At last he saw something just ahead. He made for it, with that same sort of languor, and soon he saw that it was a small town, really just a collection of several buildings where the track terminated. A train stood at the end of the track with many of its windows broken and heavily sustained damage to its sides, but how it came to that state, or what it was doing there, he had no idea. It was then that a man wearing a conductor’s uniform came in his way, and the Kid looked at him with some surprise. The man held an official-looking clipboard in his hands and he looked at the Kid and he looked at the clipboard and he ticked something off on the page.

He said, “You’re late.”

“I am?” the Kid said.

“Come with me,” the conductor said. The Kid followed him meekly. I must be very late, he thought. There was a clock, somewhere nearby, and it kept ticking and ticking.

The conductor led him past the clock tower and into the plain beyond the town. As they walked, the Kid saw a group of passengers standing around in a patch of dug earth. He didn’t know why he thought they were passengers. Perhaps it was that they seemed ill-suited for the purpose to which they’d been put. The men wore hats and suits and of the women, some wore dresses and some riding pants, but all of them held spades.

They were digging in the hard ground.

They dug without haste and with seeming indifference to the task they performed. Their spades rose and fell mechanically, dislodging earth, shifting it, then back again, until the spades encountered something in the ground and the diggers would stop, and frown, and lay down the spade, momentarily, in order to clear dirt from the object with their fingers. The Kid watched, and he saw that what they dug out, like turnips or yams, were timepieces.

They were clocks.

The clocks were half-melted, almost malleable, near two-dimensional in form. The diggers handled them with great reverence, brushing dirt from the clock faces before throwing them without ceremony onto a growing pile of similar objects. It was only when they touched the objects that their countenance changed, however briefly, and they seemed more animated.

“Here,” the conductor said. He handed the Kid a spade. “Dig.”

The Kid took the spade. It seemed natural to hold it. He joined the line and began to dig. It seemed to him he could hear something, on the edge of sound, a soft murmur underground, as though the things buried there were squirming around, shifting, trying to burrow deeper. As though they were, in a sense, alive.

As though, in a way, they were not clocks at all.

The Kid dug. When the spade hit an object he knelt down and with his fingers began to clear the dirt around the clock. When he touched it, excitement quickened in him. The materiel felt soft to the touch, pliable. The clock was like a disc of rubber in his hands. He felt it pulse against his fingertips, tiny ticks, like a baby’s heart.