Where the Trains Turn: a Tor.com Original Read online

  “Oh what a nice picture! Is it a cow? And that must be a milking machine.”

  “No.” (The child is very indignant about his mother’s poor insight.) “It’s a horse-moose who travels in a time machine to the Jurassic period where the dinosaurs will eat him up.”

  (Mother takes an aspirin and a glass of water.)

  Rupert’s drawings were technically quite sophisticated and even precocious, but he never let the objective reality interfere with their content. Such can be very depressing to a sensible adult who only wants to make her child understand how the real world functions.

  “The train tried to kill us,” said Rupert.

  He sat, feet crossed, upon the comic books spread on his bed, wiped sweat from his round forehead and stared absentmindedly at the beam of afternoon light in the room. It was catching the dust motes in between model airplanes hanging from the ceiling. I crouched on the floor by the bed and tried to catch his eyes.

  “The train tried to kill you,” I repeated expressionlessly as a machine to show that I listened.

  “We were walking on the track with Daddy. I sat on Daddy’s shoulders. It was warm and the sun warmed our skin and the air was shimmering and everything looked funny. Daddy even took his coat off and opened his waistcoat and rolled up his sleeves. The tie he never takes off, however hot it is. He says it’s a matter of principle and every time a man dresses or undresses he makes a far-reaching decision on who he actually is and who he is not. We’d found a whole new section of tracks, it’s far beyond that long tunnel and the big rocky mountain. We had to drive a long way on the big road and back along all kinds of funny side roads to get there. The rails there smelled completely different. Much stronger. Daddy said it might mean that we were closer to the secret of railways than ever before. I asked what the secret was, but he just smiled as always, kind of pleased.

  “Then we started hearing a train noise. Such a queer rattle, like a hundred tin buckets were banged with iron pipes, each in a rhythm that was a bit different. It’s a kind of scary noise. Like thunder on the ground. It came from somewhere behind us.

  “At first I wasn’t scared, but then I started to feel that all was not as it should. That smell started to feel too strong in my nose, and somehow wrong.

  “And I glanced behind and saw the train. It came towards us. It was hard to see because it came from the direction of the sun, but I saw it anyway. First it was sneaking slowly but then, when it saw that I had noticed it, it started to come faster. It accelerated. And I saw that it wanted us. Daddy heard it coming, too, and we moved to the bank, but it was not enough. It would never have been enough, the train would have got us from there, too. But Daddy did not understand, he was like in a dream. I had to get Daddy somehow to run off before it was too late.”

  “How could it have got you from there?” I asked in an unnaturally calm voice.

  Rupert stared at me with his big blue eyes that now were like two deep saucers of cold fear. “That train was one of the outside-of-timetables kind. It did not run on rails. It pretended to, but it went a little beside them. I saw. I tried to get Daddy to realize that we had to run, but he seemed not to understand anything I told him. Not even when we had just before been talking about such trains.”

  The boy swallowed audibly and crept to the window. His paranoid gaze raked the view.

  “Suchtrains,” I repeated again. The back of my head was pricking. “Now listen Rupert, what kind of trains are we actually talking about here?”

  “The ones that leave the timetable and run off rails,” Rupert sighed.

  He kept looking out. The rowan crown was swaying behind the window; it stirred the now oppressive backyard air that swarmed with insects flying dazedly to and fro.

  The boy’s fingers were fumbling with each other nervously and the narrow chest beneath the yellow shirt was heaving violently. There was an asthmatic, wheezing tone in his respiration that I’d never noticed before.

  I had to talk seriously with him, really talk. I assumed an understanding and gently motherly smile and opened my mouth.

  “What has that man put into your head!” I shrieked.

  The voice escaping from my mouth startled even me; I sprang up and hit my head badly on the window board. I groaned from pain.

  Rupert turned to look at me in astonishment—at last I’d achieved his full attention.

  “Trains do not jump off the rails,” I articulated carefully so that the child was sure to hear and understand what I was saying. “They stay on the rails and go along them from one place to another. And besides—”

  Rupert looked at me expectantly.

  “Besides, trains are just big inanimate machines driven by humans,” I declared.

  The boy smiled at me. Not in a relieved way. He smiled in that special way reserved for those who clearly do not know what they are talking about.

  “Trains do go along rails from one place to another,” he admitted kindly. “And usually they also stay on the rails. Usually. That’s the official truth. But there is another truth that is less known. A secret. Sometimes they leave their timetables and tracks and are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then they make trouble for people. Then they are not as they normally are, and you’d better not trust them at all. They are supposed to stay on the rails and follow the timetables to be as they are meant to be, just inanimate machines that obey people. But sometimes they do actually leave the rails and break off beyond their timetables. And then they change. Their own deep hidden nature comes out. They become different. Mean and clever. And very dangerous.”

  “Indeed.” I found it difficult to speak. “So they leave the tracks?”

  “Yes. They leave their tracks,” Rupert enlightened me. His voice broke when he continued: “There, where the trains turn.”

  The sad news of the death of Rupert’s father reached us a couple of days later, and I can’t say that it made my efforts to normalize the situation any easier (I admit that “to normalize” is a somewhat peculiar choice of words in connection with Rupert). The identity of the victim of last Sunday’s railroad crossing accident had started to become clear only the following day, when a swarm of little boys found the lost number plate; it had drifted downstream in the brook close to the accident site and got stuck in a dam the boys had built.

  The term “obscure circumstances” was used a couple of times. Police and all kinds of inspectors came to talk to us, and afterwards I could not remember what they had asked or what I had answered to them.

  When I went shopping on the north side I heard the villagers talk almost nostalgically about a train accident that had taken place two decades earlier in the neighbourhood. That had, after all, been of a completely different scale than this minor tame railroad crossing accident which didn’t even merit a proper news story: In the past, a goods train had actually been derailed in the Houndbury railway section, with dramatically unpleasant consequences—then, in the middle of the fifties, there had of course been in front of the train cars one of those good old steam locomotives, the last of which had been taken off sometimes in the seventies.

  Two persons had died in the accident: an engine driver and a little local girl. There had been large horrified headlines in almost all newspapers and it had even been announced on the radio; publicity loves innocent victims (at least when they are not too many and not too far away). When the train had been derailed it had, by a terrible whim of chance, crushed the child playing on the bank, the daughter Alice of the district surgeon Holmsten.

  Unless I completely misremembered, Alice Holmsten had been in the same class with me in primary school, and we had perhaps been friends. But of all memories, the childhood memories are always the most confused and subjective, so I couldn’t be sure about it. Actually I didn’t even manage to think about the matter, the present was too much for me.

  After he had left us, Gunnar had obviously been driving south along little side roads—he lived after all in Helsinki, when he wasn’t on a business tr
ip to Bonn, London, Paris, Tokyo or some other distant place (Rupert received picture postcards with a railway theme from everywhere). Thirty kilometers away there was a level crossing, with scant traffic but not completely unused. The two o’clock slow extra train from Tampere to Eastern Finland had lead to Gunnar’s death.

  The engine driver said in the interrogation that when the train arrived at the railroad crossing everything had seemed to be in order, the track had been free, and suddenly the purple car waiting behind the crossing had driven straight in front of the train—obviously the gate hadn’t come properly down either. The train hurrying eastward had caught Gunnar’s thunder-reflecting car with it, crumbled and torn it in passing as if it hadn’t been a real car at all but an origami folded of purple paper, and then thrown its remains in the willow bushes growing by the track.

  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 fingers 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, over-scared, 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.