CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The Train Through the Annex

A big, slightly transparent white stone building stretched out in front of us. “This is Lost Penn Station,” said Dr. Rust.

“It’s huge! What story is it from?” asked Cole.

“It isn’t actually fictional, exactly,” said Andre. “It was a real train station that got torn down. But everybody loved it so much that it entered into the shared mythology.”

“If it isn’t fictional, why is it here?” I asked.

“In some real sense, it isn’t,” said Dr. Rust. “Only its echo is here.”

“We have plans to start a collection of Lost Places,” said Elizabeth. “That’s going to be my next project, after the Poe Annex. All we have so far are a few spots in Manhattan, including Lost Penn Station. We’re using it as a train depot until we can acquire a good fictional one.”

Inside the station, light streamed down from arched windows a long way up. A woman ran through me, furling her umbrella. Its raindrops spun through the air without wetting me.

“That’s not a ghost, is it?” I said.

Elizabeth shook her head. “More like a memory.”

“If the people can just walk through us and the building’s not really there, why don’t our feet fall through the floor?” Cousin Hepzibah asked.

“You’re right, they should,” said Dr. Rust. “But that would be very inconvenient, so we substantiated the floors. Don’t jump too hard.”

“The train’s this way,” said Andre.

We followed him through the vast station, with its lacy ironwork, to the staircases that led to the trains. They seemed much more solid.

“Are these real trains?” I asked.

“Yes—well, fictional trains,” said Elizabeth. She pointed to a freight train with an evil look to it. “For example, that one’s from a Willa Cather story. It goes way out West. We’re taking the train from the Hawthorne story ‘The Celestial Railroad.’”

Sure enough, the compass pointed to a platform where an iron monster was belching steam and coal smoke. “All aboard!” said Andre, hopping up on a car, pulling the door open, and ducking his head to keep from hitting it on the door frame. He reached his long arm down to give me a hand up. Cole helped Cousin Hepzibah up next, and Elizabeth scrambled up after us. Dr. Rust shut the door, and the shaking metal monster clattered into motion.

• • •

As we rattled through the landscape, Elizabeth and Andre pointed out haunted houses.

“Here’s Lyng,” said Elizabeth. “Isn’t it beautiful?” We were passing a manor house on a hill, the kind you might see on a TV show about an aristocratic English family and their servants.

“What’s its story?” I asked.

“It’s from ‘Afterward,’ by Edith Wharton. An American man makes a lot of money, not very honestly, and buys an estate in England. But the guy he cheated killed himself and starts haunting him.”

“Spoiler alert!” said Andre.

“Oh, sorry.”

The house disappeared around a bend. “If it’s an English house, what’s it doing here? Are we somehow in England now?” asked Cousin Hepzibah. “It doesn’t feel as though we’ve traveled anything like far enough. Shouldn’t we still be in New York, or at most New Jersey?”

“No, we’re still in the Poe Annex. Standard geography doesn’t apply,” said Dr. Rust.

Elizabeth elaborated. “Parts of the Poe Annex do have a relationship to New Jersey, of course. The Annex relates to the New England states, plus a few in the South and the West, and some more distant regions. But there’s no one-to-one correspondence with the geography you’re accustomed to. You can think of this as a separate dimension from our usual world.”

“The geography here in the Poe Annex isn’t particularly linear,” said Dr. Rust. “We file the items by their call numbers, not continents. Even though ‘Afterward’ is set in England, it’s an American classic—Wharton was an American, and so are the characters and themes.”

“Wow, Sukie! Can you believe all this?” said Cole. “I’m totally going to start paying more attention in Language Arts class.”

I laughed. “Science, and now Language Arts? Who knew I would turn out to be such a good influence?”

“I did,” said Cole. “It was obvious from the way you stuck your nose in a book and ignored me.”

We passed a few more fancy English country estates and some gloomy houses, which Elizabeth said were from the ghost stories of Henry James. Cousin Hepzibah looked impressed.

Then the train went through a town with a big house with lots of peaks and gables. “One, two, three, four . . . five . . . Is that the House of the Seven Gables, from the Hawthorne novel?” I asked.

“No, but good guess,” said Elizabeth. “It’s from a different Hawthorne story, ‘Peter Goldthwaite’s Treasure’—I think I mentioned it before. The Hawthorne houses all have a certain family resemblance. It’s like the way houses designed by the same architect tend to look like each other.”

“Hey, it looks a lot like your house, Spooky!” said Cole.

“You’re right, Cole. Especially those gables,” said Cousin Hepzibah.

“Makes sense,” said Andre. “Laetitia Flint was influenced by Hawthorne.”

“What about that clump of houses up ahead?” I asked. They looked kind of like the Hawthorne ones, only more modest.

“Those are from Mary Wilkins Freeman stories—she was another writer who influenced Flint,” said Elizabeth. “Remember those doorknobs you sold us? We think they came from one of her stories.”

Cole spun around to watch them disappear as we passed. “That last one looks like my house, a little bit,” he said. “Do you think mine could be haunted too?”

“Oh, I hope so!” I said. “Then you would be the spooky one! What should I call you? Fearsome Farley? Uncanny Cole?”

“Fantastic Farley, obviously. Or—” He put on a deep voice and intoned, “Cryptic Cole—he’s always a surprise!”

“Here comes one of our coolest houses,” said Andre. “Up to the right, see? The Cap’n Brown House. It’s from a Harriet Beecher Stowe story and it’s haunted by a herd of headless black colts.”

“Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin?” I asked. “We read about that book when we were studying the Civil War. I didn’t know she wrote ghost stories too.”

“Sure, lots of writers did back then. Look left now, we’re passing another one of my favorites.”

A little wooden structure flashed by. “What was that?” Cole asked.

“The haunted schoolhouse from Charles W. Chesnutt’s story ‘Po’ Sandy.’ A man gets turned into a tree, and they make the wood into a schoolhouse. So of course the man haunts it.”

“I would too,” Cole agreed, “if somebody built a school out of me.”

I thought about the many reasons ghosts had for haunting people and places. They wanted revenge, or acknowledgment, or something they lost. Or they were trying to keep a promise from when they were alive, like my sister. It must be so sad to be a ghost and not be able to do anything really new—if you needed something done, all you could do was try to get someone living to do it for you. And half the time the living people couldn’t even hear you.

“Here comes the jewel of our collection,” said Elizabeth. “We named the annex in its honor.”

The train labored toward a medieval-looking stone building with a still lake in front of it. Its unruffled luster reflected the castle’s bleak walls and empty, eyelike windows.

“Ooo, creepy,” said Cole.

“That’s the House of Usher,” said Andre proudly. “From the Poe story.”

I stared at the house. “Didn’t you say we were related to some Ushers?” I asked Cousin Hepzibah.

“Yes,” she answered. “I wonder if it’s the same family.”

“That place looks so dismal,” I said. What a gloomy family I’d been born into, so full of ghosts and death! At least the Flint stories sometimes had happy endings—though not for everyone. Just for the hero and the heroine, usually. I hoped I was the heroine here.

“Wait a sec,” said Cole. “I read that story. It’s called ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ The fall of the house. The house falls down in the end. It gets completely destroyed. So how can it be here now?”

“Thanks for noticing! We’re very proud of that,” said Elizabeth. “A former page of ours at the repository, Leo Novikov, is doing some really innovative work in fictitious technology. He invented a machine that can select any temporal state in the narrative span of a fictional object.”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow,” said Cousin Hepzibah.

Dr. Rust clarified. “If you have an object from a work of fiction, Leo’s machine can return it to the state it was in at any point in the story. It’s been incredibly useful.”

The train dived into a dark wood, then chugged up a hill. When it reached the top, I could see seawater sparkling in the distance. “Almost there,” said Andre.

As if the hands of a ghostly brakeman had pulled a spectral lever, the train screeched and rolled slowly to a halt. We shouldered our backpacks, and Cole picked up Cousin Hepzibah’s bag. Andre pulled the door open, ducked through it, jumped down, and held out his hand to me. He caught me as I stumbled on the steep step. “Here we are,” he said.