PART SEVEN
"This is a work of art." Brass stood impressed in the company of Nick and Catherine re-investigating Braddock's house, but he just had to see this legendary train set for himself. "When I was a kid, we had the old HO Scale which was a little bigger and a lot of the same accessories, but it didn't have the magnitude or attention to detail of these smaller sets."
"Wait," Nick stood up straight. "Do you notice anything missing from it?"
"Like what," Catherine looked upper the sprawling small town under her. "Buildings, people, cars, trees, brooks, a lake…."
"Where's the train?" Nick pointed out. She looked at him and realized that only someone who understood these sets would get that reference. Brass stooped to his feet and looked through the train set at eyelevel and Catherine raced her light over the tracks in several loops through its business and residential areas. There was no train. She turned to the work area with the paints, parts and tools, but there was no engines, extra cars or anything else. Who made a tabletop train but forgot the train?
"Maybe it's in there?" Brass pointed to a tunnel built to fit the corner of the room. Two tracks at table level entered and exited the paper-mache mountain, but another on a small-scale steel girder bridge entered and didn't come out. Catherine looked to the end of the table near the entrance to the laundry room and noticed another tunnel going onto the wall.
"It goes into the wall?" She realized. "How does he get it out if it jumps the tracks?"
"Maybe…" Nick stooped for a hidey-hole under the train set and noticed something else. There were hinges where a section of the table neatly folded up. He stood, carefully lifted and raised a section of the table set between buildings. When he lifted the section, he could more than plainly notice the door to the room behind the wall pop open. The train set rested right on the door handle and obscured it. Catherine pulled it open and started entering with her light ablaze to look inside.
"Well, that's genius." Brass commented. "The train gets so big that he closes up part of the basement." He reached to poke his head in, but the second Nick let go of the section of table, it slammed back down with a thunderous crash. Tiny people glued in place partially vibrated and the more sturdily constructed buildings received their tremor-like crash to a lesser degree. The vibration jarred two of the bottles of paint at the work desk to shatter on the floor with the previously shattered red paint. Brass snapped to attention and realized what was happening before him. He helped Nick to re-lift the section of table again to unseal Catherine from inside the secret room beyond the wall.
"Are you okay?" Nick looked at her again.
"Well, that was a bad scare…." She looked at him with relief that she had not been entombed in the house. With Nick holding the way open, Brass took a quick look around. Boxes were disturbed, clothes were strewn around and an old model TV was plugged into a forgotten electrical plug. Two complete sets of train cars with engines and boxcars lined the back where they had crashed headfirst into each other. Next to the entrance, Catherine hovered over the unconscious body of William Nathaniel Braddock where he had dropped after getting trapped inside. Nick read the scene at once. He pictured William running two trains at once and reacting when they entered the tunnels at once. After hearing the collision, he then reentered the old storage space and got trapped inside when the table crashed down again. The impact of which had shattered the red paint bottle at his work area. He had been trapped in the wall for almost two weeks without food and water as he screamed to the empty house above him for help without response.
"He's still alive!" Catherine recognized pupilary response from Braddock as she checked him. "Call 911!"
"I'm on it!" Brass reacted with his cell.
"And that's…" Nick held the entrance open. "…Why you should always have your cell phone on you at all times."