It was hard to see through the smoke. The Stranger advanced, but now he withheld his fire. The other men’s shots halted too, as both advanced and reloaded. As the smoke cleared there was no sign of the faux clown.

The Stranger whirled around, but it was almost too late. Pogo stood behind them, his entire face leering and his eyes dead as he raised his machete to strike. It came down just as the Stranger slid to the ground and it missed his head by a hairbreadth. Pogo roared then, in hatred and frustration, and his oversized red boot stomped down hard on the prone Stranger. The Stranger raised his hands protectively and managed to fend off the worst of the blow, but his gun fell away and a thrum of pain vibrated through him like the chime of a struck bell. Just then the blast of a shotgun filled the air and he saw Pogo thrown back, but the faux clown soon gained his footing again and he screamed in an awful mockery of laughter, and reached into his pocket. When his hand emerged it held a small glass canister, and with a sharp movement, he threw it on the ground between him and the three men.

The glass shattered against the hard ground.

The shotgun fired again and the Kid’s gun went off but it was accompanied by a scream of pain as Pogo’s machete cut into his side with savage force. The air filled with hexagrams, crosses, and obeli, and the Stranger fought to rise but there was so much substance in the air that it was hard to hold on and he found himself slipping once again into that other place.

Somewhere a telephone was ringing and had been ringing for a long long time, but the man didn’t get up to answer it and it finally went quiet. The darkness outside gradually turned to light, and the man could hear the sounds of early morning, the garbage trucks outside and a police siren in the distance and shop shutters opening, and then someone was knocking on the door, saying, Are you in there, let me in, over and over. The man didn’t want to rise and he held on to the child’s stuffed toy and he said, You don’t understand, I have to find it, I have to find the Ur-shanabi, it flowers only beyond the Mountains of Darkness. But the person knocking wouldn’t go away and at last the man rose to answer them.

“Come on, stranger!”

He staggered to his feet. The Kid was bleeding from his side and the Pilkington man was binding the wound. Pogo, leaping and somersaulting, was getting away from them, down Main Street, towards the railway terminal. The Stranger retrieved his gun.

“Can you walk, kid?” he said.

“I can shoot,” the Kid said, grimly. The makeshift bandage stemmed the flow of blood. “I’ve been hit worse.”