The town of Kellysburg looked like an ugly spider bite when the Stranger approached it at dusk. An ill-omened wind blew from the east and it stirred the stunted shrubs and sent a brightly coloured scorpion into shelter in the shadow of an upturned rock in the shape of a severed fist. The train of horses, patient, followed behind the Stranger. The town was lit with thieves’ lights, crude torches soaked in diluted substance, casting off a flare-bright glow, and they hissed and fizzed sporadically. In their light, the Stranger could see the ramshackle, lean-to houses, hastily erected constructions built with dark mud, bad wood, rusted nails and spit. But the storms had left their mark on the town, and the Stranger saw a circular staircase rising high into the sky, with no walls around it, until it stopped abruptly in mid-air; and he saw the houses that grew on stalks, and disturbingly reminded him of watching eyes; and he saw the bridges that connected nowhere to nothing and looked like the tentacles of some giant beast. The air was so thick with substance that even the horses began to seem ghostly and translucent, and the Stranger’s senses were assailed with the noises of that other place, the honk of car horns and the sound of engines and a telephone ringing, somewhere nearby, over and over, and a television whispering of things to buy.

This was prospecting country. There was so much substance they were using it for light. As he came closer he saw that a small cemetery had sprouted near the entrance to the town, rows and rows of graves denoted with the slash of a clown smile, and a solitary gravedigger at his work. The Stranger passed by and stopped, contemplating the stooped, skinny man with the worm-white skin who was digging a fresh grave in the hard cracked earth.

He said, “Who’s that for?”

The gravedigger straightened and wiped his face with the back of his hand and shrugged. “Night’s yet young,” he said. “Throw the dice and take your pick, stranger.”

“I don’t play dice.”

The gravedigger grimaced and tilted his head. The ghostly outline of a late-model Ford rose towards them in the darkness, its twin headlights shining as it passed through the gravestones and disappeared back into that other place.

“I hate this fucking town,” the gravedigger said. He stared at the Stranger and the Stranger saw he had one blue eye and that the other was a milky white and made of glass. “You ever miss it, stranger? You ever want to go back?”

“I can’t,” the Stranger said. “I am looking for something. Something precious.”

“I must have been looking for something, too, once,” the gravedigger said. “Now I just dig holes in the ground. Watch your steps tonight, stranger. There’s a bad wind coming in from the Doldrums, and the fresh graves never stay empty for long.”