Where the Trains Turn: a Tor.com Original

by Pasi Ilmari Jaaskelainen

  1.20.1976, Observations of a Ferroequinologist:

  I dreamt again that a train was chasing me on a road. I climbed to a roof but the train climbed after me along the wall. I woke up when I fell off the bed to the floor and hit my head. I got a big lump. I could hear a train in the forest, again too close. I dared not go to sleep again. In the morning I went to look for traces but didn’t find any.

  4.12.1976, Observations of a Ferroequinologist:

  I dreamt that I sat on the nose of a steam locomotive. It was rushing ahead with enormous speed.

  First the scenery was unfamiliar, but then we came to Houndbury. Two girls were standing on the track. They held each other’s hands. The girls shouted something to me and laughed and at the last moment they stepped aside and their skirts flapped in the draught of the train. Both of them were quite good looking, but I liked more the one with the golden hair.

  The other one seemed familiar at first, but then she wasn’t anybody I knew but a perfect stranger. After a while we approached the level crossing. Behind the level crossing gate a purple car was waiting. Dad was sitting in the car and he looked sad. I waved and yelled at him not to be sad anymore because I was already quite all right, but he didn’t hear.

  Then the locomotive shivered under me and began to feel somehow queer. Awakened. Besides it was no longer a steam engine but a diesel engine. It talked to Dad along the rails, whispering in a peculiar sort of voice that started to make me sleepy though I was already asleep to begin with. It told Dad to put the gears on and to drive on the rails. Somehow it made the gate rise before its time and it bewitched Dad and he obeyed it.

  And we crashed into Dad’s car and I watched how the train smashed the car against the rails a bit like the lion tore up the little deer in “Nature’s Wonders” that Mum still lets me watch on the TV. Sheet metal and steel and register plates and bloody bits of Dad were falling along the tracks. I saw a loose hand fly into a ditch. Dad was smashed all into pieces with the car and suddenly I realized that the train was eating him and then I started to scream and punch the train with my fists.

  Then the train had eaten its fill and fell to sleep again. That’s when I fell off the engine hood and woke up in my bed, and outside a train was hooting shrilly.

  Yesterday I went to the library and looked up in a dictionary what “Ferroequinologist” means. A person interested in railways. Dad sometimes said that he and I are both ferroequinologists, but especially me, considering my origin. I had no idea what he meant by that, and he smiled and promised to explain sometime when I’m old enough to understand. But the train killed Dad, so I’ll probably never find out. And Mum of course understands nothing of these matters.

  6.14.1976, Observations of a Ferroequinologist:

  In my dream the trains were in an especially foul mood, and I dreamt that they chased me all through the night. I ran home and hid in the woodshed, and somebody there whispered in my ear that trains have dragon souls and that’s why they love tunnels and are so mean. It also said that my basic task is to save a maiden. I tried to see the one who spoke, but when I turned I was awake in my bed and staring at my own teddy bear.

  “Observations of a Ferroequinologist” (as well as the smudged train ticket between the pages) ended down in the hole. Rupert had finally, after all, recovered from the morbid and dangerous condition that his swollen imagination had induced. However, I wanted to take no risks with the questions concerning his childhood. We had never spoken about his long ago train fantasies. I felt like he didn’t necessarily even remember them or most anything else about his childhood, at least nothing very detailed—during his student years he always travelled home by train, though there was no railway station in Houndbury and for the last forty kilometres one had to take an inconvenient bus or try to get a lift. Indeed he seemed to have forgotten his childhood, and all to the good. I had forgotten mine, too.

  Studying law kept the boy’s thoughts firmly in the objective reality, ruled by reason and the logic dictated by cold facts. Rupert had no time for idle novels or movies, so his imagination stayed safely asleep.

  But his life was by no means pure toil. He had in the law faculty a couple of fairly good friends with whom to go out and to play tennis (over the years Rupert had become quite an athlete, although in the bird boned fashion of his father). And from his curt postcards I even gathered that for some time he had been seeing a certain young woman who went to the same lectures.

  Rupert went to study law immediately after his high school graduation, for which I take the credit myself. When he had made his last ferroequinologist exploration at the age of nine years, I realized something: even after all the hobbies I’d arranged for him he still had too much time to brood on the peculiar fantasies in his head. I could confiscate his things, and I could make sure that he no longer crept out of the house by night to make his ferroequinologist observations—I for instance attached a bell on his door and another one on his window and hid his shoes for the night. But of course I couldn’t control the thoughts going around in his head. Therefore I had to find a way to make Rupert voluntarily use his head for something sound and rational.

  Gunnar had once left a thick book of statutes in my house. I’d put it temporarily on my bookshelf, in the middle of encyclopaedias, and there it lay forgotten several years. Now I lugged the massive book into Rupert’s slender arms. I told him it was his father’s old book that he had meant for his son when he would be old enough to read it (which might very well have been true). I said his father had told me to pay him five marks for each page he could learn by heart.

  At first the boy seemed suspicious. A couple of days went by. Then he calculated the pages in the book and multiplied that by five. He went to look at the shiny ten-geared bikes in Houndbury Bicycle and Engine, and soon he was spending most of his leisure hours studying the book of statutes.

  I was overjoyed to pay the money he collected from me after examinations. By and by he stopped having nightmares, and he recovered from his anxiety and his train obsessions. Surprisingly quickly he accumulated the money for a bike, but he hardly got time to ride that brand new geared wonder for his reading stint continued; even in sleep he was leafing through his statute book, mumbling his statutes and counting the money he’d earned and would still earn.

  A born lawyer, I thought proudly.

  By spring 1991 Rupert graduated with the best grades, and for a graduation present I bought him a golden Rolex with my savings (I’m not ashamed to admit I cried with happiness for two whole months and finally got a nasty inflammation of the eye). He got a job in a small but respected law office in the capital and moved together with his girlfriend Birgitta who graduated soon after Rupert and found herself a job in the same firm.

  Birgitta Susanne Donner was a good and sensible girl, I’d met her a couple of times and could safely trust Rupert to her keeping. I saw that she would become an exceedingly reliable and refreshing life partner to Rupert, and surely also a caring mother to my grandchildren, when the young couple would have the time to think about reproduction. I had myself started to meet more regularly a certain charming person now that I no longer had to worry about Rupert. It wasn’t especially serious; and dating openly in a small village like Houndbury would have provoked too much talk and fuss, my friend was after all a teacher and thus sort of under the magnifying glass of the villagers. Now and then, however, she stopped for a coffee in the evening, and sometimes it happened that we woke up in the morning nose to nose.

  It would be nice to stop here, with the picture of a successful son and a happy mother. But happy endings in real life are usually just stages on the way to a more final and less cheerful end—the worms will get us in the end, one way or another. Late in the hot July of 1994 trains again got entangled in my son’s life.

  Rupert and Birgitta had been busy for a long while, and sometimes I couldn’t reach them for days on end even by a phone, and I started to suffer from a delusion that my son had somehow disappeared from the ea
rth and I’d never see him again. Finally, however, they managed to take a few days off and come to visit me for a whole weekend.

  Seeing those two enlivened my mind and at the same time made it strangely wistful.

  On Sunday we decided to have a picnic. The day simply floated in heat and bright colours, and when you add to the picture the dragonflies buzzing absent-mindedly to and fro, it was one of those days that should actually be framed and hung on the living room wall for the coming winters. I packed in the picnic basket juice, salami sandwiches and some chocolate cake with cherries I’d baked for Rupert’s approaching twenty-ninth birthday. We drove in Rupert’s new red car along small roads until we came to the foot of Sheep Hill. It rose as a gently sloping green field towards the dense blue sky. In accordance with its name, Sheep Hill was a sheep pasture: they were standing around in white clusters, and now and then they got excited and started baaing in competition.

  We left the car in the shade of a big birch, followed a path that descended near a low stone fence down the steep bank of Sheep Hill (which at some distance changed to Sheep Rock), and arrived finally to our goal, the grassy meadow by the raised railway embankment where the limpid Ram Brook murmured with cool cheerfulness.

  I spread a white tablecloth on the ground, set the table and told the young couple to set to it before the heat and flies would spoil it all. We ate, and suddenly Rupert stood up and, spitting breadcrumbs, proclaimed that Birgitta and he had become engaged two weeks before.

  I almost choked on my sandwich.

  I looked at my son who stared at me as if expecting a scolding. He was nervous since he wasn’t sure about my attitude, but he was obviously very happy, and the sudden perception made me laugh aloud from sheer joy of living.

  “Now what’s so funny?” Birgitta asked, a little suspicious, but then broke into a broad grin. Such a beautiful girl, I sighed. I already knew what I was going to buy them for a wedding present: the most gorgeous hardwood grandfather clock in the universe!

  With a relieved smile Rupert sat down and continued his meal.

  I suddenly thought of the moment Rupert was conceived. I didn’t remember much of it, just that I and Gunnar had had intimate intercourse with each other and prevention had somehow let us down, but anyway, there Rupert now was in front of me, happy, handsome and a successful lawyer with a tie around his neck.

  “I often think of the moment Rupert was conceived. Gunnar took me for a drive on his new motorbike—at that time he still was a rather wild spirit, in his own trim controlled way. He even had a leather coat. That, however, was no ragged black motorcycle jacket but a fine brown Italian coat, surely terribly expensive. I’d seen him often at the Pavilion which in those times still was full of people almost every Saturday of the year, now of course it’s been closed for a long time and people go to the city. I went there now and then to dance and to look at people. He’d been besieging me for some time (at least I felt he’d done that, one couldn’t be quite sure of him), and although he didn’t really turn me on, I liked his quiet self-confidence and that everyone was looking at him, and was willing to go for a ride with him when he asked me.

  We were driving along small roads by this very countryside and stopped finally to sip white wine in the middle of a small lyrical grove. Gunnar said he liked my nose very much, and then he seduced me.

  I still didn’t really want him but I let him do it anyway. It was actually quite pleasant, the light way he made love to me. I held on to his tie and smiled all the time. The grass tickled my bottom. He promised to withdraw in good time before he’d come, and surely he would have done that since he was a perfect gentleman and I knew I could trust him completely.

  Finally I felt his rhythm accelerate. His muscles tensed. I remember hearing the sound of a train, the rails ran somewhere quite close, I hadn’t realized that before. Gunnar was struggling in my arms like a trapped animal, I’d folded my legs behind his back and he couldn’t get off me in time. I was quite sure he would get extremely angry at me, but he just looked at me a little sadly, kissed me on the cheek and took me back to the dance pavilion where we danced one waltz together before he left, looking pensive.

  I knew that a new life had started to develop inside me, and six weeks later the doctor confirmed it.”

  —From the unwritten Dream Diary of E.N.

  I woke up from my thoughts.

  Farther off the sheep had suddenly began baaing wildly. I saw them start to come tumbling down the slope as if they were suddenly in a big hurry to get somewhere.

  “The train is coming,” Rupert said.

  Only now I noticed that there were little decorative Donald Ducks on his picnic tie—he hadn’t completely forgotten his childhood after all. A gust had arisen and was intently tugging at his tie and making his white lapels flap like the wings of a large white butterfly.

  “What did you say?” I said.

  “The train is coming,” Rupert repeated still smiling and pointed somewhere towards the sheep. I put my sandwich down and turned to look.

  The railway ran along the ridge of Sheep Hill; from the cool darkness of the spruce forest it dived down to the clearing and disappeared finally in a long cold tunnel excavated through the Sheep Rock whose mouth stood above us, breathing darkness, on top of the high embankment heaped out of big stones. The growing metallic clang and the rumble of hundreds of metal wheels against the iron rails muffled the protest of the affronted sheep. A fast red electric engine emerged. After it an endless line of dark goods wagons rattled towards the clearing.

  I instinctively glanced at my watch: the time was 1:27.

  The rhythmic noise chased the sheep; finally it filled the whole scene and buried the cries of the sheep under itself like an avalanche. Rupert took the hand of his fiancée, kissed her and then said something I didn’t hear. She laughed. A nervous butterfly fluttered over our party, and its brown dryness made me think of falling autumn leaves.

  The train now drew a moving line the length of the whole clearing. Wagon by wagon it pushed itself above us into the tunnel and eclipsed the sun burning above Sheep Rock, offering instead a hypnotically quick dark-bright dazzle. Dust from the embankment began to fall on us. I glanced upwards with a mild resentment and thought that I definitely ought to cover our sandwiches before they started tasting too sandy.

  Then something broke loose of the train’s dark shape and started to spin down towards us.

  I followed the track of the object on the blue skies, now grey with dust; it rotated and whirled and got bigger all the time. I stared at it spellbound. Suddenly I realized it was coming towards us and would probably fall right in the middle of our picnic.

  I opened my mouth to yell a warning to Rupert and Birgitta, but instead inhaled dust and could for a while get no sound out of my throat because of a fierce fit of coughing. To crown it all the dust blinded my eyes and I could do nothing but cough and fling my arms about and hope that my companions would realize they ought to move back.

  Among the clank and rumble I discerned a muffled crack, like the sound of a breaking egg.

  I tore my running eyes open and saw faintly how Rupert waved his arm, as if greeting an old acquaintance he hadn’t seen for years, and an object the shape of a marrowbone rebounded off his head into the brook. Rupert fell on his back in the grass. Birgitta’s shrill whimper penetrated my ears through the train’s monotonous chant.

  “Do we have eggs in the basket?” I yelled idiotically and started to cough again.

  The girl kept shaking her head and pointed with a trembling finger at Rupert who lay on the slope, limbs spread out, and seemed to be asleep. When one looked closer at him, one could see that his hair’s recently so neat part was now missing completely.

  Birgitta started a furious legal campaign against the State Railways.

  State Railways admitted that the metal object which had broken Rupert’s skull had indeed originated from the train rushing past us, to be exact from the locking system of the twenty-eight
h goods wagon of the train. The Railway attorney expressed his surprise that a part had come loose at all, since that was in principle impossible for the train had been duly and carefully checked before departure according to all possible railway traffic regulations. It sounded as if he were insinuating that actually we should be under suspicion for some malicious act cleverly sabotaging their precious train. The part coming loose troubled the SR very much. But for Rupert’s sake the railway people seemed not to lose a single night’s sleep—when the insincere platitudes were peeled off, the basic attitude of the SR seemed to be Shit happens, so what? You should have kept far off our railway!

  In the past I’d have wanted to go into a blind rage and tear the attorney’s self-important head off his weak shoulders, but the dinosaur seemed to have disappeared from inside me and instead of empowering rage I only managed to feel enormous fatigue and defeat.

  About indemnities no consensus could be reached: Birgitta demanded thirty million, and the Railways did not want to pay a penny over hospital expenses—just paying the hospital bill was already proof of the extraordinary benevolence of the SR and exceeded all legal obligations, said the Railway attorney and chided us for our greed. Birgitta swore to me, gasping for breath, that she would make the Railways pay dearly and would even destroy with different tactical lawsuits the whole Finnish railway system, if nothing less would make the SR take full responsibility for Rupert’s skull fracture and its possible consequences.