Some of the Best from Tor.com

by Various Authors

  I decided not to think about the matter anymore than I had to. Gunnar was dead, gone. By a coincidence he had driven under a train. He had been beside himself because of Rupert’s fit, the gate had been up, and Gunnar hadn’t noticed the approaching train. That was all. As usual, what had happened could not be undone, not by any means.

  I knew some people think that the daily and sometimes merciless course of life is a kind of kids’ puzzle where you have to connect the points in a correct order and find out whatever is hiding in the picture. Effect was always preceded by a cause, of course, and the cause itself was always a consequence of something. To seek logic and meaning from every coincidence, however, was likely to push a person towards the deep pit of madness, with sharp stakes waiting at the bottom. I could not afford to cloud my mind with unnecessary speculations or shaky what-ifs. I needed all my strength to help my son, since now he had lost his father he needed his mother more than ever.

  Rupert of course took it as self-evident that his father had been killed by the same train that had tried to kill them both earlier, never mind logic or timetables; I don’t know whether he actually said the thought aloud, but he didn’t need to, it shone from his whole being. And he could not be blamed. His poor little mind was tortured by those strange stories that Gunnar in his great lack of judgement had fed him. The railways may well have meant a great and wonderful adventure and boundless fantasy to Rupert, and all that had surely been rather pleasant as long as it had stayed that way. But now the caramel coloured surface of the fantasy had fallen off and the dark colours of chaos, nightmare and bitter fear of death had come out—the real nature of fantasy!

  With difficulty I pieced together hazy bits of truth to form at least some vague picture of what the father and son had been doing together during the last years. I got the impression that during their walks together Gunnar had at first talked to the boy of various relatively harmless things. Then Rupert had become excited and asked about railways and trains, and finally the man had probably become a little tired answering his endless questions and started to make up his own stories, which again had provoked Rupert to evolve even stranger questions. In this way they had been inciting each other, and finally, perhaps to silence the boy for at least a moment, Gunnar obviously had come to invent that dark, terrifying, perverted story:

  Daddy, how far do those rails go?

  All around the world back to this same place.

  Do these rails go to China?

  Yes, they do. And to Australia and France and even Africa. Sometimes bored lions start following the rails and stray even as far as here. Luckily that’s rare.

  If you lead electric current to the rails here, will somebody on the other side of the world get an electric shock?

  Yes, he will, if he happens to touch the rails just then. But one shouldn’t lead electric current to the rails, because electricity goes around the globe and comes back here and then you’ll get an electric shock yourself.

  How do people know where each train goes and what time they ought to get on?

  From the timetables. Trains go according to certain exact timetables.

  Always?

  Well not quite always. Sometimes they cannot keep their timetables. Then they’ll be at a wrong time in a wrong place, and that results in confused situations and sometimes even bad trouble for people. Believe me, I’ve met with that myself.

  Must the trains going in that direction circle around the whole globe to get back home? They can’t reverse the whole way back, can they?

  Of course not: there are places where the trains turn. But those places really aren’t any kids’ playgrounds. This is actually a secret, but let me tell you something …

  And thus it became clear what would thereafter be my primary task: to dig from the boy’s head all the dangerous fantasies that had slipped in there, before they would take root there too firmly and produce a terrible harvest.

  We lived south of the little village of Houndbury (nowadays Houndbury wants to call itself officially a city, as touchingly megalomaniac and attention-seeking as that may sound). Actually there were two Houndburies: the rapidly transforming North and the South that had kept its old homely face from the fifties, and at that time still been saved from the bite of Development’s concrete teeth. In the beginning of the seventies, the North side had quickly filled up with new cubic meters of tenement houses, poor industrial plants and hungry supermarkets. We people on the South side instead still had lots of pensive detached houses, wildly flourishing gardens and clean swimming beaches and forests. Along our meandering paths you could get from everywhere to everywhere without seeing a single human dwelling or a paved road on the way. And yet we from South Houndbury could whiz quickly to the North side to enjoy the services of the area, neither was the nearest city too far away when needed. Our children were thus very lucky.

  I would have let both my breasts be ground to mink food if only Rupert, too, could have been one of those healthy noisy happy children one saw in our neighbourhood. They raced each other, rode recklessly on their bikes and played football and ice hockey. They yelled, screamed and fought each other. They broke windows, went swimming, blasted firecrackers and stole raw apples to throw them at house walls and roofs and at people’s heads from behind the hedges.

  Of course I would have punished Rupert if I’d heard that he was involved in such tricks. But I’d have done that smiling, knowing that my son was a completely normal boy who only needed a proper mixture of motherly love and discipline to grow up a man.

  But Rupert kicked no ball. He raced nobody, he ran alone. In his whole life he hadn’t stolen a single apple or broken a single window. (I thought I could remember him breaking one green tumbler when he was four years old, that was the list of his misdeeds in its entirety.) He just kept drawing pictures and reading books and playing his own peculiar games alone.

  He did not get along with other children, since he’d been talking so long to birds and trees he no longer knew how to talk to people. Other children quickly got irritated at his strange stories and didn’t want to have anything to do with him. For that I could have wrung their necks like potted chickens, Rupert was after all my own little son, but at the same time I understood them in spite of myself.

  “You’ve got to stop this tomfoolery,” I told Rupert seriously. “Do you understand what I mean? People don’t like silly fools. Besides, soon you’ll not know yourself what’s true and what’s not, and to know that is not too easy in this world anyway. Moreover, there’s a quite special place for the people who can’t stop fooling in time, and believe me, you don’t want to go there.”

  Rupert nodded, resigned. It had been a month since Gunnar’s death, the slowest and darkest month of my life. There was a fine aroma of an approaching autumn in the air, and it made birds and several other living creatures feel an oppressive longing for faraway places and at times even mild panic. Cold rains started to wash off the colours and warmth of summer, and pleading bad weather Rupert stayed within four walls, which wasn’t at all like him since he’d always been a dedicated puddle jumper and rain runner. For four weeks he hadn’t even once gone farther than our mailbox—always on Wednesday at one o’clock he ran quickly out to get his precious Duck comics (Wednesday is the week’s best day, for then you get your Donald Duck, the world’s funniest comic!) and then closeted himself in his own room with the devotion of a monk studying holy scripture.

  As much as I’d have enjoyed his company in other circumstances, now he started to get badly on my nerves.

  He was quieter than the grey colour of the autumn sky. He sneaked ghostlike around, unnoticeable and almost translucent, close to non-existence. Now and then I had to steal near him and touch him to make sure that he still was flesh and blood.

  Sometimes I was caught by an irrational certainty that he had tracelessly disappeared from the earth, and I ran around the house to seek him until I finally found him cowering in some dark corner.

  He cracked his fing
ers on the borders of my visual field. He grated his teeth. He kept staring out of windows and rolling his eyes just like the black bearers in his beloved Tarzan movies when they heard the oppressing, maddening drumming of the wicked natives from the jungle.

  I’d have liked to run away from home.

  I was relieved when school finally started and the bus took him away for at least a few hours a day. Of course Rupert did not feel happy at school. He was bullied, not so badly it would have made his life hell, but obviously he wouldn’t have brought home any popularity awards, if such things for any reason had been presented.

  After Gunnar’s death Rupert was like a kind of little, overscared, endangered animal which all the time expects something big and extremely terrible to attack him. His irrational fear was by and by infecting even me—I began to startle at all kinds of the slightest rustles and flashes. I had bad dreams, too, although after waking up I could remember nothing more of them than a tormenting feeling of loss, and that in the dreams I heard myself talk to some strange unfathomable abstract being (it seemed to consist of rails) and asking it for something I suspected I’d later regret.

  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. Hi
s 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.)