The Stranger held the string and the balloon bobbed gently in the air. His eyes were wet and it was hard to see clearly.

He let go of the balloon and it rose into the sky.

He felt so happy, suddenly and overwhelmingly happy, though he could not articulate why. But “why” is a question only children, who do not know any better, still ask.

He stood there with the child and they watched the balloon drift farther and farther away, growing ever smaller against the endless sky, until it finally vanished from sight.

Afterword

AFTERWORD

The Escapement owes a debt to a great many varying influences. The basic plot was very loosely inspired by the Hebrew fairy tale “The Heart of the Golden Flower,” created by Z. Ariel in 1930. It, in turn, is based—to some extent at least—on similar stories in Russian fairy tales and in Hans Christian Andersen.

Similarly, I have borrowed from the ancient story of Gilgamesh at several points, and very loosely for some of the structure. The Ur-Shanabi was the ferryman of the dead in Mesopotamian mythology. The Plant of Heartbeat is found in of the Epic of Gilgamesh, while events recounted in Chapter Twelve are somewhat modified from what transpires in Tablet Nine of the story.

The Mountains of Darkness come from stories in the Jewish Talmud about the adventures of Alexander the Great. The mountains are covered in eternal dark, representing the end of the known world.

The Colossi in this book were inspired in equal parts by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” (1818) and by Czech artist František Kupka’s 1903 expressionist painting The Black Idol (Resistance). Where the pupae umbrarum come from, however, I do not rightly know.

I owe a particular debt to Michael Ende’s 1984 surrealist collection, The Mirror in the Mirror: A Labyrinth, and to Dr Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (1990). Other obvious influences include Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), the artwork of Salvador Dalí, the work of Shirley Jackson (Chapter Ten), and Tony Collingwood’s wonderful animated movie Rarg (1998), from which I borrowed the pink flamingos in Chapter Eight.

Some of the terminology I’ve bent to my own uses in this novel, such as “thickening,” “vastation,” and “revel,” is borrowed from John Clute’s magnificent The Darkening Garden (2006), as are many of his ideas in that book on the nature of the fantastic.

In Greek mythology, the Titanomachy was the war between the Titans and the Olympian Gods.

Several figures from the Major Arcana of the Tarot appear in this book, including Temperance, The Lovers, The Hierophant, Justice, The Devil, and The Hermit.

Pogo the Clown (Chapter Three) was better known in life as John Wayne Gacy, a notorious serial killer and children’s entertainer who was executed in 1994. The Bloody Benders (Chapter Nine) were a Kansas family who preyed on unwary travellers in the 1870s, much as described here.