Shadow Train by J. Gabriel Gates Page A

back the desperation that was trying to surface. Where is Raphael?

Chapter 6
    Raphael Kain awoke from a long and dreamless sleep .
    Before he even opened his eyes, he was aware of a sound, a single deep, sonorous note that seemed to him like the mingled howl of a mighty wind and the low hum of a huge, powerful motor, combined into the single, soul-thrumming chord of a Gregorian chant.
    Oooooooooooooooooo . . .
    He sat up and looked around. He was on the floor of a small room, perhaps 10-feet-by-10-feet wide. Windows ran along three sides, but they were too high up for Raphael to see what was outside them. In the front of the room, strangely enough, was the control panel from the Wheel of Illusion—or a panel that was almost identical to it, with the same polished-wood body and old-fashioned gauges. There was a single high leather seat in front of the control panel, as if one were meant to sit there to operate it. Slowly, Raphael rose to his feet.
    Standing, the sound he heard rushing and moaning all around him seemed to condense into a vibration that ran from the soles of his feet up through his shinbones and all the way into his chest and his head, where he felt as if it was jiggling his heart and his brain at once. It was a weird feeling, but not entirely unpleasant. Now that he was upright, he was able to look out the windows. Outside, a thick gray fog was racing past. It seemed to be blowing toward him from the direction that the chair and the control panel faced, and Raphael suddenly understood. It wasn’t the fog outside that was moving—it was him. And he had to be moving at an incredible speed.
    Only then did he remember what had happened on the train tracks back in Middleburg.
    In his mind, he retraced the events for himself, trying to make sense of it all. There had been a battle raging between the Flatliners and the Toppers, then between the Obies and Orias. Raphael remembered saving Aimee from the giant cobra, then Maggie saving him from the slithering, raging beast. Then, he had picked up the treasure that everyone—the Order of the Black Snake, Orias, the Flatliners, and the Toppers—had been searching for. The glowing crystal ring. He had grabbed it, and when he looked up, he had seen the train coming—a massive, ancient-looking steam-powered locomotive thundering toward him. But instead of being scared, he had felt mysteriously grateful. And he’d stood his ground without moving, without flinching, without fear, until the engine hit him.
    The next thing he remembered was waking up in this room—and of course it was not a room. It was the cab of the train that had struck him. Somehow, he was inside it now. He stepped up to the front of the car, placed one steadying hand on the back of the big leather engineer’s chair and gazed out the windshield, hoping to get some idea of where he was.
    The fog he was passing through was the densest Raphael had ever seen. He stared into it for perhaps ten minutes as it flowed past, but it was as thick and heavy as cotton candy, and it obscured every feature of the land that might lay behind it; he couldn’t catch a glimpse of a single tree, or a house—nothing. Raphael had never been on an airplane, but he imagined this must be what it would look like to be jetting through a massive cloudbank.
    For a moment, it occurred to him that he might be dead. Maybe this was what people saw when they passed away, he reasoned. The famous tunnel leading to the white light. But when he went to the side window and looked down, he found that he was not racing through the heavens. There was land below him, featureless brown earth that shot by so fast it was a total blur. He stared down at it for a moment, then looked out the front window again, trying to estimate how fast he might be going. But, he decided, it was impossible. Without any landmarks to watch, there was no way to judge. All he knew was that he was moving fast.
    â€œVery fast,”