The Motion Demon

by Grabinski, Stefan

  Clinging on to the last plank like a drowning man, Pomian phoned the Zbaszyn station, in the opposite direction, supposing, he didn’t know why, that the alarm was coming from there. Naturally he was answered in the negative; everything was in perfect order in that area.

  ‘Have I gone crazy or is everyone not in their right minds?’ he finally asked a passing blockman. ‘Mr Sroka, have you heard these damned bell signals?’

  ‘Yes, stationmaster, I heard them. There they go again! What the hell?’

  Indeed, the relentless hammer struck the iron bell anew; it called for help from workers and doctors.

  The clock already read past one.

  Pomian flew into a rage.

  ‘What business is this of mine? In this direction, everything’s fine, in that direction, everything’s in order—then what the hell do they want? Some joker is playing games with us, throwing the whole station upside-down! I’ll make a report—and that’s that!’

  ‘I don’t think so, stationmaster,’ his assistant calmly put in; ‘the affair is too serious to be grasped from this point of view. One rather has to accept a mistake.’

  ‘Some mistake! Haven’t you heard, my friend, the answer from both of the stations nearest to us? It’s not possible that these stations would not have heard any accidentally stray signals from stops beyond them. If these signals reached us, they would have to go through their regions first! Well?’

  ‘So the simple conclusion is that these signals are coming from some trackwalker’s booth between Dabrowa and Glaszow.’

  Pomian glanced at his subordinate attentively.

  ‘From one of those booths, you say? Hmm . . . maybe. But why? For what purpose? Our people examined the entire line, step by step, and they didn’t find anything suspicious.’

  The official spread out his arms.

  ‘That I don’t know. We can investigate this later in conjunction with Glaszow. In any case, I believe we can sleep peacefully tonight and ignore the signals. Everything that we had to do, we did—the region has been searched rigorously, on the line there isn’t any trace of the danger we were warned about. I consider these signals as simply a so-called “false alarm”.’

  The assistant’s calmness transferred itself soothingly to the stationmaster. He bid him leave and shut himself in his office for the rest of the night.

  But the station personnel did not ignore this so easily. They gathered on the block around the switchman, whispering secretively among themselves. From time to time, when the quiet of the night was interrupted by a new ringing of the bell, the heads of the railwaymen, bent towards each other, turned in the direction of the signal post, and several pairs of eyes, wide with superstitious fear, observed the movements of the forged hammer.

  ‘A bad sign,’ murmured Grzela, the watchman; ‘a bad sign!’

  Thus the signals played on until the start of daybreak. But the closer morning came, the weaker and less distinct the sounds; then long gaps between each signal ensued, until the signals died down, leaving no trace at dawn. People sighed out, as if a nightmarish weight had been lifted from their chests.

  That day Pomian turned to the authorities at Ostoi, giving a precise report of the occurrences of the preceding night. A telegraphed reply ordered him to await the arrival of a special commission that would examine the affair thoroughly.

  During the day, the rail traffic proceeded normally and without a hitch. But when the clock struck seven in the evening, the alarm signals arrived once again, in the same succession as the night before. So, first came the ‘cars unattached’ signal; then the order ‘stop all trains’; finally the command ‘send a locomotive with workers’ and the distress call for help, ‘send an engine with workers and a doctor’. The progressive excellence of the signals was characteristic; each new one presented an increase in the fictitious danger. The signals clearly complemented each other, forming, in distinctive punctuations, a chain that spun out an ominous story of some presumed accident.

  And yet the affair seemed like a joke or a silly prank.

  The stationmaster raged on, while the personnel behaved variously; some took the affair from a humorous point of view, laughing at the frantic signals, others crossed themselves superstitiously. Zdun, the blockman, maintained half-aloud that the devil was sitting inside the signal post and striking the bell out of contrariness.

  In any event, no one took the signals seriously, and no suitable orders were given at the station. The alarm lasted, with breaks, until the morning, and only when a pale-yellow line cut through in the East did the bell quieten down.

  Finally, after a sleepless night, the stationmaster saw the arrival of the commission around ten in the morning. From Ostoi came the most noble chief inspector, Turner—a tall, lean gentleman with maliciously blinking eyes—along with his entire staff of officials. The investigation began.

  These gentlemen ‘from above’ already had a preconceived view of the affair. In the opinion of the chief inspector the signals were originating from one of the trackwalker’s booths along the Dabrowa–Glaszow line. It only needed to be ascertained which one. According to the official records, there were ten booths in this region; from this number, eight could be eliminated, as they did not possess the apparatus to give signals of this type. Consequently, the suspicion fell on the remaining two. The chief inspector decided to investigate both.

  After a lavish dinner at the stationmaster’s residence, the inquiry committee set out in a special train at noon. After a half-hour ride, the gentlemen got off before the booth of trackwalker Dziwota; he was one of the suspects.

  The poor little fellow, terrified by the invasion of the unexpected visitors, forgot his tongue and answered questions as if awakened from a deep sleep. After an examination that lasted over an hour, the commission decided that Dziwota was as innocent as a lamb and ignorant about everything.

  In order not to waste time, the chief inspector left him in peace, recommending to his people a further drive to the eighth trackwalker on the line, on whom his investigation was now focused.

  Forty minutes later they stopped at the place. No one ran out to meet them. This made them wonder. The post looked deserted; no trace of life in the homestead, no sign of a living being about. No voice of the man of the house responded, no rooster crowed, no chicken grumbled.

  Along steep, little stairs, framed by handrails, they went up the hill on which stood the house of trackwalker Jazwa. At the entrance they were met by countless swarms of flies—nasty, vicious, buzzing. As if angered at the intruders, the insects threw themselves on their hands, eyes, and faces.

  The door was knocked on. No one answered from within. One of the railwaymen pressed down on the handle—the door was closed. . . .

  ‘Mr Tuziak,’ beckoned Pomian to the station locksmith, ‘pick it.’

  ‘With pleasure, stationmaster.’

  Iron creaked, the lock crunched and yielded.

  The inspector pried the door open with his leg and entered. But then he retreated to the open air, applying a handkerchief to his nose. A horrible foulness from inside hit those present. One of the officials ventured to cross the threshold and glanced into the interior.

  By a table near the window sat the trackwalker with his head sunk on his chest, the fingers of his right hand resting on the knob of the signal apparatus.

  The official advanced towards the table and, paling, turned back to the exit. A quick glance thrown at the trackwalker’s hand had ascertained that is was not fingers that were enclosing the knob, but three naked bones, cleansed of meat.

  At that moment the sitter by the table wavered and tumbled down like a log onto the ground. Jazwa’s body was recognized in a state of complete decomposition. The doctor present ascertained that death came at least ten days earlier.

  An official record was written down, and the corpse was buried on the spot, an autopsy being abandoned because of the greatly-advanced deterioration of the body.

  The cause of death was not discovere
d. Peasants from the neighbouring village were queried, but could not shed any light on the matter other than that Jazwa had not been seen for a long time. Two hours later the commission returned to Ostoi.

  Stationmaster Dabrowa slept calmly that night and the next, undisturbed by signals. But a week later a terrible collision occurred on the Dabrowa–Glaszow line. Cars that had come apart by an unfortunate accident ran into an express train bound for the opposite direction, shattering it completely. The entire train personnel perished, as well as eighty or so travellers.

  THE SIDING

  IN THE PASSENGER TRAIN heading to Gron at a late autumn hour the crush was enormous; the compartments were packed, the atmosphere was stifling and hot. Due to the lack of space, class differentiations had been obliterated; under an ancient illegal law one sat or stood where one could. Above the chaotic assemblage of heads, lamps were burning with a small, dim light that drifted from car ceilings onto weary faces, rumpled profiles. Tobacco smoke rose in sour fumes and was drawn out in a long, grey line along the corridors to billow in clouds and exit through the abyss of the windows. The steady clatter of wheels acted soporifically, inducing through their monotonous knocking a drowsiness that prevailed in the cars. Chug-chug-chug…chug-chug-chug….

  Only in one of the third-class compartments, the fifth car before the end, had the ambience not surrendered to the general mood. Here the throng was loud, lively, animated. The attention of the travellers had been entirely captured by a small hunchbacked fellow in a railwayman’s uniform of lower ranking who was intently narrating something and underlining his words with colourful and expressive gestures. The clustered-about listeners did not lower their eyes from this person; some, to hear better, got up from other areas of the car and came closer to the centre bench; a curious few had put their heads through the door of the neighbouring compartment.

  The railwayman was speaking. In the washed-out lamplight that flickered with the tossing of the car, his head moved in an odd cadence, a large, misshapen head with dishevelled grey hair. The wide face, broken erratically on the line of the nose, paled or flushed purply in a rhythm of stormy blood—the exclusive, unique, obstinate face of a fanatic. The eyes glided absentmindedly about those present, glowing with the fire of stubborn thoughts strengthened through the years. And yet this person had moments of beauty. At times it seemed that the hump and the ugliness of the facial features disappeared, and the eyes took on a sapphiric radiance, infused with inspiration, and in the dwarfish figure breathed a noble, irresistible passion. After a moment the metamorphosis weakened, expired, and inside the circle of listeners sat only an entertaining but ugly narrator in a railwayman’s shirt.

  Professor Ryszpans—a tall, lean man in light-grey attire, a monocle in one eye—had been passing discreetly through the attentive compartment, when he stopped suddenly to glance carefully at the speaker. Something intrigued him, some phrase thrown from the hunchback’s lips riveted him in place. He rested an elbow against an iron bar of a partition, tightened in his monocle, and listened.

  ‘Yes, ladies and gentlemen,’ the railwayman was saying, ‘in recent times puzzling occurrences have been happening more frequently in the train world. All this seems to have its own purpose, it’s clearly heading towards something irrevocable.’

  He became silent for a moment, blew away the ashes from his pipe, then began talking again:

  ‘Has anyone heard of “the car of laughter”?’

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ cut in the professor. ‘I read something about it a year ago in the newspapers, but superficially, and didn’t attach any importance to it; the affair appeared to be journalistic gossip.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind, my dear sir!’ contested the railwayman passionately, turning to the new listener. ‘Nice gossip! An obvious truth, a fact ascertained by the testimony of eyewitnesses. I’ve talked to people who rode in this car. Everyone became ill a week after that ride.’

  ‘Please tell us exactly what happened,’ responded a few voices. ‘An interesting affair!’

  ‘Not so much interesting, as it is amusing,’ corrected the dwarf, shaking his lion-like mop. ‘A year ago some short-lived car briefly wormed its way among its solid and serious companions, and, to people’s delight and irritation, it roved on railway lines for upwards of two weeks. Its facetiousness was of a suspicious nature, at times resembling mischievousness. Whoever entered the car, immediately fell into an extremely cheerful mood, which soon developed into explosive hilarity. People would burst out laughing for no apparent reason, as if taking nitrous oxide. They held themselves by the belly, they doubled over, tears streaming down their faces. Finally their laughter took on the threatening characteristic of a paroxysm. In tears of demonic joy, passengers had endless convulsions; as if demented, they threw themselves against walls; and, grunting like a herd of swine, they foamed at the mouth. At various stations, one had to remove several of these unhappy happy persons from the car, for a fear arose that otherwise they would simply burst from laughter.’

  ‘How did the railroad authorities respond to this?’ asked a stocky man with a strong profile, a designing engineer named Znieslawski, taking advantage of the pause.

  ‘Initially, these gentlemen believed some psychic pestilence was involved that was transferring itself from rider to rider. But when similar occurrences began to repeat themselves, and always in the same car, one railway doctor hit upon a brilliant idea. Assuming that somewhere in the car resided a laughter bacterium, which he hastily named bacillus ridiculentus and also bacillus gelasticus primitivus, he submitted the infected car to a thorough disinfection.’

  ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ boomed a professionally interested neighbour, some doctor from W., in the ear of the matchless conversationalist. ‘I wonder what antiseptic agent he used—Lysol or carbolic acid?’

  ‘You are mistaken, my dear sir; none of those mentioned. The unfortunate car was washed from the roof to the rails with a special preparation devised ad hoc by the aforementioned doctor; it was named by its creator lacrima tristis, or “the tear of the sad”.’

  ‘Ha, ha, ha!’ choked some lady from a corner. ‘What a precious man you are! Ha, ha, ha! “The tear of the sad!”’

  ‘Yes, my dear lady,’ he continued calmly, ‘for shortly after the release of the cured car into circulation, several travellers took their own lives with a revolver. These types of experiments revenge themselves,’ he concluded, shaking his head sadly. ‘Radicalism in these things is unhealthy.’

  For a while there was silence.

  ‘A couple of months later,’ the functionary resumed the tale, ‘alarming rumours began to spread across the country concerning the appearance of a so-called “transformation car”—carrus transformans, as a certain philologist dubbed it—apparently one of the offerings of the new plague. One day, strange changes were noticed in the outward appearance of several passengers who had made a journey in the same ill-fated car. Families and acquaintances could in no manner recognize the warmly greeting individuals who had exited the train. The female judge K., a young and attractive brunette, repulsed with horror the poxed stranger with a pronounced bald spot who was stubbornly insisting that he was her husband; Miss W., a beautiful eighteen-year-old blonde, went into spasms in the embrace of a grey-haired and podagric old gentleman who had presented himself to her, with a bouquet of azaleas, as her “fiancé”. On the other hand, the already well-advanced in years lady councillor Z. found herself, with pleasant surprise, at the side of an elegant young man restored miraculously by upwards of forty years, an appellate advisor and her husband.

  ‘At news of this, a huge commotion arose in town. Nothing else was talked about save the puzzling metamorphoses. After a month a new sensation: the bewitched ladies and gentlemen slowly regained their original look, reverting to their time-honoured outward appearance.’

  ‘And was the car disinfected this time?’ asked some woman with interest.

  ‘No, my dear lady, these precautionary measures were waived. On the co
ntrary, the rail authorities surrounded the car with special care when it became apparent that the railroad could derive great profit from it. Special tickets were even printed up to gain entrance to this wonderful car, so-called “transformation tickets”. The demand was naturally huge. At the front of the queue were long columns of old ladies, ugly widows, and spinsters insisting on the travel tickets. The candidates voluntarily inflated the cost; they paid three to four times in excess of the price; they bribed clerks, conductors, even porters. In the car, before the car, and under the car dramatic scenes were played out, sometimes passing over into bloody fights. Several grey-haired women expired in one skirmish. This horrible example did not, however, cool down the lust for rejuvenation: the massacre continued. Finally, the entire disturbance was put to an end by the wonderful car itself. After two weeks of transformation activity, it suddenly lost its strange power. Stations took on a normal appearance; the cadres of old men and women retreated back to their firesides and cozy sleeping nooks.’

  The hunchback stopped talking, and in the midst of the din of stirred voices, laughter, and jokes on the subject presented by the story, he slipped furtively from the car.

  Ryszpans followed him like a shadow. He was intrigued by this railwayman with the darned-at-the-elbow shirt who had expressed himself more properly than many an average intellectual. Something drew him to the man, some mysterious current of sympathy impelled him towards the eccentric invalid.

  In the corridor of first-class compartments, he laid a hand lightly on his shoulder.

  ‘Excuse me. Can I have a few words with you?’

  The hunchback smiled with satisfaction.

  ‘Certainly. I’ll even show you to a place where we’ll be able to talk freely. I know this car inside out.’