him, and his job was to clout the jug-filler on the head if there was too much spillage.
Andrew’s father had given him a glass of the foaming cider, and although he had tasted a great many forgotten delicacies during his years in the city, he had never tasted anything finer than that sweet, cold drink. It had been like swallowing a gust of October wind. Yet what he remembered even more clearly than the taste of the cider or the wormy shift and squiggle of Dewlap’s muscles as he dumped the baskets was the merciless way the machine reduced the big red-gold apples to liquid. Two dozen rollers had carried them beneath a revolving steel drum with holes punched in it. The apples had first been squeezed and then actually popped, spilling their juices down an inclined trough while a screen caught the seeds and pulp.
Now his head was the cider-press and his brains were the apples. Soon they would pop as the apples had popped beneath the roller, and the blessed darkness would swallow him.
“Andrew! Raise your head and look at me.”
He couldn’t . . . and wouldn’t even if he could. Better to just lie here and wait for the darkness. He was supposed to be dead, anyway; hadn’t the hellish squint put a bullet in his brain?
“It didn’t go anywhere near your brain, you horse’s ass, and you’re not dying. You’ve just got a headache. You will die, though, if you don’t stop lying there and puling in your own blood . . . and I will make sure, Andrew, that your dying makes what you are feeling now seem like bliss.”
It was not the threats which caused the man on the floor to raise his head but rather the way the owner of that penetrating, hissing voice seemed to have read his mind. His head came up slowly, and the agony was excruciating—heavy objects seemed to go sliding and careering around the bony case which contained what was left of his mind, ripping bloody channels through his brain as they went. A long, syrupy moan escaped him. There was a flapping, tickling sensation on his right cheek, as if a dozen flies were crawling in the blood there. He wanted to shoo them away, but he knew that he needed both hands just to support himself.
The figure standing on the far side of the room by the hatch which led to the kitchen looked ghastly, unreal. This was partly because the overhead lights were still strobing, partly because he was seeing the newcomer with only one eye (he couldn’t remember what had happened to the other and didn’t want to), but he had an idea it was mostly because the creature was ghastly and unreal. It looked like a man . . . but the fellow who had once been Andrew Quick had an idea it really wasn’t a man at all.
The stranger standing in front of the hatch wore a short, dark jacket belted at the waist, faded denim trousers, and old, dusty boots—the boots of a countryman, a range-rider, or—
“Or a gunslinger, Andrew?” the stranger asked, and tittered.
The Tick-Tock Man stared desperately at the figure in the doorway, trying to see the face, but the short jacket had a hood, and it was up. The stranger’s countenance was lost in its shadows.
The siren stopped in mid-whoop. The emergency lights stayed on, but they at least stopped flashing.
“There,” the stranger said in his—or its—whispery, penetrating voice. “At last we can hear ourselves think.”
“Who are you?” the Tick-Tock Man asked. He moved slightly, and more of those weights went sliding through his head, ripping fresh channels in his brain. As terrible as that feeling was, the awful tickling of the flies on his right cheek was somehow worse.
“I’m a man of many handles, pardner,” the man said from inside the darkness of his hood, and although his voice was grave, Tick-Tock heard laughter lurking just below the surface. “There’s some that call me Jimmy, and some that call me Timmy; some that call me Handy and some that call me Dandy. They can call me Loser, or they can call me Winner, just as long as they don’t call me in too late for dinner.”
The man in the doorway threw back his head, and his laughter chilled the skin of the wounded man’s arms and back into lumps of gooseflesh; it was like the howl of a wolf.
“I have been called the Ageless Stranger,” the man