The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  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 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 could take root 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 had quickly filled up with new cubic meters of tenement houses, poor industrial plants, and hungry supermarkets. We people on the south side 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 paved road on the way. And yet we from South Houndbury could whiz quickly to the North to enjoy the services of the area, nor was the nearest city too far away when needed. Thus our children were 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 neighborhood. 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 at house walls and roofs and 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 it with a smile, knowing my son was a completely normal boy who only needed a proper mixture of motherly love and discipline to grow up to be 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 approaching autumn in the air: 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 colors and warmth of summer. 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 gone farther than our mailbox—and that only on Wednesdays at one o’clock when 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 gray color of the autumn sky. He sneaked around ghostlike, unnoticeable, and almost translucent, close to non-existent. Now and then I had to steal near him and touch him to make sure 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 seeking 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 like the stereotypical 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 as to make his life hell, but he wouldn’t have brought home any popularity awards, if such things had been presented.

  After Gunnar’s death, Rupert was like a kind of small over-scared endangered animal that constantly expects something big and extremely terrible to attack him. His irrational fear was even infecting 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 talking 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 night a capricious wind brought to our ears the noise of a train passing by the district from the railway far away behind the forested hills. At the closest, the tracks were at least fifteen kilometers 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 at the sounds for I knew how the phenomenon affected Rupert. 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. 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 labeled a mental health problem. I was the best expert with my own child, and therefore 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 no matter what sacrifices it demanded from both of us.

  First, I took a deep breath, grabbed the phone, and canceled 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 Duck, Superman, Jokerfants, Space Journeys, King Kong, Phantoms, Shocks, Frankenstein and Werewolves, Pink Panther, Roadrunner, John Carter, Dracula, Marcos—and burned them all in the sauna oven.

  There were hundreds, and my work of destruction took hours. The neighborhood was covered in charred bits of comics.

  I hesitated awhile with storybooks. 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, so I hardened my heart in the cleansing blaze of book pyres.


  Into the flames went Grimm’s Fairytales; The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe; The Best Animal Stories; My Brother Lionheart; Pippi Longstocking, and other literary fiction that excited imagination. To be on the safe side I pushed all coloring books in the oven, too.

  Then I sought out all his crayons and drawing pens and 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 programs Rupert could still safely watch. All movies were completely prohibited. I enrolled Rupert in the chess club, model airplane club, volleyball club, Boy Scouts, and ceramic crafts. After some reflection, I canceled the ceramic crafts. To conclude it all, I ordered him always, from then on, to keep his watch on time and to be aware of the date—or be left without his pocket money.

  Rupert wasn’t very happy about all this, but neither did he protest. When he noticed his comics and books were missing, he looked at me with silent astonishment, but said nothing. I fervently hoped he would understand this was all for his own good. He tried to ask about his drawing materials, 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 favorite programs on 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 program 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 first get 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 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 art grade fell from A to D and his composition grade also fell off a bit, but I didn’t consider it a bad trade at all—I’d always been afraid 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 at team games. After I’d looked at his wan expression for a couple of months, though, 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. 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 set his watch to the correct time by the second every evening by the radio time signal. Months went by pretty comfortably, seasons came and passed, and as time went on I started to think the worst was over.

  Then one winter night, coming back from the bathroom, I peeked into his room and saw the boy had disappeared from his bed.

  I forced myself to calm down, 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 every place in the house at least twice I realized that he had to be outside.

  I saw he had taken his skis from by the steps. Gone also was his fine new camera which he always kept on his bedside table by the glass of water.

  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 or at least go out myself to seek my child, then I heard skis swishing outside.

  I heard the door and Rupert lumbered in, bleak as Death itself.

  He was covered all over with snow. His 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 creosote used to treat the railway ties.

  I wasn’t able to utter anything for a while, so as not to start crying or screaming uncontrollably; I wasn’t even able to move, because I felt a compelling desire to seize the child and thoroughly shake him for scaring me like that.

  Finally I said, with surprising calm: “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 the constable 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.)

  I didn’t want to encourage him to continue his game, which had gotten out-of-hand, so I pushed the camera far back on the upper shelves of the hall cupboard, behind empty jam pots, and only took it out the next summer when I went and buried it and its film a couple of meters deep, next to the other dangerous things.

  Twenty years later, when Rupert was studying law in Helsinki, I happened to find a notebook, which had functioned as some kind of diary for him. It was lying on the bottom of the cupboard, with old school books and wrinkled exercise books. On its cover stood the text Observations of a Ferroequinologist.

  Rupert’s diary contained some rather disconnected notes written over only a couple of years. It also included a chaotic explanation about the trip he had made that night.

  It’s very improper to read other persons’ diaries, and I did not succumb to such baseness; I just glanced at it a little here and there.

  (Myself, I’ve never kept a diary, at least I don’t remember having done that. Neither as a child nor when older. I think the past has nothing to give us, no more than an outdated mail-order catalogue. Besides, my memories in their subjectivity and contradictoriness are much too confused for me to bother recording them.

  I do not know what evil I have done that my mind punishes me so, but almost every night I still have a silly dream in which I anyhow keep a diary. In this Dream Diary of mine one can find all my fuzzy past; there are—carefully recorded—all the thoughts I’ve thought, all contradictions, all the insignificant incidents which my conscious
ness has crumbled down as unnecessary. Its pages teem with hidden motives and causes and consequences and obscure speculations about them.

  In the dream I know that I could, at any time, turn the pages back and look at my past without the softening and diluting influence of time. Only lately, when I’m remembering Rupert, I’ve started to feel the temptation to do so. But I don’t rightly know. It’s much easier when you don’t dwell too much on what is past, but just accept the concrete present as it is.)

  1.12.1976, Observations of a Ferroequinologist:

  Last night I did it, I PHOTOGRAPHED A TRAIN THAT HAD GONE OFF THE RAILS.

  I got up at twelve o’clock at night, hung the camera around my neck, and started to ski on the crusted snow to where I knew the trains did go to turn.

  There’s at least fifteen or twenty kilometers to it, or maybe even a hundred kilometers (it’s very hard to know by night how long a distance is) and several times I almost turned back, but some things one just has got to do, as Mummy says, and then finally after skiing for two hours I found the place though I’d gone astray a few times and thought I’d never find home again and the wolves would eat me, or maybe a bear.

  The place where the trains turn is SECRET, and it’s not easy to find. There’s a blind track leading there, but I still haven’t found the place where it forks from the main track though I’ve searched for it many times. It’s pretty close to the section where that train outside the timetable tried to kill me and Dad in summer, maybe four or five kilometers away. I don’t know whether I was more afraid of the place or of Mum tumbling to that I’d gone out (as it happened this time anyway). I waited for surely at least three hours before the train arrived—luckily I had provisions: three chocolate bars, a packet of chewing gum (two eaten beforehand), one gingerbread.

  The rails come to that place in the middle of the forest from somewhere farther off, from behind a really thickety terrain. And on them the trains come and go. The blind track ends completely among trees so the trains can get off the rails and turn in the forest and then mount the tracks again and return to where they came from.