Oscar Rusk lay there deader than shit, his throat ripped wide open and his vocal cords straight up stolen. Dark rivulets of blood crawled away from his body in every direction, crossing the threshold back through the door from which he had emerged only moments earlier. The door led into another tunnel, but different from the prior one which had led Seymour and Penny inside from the hedge maze, delivering them into the unimaginably enormous treasure room.

  The corridor which Rusk had been murdered at the mouth of opened up twice as tall and wide as that earlier tunnel, and as Seymour peered into the darkness he could make out a pair of narrow, metal beams set into the floor, looking something like train tracks. He knelt to place his hand upon the rail and could feel the metal vibrating, just barely. Rusk’s blood kept creeping closer and closer, and Seymour had to stand up and take a step back to avoid it.

  “Time to go, bro,” Jerome warned from down by his ankle, urgently tugging at the cuff of his pants, spattered from head-to-toe in Rusk’s blood.

  “What is this?” Seymour wondered. He could hear the dissociation in his own voice, even more detached than what would have been completely justified after witnessing the murder Jerome had just committed. The weird train tracks were messing with his head.

  “Something’s coming.” Penny hesitated a few steps back, as if the doorway itself might drag her inside the eerie tunnel. Seymour glanced back to briefly meet her eyes, just long enough to see the look of worry written across her face. He turned back to the darkness.

  “I feel it, too,” he said, “but what is it?”

  “That’s the Midnight Express,” Jerome explained in his uncannily deep, soulful voice. Was that what Oscar Rusk would have sounded like? “And you ain’t ready for it.”

  “What do you mean? What’s there to be ready for?”

  “That’s the trap, baby. The Midnight Express can only be controlled by someone who has achieved Adept Rank or higher. Anyone lower just gets eaten up.”

  “Rusk’s letter didn’t say anything about that. It just said I’d need to rank up if I was going to command it at will or whatever.”

  “Yeah, well, this dude was a major bullshitter.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “It’s a long story.” The cactus man began climbing up Seymour’s pant leg. “I can tell you all about it, but in the time it takes you’re gonna get your asses all smooshed to shit by the ghost train coming down these tracks.”

  “A train? You really mean that, don’t you? Like a literal train that can go back and forth between worlds?”

  “What’s a train?” Penny wondered.

  “You’re about to find out in the worst way.” Jerome leapt up onto Seymour’s shoulder. “Now I mean it, baby bro, we gotta run. Right now.”

  An ear-splitting, electrified shriek echoed out from the depths of the tunnel like the mechanical cackling of an asylum for insane robots. Seymour flinched and stared off into the pitch black, fruitlessly searching for the source of the sound. The engine itself could suddenly be heard then, some distance deep within the darkened tunnel, grinding and clattering. Penny groaned out loud and Seymour knew why. The noise was awful, and he felt it in his guts. In his bones. Maybe even deeper than that.

  Penny and Seymour exchanged a wide-eyed look and without another word between them they both turned on their heels to run. They dashed back into the treasure room, sprinting straight along the red carpet, right on the verge of losing control. The drifts of gold and rubies on both sides of their path became a blur as they raced past. They ran and ran until their lungs burned. Penny’s familiars both kept up the pace with ease, flying straighter and smoother than their constant flapping should have allowed. Jerome rode on Seymour’s shoulder, crouched something like a jockey in a horse race.

  “Wait!” Penny suddenly cried at close to the halfway-point, grabbing Seymour by the arm and spinning him back around. “We can’t leave yet. Shovel in as much as treasure you can. Hurry!”

  Glory’s butterfly wings melted into the air around her like a Rorschach inkblot come to life, until in no time at all she had become a circular void the size of a beach ball, floating just above the surface of the golden ocean. Penny worked frantically to shove and chuck treasure into Glory’s hole.

  “Have you lost your goddamned mind!”

  “Yeah. Damn, girl,” Jerome agreed, shaking his head-nub but sounding impressed. “You crazy.”

  But Seymour obeyed her orders anyway, and plunged his arms into the golden mound until they were both buried up to the elbows. To his surprise it all felt bitingly cold. He lifted as much of the loose treasure—coins and gems and other things—as he could wedge into his clutches and chucked it all into Glory’s hole as efficiently as he was able.

  At any other time in his life, even a half-assed armload of treasure would have felt like a massive score, but right then he could only agonize over how much he had let spill onto the floor and how much tougher it was to swim his arms through the drifts of gold coins than many hours of watching Ducktales had led him to believe the act would be.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  On his right, Penny now held one of the carrying handles of a half-buried treasure chest. “Help me with this!”

  She struggled and strained to pull the chest into Glory’s void, but between the weight of whatever it held inside and the added impediment of the treasure it was currently buried beneath, she had no chance of extracting it by herself. Seymour shoved his hands into the freezing gold and found the other handle. He worked the chest side-to-side and pulled, wiggling and dragging it free. His body remained all bulked out from Jerome’s bloody Infusion, or he knew he never could have so much as budged it.

  The chest was made of dark wood reinforced with iron and adorned with gold and silver inlays, and then the inlays were decorated further with designs made with gems of all kinds. He knew just looking at it that the chest must be worth a fortune all on its own, and it was straight up heavy as hell. His mind began to race with visions of the rare loots it might be hiding within its sturdy frame.

  “This is taking way too long,” Jerome warned up close to Seymour’s ear.

  And then right on cue, the Midnight Express crashed out of its tunnel seemingly completely out of control, blasting out bricks as it widened the entrance. It looked like an old steam engine from Earth, black as its name would imply, except for a blood red cowcatcher mounted to the front.

  It was too wide for the walkway down the carpet, but when it smashed into the treasures piled high on either side of the red carpet the entire, massive hall flashed orange and blue with magical explosions. Coins shrieked off in every direction at each impact, a few sizzling through the air to land on the carpet only a short distance from where Seymour and Penny stood.

  For a long beat the train lurched like it might be losing momentum. But then black-metal rails suddenly shot up through the stone floor, emerging from below like mechanical eels, shredding the red carpet and throwing the tatters into the air along with billows of masonry dust. The rails cut a straight path, laying down tracks toward the exact spot where Seymour and Penny stood like a pair of deer in headlights, caught in the act, still holding the treasure chest between them.

  They might have just stood there even longer but Glory flew down and put herself between them and the sight of the train, breaking the hypnotist’s spell. Penny became spurred to action first, pulling her side of the chest toward the void, and then Seymour snapped out of his temporary stupor and helped her toss the entire thing inside. Glory quickly melted back into the shape of an inky black butterfly and zipped off toward the far exit, back in the direction of the hedge maze.

  “Run!” Penny cried, and they fled with the Midnight Express smashing through the gold dunes behind them, causing more sunset-colored explosions.

  As they ran, Seymour suddenly found himself surprised to hear his own laughter. At that moment, he found himself running from an evil ass ghost train across an arena filled with treasure – and yet it felt more like he might simply be a kid again playing ding-dong ditch. How did this all feel so natural to him? Strangely wholesome, in a way. He wanted to hold Penny’s hand or something, but the best he could do without slowing his pace was to catch her in the corner of his eye as they sprinted side-by-side.

  And he saw that she couldn’t contain her laughter, either.

  Even as the train outpaced their escape, she kept laughing and laughing.

  “Oh shit, baby bro – we ain’t gonna make it!”

  Even as the sound of the train filled his ears with the sound of its cataclysmic engines, Seymour could still hear himself and Penny laughing. And then the Midnight Express caught them from behind – caught them with its blood red cowcatcher and tore their bodies to something smaller than shreds.

  Being dead turned out to be pretty much exactly what Seymour had always suspected. There wasn’t any wholesome-assed whitelight, after all. No long-lost family members waiting for him. No cancer-free dad. No nothing. Only an emptiness that went beyond the darkness and sensory deprivation.

  Deep down, he’d always known it would be like this. Death. Like a TV shutting off; a screen simply gone blank. The afterlife didn’t consist of heavens and hells – just an infinite absence to float through helplessly, forever and ever after.

  And so he did precisely that. He floated miserably, blind and deaf because he had become formless and no longer possessed the organs and nerves and whatnot needed to perceive anything.

  Yeah, like I don’t even have a brain anymore to process anything sensory-related, he thought. But that idea immediately became troublesome, because: how am I thinking though, if I don’t have a brain?

  Somewhere within the infinite, weightless darkness engulfing him, Seymour felt a laugh bubbling up. How could such a thing be possible? How could he feel a laugh without a body or a brain?

  Finally, Jerome could take no more. “Goddamn, bro. You got existential in a hurry right there, didn’t you?”

  “What the fu—”

  “You’re not dead. Well, I guess technically you might as well be right now – but the Man wants to talk it out with you.”

  “The man?” Seymour wondered into the void. “You mean, God?”

  Jerome absolutely cackled at that suggestion. “Oh no, absolutely not. Not the way you’re thinking, anyway. He ain’t no kind of wrathful Earth-God. He’s way worse than that. Oh shit, here he comes!”

  The darkness suddenly became different then, less impenetrable, somehow – and Seymour realized this had never been any sort of afterlife. That had been wishful thinking, at best. This place, this so-called purgatory where he’d expected to be trapped forever, he now sensed it was more like a laboratory – and he’d been under the microscope this entire time.

  “Naw, bro.” Jerome’s voice had become a whisper. “This ain’t no nerdy-ass science lab. It’s more like a pawn shop. A cursed one.”

  “A pawn shop,” the darkness repeated, sounding amused by Jerome’s description. “How have you been, little one?”

  “Can’t complain. You gonna help my boy out?”

  “That depends entirely on him, doesn’t it? And how willing he is to strike a bargain.”

  The darkness began to coalesce into the shape of a man, hovering in the space before Seymour. After a moment, he could even make out its face. Oddly, for some reason he expected it to look like a perfect replica of himself – but that wasn’t quite right. The darkness had become a man—or something shaped like the concept of a man, at least—but it didn’t look like Seymour.

  “Oscar Rusk?” he wondered.

  “I am the Avatar of Rivulon.”

  “What do you want?”

  “To return you to life, of course.” The Rusk-shaped stranger suddenly held a quill in one hand and a sheet of glowing, spectral parchment in the other. “But only after we’ve negotiated a fair trade for your soul.”