The motion of the train had such a soothing effect on Kevin that for quite some time, he was content to rest on the floor, hard as it was, and let the train take him wherever it would. The dark grains on the shellacked floor swirled in the same tangled way as the swirls he had copied from the book he found in the library. Slowly, Kevin's eyes followed the wood design in the flickering light until it ended at a wooden bench. A pair of black shoes bursting at the seams grew out of the swirls. Kevin's eyes followed on upward along a thick pair of legs, past a washed-out blue lace dress with a pile of white and gold yarn on the lap, and ending up at the face of enormously fat lady seated on the bench against a dark window. Hearing the click of knitting needles matching the rhythm of the train's wheels, Kevin realized that the woman was knitting a gold and white sweater. The yarn for the woman's sweater extending along the bench in each direction further than Kevin could see. In places, the yarn dipped down off the bench and tangled itself up in the swirls in the wood's grain to the extent that Kevin couldn't always tell which was which. Every time the woman came to the end of a row in her knitting, she snorted like a pig, as if satisfied with what she had done, and then started the next row. Each time she snorted, her pink face looked more and more like that of a pig. Perched on a baggage rack above her was a hen sitting in her nest. She fluffed her feathers from time to time, but otherwise kept perfectly still.
Looking across the carriage from the fat lady, Kevin thought he saw a tree growing out of the floor. But the tree bent at the bench so put it in a sitting position. At the lap of the tree, two branches filled with white and golden leaves held a large leather-bound book. Above the book, Kevin saw a pair of eyes looking down at the book. Just under the eyes, a nose emerged from the wood and so did a thin mouth. Above the wooden face, leafy branches with flowers and fruit dangling from them grew out of the reader's head. Every now and then he turned a page of the book, but he seemed too engrossed in his reading ever to look up. The window behind him was also black, suggesting that the train was traveling at night.
By this time Kevin began to wonder where he was. That he was on a train was obvious enough, but it was the strangest train he's ever seen. His fellow travelers also seemed quite odd and the effect of their presence was only heightened when he realized that the only light in the train car came from candles hanging down from the ceiling. As to where he was, Kevin had not the slightest idea. He had vague memories of swimming in a warm river made up of the golden swirls he was drawing. Then, with a jolt, he remembered that the reason for swimming in that river was to get away from the boar that was chasing him. Kevin jerked his head in each direction, but he did not see the boar. Except for the two passengers he had already seen, the long benches down each side were empty. Kevin carefully rose to his feet and then tried to decide where to sit. He didn't want to sit too close to either of the strange people, but he wanted sit close enough to one or the other of them so that he could ask them what train he was on and where it was going. Kevin decided to sit on the same side as the knitting woman who was knitting, a respectful distance away from her. All this time, the fat woman continued with her knitting and the tree-man continued his reading, neither of them taking the slightest notice of Kevin.
Fearing that the bench might not be what it seemed, Kevin edged himself down until he was almost settled. To his surprise, the bench felt much softer than he expected it to be. It was also much lumpier. A low-pitched animal-like grunt made Kevin tense up. The knitting woman snorted once again, making it clear that the other grunt came from a different direction. The bench moved, spilling Kevin back on to the floor. Two large dark eyes framed by golden horns seemed to emerge out of the bench. With a cry, Kevin slid backwards with the train's motion right up against the fat woman. Her knitting needles, sweater, and yarn tumbled all over him, tangling Kevin up in the whole mess
"I'm sorry," Kevin apologized as he tried to untangle himself, only to entangle himself further.
"I could have told you that Bertha won't hurt you," said the woman in a voice as soft as wool.
By this time, Kevin could see for himself that the animal that had scared him was a cow curled up on the bench, looking about as placid an animal as one could ever hope to meet on a train.
"Then why didn't you tell me?" Kevin asked.
"Because you didn't ask," the woman replied. "You simply jumped to conclusions."
"I didn't have time."
"Time for what?"
"Time to ask. I was startled too quickly."
Kevin twisted himself in one direction, and then another, but each movement entangled him more and more in the yarn. He tried standing up, but the yarn, caught up in the floor, pulled him back down. One of the needles jabbed Kevin in the stomach, but when he tried to pull it out, the sweater wound itself about him as a tight as a strait jacket.
"How could that be?" the woman asked. "We have all the time it takes the train to make this trip."
"If Bertha were a wild boar, she could have killed me in about a second," Kevin replied. "I couldn't wait that long to find out she wasn't the wild boar."
"But Bertha isn't a wild boar," the woman insisted. "She never has been, as far as I know, she is not a wild boar at this moment, and she never will be one--again--as far as I know."
"However," said the tree-man in a deep voice, "we do not know all future possibilities. Not even all possibilities relevant to Bertha the Cow and all others who cross her path in life."
"I hope she doesn't turn into a mad, wild boar," said Kevin.
But as he spoke those words, Kevin was alarmed to see fire burn in Bertha's eyes and tusks grow out of her mouth. Kevin struggled again to extricate himself from the yarn, but only succeeded in stuffing his mouth so that his cries for help were muffled. When Bertha growled like a boar, Kevin desperately exerted his will against the animal as if he could make it be whatever he wanted it to be simply by wishing it strongly enough. To his surprise, the fire in Bertha's eyes diminished, and her tusks grew smaller. The clack of the train wheels became suddenly louder, and then softer again as Kevin heard a car door open and shut.
"May I have your ticket?" asked a woman.
Kevin tried to turn and face the woman who had spoken to him, but he could not turn his head.
"Whose yarn is that?" asked the woman who was still out of Kevin's line of vision.
"It's his, now," answered the fat lady.
"Takers makers," remarked the tree-man, whose nose was still buried in his book.
Kevin tried to explain his predicament, but the yarn muffled his voice. The needle digging into him was beginning to hurt. An elderly woman dressed in a bright blue conductor's uniform carrying a white pouch over her shoulder moved into view.
"Would you like for me to untie you?" asked the conductress.
Kevin nodded with more squeals and grunts.
With motherly gestures, the conductress slowly unraveled the yarn until Kevin was free of it. The unfinished sweater, however, was hopelessly tangled up with the knitting needles, the unused yarn, and the floor itself.
"Thank you," said Kevin.
"You're welcome. Now, may I have your ticket?"
"I--don't have one. I - "
"Where did you get on?"
"In - in Milton, Pennsylvania, I guess."
"Hmm, I didn't know that was on the line."
"He said he was running away from a wild boar when he boarded the train," said the fat lady.
"Well, that explains something. Now, where are you going?"
"I - don't know. Where is the train going?"
"That depends."
"Depends on what?"
"On where you're going."
"Where are you going?"
"That depends on all this yarn," said the tree-man, again not even looking up from his book.
"I rather thought I was taking the Kevin Express" answered the fat lady. "It sounded like such an interesting trip, being part of a journey to Kevin Rosskill's great masterpieces and all. I only wish I had known how tangled up my knitting would get. It looks as if now I'll never get this sweater done."
"But I'm Kevin!" Kevin protested.
"You are?" asked the conductress. "Then that does change the complexion of the situation."
"Must be the boar he drew he's running from," said the tree-man in his flat voice.
Bertha snorted, more like a cow than a boar, but there was still the hint of a pair of tusks at her mouth.
"Why were you running away from a wild boar if you were drawing it?" the conductress asked Kevin.
"I--uh--I was scared when--when its tusks got longer and-and--fire came out of its eyes--and then it started to chase me--and I ran to get away from this wild boar--and I found myself swimming away--and then--the water turned into the floor of this train."
Kevin expected the conductress to declare him unfit for rational discourse, but she seemed to take in Kevin's story as if everything he recounted happened every day.
"That's all very well," said the conductress, "but running from a boar doesn't solve your problems."
Kevin eyed Bertha suspiciously, half-suspecting that he was stifling the further growth of her tusks by his look.
"What will you do to me, since I don't have a ticket?" Kevin asked, "throw me off the train?"
"No. You will have to stay on the train for now. You won't need your ticket until you want to get off."
"You mean I'll have to ride this train forever?" Kevin asked.
The train continued to move at top speed as if it would never stop.
"I didn't say that," replied the conductress. "It is you who say that you may have to ride on this train forever. If you make your ticket, you can get off."
"How do I do that?"
"You can finish knitting your sweater," the fat lady suggested unhelpfully.
"I can't knit," Kevin replied. "All I can do is draw and paint."
"Then paint your ticket," said the conductress.
Kevin reached into his pocket for his pencil, but all he found there was a crumpled piece of paper. Hoping it was his drawing, and that it might serve as his ticket, Kevin pulled the paper out of his pocket, only to find that it was the funny note inviting him to a place he had never heard of before. Kevin swore in his frustration, crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it away. It landed in the yarn and lay suspended in the tangle.
"Why did you do that?" the conductress asked Kevin.
"Because the note was a fake."
"Or was it a real fake?" asked the tree-man.
"Or was the fake real?" asked the fat lady.
"You don't have to answer those questions now," said the conductress. "You are better off concentrating your energy on drawing or painting your ticket."
"But I don't have anything to draw or paint with," Kevin protested.
"The Book of History of Masterpieces said that Kevin the Illuminator could paint or draw with whatever materials he held in his hand."
"Somebody made that up," Kevin pouted.
The tree-man grunted, turned the page in his book and then placed the volume in Kevin's hands.
"Sir Woodbrook at your service, my dear Sir Kevin the Painter Weaver" said the Tree-man.
Kevin stared at the blank parchment page.
"I'm--only Kevin. There's no Sir in my name."
"But you were knighted by Prince Morach for the painting you are about to do," said the fat lady.
"But I haven't done it yet, so I can I have been knighted already?"
"Simple," answered the tree man. "You are about to finish it two hundred years ago."
"Isn't that a little backwards?" asked Kevin.
"Same as frontwards. Your painting will be the instrument of a curse, but also the means of lifting the curse."
"A curse? I don't want to do that."
Bertha growled again like a boar, and Kevin had to stare hard at her to keep her tusks from sprouting out.
"What you paint is what you want," said the conductress cheerfully. "Just don't lose yourself in your work."
"But--I don't have anything work with," Kevin complained.
Sir Woodbrook tore a twig off of one arm. If the act hurt him, the pain did not show on his face.
"Now you need some fair hairs for the thrush's brush," said the tree-man.
Kevin stared at the twig he had been given. It was already hollowed out at one end, ready for filling it with a brush. Kevin looked over to Bertha who appeared to be absorbed in her own meditations. Then, as if catching on that something was expected of her, a bit of flame rose in her eyes for just a moment. She bit at her shoulder and ripped out a clump of fur and dropped it in Kevin's lap. Kevin gratefully accepted the gift and stuffed the hairs into the handle. To his surprise, they stuck. He had a workable paint brush.
"I still need some paint to paint with," Kevin announced.
Kevin received no response to this request. The fat lady made the motions of knitting although her hands were empty. The tree-man continued to turn the pages of the book as if he still held it. The conductress shuffled through a fistful of tickets as if they were a deck of cards she was about to deal out. Looking about the train car, Kevin saw the hen nested on the baggage rack above him. Hen. Hens lay eggs. That train of thought brought back something his art teacher taught him. Kevin pulled himself up, lurched with the train's motion, caught himself by grabbing a post, and eyed the nest. The hen obligingly stood up, allowing Kevin to take a pair of eggs out of it.
"Thank you," said Kevin although it felt silly to thank a hen, he still had the feeling that the hen appreciated being thanked.
"Here, use this," said the conductress as she pulled out a small bowl from her pouch.
Kevin accepted the bowl, broke the eggs against the lip, then poured the whites into the bowl, keeping the yokes in their half shells.
"The litter bag is beside you," the conductress told him.
Seeing the little brown bag attached to the bench that the conductress pointed to, Kevin dumped the shells and yokes into it.
"Now all I need is the pigment," Kevin announced.
"Don't you have any of that, either?" asked the conductress.
"No."
"Don't you have anything?"
"About all I have with me is the shirt on my back."
"What's wrong with that?" asked the conductress.
Kevin shrugged and looked at the tangle of yarn with its golden threads and wondered if he could make a gold paint by mixing the yarn with the egg whites. In this strange universe, perhaps he could, but he would still need other colors. The shirt on his back was a plaid of several colors. That took care of the colors, but he still had to convert them to paint. Testing his ingenuity at understanding a set of natural laws he had never encountered before, Kevin took one of the knitting needles and gently dug out different squares in the plaid representing different colors and placed each color in his other hand. Noticing that one board in the floor of the train had come loose, Kevin picked it up. As he had strangely suspected, there were little indentations in the stick of wood, perfect for an artist's pallette. Kevin poured a bit of egg yolk into each dip in the tray, and mixed in each color extracted from his shirt. To his surprise there was one indentation left. Surely there was supposed to be one more color. Of course! The gold in the yarn!
"Uh - may I have a small piece of yarn?" Kevin asked the fat lady.
"As I said, the whole thing is yours," the woman answered, were hands still knitting in the air.
"Takers makers," said the tree-man, still engrossed in the book he no longer held.
"It's your sweater," the fat lady continued. "I suggest you finish it. You may need it sometime. As for the yarn, you can do anything you want with it."
"Uh - thank you," Kevin replied uncertainly.
The woman did not answer him. Kevin tore off a piece of the golden yarn and mixed that with the yoke. He dipped the brush into the egg white, then into his gold pigment and began to paint on the blank page Sir Woodbrook had turned to. Again, he drew golden swirls such as he had seen on the page in the book he had found at the library.
"That's a good start," said the conductress, looking over his shoulder. "You should have a good copy of your fresco in due time. That will make a beautiful ticket."
"And then I can get off this train?"
"If that is what you want to use your ticket for, yes," the conductress answered.
The train's clacking of the train's wheels grew louder for a second as the conductress opened the car door, and then the sound was muffled once again when she closed it. Kevin fell to drawing his swirling design in earnest, mixing in other colors to add interest. To his annoyance, he entangled his arm with a knitting needle and the yarn as he drew. He tried to shake his arm loose with the result that he ripped off several more splinters from the floor so that the designs of the wood grains mixed in with the swirls Kevin had just drawn on the parchment. Kevin twisted his body in an attempt to extricate himself, but seemed only to draw the yarn tighter around his arms. The train jolted Kevin, sending the ball of crinkled paper into his lap. The paper began to swell as if it had notions of turning into a hedgehog or some such creature. Bertha growled as if she were turning into a boar. Kevin looked sharply at was of paper.
"Some invitation you were," he muttered.
Under the influence of his sharp look, the wad of paper shrank back to its original size.
"Who sent the invitation?" asked the fat lady.
"I don't know. Somebody named--uh--Anna Jean--no--Amber Lee--no--Amarilla. Never met her in my life."
"Amarilla's invitations never fail reality's test," said Sir Woodbrook.
"But what's real?" asked Kevin.
"How about your illuminated manuscript for starters?" suggested the fat lady as she continued with her invisible knitting.
Kevin look dubiously at the swirls that flowed in all directions without any of them going anywhere.
"And what was Amarilla's invitation for?" asked Kevin. "And why would she invite me if we don't even know each other?"
"Invitations open openings," the tree-man answered as he turned another page of his invisible book.