“Mr. Hurley did leave a message,” the switchboard operator said. “I’ll read it now. ‘Dodge. Have tracked down Barron. Our friends are with him. He’s en route to unknown destination in the east. We are flying to Lisbon on the clipper. Leaving the Catalina for you. Will send telegrams with more information as we’re able. Good Luck, Hurricane.’ That’s all there is.”
Dodge’s heart sank. “When did he leave this message?”
“Last night at half past nine.”
He thanked the operator and hung up the phone. Suddenly, the mystery of what had happened at the tunnel seemed unimportant. One of his friends was in danger, and another was rushing off to meet it, and he was stuck in the middle of nowhere. He turned back to Haines. “I need to get to the nearest train station.”
“That’d be Altoona. It’s a bit of a drive, but there’s bound to be someone heading that way that can take you. I’ll put the word out.”
Suddenly feeling very weary, Dodge thanked Haines and took his leave of the store. He had spied the sign for a café when arriving in the town, and he made his way there, hoping more for a quiet place to bide his time more than anything else. He settled in at a table and nursed a cup of coffee, doing his best to ignore the stares of the establishment’s other patrons.
His mind never strayed far from Hurley’s message. Newcombe, along with Lightning Rod Lafayette, were with Walter Barron, and evidently being taken somewhere on the other side of the world. But for what purpose? Had Anya told him the truth about Barron? Had the industrialist abducted Newcombe in order to force the scientist to build some kind of death ray weapon?
As he was working on his second cup, a small voice intruded on his thoughts. “Excuse me, mister. Are you Dodge Dalton?”
A dark-haired young boy of no more than ten years, wearing tattered bib overalls and an earnest expression, stood before him. Dodge cringed inwardly. He hadn’t identified himself by his nickname, but evidently that precaution hadn’t been sufficient. Not only had the news of his arrival spread like wildfire, but the town gossip machine had also evidently put two and two together.
He managed a smile. “That’s right, son.”
The boy broke into a grin. “I didn’t think you’d really come.”
Dodge was also capable of simple addition. “You must be Jim Perdue.”
If possible, the boy’s grin got even wider.
“Have a seat, Jim. And a glass of milk, on me.” The boy scooted into the chair opposite. Dodge could see was on the verge of bursting with questions, and even though he knew what the question would be, he prompted the boy to ask it. “What’s on your mind?”
“Are you going to find out what happened to my brother and Zeb?”
Anya… the tunnel… the “ghost train.” Was there a connection? He had to know.
“Yes, Jim. Yes, I am.”
Dodge remembered well the old adage about never forgetting how to ride a bicycle, but after an hour of pedaling along the country roads in the western Appalachian foothills, he was ready to pen a coda. Something about the body not remembering. It had been years, maybe even a decade, since he’d last ridden, and his muscles had definitely forgotten. His legs felt like they were made of rubber and his backside felt like he’d been kicked there repeatedly by mule. But it was better than walking, or so he kept telling himself.
Although nothing looked familiar, he was traveling the same road he had walked the night before, and there was only one landmark he was interested in. When he arrived at the railroad crossing, he dismounted and stashed the bicycle — one of several purchases made at Haines’ general store — behind a stand of trees, just out of sight from the road. With the rest of his gear in a knapsack slung over his shoulder, he resumed his trek along the rail bed, this time heading east, toward the tunnel.
The opening to the passage through Saddle Mountain looked considerably less imposing by daylight, but Dodge approached it warily, recalling how quickly the ghost train — he didn’t know what else to call it — had appeared. With a dry-cell powered flashlight in hand — another purchase from Haines’ store — and hugging close to the soot-stained tunnel wall, he took a deep breath and ventured inside.
As he moved into the tunnel, he started sweeping his light across the area to either side of the rails. He knew that Anya had made her leap much further in, but if he was to identify the area where she had landed, presumably tumbling as he had, he first needed to know the appearance of the rail bed in an undisturbed state. He quickly fell into a routine: sweep, step, sweep, step. In a matter of only a few minutes, he was deep enough into the tunnel that the west entrance, through which he had come in, was a mere spot of light; the east end was not visible at all.
He soon found what he was looking for, an area alongside the tracks where the rock had been scattered and the layer of greasy soot smeared in a swath several yards long. This was, unquestionably, where Anya had made her leap.
But where had she gone next?
“She didn’t come out,” he said aloud. His voice echoed weirdly in the passage, but offered no other insights. He kept walking, looking for other signs of her presence, but soon even the trail left by her disembarkation vanished.
And then, as the endless darkness of the tunnel had almost eroded his resolve enough that he was considering turning back, the flashlight revealed something that stopped him in his tracks.
It wasn’t anything as obvious as the signs of Anya’s jump. He actually had to stare at the piled rocks for several moments to figure out why they had commanded his attention, but then he finally saw it: a distinctive line — an arc rather — where the chaotic jumble of stones did not quite meet. He followed the arc as it curved into the tracks, exactly at a joint where two rails met. He inspected the joint, and saw that the ends of the rails were not spliced together with a piece of riveted steel, as was customary and in fact necessary to prevent the rails from spreading apart and causing a train derailment. The arc continued under the rails and curved back toward the opposite wall of the tunnel. As his beam illuminated the tunnel wall, he saw something even more amazing.
The line abruptly became a vertical seam, stretching from the ground and up the side of the tunnel wall. About ten yards further down, a second seam marked the beginning of another arc that curved the opposite way. Dodge immediately saw that the two arcs formed a circle which extended beyond the tunnel walls on either side.
He was standing on a railroad turnaround — a section of track mounted on a platform that could swivel completely around, allowing a train car to be reoriented. Such devices were common in railyards, but Dodge could not conceive of a good reason for the railroad to build one in the middle of a tunnel.
There was a matching set of seams on the other wall of the tunnel, exactly where he expected it to be; the radius of the turnaround was bigger than the breadth of the tunnel, but that wasn’t what Dodge was looking for. He swept the light across every square inch of the wall until at last he found it: a protruding stone, smeared with sooty fingerprints. He tried wiggling it experimentally, then gave it a firm push.
Somewhere deep beneath his feet, there was a clank of machinery, and the ground beneath his feet began to move. There was a tortured squeal of metal moving against metal as the concealed turnaround started rotating.
The sections of tunnel wall between the seams slipped easily out of place, the edges beveled in such a way that, with only a dusting of soot now and then, they would be virtually invisible. Dodge saw that the wall section was not actually stone at all, but a façade of wood and plaster. On one side, the moving false wall revealed only a scalloped cut in the gutrock of the mountain, just enough to accommodate the false wall. The other side, however, opened to reveal a side passage, running perpendicular to the tunnel. A pair of rails had been laid in this new tunnel, and as soon as the rails on the turnaround matched those in the new tunnel, the machinery fell silent.