The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Novellas 2015

by Paula Guran

  The train seemed like a giant dying beast, a dragon fallen on its side and leaking dry. Thick black smoke was gushing out from inside the split engine case as it started to bury the wrecked giant and hide it from the eyes of the world. Some wagons had burst like cardboard boxes and the stuff inside them was spread all along the track.

  The smoke crept on the ground toward me, and when it touched my bare feet I shuddered with loathing—I felt that in its shelter the many-faced emperor Death himself was hiding; he was stroking my living flesh with his bony hand. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, it whispered gently among the engine’s hiss, let’s bear no grudge, dear girl, let’s meet again sometime!

  And somewhere in the shelter of the smoke, Death was pressing against his thin breast the lifeless body of my Alice, my golden-haired slender-fingered little Alice . . .

  whose residual warmth I still felt in my own hand;

  whose desk would be empty on Monday morning;

  who would then have a moment of silence to commemorate her, and the boy who had secretly been in love with her would burst into tears in the back row;

  whose parents would turn gray and shrivel up and bent down in a few weeks and move away from the village without saying good-bye to anyone;

  who would never again appear for piano lessons with Amalie Forrester, because her pianist’s hands had been cut off and crushed under the train and would never play even the simplest melody . . .

  I thought of the day when Robbie had chased the rabbit to the rails and run directly in front of the train. I’d never have believed an animal could look so sincerely astonished. I’d collected hairy pieces in a sack for several days from along the track. Even if dogs wouldn’t get to heaven I wanted to give him at least a decent rest in a grave. I walked back and forth along the track from morning to evening and searched the ditches and grassy plots and brooks, but Robbie’s left ear, right hind foot, and half of his tail stayed missing. I’d always felt that the train had eaten them.

  I pressed my eyes shut and with all my soul’s power sent an appeal to the One who had deemed it justifiable to let the train run over Alice, whoever or whatever it was—perhaps some kind of a Big and Terrible Death Deity of the Railways existed, whom we in our immense ignorance had defied: IF IT’S AT ALL POSSIBLE TO YOU, PLEASE MAKE THIS SOMEHOW UNHAPPENED! I’LL GIVE YOU ANYTHING!

  Then I turned my back on the scene and walked home.

  I felt confused. I never told anyone, not even my parents, that I’d been a witness to the death of my best friend and to a train accident that was in the newspapers and even on the radio. It felt too unreal for me to talk about it. I never let myself even think about that rainy afternoon. Finally it turned into that hazy dream image that sometimes flutters somewhere on the fringes of my consciousness like a black bird.

  It was the memory of that day I felt nearby when Gunnar was inside me moving faster and faster and I held onto his tie and suddenly heard, quite close, the train’s terrible hungry scream—the memory returned and took the breath from my lungs and the warmth from my blood and the feeling from my nerves. I repelled the shadow of Death, coldly stretching toward me, by clinging to the chance of a new life which in that magic moment was within my reach—I seized it, stole it, refused to surrender it back to Nothingness, which is just the other name of Death.”

  —From the unwritten Dream Diary of E.N.

  “Now,” Rupert whispered.

  I stared into the vertical darkness of trees where the rails emerged.

  I heard something, maybe a heavily melancholy metallic sigh that lingered, echoing in the snowy halls of the quiet forest. It was followed by a stretching metallic screech. Then I saw movement, or rather a premonition of movement.

  At first it was just a shadow among shadows, the mischievous play of night wind and moonlight among the swaying spruce and snow. But gradually an apparition began to take shape on the clearing’s edge. The rails held a tall black being which crept forward, hissing, gasping, and terrifyingly huge and heavy. Now and then, the moonlight touched it, but not for a moment did it give up the shadows it wore. It moved carefully, almost shyly, and nearly stopped, but then it puffed a large smoke cloud into the frozen air, gave a jolt, and started, creaking painfully, to flow off the rails in front of my eyes.

  I realized vaguely that Rupert stood near me.

  “What are you planning to do?” I asked him.

  I was straining to understand what was happening before my eyes; I kept trying to figure out a plausible explanation to it and to fit it into some rational frame of reference, but the gnawing ache behind my brow didn’t make rationalization any easier.

  “You just stay there. And Mother: don’t move, under any circumstances! Wait there, keep your head low and hold your ears.”

  “My ears?”

  But he had already gone, rushing down the slope with coat flapping, toward the train descending off the rails. I stared after him along the surface of the snow, until he sank into the thick shadows.

  Hold your ears.

  A series of relays clicked in my head, and suddenly I remembered the dynamite theft Miriam had mentioned; I remembered all the recent cases of disappeared explosives. How much had actually been taken?

  . . . Or else there’s a huge cache of explosives somewhere close by. Very soon a part of Houndbury will surely fly off in the four winds!

  “But you can’t possibly blow up a train!” I whispered into the darkness, completely taken aback.

  But of course he could do it. He was brain-damaged and more irrational than ever and could do anything, because he no longer acknowledged my authority. And all those unexplained thefts of explosives—I could see with the eyes of my mind how my son had committed burglaries by night and skied here with his loot and gradually charged the whole valley. I couldn’t imagine how much he knew about explosives, surely not much, but probably still enough to achieve a considerable explosion. Trains had hurt him in so many ways, and now he planned to pay them back, measure for measure.

  “Rupert, no . . . ”

  I rushed after my son through the juniper bushes. All the time expecting the dusk in front of me to flare up in a fire that would strip clothes and skin and flesh off me and fling my burned bones up the slope. Even I couldn’t at this moment discover any rational explanation for why a train would run off rails by night in the middle of a remote forest, but that didn’t make blowing up the train any more reasonable an idea, now did it?

  “Rupert, leave the train alone!” I yelled. “We have to talk seriously. Let’s go home and take some chocolate cake out of the freezer and make some cocoa and talk properly! What about it?”

  It was darker at the bottom of the valley. I ran among the spruce, juniper, and pine toward the rails.

  I slowed down when a peculiar lump on the ground caught my eyes. I stooped down to look at it. It was a little snowman. Or not a snowman, a gravestone—there was some engraving on it, too, but I couldn’t make it out.

  I kicked off the snow on its base, and something like a paw came into view.

  I straightened up and realized that I had, indeed, no time to think about such matters. I had to warn the engine driver before Rupert could carry out his obsession and destroy what little was left of his life. The snow squeaked and thudded under my steps.

  “Rupert, Rupert,” I whispered. “Is this that ‘creative imagination’ of yours?”

  A long hiss made me stop.

  I listened for a while and then carefully stepped through the spruce twigs hanging in front of me.

  About ten or fifteen meters away from me was the train, or rather the shape of a train covered in smoky darkness. It was surrounded by trees and darkness, a lot of darkness. The valley was a sea of darkness, where everything was made up of different degrees of darkness and the scant light afforded by the moon only managed to confuse the eye with its roguish play. If I could see properly, there was a big black steam engine driving the train that had arrived via the rails, a real muse
um piece. So black it looked like condensed night, like darkness cast in the shape of an engine. There was a dark line of goods wagons behind it. Those were still left on the rails, but the engine stood in the snow between the spruce trees. Its long black bumpers stretched toward me like the paws of a beast. I only saw completely clearly the plow-like metal contraption in front of it that was probably intended to remove obstacles off the rails; it had snow and twigs heaped on it now.

  Perhaps they were founding a kind of steam engine museum out here, I reasoned weakly.

  I wished my head wouldn’t ache so furiously; even a slight migraine hampered logical thinking and easily made me do foolish things. (When Rupert was six years old I had, for instance, taken all the laundry out of the washing machine and directly off to the rubbish heap. Rupert had given me an enormous headache by pretending for three days in a row that our house was a space ship landed on Uranus—when I’d tried to open the windows, he had hysterically caught my hands and screamed something about a noxious atmosphere waiting outside.)

  “Hello!” I yelled and waved my hand. “Ahoy! You there in the engine! Have you seen my son? Stetson and a long coat. He’s not quite himself just now, and I think you ought to—”

  The engine spat thick smoke and howled. Its voice kept whirling around me and my ears rang as if my head had turned into the bell tower of an enormous cathedral. It was too dark to see inside the engine. The train itself seemed to stare at me with its lamp-eyes. It looked curious. If an inanimate machine can somehow look conscious, this one did.

  I stared at the big green-black mass of the engine, my head bent back, and tried to ignore my subjective feelings which were getting more irrational all the time. I felt I was being stared back at. Of course it was an engine driver looking at me from the cover of darkness, not the train itself, but the illusion was strong. And in certain hours of the night the human mind is apt to be carried off by subjectivity; perhaps this lack of objectivity has something to do with the phenomenon called biorhythms.

  “Hello! You ought to listen to me now, before anything unpleasant happens!”

  I took a few steps closer to the train. I wanted to see whether anybody was left in the engine. Perhaps the engine driver had by now noticed that something was going on and had gone off to examine the situation. I looked around myself.

  “Rupert! I’m here! Mother’s by the train! Don’t—don’t do anything at all!”

  I hoped my son—wherever he was hiding—would have the patience to keep his hands off the explosives as long as he knew I was close by.

  Then I stopped, confused.

  The train radiated incomprehensible coldness that penetrated all my clothes and burned my skin. I noticed the snow around the train was freezing to steely hardness, I heard the snow crackle as it hardened. The engine puffed and jerked a couple of meters forward, closer to me. The smoke spread everywhere into the darkness and added its own gauzy shade to it. The plough bit the snow. The engine’s hood pushed into the moonlight, the twigs swayed aside and I saw underneath the train’s turned-off lamp a plate with the number 3159.

  The comprehension emerged from some deep source inside me. What was before me was not exactly—at least not primarily—a train. It looked like a train, and to some extent is surely was a train, but its fundamental essence was one of those marginal things humans are not supposed to know about.

  I felt no need to scream in terror or otherwise turn hysterical. That would have been ridiculous. The existence of the apparition rather made me feel embarrassed, as if I had entered a room—without knocking—where someone I thought I knew well (in this case, objective reality) was doing something quite strange and private. That apparition of a train was on its own strange business; it was following purposes incomprehensible to me. In the world of reason and logic it was a complete stranger, an uninvited guest, an embarrassing secret. A ghost from another time. Yes: I knew that engine. I knew its number, and I recognized the malicious consciousness it radiated.

  I’d seen it escape the rails and kill and then be destroyed itself. And now it was here before me anyhow. Why? Was I looking at the ghost of a train?

  “It’s the ‘Little Jumbo,’ ” a voice sounded somewhere behind me. “They were manufactured in the machine shops of Tampella, Lokomo, and Frichs from the year 1927 to the year 1953. What’s the year now?”

  With stiff lips I uttered the year I thought correct, eyes frozen fast to the apparition standing before me. It was still staring at me with its lamp-eyes from between the shadowy spruce branches. Curious, hungry. The coldness of the engine flowed into my flesh, it was burning me like fire sculpted of ice, and it seemed to me that if I didn’t leave its circle of influence soon, I was never going to move again.

  That was precisely the train ghost’s intention. It was trying to bewitch and freeze me, to make me wonder about its nature and surrender myself to be its prey. And it was close to succeeding. I knew I should have turned my back to it and left, but I just kept staring at the iron dragon breathing irrationality and at its identification numbers. The sense of touch escaped my flesh, I thought I could hear even my skin crackle while it was freezing.

  3159, 3159, 3159 . . .

  “That kind has been taken out of service ages ago,” Rupert continued somewhere out of sight. “Over twenty years ago. Consequently it’s here sometime before it was retired. Now and then some come here to turn that haven’t even been made yet. That’s why I couldn’t find the picture of one of them in any books. That’s why watches don’t work here: this place is outside the timetables. They wake up on the rails and they break out of their own timetables and find a suitable blind track and come here, wherever or whenever they are.”

  “Whatever, Rupert,” I mumbled, lips numb with cold. I didn’t have the energy to try and understand his words. I only knew I was freezing to death. “Listen, are you really going to blow up that train?”

  After a moment’s silence Rupert answered: “This place is full of dynamite. It’s by the rails, in the trees, under the snow. I’ve spent several nights making preparations. I have to do it. Even if you are going to be angry.”

  “Can’t I stop you in any way? Reason with you? Make you realize how senseless this all is?”

  “No.”

  “Well then you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do,” I muttered, relieved—the responsibility was no longer mine. I couldn’t take any more responsibility.

  The train blew smoke in the air, and its steam pistons became tense and started to push the wheels where they were fixed; it was preparing to chase me again, to make its kill. To murder me.

  I felt someone gripping my shoulders. Rupert started to walk me away, fast. My feet had lost their strength to the cold, but Rupert was strong. The valley reverberated with the train’s hollow panting and the metallic screech of the steam machinery that was pushing it off.

  We got as far as the junipers, and Rupert threw himself in the snow and dragged me down with him. My face thumped against the snow. I was too benumbed to soften my landing.

  “Mother, I ignited all the fuses,” my son whispered. “Hands to your ears!”

  “We have to talk about this when we get home,” I sighed. “Let’s drink cocoa and really talk with each other for once.”

  I thought there was something that I ought to have noticed and understood. Something to do with causes and consequences. If only my head hadn’t been aching so terribly.

  With the growing pounding in my head I hardly even heard the explosions that suddenly started to tear apart the valley, the trees and the train that had left its timetable.

  We stood there an hour, hand in hand, and waited, Alice and I. Then we sat on the rails and waited yet another hour. The train didn’t come, the track stayed empty. I felt more and more miserable. My stomach was hurting and my head ached. “It’s not coming,” I said. “Let’s leave now.”

  Alice angrily plucked at golden lock of her hair and pouted. “It’s not showing up, indeed. We have to come back
tomorrow.”

  We went home, Alice disappointed and I feeling ill but relieved.

  In the night I woke up feeling that I could hardly breathe. Twinges of pain were stabbing my temples. My first thought was that Alice was dead. I fancied I remembered how the train had come and swerved off the rails and crushed Alice in front of my horrified eyes. The image was so vivid I started crying in my bed. And yet I also remembered that the train had never come and we had returned home in peace.

  In the morning I ran to see Alice; I had to make sure that she really was alive. She set about at once to get us going to the railway tracks, but I refused, even when she pressed me hard and called me a traitor and even a bad friend. She looked at me somehow strangely, and I knew something had changed between us.

  We were still friends, of course, and went around together, but day by day our friendship got thinner and we met more and more infrequently—the magic was gone. It was pretty much my fault—I couldn’t relate to Alice naturally anymore, for I remembered her dying that afternoon on the railway, even while I also remembered we’d come back home together. I remembered her funeral, I even remembered the place she was buried, and her gravestone and the golden letters on it, and yet she was sitting next to me in school.”

  —From the unwritten Dream Diary of E.N.

  That is the night I think I lost my son; I remember the night and the explosions, but after that—nothing. I don’t remember coming home. A few times I’ve tried to return by myself to look for that strange blind track in the forest, but every time I’ve been driven aside from the way and ended somewhere quite different.

  I remember Rupert’s birth. I remember him growing and his overactive imagination and the day he graduated from law school. I remember his love and the skull fracture that removed it from his mind. I remember our night trip to the place where the trains turn, and that’s where I lost him in the worst way. All that I remember, but I also remember that I never had the child I wished for. My youth was spent in studying, and then I had to further my career. We often talked about children, my husband and I, but we put off the realization of the idea. When we finally woke up to try, it was already too late.