“I’ll be sure to bear that in mind,” the Stranger said, touching the brim of his hat. He saw that the gravedigger had one bare foot, and the skin on his hands was coarse and rough. The sound of the spade hitting the hard ground came regular as the ticking of a clock now. Then the gravedigger stopped, but the ticking continued, and the Stranger saw that he had unearthed half of a melted clock, with the second hand still ticking, blindly, stuck in the same spot.

“Is it always like this here?” the Stranger said.

“I hate this fucking town,” the gravedigger said again. He pulled the clock out savagely, like a weed, and tossed it aside on a heap which already included the bent front wheel of a penny farthing, the upper half of a storefront mannequin with too many arms and three eyes like tears down one side of its smooth, blandly handsome face, and a typewriter on which all the keys were small round mirrors. The Stranger shook his head and spurred on his horse, leaving the cemetery and its gravedigger behind.

As he approached the town proper he saw a crude wooden sign planted in the ground, and on it, in chalked letters, the legend No Gunfights No Ordnance No Clowns.

Along Main Street the shadows from the thieves’ lights fell at all angles. Furtive figures skulked between the buildings and some lay flat on their backs with their eyes open and unseeing, drunk on Sticks or raw substance. Ghostly figures moved through shop walls and several times headlights once again appeared and disappeared, but the Stranger avoided the ghostly apparitions of that other place until they faded to nothing more than a nuisance at the edge of vision. But the town itself set him on edge.