“Oh, for crying out loud,” the Conjurer said. He grabbed the Kid in one arm and the Stranger grabbed the other and they pulled. The Kid howled in pain and protested with some profanity, and the tentacle of light tightened around his ankle but then, at last, released him abruptly, and the three men staggered and fell through the open door, and outside.

Inside the room, the ticking of the mechanical clock grew faster and louder in intensity and then, just as abruptly, stopped.

The three men stared at each other in the silence.

“It’s definitely about to go off, isn’t it,” the Conjurer said.

“What do we do?”

“Run?”

“Run where?”

“I know a way,” the Conjurer said. “Come on.” He hesitated, glanced at the Kid. “Son?”

“Don’t call me son!” the Kid said.

But he followed all the same.

The three men moved fast and with deadly purpose, guns drawn, and the burghers and good citizens of Jericho moved swiftly out of their way. The streets were thronged with revellers drunk on moonshine; a fat man on a piano struck “Entrance of the Gladiators,” and a mime troupe locked in an invisible glass cage writhed and floundered as though they were choking on invisible gas. A cat chased a mouse down the street. The Stranger wasn’t sure, but for a moment it seemed to him the mouse wore a bow tie.

The Conjurer led the other two men over a low stone wall and into an unlit courtyard and from there to a twisting stone staircase that rose high up into the upper echelons of the city.

“Hurry, fools!”

They huffed their way up the stairs, going round and round, and the Stranger was absurdly glad they weren’t carrying anything heavy with them, like a piano. They found themselves at last on the roof of the building, and the Conjurer led them in a leap across it, and in this way they traversed the rooftops over Jericho, which were themselves filled with revellers. The Stranger felt the city shifting then. A rumbling just beyond the edge of hearing, a subtle rearrangement of the elements all about him. He stumbled, but the Kid caught and steadied him. Wordlessly, they ran on.

There was a high tower ahead. Below, the Stranger could see wide palatial gardens, a water fountain, mimes . . .

More mimes.

The mimes crawled along the walls like spiders. They climbed up, holding knives between their teeth. Their hands were like geckos’ adhesive toes. Their eyes were black and empty holes. They weren’t human, the Stranger realised.

He said, “Pupae umbrarum.”

“Those fuckers!” the Conjurer said. “Shit!”

“Friends of yours?”

“Just . . . shoot them, will you?”

“Gladly,” the Kid said, and he took off his rifle and began to fire, picking out the white-skinned creatures one by one. They fell from the walls without sound.

“I fucking hate mimes,” the Kid said.