passed a clutter of beached machinery-generators, maybe-then entered a maze of helter-skelter traincars that were very different from those hauled by Blaine the Mono.
Some looked to Susannah like the sort of New York Central commuter cars she might have seen in Grand Central Station in her own when of 1964. As if to underline this notion, she noticed one with BAR CAR printed on the side. Yet there were others that appeared much older than that; made of dark riveted tin or steel instead of brushed chrome, they looked like the sort of passenger cars you'd see in an old Western movie, or a TV show like Maverick. Beside one of these stood a robot with wires sprouting crazily from its neck. It was holding its head-which wore a hat with a badge reading CLASS A CONDUCTOR on it-beneath one arm.
At first Susannah tried to keep count of the lefts and rights they were making in this maze, then gave it up as a bad job.
They finally emerged about fifty yards from a clapboard-sided hut with the alliterative message LADING/LOST LUGGAGE over the door. The intervening distance was an apron of cracked concrete scattered with abandoned luggage-carts, stacks of crates, and two dead Wolves. No, Susannah thought, make that three. The third one was leaning against the wall in the deeper shadows just around the corner from LADING/LOST LUGGAGE.
"Come on," said the old man with the mop of white hair, "not much further, now. But we have to hurry, because if the taheen from Heartbreak House catch us, they'll kill you."
"They'd kill us, too," said the youngest of the three. He brvished his hair out of his eyes. "All except for Ted. Ted's only one of us who's indispensable. He's just too modest to say so."
Past LADING/LOST LUGGAGE was (reasonably enough, Susannah thought) SHIPPING OFFICE. The fellow with the white hair tried the door. It was locked. This seemed to please rather than upset him. "Dinky?" he said.
Dinky, it seemed, was the youngest of the three. He took hold of the knob and Susannah heard a snapping sound from somewhere inside. Dinky stepped back. This time when Ted tried the door, it opened easily. They stepped into a dim office bisected by a high counter. On it was a sign that almost made Susannah feel nostalgic: TAKE NUMBER AND WAIT, it said.
When the door was closed, Dinky once more grasped the knob. There was another brisk snap.
"You just locked it again," Jake said. He sounded accusing, but there was a smile on his face, and the color was coming back into his cheeks. "Didn't you?"
"Not now, please," said the white-haired man-Ted. "No time. Follow me, please."
He flipped up a section of the counter and led them through. Behind it was an office area containing two robots that looked long dead, and three skeletons.
"Why the hell do we keep finding bones?" Eddie asked.
Like Jake he was feeling better and only thinking out loud, not really expecting an answer. He got one, however. From Ted.
"Do you know of the Crimson King, young man? You do, of course you do. I believe that at one time he covered this entire part of the world with poison gas. Probably for a lark. Killed almost everyone. The darkness you see is the lingering result.
He's mad, of course. It's a large part of the problem. In here."
He led them through a door marked PRIVATE and into a room that had once probably belonged to a high poobah in the wonderful world of shipping and lading. Susannah saw tracks on the floor, suggesting that this place had been visited recently.
Perhaps by these same three men. There was a desk beneath six inches of fluffy dust, plus two chairs and a couch. Behind the desk was a window. Once it had been covered with Venetian blinds, but these had collapsed onto the floor, revealing a vista as forbidding as it was fascinating. The land beyond Thunderclap Station reminded her of the flat, deserty wastes on the far side of the River Whye, but rockier and even more forbidding.
And of course it was darker.
Tracks (eternally halted trains sat on some of them) radiated out like strands of a steel spiderweb. Above them, a sky of darkest slate-gray seemed to sag almost close enough to touch.
Between the sky and the Earth the air was thick, somehow; Susannah found herself squinting to see things, although there seemed to be no actual mist or smog in the air.
"Dinky," the white-haired man said.
"Yes,