“OK, then,” the Stranger said. He pushed ahead and the Kid followed, into the next car and past cabins half-empty, and into the next car again. In the last compartment the window was open. He thought he saw a sleeping figure, a pool of darkness deeper than the surrounding gloom; the snow that blew in ringed the figure with a crown of spinose structures, like thorns. But he did not linger, and at the next vestibule they had reached the engine. The door here was polished mahogany. The Stranger pushed against the door but it wouldn’t budge. The Kid joined him and together they pressed with their combined force against the door until at last it gave way.

They staggered in.

The first thing the Stranger noticed about the engineer’s cab was how very cold it was.

It was a clean, surgical sort of cold, and it soaked into the very essence of the room, into its clean white walls and its beige parquet floor. As he became aware of his surroundings he noticed the following in quick succession: the engine room down below and the stoker, working, the large windows in the nose through which he could see the tracks running ahead between the two mountains, and finally the small and irritable man who turned from the board of shining metallic instruments with a frown and said, “What are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be here.”

The man had tufts of hair sticking out from behind his ears and a bald dome of a head and he wore double-lens glasses, like the apothecary men had worn in Kellysburg. He only looked at them momentarily before returning to his instruments, muttering under his breath figures and measurements of a geometrical nature. But what arrested the Stranger’s attention, and made his skin turn cold, was the sight of the firebox and of the stoker beside it, methodically shovelling ghosts.

The car was divided into two levels. They stood in the engineer’s upper level, but to their left the floor dropped directly onto a second level, and it was there that, within a small, iron boiler, a cold white fire burned. It was not so much a fire as the antonym of one, an icy vapour that emanated from some mechanical freezer agent deep within the iron firebox. Next to the box stood the stoker, a tall and gangly figure with a skin as white as a Pierrot’s. Despite the intense cold the man was nearly naked, and in his hands he held an old and blackened shovel, and beside him there was a large and open drum containing pure crystalline substance. The man methodically reached into the drum with the shovel and hefted up substance and threw it into the firebox. When the material connected with the cold flame it came alive with all the stored and possible permutations of that other place, and the Stranger saw faces and torsos and arms emerge out of the firebox, mouths open in speech or cries, eyes looking—looking at him, now, noticing him—before they vanished, so quickly he could have almost imagined it. There were so many of them that men merged into women and faces became the fantastical representation of phoenixes and sphinxes and all were consumed in the freezing hungry flames that had to be kept fed, over and over. The stoker never wearied from his task and his skin resembled marble and he kept shovelling ghosts into the furnace of the train.