The Train of Lost Things

by Ammi-Joan Paquette

  Inside Marty, something tipped. This was more than a made-up adventure. “So what did you do?”

  “I ran outside. I chased after it. I saw the fog and then—for the quickest of minutes, the clouds parted.” His eyes closed, and when he opened them again, they glistened. “I saw it. I saw the train, sleek and gleaming in the moonlit sky. I tried to run, tried to catch up to it, but I was too slow. It was already way up on the horizon. I never reached the train. I never got on.”

  “And you never got your eggwhistle back.” Marty felt incredibly sad all of a sudden, like the happy floaty balloon of possibility had gone pop and left him empty and alone.

  “No,” said Dad softly. His words were slowing down again, his breath returning to its usual labored state. “But I got to see it, you know? Got to see the Train of Lost Things with my own eyes. It’s not the same, of course! But that did make it better. Knowing my old beloved whistle was out there. Somewhere.” He grinned. “Hey. Maybe it still is.”

  “On the Train of Lost Things.” Marty looked at the end of his bed, at the empty post where he always hung his jean jacket. He turned his eyes to the window, looking out over the quiet street. “I wonder . . .”

  * * *

  • • •

  When the door flew open a few minutes later, to show Mom with bugging, worried eyes and a smudge of peanut butter smoothie on her chin, she found Dad sound asleep on Marty’s pillows, and Marty staring transfixed out the window.

  His mind was speeding in a wild, crazy loop.

  The eggwhistle. The jacket. Dad’s sickness. And now this.

  The Train of Lost Things.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was simple, when you thought about it: It was all connected. The Train of Lost Things gathered up the precious belongings that children had lost. You could find it if you had lost a heart’s possession. That certainly described what the jacket had been for Marty. Things didn’t get more precious than that.

  But there was more to this whole connection. When he and Mom had gone on their trip just a few days ago, Dad was doing all right. He was sick, obviously, but the new test medicine was performing well. Marty had heard the visiting doctor say those very words. Then the call came and they had to rush home and the jacket was supposed to have come, too. This was not an ordinary jacket, no—this was a Dad-and-Marty thing, a gathered-up memory of special moments they'd shared together over the years. It was their link.

  Now that link—the jacket—was gone.

  And suddenly Dad was dying.

  Something was broken in this picture, and Marty could see immediately what it was. It was all because of the lost jacket: That was the problem. That’s when things fell apart. Everything had been okay until then—still bad, but holding steady.

  With the jacket, there was hope.

  If a heart’s possession held enough power to bring a magical train to scoop it up from wherever it had gotten lost, wasn’t it logical that this same magic could be pushed outward, too? That it could, just maybe, reach out to find other lost things—like health and wellness and being fully whole and strong again? Every time Dad touched the jacket, his eyes were brighter, his grip stronger. All of his and Marty’s shared memories were preserved in that one thing, and if Marty could get it back, could hold it in his hands, put it in Dad’s hands once more, Marty knew—he knew—it would all be okay again.

  Dad would be okay again.

  * * *

  • • •

  Marty was a finder. He could find this train. He could find his jacket.

  And then everything in his life would go back to its proper place. A place for everything.

  Marty could fix it all.

  He just had to find the Train of Lost Things.

  5

  THINGS YOU HEAR IN THE STREET AT NIGHT

  Marty spent what was left of the day planning and waiting. (And also losing himself in Creature Smackdown for a bit. Which helped a lot, actually. Creatures were predictable, and once you smacked them down, they stayed down.) Dad woke up after about an hour and Mom helped him back downstairs. Then the three of them piled into the den for an early dinner. Dad fell asleep again halfway through, leaving Mom and Marty to poke quietly at their plates. Their appetites were pretty much gone by then. Dad was down for the night, so Marty crept back upstairs and Mom shut herself into her home office. She had been doing that a lot lately. He’d overheard his grandma yelling at Mom over the phone for “burying herself in her work,” and Mom answered back that she had to keep busy, otherwise she’d lose it.

  It seemed like all kinds of things were being lost these days.

  He could have asked Mom to stay with him. He had a million questions he half wanted to ask her, but the other half of him was desperately afraid of what the actual answers might be. So he let her go.

  And then he got busy. He stuffed his backpack with everything he thought he might need: a sweatshirt, an extra pair of socks, a pocket first-aid kit, and his dad’s Swiss Army knife. Some rope. An old fishing kit with lures and hooks and some shriveled-up bait—because if you’re being outdoorsy, why not go all the way? Then he settled himself at the top of the stairs with the iPad, where he could see down the darkening hallway and out through the cut-glass window above the front door. He cleared three brand-new levels on his game, looking up every few minutes to check the sky, waiting till the time was right.

  He felt sure he would know when that was.

  After Nurse Carla had come and gone from her nightly check-in, after Mom bustled out to do the dishes and her office door clicked shut behind her again, even then, Marty didn’t stir from his spot at the top of the stairs. After a while he set the game aside and just waited, his gaze glued to the sky through the tiny front window. Halfway down the landing, the tall grandfather clock marked the passing seconds with its even tick-tick-tick, keeping him company in the dark.

  Hours passed. Marty thought he would have dozed or drifted off, but he didn’t. He had never felt more wide-awake in his life. In all this time, nothing changed in the sky outside. He knew what he hoped to hear. He wasn’t entirely sure what he expected. But he didn’t hear—or see—anything at all.

  Finally, the clock gave one low bong. Midnight.

  In the end, you couldn’t find anything by sitting around waiting for it, could you? If there was one thing all great finders knew, it was that stuff doesn’t just come for the calling. You’ve got to take your foot off the brake before the wheels can start to turn.

  The time had come to get those wheels turning.

  Creeping downstairs at last, shaking out his stiff arms and legs, Marty stashed the iPad on a shelf in the kitchen. He put a granola bar in one pocket and a juice box in the other. Then he double-tied the laces on his sneakers and tiptoed through the quiet hallway, step over step. He reached the back door. Stealthily, he pulled from his pocket the note he’d written upstairs. He’d planned to leave it in the kitchen, but he didn’t want his mom to find it too soon if she came to get a late-night cup of tea or something. The back door wouldn’t be touched till morning.

  He read the note one last time:

  Dear Mom:

  Don’t worry about me. I’m safe. I’ve just gone out on a super important mission. I won’t be gone long, and don’t worry, I have my phone with me. Don’t call me, though. I need quiet to do what I’ve got to do. I’ll be back by morning.

  Love,

  Marty

  * * *

  • • •

  As he wedged the paper into the frame and shut the door carefully behind him, it occurred to Marty that finding this note might not actually make his mom feel a whole lot better. But he couldn’t worry about that right now. He’d heard how Dad sounded when he coughed. And even if Marty didn’t want to believe what his mom had said about the new results, he couldn’t deny that Dad was really sick.

 
Marty had to find the train. He had to find his jacket, had to get it back to Dad, had to see what the magic could do. The sooner, the better.

  Before leaving the house, Marty pulled the iPad back out and looked up the directions to the train station. After all, if you were looking for a train, what better place could there be to find it?

  His foot was off the brake. His wheels were turning.

  Now what?

  * * *

  • • •

  The street down from Marty’s house was quiet in the midnight blackness. The streetlights were making a good effort, but they barely eked out their pale orange half-moons. Still, Marty felt better under their faint light, so he made a game of rushing from one to the next, trying to spend as much time in their glow as possible.

  The city at night was very different than during the day. It was early fall and the weather wasn’t too cold yet, but Marty pulled his jacket tight against the damp chill. He walked for ten minutes, down one long street and up another, without seeing a single car drive by. Then he heard one coming a ways down the road, and he ducked behind a bus shelter. Somehow it didn’t seem right for actual people to see him out and about at this hour. Who knew what kind of strangers might be roaming the streets late at night? Deep down, Marty knew that what he was doing was really stupid. Dangerous, even.

  Or it would have been, if there hadn’t been a magical train loose in the world. And his dad’s life at stake!

  How could anything be more important than that?

  * * *

  • • •

  Marty had been to the train station a few times, when they’d gone for day trips downtown. It wasn’t too far from his house. But alone, at night, it seemed a lot bigger than he remembered—kind of threatening, actually. Marty stood down below the tracks, not quite ready to go into the dark tunnel and climb the stairs to the platform. He stayed nearby, though, so he could make a quick dash for it if the train came.

  When the train came. It was coming, right?

  His dad had said there was the sound of a horn, that you knew it when you heard it. Marty didn’t hear it. He waited and he ate the granola bar and drank the juice box and wished he’d brought another one of each. He kept waiting, till finally he knew that he had to be in the wrong place. Which sort of made sense, when he thought about it.

  “The Train of Lost Things is magic, stupid,” he muttered to himself. It felt good to hear real spoken words bouncing around in the darkness. “It doesn’t need to go through a regular train station.”

  Then where?

  He thought of the old depot. If you followed the tracks back toward the edge of town, there was a bunch of abandoned warehouses where all the old trains used to be parked, before they got moved farther out of the city. He’d gone there with Dad once, years ago. So long that he’d been small enough to ride on Dad’s shoulders to see over the top of the wire fencing. That had to be where he’d find the Train of Lost Things.

  Marty squared his pack on his back and started walking again.

  * * *

  • • •

  Following the train tracks was harder than it looked. He wasn’t dumb enough to walk along the actual tracks—he’d seen this movie one time where some guy tripped and fell and got hit by a train, and Marty had never gotten that out of his mind. And for a long time there was a road that went right alongside the train’s route, so it was no problem.

  But after a bit he realized that the road he was on was curving away, and had been for a while. Then he heard some rowdy guys making noise up ahead and he took a side street to avoid them. And between one thing and another, Marty suddenly took a good look around himself—unfamiliar street signs, dark shuttered stores, empty parking lots—and realized—

  —he was completely lost.

  * * *

  • • •

  Marty’s heart thumped in his chest. He could be anywhere. No one knew where he was. He fingered the phone in his pocket—he knew that if he really wanted to, he could use it to call for help.

  But he wouldn’t.

  The bottom line was, Mom would hit the roof when she found out what he’d done. The whole point of leaving that note was that by the time he got back and had to face her anger and whatever punishment came next, he’d have already done what he set out to do. He’d have found the train.

  If he called Mom now, before finding anything, the whole adventure would be over. There was no way he’d be sneaking out anywhere for a good long time. And time was something he didn’t have right now.

  No, if Marty was going to find that train, it had to be now. Tonight.

  So Marty kept walking. He’d started this game level and he was going to see it through. Lost or not, he would stay out here until he found what he was searching for. Or until morning, whichever came first.

  * * *

  • • •

  There are certain things in life—the best things, some people think—that you can never find until you are well and truly lost. Marty learned this that night. As he trudged on, pushing worry from his mind and trying not to think about what would happen next . . . suddenly, he heard it.

  Cutting through the darkness like a knife of moonlit magic came one long, low blast of a horn. The keen of a train pushing through fog. The sound of enchantment seeping into the world. Just a sliver. Just enough that, if you ran as fast as you could, you might catch it.

  Run!

  6

  HOW TO CHASE AN INVISIBLE TRAIN

  Marty ran.

  He’d never been in this part of the city, never been outside this late at night, never felt—or been, really—so completely and utterly alone. He wished he’d called someone to come with him. Like Jax, maybe. He realized it was the first time in ages that he’d been able to think of Jax with something other than dread. But Jax wasn’t here, and what could Marty even have said to him after all this time? Marty was on his own. He ran on.

  The horn blew again, long and low.

  Where was it coming from? Marty slowed, his pack thumping on his back and his shoes scuffing at the gravel. His breath rasped in the silence like the saw of wind on branches.

  Or did it?

  No. There was the sound of actual wind, too. It ruffled the trees lining the street. It gusted around him like the brush of a giant’s hand, whipping his hair and furling the hem of his pants and clacking at the purple zipper pulls on his backpack.

  Pinching his phone tight in his hand, Marty turned in a slow circle. “Come on, Train,” he whispered. “I know you’re out here somewhere. Show yourself!”

  The street Marty was on was wide, with dark and dozy houses to either side. Murky streetlights fought against the gloom. Up ahead, the way curved out of sight in the shadows, but Marty thought he could make out a stretch of trees. A park, maybe? It was hard to tell, because the farther he went down the street, the thicker the fog grew up ahead.

  The fog.

  Marty lifted his hands, looked at the faint mist pooling around his feet. Huh. He looked back down the street behind him. The night he’d come through was as crisp and clear as ice water.

  Did fog work like that? Marty was pretty sure that real, normal fog didn’t get denser as you got closer to one spot. It didn’t seem to be leading you somewhere.

  He thought of his dad’s words about the train: “It shoots across the night sky in a swirl of fog.”

  This had to be it.

  Marty thumped on down the street. His sneakers slapped the asphalt and his breath came in little puffs. Anticipation slammed in his chest and rang in his head, almost like words: Wait for me! Wait for me! Wait for me!

  He reached the end of the street and saw a trail curving in between some bushes. He hesitated for a second. Like ghostly fingers, the fog beckoned. And off ahead, a sound: the long, low groan of a train.

  He dashed onto the path, following the narro
w gravel strip till it spilled out onto a grassy field, where it kept curving across the park toward a smooth, rounded hilltop.

  The wind blew stronger here in the open. Much stronger. But Marty barely noticed because the fog was billowing around him now, actual visible puffs of mist that clouded and clumped all over and through the huge open field.

  The horn sounded again.

  The train had to be inside the fogbank. It had to be.

  For an instant Marty hesitated: creepy fog, dark night, empty park. Well, this was the reason he’d come all the way out here. Still . . .

  Then something rammed him from behind and he went flying headlong off the trail and into the grass. The wind again? No. This was way more solid—not something but someone.

  Suddenly scared, Marty started to dive for cover in the bushes. Then he saw that the figure standing over him was no bigger than he was: wide, staring eyes in a small, shadowed face.

  “Who—who are you?” came a sharp voice.

  Marty jumped to his feet. “Who am I? You ran into me!”

  It was a girl about his own age. She wore neon-orange sneakers, dark jeans, and a blue sweatshirt with the hood pulled over her head. Her hands were fisted up in a boxer’s stance and she looked as steaming mad as Marty felt.

  “Well?” she challenged. “What are you doing standing like a lump at the end of the path? In the middle of the night?”

  “Why were you running crazy down the path in the middle of the night, anyway, without even looking where—”

  The horn sounded again, but it was different this time.

  A little sharper. A little more urgent.

  Marty spun back toward the field. The fog puffed and billowed. He took a couple steps in its direction before he realized that the girl was at his side. But she wasn’t paying attention to him anymore. She, too, was facing the field, staring out toward the fog.