He whirled around. There, in the door, was a conductor. It was a rather common thing to see a conductor on a train, but Lake stared at him in astonishment. For a moment he closed his eyes, then opened them. The conductor was still there, looking at him questioningly. “You all right, sir?” the conductor said. He had a white mustache and a blue conductor’s suit with red cuffs.
Lake closed his eyes again; he opened them again. “Yes,” he smiled weakly, “I guess I am all right.”
The conductor nodded and stepped back out of the compartment. “We’ll be pulling in before dark,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Angeloak is the station.”
“Angeloak?”
“Before dark,” the conductor repeated, and tipped his hat.
I still could not see the end of the river. From both sides of the train I looked for it in vain. But as the sun set fast into the sea, its geyser continued to spew higher and higher, black and coiled, branching out beyond the star’s outline until the sky filled with it. Even after the sun was gone the eruption grew larger and more powerful. Then I saw it wasn’t a geyser at all. Then I saw it wasn’t from the sun at all but out of the river: a colossal oak that spread in all directions against the billowed ceiling of the clouds, the waves of the water pounding its massive scorched-black and bleached-white trunk. As we came closer the tree became more and more huge. Its top was mostly naked in the wind; on the water below I could see passing leaves, bits of bark. In the frail pink glow of the sun-stained west there was only this tree webbing the horizon until the sky seemed a sea shell curling to its middle, the roof of it beveled gray; and there was this roar, the dull sound of the sea they said when I was a child. .
Soon the train began to slow. A blue fog drifted over the river. By the time the train came to a crawl it had reached the monstrous tree; the trunk was some forty or fifty yards wide. Lake could see it from both sides of his car. A tunnel was cut through the middle and lanterns hung from the archway. The train reached a complete halt inside the tree; it was no surprise at all to Lake that he was the only passenger to step onto the station platform. A wet wooden smell was in the air, and through the trunk roared a gust off the water. The platform beneath his feet still had a rhythm; he wasn’t certain if it was the sensation of the train in his legs or the tree buffeted by the constant crash of the waves. A porter came up to him and asked if he could take Lake’s luggage. “I have no luggage,” Lake told him; the porter nodded and touched the rim of his hat. He looked at Lake in a way that was a little off-center. In the light of one of the lanterns Lake could read a cawed wooden sign: ANGELOAK.
Lake stared through the tunnel toward the front of the train. Through the smoke of the engine and the fog off the river he could see the railroad tracks continuing on over the water into the dark until they vanished from sight. “Will we be pulling out again soon?” Lake asked the porter.
“Not for a while, mister,” said the porter, still not quite looking at him. “You got time to get a hot meal upstairs if you like.”
Lake cleared his throat a little and said, “How far to the other side of the river?”
The porter pursed his lips and after an uncertain moment answered, “Oh, still a ways.”
Lake nodded. “It’s quite a river.”
The porter got a look on his face of almost vicious delight. He began to laugh. “Quite a river indeed,” he said. He kept laughing, “That’s it, all right, it’s quite a river.” He continued laughing as he turned from Lake and walked on down the platform.
Lake walked up a series of winding steps to a level constructed above the tracks. In the hollowed core of the oak was a small cantina and inn: a few tables and a bar in a dimly lit wooden cave, with misshapen gaps in the trunk staring out into the night. Hanging on the inside walls were several odd pictures, all of them the same; behind the bar hung a calendar. The inn consisted of half a dozen very small rooms perched on individual tiers in the most formidable of the upper branches; these tiers were reached by four long rope bridges that draped the branches from the trunk. The innkeeper was a friendly fat man with ruddy skin, clear-eyed but looking at Lake the same way as the porter had, as though he was not quite in focus. He asked if Lake wanted a room. Lake said no, that he would be pulling out with the train, but he would like something to eat. He asked the keeper if many people came through and the innkeeper said, Not as many as there used to be. The innkeeper asked Lake where he was headed and Lake said west, and the innkeeper nodded agreeably to this, but he seemed to nod agreeably to everything. Finally Lake said if it was all right he’d just sit over on the edge of the cantina next to one of the open knotholes where he could look out over the river. The innkeeper said this was fine and to let him know if Lake changed his mind about the room. Lake sat over by the window of the tree and for a while studied one of the odd pictures on the walclass="underline" it was nothing but a black spot, framed and lit by a nearby lantern. The other pictures on the wall were exactly like this one except for variations in shape and size. Lake decided he would just as soon get on with his journey. He closed his eyes and listened to the seashell roar, which pulsed and expanded around him. Somewhere in his slumber something struck him, and he suddenly jumped to his feet to see that the roar was not that of any seashell but that of the train, which had just pulled out of Angeloak and was slithering off into the fog.
I watched in disbelief as the train went off without me; cursing, I went back to the bar and began berating the keeper. I ran down the steps to the platform below and stood there as though it would somehow bring the train back. I simply could not get it through my head that I had missed the train. The porter was still there and I berated him too: it wasn’t, after all, as though there had been a throng of passengers. I was the only one, and both the innkeeper and the porter knew I meant to take that train out. The innkeeper assured me I would have a room until the next train came through. I told him I didn’t want a room, I wanted to be on that train, and I asked when another would arrive. He said he didn’t know, that the trains didn’t follow a precise schedule and I must have realized that when I got on. All the more exasperating was the way neither the innkeeper nor the porter would look right at me when I spoke to them, and finally I got rude and snapped my fingers in front of the innkeeper’s eyes. And then I realized he didn’t see me. Then I realized the porter didn’t see me either. Neither of them saw anything.
I was given the room on the highest tier of the oak. There was no key; the porter directed me to the third bridge and smiled broadly as I went on my way. I expected to tumble off the tree into darkness as the railing in my hand ran out. A lantern hung from the branches; I took it with me. In fact the bridge did indeed lead to a room, where the night was warmer and the wind softer than it had been in the tunnel. Hanging in my room were two more pictures that didn’t show anything. There was a single bed and a basin of water on a stool. There was a contraption for bringing water up from the river that hadn’t worked in a long time. I slept restlessly.