The Escapement Read online

  Far in the distance, one could almost imagine they could hear the sound of giant stone feet, treading softly on the earth. . . .

  The Stranger watched the view roll past beyond the window. Mountains rose in the distance and their peaks were white with snow. The sky was a calm blue, and the air felt fresh and clear as the wind blew in. The train crawled along the ledge of a high precipice and the Stranger could see the Nikulin River down below, a wide expanse of cerulean blue, and the sunlight caught a leaping fish and reflected off its silvery scales.

  “I don’t like this,” the Kid complained. He kept fidgeting with a pendant that hung from a necklace round his neck. The Stranger had noticed it before. It was a silver thumb-tip, and on it, engraved, was the legend Vernaculus: it was an old word, and it meant both clown, and slave.

  The Kid saw the Stranger looking at his pendant and put it back under his shirt, out of sight.

  “You mean we just sit here?” he said.

  “That’s how it goes,” the Stranger said. He was not in a hurry. He felt content for the time being to simply sit and look out on the ever-changing Escapement and not to think too much. It was soothing. The train was headed to Jericho, a large town deeper in the Thickening and a terminus for several of the rail routes. The Stranger hoped to find a cartographer there.

  “Listen,” the Kid said. “In your travels, did you ever run into a conjurer?”

  “A conjurer?”

  “You know. White gloves. Black clothes. Wears a tall black hat. Makes ducats disappear. A fucking conjurer.”

  There was a sort of pain behind the Kid’s eyes. The Stranger said, “I can’t think as I have.”

  “This one wears pistols with silver handles on his belt,” the Kid said.

  The Stranger shook his head. “I’ll keep my eyes open,” he said.

  “Yeah. Well.”

  “Where are you from, kid?”

  The Kid shrugged. “A small town called Bozoburg, on the Fratellini plains. The sort of place where nothing ever happens.”

  “A one-clown town.”

  “Yeah.” The Kid reached for his pendant again, absent-mindedly. “What about you?” he said. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re from that other place.”

  “Ah,” the Stranger said. “Well, that’s a question, isn’t it.” He looked out of the window. High above, he noticed a line of Erlandson trees, tall, graceful trunks like vaulting poles and twisting branches shaped into hearts or arms or lightning bolts, and he thought he saw dark shapes dart between the high branches, but if so he could not make them out clearly. Yet they made him uneasy. The train continued to chug gaily parallel to the Nikulin down below. The air grew colder by degrees, and a flurry of snow blew down in a sudden gust of wind, never reaching the ground but bursting overhead in tiny flashes of sunlight and microscopic rainbows. “I mean, do we dream that other world, or does it dream us, do you think?”

  The Kid shrugged, indifferent. He had no parallel. Sticks gave him nothing but a sickly hangover. “As much as I enjoy talking metaphysics,” he said, “I think I prefer playing cards.” When he spread his arms, Tarocchi cards leaped between his fingers. The Stranger caught flashes of wands and swords and rings, of Death, of Temperance, and of the Hermit. He said, “You seem to have a little of the conjurer in you, yourself.”

  The Kid scowled. He got up smoothly, making the cards disappear. The wound in his side was healing nicely. Only a slight stiffness when he moved betrayed its presence. “I’ll be in the dining car,” he said, “if you’d like to join me.”

  “I might, later,” the Stranger said.

  The Kid grinned. “If only you played cards the way you shoot . . . ,” he said, and shook his head in mock sorrow. He disappeared down the corridor. The Stranger turned back to the window. The motion of the train lulled him to sleep and yet he watched uneasily as the river expanded farther ahead, how the mountains loomed, how dark shapes seemed to fleet swiftly between the vines and high branches of the Erlandson trees. The snow had gone as quickly as it had come, and what remained now in the air was merely the ghost or the idea of snow.

  In time, the Stranger fell asleep. From high above the Escapement, the flock of caiques watched the little toy train with amused interest, and some of the birds surfed against the tree bark or the wet leaves down below, propelling themselves in play by their beaks, rolling and wrestling with each other. But the caiques were soon disturbed in their frivolity by the larger, fleeting shadows, and their chatter turned nervous and soon they took flight as one, an explosion of feathery colour, yellow and snow-white and green, as they followed the contours of the mountain.

  High on the branches of the Erlandson trees, the aerialists halted. They were dressed in simple whites, and their lithe, strong bodies seemed impervious to the altitude and the cold. They paused, perfectly balanced. There were five of them. Their leader, Carl, followed the slender branch of a tree as it bent over the sheer drop above the Nikulin like a fishing rod. He stood with his arms at his sides, watching the train.

  “Well?” Loretta asked. She backflipped lazily across her branch and leaped into the air, catching one of the Erlandson tree’s rings. She raised herself to a sitting position above the others. “But I don’t want to rob another train,” she said.

  Carl ignored her. Carl was tall and handsome with short-cropped blond hair and a thin blond moustache. He’d been loose and charming when Loretta first met him, she had hung on his every word. But he had gradually become more and more like stone, hard and unyielding. She tried to tell herself he simply wasn’t himself these days.

  Carl’s gaze traced the path of the railway line. Ahead were two low mountains, the Petit Philippe and the Grand Philippe, and the train would pass through the saddle to reach the other side. Beyond, the Nikulin snaked under the towering mountain range, until it reached a natural breach in the landscape, a deepening into which both the river and the melting snows drained, forming a wide lake called the Chagrin.

  Beyond the Chagrin, the train would take a sharp turn away from the mountains and down to the fertile plains, heading away from the Doinklands and into the Thickening proper, far from the sounds of war and the pratfalls of clowns. But to make its getaway, the train would have to first cross the bridge over the lake. . . .

  The troupe of aerialists listened impassively as Carl outlined the plan. Loretta knew not to show any more emotion now, let alone disagreement. Carl tolerated chitchat but any outright disagreement would likely result in terrible punishment. Carl did not tolerate dissent. That, she’d learned the hard way. Carl could be charming, and funny, and wise: he had gathered them to him from across the sad places of the Escapement, helpless, hopeless, friendless, aimless—and he gave them help, and hope, and friends, and purpose. He made them a part of a family.

  His family.

  It was only later that Loretta realised what he really was, and what he was capable of doing.

  Carl was finished. He looked at each of them in turn. Then they once again took to the air, leaping from vine to hoop, from stilt to swing, traversing the curious trees that grew all along this side of the mountain, and only the little caiques watched them pass.

  The knocks on the door kept repeating until, at last, the man had no choice but to get up off the couch and fumble with the door. She stood there glaring at him before pushing past him. What have you been doing with yourself, she said. She began to move around, tidying up. She emptied the ashtray with a sound of disgust and she turned off the television set and opened the blinds. Sunlight streamed into the room, making his eyes hurt.

  You don’t understand, he told her, speaking thickly, I am not really here, this is just the effect of substance, I am looking for the Plant of Heartbeat—

  She touched his cheek. Her touch was so light and yet it burned through him and he turned his face aw
ay. As she tidied up she picked a book from where it must have fallen behind the sofa. It was The Fabulous Flying Banditti, he must have been reading it to the boy the last time—

  The Stranger was jolted awake as the train took a sharp turn and passed back on itself and looped in a knot in the rail. It was a sort of ankh-shaped looping and as he watched he could see the back of the train and the front of the train converging upon one another, and it put him in mind of a giant worm, continually devouring itself. He could see the hopping cars with their sacks of substance bouncing on their suspension, and the animal cars where his horse napped standing up, seeming content. Overhead, night had fallen. The snow that fell down now was as fine as ash. The Stranger rose and left the cabin. His feet trod on the soft worn carpet of the hallway. Half of the cabins on this car were empty, as few boarded the train at the Kellysburg end. He made his way to the dining car.

  Hot air and the smell of tobacco and gun stew and bread hit him as he entered. Unlike the rest of the train, the car was packed, and the men and women who crammed around the low tables were on the main a rough-and-ready crowd. Bottles of moonshine and some of Sticks sat on the tables and the drinkers were merry but for the Sticks drinkers, who were slumped in their chairs with their eyes glazed open as they visited that other place. The Kid sat near the galley, with his back to the wall, playing cards with three others, two men and a one-eyed woman who winked at the Stranger as he passed. There was a large pile of ducats before the Kid and much smaller ones before the other three. The Kid saw the Stranger and nodded, with only a hint of a grin, and then went back to his cards.

  The Stranger squeezed his way among the throng. The only empty seat was across from the card players, near the warmth of the open galley, where a large doughy man and a small, compact woman were working. The man stirred a pot that bubbled over a solid iron cooker, and the woman rolled dough with quick, violent turns. The man, from time to time, reached out and filled a small glass with moonshine from a large bottle, and this he would lift methodically to his lips, wet them, then down the rest in one go. The Stranger slid into the one empty chair. Across the small table from him sat one solitary figure, apart from all the others. It was a short, squat man, in a worn black suit and a rumpled white shirt and a small and rather jaunty trilby on his head. He wore thick-lensed round glasses and a toothbrush moustache. His large eyes were a watery pale blue. The Stranger pressed himself into the seat, hemmed in between the wall and the thick, sweaty back of a woman in a chequered flannel shirt, smudged with pale deposits of substance, who was laughing loudly with her companions. The man in the trilby hat looked at the Stranger’s travails with kind amusement in his eyes. The laughter on the other side grew loud in response to a joke the Stranger didn’t quite catch.

  “Everyone’s a comedian,” the man in the trilby hat said. He reached across the table to shake the Stranger’s hand. His grip was strong. “I’m Mr. Norvell.”

  The Stranger shook his hand. He said, “If you don’t mind me saying, you don’t look like a prospector.”

  The man’s eyes twinkled and he said, “That’s quite all right, I’m not.” He reached under the desk for a black and much battered briefcase and placed it on the table between them, opening it with a click. “I am purveyor of nostrum remedium—that is to say, of patent medicines, elixirs, mugwump, and snake oil. I, sir, am a commercial traveller.”

  He said that with an air of quiet pride. When he turned his briefcase to face the Stranger, the Stranger saw inside it there many curiously shaped bottles of small sizes, some made of rough glass, and some of clay and some of wood. Some of the glass was an opaque rich blue and some was colourless and grainy. The wood bottles were engraved with sigils and the clay ones with simple marks like crow’s feet.

  “I have all manners of medicines to cure every manner of ailment,” Mr. Norvell said. “And all for a mere handful of ducats. Yes, sir. In my time I have treated with the great and the good of the land. I have been to Xanadu and El Dorado, to Shangri-La and to the Doinklands, yes, sir, I have indeed, and I have healed the deathly wounds of the big boss clown of the Whitefaces. I could have been rich by now, indeed I could have, but it is not the desire for ducats which animates me, indeed it does not, but only the desire to help those less fortunate than I. And you, sir? You have need for succour? Does wart-tongue trouble you, or eagle’s claw? A sore tooth? My rates for teeth extraction are most reasonable. Perhaps a love spell?”

  “No,” the Stranger said, shaking his head. “No, but thank you all the same.”

  Mr. Norvell folded his hands before him on the table and leaned forward, and pitched his voice low. “You ask me for curses, is that it? I don’t . . .” He looked from side to side. “But perhaps . . .”

  “No, no, I’m sorry,” the Stranger said. “But thank you.”

  “But what is it you seek?” Mr. Norvell said, frustrated. “You must seek something!”

  “I am looking,” the Stranger said, “for the Ur-shanabi.”

  Mr. Norvell unfolded his hands and lifted his head and sat back. The motion of the train grew faster then, the cabin rocking from side to side, and looking out of the window the Stranger saw the twin mountain peaks of the Petit Philippe and Grand Philippe approach, as the train headed to the crossing through the saddle.

  “The Plant of Heartbeat . . . ,” Mr. Norvell said. “No, no, it is I who is sorry, stranger. That flower is beyond even my powers to give.” His eyes filled with what looked like genuine sorrow. The glasses magnified them and in their pale blue orbits one could almost imagine the formation of tears. There was something hypnotic about Mr. Norvell’s eyes, as though behind their innocent vista of sky there was a melancholy, chthonic quality. It made the Stranger feel that if only he let himself wander for too long, if only he looked too deeply into those innocent eyes, he would find himself sinking, down into that liquid ocean and farther, into the tubular optic nerve that led not to a brain but to a place of shadow. And he wondered then, again; for the pupae umbrarum had agents among the ordinary and not so ordinary tenants of the Escapement, just as the Colossi did.

  High overhead, shadowing the train effortlessly, the aerialists leaped and vaulted from branch to branch and hoop to hoop, and Loretta saw the tiny toy train as it puffed its way towards the mountain pass. Loretta had only vague memories of that other place, which she sometimes still visited, on the rare occasions that she used substance. Such visits seemed very real when she was in the grip of them but later, as they faded, seemed cheap and tawdry, for over there she seemed to have been teaching school and returning, each day, to an apartment in the city where she lived alone but for her cat. She did not miss the sound of the television and the ping of the microwave on yet another ready-meal and she wondered often why she kept illicitly taking substance from time to time and visiting that existence, which both repulsed and fascinated her in equal measure. As for the cat, it was often said that felines were neither entirely of this place or another, and could cross the threshold between the real and the not with ease. But for whatever reason that cat in her visions never crossed over, and few cats visited the Escapement. Loretta had been with the aerialists for several years now, ever since meeting Charlie and Simone and Eduardo at Codona. It was a dismal little township and it had been devastated by the Titanomachy in past years, so that its residents were all malleably transformed in unpleasant ways, men with violins for legs, women with aquariums for eyes, the houses all tessellated, and opening in on themselves, endlessly, and linked together by Piranesian drawbridges and the like—it was a marvel the whole place stood up at all. It was a grim grey place and she had danced there alone, for settlers who wouldn’t look her in the eye, nor at each other, and even the few ducats they threw her way would often enough change into sickly wasps or wounded birds and try to crawl away.

  Then came Charlie with his handsome, laughing face; graceful Simone, who was always so kindly; and the small, intense Eduardo, who almost nev
er spoke and was never still, whose feet never seemed to touch the ground.

  They saw something in her. Unlike the others in that town they were whole and wholesome, filled with a controlled energy, and she came with them gladly. They travelled the small towns and outposts, performing, and she learned the adagio and the threefold way of silk, of climbs and wraps and drops, and how to walk a tightrope and how to juggle while standing on her head. Those were heady times but it was only when the four of them returned here, to the mountains, that she met Carl, their leader who awaited them, and then she saw the faces in the stone.

  The laughter and the smell of moonshine and the haze of smoke grew in intensity inside the dining car. Mr. Norvell looked at the Stranger with his curious gaze, and he laced his fingers together, and cleared his throat. “That flower I only heard tale of,” he said. “It lies beyond the Mountains of Darkness, beyond even the reach of Colossi or pupae. Yes, yes. I have travelled far, stranger, but never there. They lie beyond the Great Salt Lakes, they say. There is a passage underground, where only the dead can walk. Or so it’s said.” He shrugged. “I could help you forget it,” he said. ”Your quest. For a handful of ducats, I can give you the gift of forgetting. That much, I can do.”

  The Stranger nodded. His fingers rested lightly on the butt of his gun, under the table.

  “What were you doing in Kellysburg?” the Stranger said. “If you don’t mind me asking? It is a little off the . . . beaten path.”

  Mr. Norvell shrugged. “I go where there’s need.”

  “And was there? Need?”

  “Not as much as I’d hoped.”