Where the Trains Turn: a Tor.com Original

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  Sometimes by nights a capricious wind brought to our ears the noise of a train passing by the district, from the railway far away behind hilly forests. At the closest, the tracks were at least fifteen kilometres away, but now and then it sounded as if the trains did run quite close, even in the folds of our own familiar woods. I got shooting pains in my belly for I knew how that strange phenomenon affected Rupert. Sometimes, when I secretly peeked into his room and checked that the boy was still safe, I saw him pull his quilt over his head and tremble.

  It was obvious that the situation could not continue like that. I didn’t want to take my child to a psychiatrist, at least not yet. I didn’t want him to get a mark in his papers and be labelled a mental health problem. I was myself the best expert with my own child, and therefore I had to grapple with the core of the problem, Rupert’s monstrously grown imagination, before it would undo him.

  First I made a list of things that were apt to make my son’s condition worse. Then I took the necessary measures. Now and then I felt myself a proper monster of a mother, a perverse tyrant who pursues a noble goal by a reign of terror. But I made myself continue in spite of my doubts. My child was in trouble, and I had to save him whatever sacrifices it demanded from both of us.

  First I took a deep breath, grabbed the phone and cancelled the subscription to Donald Duck. And the next morning, after Rupert had shuffled along to the school bus, I hunted down all his comics—Donald Ducks, Superman, Jokerfants, Space Journeys, King Kongs, Phantoms, Shocks, Frankensteins and Werewolves, Pink Panthers, Roadrunners, John Carters, Draculas, Marcoses—and burned them all in the sauna oven.

  There were hundreds, and my work of destruction took hours. The neighbourhood got covered in charred bits of comics.

  I hesitated a while with story books. What kind of a mother could do such a thing, destroy her child’s property like some loutish Gestapo commander?

  But extreme situations demand extreme means, and so I hardened my heart in the cleansing blaze of the book pyres.

  Into the flames went the Grimm’s Fairytales, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, The Best Animal Stories, My Brother Lionheart, Pippi Longstockings and other literary fiction that excited imagination. To be on the safe side I pushed all colouring books in the oven, too.

  Then I sought all his crayons and drawing pens and blocks of drawing paper and all his graphically gorgeous but badly twisted drawings and buried them underneath the currant bushes behind the house. I made a list of the TV-programmes that Rupert could still safely watch. Obviously, all movies were completely prohibited. I entered Rupert for the chess club, the model airplane club, the volleyball club, the boy scouts and the ceramic crafts. After some reflection, I cancelled the ceramic crafts. To conclude it all, I ordered him always from then on to keep his watch on time and to always be aware of the date, or be left without his pocket money.

  Rupert wasn’t very excited about all this, but neither did he protest. When he noticed that his comics and books were missing, he looked at me with silent astonishment but said nothing. I hoped fervently that he would understand this was all for his own best. He tried to ask after his drawing things but fell silent when he noticed my expression and understood that those were gone just like all the other things I considered inappropriate. He didn’t even try to watch his former favourite programmes from the TV, for he guessed it wouldn’t be allowed. Sometimes I turned on the TV and he came and watched it, quietly, until the approved programme was over and I shut off the apparatus.

  “Rupert, it’s time to go to bed. And Rupert, what time is it and what’s the date?”

  “It’s now eight-twenty-three and it’s Wednesday, October twelfth.”

  “Excellent. Well, good night and sweet dreams.”

  The new order was surprisingly easy to realize. Rupert went regularly to the chess club to learn logical thinking, and to my amazement he suddenly started to get first B’s and then clear A’s from math examinations instead of the earlier C’s and D’s. On account of that, Miriam Catterton, the well-known pretty golden haired teacher of his class, came personally to see me and to discuss the boy’s wonderful change. (To be sure, at the same time Rupert’s arts grade fell from A to D and his composition grade also fell off a bit, which I however didn’t consider a bad trade at all—I’d always been afraid that the verbally fluent and graphically gifted Rupert would decide to choose the dubious profession of an artist or a writer for his life’s career.)

  In the model airplane club Rupert constructed a model plane strictly according to the incorruptible laws of aerodynamics and flew it immediately on its virgin flight into the thin upper branches of our backyard rowan tree, where it stayed until it was finally covered with snow. He even learned the ins and outs of volleyball with the village boys and was no longer completely helpless in team games. After I’d looked at his wan expression for a couple of months, I pitied him and let him quit volleyball training.

  As for the boy scouts Rupert wouldn’t agree to go even once, he said they dressed up too silly there according to his taste, but instead he himself thought of joining the school photography club, which I thought was an excellent idea—after all, weren’t cameras used to record objective reality with the most objective way possible (as I then still thought, naively).

  His watch he set to the correct time by the second every evening after the radio time signal. Months went by pretty comfortably, seasons came and passed, and as time went on I started to think that the worst was over.

  But then one winter night, coming back from the bathroom when I peeked into his room, I noticed that the boy had disappeared from his bed.

  I forced myself to calm down and draw a breath and think rationally. He surely hadn’t vanished without a trace; here still were his socks and there his rucksack and old rocking horse, and from the ceiling hung his airplanes. After searching for him in every place at least twice I realized that he had to be outside.

  I saw he had taken his skis from by the steps. Gone was also his fine new camera which he always kept on his bedside table by the glass of water.

  By and by I began to understand that this was by no means the first time he’d done something like this—I suddenly remembered how some mornings he’d looked unusually tired, and I recollected several other suspicious circumstances to which I hadn’t paid attention before (I’d wondered why his boots were often still wet in the morning, although I’d put them to dry on the radiator in the evening).

  I sat by the kitchen table and drank a couple of bathtubs of coffee. After four hours of waiting I was coming to the conclusion that I couldn’t wait any longer but had to phone the village constable Herbert Starling or at least go out myself to seek my child, but then I heard skis swishing outside.

  I heard the door and Rupert lumbered in, bleak as Death itself.

  He was covered with snow all over. His face was blue with cold, although the night was mild. The boy marched into the kitchen in his snowy boots without a word and put his camera on the table in front of me.

  To me, Rupert looked like a soldier returning from battle, small in size but to be taken extremely seriously. Tiny icicles hung from his eyelashes. His clothes had a clinging smell that I couldn’t connect with anything until the next time I was in the vicinity of the railway and sensed that peculiar smell, which somebody may have once told me came from the impregnation substance used in the railway sleepers.

  I wasn’t able to utter anything for a while, so as not to start crying or screaming uncontrollably; I wasn’t able to even move, because I felt a compelling desire to seize the child and thoroughly shake him for scaring me like that.

  Finally I said surprisingly calmly: “I’ll make you a cup of cocoa. You’ll drink it without a murmur and then go back to sleep. The camera stays here. We won’t talk any more about this, but if you do something like this once more, I won’t even ask you anything, I’ll make a stew of you while you sleep and sell you to that drunkard Traphollow for mink food. And with the money I get
I’ll bribe Mr. Starling to close his eyes about your disappearance. And if anybody asks about you, I won’t admit you ever existed. Do we understand each other?”

  Rupert stared at the camera with nostrils wide open. He pointed at it and whispered: “But there’s evidence in there!”

  “Do we understand each other?” I insisted. My voice could have peeled an apple.

  He struggled long with himself before he gave up and nodded.

  After he had drunk his cocoa and gone, I checked the camera and noticed that since earlier in the evening it had been used to take four pictures. (I always tried to keep track of such things.)

  I didn’t want to encourage him to continue his game, which had got out-of-hand, so I pushed the camera far back on the upper shelves of the hall cupboard, behind empty jam pots, and only took it out the next summer when I went and buried it and its film a couple of meters deep, next to the other dangerous things.

  Twenty years later, when Rupert already was studying law in Helsinki, I happened to find a notebook, which had functioned as some kind of diary for him. It was lying on the bottom of the cupboard, with old school books and wrinkled exercise books. On its cover stood the text OBSERVATIONS OF A FERROEQUINOLOGIST.

  Rupert’s diary contained some rather disconnected notes, altogether from a couple of years, and it also included a chaotic explanation about the trip he had made that night.

  It’s very improper to read other persons’ diaries, and of course I did not succumb to such baseness; I just glanced at it a little here and there.

  (Myself, I’ve never kept a diary, at least I don’t remember having done that. Neither when a child nor older. I think the past has nothing to give us, no more than an outdated mail-order catalogue. Besides, my memories in their subjectivity and contradictoriness are much too confused for me to bother recording them.

  I do not know what evil I have done that my mind punishes me so, but almost every night I still see a silly dream in which I anyhow keep a diary. In this Dream Diary of mine one can find all my fuzzy past; there are carefully recorded all the thoughts I’ve thought, all contradictions, all the insignificant incidents which my consciousness has crumbled down as unnecessary, and its pages teem with hidden motives and causes and consequences and obscure speculations about them.

  In the dream I know that I could at any time turn the pages back and look at my past without the softening and diluting influence of time. Only lately, when I’m remembering Rupert, I’ve first started to feel the temptation to do that. But I don’t rightly know. It’s much easier when you don’t dwell too much on what is past, but just accept the concrete present as it is.)

  1.12.1976, Observations of a Ferroequinologist:

  Last night I did it, I PHOTOGRAPHED A TRAIN THAT HAD GONE OFF THE RAILS.

  I got up at 12 o’clock at night, hung the camera around my neck and started to ski on the crusted snow to where I knew the trains did go to turn.

  There’s at least fifteen or twenty kilometres to go or maybe even a hundred kilometres (it’s very hard to know by night how long a distance is) and several times I almost turned back, but some things one just has got to do, as Mummy says, and then finally after skiing for two hours I found the place though I’d gone astray a few times and thought I’d never find home again and the wolves would eat me, or maybe a bear.

  The place where the trains turn is SECRET, and it’s not easy to find. There’s a blind track leading there, but I still haven’t found the place where it forks from the main track though I’ve searched for it many times. It’s pretty close to the section where that train outside the timetable tried to kill me and Dad in summer, maybe four or five kilometres away. I don’t know whether I was more afraid of the place or of Mum tumbling to that I’d gone out (as it happened this time anyway). I waited for surely at least three hours before the train arrived—luckily I had provisions: three chocolate bars, a packet of chewing gum (two eaten beforehand), one gingerbread.

  The rails come to that place in the middle of the forest from somewhere further off, from behind a really thickety terrain. And on them the trains come and go. The blind track ends completely among trees so the trains can get off the rails and turn in the forest and then mount the tracks again and return to where they came from.

  I lay behind the top of the ridge under juniper bushes and watched how one train again crawled slowly and carefully out from the thicket. It came to the end of the blind track, stopped and then started to get off the rails.

  It was huge, although by night it’s also hard to know for sure how big something is. I somehow felt how it changed, not so much outwardly so that it could be seen with one’s eyes, but inwardly. It sort of woke up and pricked up its ears and put about feelers to its environment as if it had guessed I lay there watching.

  I wondered if there was anybody inside it (I felt that even if there was somebody in there, it wasn’t human, at least not a live human).

  Suddenly it became awfully cold and I started shaking and my teeth started rattling. I felt that the coldness came out of the train, as if it had been to the North Pole or the Moon or some other really cold place. I took four photos of it with timed exposure.

  I lay there in the snow without moving and waited and shivered from cold and heard trees breaking and crashing when the train puffed its way along in the snow and made its slow turnaround in the forest and then finally climbed back on the rails.

  It must have taken surely at least four or five hours. I almost peed in my pants and I thought I’d get a proper licking when morning came and Mum went to wake me up and I wouldn’t be at home yet. I tried to look at my watch but there was not enough light to see the hands.

  Then the train slowly went off and disappeared behind the thicket and the air wasn’t so cold anymore. When I was quite sure no more trains were coming I descended into the valley bottom and went to see the rails closer.

  Sometimes one can find all kinds of things there. Once I found from the snow a bit of paper that turned out to be a thirty years old 3rd class train ticket from Helsinki to Oulu. Now I found no tickets, but there was a dead cat. I rather think it was our neighbours’, Toby who had disappeared, but it wasn’t possible to identify it for sure. It had gone all flat and stiff and I saw its intestines. It was just like it had been hit with a house-sized sledgehammer. Not all of it was there, it was as if something had bitten a piece off it.

  I threw some snow over Toby the cat and built it a little gravestone out of snow.

  Once I tried to follow the rails so I’d see where they actually join the big tracks. I walked along the blind track some two hundred meters (the forest around the track is such a tangle nobody can get through it without a chainsaw), but then I had to turn back, because the railway smell got so strong I couldn’t breathe anymore. Besides I was afraid a train would come the other way. If a train had come towards me, I couldn’t have got off anywhere from the rails. I almost fainted just like that one time at school when I had a fever over 39 degrees, and by a side glance I thought I saw all kinds of strange things in the shadows of the thicket, things I don’t like to remember, and afterwards I realized that the railway smell may actually be poisonous when there’s too much of it in the air.

  I won’t go there any more, at least not before I’m grown up and can buy a chainsaw and an oxygen apparatus and other necessary things and when I no longer need to be afraid of Mum.

  When the trains stay on the rails, they are obviously sort of asleep, and people can control them just like a sleepwalker can be manoeuvred.

  I didn’t see the train this time very clearly, since it was quite dark and one cannot see well in the dark, but I did recognize the type. It was one of those big red diesel engines, with a white cabin. I found its picture in the library’s train book. It was a DV15 manufactured in the Valmet Lokomo machine shop. Or it could have been a DV12, which looks pretty much alike. I’m not quite sure. It had 15 wagons after it—I counted them. They were not passenger carriages but empty open
trucks that look like animal skeletons and usually carry tractors and other big machines.

  The previous time I saw a short blue local passenger train, the kind that doesn’t have a separate locomotive. One can see them now and then in daily traffic. They transport people, but at the turning-place the short blue train had blackened windows and I couldn’t see whether there was anybody inside.

  But when I went the first time to the place where the trains turn, I caught a glimpse of a really odd-looking train, and so far I haven’t found its picture anywhere though I’ve spent hours in the library and leafed through all the train-books I’ve discovered. It was quite bullet-shaped and really streamlined and looked actually more like a space rocket than any train. And it seemed to float a bit above the rails. That’s the one I really would like to photograph some day so I could show it to a grown-up who knows a lot about trains and ask what it actually is.

  When I started to return home and came to an open place with more light I looked at my watch. It was only twenty past two, and at first I was relieved but then I started to get doubtful. I felt that it had taken a lot more time. I thought that my watch had stopped for a while, but at home it was showing the correct time anyway when I checked.

  If only I could find my camera and could develop those photos! Even Mum would have to believe when she saw the pictures, though otherwise she doesn’t believe anything, she’s such a bonehead. (I hope Mum doesn’t read this!) I feel she doesn’t even believe in my existence without coming to check on me every little while.

  Today at school we had cabbage casserole and chocolate mousse again, and of course one wasn’t allowed to have chocolate mousse before eating a plateful of cabbage casserole. Ossian threw up on the table when he tried to eat his plate empty, though he hates cabbage more than anything, and the whole table was flowing green and others started to feel squeamish, too. I was smarter and flipped the cabbage casseroles under my chair and fetched myself a big portion of chocolate mousse with a straight face.