“But that is it, don’t you see?” Carl said. “You had it all wrong, stranger. It isn’t just me, and Loretta. It’s so much more than us, than any of us. They need it. They need the Dumuzi Device.”

“Listen to me,” Loretta said. “Listen to me, you have to get out of here, you have to get off the island!”

But they were so slow, so much without grace. They moved so stiffly. Their faces stupid with incomprehension. She looked out of the windshield and then she saw it.

It was coming, at last.

The Colossus.

From high above the lake, from the pitiless gaze of a Colossus, they all seemed so puny. The little toy train running round and round on the track, trapped on that little baleful island. The bridges shone wetly to either side. They looked like wings, the island like a beetle. The loons chattered nervously on the black rocks and high above on the Erlandson trees the caiques cowered in the leaves.

No, no, make it stop, make it stop, the Stranger said, but concepts like sound no longer existed. On the hopping cars, uselessly guarding the useless substance, armed men went mad and fired gut-shots into the darkness and mostly succeeded in killing each other.

It began to snow then, big fat drops of snow, as the great big mountain shook itself from its bond of rock and roots, triggering landslides, bringing down trees, as the Colossus took one giant step and then another, feet of stones slamming into the lake bed, causing the very earth to shake and triggering a miniature tsunami.

The moonlight caught its face, its terrible and beautiful face with its classical angles of antiquity, and the loons cried on the island and the passengers tried to throw themselves out of the windows of the train, and the Stranger reached desperately into his pocket, for the bottle marked lethe, to swallow the snake oil inside, to somehow stop this awful, unbearable sensation, to block his ears to the dreadful laughter of the Colossus, to find oblivion.

It was so easy from above for the Colossus to see the humans’ fragile, fleeting thoughts as dazzling fireflies flying in confusion, for they were nothing to it, these . . . people, mere irritants upon the body of the Escapement, ants that crawled through the cracks in the worlds.

On the train, this limb of the Colossus, this mindless appendage, this Carl, as the humans called it, shuddered as it responded to the Colossus’s demands. The Colossi had to find it, this thing of the pupae umbrarum, this device. But already they felt they had been misled, that it was not, had never been, on the train, and their rage grew and they took another step, and another, detaching themselves entirely from the mountain range, until the Colossus stood up to its chest in the black water of the Chagrin.