“I’m sorry!” Uncle Herbert called. “This wasn’t supposed to happen! You’ve got a big job ahead of you, a huge job, so—just do the best you can!”
They were gathering speed now, following the tracks across the lawn as smooth as a blade over ice.
There was just one thing missing.
“How do I blow the whistle?” Kate yelled.
“Dangly thing!”
It was the last thing Uncle Herbert said before they lost sight of him.
There was a wooden handle dangling from the ceiling. Kate pulled it, and the sound blasted out into the night:
FOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!
The whole neighborhood could hear it. It felt like the whole world could hear it. She did it again. And then, because she was a generous person, she let Tom do it, too.
5
Things Get Weirder
THE TRAIN SWUNG TO THE RIGHT, FOLLOWING THE tracks into the woods behind their house, which just barely saved Kate and Tom from crashing through the fence and annihilating the neighbors’ house and probably the neighbors.
Instead they started smashing their way through the trees.
“I can’t believe this!” Kate shouted. “This is insane!”
“Whoooooo!” Tom whooped. “Whooo!”
“I mean this is really crazy!”
The train snapped branches and shoved aside whole trunks of trees, the headlight blasting out ahead of it like the fiery white breath of a dragon. Green summer leaves flew everywhere. They were going to be in so much trouble. So much. They were going to pay for this forever! But it was totally worth it.
They knew these woods like the backs of their hands. They’d lived here their whole lives, and they’d climbed and jumped off and fallen from every tree and rock a million times. But they’d never seen the woods at night from the cab of a giant runaway steam engine. Kate braced herself for the ultimate smash, when they would hit something big or when the tracks would run out and the whole train would lurch to a halt. It was going to be such a disaster. But so worth it. She swore to remember this her whole life: the night she rode through the woods behind her house in her own real steam train.
But the big smash or lurch never came. Instead the train kept going. Birds startled. Stiff branches scraped against the windows. She and Tom laughed hysterically. How far was it going to go?
Then Tom stopped laughing.
“Wait,” he said. “What happens when we get to the hill?”
It was a good question.
In the old days, when people made maps and they came to the part where they didn’t know what was there, they just drew a bunch of dragons and sea monsters instead of land. On the very oldest maps they wrote Hic sunt leones, which is Latin for “Here be lions.”
About a quarter mile into the woods behind Kate and Tom’s house there was a sudden steep hill, almost a cliff, with a chain-link fence at the top, and at the bottom was a scary dark swamp with a lot of bugs and, supposedly, a giant snapping turtle so big it could bite your foot off. If an olden-days person were making a map of the woods behind Kate and Tom’s house, that hill would’ve been where they started drawing sea monsters. Or lions.
Kate risked sticking her head out the window.
“Oh my God. We’re almost there!”
“Kate,” Tom said seriously, “what’s actually going to happen, though? I mean really? Should we jump out?!”
“I don’t know!”
She felt paralyzed. Panicked. She was the older one, she was supposed to know! For the first time it occurred to her that maybe this wasn’t going to come out okay. She wondered how deep the swamp was. If the train hit that water and sank, they’d be trapped. They could drown.
But it was too late, because even as she thought it she felt the Silver Arrow punch through the chain-link fence as easily as a brick through a plate glass window, hesitate for a moment like a roller coaster right before a big drop, and then tilt forward as the whole massive engine began its horrifying dive down the hill.
The clackety-clack of the wheels went faster and faster and faster. Kate closed her eyes and felt a sick, weightless lifting in her stomach. She clenched her jaw tight and gripped the seat till her knuckles went white.…
But the end didn’t come. When they got to the bottom of the hill they just kept rolling smoothly along, faster now but quieter, with no more breaking branches. Slowly she unclenched her jaw and ungripped the seat. The engine chuffed happily. Cautiously Kate opened her eyes.
They should have been sinking into the swamp by now, with the snapping turtle waiting impatiently to snap the feet off their drowned corpses, but instead they were cruising along easily through dark, still woods.
Kate knew perfectly well that there were no woods here, there was only swamp, and after that an office park, and beyond that the highway. It was impossible.
But the woods didn’t seem to care about that. They just went on getting deeper and darker.
“Where are we?” Tom whispered.
“I don’t know!”
“I can’t believe we’re in a real train!”
“I know, right?”
“I mean what is even happening right now!”
Over the next few minutes Kate and Tom had three separate versions of this conversation, different but all basically the same. They raised the possibility that they were going to Hogwarts and decided they probably weren’t, though that would’ve been cool, too. And it was Kate’s eleventh birthday.
Kate stuck her head out her side of the cab, and Tom stuck his head out his side. She wondered where they were going, and whether it was a good idea to go there, and whether, if they absolutely had to, they could jump out of the train without getting badly injured, and how long it would take them to walk home after that, and how exactly their parents would punish the bejeezus out of them when they got there. They were definitely putting Grace Hopper’s whole permission-versus-forgiveness theory to a serious test.
But at the same time all the excitement, all the energy, all the joy she’d been waiting her whole life to feel were finally thrilling through her whole body. Anything was worth that.
The air outside was getting pretty cold, even though it was June, and Kate shivered in her T-shirt. She was grateful for the warmth of the fire. After a few minutes she saw a pale light through the trees up ahead.
It was dim and distant at first and blinked in and out among the branches, but it got stronger and stronger till at last it came fully into view. It was a train station.
Not a fancy one, just a small country train station, a long lit platform in a clearing among the trees. There were people waiting on it.
Except they weren’t people, they were animals. A few deer, a wolf, several foxes, a big brown bear, some rabbits or hares—or were they the same thing?—and a stripy-faced badger. Perched along a railing at the back of the platform was an assortment of birds, large and small.
They just stood there, as still as commuters waiting for their morning train. Each one had a ticket in its mouth.
6
Click-bing!
THE SILVER ARROW SLOWED, PULLED SMOOTHLY INTO the station, puffed out a huge cloud of white steam, and stopped with a loud hiss. There was an old-fashioned train clock on the platform, the round kind with a light inside that sits on top of a lamppost. It was late, almost ten o’clock at night.