The Last Train to Dreamland

The first time Nora heard the train, she was seven years old and had been putting off bed for forty-five minutes by finding extremely important things to do — watering the plant she had already watered, reorganising her bookshelf by colour, and brushing her teeth for a second time in case the first time had not been thorough enough.

She heard it through her bedroom window: a low, soft whoooooo — not a loud train sound, but the kind of sound a train makes when it knows it is in a garden and is trying to be polite about it.

She looked out. At the very bottom of the garden, just past the apple tree, she saw something golden and glowing moving slowly along a pair of tracks she was quite certain had not been there that morning. A small, beautiful train — three carriages, each window lit warm amber — was pulling to a halt beside a little platform she also had not noticed before.

On the platform stood a sign: DREAMLAND EXPRESS. DEPARTS 8:15. FINAL BOARDING.

Nora looked at her clock. It said 8:13.

She thought about going. She really did. But she was not in her coat, and she had not packed anything, and she was not entirely sure where Dreamland was, and her mother had said bed and not mysterious garden train, and by the time she had finished thinking all of this, her clock said 8:15, and the train moved quietly away into the dark, and was gone.

This happened every night for three weeks. Nora would hear the train. She would look out. She would see it waiting. And she would spend the time between 8:13 and 8:15 thinking of reasons not to go — and the train would leave without her.

The conductor, she had noticed, was an owl in a dark green waistcoat with a gold pocket watch and a very small clipboard. Each night, as the train departed, he would look up at her window — the same patient look that a creature gives you when it has been waiting a very long time and is not angry, only hopeful — and then the train would go.

On the twenty-second night, Nora sat on the edge of her bed at 8:12 and talked to herself.

“You don’t have your coat,” she said.

“It’s a dream train,” she answered herself. “You probably don’t need a coat.”

“You don’t know what’s there.”

“That’s rather the point.”

Her clock ticked to 8:13. Downstairs, the golden sound of the train reached her — warm and low, like a lullaby played on brass instruments.

Nora stood up. And then she ran.

She reached the platform at 8:14 and forty-nine seconds. The owl conductor looked at her, then at his pocket watch, then at her again.

“One ticket,” he said. His voice was exactly the voice you would expect a wise old owl to have — low and warm and unhurried and somehow already knowing everything you were about to say.

“I don’t have a ticket,” Nora panted.

“You’ve been holding it for three weeks,” he said pleasantly. “Most passengers do.”

He pointed at her left hand. She looked down. In her palm — she had no idea how it had got there — was a small golden ticket, warm and faintly glowing. On it was written: Nora. One passage to Dreamland. Valid: Tonight.

She boarded. The carriage was warm and soft and smelled of the feeling you get on the last day before a holiday. The seats were the exact right kind of comfortable. Other children sat in the amber-lit windows, some already sleeping, some looking out at the dark garden with wide quiet eyes.

The train moved. Softly at first, then faster, then so smoothly it felt like floating. The garden, the apple tree, the house with her lit bedroom window — all of it slid gently past and away.

The owl conductor came through the carriage. He stopped beside Nora and looked at her ticket, then at her one sock and one bare foot, and said nothing about either.

“First time?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Nora. “What’s it like? Dreamland?”

He considered this with the seriousness the question deserved. “Different for everyone,” he said. “It gives you what you most need. Sometimes that is an adventure. Sometimes a feeling. Sometimes just an uninterrupted rest.”

“What if I need all three?” Nora asked.

He smiled — a very owl sort of smile, which is mostly in the eyes. “Then it will be a very full night,” he said, and moved on down the carriage.

Nora looked out the window. Outside, the dark had changed. It was still night — but a different kind of night, a warmer one, lit from somewhere within itself like a lighthouse beam seen from the inside. Trees she had no name for drifted past. Shapes moved between them — animals, maybe, or music, or colours that had not been invented yet.

She felt her eyes growing heavy in the exact way they never did at bedtime — the deep, willing, grateful heaviness of someone who has finally stopped resisting something wonderful.

The train slowed. The owl’s voice came from somewhere warm and far away: “Dreamland. All passengers, Dreamland.”

Nora closed her eyes. She was still on the train when she fell asleep, and she was still smiling when the dream found her — the biggest, warmest, most completely right dream she had had in her entire seven years — and she did not think once about her coat, or her missing slipper, or any of the other things she had been too busy thinking about to simply run.