle sound of the train to amuse themselves. The train struggled as the land’s elevation rose. They were still only on the edges of the Thickening, where the majority of human settlers lived, and beyond lay the Doinklands and the Doldrums and the great graveyards of the wild elephant herds.