by Lev Grossman
“You’ll be okay,” she said. “You’re safe now.”
She hoped it was true.
By then it was dinnertime, and she went to the dining car to eat with the gang from the library. Tom came, too. The mood was subdued.
“I hope she’ll be all right,” Kate said.
“Sure she will,” the heron said.
“Polar bears are tough,” said the cat. “Very hard to kill.”
“I could probably kill a polar bear,” the snake said. “Couldn’t eat one, though, so what would be the point?”
Everybody stared at her.
“Anyway, she’ll probably be fine.”
It occurred to Kate that they hadn’t all been properly introduced, not the way humans did it anyway. So she and Tom told the animals a little about themselves and where they came from, and the animals told her and Tom about themselves, too.
The snake was an eastern green mamba from South Africa. (“Another ridiculous name. Mamba—I can hardly say it! Only a creature with lips would think of a name like that.”) He spent most of his time in trees. He insisted that in spite of his fearsome reputation he was rather shy and generally kept to himself.
The bird was a white-bellied heron from a river in India, and she was about a yard tall and incredibly beautiful—her neck was long and curvy, and her feathers were a million fine shades of gray. She had a thin, rather tasteful silvery crest on the top of her head, and, as advertised, a pure-white belly.
“We used to be called great Indian herons, or imperial herons,” she said. “Come to think of it, I can’t think why we changed. Those both sound much better.”
Kate took the opportunity to ask her about something that had always bothered her, which was how herons could walk with knees that bent backward. It turned out that the heron’s knees worked exactly the same way human knees did, you just couldn’t see them because they were tucked up under her feathers. What looked like the heron’s knee was actually her ankle, and what looked like her lower leg was actually a long, skinny foot.
Kate found that explanation almost equally unsettling.
“I always thought if I ever went on an adventure with talking animals, it would be with bunnies and mice and that sort of thing,” Kate said. “I mean, no offense.”
“None taken,” said the porcupine (who was just a very grumpy North American porcupine from Michigan). “Though you’re lucky. Rabbits and mice are incredibly boring. All they talk about is vegetables and seeds.”
For dinner the heron and the cat both ate fish. The porcupine worked his way through a big heap of clover, then gnawed on a branch. The mamba didn’t eat at all.
“I swallowed a wild gerbil a few days ago,” he explained, “and I’m still digesting. Besides, the sight of a mamba feeding is too awe-inspiring for most animals to watch.”
“It’s probably the way you inject your prey with horrible venom,” the porcupine said, “that makes them suffocate in their own skin.”
“Oh, that’s only the beginning!” the mamba said. “Mamba venom also causes dizziness, nausea, difficulty swallowing, heart palpitations, and convulsions! Though it’s true, it’s usually the suffocation that does them in.”
“Well, I think it’s horrible.”
“You’re just jealous,” the snake said, “because you can’t shoot poison out of your teeth.”
At this point Kate excused herself to go to bed. She was as tired as she could ever remember being, and she wanted to find a Band-Aid for her shin. And she was worried about the polar bear. And the invader animals. And the train was still short of fuel. When all this started she’d thought it was just going to be one big thrill ride, and it kind of was, but adventures were turning out to be a lot of hard work, too. And kind of stressful.
Tom headed the other way, toward the back of the train.
“The sleeper car’s this way,” Kate said.
“I know,” Tom said. “But the candy car is this way.”
Kate had almost forgotten about the candy car. She was tired—but you could never be too tired for candy.
Kate wasn’t sure where it was, but it turned out that while she was hanging out in the library Tom had—with his usual surplus of energy—been off exploring the whole train from front to back. From the outside the candy car looked like an ordinary red metal boxcar, even a little on the rusty side—inside it was full of bright light and rainbow colors. A wave of cool air rolled out, heavy with the smell of sugar. The walls were lined floor to ceiling with polished wooden shelves, and every inch of every shelf was loaded with candy. It was like Aladdin’s cave crossed with the candy counter at a supermarket and multiplied by a million.
There were bundles of lollipops, and coils of black and red licorice ropes, and barrels of caramel cubes and fruit chews and sours and mints and nut clusters and brittles and candy canes and gobstoppers and honeycombs and gumballs and Swedish Fish. There were heaps of marshmallows and hard candies, and armies of gummy bears, and fields of candy corn. Candy necklaces hung from the ceiling.
There was a machine where you could type any flavor and it would deliver that flavor of jelly beans, by the pound. There was every candy bar ever made. Above all there was chocolate: milk chocolate, white chocolate, dark chocolate, solid bricks and bars of it wrapped in silver and gold foil. There were trays and trays of chocolates stuffed with caramel and cherries and nuts and nougat and coconut and toffee and cream and pretzels and everything else you could imagine and a lot of things you couldn’t.
It was all arranged by size and type and flavor and color, as neatly and carefully as a library. And it was all free, and it was all theirs.
“You laughed when I asked for a candy car,” Tom said.
“I know.”
“You thought it was funny.”
“Whatever! You were right! Don’t rub it in!” She hated when Tom was right. But if he had to be right about something, she was glad it was this. “Come on, let’s see if we can eat one of everything. Except the coconut ones. Those are all yours.” She hated coconut almost as much as she hated Tom being right.
But that night she never even made it past the chocolates, and Tom got stuck trying to stump the jelly bean machine till he couldn’t eat any more.
Afterward they walked back together, happy, not talking, knowing that their cozy sleeping car was waiting for them, stopping only at the boxcar to make sure the polar bear was warm and sleeping peacefully. The train was chugging along beside a mountain lake as flat and smooth as glass. At home there were always streetlights around to spoil the night sky, but now, far away from the cities and suburbs, Kate and Tom really saw for the first time in their lives the blazing-white Milky Way spilling out across the deep black sky, which was perfectly reflected in the black mirror of the lake.
Uncle Herbert had said something before about a twilight star. She wondered if he’d meant one of these.
Then she went to bed. If the world were a just and fair place, she and Tom probably would’ve gotten stomachaches, but they didn’t. Every once in a while the world is unfair in a good way.
15
The Branch Line
THE NEXT MORNING WHEN KATE WOKE UP THEY WERE moving more slowly because the train was heading uphill, into mountains.
The cat and the mamba and the heron and the porcupine played with the baby pangolin. He’d finally woken up and was drinking milk from a bottle. They’d made a new, even more luxurious nest for him in a big salad bowl from the kitchen lined with a soft, thick towel. He was unbelievably cute for something whose entire body was basically covered in fingernails.
The polar bear was still asleep, but the fish and the water Kate left for her were gone. That was a good sign: She’d eaten and drunk. Kate left her more of both, then went forward to the engine to check on the Silver Arrow.
They were crossing a steep slope covered with thin grass and gray rocks. Powdery snow fell out of a gray sky, and she picked up her heavy black coat from the sleeper car on the way forward.
&
nbsp; But cold as it was outside, it was still warm in the cab. She breathed in the smell of steam and coal smoke and hot metal.
“How’s it going?” she asked.
HUNGRY
NEED MORE FUEL
Right. It had said that before. She checked the tender, and it was getting pretty empty, just a few piles of coal left in the corners.
“Do you know where we can get more?”
MAYBE
“Maybe? How can you not know?!”
THERE’S NOTHING ON THE MAIN LINE
WE’LL HAVE TO TRY A BRANCH LINE INSTEAD
“Okay. Is that bad?”
WE’LL FIND OUT
THE BRANCH LINES ARE NOT WELL EXPLORED
“Well, I guess we’ll explore them!”
There she went, looking on the bright side. She was as bad as Tom.
An hour or so later they came to a fork in the tracks and stopped. Kate and Tom climbed down from the engine and walked a few yards ahead to where a branch line peeled off to the right. There was a big iron lever by the side of the tracks that shunted trains from one line to another. They pulled it and ran back to the warm cab, and the big train rumbled on down the new track.
PROMISE ME SOMETHING
“Sure,” Kate said. “Anything.”
DON’T LET MY FIRE GO OUT
IT’S THE ONE THING I’M SCARED OF. I DON’T WANT TO GO TO THE ROUNDHOUSE!
Kate and Tom looked at each other.
“Sure. Of course.”
“We promise,” Tom said. “What’s the Roundhouse?”
I CAN’T EVEN TALK ABOUT IT
After a few hours they entered a silent, misty forest. The tops of the trees disappeared overhead into thick fog. Kate knew it was still daytime, but the sun was hidden by the mist. It looked miles deep.
Still: so far so good. She found Tom in the dining car eating a muffin and looking out the window at the giant trees in the gloom.
“This is weird,” he said.
“Eerie.”
They didn’t speak for a while. It was kind of hypnotic, staring into the misty depths.
“What kind of muffin is that?” she said.
“Banana chocolate.”
“Are there any more?”
“There were two, but I ate them both.”
She sighed. It was hard being philosophical about things all the time, but somehow she managed it.
Kate felt the train slow down and stop. Once again they weren’t at a station—that was never a good sign. She went forward to talk to the Silver Arrow.
“Where are we?” Kate said.
I DON’T KNOW
“Oh.” Kate considered that. “How about we keep going till we get to somewhere where we do know where we are?”
I DON’T THINK I CAN
I’M OUT OF COAL
Wait—really? Kate checked the tender again, and her insides went cold. Nothing but coal dust. A load was still burning in the firebox, but that would only last another few hours. Somehow she’d just assumed that they’d have enough to make it to the next station or fuel depot or whatever. These things always worked themselves out, right? Some part of her must still have thought, deep down, that somebody else would solve the problem.
But there was no one else, just her and Tom, and now they were stuck here alone in a strange forest who-knows-where, way off the main line, with no way to get home, and soon the Silver Arrow’s fire would go out. And that was its greatest fear.
Kate felt herself starting to panic. She wasn’t even sure this problem had a solution. In video games, however bad things got, you knew there was always a way through to the next level. But real life wasn’t like that. Sometimes there just was no way.
The trees outside were just ghostly shadows.
Trees. Wait a second.
“I don’t suppose,” Kate said slowly, “that you could burn wood, could you? Instead of coal?”
The train hesitated.
IT’S NOT MY FAVORITE
“But if you really had to?”
I GUESS
IF I REALLY HAD TO
“Well, all right, then! We’re in the middle of a forest! There’s bound to be loads of branches and things. Everything here is fuel!”
Though when she climbed down from the train, Kate suddenly felt nervous and exposed. It was very still and quiet in the forest. There was no wind. No birds sang. It seemed like anything could come out of that mist at any moment.
But she couldn’t think of any other plan. She wondered if this was what had happened to that other train, the one that never came back. Maybe they’d gotten stuck here, too, and been devoured by some hungry forest-dwelling mist monster. Something rustled behind her, and she spun around.
It wasn’t a mist monster. It was the others: Tom, the heron, the fishing cat, the snake, even the porcupine.
“We thought you might want some company,” the cat said.
“Especially since it’s kind of spooky out here,” the heron said.
“I just wanted a fresh gnawing stick,” the porcupine said.
Kate smiled. Adventures were great, but she was learning that sometimes you didn’t want to go on them alone.
16
Trees
SLOWLY AND CAUTIOUSLY THEY FANNED OUT INTO THE forest. The train disappeared behind them in the fog almost immediately. It was ridiculously thick, as if there were a smoke machine somewhere nearby that was stuck on maximum.
The trees were absolutely enormous, and they had no branches low down, so they looked like big stone columns in a cathedral. The biggest ones were as thick around as an elephant. It was so quiet it was almost like they were holding themselves still.
There was only one problem: There wasn’t any firewood. None. The forest floor was completely bare of branches.
“Where’s all the sticks?” Tom said.
“I don’t know.”
It was as if somebody had come through right before them and tidied up. Kate looked up, but even the lowest branches were lost in the fog. There had to be a way. Without wood they’d be stranded here forever.
“Maybe we could chop one down,” Tom said.
“Yeah. Except that we don’t have an ax, and even if we did it would be completely impossible because they’re like the size of buildings.”
“True.”
“Maybe the heron could fly up and get some branches.” Though Kate knew the delicate heron could never get as many as they needed.
It almost felt like the forest was waiting for something from them. Kate guessed it made sense—here she was, just showing up like this, expecting to collect armloads of wood for free. Maybe it wanted something back.
That was fair. But what? What would a forest want?
“All right,” she said quietly. “Hi, forest. We’re looking for firewood to make our train go. Want to trade? What can we give you?”
The fishing cat cocked her head. “Who are you talking to?”
“Nobody!” Kate blushed. She didn’t want to admit she was talking to a forest.
But she kept going in her head. We really don’t mind, she thought. We’re happy to pay. We’d be grateful.
And then it was the oddest thing, because a thought appeared in her head:
Are you sure?
It was a thought, but it wasn’t her thought. It came in a voice that felt old, and very gentle, and very strong. And not alone, but like many voices speaking in unison.
It was the forest. She knew it.
I’m sure, she thought.
And that was that. It started as soon as she thought it.
The bottoms of her feet tingled. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it gave her an uncontrollable urge to take off her shoes. And not just her shoes but her socks, too: Suddenly she was craving the feeling of prickly, loamy soil under her feet.
So she took them off. Tom was doing the same thing. The second her bare soles touched the ground, she curled her toes right into it. And the really weird thing was, her toes kept on going.
They were getting longer. They stretched and pushed down into the cold dirt, like when you bury your feet in the sand at the beach, but much, much more. She felt them going deeper and deeper into the dirt.
At the same time her legs were getting longer, and her arms. She was getting taller, growing so fast that the ground zoomed down away from her.
It should have been scary, but for some reason it just wasn’t. It actually felt kind of amazing. Kate threw her suddenly huge arms wide, and as she did they stiffened, and her fingers spread and multiplied and then burst gloriously into twigs and foliage. She grew up, up, up, and it was like she was stretching her back after a long sleep. She was turning into a tree.
She closed her eyes. She didn’t need them! There were so many other ways to sense and feel. Her toe-roots went down, down, down, winding and finding their way through layers of delicious cold black earth as if it were mile-deep chocolate and at the same time spreading outward around her in a huge underground web, threading between pebbles and rocks and other roots, rubbing elbows with friendly worms, drinking in delicious chilled clear water that flowed funnily up through her legs and all through her body to feed her finger-branches and her leaf-hair.
The wind flowed past her, and she swayed with it like it was music. She grew so tall she could stick her crown up above the mist and feel the warmth of bright sunlight on it. It felt wonderful, like sunshine always does, except that now she was a tree, so she wasn’t just feeling the sunlight, she was eating it. It was her food. And it tasted incredible.
And when it rained, she drank the rain, and that was delicious, too.
Her branches touched the tips of other trees’ branches, and their roots mingled underground, as if they were holding hands but with their toes. The cat had become a pussy willow, and the heron was now a lovely gray ash tree. The mamba had become a magnificent African blackwood tree. The porcupine was a thorny honey locust.