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“Your little trick didn’t work,” Nabler said. “I drove out of the alley, parked down the street for a bit, and then came back.

That was very naughty of you. And very naughty of Susie. How stupid did you two think I am?”

Harry had not yet been able to find any words. He hadn’t fully reconciled what he’d found in here. The horror of it.

Nabler smiled. “And, while I’m annoyed with you, I’m still inclined to do you a favor. I’m going to give you the opportunity

to be part of something larger than yourself. Not very many people get that kind of chance.”

Harry managed to part his lips, to speak, as a passenger train sped past him.

“What are you?”

“I am Mr. Choo. I bring joy and delight to young and old.”

“The fuck you do.” Harry shot a quick glance at the miniature town, not wanting to take his eyes off Edwin for long. “Who’s

in there?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Gavin? Are parts of him in that? And Walter Hillman? The bones you took out of Angus Tanner. Are they what hold up the mountain?

Those his teeth in the garden? That’s my son’s goddamn skateboard, isn’t it? How many personal trinkets have you lifted off

people and folded into this shit? And a fucking goat?”

“So many questions,” Edwin said, raising his voice to be heard over the din. A steam engine pulling a dozen cars barreled past his shoulder on a ribbon of suspended track. “I have one for you.”

Harry waited.

“Who knows you’re here? Other than that dyke at the community center, who I’ll deal with later.”

“Plenty of people.”

“You’re lying.”

Harry shook his head. “You’re the focus of a large investigation. I’ve been talking to state and federal officials. The net’s

closing in on you, Nabler.”

“I see. And that’s why you recruited Susie to help you. Because of her extensive background in Homeland Security.” His grin

grew broader, almost unnaturally so, exposing a mouthful of gleaming teeth. “You’re on your own.”

Harry began to think there was little point in denying it.

“And I’ll tell you why. Because even you couldn’t believe what you thought I was up to. If you weren’t sure, how would you

be able to convince anyone else?”

“But I’m right, aren’t I?”

“I don’t know. What is it, exactly, you suspect me of? Beyond killing a few people and pets for my project here.” He tossed

that last part off as if he were confessing to speeding in a school zone.

“The sets you sell,” Harry said, starting off slowly. “They... make people do things. Make things happen. I don’t know

how, but I think this is where you prep them. Running them through this monstrosity, filled with personal items and body parts.

But it’s more than that. It’s you . There something about you . Some power you possess. You’re the secret ingredient. And you’re not... a real person. You’re something else.”

“Close enough,” Nabler said, nodding while another train circled around both of them.

“What I don’t get is why.”

Nabler sighed. “I get tired of explaining myself. I went through all of this with your friend Gavin. Suffice it to say that

I’m one of those working in the sliver who restores things to a natural order, creating balance in a world where the frequency

with which bad things happen is dropping.”

Sliver? Harry thought. But what he said was, “I guess you don’t get CNN.”

Nabler waved a dismissive hand. “Three thousand dead here, three thousand there, they seem like major events, but they are

but a drop in the ocean. The population continues to soar. Resources are dwindling. It can’t go on like this forever. My kind

are buying you some time. Spreading out, doing our work in countless locations in a multitude of ways, working, as you might

say, under the radar.”

“So you’re, what, some sick force of nature, like a pandemic? Keeping the population in check?”

Nabler sighed. “I’ve been at this a long time, in different places, and you’ve figured it out as well as anybody. Not bad,

for a two-bit cop in a two-bit town.” He paused, reflecting. “And now I may have to move on. It’s always a pain, and I was

hoping this was a place where I could settle down.”

The trains continued to swirl and race around them.

“Can we pull the plug on these things?” Harry asked. “Your electric bill must be through the roof.”

It was then he remembered something Janice had told him. How, in her work for the town’s electric company, there’d been a

power drain they’d not been able to account for. Harry figured he was standing in the middle of it.

Enough , Harry thought.

Time to take out his gun, put the handcuffs on this sick fuck, and take him in, whoever and whatever he was. Linking him to recent bizarre deaths like Darryl Pidgeon’s or Nadine Comstock’s would never be possible, but there

was plenty of physical evidence in this room to convict Nabler on charges of being a serial killer. There’d been huge advances

in DNA technology in the last few years. Forensic experts would be able to match these ghastly remains to the deceased, or

their relatives.

Harry pulled his weapon. “I’m taking you in,” he said.

“Oh my,” Nabler said. “What do they say? The jig is up?”

All but one of the trains maintained their frenzied loops around Harry and Nabler. One train slowed to a stop not far from

where they stood facing one another. A steam engine with several cars attached, including one very special gray boxcar.

“Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

“Perhaps we might discuss this further first.”

“Shut up and turn around.”

Slowly, Nabler started to turn his back to Harry, who had pulled a set of handcuffs from his jacket and reholstered his weapon

so that he might grab first one arm and then the other to link Nabler’s wrists together.

The roof of the gray boxcar split along a center line, then the two pieces slowly retracted down the side of the car. From

inside, a small red projectile rose up on an angle. Ready to fire.

A missile car.

And suddenly it launched with the swiftness of a dart thrown at a wall-mounted board, but it was not aiming for the wall,

it was aiming for Harry.

He never saw it coming, not even when it struck him in the left eye.

“Jesus fuck!” he shouted, dropping the cuffs before he’d had a chance to attach one to Nabler’s first wrist and throwing both hands over his injured eye. “Goddamn it!”

Nabler moved very quickly.

He went into his pocket for the scalpel-like instrument that had served him so well, but this was not the time for a precise

incision. Gripping the knife as firmly as he could, he drove it into Harry’s stomach.

Harry screamed. And continued to scream as Nabler thrust the knife into him a second time, and then a third.

Harry moved his hands to his gut, blood already seeping through his clothes and between his fingers. He looked down with his

one good eye and saw what was happening to him. In a moment of clarity, realizing he had very little time to get out of this

alive, he reached for the gun that seconds ago—had it even been half a minute?—he had tucked back into the holster at his

side.

But when he reached for it, he discovered it was gone.

“Looking for this?” Nabler asked, waving the gun in front of Harry’s face, taunting him.

“You son of a...”

“You have a mighty fine bone structure, Chief. A true model train enthusiast will tell you the layout is never finished. You

think you’re done, but then you go back to a completed section and think, I want to take another run at that. I think I can make it better . Kind of like highway projects. You think that stretch of the interstate is done, and then they rip it up and do it all over

again. The layout is always evolving, always hungry, if you will, for new material.”

The train to which the missile car was coupled began to move once more. Soon it was keeping pace with all the other ones that

continued to race around the room.

Harry was slowly sliding toward the floor, clutching his stomach. Nabler knelt, synchronizing his descent so his mouth stayed close to Harry’s ear.

“They will never find you. The parts I don’t use I will burn. I was careless with Tanner, but I won’t be with you.”

Harry was almost to the floor.

And then, with his last dying breath, he shot himself forward, throwing his arms around Nabler in a half-assed tackle that,

while hardly worthy of a linebacker, was enough to throw Nabler off balance. Nabler managed to shove Harry off him, and when

the chief hit the floor he did not try to get back up.

Nabler staggered as he regained his balance and threw an arm out instinctively to steady himself. His hand came down hard

on one of the ribbons of track five feet above the floor, suspended by wires that went to the ceiling. Nabler hit it hard

enough that the track and the thin strip of wood to which it was nailed down buckled sharply. A second before one of Nabler’s

many trains was approaching. The engine hit the gap, jumped the rails, and plummeted to the floor, hitting it with a splintering

thud, bits and pieces of its plastic-and-metal shell scattering everywhere.

What really mattered, however, was not the engine but what came down in its wake.

Coupled to the engine was a long trail of tanker cars. At least twenty of them. Detailed replicas of the freight cars that

carried hazardous chemicals from one side of the country to another, often passing through the heart of Lucknow.

One car hit the floor and practically disintegrated. Then another, and another, and another, and before Nabler could catch

even one of them, they had all landed on the concrete and shattered into hundreds of pieces.

Nabler worked his way through the jungle of tracks to the control panel that powered everything and shut it down. For the first time, the room went eerily quiet.

“What a fucking mess,” he said, looking at Harry’s body, the blood on the floor, the busted trains scattered helter-skelter.

He took a long breath, dreading the tasks ahead. Sure, the chief’s remains would make an excellent addition to the layout,

but slitting open his torso and limbs to retrieve what he could best make use of was not something he felt up to at the moment.

And he was going to have to repair that broken stretch of track if he—

Nabler heard something.

A distant rumbling. Minor at first, but then it began to build. Nabler could sense it coming up through the walls and the

floor, and if he didn’t know better, he would have thought Lucknow was in the throes of an earthquake.

But Nabler did know better, and had a strong suspicion that this was not an earthquake, which were not common to this area

of Vermont, anyway. What he believed he was hearing was, potentially, something far more serious.

He left the back room, made his way through his shop, turned back the front door lock, and stepped out onto the sidewalk.

The rumbling persisted, and it was coming from the direction of the rail line that ran straight through the center of town.

Nabler thought about all those mangled toy tanker cars on the floor, and the fact that this was often the time in the evening

when a large chemical train made its way through town.

Some of his trains had more chaotic agency than others. The tanker cars that hit the floor clearly packed a punch.

Nabler said, “Oh shit.”