The Stranger passed the clown and as he reached the next light fixture he saw a group of shackled clowns digging into a rich seam of crystal, and they all hummed in unison, a deep and thrumming sound that ran through the rock and was magnified in the crystal substance until it seemed it could alter the very shape of the world. And he realised then that, in their own, curious fashion, the clowns were singing.

It was this eldritch subterranean song that carried him, deeper and deeper into the mine, along that dark tunnel, traversing the twilit world from one lamp post to another. Into the song he went, into a sort of wakeful dreaming, and his shadow travelled by his side. He began to see the crystals blossom along the walls as new seams were found and not yet exploited. He saw there traces of the ancient Escapement, its hidden layers. The silver fin of a struck ship, the earlobe of a Colossus, a broken wind chime still making eerie noise and shifting the air and light around it in disturbing ways, the skeleton of a giant, ossified boss clown with seven elongated toe bones. The darkness sang to him ahead. He walked between the lights along the darkness, until there were no more lights, and no more relics, and the clowns’ song vanished behind him, and he was all alone in the total, all-consuming dark.

There was no more ground, there was no more floor. The Stranger fell, into Hole.

What he saw there, in that null-space, he couldn’t, later, recall. Only vague and fleeting sensations, somewhere far older than humanity’s newborn existence, out there between the stars, where huge, black machines floated, dead and unresponsive, in the vastness of space. The Stranger floated there, in that ancient graveyard. He could make no coherent shape out of the vast objects he passed. They were larger than worlds, and dormant, all—all but one. For one of these ancients opened an eye as large as a moon, and saw—saw him! And it spoke to him, in some alien fashion, and whispered tales of a younger age, and of machine minds which fell from the sky one day onto the Escapement, through some hole torn out of space and time and dream, and for an era made it in their shape. They had wakened the Colossi and the pupae umbrarum, who took on their shapes as they took the shapes of whichever generation of species came upon the Escapement, as all living, dreaming beings do.

But nothing lives forever . . . , the ancient thing whispered, there in the null-space. What is it you seek, stranger?

The Ur-shanabi, the Stranger said, The Plant of Heartbeat, which can cure even time.