The Prospector

I fell backwards off the boat.

There was a single moment of solitude.

The water crashed into my back. Everything went dark.

I fell for a time, watching the silt move in and out of the shadow of the boat. Something interposed itself between us. I drifted down into the forest.

Huge pillars meandered thorough the gloom, nosing out from the loose earth and plunging through the ceiling of the world. I watched their gnarled fingers rise past me. These roots were sometimes as much as five metres thick, snaking over and under one another.

Time passed.

I came to rest on the sea floor. The world was lit by a dusky glow, and above me the infinite possibilities of the mangrove swamp.

I set a marker, got out my detector and began to work.

It doesn’t follow that any metal found here will suit, to really know, you have to touch it to your skin. But near Sodor you have the best chance of anywhere in the world.

I scythed my detector across the face of the earth. Then I began to swim.

I was going for maybe 40 minutes when BEEP. I got out my seive and filtered through the murk. A single bolt. Pulling back the sleeve of my wetsuit, I pressing it’s curved head against my skin.

“And the rivers shall pour forth and their waters shall heal the-”

I snapped it away and forgot. I put it in my pouch.

I found nothing more in the next 40 minutes so I followed my markers back and collecting the last, pushed slowly off the sea floor.

The world was utterly silent as I ascended. The mangrove watched me implacably. Feeling queasy, I paused at the base of a great opening, formed from two roots twisting past one another.

There was a patch of darkness through the portal, moving closer. A whale?

Dread rushed up from my stomach nearly causing me to wretch. I just hung there, unable to move more than the odd thrashing pulse of my legs.

A wall of pressure and he was on me. His face pierced the gloom. His huge eyes, his bulging cheeks. I gagged. It took me far too long to realise he was upside down. His great wheels hanging above me and his huge boiler casting me into darkness.

“1”. The upside down numeral hung in front of my face. I brushed my forehead up against the paintwork.

Sunny uplands. Vast fields of amber crops with tracks through them. Warmth and companionship. Leaves brushing my sides. Falling. Falling. falling. “ANNIE”. “CLA-” Hot darkness. A rope of iron, snaking into the darkness. Rapidly it goes taut. White-

I jerked me head back in shock, the emptiness of the drivers cab slamming past me.

And then there was light on my face. I watched him plunge into the abyss, becoming indistinct. His coal box fading from sight.

Thomas the Tank Engine. The last of the trains.

Photo by Matt Hardy on Unsplash