The Stranger looked down at his arms and they were transparent, but when he looked at the other two men they were solid, and he realised that they had no parallels.

They stood on the side of the road of a busy intersection. The moon hung in the sky, but it was the only thing visible above, and unlike on the Escapement it was not broken. There were no stars, and the streetlights shone in a soft eternal yellow. Cars and trucks crawled along the four-lane roads, their lamps shining. A cat emerged beside the three men, purred, rubbed itself against the Stranger’s leg and wandered away along a pavement strewn with cigarette butts and broken bottles. The traffic lights flashed red and green and yellow. The cars crawled and crawled and music blared out of the speakers of a white Buick. The Kid looked at the scene with awe on his face and said, “What is this place?” and then he looked at the Stranger and said, “Hey, you’re a ghost!”

“I am not a ghost,” the Stranger said, but the Kid wasn’t paying attention. “This must be what the circus is like,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to visit the circus.”

“The circus isn’t what it’s cracked up to be,” the Conjurer said. He looked very out of place in his black suit and top hat and his very white gloves, and his silver-handled pistols. The Stranger worried a police car would go past and see them with their weapons. But there was no one around, they were on some no-man’s-land, a traffic island, and an overhang for foot traffic made of rusted steel was the only way out. He began for the stairs.

“When did he turn into a ghost, Dad?”

“I told you not to call me that.”

“Where are we?”

The Conjurer sighed. “We’re at that other place, Kid,” he said.

“I never thought it was real,” the Kid said.

“No,” the Conjurer said. “It does seem far-fetched.”

They followed the Stranger up the stairs and along the bridge. Overhead on a low hill there stood a grand old bank building with stone columns, and on the other side, one block away, the Stranger could see—

The hospital, he thought, with a sudden chill. This had never happened before. Should not have happened. It was Hole, it had drilled a hole so far down the substrata of the Escapement that it came clean through the other side, into that other place. He could go there right now. He could see the boy, he could tell him everything, about the Titanomachy, and las máquinas de sueños, and what happened in Jericho, and, and . . .