On the seventh day of Christmas…

We missed a blog for yesterday due to things entirely my fault. At first there was the three-hour search for the missing document needed to finish this story – meaning the story below. It had all of the characters delineated, carefully and in detail, the setting established and explained, and various other things, all parts necessary in order to complete the story. I searched my main computer, in every way I could think of, then called in experts to search for me. No document. Perhaps it would help if I could recall what I’d named it, but that isn’t the way my mind works. Could I pin down when the missing document was created, and/or last modified? No, of course I can’t do that. I lose entire weeks of time, when I’m not paying attention. I forget entire years in which important stuff happens. Recall the day a document was created? Not a chance.

Since I have a laptop computer, in addition to my desktop monster, for working outside of my designated writing room, I did the same exhaustive search on that. No joy there, either.

Then, since I often write on paper, with an actual pen, I searched every notebook and piece of paper, first in my library and then throughout the house. Nope. Nothing.

Then I gave up and decided to make myself a hamburger, using questionable meat. While it was cooking, I broke out my iPad to dink around, which is what the iPad is for, and there, in the notepad ap was my lost document. Of course that’s where it was. I’ve been doing increasing amounts of preliminary writing on my iPad, including the advance work for this very story (rather, series of stories, about which more information later).

The story was saved, even though I was already three hours late in writing it.

Then I ate the bad, bad burger and the rest of the day was taken away, with the standard effects of eating meat whose time of meaty goodness had long come and gone.

That’s why you’re getting yesterday’s story today and why this is a two-blogs day, so that the 12 Blogs are completed on Christmas Day, as is only right. I hope you enjoyed my assistant Stephanie’s bacon pie recipe earlier today, tying in to Christmas via our recurring Fables legend of the Miracle Christmas Pies.

Now, on to the business of today and the original introduction to this episode, begun yesterday:

As promised, we have another story this time. It’s not specifically a Fables story, since DC/Vertigo still has the exclusive rights to publish my Fables stories, and what kind of stinker would I be to do a Fables tale without at least giving them notice? However, who wants to have to get permission from a giant corporation just to write a small Christmas story, given away free to whomever wants to visit this site?

The solution seemed simple and obvious. Write a prose Christmas story that isn’t a Fables tale. Instead it’s a story set in a new fictional universe that will officially debut soon (sometime around the end of Fables in fact), and if one of the Fables characters just happened to slip into the tale? How can I be faulted for that? They’re powerful magical creatures and tend to flit all over the place. Who can keep track of all of them? Instead we’ll accept her appearance in this tale and pass it off as another ordinary Christmas miracle today.

What follows is the first of my Night Train stories – at least the first of many in progress to be published in any way. Magical trains are a staple of fantasy fiction, almost as popular as magical bars. I’ve had the chance to write a few magical bars, my work in San Cibola with the Clockwork boys being a prime example, but I’d never yet done my bit in the magical train field, though I’ve long wanted to. Now, at last, here we are. Depending on the vagaries of opportunity and audience, current plans are there will be many more Night Train stories in prose and in comics.

Night Train to the North Pole

When the Night Train comes, it comes cloaked in mist.

The Overseas Railroad was an extension of the Florida East Coast Railway out to Key West, 128 miles beyond the Florida mainland. Mighty stone bridges were built, over swamp and coral and ocean, between the keys, sometimes seven miles at a stretch. Daily passenger and freight service ran back and forth, until it was suddenly and emphatically ended by the great hurricane of 1935. When the bridges were restored and replaced, they were built for the cars and trucks, which had become predominant by then. The tracks were left to rust. The train line was dead.

Some of the track still exists today, unused and tucked away behind stone barricades. Some of the buildings on Key West’s Trumbo Point Terminal still stand, empty of all but ghosts.

A fat man stood on the concrete platform outside of the abandoned terminal, watching the mist role in. He wore khaki shorts and a black Beanteacher shirt, emblazoned with dueling biplanes. A half-filled formless sack sat on the platform, near his feet.

It was twenty minutes past midnight when he finally heard the train rolling in, along tracks where no trains but this one had run for decades. The mist blurred its outlines. The fat man had a vague impression of a huge art deco diesel engine pulling the cars, a giant steel relic of the great age of train travel.

Cars passed as the train slowed, then came to a noisy halt, leaving one of the passenger cars directly opposite him. Mr. Caruthers appeared in the car’s open doorway.

“Good evening, Nick,” Caruthers said. “How was your post Christmas vacation?”

“About the same,” Nick, the fat man, said. “How about you? Do anything special this year?”

“Every moment is special aboard the Night Train,” Caruthers said.

Nick picked up his sack and boarded the car. He was the only passenger waiting at the disused terminal, and no passengers disembarked. The train started moving again as soon as he was aboard. Nick followed Caruthers into the car. It was a second-class car, with comfortable leather cushioned bench seats, but no private compartments.

“I’m afraid all of our sleeper compartments are full, until The Carters get off at the next stop,” Caruthers said. “That shouldn’t be more than an hour or two, depending.”

“I’ll be fine, until then,” Nick said.

“Once the suite is free, I’ll have it cleaned and made ready for you, as quickly as can be arranged.”

“No rush. There are no uncomfortable seats on your train, Mr. Caruthers.”

Nick dug his ticket out of a pocket and handed it over to be punched.

“All the way home?” Caruthers said.

“Yeah. Play time’s over. Already time to get started on next year’s run.”

“We’ve stops scheduled at four different North Poles this time. Yours will be the third one.”

“You’ll wake me in time?”

“Of course,” Caruthers said, while his expression added, need you even ask?

Nick handed his bag over to Caruthers saying, “My luggage,” and walked forward in search of the club car and a sandwich. While he was tucked in to one of Chef Alden’s Mountaintop specials, a little girl climbed up onto the barstool next to his.

“You probably won’t remember me,” she said, “but I know you. At least I think I do. You’re Santa Claus, right?” She was small and shy, if her reluctance to make eye contact was any indication. Her hair was dark and tangled, like she’d just come out of a blustery wind.

“Of course I know you,” Nick said. “I remember every little girl who’s ever made it onto one of my lists. You’ve appeared nine times, and always in the ‘Nice’ column.” He wiped mayonnaise from his white beard. “Winter is your name.”

“I was hoping I might run into you here,” Winter said. “Mr. Caruthers said you ride the Night Train home after every Christmas.”

“He said that?”

Nick didn’t entirely let his displeasure at Caruthers’ unusual breach of privacy show. Nevertheless Winter must have picked up on it because she answered, “He told me only because I was able to demonstrate my suzerainty to him. I convinced him you were one of mine.”

“One of your…? I’m not sure I understand what you mean by that.” Then he took a closer look at the little girl.

“Oh, you’ve changed considerably, since the last time I got a good look at you. Less fidgety. Better spoken. Darker too, I see.”

“I’m the North Wind now,” she said.

That caused the old man’s eyes to widen, under white eyebrows, so vast and bushy that it looked as if two albino badgers had lodged in place. For some time he tended silently to his Brobdingnagian sandwich and root beer malted.

Then he said, “Of course. I’d heard North had died. I didn’t even think there would have to be a replacement.”

“Me,” she said. “I went into the family business. I won a competition against my brothers and sisters, which I was quite pleased to win, at the time. Now I wish it might have turned out different.”

“Why’s that?” Nick said.

“Because I was still a little girl a year ago. Now I’m not. I’m here now, but I’m also home with my mom, and everywhere else, all at once. Everywhere the North Wind goes, in worlds without end.”

“I begin to see.” Nick pushed his plate aside, giving her his full attention now. She wore a pale blue dress, with dirt stains on its hems. She looked down at the floor as she talked.

“I’m inside every snowflake on every breeze. All of those accumulated moments flow into me, becoming years, then centuries, and then ages. All at once.”

“Not young at all anymore,” Nick said.

“But Mommy’s already so sad, because Daddy died, and then Dare died too, and Therese grew up all by herself, away from us. I can’t let her see how old I’ve become. I have to take care at all times to be a little girl around her.”

“You poor thing.”

“That’s not why I came looking for you though.”

“Oh?”

“You can be everywhere at once too. That’s how you do all the presents in every home, all in one night. At least that’s what you told my brother Ambrose.”

“True,” Nick said. “On that one night a year I make just a single trip, but it’s a single trip to every home at the same time.”

“So then you can teach me how to do it,” Winter said.

“How to be in many places at once? You already know. It’s a power that comes with the office. You just told me how you were already in every breeze in every world.”

“There’s a mountain, under a dark sky,” she said. “I’m there. Big. Gigantic. Filling every blast and blow of a giant scarp-ripper of a storm through the peaks. But I’m also in the smaller wind below, acting almost in counterpoint to the main storm. Whistling across the scree, worming my way through crook and cranny, chilling every den and hidey-hole. The me below is looking up in awe at the me above, who’s so big and bold. Aggressive. She’s laughing at me – I mean I’m laughing at me. Which one is me though?”

“Both, of course,” Nick said.

“So many,” she said, with distant eyes. “So many. How do I keep from getting lost?”

Nick laughed at that, a delighted chuckle that hearkened back to the Nick of Christmas Night. When he laughed his great belly shook like a bowl full of – well, suffice it to say, it shook.

“Child,” he said, “if you’re everywhere, the one thing you cannot possibly do is get lost. And every single one of you is the real you.”

“But how do I stand it?”

“Same way I learned. In time you get used to it.”

“That’s it?”

“Pretty simple, huh?” Nick said.

A small, hopeful smile drifted across her face, brief, but real enough.

“You should try one of Alden’s malteds,” Nick said. “Have you had one yet?”

“Nope.”

“They’re marvelous. How did you start riding the Night Train anyway?”

Winter turned to fully face the club car’s bar counter. She pulled a menu towards herself. “I stumbled across it a few months ago,” she said, “when all of us were out looking for my missing brother and sister. I rode the train all over the place – many places – searching. We found them eventually, or at least discovered what had happened to them. Since then I’ve ridden it for fun, because neither me or any of the other winds rule over this territory – over the Night Train or the tracks of its route. It was fun being able to visit a place where I can be just a person. Off duty.”

“It’s good to be off duty,” Nick said. “After every Christmas run, when I’ve put the sleigh in for regular post-mission maintenance, and dropped the reindeer off at their winter pasture, I take two weeks to unwind.”

“Where do you go?” she said.

“Everywhere. All sorts of places. But I always seem to end up in Key West on the last day. Used to drink with a fellow named Hemingway there. Do you know about Earnest Hemingway?”

“Of course.” She rolled her eyes, but just a bit. “I’m only a million billion eons old, like I said. Had time to read a book or two.”

“Of course,” he echoed. “Anyway, he was a fine drinking companion. Gone now, but I still like to end my break at his old watering hole. Then I always ride the Night Train home.”

One of Mr. Caruther’s uniformed fetch kids came through the club car, loudly intoning, “Gathol! Coming up on Gathol! Everyone off here for all Barsoom stops!”

Nick took a loud final slurp on his malted and began the detailed process of climbing off of his barstool. “The Carters will be getting off here,” he said. “They’ll have my room ready soon. Big nap coming.”

On his feet again, he turned back to Winter.

“Are we okay, for now?” he asked her.

“I think so, sir.”

“If not, you know where to find me. You’re the only wind that covers my home territory.” He paused then, scrunching his mighty brows for a moment. “And you’re also my boss now – which you already know. Forgot for a minute how you began the conversation. You’re the Lord of all in the North, just like Old Man North was, in his time. An odd transition to ponder. Are you going to be as grumpy as your grandfather was?”

“Who can be mean to Santa?” she said. “But we’ll talk more, later.” She began to study the menu intently.

Outside the Night Train moved on tracks all its own, between worlds, across the imaginary voids between places, riding the mist.