The Glass Town Game

by Catherynne M. Valente

  The parson sighed. His breath smelled of pipe tobacco. It fogged in the morning air. “Now, Emily, young ladies oughtn’t to go about telling their fathers what to do, you know.”

  Emily watched Anne stand in the sun, soaking in the warmth and the gold and the light. Branwell pinched her, and the little girl screamed very satisfactorily. They could never understand, those two. They’d never know. Emily felt that little needle-stab of hate in her stomach. They couldn’t even stay decently sad for five minutes, even on the Beastliest Day. She shut her eyes and said: “I know, Papa. I shall never do it again. But . . . cannot one of us be spared from that place? One of us should escape. One of us should have no . . . no horrors hanging on her heart. Please, Father. If you will make me go, let her stay.”

  Emily kissed her father’s bearded cheek and ran out of the Parsonage to join her sisters. He blinked after her, his own heart as heavy as a church bell, never to be rung again.

  “Mind your Bees,” Aunt Elizabeth called to them as they walked down the hill, away from home. And they did. Buck up, be brave, busy hands make bright hearts.

  Good-bye, Aunt Elizabeth.

  Good-bye, Tabby.

  Good-bye, Papa.

  Wild, stiff tangles of withered gorse and heather and wintergreen burst underfoot as the little tribe took to the day.

  The wind had got up out of bed very early indeed to see them off. It blew busily all about the moors, catching at braids and coats and scarves and noses, making that peculiar howling, sighing, grumbling sound Tabitha called wuthering. The sunlight looked warm and delightful, but it was all a trick. Those fitful scraps of sunshine were hard and cold as a Headmaster’s heart. They marched after the light all the same, up and out onto the little hills and hollows of the moorland, their cheeks whipped red and hot.

  Charlotte trudged silently up a worn purple path through the January hills. Bran quickened his pace to keep up.

  “I ought to walk in front, Charlotte!” he yelled after her. “Papa said I was your chaperone! I ought to lead the way! Charlotte? Charlotte! Are you listening? I am in charge!”

  Charlotte was not listening. Bran’s long curls whipped across the bridge of his great arched nose, his brow, as ever, furrowed and fuming. He would have been shocked if he knew how perfectly his face reflected his sister’s own frown and grump. But he could only see the back of her, her woolen dress prickled with bits of twig and old, withered thistle burrs. Emily and Anne did not care who went first. They’d all get where they were going and no one could do a thing to stop it. Why rush? They hung back, holding hands and picking their path carefully so as not to crush any sweet plant that might wake up again in the spring. Emily looked up at the frozen sun, her brown ringlets crowding a narrow, sharp face that somehow looked already quite grown.

  THREE

  A Game of And

  Down into the bruised, smoky valley they went. The carriage was to come to meet them at the hay market gate at a quarter of three in the afternoon. They would know it from the other black carriages drawn by black horses by the seal of the Cowan Bridge School on the side. It seemed the School had money to paint carriages, Emily thought darkly, but not to feed the students anything but watery porridge and a fortnightly slice of ox fat. Branwell had been preparing his farewell speech as they walked. He would take his sister’s hands and tell her that he did love her, after all, and not to be frightened, because she was Charlotte, and Charlotte could take on anything and beat it until it turned into just what she wanted it to be. Even a whole School. Even him. Then, he’d tell Emily something nice as well. Perhaps: If they give you one bit of pain, you just write to your brother and the men of the house shall ride out to protect you like a Lady with dragon troubles in a book. He hadn’t worked out Em’s bit yet. He’d been too busy working on Charlotte’s. Charlotte and Branwell were barely a year apart. Underneath all the shoving and jostling and rowing over who ruled over whom, he felt they understood each other. They liked the same things: war, stories, frowning, bossing others about. Em and Annie were so bafflingly female. If only Charlotte had been born a boy, there would only be understanding between them, and none of the shoving. He would have an older brother, and wouldn’t have to lie awake at night worrying about how to wear the iron cap of being somebody’s only son. He would say it all, except for the wishing she was a boy part, without crying or wobbling. The girls would look at him with such powerful love and gratitude that he would turn into a different person, a better person, the perfect person. All he needed was that one look and he could live forever.

  Charlotte’s furious pace had dragged them all across the moors and into the sooty Keighley streets early. The hay market gate clattered and echoed with horses and voices and smelled of many less wholesome things than hay, but no carriages waited there to collect two unhappy girls. Emily looked up to a bank’s brassy clock tower. It wasn’t near time for speeches yet.

  “It’s only half past one,” she sighed.

  “We’d have made it here by noon if Charlotte would be a proper Lady and let me lead on,” groused Branwell, shoving his hands deep in his pockets. He still had Aunt Elizabeth’s shilling and sixpence. In shillings and sixpences were the real power. Even Charlotte had to know that.

  Charlotte rolled her eyes. What difference did it make who walked in front? Branwell could go home at the end of all this and she could not. Didn’t that prove Papa loved him better? Didn’t it show beyond a shadow of a doubt that the world was his and not hers? Shouldn’t that make the little piker happy enough?

  She gave up. “All right, Bran. I bow to your authority, my Lord.” Charlotte spoke sourly and bowed grandly, sweeping one hand out to the side like she imagined the Duke of Wellington did. “You have the helm. What shall we do with our last hour and fifteen minutes of freedom?”

  “I like the bowing,” Branwell said brightly. “Though you oughtn’t do it like a man. And when you call me ‘my Lord,’ you ought to at least try to mean it.”

  “Can we go to Mrs. Reed’s shop?” asked Anne, who, though very sad for her sisters, had distinctly heard her aunt promise one hard toffee, and she’d clung to that hard toffee all the way along. The toffee would fix her up. The toffee would make everything else all right.

  “No, we can not,” answered Bran imperiously. He couldn’t help it. He knew he ought to just sit under a tree with his sisters and do a lot of hugging and blubbering and quoting dreadful soggy old poems or something, but he couldn’t help it. The train was so close. He could almost taste the coal smoke. “We are going to do something amazing. We are going to do something fantastically exciting and modern. We are going to do something none of us has done before, something that will make us all so cheerful that we’ll be thirty before we cry again! We are going to see the train!”

  Branwell had imagined the train station would look just like a magazine illustration of a train station: full of bustle and industry and men in important-looking suits and even more important-looking hats, all running to catch the 7:15 or the 9:20 or waiting virtuously, all talking loudly at the same time about only the most important things. But Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine only ever printed pictures of Piccadilly or Waverley Station. This was Keighley, and the three of them were as much alike as two wolves and a lapdog.

  Branwell felt utterly cheated.

  Though it had only just got built, somehow the station looked tired and worn down already. A single, rather shabby sign announcing KEIGHLEY STATION swung in the unhappy January wind. A few men and ladies wandered aimlessly along the roofed platform. Waiting, yes, but waiting without purpose, without that energy, without that importance Bran longed for. There was one with a small mustache cleaning his nails. Another had a big mustache, and he was picking his teeth. A Lady leaned on his arm in a dress duller than even Tabitha would be caught dead in, patting at her hair, as though anything could be done for her at this point. A great, round, dingy, white clock ticked down at them with all the sparkle and spirit of a dinner plate. Though the clo
ck couldn’t have been more than a year old, Branwell could already see a family of spiders, living undisturbed and undusted in the shadow of the numeral 6.

  The grubby old stationmaster with muttonchops like angry squirrel tails glared at them from his booth with deep suspicion.

  “I don’t know what you expected, Bran,” sniffed Charlotte. “It’s only freight in Keighley. Though Blackwood’s says that Liverpool is getting passenger service soon. The train’s probably been and gone already.”

  Charlotte didn’t think she’d ever hated anyone as much as she hated Keighley just then. Look at it! Just squatting in the moors, lording it over all the other nearby towns just because it had a train station and they did not. Trains only did one thing. They took you away. Ever so much quicker than a carriage, and you couldn’t even turn around if you changed your mind. Why would anyone want such a thing?

  No! Branwell simply would not accept it. He squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his fists against this extremely unsatisfactory reality. He whispered through clenched teeth: “What if someone came while we weren’t looking and swapped the real Keighley for a false one and all the handsome, important people for a great lot of badgers groomed up to look like people and . . .”

  Anne skipped along ahead and turned round so that she could practice walking backward while talking and not looking behind her once. “AND the newspaper shop for a monster who looks just like a newspaper shop and the bricks in the platform for bars of gold only painted to look like bricks, and . . .”

  Emily smiled faintly. She had been seriously considering simply running away, across the platform and to . . . where? Nowhere, of course. Her stomach twisted over itself and threatened to bolt, but she couldn’t help taking up the game. “AND the songbirds for miniature girls in songbird costumes and the moors for a patchwork quilt and the winter for summer and the sun for the moon and, and . . . and . . .”

  “And the train for a pirate ship to sail us all away over the edge of the wild earth,” finished Charlotte. A long, low whistle broke the fog into a hundred pieces. “Only no one did any swapping. This is Keighley, the real Keighley, and that is a real train come at last.”

  A deep, rhythmic thumping began in the distance. So deep that it seemed to growl up from inside their own chests. The platform roof began to tremble. The thump thumped again, and then again, picking up speed. All four of their hearts rattled in time with the strange sounds. None of them could move. Nothing in the world could sound like that. Like a monster and a parade and a thunderstorm and a lion and the end of the world all at once. Fear sizzled through their skin to the tips of their hair. Fear, and a wonderful, eager, starving curiosity.

  Someone shouted behind them—a man’s shout, the sort you had to listen to or else get a punishing. Charlotte startled out of her trance, expecting to be scolded for standing too close to the edge. Anne clutched her oldest sister’s skirts as she hadn’t done in years. Emily stood fast. Branwell puffed up his chest, determined not to be frightened for at least the next minute. After that, he told himself, he could crumple, if he really needed to.

  But they were not to be scolded. The shout came from a hugely fat man running across the road to catch the train. His cheeks were quite flushed and he had his collar turned up against the cold. But his collar was not a collar: It was a fine, glossy page from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, crisply creased. His waistcoat was fashioned from stacks of London newspapers. He had parchment for hair, pulled back into old-fashioned rolls, and a neat, small ponytail. His greatcoat was a special edition of the Leeds Intelligencer and his cravat was a penny dreadful folded over many times. The enormous belly that bulged beneath his coat was the carved ebony knob of an ancient scroll. Queerest of all, his enormous head was an open book longer than the Bible itself. A pair of glasses perched upon huge, decorated capital letters: two handsome Os that seemed to be his eyes, for they blinked furiously as he ran. The lower parts of the pages formed a mustache, and his nose crowned it all: a long, blood-scarlet ribbonmark, the sort used as a bookmark in old Bibles.

  Branwell, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne looked around at the men with big and small mustaches and the Lady with the hopeless hair. None of them seemed to see the Magazine Man stumbling and jogging across the meadow on the other side of the platform. None of them seemed in the least concerned that a man made entirely of books was bearing down on Keighley Station with rather terrifying speed.

  “I say,” droned the one with the small mustache and very clean nails. “The train’s running late today.”

  “It will happen,” nodded the one with the big mustache and very clean teeth. “From time to time.”

  The Magazine Man hurled himself at the ledge of the platform. He didn’t quite make it, grunting like a rhinoceros as he crashed into the thing. He hauled up his tremendous weight with beefy arms made from back issues of the Quarterly Review. Charlotte recognized it from Papa’s subscriptions immediately. The man’s cheeks flushed with red ink and great effort until, at last, the impossible fellow heaved himself over into the station and lay on his back, puffing mightily, exhausted.

  “Quite the kind of a weather we’re having,” said the Lady in the dull dress to neither of the men particularly. The Magazine Man lay sprawled at her feet. She stepped daintily round his head.

  “Don’t they see him?” asked Anne wonderingly. “He’s right there.” The train’s mournful, owly whistle broke the fog once more.

  After a moment of shock in which no one breathed and everyone clutched hands as tight as murder, all four children burst out of their stillness and tumbled toward the creature. They called out to him and demanded his name, his family, his business. He tried to scramble up and run from them, wheezy breaths whistling fearfully through the hundred thousand pages of his body. But the Magazine Man was as stuck as a turtle on his back, and forced to roll wretchedly from side to side in order to get on his feet. Once up, he towered over everyone, even the tallest of the Keighley businessmen.

  “Go away!” the Magazine Man shouted finally, puffing and wheezing. He bent over with his paper hands on his newsprint knees. “Leave me be!”

  All of them spoke at once:

  “Who are you?” demanded Charlotte.

  “Why did you climb over the ledge instead of coming through the station like a sensible fellow?” asked Emily.

  “If you haven’t got a ticket you can’t get on the train, you know,” scolded Anne.

  “Where did you come from?” shouted Branwell, far too loudly. “Why do you look like a wastepaper bin?”

  “Children ought to be seen and NOT HEARD, ORRIGHT?” barked the stationmaster from his booth, showing no concern at all for the enormous thing right in front of him.

  “Can’t you see the paper man standing eight feet tall and coughing up both lungs in the middle of your station?” snapped Charlotte. She was unable to bear this total abandonment of adult responsibility one second longer.

  “All I see are a pack of brats who ought to be in school!” the stationmaster snarled back, and slammed his little window shut. Emily flinched.

  School.

  The 2:00 train arrived in Keighley Station. None of them had ever seen one except in drawings. They’d heard the better-off folk in the village talk about the huge, noisy, smoky, rattley beasts. But here it came, in real life, barreling down the rails, a splendid engine, making that thumping, pounding sound they’d felt in their chests, puffing and whistling and thumping and clacking.

  “They look so different in the newspapers,” whispered Emily.

  In fact, no train in any newspaper anywhere in any country looked anything at all like the one steaming into the station just then. It had a wicker engine made all of sticks and brambles, as though the dead winter moor itself had woken that morning and decided it wanted to see the world. The smokestack was a basket of spiky frozen gorse branches. The carriage doors were thatches of old heather and gooseberry thorns. Great hay wheels turned along the tracks as though they were wheels of ir
on, bound to a long, rough-hacked ruby axle. But not the pretty, polished rubies that you’d put in a ring. Ancient, glowering red stone still clotted up with black rock. The wicker engine drew impossible cars behind it, built out of apple skin and glass and pheasant feathers and even widow’s lace that seemed somehow as sturdy as steel.

  The train’s headlamp was a star. A real, honest star, pulled right out of the night like a coin from behind your ear.

  The children stared as the train came to a wheezing rest in the hollow, gleaming, its windows full of shadows. Emily’s mouth dropped open. She simply couldn’t make any sense of it, no matter which way she turned her head. Perhaps this was simply what trains looked like. They’d only just been invented, after all. Perhaps rubies and apple skin window curtains were so usual to the well-off folk in Haworth that it never occurred to them to bring such things up down at the pub. But surely, surely Blackwood’s had never mentioned using stars to light the way.

  “What if someone came while we weren’t looking,” Branwell whispered, “and swapped the train?”

  Anne giggled madly. She felt as though the top of her head had come clean off. “We’re dreaming!” she laughed. “It’s all right, it’s a dream and we’re dreaming!”

  Charlotte said nothing, but that smile that was so slow to come spread over her flushed and rosy face. Something was happening. Something straight out of a story. Something so astonishingly fantastic that no fanciful lie she’d ever told could top it.

  The Magazine Man decided to make a run for it. But he was not a graceful sort of beast and they weren’t about to let him get away. He was magic. It was all magic and they knew it was magic; they’d known it at once. Anyone would know! There had never been a train like that made in the London Yards, not ever in the whole history of the British Rail Service. And without saying a word to each other, they already knew that not a one of them wanted anything in the world at that moment but to get on board. Clearly, the Magazine Man wanted the same thing. He tripped and stumbled and the platform was only so big, so he ended up running somewhat pitiful circles away from his tormentors and more or less toward the tracks. He got so out of breath he couldn’t even cry properly, but tried anyhow. Ink squeezed and sprayed out of his eyes. The train sighed and a great jet of steam belched out of its stack.