Frederik Sandwich and the Mayor Who Lost Her Marbles

by Kevin John Scott

“No. I won’t hide anymore.”

  He thought his head might burst. He scanned the surrounding streets again. He had to get her out of there. He had to get both of them out of there and fast. “She’s hiding,” he said. “Your mama is hiding. She must be. She’s somewhere out of sight. Or you would have found her sooner.”

  Her eyes widened. “That’s true. That’s a good point.”

  “Come on!” He grabbed her hand and hauled her to her feet. A gust of wind bowled paper and dust across the wide-open square. They were terribly exposed. Might be seen from any angle. Where could they go?

  “We know my mama is not the mayor,” Pernille went on. “That childish illusion is behind me now. And she certainly isn’t Gretchen Grondal. So who? Who is she? She’d be someone a lot like me, don’t you think? Someone like us.”

  “A hopeless misfit hiding from the authorities?” he muttered.

  “Yes. Perhaps that’s it.” She stared at the sky.

  “We must go!”

  She stared at the floor. “Someone who doesn’t fit in. That must be right. Someone who cannot reveal herself.” She stared across the square to the steps that led down to Frederik’s Hill Central Railway Station. Blinked. Twice. “Surely not?” she whispered.

  “Surely not what?”

  “Surely not her?”

  “Who?”

  She grabbed his arm, and now it was she who was doing the hauling and he who was being hauled.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Out of sight,” she said. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Somewhere hidden.”

  “The train station?” he said as they reached the top of the steps.

  “Exactly.”

  They plunged down the steep stairs to the station platform. It was quiet down there, but not for long. Within minutes, the whispery silence was shattered by a roaring diesel engine and the screech of ancient brakes. Not In Service said the sign. Do Not Board. But Frederik and Pernille knew this battered, blue train. They’d ridden it once by mistake, and another time by luck. This was how they’d escaped the mayor and her detectives.

  The coaches were dilapidated, decades out-of-date. The doors burst open like weapons. No one ever boarded this train, though it looped the borough every half hour. No one apart from them.

  He followed Pernille up the step and down the narrow aisle of the carriage, among threadbare seats long neglected, little lamps at tables set in the wall. The train growled out of the station, into darkness, daylight, and darkness again. There was a lurch, and he pitched forward, almost falling, and grabbed Pernille’s arm.

  “Bend the knees! Roll with the motion of the train.” The train conductor marched toward them from nowhere, hat askew and gaze askew-er. “Or simply sit down. It’s safer. And while you’re there, I’ll take a look at your tickets please.”

  “We don’t have tickets,” Frederik managed.

  “Relax, dear. I’m joking.”

  It was impossible to buy tickets for this train, as they knew. It only continued to run due to a bureaucratic oversight. And for all her official sternness, the conductor had helped them immensely in the past. In fact, it was she who had first suggested their club for outsiders. She gave an unexpected cackle, a glint in her eyes, one pointing a slightly different direction than the other. “I imagine if you two are back on my train, there must be a very good reason. Am I right? Sit down! Sit down! There’s a really bumpy bit coming up any second.”

  Pernille did as she was told. That was unusual. The conductor took the opposite seat, and just in time. The carriage rocked and rattled madly and Frederik tumbled onto the rough upholstery. The conductor’s graying hair was short beneath a battered, blue hat with the crest of Frederik’s Hill. There were shiny patches at the elbows and cuffs of her blazer. Her skirt looked a little too worn. Everything about this train was worn: an underground branch line entirely forgotten by everyone up above.

  Brakes whined, and the train slowed into the glow of another underground station. Municipal Hall and Lighthouse. Disused for years, by order of Her Ladyship the Mayor. Dust drifted along the platform. Frederik’s breath caught. Somewhere directly above them, inside Municipal Hall, Venkatamahesh was facing the mayor. She’d make him talk. Name names. Their names: Frederik Sandwich. Pernille Yasemin Jensen. Wanted. For crimes against the borough. And guilty as could be.

  “We are here for a reason,” Pernille told the conductor.

  “I knew it,” said the conductor. “I could tell straightaway. You’re not yourself.”

  “Am I not?” Pernille replied. “I don’t know if I am. I don’t know who I am. Never have.” She raised her enormous eyes toward the conductor.

  The conductor sighed. “You will, dear. Soon enough.” And she leaned across the gap to give Pernille’s knee a friendly rub.

  Emotions leaked across Pernille’s face, one after another—hope, excitement, worry.

  “You think it’s her?” Frederik realized.

  “I think it’s her,” Pernille whispered.

  “No,” he said. “Pernille, no. I doubt that.”

  “Is it you?” She grabbed the conductor’s hand. “What is your name?”

  “My name, dear?” The conductor laughed. “How odd. It’s usually my job to ask that question. My name is Edna. Edna Brink. And I’m delighted to see you both again, tickets or no tickets.”

  “Pernille Brink,” said Pernille under her breath.

  “No dear, Edna Brink.”

  “Please ignore my friend,” Frederik interrupted. “There’s been a misunderstanding.”

  “No, there hasn’t,” Pernille said.

  Edna the conductor squinted at them both. “I think there might have been. I’m not following this conversation at all. Age, perhaps. Or too many loops of this branch line on my own. I fear I’ve gone loopy.”

  The train was moving again, Municipal Hall was slipping away into darkness. There was no way to get to Venkatamahesh. No way to help him.

  Unless…

  Frederik gulped. Edna the conductor? She had helped them before. She’d warned them about the mayor. She knew the borough’s secrets. And there was no one else.

  “We’re in trouble,” he said. “Again.”

  “I thought so. What is it this time?”

  “Zombies.”

  Her eyes scrunched up.

  “The mayor is having people arrested. It’s our fault. We mentioned the zombies. But zombies don’t exist. How could they?”

  “Which zombies, dear?”

  “The ones the elephant keeper told us about.”

  “Rasmus?” she said, suddenly breathless. “Rasmus Rasmussen?” She had a lifelong crush on the elephant keeper, though she hadn’t seen him for years.

  “Yes. Rasmus thinks there are zombies. Here in these tunnels. He’s out of his mind, of course. Completely doolally.”

  Worry descended on Edna. Her face became gray. “And you mentioned these zombies? Publicly?”

  “Just to some kids. What’s wrong with that?”

  “We never mention them, dear.” She pulled herself forward and regarded him with very grave concern. “We never mention them.”

  “But they don’t exist!” he wailed.

  Edna straightened her jacket and frowned at the floor. “Whatever gave you that idea?”

  The seat vibrated beneath him. The carriage rattled.

  “You’re joking,” he said. “You’re kidding me. Zombies? There’s no such thing.”

  Edna stood slowly, rubbing her back. Stepped into the aisle and said, “Come with me. But be careful. It’s dangerous.”

  Confused and nervous, Frederik and Pernille followed Edna along the dusty carriage, through the door at the end, and suddenly they were outside. A howling roar, a wind tunnel. A narrow step across couplings from one coach to the next. Edna hopped the ga
p as though it weren’t there and tugged open the door on the other side. Frederik held his breath and followed, terrified of falling. The next compartment was like the first—shabby, worn, years out of date. They struggled after Edna, trying to keep their feet as the train swayed.

  “I’m sure it’s her,” Pernille whispered to him. “Isn’t she amazing?”

  “This way, dears! Hold on tight.”

  They reached the end. Another door. Another roaring gap between carriages, railroad ties flashing by just feet below. Edna hauled them across to safety and slammed the door behind them. It was like being dragged through a battlefield.

  “Here,” Edna murmured. She stepped aside so they could see.

  They were nearer the front of the train now, inside a carriage just like the others. Except the seats were demolished. Bent and buckled and shoved against the sides. Metal handrails had been bent like paper clips. Tables were hanging broken from the walls. The chintzy drapes were ripped. The shell was intact: the walls and the roof and most of the windows. But dividing partitions of wood and glass had been flattened. There was rubble everywhere. Fist-sized lumps of rubble. Big, jagged rocks. On the floor and on what was left of the seats. And a roaring, howling wind. Because the far end of the carriage had no door. Not anymore. In fact, the far end of the carriage was just an enormous, ragged hole, and beyond it, another. In the halfhearted light of the few remaining bulbs, they could see through the gash and all the way along the next car. More wreckage. And then Frederik looked down.

  His stomach clamped tight.

  His breath abandoned him.

  Bile rose in his throat.

  In the half-light, halfway along the carriage, staring up at him from the floor, eyes and mouth opened wide in a hideous grimace, was a severed human head.

  Chapter 7

  Round the Twist

  The mouth twisted in a cruel snarl. The eyes were wide open, but there were no irises, no pupils—just gray, bulging eyeballs with no center, no soul. The cheeks were deathly pale. Gray hair, gray flesh. The severed head of an old, wrinkled, balding man.

  Frederik was so shocked he forgot to steady himself. The train braked and sent him tumbling toward that hideous head. “No!” he yelled. “Help!” He hit the floor among stones and debris, sliding out of control. He came to a stop just a reach away. It was horrifying. The tongue drooped from its mouth. Teeth were missing, others chipped. An awful, colorless sag to the skin and the lips. He tried to slither backward, staring straight into those unblinking eyes.

  And then Edna’s sturdy shoes crunched the gravel by his ear. “I see you’ve met Abbot Anders,” she said. “First prior of the Abbey of Valgaard.”

  Pernille knelt beside him. Reached out with tentative fingertips.

  “Don’t touch it!” he hissed.

  But she did. “It’s cold,” she said. “Terribly cold.” Then she rapped it with a knuckle, right on top. It made a dull, solid sound. “And stone dead. Literally. Feel it.”

  “No!”

  “It’s stone, my little muffin. It’s made of stone.”

  He dared to look closer. Eyebrows, eyelids, lips, teeth. Intricate, awful detail. But she was right: Stone. A horribly lifelike carving. Not a zombie. Stone.

  He was overcome with relief and embarrassment. He scrambled up and tried to recover his dignity. Brushed some of the dust from his pants.

  “What is it doing here?” Pernille asked Edna. “On your train?”

  “Nothing,” Edna said. “Nothing at all. It’s been here, doing nothing, for thirty years.”

  “Since the disaster,” Frederik realized. “The one that no one will talk about. With the train and the mayor and Rasmus the elephant keeper.”

  Thirty years before, the branch line had been closed by a terrible accident, and the elephant keeper was arrested for attempting to murder the mayor. Exactly what had happened that day remained a hazy mystery.

  “And that,” Frederik said, “is one of the zombies?”

  “Some might call them that, dear. Rasmus Rasmussen might.”

  “Were there more?”

  “Many more.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “I don’t know,” Edna said. “The mayor had them taken away.”

  The train complained into the dripping damp of the Cisterns station. Pipes and tubes and taps snaked everywhere. Water dribbled down the cracked carriage windows as though it were raining.

  “So Rasmus was right?” His head was full of fragments of information, but they wouldn’t fit together. “There really were zombies? This was what the mayor wanted to hide?”

  “She wasn’t mayor in those days, but yes. It’s her darkest secret. That was the day she lost her marbles, you see. The day she first went round the twist.”

  “She went crazy?” Pernille said. “She lost her mind?”

  “No, no. Not Kamilla. A clearer, colder, more calculating mind could not be found.”

  “But she lost her marbles, you said. Went round the twist.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Edna led them through the wreckage to a bench intact enough to sit on. “I was just a slip of a girl when the accident happened. Dizzy. Distracted.”

  Frederik glanced out the window at the damp of the Cisterns. Shuddered, watching for sinister faces at the glass.

  “The branch line was wonderful in those days. We called it ‘the Twist.’ I don’t know why; it’s more of a loop. But it was the place to be seen. ‘Go Round the Twist,’ the billboards said. It was sort of a joke, you see. And people did, from far and wide. You could get on and off wherever you wanted with the one ticket—the Garden Park, the castle, the brewery. The zoo brought the crowds in their thousands. The porcelain factory too. Something for everyone, the kids, the grandparents.”

  Pernille gazed at Edna, hypnotized.

  “And it wasn’t only for tourists. There were hundreds of workers converging on Frederik’s Hill every day. Factory laborers, brewers, municipal officers. We made a preposterous profit. Which is how the train came to be so luxurious.”

  Frederik blinked at the tattered drapes and shabby seats.

  “Of course, it could do with some patching now. But thirty years ago, my goodness, there wasn’t another train like it. The fabrics, the polish, the grain of the wood—like the classic railways of old: the Trans-Siberian, the Orient Express. My heart would thump every time I boarded, clutching my notebook, my little pencil, so proud to be part of the finest railway there was. And you may not believe it now, my dears, but I turned a head or two in my uniform, in spite of my eccentric eye.”

  Frederik pretended he’d never noticed any such thing.

  “Strapping young men on their way to the Cisterns. Brewers, hardened from hefting barrels. Civic officials, tall and serious in suits and ties. They would wink as I checked their tickets. But I didn’t take any nonsense. Nothing would come between me and my duty to the railway.” She sighed. “Can it really be thirty years?” She watched the station slide away.

  “And the zombies?” Frederik asked.

  “The ‘marbles,’ she called them. Life-size medieval statues carved from solid rock. Every church and castle in the country had a few. Over the centuries, wind and rain took their toll. Finer details eroded away. There was a TV documentary about it. And a certain ambitious young woman took note. She muscled her way forward, determined to make a name for herself.”

  “And her name was Kamilla Kristensen?” Pernille guessed.

  “Yes. At that time Secretary for Arts and Antiquities, here on Frederik’s Hill. She blackmailed someone into giving her a budget. Then she arranged for all the marbles to be brought to Frederik’s Hill for restoration and a grand exhibition. The porcelain factory had special equipment. And the only way to get all that rock to the porcelain factory—”

  “Was the Twist,” Frederik said.

  �
��That’s right. One spring morning, we waited for hours while she marshaled them, one at a time, onto the train. Filled four whole carriages. It was the first time I saw her, and right away, I didn’t like her. Barking orders and waving her little clipboard around like she owned the line.”

  Edna’s eyes clouded. She fell quiet. She was somewhere else. Somewhere long ago. “Ole the Engineer took it slow. There were no passengers. No room. I was three carriages that way.” She nodded toward the front of the train. “I’ll show you.”

  They picked their way along the inside of the train, stepping over debris. Occasional fragments were recognizable. Here a stone hand, there an ear. They braved the gale between the cars, the broken benches, and shattered fixtures, another carriage, and another, more damage.

  But the final car they reached was completely different. It was like a huge cattle car, no seats, divided into two large spaces by a hinged metal gate halfway along. Dusty floorboards. Bars at narrow windows. One enormous door in the end they had come from, and another in the side wall beyond the gate.

  “I was standing just here,” said Edna. “And he was standing there.” She looked to the gate.

  “Who?” Pernille breathed.

  “Rasmus. The elephant keeper. I was dawdling, hoping he’d notice me.” She shook her head sadly. “He was the only man I ever loved.”

  “What happened?”

  “I came through the gate to this end of the car. Then he saw me, and he seemed to falter. I didn’t know why. I saw him blush. What is it? I wondered. And then I saw, in the palm of his hand, a tiny box. The lid was open. And something was sparkling under the lights.”

  “A ring?” Pernille whispered.

  “He was just feet away. Right there, in front of us.”

  “And?”

  The train rumbled like a drumroll.

  “Then the door behind me flew open.” She whirled around as if to confront whoever had dared to break the spell.

  “Who was it?”

  “Kamilla.”

  “The mayor?”

  “She was yelling, ranting, ‘What the devil is that?’ and Rasmus became completely flustered. Kamilla kept shouting and shrieking and pointing, ‘What’s that? What’s that?’”