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slipping and clutching and hauling themselves into the mouth of the cavern and out of the rain. From there they could just see, misty and pale through the curtain of falling drops, the train trestle where it crossed above the stream eighty feet farther down the beach.
    The train tracks were a ruin, and had been for as long as any of them could remember. They were rust-pitted and twisted, and a good many of the ties had long ago fallen prey to termites and to sliding hillsides. But there was something in the night, in the rain and the wind and the tide, in the dark bulk of the giant shoe that sat like a behemoth on the sand, that made the impossible appearance of the train seem half expected.
    Years ago there had been a northbound coastal train, the Flying Wizard, from San Francisco to the south and all the way up from subtropical border towns before that. The population of the north coast had dwindled, though, over time. And in the rainy season, water off the coastal mountains crumbled cliff sides and swept train trestles and tracks into the heaving ocean below. The tracks fell into disrepair. The train – strangely – had run anyway during the Solstice twelve years earlier, but it had never been settled whether the tracks had been hastily repaired for that last journey or whether it had been a miracle that brought the train and the Solstice carnival to Rio Dell and Moonvale.
    There was another whistle blast and the screech of brakes, and from where Jack crouched in the cavern he could see steam roiling from beneath the cars. The train was slowing. It wound around a curve of track, appearing for the moment that it took to clatter across the trestle, then almost at once disappearing beyond the rain and the redwoods that climbed down the hill toward the sea. One by one the hazy cars lurched past, dark and low and open and freighted with strange, angular machinery.
    ‘What is it?’ Skeezix whispered, referring not to the train but to the junk heaped in the cars.
    Jack shook his head, realizing suddenly that he was shaking with cold too. Wind off the ocean sailed straight into the cavern, swirled round in back of it, then sailed out again. It was drier than it had been on the open beach, but at least there they’d had their minds on something other than the cold and wet. The chill seemed to have come with the train, carried, perhaps, on the steam that whirled away into the misty night. They could hear that the train had stopped, although they could no longer see it, and Jack supposed he could hear the soft chuffing of the waiting engine, even though the wind was blowing in the opposite direction.
    ‘Carnival stuff,’ Helen whispered.
    Skeezix jumped, as if Helen had poked him in the ribs. ‘What?’
    ‘On the train. That arched framework was a Ferris wheel, and there was one car piled with little cars of some sort. Didn’t you see that?’
    ‘Yes,’ Jack said, because he
had
seen it, although he hadn’t any idea what he was looking at. Helen came from down south, from San Francisco, and she would have seen carnivals. But there hadn’t been any such thing on the north coast since the last Solstice, and Jack had been too young to remember it much. What had happened there, though, at the carnival, was something he couldn’t entirely forget, ever –even though there were times when he might have wished to. He’d seen pictures of carnivals in library books, and he knew well enough what a Ferris wheel was. Seeing one in a book, all put together and lit up and with the rest of the carnival laid out below, was a different thing from seeing the dim pieces of one dismantled and howling past in a distant, darkened train.
    ‘Why’re they stopping at the bottom of the grade, do you suppose?’ asked Skeezix, whispering just loud enough to be heard above the rain. Neither Jack nor Helen answered, since they didn’t know, so Skeezix replied to his own question. ‘Some sort of mechanical trouble, I bet. We could ride down the