As he waited for his eyes to adjust at least a little, Abe felt Begonia’s hand slip into his. She must be frightened, he thought. He was wrong.
“The spirit business’s much further in,” she said. “If she finishes before we get there, though, we’ll be back to square one.” She tugged his hand as she started to walk down the wide aisle, quickly picking up speed. He had to jog to keep up, and soon that wasn’t fast enough.
“Clear out, mole!” she yelled at a lump in her path as she ran down the train. It was the term that she’d used to describe them, these hunkered-down men in the shadows, again and again, but for the first time it sounded like a slur. Her grip on Abe’s hand was stronger than he expected, and he had the fleeting thought that if he were to stop the little girl would just drag him after her without slowing a step.
The further they went the darker it got. The glowing pieces of stone seemed to get both smaller and farther apart as they hurried down the length of the train. It was an odd counterpoint to the bright glow the train had on the outside, but Abe assumed it was bright on the outside to make it easier to spot. The preferences of the moles notwithstanding, Abe couldn’t help but imagine that the interior was so dim, at least in part, to make what goes on inside easier to hide.
The light wasn’t the only thing making him suspicious. When they had first entered the body of the train the entire width of the car had been open, but as they moved deeper places began to appear that were closed off. At first it was just a tell-tale curtain, but before long they were forced to move through an empty, narrow lane between actual compartments. These were more like what Abe was used to seeing on trains, but while most compartments in his experience had thin doors that seemed to suggest privacy more than grant it, some of the doors in the mole train would have been perfectly at home on vaults.
Not that Abe had a great deal of opportunity to analyze. After the first few cars where variously-defined people were moving about in normal fashion, occasionally jostling one-another and eliciting shouts of impatience from the angry little girl, the path before them had mostly cleared out. This was probably initially due to Begonia’s fury, at least in part, but as the number of compartments increased the number of people in the hallway decreased so that now there was no one to be seen. Abe would have thought they were completely alone except that he occasionally heard muffled shouts from behind closed doors. The unpredictable noises leaching through what sounded like feet of iron coupled with the completely empty, dim hallways and the gentle, almost ship-like swaying of the train made for a creepy feeling that made Abe want to walk slowly and warily, making as little noise as possible. But, again, he wasn’t in a position to do that.
“There!” Begonia shouted and pointed into the gloom. Abe couldn’t see a thing, and was surprised she could make out anything worth shouting about. A few more seconds of sprinting, though, and he saw what she was running toward. Someone with a backpack was stepping out of a compartment and seemed to be saying something to an unseen individual within.
“She’s saying goodbye,” Begonia said through her teeth as if she were positively furious. Her voice, Abe thought, sounded deeper when she was running and incensed. “Stop!” She shouted, and whoever she was yelling at did the opposite.
4.
The person took off running in the other direction, and that part of the train seemed to be a bit brighter than where Abe and Begonia were currently running. “I don’t understand the rush,” Abe wheezed. The train was at least a mile long, and they’d been sprinting it for ten minutes now. He was once again unpleasantly damp in his layers of linen and tweed. “She’ll run out of train eventually.”
“And she couldn’t possibly step off the train, then, could she?” Begonia managed to shoot him a nasty look as she ran. “The one that’s running at four miles an hour? The one you fell on?”
She raised her voice to a shout (and dropped the sarcasm) to yell at the retreating figure, “stop!” again. They were gaining on her (the light had increased enough by now that he could tell it was a female), but the shout had made the chased girl run faster.
Abe tried. “Merry!” he called out. “Your aunt sent me.” The ‘I’m from Ebensworth and Associates and have come to escort you to what I imagine to be a sumptuous wedding’ didn’t manage to get said as Abe struggled for breath, but what he’d managed seemed to be enough. The girl, Merry, he assumed, stopped and turned around. She squinted back at them as Begonia dragged the puffing Abnerssen behind her, closing the distance quickly.
“There, see, we found her,” said Begonia, suddenly all smiling little girl again. And then the train shuddered and fell over. Merry (and probably Abe too) screamed.
Chapter Six: Merry meet
1.
There was a man standing on the tracks of the only train in Underton. The train was covered entirely in some brightly glowing substance so that it resembled a great glow worm. It was, therefore, impossible for the man – even if it could be believed that he wasn’t clued in by the fact that he was standing on train tracks – to have not seen the train coming. And since he couldn’t help but anticipate the collision one must consider whether he had time to get out of the way.
The train moved at approximately the same speed as a fast walk for a person of normal health. It moved with the speed of a badly damaged bicycle being ridden by a child. It moved at a rate which made the idea that even the feeblest of persons could not have gotten out of the way laughable.
The man did not get out of the way.
He actually didn’t even try. He watched the train coming, and he did not react at all.
He might as well have been made of wood.
“Irresistible force,” he said quietly. “Meet immovable object.” He thought it was very clever, but nevertheless he did not smile.
The train was going too slowly to properly slam into him. It hit him and tried to keep on going, and when it couldn’t it began to lift off the tracks. It began to go around him. The front listed and fell to one side, and the train was so long that it took a while for the rest of it to follow. Like a wave breaking the whole enormous vehicle began to turn around the man who didn’t budge, and the great glowing thing fell.
2.
“What the–!” yelled Abe as he lay sprawled on the wall of the train. Or maybe it was the floor now, since it was at the bottom, but it used to be the wall. Anyway, he shouldn’t have been there, and he was shouting to express his discomfiture, but he was cut off by a shudder as the train settled and he was thrown once more to the floor/wall. He was secretly a little relieved at the interruption because he had actually not had a proper swear to finish his shout with.
Begonia was the first to her feet, though in the dim light it was hard to tell her and Merry apart. Abe was not, to be fair, greatly in practice at distinguishing between females. The giveaway was the crossbow. Begonia had kept a grip on it as the train fell groaning on its side and then jerked and shuddered like an enormous, downed beast in which they were all trapped.
“Ugh,” said Begonia, queen of understatement, and she put a hand to her head as the train lurched again. “I think we should go.”
“Begonia...?” Said a voice Abe didn’t recognize. He couldn’t see the speaker, but process of elimination suggested it was Merry. The mystery was solved when a silhouette of a head popped up from the door of a compartment that now functioned as more of a trapdoor. By the time Abe got to his feet the silhouette had climbed out of the compartment and was dusting itself off. “What are you doing here?”
Abe pushed his hands through his hair and then realized that he was pushing both hands through his hair, which meant he wasn’t holding anything. He slapped his sides and encountered no massive, inconvenient revolver and panicked. He fell back onto his knees, crawling about and scouring the dim wall/floor for his gun.
“This one was lookin’ for you, Mer,” Begonia responded, nodding to the frantically crawling figure of Abnerssen Crompton. “He’s not always crawlin’ about panic
kin’. Say hello, Mister.”
Abe wasn’t really paying attention, but he waved his hand noncommittally as he searched in the dark. The train gave another lurch and he fell over. At this rate the train would be fully upside-down in a matter of minutes.
“He lose something?” Merry asked very nonchalantly. She was, of course, holding the gun that Abe had dropped, and he was, of course, oblivious. Begonia nodded and Merry cleared her throat in a deliberate, pay-attention-to-me way.
Abe wasn’t paying attention. She did it again, putting so much into it that she ended up coughing a little, but still Abe was intent on his search.
“Hey, Highmark!” Begonia walked across the wall and nudged Abe with her boot and he finally looked up. When he saw Merry dangling his gun he climbed to his feet, brushing himself off in an attempt to look dignified.
“Oh, there it is. Right. Glad you found it, then.” He was unaware that he was speaking a little more deeply than he had been, but he was quite aware that, up close, Merry was very easy to distinguish from Begonia and he was at least as aware that if he was blushing (not that he was, of course) it would be hard to tell in the low light.
Just as he reached out and laid a hand on the barrel of the proffered gun the train lurched once more. This was a new and noteworthy lurch in that the train had seemed to be slipping down the small rise the tracks were built on, sliding further and further down with every previous lurch. This time, the train seemed to be be pulled up.
Begonia, Merry, and Abe all managed to keep their footing this time, but that minor triumph didn’t put to rest the disconcerting idea of something strong enough to move a train pulling them closer.
Abe looked down the sideways corridor and then back at the two girls with something like terror in his eyes. The train lurched again. “Is there a window or something?”
“We’re near the back door. I was almost there when...” Merry trailed off, perhaps unwilling to verbalize that she was almost off the train when Abe and Begonia had stopped her just in time to be trapped by what was, apparently, a superhuman train-hating monster. Instead, she just turned and started running along the wall of the train toward the back.
“Watch for holes. Or doors. Or whatever. Watch your step,” Begonia said as she took off after Merry. Abe gripped his gun in entirely the wrong manner as he ran after them.
3.
The door at the back of the train was very like the one at the front of the train, complete with soft cushiony platform and, one imagines, pillows. One has to imagine the pillows because, assuming they were ever there, they would have been lost in the darkness when the train wrecked and turned over. There could be a dozen soft pillows just off the the side, but Abe certainly couldn’t tell. The train had been on the dark side of its circuit when it was stopped, and Abe slid awkwardly out of the door of the sideways train to find himself surrounded by a deep and ominous darkness.
The train itself glowed, but the greenish phosphorescence seemed to extend only a few feet before being swallowed up. This was deep in the old part of Underton, between the hidden platforms where the moles loaded their drugs and unloaded their cattle and weapons and other trade goods from the world of light. A person could follow the tracks in either direction and eventually emerge into the half-light of Underton, but this was the part of the route where no light penetrated beyond the glow of the train itself.
Abe slid awkwardly down the soft platform, landing with a surprising amount of grace on the gravel a few feet from Begonia and Merry. He looked toward them as if expecting some recognition for his smooth descent (down what was essentially a slide made of pillows and, therefore, hardly worthy of recognition for anyone capable of sitting) but found himself entirely ignored.
“I was about ten minutes from my stop,” said Merry. She nodded toward the front of the train. “Shouldn’t be more than a few minutes on foot.”
“Where were you going?” Begonia sounded suspicious.
Beside them, the train shuddered and shifted a few feet up the track. Abe seemed to be the only one who noticed. “Um,” he said.
“You know Glowworm Station, Begonia.”
Begonia nodded. “Don’t like it much.”
Merry shrugged. “I have a date to keep, and if anyone’ll know what to do about the train breaking, it’ll be the Deepmen of Glowworm Station.”
Begonia sighed. “Treaty’s in effect, anyway, so at least there won’t be trouble.”
“Excuse me,” said Abe.
Both ladies turned toward Abe, and he pointed back at the train which had stopped shifting away from them mostly. He was about to ask what he thought was the obvious question when the obvious question, so to speak, asked itself.
At first it was just a pounding sound – a regular, fast-paced drumming that was getting closer and louder. The train began to shake as the sound got nearer until it stopped with a tremendous crash and the whole glowing train shifted another dozen feet up the tracks. As if something very strong and heavy had just kicked off.
The man landed so hard on the tracks beside them that his impact made a crater. Abe was thrown against the wall of the tunnel by the force and when he looked back he finally saw the thing that had wrecked the train. The thing was a man in plain brown clothes that appeared to be the same color as his skin – a sort of pale brown like split wood. The thing was dusty and perfectly nondescript and looked, actually, bored. In fact, the thing had an expression on its face that suggested nothing so much as a desire (a mild desire) to go to sleep.
The thing, the man, straightened up and regarded Abe with a sort of robotic gaze. Its – his – his eyes were the same color as the rest of him. “Abe,” he said. He was totally monotone. Muscles in his face moved as if he were doing all the right things to smile, but the man did not smile. “I’ve lost something, and you can help.”
Abe swallowed hard as he straightened up. “Did you...” He tried to swallow again, but the lump didn’t seem to be cooperating. “Did you do that?”
“The train or the hole?” said the man. “I did both.”
Abe looked to where he thought Merry had landed but saw nothing. There was no sign of Begonia either. The man was focused entirely on him, was starting to walk, very slowly and stiffly, toward him now. “You said I could help?”
If you thought the walking was stiff, wait until you see the nodding. The man nodded so woodenly that he resembled a ventriloquist’s dummy. “You can. In the interest of full disclosure you have already. I am looking for a girl, Abe Crompton. I followed you to her.” Again he looked like he wanted to smile.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Abe. He wondered if Begonia and Merry were very far away by now. He wondered if Merry would go to the wedding, and he hoped, if Mr. Ebenswood asked her about him, she would say that Abe had been brave and had saved her life. Perhaps she would say that he was handsome, too.
“Oh, now that isn’t true.” There was something in the pausing and phrasing of the man’s speech that was attempting to convey mocking disappointment. It didn’t quite work, but Abe got the idea. He also realized that he was still holding his gun, albeit in a wholly useless manner. He amended the manner in which he was holding his gun.
Abe pointed the barrel at the man as he emerged from his crater. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about,” Abe said. “And I’m going to insist that you keep your distance, sir.”
“Merryanna Lynnarine Richards.”
Abe shook his head. And his hand, incidentally. The one holding the gun. It shook. But that wasn’t on purpose.
“Come on, Mr. Crompton. You know where she’s going. I can be very persuasive.”
Up close the man looked even more like wood. He even seemed to have grain to his skin and to have subtle lines like rings in a tree that are still visible after the tree’s been turned into a well-varnished table. He was reaching his hand out toward the gun when Abe pulled the trigger.
The man’s expression didn’t even change when the bullet
struck him. He didn’t react at all.
Chapter Seven: The Woodsman
1.
Naturally, Abe assumed he had missed. It was dark, after all, and the man was ten steps or more away, so Abe ignored the evidence of a very clearly smoking hole in his adversary’s jacket and adjusted his aim.
When Abe pulled the trigger this time there was no doubt. The echo of the shot rang out from the cave walls around them and The entire front of the man’s shirt was immediately blackened with smoke and powder. The bullet hit directly in the middle of the circle of darkness, and Abe could see the silvery bullet glinting at him through a hole in the man’s tie, so symmetrically placed that it could have been a tie-pin.
Perhaps the man paused, but if so it was only for a moment.
Abe thought he could see what looked like wood grain in the sides of the bullet hole. What he definitely did not see was blood.
The man’s hand was on the barrel of the revolver when Abe fired again. A chunk of the man’s face splintered off, and Abe fell back with a cry. The shot had struck the man’s face harmlessly, but it had sent shards of something very like wood scattering in all directions. One of these splinters sliced into Abe’s cheek and he fell back, his hand pressed against the already-bleeding wound.
“NOW!” Came a shout from the darkness, and the voice was followed by a flash of bright orange and yellow. A second later another, and twin gouts of flame erupted from the shadows.
Abe slid back across the gravel floor of the cave, still pressing his hand to his cut cheek as fire enveloped the man who still held his gun. As he did he observed the source of the flames with a sort of exhausted inability to disbelieve – Begonia and Merry were each blasting streams of fire from their outstretched palms.
The wooden man initially reacted to this new attack as he had to the bullets, which is to say that he didn’t react at all. And then his clothes began to burn and his face distorted very, very slightly with what one has to guess is the wooden equivalent of genuine terror.
Highmark Page 4