Boss clowns, shackled like the rest, moved among them, shoulders slumped in mute defeat. The clowns trod the white earth with their long red feet. It was hard to tell them apart. Fine substance clung to their clothes, their arms, their faces. They held drills and spades and shovels. Tracks led down the slope into the hole and came back with cargo, and every few seconds, in the distance, the Stranger could hear a carnie shout, “Fire in the hole!” and this was followed by an explosion, and then another. Drifting through the floor of the mine he could see ghostly cars, ghost men walking, and cats that slunk between the mine and the streets of that other place. Planted in the ground down below he could see a traffic light. It was not ghostly but solid, firm. He realised with horror that it must have somehow slipped from that other place to the Escapement and there it remained, an impossible relic. Somehow, the sight of that traffic light, in all its ordinariness, was worst. It did not belong here, its presence was a wrong, it was like a splinter in a pussing wound. The sight of the enslaved clowns filled the Stranger with rage, but he controlled it with an effort, and the face he turned on his captors was bland and pleasant, as though he had not a care in the world.

“A mine, eh?” the Conjurer said. He rubbed his white-gloved hands together, as though to keep them warm.

“Not just any mine,” the carnie said. “This is the mother lode.”

It had to be. The Stranger had been traversing the Escapement for a long time, and was destined to travel for a little while more, but in all this time he had never seen a mine such as Hole. It should not have existed, it was more than a hole in the ground, it was a breach between the Escapement and . . . other places. The man woke with a shudder in the hospital room and looked about him helplessly, spooked by some nameless night terror, and when he looked out of the window he saw not the city streets but the white dusty plains of a crater like something on the moon, and it was full of clowns.

The Stranger looked around the rim of the crater, and he saw the carnies positioned in their little booths, with rifles pointed down at the slaving clowns like shooters at a duck gallery. He said, “You seem to have everything very much under control round here.”

“Pride ourselves on it,” the head carnie said, and spat again. A cat materialised a few feet away, slunk to the carnie and purred against his leg, then vanished. “Now get a move on.”

The Stranger was keenly aware of how close they were to the edge. How easy it would be to topple down there. One push . . .

“Where are you taking us?” he said.