Not long ago nor very far away, a young boy named Seamus Macnessa walked down a dirt road on his way to the one-room schoolhouse where he was sure it would be at least 150 degrees inside before noon.

He pulled at the collar of his scratchy wool shirt and dug at the crotch of his scratchy wool pants, then he kicked a clod of dirt and grunted satisfaction when it crumbled to nothingness, wishing vaguely that he could do the same. Then he would have no more worries about school or chores or his Ma and Pa; no more worries about his two dumb brothers, Declan and Patrick, and all of the things that they could do and he couldn’t. He would just be particles of dust, floating on the breeze.

Maybe he would float down the trail, out to the field and up Declan’s nose, making him sneeze until he fell off his horse and got stepped on by that stubborn red bull he was always griping about. Seamus snorted laughter and then was startled from his thoughts by a polite cough from the side of the road. He looked up to see a tiny man, no more than a foot taller than he was, dressed in a long black coat and holding a tall black hat. The man was completely bald but sported an enormous handlebar mustache that grazed his shoulders on each side. He stood beside a large covered wagon with “Imagination on Horseback - Every child’s dream!” painted on the canvas in lurid red letters. Hitched to the wagon was the strangest team Seamus had ever seen. Not horses or mules, in fact, they looked rather like giant horned cows, and they were as black as the dead of night.

“Oxen my boy. The finest pair in the free world, I’d set my watch and warrant to it. This brute here is Sampson and the beautiful lady next to him is Delilah.” The man gestured affectionately at the dark team, which merely scratched in the dust and snorted. “Not great conversationalists to be sure but pure genius when it comes to pulling my wares from one small bastion of society to the next. Unaffected by rain or snow or drought. I’m sorry boy, are you feeble in some way?”

Seamus, who felt that he hadn’t been given an opportunity to speak or even think properly of something to say, resented the question. “No, Sir. I’m not feeble.”

“Marvelous. My name is Lysander Popanopolous but you can call me Zan if you like. I am the maker and seller of the best, most amazing toys you will find this side of paradise, guaranteed. I am headed at this very moment to make my fortune in the great city of Chicago. Sadly, bad luck has befallen me.” He indicated the wagon and Seamus saw that it clearly rested at an angle.

“Bust a wheel did you, mister?”

“Very astute observation Mr….? I’m sorry, I don’t believe I caught your name.”

“Seamus. Seamus Macnessa.”

“And a fine Irish name it is lad. Although with hair like that I might have guessed.”

Seamus ran a hand through his unruly red curls and wrinkled his freckled nose. The man certainly was odd and Seamus didn’t know quite what to make of the situation. He knew his Ma didn’t like him to talk to strangers, but she didn’t like him to be rude either. He needed to be getting to school, but leaving a man stranded by the side of the road seemed rather impolite. “Um. Can I help you somehow?” he asked finally.

“Oh, well, awfully kind of you to ask. Your mother would be so proud, but no. My associate is following with the rest of the merchandise. He’s a large, handy fellow. I am sure I will be back on the road directly. He has probably only stopped for a wee nap. I’ll just wait here for him.”

“Um. All right then. Well, it was good to meet you but I have to get to school. Miss Lily doesn’t like it when we’re late.”

“Of course you do. A fine education is the means to a bright and shining future. I merely thought that as long as my shop and I were delayed here, I might open for a spot of commerce. I am an entrepreneur, you know, ever vigilant for an opportunity to do business. I don’t suppose you would like to step inside and have a look around would you? See if something strikes your fancy?”

Seamus eyed the wagon skeptically. It looked a bit shabby. The boards were weathered and cracked. The canvas, even with its garish coat of paint, looked tired and worn. The whole rig looked as if it had seen a million miles of hard road and all of it without cleaning or repair.

“I don’t have any money,” said Seamus.

“Oh, well, that is unfortunate. For me anyway. But for you, well, it doesn’t cost a thing to look now does it? And if you see something you like, you might mention me fondly to some of your associates who may be a bit better endowed then yourself, if you catch my meaning.”

Seamus pushed aside the canvas flaps and stepped into the wagon before he even realized that he wanted to see just what “Imagination on Horseback” was all about. His eyes quickly adjusted to the gloom and he looked around, shocked at the apparently cavernous interior. There were several shelves lined with the sort of dolls that his Ma was always collecting to give to the daughter that she never seemed able to produce. In one dusty corner stood a beautiful dollhouse, and Seamus blinked when he saw that the windows were glowing softly as though the house had somehow been rigged with electric lights.

He saw a carved wooden boat, loaded with dozens of intricately carved wooden animals and even a tiny wooden Noah. Floorboards to canvas ceiling, back to impossibly far away front, the wagon was piled with an army of toys. Not even the special order catalog kept behind the counter at the store in town held such a selection. His eyes crossed with the effort of trying to look everywhere at once. Then he saw the train from the corner of his eye and his whole body jerked as if struck by lightning. His eyes grew huge and his mouth fell open.

It was not just any train. It was the Transcontinental Bullet. The fastest locomotive ever built. He had never actually seen the train itself, only a black and white photograph in the newspaper, but he knew that this was it just the same. A perfect replica. The enormous black smokestack and shiny brass whistle gleamed above the deep, almost menacing, gunmetal blue engine. Seamus tried to swallow, but his mouth was bone dry and his tongue felt glued to the roof of his mouth.

“Ah, you are a boy of discriminating taste. Gorgeous isn’t she? Not another quite like her in all the world, I’d wager.”

Seamus reached to touch the beautiful train and Zan’s hand fell on his shoulder, grinding the bones together painfully. A low moan of hurt and sorrow that neither of them heard, rattled deep in his chest.

“I don’t think you want to do that. Would you pet a strange dog before you knew if it would bite?” Zan asked.

Seamus felt as if his heart would break. In his mind, he could actually feel the cool, sleek metal body already. He was nearly overwhelmed by the urge to knock Zan out of the way, grab the engine and run for the woods as fast as his feet would fly. Instead, he licked his dry lips and said, in a hoarse croak, “Please. Please, Sir, I promise I won’t hurt her.”

“It’s not you hurting her that worries me,” Zan said with a mysterious half smile. “Why don’t you come over here? I have some remarkable wooden ponies. Their legs are jointed so that they actually move. You’ll love them!” Zan turned and moved toward a box in the far corner of the wagon. When the man’s back was turned, Seamus reached out and touched the train with one trembling finger. His head rocked back and his eyes rolled up to show all white.

The train was really real. He heard it chugging along, felt the rhythm of the tracks and even smelled the burning coal. Seamus jerked his hand back and looked at Zan.

“Foolish boy. I told you not to touch it.”

“What was that?” Seamus asked.

“What did it seem to be?” Zan’s eyes glittered with curiosity and greed.

“I…I don’t know. I can’t say,” Seamus stuttered.

“Here. Let me help you.” Before Seamus could protest or back away, before he could even see what the strange little man meant to do, Zan picked up the model engine and dropped it into the boy’s outstretched hands.

Again, there was the feeling of being knocked back by a giant hand, and then Seamus knew he was onboard the train. He opened his eyes to see the tiny engine compartment. Hot and close, it smelled strongly of coal. Seamus saw that his plain school clothes were now replaced with the smart blue and white ticking of a locomotive engineer. One hand crept up to his head to discover the short-billed cap perched there. He looked out the little window at the green hills rushing by and a huge grin spread across his face. A black cord hung near his right shoulder that he was pretty sure could be only one thing. He gave it an experimental tug and was rewarded with an earsplitting “Woo-Woo” from the shiny brass whistle. He laughed aloud.

Seamus had always known that he was an engineer in a family of dirt farmers. He had tried to tell his brothers about all the exciting cities that he planned to visit when he got older, but they just laughed and punched him in the arm, and pushed his face into an old cow pie. Now here he was on his way to…where? Did it really matter? Away from the boring little town of Frye’s Creek was good enough for Seamus.

It didn’t seem important that Seamus had never even seen a real train, or that he knew absolutely nothing about driving one, because this train appeared to be driving itself. He didn’t even have to worry about loading the coal furnace because the train was feeding itself too. He wondered what would happen when he got hungry, and a huge meat and cheese sandwich like the ones his ma made for his brothers when they spent all day in the fields appeared beside him. Thinking of his mother made Seamus kind of sad and he wondered briefly if she would miss him. Then he figured that with Declan and Patrick around she might not even notice that he was gone. Plagued with large, boisterous redheaded sons was Deirdre Macnessa. Still, Seamus resolved to write her a letter and post it when he got to his first stop, wherever that might be.

That decided, he turned his attention to the window. Fields and farms blurred by. Seamus never imagined it was possible to travel so fast. He saw rivers and deserts and great rolling waves of green prairies with snow-capped mountains in the distance. What he did not see were any towns or houses or people.

Eventually, even the ever-changing landscape started to bore him, and Seamus wished they would just get somewhere already. After all, the train couldn’t just keep running and running forever, could it? It must stop somewhere, right? Surely, there were passengers and cargo to consider, weren’t there?

Seamus turned around to see a small windowless door in the back wall of the engine compartment. He thought it must lead to the other train cars, but when he tried to turn the knob, nothing happened. It did not move at all. Seamus seemed to be trapped there all alone, and he felt the first small flutterings of fear deep in his belly.

He looked out the window again and saw that they were speeding through a dense forest. The trees were black and twisted, the branches seeming to reach out hungrily for the train. Several of them even seemed to have grinning maniac faces, slobbering and screaming for the train to stop as if they were hurried passengers late to the station and desperate not to be left behind. He heard the skittering scrapes of branches on steel. Seamus clapped his hands over his eyes, his fingers dragging his cheeks down and changing his face to a grotesque mask of horror.

Then he saw the mountain rising through the trees. It was so tall that the top was hidden in a low bank of misty gray clouds, so wide that it stretched across the horizon, and it seemed to stand directly in the path of the train. Seamus watched the stone face grow larger and larger in the tiny window as the train shot closer. With each passing second, he became more sure that they would simply keep going full speed ahead until they plowed into the side of it, and then there would be nothing left but twisted metal and a bloody smear that had once been him. He did not know if this nightmare train had a brake, and he wouldn’t know how to work it if it did. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do but watch the mountain fill his vision. Just as he was trying to remember which of his mother’s saints he ought to be praying to in the event of a grisly death by magic train, he saw a wide black mouth open in the mountainside. He was suddenly absolutely certain that being eaten by a mountain was going to be infinitely worse than crashing into one, when the train slipped silently into the tunnel.

The darkness was complete and Seamus thought for an instant that his death had been so quick he had not even felt it happen. Then he realized that the train was still bumping along over the tracks. He faced the direction that he believed the windows to be and stared into the lightless void, willing it to change. Gradually he began to see a pale green sort of glow and dozens of yellow eyes opened in the dark. Over the sound of the speeding train, he thought he could hear something like the evil mutterings of a lunatic. He tried to imagine what would happen if the train came to a stop here, what sort of foul, mutated thing might climb aboard looking for a sweet, boy-flavored treat. He screamed and thought he heard an echoing, mocking laugh coming toward him from every direction.

“Help me! Zan help me! I want to go home!”

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” came the laughing voice from the dark.

Someone was slapping his cheeks lightly. Seamus opened his eyes to see the concerned face of Lysander Popanopolous hovering over him. He was lying on the cracked floorboards of the covered wagon next to a rusty and broken toy train.

“Are you all right my boy?”

Seamus jumped to his feet. He looked around wildly at the tired dolls with matted hair and milk-glazed, sightless eyes. He saw worn out teddy bears oozing stuffing and wooden horses with chipped ears and missing tails.

“I…I’m…” he stammered, but unable to complete the thought, much less the sentence, he turned and stumbled out of the wagon. He took a few unsteady steps towards home then found his feet and ran as if chased by demons. He ran all the way home to his tiny shack with smoke curling from the chimney. He kissed his mother hard on her round red cheek and laughed when his brothers boxed his ears. It was good to be home.

The End

James Walton Langolf is a wacky writer from Phoenix, Arizona who thinks nothing is more fun than scaring people silly. She loves campfires and s'mores and things that go bump in the night.

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