#peter sam

They didn’t have a picture; they didn’t even have a name listed. It had been more than enough to pique the interest of one engine.

“Granpuff?” Peter Sam had asked Duke casually, tapping a finger against the entry.

“Do you happen to know who this was?”

What followed was an oddly tense conversation, tension that soon turned otherwise normal questions into jagged, snappy demands, tension that eventually led to a real clash between the two. Each harsh and dismissive word eventually resulted in an appalled Peter Sam, who clutched at the crumpled booklet with trembling hands, while the rest of the Skarloey engines looked at him with confusion and concern.

“What do you mean, ‘he’s probably still buried there’?” Peter Sam had asked.

“He was real?"

But that final question was enough to break the dam completely.

Tension be damned, what came next was a literal shouting match between mentor and protege, a shouting match that continued on until Sir Handel had finally intervened to break it up. Grim-faced, the saddle tank had quickly pulled his uncharacteristically irate friend back into the quiet coolness of the sheds, giving him a chance to calm down.

And he did, eventually.

After a while, Sir Handel decided to speak.

“Isn’t like you to have a row with Granpuff,” he now said, a troubled little ‘v’ forming in the space between his dark eyebrows, “especially not about something like this. What’s got your circuits in a bunch, Peter?”

“Why’re you even asking me? You heard everything, didn’t you?” Peter Sam accused, picking frantically at a loose strip of rubber that coated his fingers; it was a frequent, nervous habit he often lapsed into. “Don’t act like you weren’t listening in on everything.”

“To be fair, the whole estate was listening in,” Sir Handel pointed out, “group eavesdropping tends to happen when you yell.”

“Ugh!” Frustrated, Peter Sam threw his patchy hands up; ready to fight his corner, but try as he might, he couldn’t think up a retort - really, there wasn’t one he could make.

So, instead, he chose to air his grievances as best he could; eager to make some sense of the mess his thoughts had become.

“I feel like I’ve been lied to, don’t you? I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all,” he said glumly, “nothing good comes of lying. Either Granpuff thinks I’m dumb enough to fall for it, or he just doesn’t trust me with the truth!” “I’m sure he doesn’t think you’re stupid; not anymore at least.” Sir Handel attempted warmly, but Peter Sam was immediately on top of him. “So he doesn’t trust me then. Great! That’s just wonderful to know.”

“That’s not it either and you know it,” the blue engine shot back, “you and I mean the world to him, Peter. If you want my opinion, I reckon he lied to you to spare your feelings; to protect you from the horrible stuff that went on back then.” Peter Sam snorted, a derisive noise that sent jets of steam shooting out everywhere.

“Well a fat load of good that’s done, huh?” He snapped from the hazy cloud that had formed around him. “This isn’t something you can explain away, Sir Handel! You can’t put a positive spin on something like this! An engine - one of us is missing! Granpuff was all too happy to act like number two was just relocated and that what happened to him was a made up story; but now that we’re miles away from Mid Sodor he finally decides to ‘fess up!”

The air around the smaller saddle tank soon cleared, revealing him to be in a sorry state with his shoulders hunched and his face buried in his hands, as if he were crying.

Sir Handel awkwardly opened his mouth to say something, but once again Peter Sam cut him off.

“The way he spoke about him back there was almost malicious,” he mumbled, his tone grave and a far cry from his usual, cheery demeanor, “didn’t you hear him? ‘Oh, don’t worry yourself, Peter Sam, nothing of great value was lost,’ like that was meant to make me feel better! He didn’t even care enough to tell me his name.”

Silence fell, a pregnant and unbearable nothingness that threatened to suffocate the two friends, until… “It was - um - Smudger, I think?” Handel said slowly, rolling the name around in his mouth, as if it took him some effort to say. “No, in fact I’m sure that was his name. I’m not about to forget what happened to him in a hurry; Granpuff knew how to tell a cautionary tale and he knew how to make them stick.”

Peter Sam stared down at the floor through the gaps in his fingers; letting Sir Handel’s words and number two’s name rattle around in his smokebox, like a loose eye would rattle in a doll’s head.

‘A cautionary tale.’

‘Smudger.’

“That ‘cautionary tale’ is still buried somewhere below Mid Sodor,” he murmured, allowing his memories of the old line to resurface, “just because we never saw him doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. You remember the tool shed behind ours, right?”

Handel gave a shudder so vicious that his frames audibly clattered.

“Don’t remind me,” he began, “I’d really rather n…”

“Someone has to remind you, damnit!” Peter Sam exclaimed, finally tearing his hands away from his furious face, “we can’t just sit on this, Sir Handel! Not now that we know better. I can’t bear the fact that he was right behind that shed door, he was right there all along for all those years and we did nothing.”

“We were told there was nothing in there, Peter,” Sir Handel fired back, his voice rising to meet the volume of his friend’s, “we were assured. We didn’t pretend he wasn’t there! As far as we knew, that shed was empty.” “Because we were lied to!”

“Cinders and ashes…”

Sir Handel kneaded at the bridge of his nose and turned his face away from his distressed friend, shaking his head.

“You can blame whoever you like, Peter, I don’t want to fall out with you. At the end of the day, our options are limited.” He said curtly. “If I were you, I’d get in touch with the Railway Society; let them know Smudger’s name and his story, at least then he’ll be more than just some blank space on a page. What else can we do?”

Peter Sam snapped his head up to look at his friend, his face the picture of anguish. “‘What else can we do?’ You don’t think there’s any chance of recovering him then?” He asked desperately, his voice had changed, it had pitched up from his normal, agreeable tone to a childish whine. “None?”

Handel gave the green saddle tank an utterly perplexed look before fighting to soften his expression, along with the blow he then dealt.

“Peter Sam, think about it,” he said, his tone uncharacteristically gentle, “say he was found, say he was conscious and in some way physically salvageable, what God-awful state would he be in - here?”

He tapped a long finger against his head.

“How would you even start to rehabilitate an engine in that state? I don’t think it’s worth disturbing him, if he’s still there, which I doubt.”

“So you’re saying we shouldn’t even try to find him?” Peter Sam demanded, his voice cracking with the strain.

“I’m saying that it’s kinder not to.” Sir Handel replied patiently, though he couldn’t suppress a mighty frown. “Give him back his name, tell his story, but let the poor engine rest. Some things really ought to be left alone, Peter. Same goes for the rest of the Mid Sodor, let it lie. Please.”

Another prickly silence fell between the two engines, but Peter Sam’s anger still hung heavily in the air, as thick and as choking as smog. “I don’t know how you can cope with not knowing,” he said, his tone souring with spite, “how can you be so apathetic about this? Need I remind you that had Granpuff not talked some proper sense into you; Smudger might not have been the only one decommissioned. You might’ve ended up singing a very different tune indeed, Falcon.”

“Right.”

Handel turned on his heel and started towards the door, his jaw set, he carried with him an air of one who aimed to quickly diffuse a bomb.

“I'm done, I’m not letting you get arsey with me. I’m just trying to help, Peter, s’not my fault if you don’t want it.”

“Some help! I’m not the engine who needs it right now!” Peter Sam shouted after the retreating engine. “I’m not about to drop this, Sir Handel! Not until the whole island knows!”

Sir Handel might have said something in response, or he could’ve stayed completely silent; the blue saddle tank was already too far away for Peter Sam to hear, or care.

-

Later, when night had fallen upon the island of Sodor, the chilly Winter air dropped to well below freezing with the absence of the sun, but Peter Sam barely felt the cold; his mind was elsewhere.

The awful, restless energy that had possessed him since his row with Duke and Sir Handel had refused to leave him all day. It was a horrid sensation of guilt that ate at him to the point where it eventually drove him out of the sheds and up the rolling hills that surrounded the estate. 

Nobody had stopped him; it was clear that they had all unanimously agreed to leave him be.

Blinded by the discomfort plaguing his mind, Peter Sam kept on going, letting his legs carry him wherever until eventually, he came to with a sudden jolt. 

His angry hike had led to him standing in the middle of a faint dirt track that, judging by the sparse blades of grass that had begun to spring up from the earth, was very rarely used. Peter Sam glanced this way and that, quite unaware of just how he had gotten here and how he would get back; but before that thought could bloom into a real worry, something else soon caught his eye and erased all thoughts of returning to the Skarloey estate from his mind. Something was moving up ahead, something bright.

Around him, the darkness slowly began to close in, surrounding him and covering him in its pitch-black blanket, until all he could see was a light before him, a light that danced almost mischievously before him, a light that was far, far too harsh to have been the moon. Then it was gone as quickly as it had appeared. Before Peter Sam had a chance to process what he had just seen, it blazed into life again except this time it was much closer and now stared out at him from that solid wall of darkness like an eye.

An eye, or perhaps…

On and on it flashed.

On and off. Off and on.

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