Old Tom lived on top of the Vanishing Palace. This was the name of the amusement arcade, right next to the cemetery. To get there you had to step over the fallen stones, what was called the crazy paving of the dead. Us kids used to hang around the Vanishing Palace a whole lot, because what else was there, except for the Factory and that was too well protected. There were six machines to play. Five, really, because one of them was adults only. This was the famous Intravenus machine.
That's about as much excitement as you could find in Crawl, just thinking about what the beautiful Intravenus girl got up to. We just assumed the machine was female, it felt right somehow.
Crawl. Sounds like a strange name for a place, but believe me, you ever take several bad luck wrong turnings and end up here one day, you'll know where the name comes from. It's somewhere to the north of Manchester, so they tell us at school anyway. I won't say where exactly, just in case you're tempted. Anyway, I was born here, that's my excuse. I say born; nobody is strictly born in Crawl - you just wake up one day and find yourself here, alone in a stranger's bed, with nowhere else to go, and then you realize, oh shit, I've been here all my life already, what now? But like Tom said, escape isn't in the dictionary. Believe me, I've looked.
The machines in the Vanishing Palace only worked with old money. So when you went up to the change booth, and handed in your allowance, Tom would hand you back a little pile of antique coins. Most of them had a king's head on them, Charles III or somebody. And near all of them had teeth marks in the soft metal. Some of them had been bitten so hard, they didn't even work the machines. And anyway, the Intravenus machine would only work with one special coin that we never got to see. Tom kept it in a box behind the counter. And he'd sit there reading his paper while us youngsters played the kiddie games. Every so often he would mutter something about the state of the world, I mean the state of the town, of course.
The Crawl Gazette was four pages thin. It came out once a month. It was always four pages, even when there wasn't enough news or adverts to fill it; those times they just left some blank spaces in there. Sometimes they'd leave whole pages blank. One famous time the whole paper was blank, except for the title. When there was news, it was usually about the overcrowding of the cemetery, or the campaign to get rid of the Intravenus machine. Sometimes it reported on the latest product of the Factory. That was all I ever read it for, to see what the Factory had given this month. It always gave one thing a month.
Tom Sharpsaw had a robot that helped him run the Vanishing Palace. It was a crude spider of a thing, with two-and-a-half of its legs missing, and a single bulbous eye that was often clouded with a strange liquor. Out of its round body, a long needle sometimes protruded. This it would plug into the electric socket. The robot's name was Oris. Tom said that the name stood for Automated Retrieval of Information System, even though automated didn't begin with an O, it just sounded like it did. He'd stolen Oris from the library, so the machine wasn't up to much except maybe checking how many games had been played on which machine by whom. That kind of stuff. So Tom claimed anyway, but we reckoned it knew a whole lot more than that, including maybe the secret code to the Intravenus machine.
Tom had a thing about stealing things. He didn't see it as a crime, because everybody knew he'd done it. And mostly the stuff he stole was useless anyway, nobody wanted it back. Like I mentioned, the second hand of the clock was missing, and some of the numbers. Well who needed a clock in Crawl? What was there to get to on rime? So Tom had done his civic duty; the tall, spindly finger was planted in his garden round back of the Palace, with creepers growing all up it. The numbers, some he'd turned into furniture; the number two, for instance, he'd put legs on it to use as a dining table. But most of the things he stole went into the making of the game machines; the number four of the clock, that was the base of the Butterfly Circle machine. The machines were never finished, always something more would be added to them.
You can guess why Tom was just about the only grown-up I talked to much. He had some crazy stories, and the brilliant games, and all that. And sometimes he would take me on his stealing trips, and teach me some of the arcane secrets of breaking and entering. Other times I would help out adding new bits to the machines, that was the most fun. But mostly I liked him just because he was the only one who ever talked about getting away from the town's clutches.
It was all just talk, but what the hell.
Oris had come out of the Factory. Whenever anything comes out of the Factory, first of all we have to decide what it is, what it does. This is the Town Hall's job. Sometimes they can't ever find a reason for it. But with Oris, it was fairly obvious what was going on, what with those legs, and the eye, and the computing engine. That's why the library got to use it. Until Tom stole it off them, of course. I helped him do that. By then the robot was on its last five-and-a-half legs anyway. Nobody missed it.
If you've ever seen the Crawl library, you'll know why they really didn't need an Automated Retrieval of Information System. There just wasn't enough information to retrieve, that was it. The place was a shack, really. Small and grotty, made out of planks, and mostly falling down. And so small, they couldn't have more than a hundred books in there, surely. Tom claimed that one book was enough to last a lifetime anyway, especially if you read it in the special way.
'What do you mean?' I'd ask him. 'What special way?'
'One word a day,' he'd answer.
'One word a day, lasts a lifetime? I don't believe you.'
'Check it out, girl. Put up some money.'
Now Tom Sharpsaw had a whole bunch of books on the shelves at the Vanishing Palace. More than the library had, that was for sure. The thing about the books that Tom kept: they were all written by himself. So we made this bet. I said that reading a book one word a day wouldn't take a lifetime, and he claimed it would. And so certain was he of winning, he let me choose whichever book to test the theory on. So I looked over them alclass="underline" unfinished novels, engineering manuals, dictionaries of illusions, a censored atlas of the world, collections of poetry. Of course I chose the atlas, after all wasn't it all maps?
'There's lots of words in there,' said Tom.
'Like where?'
'Place names. Here, in the back. Thousands of them.'
'OK. I'll choose a poetry book.'
The book I picked out was a tattered paperback affair, a slim self-published volume called The Silvering. The author's name was Zenith O'Clock, which was one of the names Tom sometimes used for his writing. I flicked through the book; there were only thirty pages, twenty-six of which contained poems. Actually, now I looked at it, it wasn't so much a bunch of poems, more a very short story, set out with only a few words on each page, and lots of empty space.
'Do we read all the book?' I asked. 'The bits at the front, the contents and all that? Or do we just read the poems themselves?'
'Just the poems,' Tom answered.
'What's wrong? Don't you want to win, or something?'