“You just stay there. And mother: don’t move, under any circumstances! Wait there, keep your head low and hold your ears.”
“My ears?”
But he had already gone, rushed down the slope with coat hems flapping, towards the train descending off the rails. I stared after him along the surface of the snow, until he sank into the thick shadows.
Hold your ears.
A series of relays clicked in my head, and suddenly I remembered the dynamite theft Miriam had mentioned; I remembered all the recent cases of disappeared explosives. How much had actually been taken?
…Or else there’s a huge cache of explosives somewhere close by. Very soon a part of Houndbury will surely fly off in the four winds!
“But you can’t possibly blow up a train!” I whispered into the darkness, completely taken aback.
But of course he could do it. He was brain-damaged and more irrational than ever and could do anything, because he no longer acknowledged my authority. And all those unexplained thefts of explosives—I could see with the eyes of my mind how my son had committed burglaries by night and skied here with his loot and gradually charged the whole valley. I couldn’t imagine how much he knew about explosives, surely not much, but probably still enough to achieve a considerable blow-up. Trains had hurt him in so many ways, and now he planned to pay them back, measure for measure.
“Rupert, no…”
I rushed after my son through the juniper bushes. All the time I expected the dusk in front of me to flare up in a fire that would strip clothes and skin and flesh off me and fling my burnt-up bones up the slope. Even I couldn’t at this moment discover any rational explanation for why a train would run off rails by night in the middle of a remote forest, but that didn’t make blowing up the train any more reasonable an idea, now did it?
“Rupert, leave the train alone!” I yelled. “We have to talk seriously. Let’s go home and take some chocolate cake out of the freezer and make some cocoa and talk properly! What about it?”
It was darker at the bottom of the valley. I ran among the spruce, juniper and pine towards the rails.
I slowed down when a peculiar lump on the ground caught my eyes. I stooped down to look at it. It was a little snowman. Or not a snowman, a gravestone – there was some engraving on it, too, but I couldn’t figure it out.
I kicked off the snow on its base, and something like a paw came into view.
I straightened up and realized that I had indeed no time to think about such matters. I had to warn the engine driver before Rupert would carry out his obsession and destroy even what little was left of his life. The snow squeaked and thudded under my steps.
“Rupert, Rupert,” I whispered. “Is this now that ‘creative imagination’ of yours?”
A long hiss made me stop.
I listened for a while and then carefully stepped through the spruce twigs hanging in front of me.
About ten or fifteen meters away from me was the train, or rather the shape of a train covered in smoky darkness. It was surrounded by trees and darkness, a lot of darkness. The valley was a real sea of darkness, where everything was made up of different degrees of darkness and the scant light afforded by the moon only managed to confuse the eye with its roguish play. If I could see properly, there was a big black steam engine driving the train that had arrived via the rails, a real museum piece. So black it looked like condensed night, like darkness cast in the shape of an engine. There was a dark line of goods wagons behind it. Those were still left on the rails, but the engine stood in the snow between the spruce trees. Its long black bumpers stretched towards me like the paws of a beast. I only saw completely clearly the plough-like metal contraption in front of it that was probably intended to remove obstacles off the rails; it had snow and twigs heaped on it now.
Perhaps they were founding a kind of steam engine museum out here, I reasoned weakly.
I wished my head wouldn’t ache so furiously; even a slight migraine hampered logical thinking and easily made me do foolish things. (When Rupert was six years old I had, for instance, taken all the laundry out of the washing machine and directly off to the rubbish heap. Rupert had given me an enormous headache by pretending for three days in a row that our house was a space ship landed on Uranus—when I’d tried to open the windows, he had hysterically caught my hands and screamed something about a noxious atmosphere waiting outside.)
“Hello!” I yelled and waved my hand. “Ahoy! You there in the engine! Have you seen my son? Stetson and a long coat. He’s not quite himself just now, and I think you ought to—”
The engine spat thick smoke and howled. Its voice kept whirling around me and my ears rang as if my head had turned into the bell tower of an enormous cathedral. It was too dark to see inside the engine. The train itself seemed to stare at me with its lamp-eyes. It looked curious. If an inanimate machine can somehow look conscious, this one did.
I stared at the big green-black mass of the engine, my head bent back, and tried to ignore my subjective feelings which were getting more irrational all the time. I felt I was being stared back at. Of course it was an engine driver looking at me from the cover of darkness, not the train itself, but the illusion was strong. And in certain hours of the night the human mind is apt to be carried off by subjectivity; perhaps this lack of objectivity has something to do with the phenomenon called biorhythms.
“Hello! You ought to listen to me now, before anything unpleasant happens!”
I took a few steps closer to the train. I wanted to see whether anybody was left in the engine. Perhaps the engine driver had by now noticed that something was going on and had gone off to examine the situation. I looked around myself.
“Rupert! I’m here! Mother’s by the train! Don’t—don’t do anything at all!”
I hoped my son—wherever he was hiding—would have the patience to keep his hands off the explosives as long as he knew I was close by.
Then I stopped, confused.
The train radiated incomprehensible coldness that penetrated all my clothes and burned my skin. I noticed the snow around the train was freezing to steely hardness, I heard the snow crackle as it hardened. The engine puffed and jerked a couple of meters forward, closer to me. The smoke spread everywhere into the darkness and added its own gauzy shade to it. The plough bit the snow. The engine’s hood pushed into the moonlight, the twigs swayed aside and I saw underneath the train’s turned-off lamp a sign with the number series “3159”.
The comprehension emerged from some deep source inside me. What was before me was not exactly—at least not primarily—a train. It looked like a train, and to some extent is surely was a train, but its fundamental essence was one of those marginal things humans are not supposed to know about.
I felt no need to scream in terror or otherwise turn hysterical. That would have been ridiculous. The existence of the apparition rather made me feel embarrassed, as if I had without knocking entered a room where somebody I thought I knew well (in this case, objective reality) was doing something quite strange and private. That apparition of a train was on its own strange business; it was following purposes incomprehensible to me. In the world of reason and logic it was a complete stranger, an uninvited guest, an embarrassing secret. A ghost from another time. Yes: I knew that engine. I knew its number, and I recognized the malicious consciousness it radiated.
I’d seen it escape the rails and kill and then be destroyed itself. And now it was here before me anyhow. Why? Was I looking at the ghost of a train?
“It’s the ‘Little Jumbo’,” a voice sounded somewhere behind me. “They were manufactured in the machine shops of Tampella, Lokomo and Frichs from the year 1927 to the year 1953. What’s the year now?”
With stiff lips I uttered the year I thought correct, eyes frozen fast to the apparition standing before me. It was still staring at me with its lamp-eyes from between the shadowy spruce branches. Curious, hungry. The coldness of the engine flowed into my flesh, it was burning me like fire sculp
ted of ice, and by and by it seemed to me that if I didn’t leave its circle of influence soon, I was never going to move again.
And that was precisely the train ghost’s intention. It was trying to bewitch and freeze me, to make me wonder about its nature and surrender myself to be its prey. And it was close to succeeding. I knew I should have turned my back to it and left, but I just kept staring at the iron dragon breathing irrationality and at its identification numbers. The sense of touch escaped my flesh, I thought I could hear even my skin crackle while it was freezing.
3159, 3159, 3159…
“That kind has been taken out of service ages ago,” Rupert continued somewhere out of sight. “Over twenty years ago already. Consequently it’s here sometime before it was taken off. And now and then some come here to turn which haven’t even been made yet. That’s why I couldn’t find the picture of one of them in any books. That’s why watches don’t work here: this place is outside the timetables. They wake up on the rails and they break out of their own timetables and find a suitable blind track and come here, where ever or whenever they are.”
“Whatever, Rupert,” I mumbled, lips numb with cold. I didn’t have the energy to try and understand his words. I only knew I was freezing to death. “Listen, are you really going to blow up that train?”
After a moment’s silence Rupert answered: “This place is full of dynamite. It’s by the rails, in the trees, under the snow. I’ve spent several nights making preparations. I have to do it. Even if you are going to be angry.”
“Can’t I stop you in any way? Reason with you? Make you realize how senseless this all is?”
“No.”
“Well then you’ve obviously got to do what you’ve got to do,” I muttered, relieved—the responsibility was no longer mine. I couldn’t take any more responsibility.
The train blew smoke in the air, and its steam pistons became tense and started to push the wheels where they were fixed; it was preparing to chase me again, to make its kill. To murder me.
I felt somebody gripping my shoulders. Rupert started to walk me away from there, fast. My feet had lost their strength to the cold, but Rupert was strong. The valley reverberated with the train’s hollow panting and the metallic screech of the steam machinery that was pushing it off.
We got as far as the junipers, and Rupert threw himself in the snow and dragged me down with himself. My face thumped against the snow. I was too benumbed to soften my landing.
“Mother, I ignited all the fuses,” my son whispered. “Hands to your ears!”
“We have to talk about this when we get home,” I sighed. “Let’s drink cocoa and really talk with each other for once.”
I thought there was something that I ought to have noticed and understood. Something to do with causes and consequences. If only my head hadn’t been aching so terribly.
With the growing pounding in my head I hardly even heard the explosions that suddenly started to tear apart the valley, the trees and the train that had left its timetable.
We stood there an hour, hand in hand, and waited, Alice and I. Then we sat on the rails and waited yet another hour. The train didn’t come, the track stayed empty. I felt more and more miserable. My stomach was hurting and my head ached. “It’s not coming,” I said. “Let’s leave now.”
Alice angrily plucked a golden lock off her head and pouted. “It’s not showing up, indeed. We have to come back tomorrow.”
We went home, Alice disappointed and I feeling ill but relieved.
In the night I woke up feeling that I could hardly breathe. Twinges of pain were stabbing my temples. My first thought was that Alice was dead. I fancied I remembered how the train had come and swerved off the rails and crushed Alice in front of my horrified eyes. The image was so vivid I started crying in my bed. And yet I also remembered that the train had never come and we had returned home in peace.
In the morning I ran to see Alice; I had to make sure that she really was alive. She set about at once to get us going to the railway tracks, but I refused, even when she pressed me hard and called me a traitor and even a bad friend. She looked at me somehow strangely, and I knew something had changed between us.
We were still friends, of course, and went around together, but day by day our friendship got thinner and we met more and more infrequently—the magic was gone. It was pretty much my fault—I couldn’t relate to Alice naturally anymore, for I remembered her dying that afternoon on the railway, even while I also remembered we’d come back home together. I remembered her funeral, I even remembered the place she was buried, and her gravestone and the golden letters on it, and yet she was sitting next to me in school.”
—From the unwritten Dream Diary of E.N.
That is the night I think I lost my son; I remember the night and the explosions, but after that—nothing. I don’t remember coming home. A few times I’ve tried to return by myself to look for that strange blind track in the forest, but every time I’ve been driven aside from the way and ended somewhere quite different.
I remember Rupert’s birth. I remember him growing and his overactive imagination and the day he graduated from law school. I remember his love and the skull fracture that removed it from his head. I remember our night trip to the place where the trains turn, and that’s where I lost him in the worst way. All that I remember, but I also remember that I never had the child I wished for. My youth was spent in studying, and then I had to further my career. We often talked about children, I and my husband, but we put off the realization of the idea, and when we finally woke up to try, it was already too late.
A few months ago I saw Gunnar on the television. He’d put on a lot of weight. I was startled; somehow I’d imagined he was dead. He spoke dryly about the big export sales his company had made, and I wondered whether he ever thought about the girl he had seduced by the railway tracks three decades since. So often had I wondered what would have happened if at the critical moment I’d prevented him from withdrawing and taken his seed and made him the father of my child. The thought had entered my mind at the time, however irrational and irresponsible it was. If I’d really done that, would the other line of my memories now be objective reality, not only subjective? Would Rupert now be objective reality?
Remembering makes me feel ill, but I can’t help thinking of Rupert. He feels so real, often more real than this real life of mine. I remember how my figure got rounder and I took a taxi to the hospital and gave birth to my son, I remember the pain and the tears and the joy, when I received the little wrinkled human being in my arms. I remember the sour midwife and the hospital ward. And yet I know nothing like that happened to me—on the day Rupert was born I was on a business trip to Moscow, it’s documented. I remember that quite well, too, the small hotel room and the chambermaid I surprised as she was rummaging in my bag.
Perhaps I’m crazy. How many sane persons have two sets of superimposed memories from 40 years’ time? Perhaps all those empty recollections that torment me are only the product of a brain that’s gone completely round the bend? That would be the easiest and also the most believable explanation—without one small problem: I could have invented Rupert, yes. He could very well be just a delusion, flung by an ageing woman suffering from childlessness into her past to soothe her pain. But what about the place where the trains turn? I do not have enough imagination to invent anything like that. I’m a very rational person, who keeps her feet closely and safely in the dust of the earth in all situations. Unlike some others, who used to let their imagination fly irresponsibly like a kite on a stormy Sunday afternoon; such was my lost son Rupert. The place where the trains turn could only have been invented by Rupert himself, and he couldn’t have done that if he himself were nothing more than my invention.
I hunt my memories and study them from all angles, the way a scientist may collect and study extremely important samples. I draw charts of the two different lines of my life, they are sometimes hard to distinguish. And there is a pile of evidence on my desk
:
There is a phone number: there’s a lawyer called Birgitta Donner in Helsinki, but she has never heard of Rupert Nightingale.
There is a Christmas card from Alice Holmsten, nowadays Frogge; she tells she’s married and works as a music teacher in a school in Turku. I hadn’t thought of her for years, but sometimes one receives cards from persons already forgotten even when there’s been no particular reason to remember them.
There is a collection of short stories by Miriam Catterton that I bought yesterday from Houndbury Books. I’m not acquainted with Miriam, although I also have other kinds of recollections of her. Most people know her since she’s a teacher, but I don’t have children, and we’ve never even talked with each other. She seemed surprised when I phoned her this morning and introduced myself. I told her I’d read her book and been especially fascinated by one of the stories, the one that tells about a little boy called Robert who loves railways and whose imagination his overly rational mother Anna tries to repress.
This is now quite silly, I explained, but I simply had to call and ask where you got the idea for Robert’s story.
Well, where do ideas come from, generally, Miriam said, sort of embarrassed.
They just are in the air. Ioften have dreams and I use them. For a couple of nights I dreamed about a little boy who loved railways, and it developed out of that, gradually.
I’ve read the story through several times already, trying to decide which truth its existence proves.
There’s also on my desk an article I clipped out from the newspaper 40 years ago and kept unto this day between the encyclopaedia pages. It tells about a whole goods train that vanished without a trace with its freight and engine driver somewhere in the Houndbury region. The authorities investigating the case were puzzled, but according to them it appeared probable that there was an extensive conspiracy of railway personnel behind the train theft—no way otherwise could such a crime be explained. The press clipping also seems to want to tell me something, but I’m not able to figure out how that event could be connected with Rupert’s disappearance, not yet.
Where the Trains Turn: a Tor.com Original Page 7
