Now and then Rupert flashed ahead of me, a shadow in the shadows, and then after I didn’t see him for some time and thought I’d lost him, but when for the thousandth time I pushed myself, protecting my face, through the firs that had died in each other’s arms, I saw him.
The trees were thinning out a bit and even let some light through; somewhere above, the moon’s pale disk flashed. After a long and breath-taking climb Rupert had stopped to wait for me in the middle of juniper bushes. Leaning on his sticks he was staring ahead with a severe expression.
“It’s there,” he whispered, when I had hurried close to him. “We’ve arrived.”
In front of us there was a valley-like depression, a sort of pool filled with darkness, from the bottom of which snowy trees stretched themselves up to the black edges of the sky. And only a stone’s throw away from where we stood was a blind track. I couldn’t see all of it, but here and there between the trees dim rails were gleaming. The track came from somewhere beyond the forest, from the heart of a similar (or perhaps even worse) tangle of darkness than we had just gone through; it ran on a low bank among the trees until it suddenly ended in the middle of a stand of fir trees, as if it had been cut off with enormous scissors.
I frowned. Rails were not supposed to end like that. Where rails ended there had to be a proper barrier so that trains wouldn’t accidentally drive too far and fall off the rails! The track seemed anyhow to be in quite a wrong place. Perhaps by some office desk a line had been drawn in a wrong place on the map, and when the mistake had finally been discovered the men of the railway construction gang in the forest had simply left the work unfinished and gone off, swearing and laughing and cracking jokes about the wisdom of engineers.
I drew the peculiar smell of railways into my nostrils. Here it felt markedly stronger than anywhere else. “And this place is…”
“The place where the trains turn,” Rupert said quietly. He seemed embarrassed, or perhaps nervous. The cold sculpted crystal clouds out of his breathe and the overlapping shadows of the trees hid his features from the moonlight and my eyes. He took the skis off, stuck the sticks close by in the snow and laid himself down in a prone position.
I followed his example.
“One of them ought to be arriving from out there soon enough. Sometimes you have to wait for a long time, but it’s no use worrying about the course of time here, I’ve noticed. Do you have a watch with you?”
I drew my sleeve up and tried to find some moonlight, but the darkness stubbornly covered the hands of my watch and I couldn’t see them, however closely I kept peeking or turning my hand.
“Where’s your own watch?” I asked then.
Rupert said his own Timex used to stop during ferroequinologist observation trips; he hadn’t bothered to keep it with him any more since that kind of stopping surely would harm the delicate watch machinery over time.
I lifted my own watch to my ear and tried to hear if it was ticking. I heard nothing, but maybe my ears were just frozen. Besides, there was an almost non-existent breath of wind among the trees, and it somehow made the dried-up forest continuously crackle and rustle around us, which hampered my efforts to listen.
Rupert surprised me by asking whether I wanted a half of his chocolate bar. I was going to automatically refuse, but then I realized that I did want chocolate, very much, the first time since my childhood. Rupert took a chocolate bar from his rucksack and passed me one of the bits. Then he wrapped his Burberry closer around himself and settled into a comfortable position like an experienced watcher. And we watched the rails drawn into the wildwood and the rustling trees standing around us, and the white snow packed to keep company with darkness and shadows in the narrow spaces between the trees, and we ate chocolate and we waited.
By and by the waiting started to feel ghostly familiar to me. My tired brain probably played some kind of electrochemical trick, I thought sleepily, and then I yawned long and slowly started to regret taking this whole purposeless nighttime skiing trip—what had I thought, foolish woman, to leave my warm bed on a night like this…
We wanted to look Death in the eyes and laugh at its face, and that’s why we that Saturday met and walked to the railway around five p.m., immediately after we’d come from school and eaten dinner and washed the dishes. When we got to the rails, it started to patter raindrops the size of cranberries. Our dresses got wet and stuck to our skin, and we got cold but we didn’t leave; Death had to be humiliated today, too, Alice said, so we could really feel alive.
We both had some bones to pick with the cosmic saboteur called Death: it had wasted the life off Alice’s mother with tuberculosis when Alice had been only four years old, and from me it had stolen a good dog—a year earlier my gay collie Robbie had run under the train when he was chasing a rabbit. (I’d also lost Uncle Gabe quite recently, but I didn’t care that much about him, for he had been a boisterous drunkard of a man, never did anything really sensible, just boozed and ran around with his pants down and yelled awful obscenities to kids.) We wanted to defy Death, and what would have represented him to us better than the train that thundered non-stop mystically through Houndbury.
First, it had killed my Robbie, rolled over him like some moving meat grinder on the rails. And only a couple of months before Elmer of Pig Pond had walked into a train somewhere around here, because he had lost in the war his ability to see life’s beautiful side (that’s what daddy said anyway), and Elmer was by far not the only Houndbury person who over the years had come to do the same trick, “bitten the train”, as people used to say—during the last year at least six locals had “bitten the train”, and we were not farther than May yet. Considering that, it was understandable that the train nowadays reminded most locals of death—we had no station anyway, and the train didn’t stop at Houndbury, except when somebody jumped in front of it with the purpose of self-destruction, so one couldn’t really think of the train as a vehicle.
We breathed in the peculiar smell wafting about by the rails and waited. (Alice said the smell came from rust and the impregnation stuff used in the sleepers and some third unknown substance). While we waited we sucked the sugar lumps Alice had pinched from home.
The train came every Saturday at 5:15. Today it was late, I checked the time on my fine Russian watch I’d got from daddy as birthday present (he’d found it laying on the ground during war). We heard the train only at 5:23.
“It’s coming,” Alice whispered. We kissed each other on the cheek according to our ritual and took each other’s hands. Alice had a warm hand and enviably slender fingers, she had the talent to become a pianist, said our teacher, and Alice was taking piano lessons once a week from Amalie Forrester.
The train puffed into sight from behind the bend. If you stand on the rails when the train comes, Alice had once said, you’ll be smashed up like a fly under a hammer. You have no chance at all to survive. But at the very same moment you step aside from its path, the train becomes harmless and Death loses his grip on you. You can stand half a meter or even just a few centimetres from the moving train, and the Grim Reaper can’t do anything but grin at you. Then you can laugh at his pale disappointed face!
At first the train looked like a smoking huffing toy, a cleverly constructed miniature model of a goods train. Then it took its place in the perspective and grew in my eyes up to its real dimensions. I looked at the black nosed apparition that was rolling towards us, metallically rumbling; I looked at the rails on which it was travelling and between which we were standing, teetering on the sleeper.
The train meant millions of kilograms of unstoppable weight. If we were to stay on the rails, it would tear us to pieces without even having to slow down. Though the engine driver would brake, the train would never get to stop in time, not before it had wiped the rails with our remains for the length of a couple of kilometres at least.
Usually the thought gave me a bubbling excitement in my stomach, but now I was just cold. I wasn’t feeling well and I kept moving around
nervously and aimlessly fiddling with my hair which didn’t look golden like Alice’s but was boringly dark.
The train hooted. Alice laughed aloud, shrilly, but I didn’t feel like laughing, not one hair of a shrew’s whiskers.
“Take us if you can!” Alice whispered sensuously and laughed again. She was sometimes quite scary when she was like that, and maybe that was why I liked her so much; being with her never felt ordinary.
When the engine’s dark presence was only fifty meters away, the train hooted again. Our play probably made the engine driver nervous, and sometimes we saw him shake his fist at us, but as Alice said: What could he have done to us? Jump off the train to punish us?
The green-black engine rushed towards us. Its long bumpers stretched eagerly forward like the hands of a hungry child. The headlight trembling on its hood looked like a Cyclops’ gleaming eye. Steam rasped and swished with terrible pressure in its iron lungs and pipes, and the furiously whipping pistons on its sides forced the steel wheels to revolve faster and faster and faster. The funnel splashed smoke clouds on the sky and they started to spread like black dye dropped into water. There was a number plate on the round end of the metal hood with the series “3159”; I read the numbers over and over and thought how easy it would be to go on reading them, endlessly, and to forget oneself on the rails and just let everything happen to you.
We left the rails and pretended to be calm and unhurried, although my guts were tightening and my body felt cold and heavy.
We stayed on the railway bank, on our old place just by the rails, not too close but close enough to be able to smell the disappointment of Death when the train was rumbling past. We stood there, erect and proud as princesses and waited for the train’s draught to shake our clothes and the noise of its rhythm to deafen our ears, and for the smoke the engine was puffing to surround us for a moment and brush our faces like a cloak of our ancient enemy, cut from a weave of darkness.
Then we’d know that uncle Death had once again lost the game and we had won, and we’d feel ourselves quite especially alive.
The engine screamed. Its voice was hungry, it had something in it that was similar to the crying of the strange, ever-angry baby born to our neighbours when it woke up and started to demand food, mad with rage. I felt the smell of railways in my nose, stronger than ever. The train’s rhythmic noise sort of reached out an invisible arm and seized my heartbeats; for a moment our rhythms were one, and blood started coursing along my veins all too fast—something was now different from earlier times, I’d felt that all the day in my stomach; suddenly I realized that this time the powers we’d been defying had their own plan for us.
I wrenched my eyes off the approaching train and tore my hand off Alice’s and fled in senseless panic.
After the dash of a few heartbeats I slowed down. Embarrassed I looked behind me, and immediately lost the control of my body as totally as if I’d been shot. I forgot the existence of my feet and how to move them, and everything else, and flew on my side into the boulders, but if I happened to hurt myself I didn’t remember how to feel any pain.
The last seconds had been full of sound, I now realized. The very same moment I had spurted to flee there had been a hard metallic slam. It was followed by a long scratching noise, huge as the sky, it sounded like the Father God from religion lessons Himself had thumped his foot down from the clouds and started to furrow a kilometre deep line into the ground.
My insides constricted and turned into a cold mess when I saw the engine throw gravel, dust and stones in the air so that the whole sky was filled up with earth.
The engine numbered 3159 no longer ran on rails. It pawed the embankment and then as in a fit of anger started into quite another direction than the rails tried to persuade it. It drew the whole chain of wagons after itself, over thirty wagons long, yanked it furiously off the rails. The train was now free and mad with exultation. The steam pistons pulled it violently forward like the forearms of a lunatic escaping from an isolation ward. It wanted to conquer the world. Nothing could stop it. The arrogant challenge whispered by a little girl had freed it, and on the engine’s hood Death himself was roaring with laughter in his flowing cloak.
I looked at the train gliding past me as a huge and endlessly long dream monster, darkening the light of the sky and filling all my consciousness.
Had I stood up and taken a couple of steps I could have touched its dark flank, gone along with it. Then I turned my head, now weighing as much as a horse’s, and looked at the little golden haired girl towards whom the train was speeding. Alice stood in front of the metal monster she had freed, slender and vulnerable and angelically beautiful. I gasped for breath: I’d never realized that she was so exceedingly beautiful! She still seemed to be full of laughter, her mouth a black hole and thin hands twirling like the wings of a windmill. Her voice wasn’t audible, the train’s thousand-voiced scream filled the whole world. The girl was visible only for the hundredth of an instant and then the gravel and smoke and the moving black metal mountain swallowed her up.
And the train still kept pushing forward, rebellious and insatiable and hungry. Off the rails its massive speed was unavoidably slowing down, however. Its wagons were colliding into each other, and a chaos ensued that an orderly mind could no way perceive.
The train seemed like a giant dying beast, a dragon fallen on its side and leaking dry. From inside the split engine case thick black smoke was gushing out, it started to bury the wrecked giant and hide it from the eyes of the world. Some wagons had burst like cardboard boxes and the stuff inside them was spread all along the track.
The smoke crept on the ground to me, and when it touched my bare feet I shuddered with loathing—I felt that in its shelter the many-faced emperor Death himself was hiding; with his bony hand he was stroking my living flesh that fascinated him so much. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, it whispered gently among the engine’s hiss, let’s bear no grudge, dear girl, let’s meet again sometime!
And somewhere in the shelter of the smoke Death was pressing against his thin breast the lifeless body of my Alice, my golden-haired slender-fingered little Alice…
whose residual warmth I still felt in my own hand;
whose desk would be empty on Monday morning;
who would then have a moment of silence to commemorate her, and the boy who had secretly been in love with her would burst into tears in the back row;
whose parents would turn grey and shrivel up and bend down in a few weeks and move away from the village without saying good-bye to anybody;
who would never more appear for piano lessons with Amalie Forrester, because her pianist’s hands had been cut off and crushed under the train and would never play even the simplest melody…
I thought of the day when Robbie had chased the rabbit to the rails and run directly in front of the train. I’d never have believed an animal could look so sincerely astonished. I’d collected hairy pieces in a sack for several days from along the track. Even if dogs wouldn’t get to heaven I wanted to give him at least a decent rest in a grave. I walked back and forth along the track from morning to evening and searched the ditches and grassy plots and brooks, but Robbie’s left ear, right hind foot and half of his tail stayed missing. I’d always felt that the train had eaten them.
I pressed my eyes shut and with all my soul’s power sent an appeal to the One who had deemed it justifiable to let the train run over Alice, whoever or whatever it was—perhaps some kind of a Big and Terrible Death Deity of the Railways existed, whom we in our immense ignorance had defied: IF IT’S AT ALL POSSIBLE TO YOU, PLEASE MAKE THIS SOMEHOW UNHAPPENED! I’LL GIVE YOU ANYTHING!
Then I turned my back on the scene and walked home.
I felt confused. I never told anyone, not even my parents, that I’d been a witness to the death of my best friend and to a train accident that was talked about in the newspapers and even on the radio. It felt too unreal for me to talk about it. I never let myself even think about that rainy
afternoon. Finally it turned into that hazy dream image that sometimes flutters somewhere on the fringes of my consciousness like a black bird.
It was the memory of that day I felt nearby when Gunnar was inside me moving faster and faster and I held onto his tie and suddenly heard quite close the train’s terrible hungry scream—the memory returned and took the breath from my lungs and the warmth from my blood and the feeling from my nerves. I repelled the shadow of Death, coldly stretching towards me, by clinging to the chance of a new life which in that magic moment was within my reach—I seized it, stole it, refused to surrender it back to Nothingness, which is just the other name of Death.”
—From the unwritten Dream Diary of E.N.
“Now,” Rupert whispered.
I stared into the vertical darkness of trees where the rails emerged.
I heard something, maybe a heavily melancholy metallic sigh that lingered, echoing in the snowy halls of the quiet forest. It was followed by a stretching metallic screech. Then I saw movement, or rather a premonition of movement.
At first it was just a shadow among shadows, the mischievous play of night wind and moonlight among the swaying spruce and snow. But gradually an apparition began to take shape on the clearing’s edge. The rails held up a tall black being which crept forward, hissing, gasping and terrifyingly huge and heavy. Now and then the moonlight touched it, but not for a moment did it give up the shadows it wore. It moved carefully, almost shyly, and nearly stopped, but then it puffed a large smoke cloud out into the frozen air, gave a jolt and started, creaking painfully, to flow off the rails in front of my eyes.
I realized vaguely that Rupert stood up near me.
“What are you planning to do?” I asked him.
I was straining to understand what was happening before my eyes; I kept trying to figure out a plausible explanation to it and to fit it into some rational frame of reference, but the gnawing ache behind my brow didn’t make rationalization any easier.
Where the Trains Turn: a Tor.com Original Page 6
