The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  I lay behind the top of the ridge under juniper bushes and watched how one train crawled slowly and carefully out from the thicket. It came to the end of the blind track, stopped, and then started to get off the rails.

  It was huge, although by night it’s also hard to know for sure how big something is. I somehow felt how it changed, not so much outwardly so that it could be seen with one’s eyes, but inwardly. It awoke and pricked up its ears and put about feelers to its environment as if it had guessed I lay there watching.

  I wondered if there was anybody inside it. (I felt that even if there was somebody in there, it wasn’t human, at least not a live human.)

  Suddenly it became awfully cold and I started shaking and my teeth started rattling. I felt that the coldness came out of the train, as if it had been to the North Pole or the Moon or some other really cold place. I took four photos of it with timed exposure.

  I lay there in the snow without moving and waited and shivered from cold and heard trees breaking and crashing when the train puffed its way along in the snow and made its slow turnaround in the forest and then finally climbed back on the rails.

  It must have taken surely at least four or five hours. I almost peed in my pants and I thought I’d get a proper licking when morning came and Mum went to wake me up and I wouldn’t be home yet. I tried to look at my watch but there was not enough light to see the hands.

  Then the train slowly went off and disappeared behind the thicket and the air wasn’t so cold anymore. When I was quite sure no more trains were coming, I descended into the valley bottom and went to see the rails up close.

  Sometimes one can find all kinds of things there. Once I found a bit of paper in the snow that turned out to be a thirty-years-old third-class train ticket from Helsinki to Oulu. Now I found no tickets, but there was a dead cat. I rather think it was our neighbors’, Toby, who had disappeared, but it wasn’t possible to identify it for sure. It had gone all flat and stiff and I saw its intestines. It was just like it had been hit with a house-sized sledgehammer. Not all of it was there, it was as if something had bitten a piece off it.

  I threw some snow over Toby the cat and built it a little gravestone out of snow.

  Once I tried to follow the rails so I’d see where they actually join the big tracks. I walked along the blind track some two hundred meters (the forest around the track is such a tangle nobody can get through it without a chainsaw), but then I had to turn back, because the railway smell got so strong I couldn’t breathe anymore. Besides I was afraid a train would come from the other way. If a train had come toward me, I couldn’t have got off anywhere from the rails. I almost fainted just like that one time at school when I had a fever over thirty-nine degrees, and by a side glance thought I saw all kinds of strange things in the shadows of the thicket, things I don’t like to remember. I realized afterward that the railway smell may actually be poisonous when there’s too much of it in the air.

  I won’t go there any more, at least not before I’m grown up and can buy a chainsaw and an oxygen apparatus and other necessary things and when I no longer need to be afraid of Mum.

  When the trains stay on the rails, they are asleep, and people can control them just like a sleepwalker can be maneuvered.

  I didn’t see the train this time very clearly, since it was quite dark and one cannot see well in the dark, but I did recognize the type. It was one of those big red diesel engines, with a white cabin. I found its picture in the library’s train book. It was a DV15 manufactured in the Valmet Lokomo machine shop. Or it could have been a DV12, which looks pretty much alike. I’m not quite sure. It had fifteen wagons after it—I counted them. They were not passenger carriages but empty open wagons that look like animal skeletons and usually carry tractors and other big machines.

  The previous time I saw a short blue local passenger train, the kind that doesn’t have a separate locomotive. One can see them now and then in daily traffic. They transport people, but at the turning-place the short blue train had blackened windows and I couldn’t see whether there was anybody inside.

  But when the first time I went to the place where the trains turn, I caught a glimpse of a really odd-looking train, and so far I haven’t found its picture anywhere though I’ve spent hours in the library and leafed through all the train books I’ve discovered. It was quite bullet-shaped and really streamlined and looked actually more like a space rocket than a train. And it seemed to float a bit above the rails. That’s the one I really would like to photograph some day so I could show it to a grown-up who knows a lot about trains and ask what it actually is.

  When I started to return home and came to an open place with more light I looked at my watch. It was only twenty past two, and at first I was relieved but then I started to get doubtful. I felt that it had taken a lot more time. I thought that my watch had stopped for a while, but at home it was showing the correct time when I checked.

  If only I could find my camera and could develop those photos! Even Mum would have to believe when she saw the pictures, though otherwise she doesn’t believe anything, she’s such a bonehead. (I hope Mum doesn’t read this!) I feel she doesn’t even believe in my existence without coming to check on me every little while.

  Today at school we had cabbage casserole and chocolate mousse again, and of course one wasn’t allowed to have chocolate mousse before eating a plateful of cabbage casserole. Ossian threw up on the table when he tried to eat his plate empty, though he hates cabbage more than anything, and the whole table was flowing green and others started to feel squeamish, too. I was smarter and flipped the cabbage casserole under my chair and fetched myself a big portion of chocolate mousse with a straight face.

  1.20.1976, Observations of a Ferroequinologist:

  I dreamed again that a train was chasing me on a road. I climbed to a roof but the train climbed after me along the wall. I woke up when I fell off the bed to the floor and hit my head. I got a big lump. I could hear a train in the forest, again too close. I dared not go to sleep again. In the morning I went to look for traces but didn’t find any.

  4.12.1976, Observations of a Ferroequinologist:

  I dreamed that I sat on the nose of a steam locomotive. It was rushing ahead with enormous speed.

  First the scenery was unfamiliar, but then we came to Houndbury. Two girls were standing on the track. They held each other’s hands. The girls shouted something to me and laughed and at the last moment they stepped aside and their skirts flapped in the draft of the train. Both of them were quite good looking, but I liked the one with the golden hair more.

  The other one seemed familiar at first, but then she wasn’t anybody I knew but a perfect stranger. After a while we approached the level crossing. Behind the level crossing gate a purple car was waiting. Dad was sitting in the car and he looked sad. I waved and yelled at him not to be sad anymore because I was quite all right, but he didn’t hear.

  Then the locomotive shivered under me and began to feel somehow queer. Awakened. Besides it was no longer a steam engine but a diesel engine. It talked to Dad along the rails, whispering in a peculiar voice that started to make me sleepy though I was already asleep to begin with. It told Dad to put the gears on and to drive onto the rails. Somehow it made the gate rise before its time and bewitched Dad and he obeyed it.

  And we crashed into Dad’s car and I watched how the train smashed the car against the rails a bit like the lion tore up the little deer in Nature’s Wonders that Mum still lets me watch on the TV. Sheet metal and steel and license plates and bloody bits of Dad were falling along the tracks. I saw a loose hand fly into a ditch. Dad was smashed all to pieces with the car and suddenly I realized that the train was eating him and then I started to scream and punch the train with my fists.

  When the train had eaten its fill, it fell to sleep again. That’s when I fell off the engine and woke up in my bed. Outside a train was hooting shrilly.

  Yesterday I went to the library and looked up in a dictionary what “f
erroequinologist” means. A person interested in railways. Dad sometimes said that he and I are both ferroequinologists, but especially me, considering my origin. I had no idea what he meant by that, and he smiled and promised to explain sometime when I’m old enough to understand. But the train killed Dad, so I’ll probably never find out. And Mum of course understands nothing of these matters.

  6.14.1976, Observations of a Ferroequinologist:

  In my dream the trains were in an especially foul mood, and I dreamed that they chased me all through the night. I ran home and hid in the woodshed, and somebody there whispered in my ear that trains have dragon souls and that’s why they love tunnels and are so mean. It also said that my basic task is to save a maiden. I tried to see the one who spoke, but when I turned I was awake in my bed and staring at my own teddy bear.

  Observations of a Ferroequinologist (as well as the smudged train ticket between the pages) ended down in the hole. Rupert had finally, after all, recovered from the morbid and dangerous condition that his swollen imagination had induced. However, I wanted to take no risks with the questions concerning his childhood. We had never spoken about his long-ago train fantasies. I felt like he didn’t necessarily even remember them or most anything else about his childhood, at least nothing very detailed. During his student years he always traveled home by train, though there was no railway station in Houndbury and for the last forty kilometers one had to take an inconvenient bus or try to get a lift. Indeed he seemed to have forgotten his childhood, and all to the good. I had forgotten mine, too.

  Studying law kept the boy’s thoughts firmly in objective reality, ruled by reason and the logic dictated by cold facts. Rupert had no time for idle novels or movies, so his imagination stayed safely asleep.

  But his life was by no means pure toil. He had, in the law school, a couple of fairly good friends with whom to go out and to play tennis. (Over the years Rupert had become quite an athlete, although in the bird-boned fashion of his father.) And from his curt postcards I even gathered that for some time he had been seeing a certain young woman who went to the same lectures.

  Rupert went to study law immediately after his high school graduation, for which I take the credit myself. When he had made his last ferroequinologist exploration at the age of nine years, I realized something: even after all the hobbies I’d arranged for him he still had too much time to brood on the peculiar fantasies in his head. I could confiscate his things, and I could make sure that he no longer crept out of the house by night to make his ferroequinologist observations—I attached a bell on his door and another one on his window and hid his shoes at the night. But I couldn’t control the thoughts going around in his head. Therefore I had to find a way to make Rupert voluntarily use his head for something sound and rational.

  Gunnar had once left a thick book of statutes in my house. I’d put it temporarily on my bookshelf, in the middle of encyclopedias, and there it lay forgotten for years. Now I lugged the massive book into Rupert’s slender arms. I told him it was his father’s old book that he had meant for his son to have when he was old enough to read it (which might very well have been true). I said his father had told me to pay him five marks for each page he could learn by heart.

  At first the boy seemed suspicious. A couple of days went by. Then he calculated the pages in the book and multiplied that by five. He went to look at the shiny ten-geared bikes in Houndbury Bicycle and Engine, and soon he was spending most of his leisure hours studying the book of statutes.

  I was overjoyed to pay the money he collected from me after examinations. By and by he stopped having nightmares, and he recovered from his anxiety and his train obsessions. Surprisingly quickly he accumulated the money for a bike, but he hardly got time to ride that brand new geared wonder for his reading stint continued; even in sleep he was leafing through his statute book, mumbling his statutes and counting the money he’d earned and would still earn.

  A born lawyer, I thought proudly.

  By spring 1991 Rupert graduated with top grades, and for a graduation present I bought him a Rolex with my savings. (I’m not ashamed to admit I cried with happiness for two whole months and finally got a nasty inflammation of the eye.) He got a job in a small but respected law office in the capital and moved with his girlfriend Birgitta, who graduated soon after Rupert, and found herself a job in the same firm.

  Birgitta Susanne Donner was a good and sensible girl. I’d met her a couple of times and could safely trust Rupert to her keeping. I saw she would become an exceedingly reliable and refreshing life partner to Rupert, and surely a caring mother to my grandchildren, when the young couple would have the time to think about reproduction. I had myself started to meet more regularly a certain charming person now that I no longer had to worry about Rupert. It wasn’t especially serious; dating openly in a small village like Houndbury would have provoked too much talk and fuss. My friend was a teacher and thus under the magnifying glass of the villagers. Now and then, however, she stopped for a coffee in the evening, and sometimes it happened that we woke up in the morning nose to nose.

  It would be nice to stop here, with the picture of a successful son and a happy mother. But happy endings in real life are usually just stages on the way to a more final and less cheerful end—the worms will get us eventually, one way or another. Late in the hot July of 1994 trains again got entangled in my son’s life.

  Rupert and Birgitta had been busy for a long while, and sometimes I couldn’t reach them for days on end, even by a phone. I started to suffer from a delusion that my son had somehow disappeared from and I’d never see him again. Finally, however, they managed to take a few days off and come to visit me for a whole weekend.

  Seeing those two enlivened my mind and at the same time made it strangely wistful.

  On Sunday we decided to have a picnic. The day simply floated in heat and bright colors, and when you add to the picture the dragonflies buzzing absent-mindedly to and fro, it was one of those days that should actually be framed and hung on the living room wall for the coming winters. I packed the picnic basket with juice, salami sandwiches, and some chocolate cake with cherries I’d baked for Rupert’s approaching twenty-ninth birthday. We drove in Rupert’s new red car along backroads until we came to the foot of Sheep Hill. It rose as a gently sloping green field toward the dense blue sky. In accordance with its name, Sheep Hill was a sheep pasture: they were standing around in white clusters, and now and then they got excited and started baaing in competition.

  We left the car in the shade of a big birch, followed a path that descended near a low stone fence down the steep bank of Sheep Hill—which at some distance changed to Sheep Rock—and finally arrived at our goal: the grassy meadow by the raised railway embankment where the limpid Ram Brook murmured with cool cheerfulness.

  I spread a white tablecloth on the ground, set the table and told the young couple to start eating before the heat and flies would spoil it all. We ate, and suddenly Rupert stood up and, spitting breadcrumbs, proclaimed that Birgitta and he had become engaged two weeks before.

  I almost choked on my sandwich.

  I looked at my son who stared at me as if expecting a scolding. He was nervous since he wasn’t sure about my attitude, but he was obviously very happy, and the sudden perception made me laugh aloud from sheer joy of living.

  “Now what’s so funny?” Birgitta asked, a little suspicious, but then broke into a broad grin. Such a beautiful girl, I sighed. I already knew what I was going to buy them for a wedding present: the most gorgeous hardwood grandfather clock in the universe!

  With a relieved smile Rupert sat down and continued his meal.

  I suddenly thought of the moment Rupert was conceived. I didn’t remember much of it, just that Gunnar and I had intercourse with each other and prevention had somehow let us down. Anyway, there Rupert was in front of me: happy, handsome and a successful lawyer with a tie around his neck.

  I often think of the moment Rupert was conceived. Gunnar took me fo
r a drive on his new motorbike—at that time he still was a rather wild spirit, in his own trim controlled way. He even had a leather coat. That, however, was no ragged black motorcycle jacket but a fine brown Italian coat, surely terribly expensive. I’d seen him often at the Pavilion which, in those times, was still full of people almost every Saturday of the year. (Now, of course, it’s been closed for a long time and people go to the city.) I went there now and then to dance and to look at people. He’d been besieging me for some time (at least I felt he’d done that, one couldn’t be quite sure of him), and although he didn’t really turn me on, I liked his quiet self-confidence and that everyone was looking at him, So, I was willing to go for a ride with him when he asked me.

  We were driving along backroads by this very countryside and stopped finally to sip white wine in the middle of a small lyrical grove. Gunnar said he liked my nose very much, and then he seduced me.

  I still didn’t really want him, but I let him do it anyway. It was actually quite pleasant, the light way he made love to me. I held on to his tie and smiled all the time. The grass tickled my bottom. He promised to withdraw in good time before he’d come, and surely he would have done that since he was a perfect gentleman and I knew I could trust him completely.

  Finally I felt his rhythm accelerate. His muscles tensed. I remember hearing the sound of a train, the rails ran somewhere quite close—I hadn’t realized that before. Gunnar was struggling in my arms like a trapped animal, I’d folded my legs behind his back and he couldn’t get off me in time. I was quite sure he would get extremely angry at me, but he just looked at me a little sadly, kissed me on the cheek and took me back to the dance pavilion where we danced one waltz together before he left, looking pensive.

  I knew that a new life had started to develop inside me. Six weeks later the doctor confirmed it.