Marla examined the map, which used color-coded lines to indicate the routes. Tenderloin Station was marked with a circle, but none of the usual lines touched it. It had its own short line, delineated in black, running a short distance and then looping in on itself. Marla ran her finger down the map, to the bottom, where the train schedules were usually posted, but that section was blank.
Rondeau stood on the edge of the platform, peering one way and then the other. “Do we go in on foot?” he asked.
“Only if I get really impatient,” Marla said. “Otherwise, I’d just as soon do without the risk of getting flattened. Assuming Bethany is home, she knows we’re here, and if she’s curious—which she must be, sorcerers are an inquisitive sort—she’ll send a train. Or else she’ll come here herself, though I doubt that. Making people come to you is the stronger position.”
They waited, Marla doing a simple series of martial arts exercises to keep her body occupied, nothing too advanced; if they were being observed, it wouldn’t hurt to seem less skilled than she was. Rondeau sat on the floor, staring at the far wall, singing Beatles songs badly. B was jittery, sitting down for a few moments, then rising to pace the length of the platform, stopping occasionally to peer into the tunnel.
“What’s on your mind, B?” Marla asked.
“Ah,” he said, “I’ve had weird experiences with trains. Not in secret stations, but that doesn’t exactly detract from the likelihood of weirdness.”
“What’s your train story?” Rondeau said. “I could use some entertainment. I’ve gone through the whole White Album already, and Marla gets pissed when I sing anything from Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
“Do tell,” Marla said.
“It happened about a year ago,” B said. “I met this guy, Jay…his girlfriend had just died, and he had this idea that he could go to the land of the dead and bring her back. And I had to help him, I knew it, because I’d had this dream about him before I even met him—”
“The way you dreamed about me,” Marla said.
“Yeah. One of those dreams. I knew there was no use trying to avoid him—I’d tried to get out of stuff like this in the past, and it never worked—so I agreed to help. We hid in a BART station until after they closed. Late that night, a train came. It wasn’t a normal train. It looked like a thighbone with windows, and there were bone hooks on the ceiling for handrails. We got on, and it took us way down deep, to some place….” He shook his head. “I don’t know where exactly. Thinking back, it’s fuzzy, misty, just images—trees, shapes in the shadows, bees, maybe lizards, and a cave, except it couldn’t have been a cave, because there were stars overhead. I don’t know what happened to us down there—it’s like I’m forgetting it even more now that I’m trying to think about it. But whatever happened, I made my way back to the train, and I came back up, alone. I don’t know if Jay found what he was looking for, or if he ever made it out….” B looked bewildered now, and maybe a little scared.
Marla found herself approximately a million times more impressed by B than she had been a moment before. “You touched something old and powerful,” she said. “The stuff that myths are made of. Don’t worry about the way your memories are wobbling on you—the numinous is like that, it resists accurate reportage. You could embellish it, make up details, throw in a love story or a little suspense, make yourself a hero—that’s how myths get made—but giving a true and accurate accounting is just this side of impossible, even for someone who can see as clearly as you do.” Marla was increasingly sure that B was something more, perhaps much more, than a man unfortunate enough to be born a seer. She couldn’t be sure he had other powers—some people just happened to encounter the numinous, that was the nature of the truly unknowable. But other people, a few so rare as to be statistically nonexistent, drew the numinous to themselves, or, as some sorcerers speculated, actually generated such fundamentally unknowable Mysteries by their very acts and movements, the way you could build up a charge of static electricity by shuffling across a shag carpet in your stocking feet. If B was one of those, an oracle-generator, he was lucky to still be alive, and as relatively sane as he seemed. Big magic affected people, and B’s relative ignorance could only protect him for so long.
“Yeah,” B said. “That makes sense to me. If I just think about it, it’s clear, but as soon as I try to put it into words, it goes all hazy. Anyway, I guess I’m just worried that I’m going to see that bone train again. I get the feeling I was only supposed to ride on it once, and if I got on board again, I don’t know what would happen. Nothing good, I don’t think.”