“There’s trouble on the line, Eli. You’d better be careful. Driver says it’s not safe to go out today.”

Eli put his small hands up to touch the smooth globes of Thomas’s cheeks. They were warm, just as he’d known they would be. “What should we do?”

“Stay here. Don’t move.”

“Is it…” Eli thought hard to remember the man’s full name. “Is it Frank Snow?”

“Never mind who.” Thomas’s eyes rolled away, the remains of his cheerful expression darkening by degrees. “Just stay here and don’t make a sound.”

“Don’t leave,” Eli whispered. “Stay here with me.”

Thomas gave a single peep. “Of course, I will.”

“Promise?”

“An engine’s word is as good as gold.” Thomas attempted another smile, but as he did, Eli noticed something leaking from the corner of the engine’s mouth. His expression had fallen slack on one side, his right eye sagging and sloping like candle wax. Without warning, an explosive burst of thick fluid spilled up from his boiler, trickling over his face, and when Thomas tried to speak again it came out in a clotted gargle of incomprehensible clucks, blurps, and growls. Eli understood that Thomas was sick, very sick, maybe dying, because of something on the other side of the door.

“What’s wrong?”

“He’s going to make a meal of you,” the engine said, in his new, glutinous voice. Now his face appeared to be dissolving in a river of foul-smelling leakage pouring from his funnel. “Glork! Not safe! Driver says—”

The doorknob turned.

Eli clapped both hands over his mouth and squeezed as far back as he could under the low shelf above his head. The Shape on the other side had stopped, and Eli heard the door open in front of him.

Stay here. Don’t move.

In his narrow pocket of darkness, Eli clenched his eyes shut and pinched his lips tight.

Driver says there’s trouble on the line.

He knew the Shape in front of him was still there, waiting. Eli wanted desperately to go back to the Island of Sodor but he was terrified of what he might find there, the other engines dying, his familiar old friends turned sick and strange in the toxic light of their unwelcome new visitor. Instead he cowered, weeping silently until he was pretty sure the Shape had withdrawn and moved on.

“Safe now,” he whispered. “Just like Thomas said. Safe now. Safe—”

That was when the rough hands shot forth from the blackness and yanked him out.

25.

Mike wasn’t happy to be back in the ER waiting room. He cast a grim look at the planks and boards that had been nailed over the windows. No light seeped through now, not even the nebulous late-evening variety that had existed just an hour earlier. Outside it was fully dark, must have been for a while. He remembered the keys and cell phone he’d left in the MRI suite and was about to suggest going back for them when the police officer—who had introduced himself as Hank—spoke up.