The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  I had sometimes tried to ask Rupert about it. He made my temples throb when he started to speak like a preacher about the Wonderful Smell of Railways and how it actually contained all the world’s secrets.

  I knew well enough when I was not in my own territory, not even close. Besides, it was after all a question of something shared between the two, father and son, which wasn’t really my business. So, in spite of my vague forebodings, I thought best to let it be.

  Until Rupert came home from such a track excursion hysterically sobbing and shaking, white as a washbasin, as if he had met eye to eye with the Children’s Own Grinning Reaper himself and had to shake his bony hand.

  I knew at once that everything was not all right when I lifted my eyes from the flowerbed I’d been scraping, and saw them returning already at 3:25.

  I had my hands full coping with the situation. To start, I chased Gunnar off, bleeding with scratches as he was. I acted purely from my spinal cord, as mothers always do in such situations; acted with the rage of a dinosaur in a white summer dress. Gunnar tried to explain: he could not understand what had come over the boy, he’d just been carrying him piggyback and stepped on the bank as he’d heard the approaching train. Suddenly the boy had gone completely crazy on his back and started to tear Gunnar’s hair and face and to scream unintelligibly like some rabid, drooling monkey.

  If Rupert had come home thoroughly scared, Gunnar was just as terrified. He behaved like a dog that vaguely understands he’s being judged for complicity in some Very Bad Thing and knows for certain that he’ll get a bullet in his brain.

  I almost felt sorry for him.

  The dinosaur in me felt no pity: it attacked. I yelled at him till my lungs hurt. I probably hit him, too—at least his nose suddenly started to bleed.

  He shook his head, perplexed, stepping back and forth in the backyard, dabbing his nose with a handkerchief, and nervously straightening his suit—covered in gray dust—having for once lost his relaxed erectness of carriage (for which I, for a brief moment, felt maliciously pleased). Then he glanced quickly at me, turned his eyes somewhere up, at Rupert’s window I suppose, and started to speak: “If I have caused trouble, I’m sincerely sorry. If you want, I’ll leave. But I have to say that with the boy I’ve always felt that for once I’m involved with something larger than my own life. You know what: he will yet do something significant, something wonderful, something neither of us now can even dream about. I have an instinct for those things. And if he—”

  I told him to be quiet and leave my backyard (although not quite in those words), and he obeyed. As Gunnar, defeated, got in his car and drove away, the dinosaur was gratified—it had won.

  I had no idea that I’d never again see the only man in this life I’d ever allowed to push his male protrusion inside me. About half an hour later he would be crushed to death together with his car. His wiry bird-boned being would be transformed to a mixed metal-and-bone paste (I know, because I later went to see the photo the police had taken of the accident scene).

  But that shock was still to come. Now I had to compose myself so I could go and calm down Rupert who, piteously wailing, had run upstairs and locked himself in his room.

  I went up the stairs and knocked on Rupert’s door. “Let me in!” I ordered, my cheek at the door. “What’s got into you?”

  “The trains,” came a trembling whisper from the other side of the door. “The trains!”

  “What about them?” I tried to keep my voice calm. I strained hard and realized suddenly that I’d been trying to see through the chipping, white-painted surface of the door. Just like that X-ray-eyed Superman Rupert admired. Well, this was how it went, this was how Rupert made even me behave irrationally! (I had always felt a deep antipathy toward that red-caped clown who wiped his un-holed arse with logic and credibility and, besides, provoked children to jump out of windows with bath towels around their necks.)

  I wondered whether my poor child had a foolish maniacal grin on his face, and a sudden horror stabbed my ovaries. Had my worst fears now come true in this dreadful way? Would my son end up for the rest of his life in a mental institution for little boys, where he would be dressed in a teddy-bear patterned straightjacket?

  I heard a choked request: “Mummy, please go and look out of the window.”

  I did. A cold bit of flesh pretending to be a heart was slapping in my breast, and I felt faint. I looked out of the round window in the upper hall, where sweaty houseflies kept buzzing in competition in the shady afternoon light.

  “And then what? What should I see? Your father? He had to leave already. He may phone you later. Or you can phone him.”

  “Do you see a train there?” asked a wan voice. “It didn’t follow me here, did it?”

  Finally I convinced Rupert there was no train in the yard, not even the smallest inspection trolley, and he let me in his room. After a long stumble over his words, he started to tell what it had all been about.

  In the crèche and the kindergarten and even in the school they had praised my son’s “boundless and creative imagination,” which they said was manifested in his play and his artistic creations. I did admit that imagination might be useful, too, provided it remained within certain proper limits. But what was there worth praising in something that made a human being babble to stones and trees and see nonexistent things?

  Perceiving reality was hard enough for the child, even without idle and completely unnecessary fantasies. And imagination by no means made Rupert happy. On the contrary, he had always suffered greatly from it. A hairy monkey paw growing in the middle of his forehead would have brought him just as much joy. His social life was surely not cultivated by talking to birds rather than to other kids. And the drawings expressing “boundless and creative imagination” which he manufactured would have been enough to employ a legion of child psychiatrists:

  “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 with a glass of water.)

  Rupert’s drawings were technically quite sophisticated and even precocious, but he never let 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, wiping sweat from his round forehead and staring absentmindedly at the beam of afternoon light in the room. It was catching the dust motes floating 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 as expressionlessly as a machine to show that I was listening.

  “We were walking on the track. 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 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 being 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 be. That smell started to feel too strong in my nose, and somehow wrong.

  “And I glanced behind and saw the train. It came toward 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, it was like he was in a dream. Somehow, I had to get Daddy to run off before it was too late.”

  “How could it have gotten you on the bank?” 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 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.

  “Such trains,” 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 gentle 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 machines that obey people. But sometimes they do leave the rails and break off beyond their timetables. And then they change. Their 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 license 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 of town, I heard the villagers talk almost nostalgically about a train accident that had taken place two decades earlier in the neighborhood. That had, after all, been of a completely different scale than this minor 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. Back then, in the fifties, there had been one of those good old steam locomotives pulling the train, the last of which had been retired sometime in the seventies.

  Two people had died in the accident: an engine driver and a little local girl. There had been horrified headlines in almost all the 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 derailed it had, by a terrible whim of chance, crushed the child playing on the bank: Alice the daughter of the district surgeon Dr. 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 been driving south along little side roads—he lived in Helsinki when he wasn’t on a business trip 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 been the cause of 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 clear, then suddenly the purple car waiting behind the crossing had driven straight in front of the train—evidently the gate hadn’t come properly down either. The train hurrying eastward had caught Gunnar’s thunder-reflecting car, crumpling and tearing it in passing as if it hadn’t been a real car at all but an origami folded of purple paper, then throwing its remains in the willow bushes growing by the track.

  I decided not to think about the matter any more 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 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 toward 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 judgment had fed him. The railways may well have meant a gre
at 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-colored surface of the fantasy had fallen off, and the dark colors 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 few 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 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 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?