Excerpt

The boy was very still in the small white bed.

The man held the book and he tried to keep reading from it but his voice wouldn't work and after a moment he let it drop by his side.

The boy's breathing was shallow but regular, and his eyes were closed. The man thought of a day in spring, not that long ago, when he'd first taken the boy to see the circus. They'd walked hand in hand through the Midway, past candyfloss and popcorn stands and the flashing lights of carousels and hayrides. They saw the clowns. He'd bought the boy a balloon and gave it to him to hold, but the boy let it go and the balloon floated far high into the sky, until it vanished. The boy had burst into tears and the man picked him up and held him close in a hug he wished would never end, and after but a moment the boy smiled and held the man's face in his hands and looked at him with such trust and love that it would have broken the man's heart had he let it. Dad, he said. Dad.

He looked at the boy so still and so small in the bed.

I can't, he said. I can't.

The machines around the boy beeped and chirped.

He staggered out. Down, down to the ground floor.

Out of the doors into the night.

A vehicle went past flashing blue and white light.

It rained.

A small red flower bloomed by the side of the hospital gates.

A small red flower bloomed by the side of the road. The Stranger paused, following the trail of red drops down the slope. Pine needles crunched underfoot. The broken moon hung in the sky, as deformed and grotesque as a clown mask. The Stranger had been travelling for a long time, searching for the Flower of Heartbeat, and he was destined to travel for a long time more. He shifted the long rifle on his back and then drew it, cautiously. He proceeded down the slope.

The night sky was clear and in the distance he could see the first signs of a coming storm. Loose ankhs flashed on the horizon, and glowing ichthys fish burst briefly in vibrant blues and reds. The storm was coming, but it was still a long way off. The air smelled fresh and sharp. The Stranger discerned pine resin, gunpowder, blood. The pine trees were not tall and the needles brushed against his face as he passed through the trees.

When he reached the clearing he stopped, and then he put the rifle back over his shoulder. He stood stock still, looking at the bodies.

The massacre must have taken place only a few hours earlier. There were eleven bodies, and some had been shot in the back and some from the front but either way they were all dead. Some had tried to flee their attackers and were gunned down, and some had stood stoically and awaited their death. The Stranger smelled greasepaint, candyfloss, gunmetal oil. The tattered remains of a yellow balloon lay on the ground.

The Stranger examined the scene of the massacre. He had been witness to such scenes before, in other places, far away from there, but he never grew indifferent to such a sight.

Eleven clowns lay on the ground.

Unusually, while five were Augustes, four were Whitefaces and two were Hobo braves. The two Hobos had stood up to their attackers, and the Stranger noted the remnants of the custard pies they had thrown.

He took everything in methodically, though he was furious inside. The Stranger could not abide an unkindness to clowns.

Each of the clowns had been scalped, and the Whitefaces' red ears had been sliced off, as were some of the Augustes' red noses. The Stranger knew it was the habit of bounty hunters to do this, to create a brace of the ears and noses for easy transport and to display; and that they would be aiming to collect a bounty for this, the massacre. Clowns were—as much as anyone could tell—indigenous to the Escapement, while people were not. And there was just something about clowns that people inherently hated. Now they killed them for their sport.

The Stranger also noted that not all ears and noses had been taken. Perhaps they were interrupted, or were spooked, as they were collecting their trophies. He glanced around him a little more uneasily. The symbol storm was still distant but it could herald the coming of other forces, though sometimes it did and sometimes it didn't.

None of this was, strictly speaking, his business, but he determined nevertheless to make it his. He, perhaps alone in all the strange travellers upon the face of the Escapement, felt that clowns brought joy. And somewhere, elsewhere, in that other place, there lay a boy who had loved clowns.

Perhaps that was enough.

The Stranger went back up the slope and retrieved his horse. He spurred it down, but around the copse of trees, and he noted the hoofprints of the horses and the direction they went.

The riders went in a hurry. Something had spooked them, he decided. The hooves had scattered pebbles and dust as they ran at full gallop from the scene of the massacre. The Stranger noted five sets of hoof prints on the ground. He spurred his own horse to a light trot. He did not bury the clowns. Golden spirals and tetractys flashed briefly overhead on the horizon. The Stranger rode away into the distance, following the scalp hunters.

He rode from sunrise to sundown without encountering a living soul. Only once was he startled, when the sun began to dip in the sky and the air grew cooler. He had looked west, where the storm had passed, and for just a moment, it seemed to him that a shape appeared there, immense against the sky: an immovable stone statue, as tall as a mountain, sat in a carved throne; and the sun shone over its head like a crown.

At the sight of this apparition the Stranger spurred his horse into a canter, and when he next looked the giant figure had disappeared as though it were never there.

That night, when he camped in a dry riverbed, the Stranger heard the distant sound of fighting: booming, maniacal laughter that echoed magnified across the Escapement, part-sob and part-screech, and the thump thumpthump of giant feet, trodding on the ground, and the terrible ticking of clocks, and this was accompanied, or perhaps accentuated by, irregular bubbles of sudden, and somehow awful, silence, a sort of negative sound which had the horse whinnying, but in a sort of quiet desperation.

The Stranger listened to the sound and unsound of battle as it raged on for hours, until at last it grew faint and passed on, the two unseen armies skirmishing to the west.

By noon the next day he came to a small crystalline brook flowing in between two green hills. The horse drank greedily and the Stranger drank sparingly and filled up his skins.

The land had changed over the past few miles and in the air he could smell distant smoke, hints of custard, and fresh horse shit. By the side of the brook he found a circle of stones engulfing another dead fire, and in this one the coals felt still warm. The Stranger, thoughtfully, checked his rifle and his revolvers.

He had turned to check on the horse next, which was feeding on the grass by the bank, when he saw the child.

The face that stared at the Stranger from the bushes on the other side of the brook was pale white and startled. The child's eyes were large and solemn, the mouth an exaggerated stroke of red, the nose a conical red protrusion. The child looked into the Stranger's eyes, with that strangely melancholic expression that is unique to clowns.

The Stranger put his finger to his lips. Never taking his eyes off the child, he walked back to the horse and mounted.

The child watched him as he rode away.

The horse walked at a steady pace, and it was only when they had turned round a bend in the stream, and the child disappeared from sight, that the Stranger spurred the horse into a full gallop.

He was concerned that the boy had managed to sneak up on him so, but clowns had that ability, sometimes: to move in deathly silence, to go unseen, to pass upon the flesh of the world without leaving a scar. The Stranger rode fast and furious now, not in impatience but with an urgency he did not feel before.

This was clown country.