And as the Train to Elsewhere coasted along the trembling tracks over the River Styx, the cabin lights dimmed, not from electricity (the train did not run on electricity to begin with), but from memory deepening its hold. Passengers gazed out through windows glazed with dream-vapor.
There, in the middle of the river, a small, bone-colored boat drifted silently. Two shadowy creatures hunched low at its edges, their forms unrecognizable and their faces made of nothing but almost-remembered fears.
At the center of the boat stood a man: tall, pale, wrapped in a cloak of soundless echoes. His fingers plucked a lyre whose strings shimmered like spider silk in starlight. Every note he played hung in the air, a question you have never had courage to ask. His face was half-lit by an unseen moon, eyes shut, but his music looked at you.
In the train car, Bob the Cat squinted. He tilted his head and twitched his ears in that exact rhythm. “Hmm,” he purred, “I know that tune. And I know him.” He stood up, flicking his tail with urgency. “That’s the guy. The one who sang open the gates … I have some questions for him.” Bob turned toward the back door of the train and murmured: “I’m off.”
Bearton Rogers, still in a meditative mode, stiffened: “Do you think it’s wise?” He asked Bob in a voice so low that he didn’t even hear himself asking the question. “You’re breaking regulations here. The subclause 9. No leaping from the Elsewhere Express mid-crossing.”
Bob didn’t even look back. “I’ve never liked regulations,” he murmured, “especially the kind written in fear.” And with a flick of intention in his tail, leapt from the train.
No splash was to be heard. Only a ripple of music in memory. The boat turned slightly, as if expecting him. Back on the train, Diotima whispered into the receiver on line 9: “He’s going into a song and songs are older than laws.”
Bearton Rogers looked around, feeling disoriented and shy. He wasn’t sure if the radio guest was referring to him or to the general audience and as he sighed, the bear realized that he was experiencing double vision.
The train rolled on. The river held its breath. Bearton did wonder: what secret did that man with strange, sorrow-stringed instrument hold, so powerful that his new friend Bob would break the laws?
Exactly two seconds later, he realized that Bob was a cat and he was only a bear. The thought gnawed gently, like an old memory refusing to dissolve. Maybe, just maybe, somewhere buried deep beneath his chest, beneath schedules, protocols, and timetables marked in permanent ink, he secretly wished that he was brave enough to follow Bob.
To leap. To ask. To sing. But he couldn’t. Because Bearton, like so many of us, had once wandered too far and had left something behind. His spirit was still curled under a moss-draped tree in the Enchanted Forest, deeply asleep.
Bearton Rogers was dreaming the world safe, and in that slumber, his courage remained folded like an unread map. So he stayed. On the train. And watched. And wondered. And suddenly he decided to let the music pass right through him, like the wind that carried names you were too afraid to speak aloud.
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