She drank the waters of Lethe (bottled by Jefferson & Norvell, of Asclepius Gardens, Jericho). The water was colourless and flavourless, but the relief it offered was immediate and lasting. She felt her mind, everything she was, Loretta of the swift dance and the impossible flying, Loretta of the Fabulous Flying Banditti, she felt her go. Her outline grew faint as rocks flew around her, as the Colossus destroyed the island. All that remained for her now was that schoolteacher in her little apartment with her cats, the woman whose name Loretta no longer even recalled. She did then the last and the most terrifying thing an aerialist could ever do.

She let go.

From high above, the little caiques watched the destruction and they were sad, and scared, but they were also creatures of the Escapement, and therefore used to such things. They saw the outline of the woman on the island grow faint and finally fade, and knew that, when she woke up, she would no longer remember them or their song, for she no longer belonged on the Escapement, and the people of that other place had forfeited wonder for the prosaic long ago.

The train raced away from there, and for a time it would be safe, away from the Titanomachy and the machinations of Colossi and pupae. The Kid paused from shovelling ghosts and looked at the Stranger mournfully.

“Well, that’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” he said.

The Waiting Place

FIVE:

THE WAITING PLACE

The room was very bright and the child frail. He was frail in a sort of doll-like way, like one of those anatomical models where you could see the bones drawn onto the skin surface. The boy’s eyes were large and the irises were a guileless blue. It was the blue of waterfalls and deep, clear skies in the late afternoon. How his eyes got their colour the man never knew. His own eyes were green. But he never stopped marvelling at this child, not just from the moment that this tiny bundle first emerged into the world, when the man, for all that he was petrified, was given the scissors to cut the umbilical cord, for all that he tried to protest; but earlier, as the boy grew bone by bone and limb by limb in its mother’s belly, when he could feel it moving there, inside. The boy hiccupped a lot in the womb. And the man talked to him, through that thin membrane of skin, and sang to him, too: he did that a lot, back then.

But he never stopped marvelling at this, his boy, and those eyes which he had secretly always thought would fade away to grey once the boy passed his first year; but they never did.