The Hierophant looked at the Stranger and made that little gesture with his fingers again. “I built this place,” he said. “To find that which was buried. I waited, and they came, those who were lost, those who had nothing left but the waiting. And you would take this from them?”

The Stranger did not reply. The Kid was climbing faster now. The clock tower seemed to elongate into the sky, as though its dimensions were not quite right, and it reached higher and higher into the grey heavens. A wind howled from nowhere, snatching at the Kid, bellowing at his hair and clothes. Down below, the passengers attempted a climb but continued to fall down as others took their place.

The Hierophant advanced on the Stranger.

“I will shoot,” the Stranger said. He took a step back.

The Hierophant smiled.

“If you have to shoot, shoot,” he said. “Don’t talk.”

He took another step forward. The Stranger took another step back. Overhead the Kid climbed ever more desperately. When he reached the next level his fingers grasped for purchase and for a moment it seemed he would fall. He flailed helplessly for balance.

The Stranger pulled the trigger of his gun.

The gun clicked with a dry sound like an apologetic cough. No bullet emerged. The Hierophant made that gesture with his fingers. He took another step, and then another.

“. . . waiting.”

No one was chasing the Kid now. He was almost at the top when he looked down. He must have realised there was nowhere to run. His foot slipped and pebbles of broken stone fell down to the ground. He shouted, and just when it seemed he would fall he took one last, desperate jump, and caught hold of the minute hand of the clock.

He hung there, suspended from the big clock above the town.

Tick, tick, tick, tick,

ti—

They were on the Stranger now, the passengers holding him helpless as the Hierophant bore down on him, and the man’s fingers pressed against the Stranger’s throat as the Stranger’s useless gun pressed into the Hierophant’s belly. . . .

That useless bullet, trapped inside.

The long, graceful fingers moving on the Stranger’s throat, pressing painfully on his windpipe, choking the air out of him.

The Kid, hanging from the minute hand of the clock, the wind lashing savagely at his face.

He cried, “Help me!”

The Hierophant’s grimace of savage satisfaction. It would be the last thing the Stranger would ever see, that and the Kid’s feet, dangling, high in the air.

A gust of wind blew in from the plains. It snatched a bowler hat off one of the passengers and tossed it skyward. It stirred the grey-brown dust and it tousled Mrs. Lazarus’s hair. Overhead, the second hand battled against the stuck minute hand. Tick, tick, tick, tick, ti—

ck.