“Jake! Jake, what’s wrong!” It was Eddie, and Jake could hear the genuine concern in his voice, but it seemed to be coming over a bad long-distance connection. From Beirut, say, or maybe Uranus. And he could feel Roland’s steadying hand on his shoulder, but it was as distant as Eddie’s voice.

“Jake!” Susannah. “What’s wrong, honey? What—”

Then she saw, and stopped talking at him. Eddie saw, and also stopped talking at him. Roland’s hand fell away. They all stood looking... except for Jake, who sat looking. He supposed that strength and feeling would come back into his legs eventually and he would get up, but right now they felt like limp macaroni.

The train was parked fifty feet up, by a toy station that mimicked the one across the street. Hanging from its eaves was a sign which read TOPEKA. The train was Charlie the Choo-Choo, cowcatcher and all; a 402 Big Boy Steam Locomotive. And, Jake knew, if he found enough strength to get up on his feet and go over there, he would find a family of mice nested in the seat where the engineer (whose name had undoubtedly been Bob Something-or-other) had once sat. There would be another family, this one of swallows, nested in the smokestack.

And the dark, oily tears, Jake thought, looking at the tiny train waiting in front of its tiny station with his skin crawling all over his body and his balls hard and his stomach in a knot. At night it cries those dark, oily tears, and they’re rusting the hell out of his fine Stratham headlight. But in your time, Charlie-boy, you pulled your share of kids, right? Around and around Gage Park you went, and the kids laughed, except some of them weren’t really laughing; some of them, the ones who were wise to you, were screaming. The way I’d scream now, if I had the strength.

But his strength was coming back, and when Eddie put a hand under one of his arms and Roland put one under the other, Jake was able to get up. He staggered once, then stood steady.

“Just for the record, I don’t blame you,” Eddie said. His voice was grim; so was his face. “I feel a little like falling over myself. That’s the one in your book; that’s it to the life.”

“So now we know where Miss Beryl Evans got the idea for Charlie the Choo-Choo,” Susannah said. “Either she lived here, or sometime before 1942, when the damned thing was published, she visited Topeka—”