The Magnificent Merlin Sprottle

Chapter Two - In Which I Meet My Estimable Host

(Theme Song: Cab Calloway "Chinese Rhythm")

The creature had been there, and then it was not.

It had either become invisible or gone off somewhere speedier than my blinking eye, teleported by magic I imagined it must have to conduct the nefarious explosion with a narrowing of his eyes. It must have been a faerie. That much was plain to me. What other breed would be inclined to commit such heinous crimes on humanity?

I looked around the station at the people flocking to see the wreckage. They were crying, screaming, holding one another - and I, the only one to stand there fully knowing the cause of the disaster, couldn't convince any of them to chase the thing.

I'm ashamed to admit I was so frightened I blocked the creature out of memory, right then. I made the subconscious decision to allow myself to be deceived by the people around me, who insisted I'd seen nothing but a trashbag. I began to imagine the explosion was caused by some combustible substance shipped on the train, rather than the winking eye of the creature (who, in our minds, hadn't existed at all). I admitted to the sheriff who interviewed me that what I'd seen was nothing more than a pointless disaster, brought on our little town by chance and poor train inspections.

"You're either the unluckiest kid I ever seen," the sheriff told me, "or you're the luckiest one in the world."

"Why?"

"If you got on that train when you planned to, you'd be laying dead at the bottom of that ditch with everybody else."

He tamped tobacco in his corncob pipe and nodded agreement with himself, and apparently did not realize how shaken his offhanded statement left me. I certainly did not feel lucky. For a long few days after this occurrence I couldn't look at the sky without fearing the sun would spontaneously fall on my head - because after all, spontaneous pain and death occurred before my very eyes. There was no reason behind anything anymore.

I couldn't breathe, but I took the suitcase they handed me back and went down to the inn, where the innkeeper barely had to be coerced into letting me stay another night. People are a lot more charitable when they've just stood on the brink of death and seen it all - when they're afraid, that is.

Next morning I was on the road to Alcombey via overland milk cart - not the most fashionable manner of travel, to say the least, but for a long time afterward I would not risk trains.

We cut our path through progressively greener and steeper hills. The nearer we were to the seaside, the more fertile the farmlands dotted with cornfields and fluffy white sheep became. We crossed bridges over murky rivers (I wasn't too calm about that), their shaded sand beaches overloaded with families swimming in cool water.

We went beyond those farms and rivers; past the coalfields, populated by sooty-faced faerie miners and their equally dusty kin; past the small outlying towns Greenwich and Lennon; and, after the most tangled stretch of roadways I'd ever seen, the creaking, jingling milk cart finally came to a stop beside a bustling city station.

"Here you are, Mister Broke. S'far as it goes," said the milkman. "Got a dime?"

"Um... I have a nickel."

The compassionate milkman looked down at pitiful me, and sighed. He couldn't have been much better off financially than I was, and yet: "Keep the nickel," he said, and drove off before I could change his mind.

He left me alone there.

Alone, more than I had ever been.

I stood on a boardwalk full of busybody pedestrians, people made of all elbows and thoughtlessly grinding shoe-heels. I heard an old man's toe crunch and scrambled for high ground, as a puffing black train whistled dark smoke into the air, squealing to a stop.