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Jack Fielding glanced at his watch as he trudged up the stairs from the Union Station subway platform to the train station above. As he had guessed, he had missed the four o’clock train to London by a good fifteen minutes; with the schedule cut back yet again, his only options were the milk run at five forty—a three hour ride—or the last train at seven fifteen. The latter got into London only forty-five minutes after the milk run, assuming that everything ran on schedule. So—wait a little over an hour, but spend an extra hour on the train? Or wait three hours? Neither option appealed to him at all. A perfectly shitty end to a perfectly shitty day, he thought. The job interview for which he’d come to Toronto had been a disaster, even when viewed through pink-tinted pince-nez... The interviewer looked like he’d graduated from college himself no more than a few years ago—young enough, Jack hoped, to remember what it was like to look for your first real job. But the expression on his face soon made it obvious that the man thought this face-to-face meeting was a waste of time. “Your grades are not the best I’ve seen, Mr. Fielding.” “I’ve been through some tough times,” Jack said. “There was a major illness in my family, and I had to help out with—” “Yes, your faculty advisor made that clear. Otherwise, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.” And so it had gone, with every weakness hinted at in Jack’s resume vivisected in a fashion that resembled a heavily-medicated version of Grand Guignol theater—bloody, but without passion. Jack had managed to refrain from actually apologizing for daring to apply for the job, let alone for showing up for the interview, but it had been a struggle. Then the friends he had been staying with had car trouble, so he was forced to take three buses and the subway to get down to the train station—cab fare being something that underemployed new graduates could never afford—and he had missed his train. To make things worse, the leading edge of a snowstorm had just reached Toronto after dumping tons of white stuff onto the Windsor-to-Toronto landscape, turning the highways into slush-covered obstacle courses. As a result, many people who might have taken traveled by road or by air were here, trying to take the one form of transportation that usually was not affected by winter weather. Jack had to join a queue of about a hundred people to trade in his ticket for a seat on a later train to London. Well, it’ll kill some of the time until the train... Almost an hour later, Jack had a newly-issued ticket for the seven fifteen train. He’d been lucky; not long after he reached the front of the queue, he’d heard angry shouting from someone who’d been told that the train was full. Jack made a quick visit to the washroom, then picked up snacks and a magazine at the newsstand before joining yet another queue stretching back from the door to the train platform. Time passed like a kidney stone, in excruciating increments. Jack half-dozed on his feet, a trick he’d learned one summer on ceremonial guard duty at Old Fort York, while the usual unintelligible announcements gabbled and squealed from the public address system and the line behind him grew. Finally, he heard the announcement he and his queue-mates had been waiting for (and waiting for, and waiting for: “Eeya drain evan ein to Braffur, Woostunk, Lunnun, an’ Wizzer now boring on ratflorn ein”. From the reaction of those more accustomed to deciphering alien languages, he guessed that it meant “Via Train Seven Nine to Brantford, Woodstock, London, and Windsor now boarding on Platform Nine.” That, or “Take me to your leader.” When he stepped out onto the platform, Jack’s breath caught in his throat as the sudden cold almost triggered an asthma attack. It was an unusual thing, heavy snow and biting cold like this; even without much wind there in the shelter of the train station, it felt like a swarm of liquid nitrogen mosquitoes were sucking the heat out of his body. Climbing up into the train car came as a blessed relief. Of course, it quickly grew too warm, with bodies packed into every available seat and outer garments that made even model-thin people look like linebackers. Jack waited until he could get an aisle seat, so he could get up and stretch his legs more easily. Sitting still for two hours would make him even more antsy than he already was. With this day’s interview, he had pretty much exhausted his prospects for any job that didn’t involve offering “fries with that”. You couldn’t move out of your parents’ basement on what a McJob—or even several McJobs—paid, and you certainly couldn’t retire a student loan balance that exceeded the price of an upscale car. The combination of fatigue and incipient despair had his mental wheels spinning wildly, and he could feel his heart doing drum solos in his chest. Gotta be calm, gotta be calm, gotta be calm, he thought, matching his internal chant to the rhythmic click and rattle of the train. Ordinarily, it wouldn’t have worked, but the storm somehow muted the voices and rustling movements of the other passengers, and the slight swaying of the train in the wind was literally hypnotic... A sudden jolt snapped him back to full consciousness. “What the hell?” Even those passengers who had been awake and alert were looking around and muttering, so Jack knew that there had been no warning about the sudden—what? “We’ve stopped!” As his mind slowly regained traction, Jack realized that the sounds and motion of the train had ceased. Even without the shock, that change would probably have awakened him. “Are we at a station? I don’t see anything out there—” Jack turned to look out the window, but could barely see anything through the reflected view of the illuminated train interior. Beyond the window there was a dark void that could have hidden anything. The dime-sized snowflakes—more like snowclumps—that flew into and out of the light from the windows made it even harder to penetrate the darkness, but Jack was fairly sure that there were no lights visible on this side of the train. “Shit, man, what time is it? We must be in the middle of nowhere.” Jack checked his watch. They were about halfway through the scheduled travel time to Brantford, so they were really “in the middle of nowhere”, if you didn’t count farms and the like. But farms would have lights, wouldn’t they? The lights went out. Someone shrieked, then laughed. “Oh, spooooky!” Other voices joined into the generally cheerful cacophony. Natter, natter, grommidge, grommidge, Jack thought. That was how someone—Harlan Ellison, or David Gerrold?—had described the meaningless sound of background conversations in movies. From the few phrases he could make out, the actual conversations around him weren’t much better. Minutes went by, and the lights stayed off. The crowd noise was slowly changing from cheerful to threatening. As if on cue, a blinding light appeared at one end of the car. “We’ve hit a section of track with heavy drifting,” a voice said. “The crew is trying to clear it now, but it may take a few minutes.” “Why are the lights out?” The light wobbled a bit, as if its holder had hoped no one would ask that question. “We’re not sure,” he said. “The engineer is looking into it.” “This is worse than the GO train getting stuck because the switches froze. At least then you weren’t twenty miles from civilization.” “Please be patient,” Flashlight Man said. “I have to get back to helping them clear the snow.” The light pivoted, splashing off the bulkhead to reveal a parka-clad man with snow clinging to his shoulders and legs as he trudged back toward the exit. They were certainly in no danger of freezing to death. The collective body heat in the railway car would keep them warm (if not too warm) for hours, and they’d either be moving or some kind of rescue would have been arranged by the time things got uncomfortable. Still, some people seemed to treat inconvenience as equivalent to aggravated assault. “This is outrageous. I’m going to speak to my lawyer about suing VIA for compensation for this.” “Shit, I got no signal on my cell phone. We really are in the middle of nowhere!” Jack shook his head, turning to look past his seatmates into the darkness beyond the window. Even with no reflected interior lighting to block his view, he could see no sign of civilization out there; no lights, no buildings, no fences or utility poles. There were trees, black against the stark white of snow that might be meters deep; a few dark patches that might be the leeward faces of jutting rocks; and—movement? “I thought I saw—” The woman seated next to him—attractive, impeccably made up, and Definitely Out of His League—turned to the window, peered out in the direction Jack was looking, but shook her head. “Just trees, snow, and more snow. I guess you might have caught a glimpse of a deer or something—” “Not a deer,” Jack said. “Too tall, too thin, like a person, but—stretched. Like those elongated figures that Spanish guy painted, but right, not distorted, like it was meant to be that way.” The woman sniffed, obviously suspecting that Jack was off his prescribed medication, or on something not prescribed. She closed her eyes and made a great show of slumping down as if to sleep. Jack continued to look out into the world beyond the window. The train was like a ship becalmed in unfamiliar waters; inside it, cocooned by snow and darkness, it seemed to Jack that all the rules and laws of the human world had been suspended. The other passengers had grown quiet, as if sensing the same strangeness. With the engine stopped, with the snow-covered ground soaking up sound, it was almost perfectly silent, a condition that felt magical to any denizen of the modern world. Jack felt his eyes beginning to close again, and decided not to fight it. The train would move, eventually; he’d get home, eventually. There was nothing he could do to make either event happen any sooner. Some time later, he awoke again, this time to a barely perceptible touch on his cheek. A single snowflake would have made firmer contact, but it would not have been as cold; Jack felt a tingling numbness spread from the point of contact like ripples in a pool of liquid hydrogen, then dissipate. He opened his eyes, and gasped. With his eyes now fully adjusted to the darkness, he saw his visitor with astonishing clarity, as though she was illuminated from within. She was beautiful in a way that was heartbreaking in its perfection, more fragile than spun glass, and not human at all. Ice Queen, fairy, High Elf, or alien—it didn’t matter what she was—her face was exquisite, from broad forehead to enormous crystal blue eyes to delicate chin. Her body and limbs were, as Jack had glimpsed earlier, human in form, but that form had been rarefied and refined into something that could dance on the point of a sword and slip between raindrops—or snowflakes. “Who are you?” Jack asked. “Elianne,” she said, or seemed to say. Jack wasn’t sure if her lips had moved; her voice, if it was a voice, seemed to flow into him and through him like a sip of glacier water on a sweltering day. “Why me?” Jack asked, but his strange visitor only smiled and signalled silence with a touch of her impossibly cold, impossibly graceful fingers to his lips. But then she frowned, straightening —her head almost touched the ceiling—as if she had heard someone calling her name. She began to move down the aisle toward the far end of the car, gesturing for Jack to follow. Technically, what she did would be called walking, but the word was woefully inadequate to truly convey the essence of her motion. Dancing? Flowing? Better, but still too clumsy and leaden. Jack stood and stumbled after her, drawing muttered curses from those whose feet he stepped on or whose outstretched legs he tripped over, but that was all: the other passengers seemed to be in a kind of trance, held by the magic of that moment outside the world they knew. Jack reached the exit in time to see his visitor—Elianne—slip through the door and step lightly across the unblemished snow—leaving no footprints, of course. She withdrew until Jack could barely make out her sylph-like form, the darkness and falling snow like a curtain of lace between them.  It would be crazy to go out there, Jack thought. I’d freeze to death in under an hour. But what did he have to go back to in the so-called real world? A lifetime of drudgery and disappointment, a failure in the eyes of his parents and friends? Would I trade my life—such as it is—for an hour or two of magic? He needed only seconds to make his choice. Jack grasped the door handle and twisted. It did not move. He looked at the handle—there was no lock that he could see, no reason why the handle should not move, no reason why the door should remain an immovable barrier between him and his chosen fate. He twisted and tugged, pushed, pounded, tears welling up and half-blinding him as he felt his luck holding true to form, taking away this chance for joy as it had taken every chance. “Hey you! What are you doing? You can’t go out there!” Desperate, Jack threw his full weight against the door. He felt something crack—ice, around the edge of the door—and drew back to try again. But strong arms pulled him back, and then more hands clutched at him, smothering his attempts to fight his way free, and Jack sank to the slush-and-salt covered floor. Through the window, he could see his visitor floating back into the darkness, and wondered why, until the lights came on, and he saw that she had moved back just beyond the illuminated area. “We’re moving, buddy,” someone said. “No need to panic. Calm down, come back to your seat.” Jack feigned surrender until most of his captors had withdrawn, then threw himself back toward the exit. This time, someone caught the hood of his coat and yanked hard enough to pull him off his feet. “That’s enough,” the man said. “It’s been a long night. Don’t make it longer.” The train lurched, brakes hissing and squealing as they were released and the wheels began to turn. Back in his seat, with several large and belligerent passengers watching him closely, Jack tried to peer through the window but could see nothing but the reflected interior of the railway car. “I need a smoke, too, but not enough to go out in that,” his seat-mate said. “I have some nicotine gum—” She pursed her collagen-enhanced lips and fell silent as she realized that Jack was ignoring her. As the train began to pick up speed, the lights flickered, and for a moment, Jack thought he could see Elianne, just beyond the glow from the windows. Wishful thinking—my eyes couldn’t adjust that fast, he thought. She was gone. The magic was gone. The train had returned to the world of schedules and regulations and profit margins, where wisp-thin fairy women could not exist, where student loans and mediocre grades formed the mile-high fences bounding his life. There were lights in the distance.
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