A doctor and three nurses came and sat at a table. They spoke in low voices, occasionally glancing at him. He thought they were glancing at him. The doctor laughed. The sound was jarring in the room. It was probably nothing, they had probably just come off a shift, or were taking a break. It didn’t matter. The figure outside whose face he couldn’t see was gone. The Stranger looked over the railing of the hot air balloon.

They had been sailing over land for days, ever since the deliquescence of Jericho. In that time they had seen the Colossi range across the land, the railway lines broken, towns and hamlets abandoned or grotesquely transformed, and vast shadows congealing like pools of dark ink across the Thickening. They pissed and shat from on high, never touching ground, drinking when it rained and subsisting on a tin of dry old biscuits that the Conjurer uncovered in the Fat Lady’s basket. One night a symbol storm burst overhead and as they passed it St. Elmo’s Fire ranged the gondola, pale luminous plasma taking form as grotesque animated puppets dancing on the railing, blinking at them with huge round eyes. They’d felt the directions change then, and in the morning when the sun rose the landscape was new and the compass needle swayed like a drunk. There were fewer and fewer signs of habitation then, and at last they passed over ground entirely uninhabited and the view changed to low-lying hills, with a smattering of viridescent shrubs and trees, into which no train tracks ran. And they knew then that they were come to the edge of the Thickening.

They’d passed that invisible boundary in the night and in the morning they were truly into the Thinning. There, where the true Escapement began, the Conjurer’s device for the measurement of time was still and lifeless.

“It isn’t permanent,” he said, looking sheepish. “It’s just a slipstream.”

He meant the way time was not neatly homogenous on the Escapement but could flow, like hot and cold currents which sometimes overlaid each other. They’d hit a patch of slow time, that was all. Or perhaps it was that the Conjurer’s clock was merely broken.

The next day and the next took them into what should have been clown country, but they saw none. Only, here and there, the hidden dwelling places of the clowns would come into sudden and unwelcome sight: funhouses burned, ballooneries trashed, trampolines lying torn and half-buried in the ground. This trail of devastation continued for miles and the three men, uneasy, kept scanning the horizon and held their guns, but there was nothing to shoot at.