The tail beat against the ground. The eyes moved, blindly. The thing was immense, a carp or, more specifically, a koi, some sort of mechanical contraption resembling such. Yet it seemed alive.

“What is it?” Mikhel said.

“Materiel,” Mathieu said, quietly.

They dug. It seemed to Mathieu that it was Davide and Esther who dug the hardest, who were most insistent on bringing this monstrosity out into the open, but they were all caught up in it by then. It was the biggest find they’d ever had, if only they knew what it was or what price they could get for it.

The sun had set. The fish was still only half out of the ground and they set fire to the heap of broken wood, and the scales of the fish glinted in the firelight. A wild mood took them. They drank moonshine and danced as the stars came out and the smoke of the bonfire curled upwards, and Davide and Esther tied ropes to the body of the fish and then they all joined forces in hauling it out, until it popped out of the hole with a sudden wet sound and flopped on the ground, moving in some mechanical way like a clockwork automaton, its mouth opening and closing and its artificial eyes reflecting the fire back at them.

They proceeded to get very drunk.

In that other place and a long time before, Mathieu imagined that he was a scholar, and he studied holy texts. He had a wife he imagined he must have loved, and two children that he knew he had. He and his wife had married young, by arrangement of their families. The children he had loved wholeheartedly, but something happened, he no longer knew what, and after that event he was no longer married nor had he any children. It was in that period immediately after the tragedy that he took up drinking. He took to drinking the way he took to books, earnestly and wholeheartedly.

It was at approximately that time that he began to experience delirium tremens, and then merely delirium. After that Mathieu kept to himself and little by little departed wholly from his old life.

In his delirium he was no longer in that other place but in a land called the Escapement. He lived, not sure if he were a scholar dreaming he was a clochard, or a clochard dreaming that he was a scholar.

In that time he had seen all kinds of things he had once thought impossible. He saw the living statue of a woman, turned to granite, the eyes still clear and tracking, trapped within. Flesh-clad skeletons stretched into accordions. A rain of bowler hats.