Fantastic Trains

by Neil Enock

  Mr. Fleetwood humphed and sat up straighter in the phaeton. “These railways are cutting up the country. They’re rubbing out some of the most picturesque spots. Good heavens, what is the use of traveling that rapidly? You cannot even see where you are going. I have said to Mrs. Fleetwood more than once, what happens if there is an accident? Those beasts can wreak untold havoc.”

  “Fine questions, Mr. Fleetwood. I shall ponder them during my supper this evening, I am sure, while I review my notes. Are you staying in Maidenhead as well?”

  “We are visiting with my brother a little south of the town,” Mrs. Fleetwood said. “Can we offer you a lift back?”

  Turner bowed slightly and tipped his hat. “Your offer is very kind, Mrs. Fleetwood, but I must respectfully decline. I prefer to walk back to the hotel. I know the way, and it is only a mile or so. Good day to you, sir. Good day to you, madam.”

  —— «» ——

  Two days later, Turner boarded the train as it lingered in Maidenhead station before resuming its journey to London. The gloomy skies had persisted, and the rain at last was heavy and unremitting. He grunted as he took the steps into the passenger carriage, ruing his advancing years and the stiffness of his joints. While the train had arrived in the station, he saw the queer man with the glinting eyes, who once again nodded and tipped his hat to him. Well, he must engage the stranger in conversation, as the gentleman seemed to know who he was.

  First, he set down his luggage and located his seat at the back of the carriage. Though the rain fell, he pulled down his window, for the air in the carriage was a tad stale. Once the train left the station, he would proceed up the car to greet the stranger.

  A stumbling commotion nearby startled Turner, and soon a young man scrambled into the seat across from him. He started slightly at the disturbance, crossing his arms upon his chest and assuming a displeased expression.

  The young man smiled broadly. “Terribly sorry for the intrusion, sir.” Thrusting forward a hand, he said, “Thomas Darbyshire. Are you traveling to London?”

  Although the lad’s spirit was infectious, Turner shook his hand briskly and said curtly, “Good day, Mr. Darbyshire. Mr. Booth, and yes, I return to London.” The alias would afford Turner anonymity. It had served him well these past many years when absconding to Chelsea and the comforts of a certain esteemed woman’s home and company.

  “I must confess, this will be my maiden voyage on the Great Western Railway,” Darbyshire said. “I am to see my uncle about a position in accounts in his company. Truly a fantastic feat of engineering, the whole system, wouldn’t you say? Brunel is a true genius.”

  A train enthusiast, then. Turner concurred with respect to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose bridge he had been sketching two days previous, waiting for the train to materialize.

  “As you say.” Turner nodded. Just then, the train lurched into motion. “Are you also an admirer of Daniel Gooch’s locomotive?”

  “The Firefly? Indeed, I am. I see, Mr. Booth, that you are familiar with your engineers. Did you know that we may attain an average speed of fifty miles per hour? One cause is the width of the tracks. The gauge it is called. Brunel decided upon a gauge of just over seven feet, for greater stability. Bloody brilliant, if you ask me. But some claim that Gooch’s use of the 2-2-2 wheel arrangement, with the large driving wheels in the middle, is the principal cause. How fast might a train go in the future, Mr. Booth? It is only 1843. Perhaps in twenty years’ time, Maidenhead to London will require mere minutes. Progress astounds me!”

  “And it should, lad.” Turner grinned as he stood. “A shame you are going into accounts,” he said, winking. “I beg your pardon, but I thought I should take a walk through the carriage.”

  “I shall await your return, sir.”

  —— «» ——

  Turner paused a few rows of seats behind the strange gentleman before approaching him. Slipping his sketchbook out of his coat pocket, he reviewed his drawings and notes from the other day. Even for him, the forms and lines struck him as rushed and slap-dash. The train was more like an apparition than a solid, menacing, thundering machine of steel. Ah, and he had forgotten about the hare, scampering ahead of the train. Well, that may be a key to expressing the train’s speed.

  In an attack of curiosity, Turner moved to a set of empty seats on his left. Opening the window, he stretched up and put his head out of the train.

  The fierce wind flung his hat back into the carriage, and cold rain lashed at his face with such severity that he could see only by blinking swiftly. His heart raced and he began to shiver as he felt through his hands the rumbling power of the train. Suddenly, the Maidenhead bridge came into view, and just as promptly they had crossed it, the Thames below frothing and gray.

  Turner pushed himself back into the carriage and dried his face and head with his scarf. Exhilaration and distress warred within him. Such fabulous force, yet he had hardly been able to make sense of the landscape as it streaked past him. He despaired that a painting could ever reproduce this discord of emotions and impressions.

  After retrieving his hat and settling his coat, he proceeded to where the stranger sat. At first, the man seemed not to notice Turner, his gaze directed ahead and his eyes shifting from left to right as if he were reading something. Like two days past, Turner swore he glimpsed a dot of pulsing blue light in the stranger’s left eye and green in the right.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” Turner said gruffly yet, he hoped, genially.

  Turner was prepared to dismiss the gentleman as ill-mannered when at last he adjusted his eyes and looked up at the old painter.

  “My dear Mr. Turner, well met!” The gentleman’s accent was London, but a shade off, as if practiced. “It pleases me immensely at last to have you before me. You are shorter than I anticipated, but no matter, there is so much I desire to speak with you about. Have you decided yet what you will do for the painting?”

  “The painting?”

  “Forgive me, Mr. Turner! I dash ahead of myself. I have not even invited you to sit with me, nor offered my name. Please do me the great honor of joining me. I am Hermes.”

  The gentleman was decidedly eccentric. His name was German, which at least accounted for the peculiarity of his accent. Yet Turner’s curiosity was undeniably piqued by Mr. Hermes appearing to be familiar with him. Turner lowered himself into the seat opposite the gentleman and said, “You travel to and from London frequently, Mr. Hermes.”

  “I am ensuring that I experience fully this part of the Great Western Railway at this particular time, before I must transpose back to when I came from. All of it owing to you, sir.”

  Mr. Hermes spoke animatedly, gesticulating with his hands and shifting about in his seat. His eyes mesmerized Turner, for they were too shiny, and those blue and green dots of light pulsed more rapidly as he spoke. Had the man said when he came from? Surely not.

  “You know of my work,” Turner said. “May I persuade you to visit my gallery in London? You might happen upon a piece that interests you, I wager.”

  “I would wish for nothing else, but I do not have the time, I am afraid. Besides, there is just one piece of yours which could ever interest me, and its purchase is now beyond the means of all but the astronomically wealthy. That painting is why I have transposed here, however.”

  “My apologies, sir, but I do not take your meaning.”

  For what felt like several minutes, the gentleman did not respond. Though he looked at Turner, his attention appeared involved with his own thoughts, and the lights in his eyes ceased pulsing. Turner stifled a gasp.

  Suddenly, Mr. Hermes smiled, clapped his hands together, and moved nearly to the edge of his seat. He smoothed out his waistcoat and trousers, and straightened his top hat, as if arranging himself for an important occasion. Turner could not account for such perplexing behavior.

  “There can be no chronohistorical h
arm in what I am about to do, Mr. Turner, rest assured. I am indeed most fortunate! Before we begin, I hope you will not consider the question too impertinent if I ask once more about your painting.”

  Not only did the gentleman speak nonsense, but he pressed the bounds of propriety. Turner desired to indulge such singularity no longer.

  “To which painting do you refer, sir?”

  “Why, the one you have been making sketches and notes for these last several days! It is why you stayed in Maidenhead and why you stood upon the hill the other day. I have an awfully keen interest in your painting, Mr. Turner. It is … well, it is a most extraordinary Temporal Inflection.”

  “Sir, you presume too much, and you speak rather queerly, indeed.” Turner was vexed and baffled. “A painting is not simply decided upon like one selects a waistcoat or a cravat. A painting is discovered.”

  “Of course, of course,” Mr. Hermes said, eager and conciliatory. “Could you at least tell me how you conceive of addressing the matter of the train’s speed?”

  His temper swelling, Turner prepared to wish Mr. Hermes a good day and return to his own seat at the back of the carriage. Yet the man was oddly enthralling, a puzzle unlike any he had met, missing a piece or two that would allow him to fit the whole together.

  “I do not know.” The timidity in his response surprised him.

  “I believe I can assist you.”

  Mr. Hermes leaned forward, opened his mouth, then exhaled a white vapor that swirled about Turner’s head. Turner coughed once, yet the vapor soon disappeared as it swept up through his nostrils and down his throat.

  —— «» ——

  The carriage dissolved and reformed into a gleaming, pristine, pleasantly warm car. Abruptly, Turner perceived that the entire car was like a single, large window. He was surrounded by a sky the blue of a robin’s egg. When he looked down, he saw beneath his feet a dark greenish line perhaps a hand’s breadth wide, interrupted occasionally by red squares. He surmised the car was moving only by the fact of the red squares blurring into and out of view. The sensation was of floating.

  Turner leaped out of his seat, which had shaped itself to his body for exemplary comfort. He nearly collapsed to his knees from a surge of dizziness, preventing his fall by grasping onto the top of his seat. Whether he glanced up or left or right, nothing appeared material. If not for the solidity of the seat in his hands and the floor upon which he wavered, he feared he could reach through the walls of the car. He would be reaching into the sky.

  “A miracle, isn’t it?” Mr. Hermes’s voice sounded in Turner’s mind. “It goes from Bath to London now in a shade under ten minutes, traveling at approximately twenty kilometers per minute. The speed is achieved by a combination of a highly sophisticated antimatter propulsion system and briefly slipping through quantum space-time. You feel as if you are floating because there are no wheels and there is no track. We discarded such constraints very long ago. It has charmed me to think that a man such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel would approve.”

  “Where am I? Where are you?” Turner said aloud.

  “You are on the train to London, Mr. Turner. I am quite literally in your head, though not for much longer. I desired a great deal to show you the world your painting helped to create.”

  “Who are you, Mr. Hermes? I demand an honest answer.”

  “My name truly is Hermes. I selected it myself. I am an android, or what you might consider an automaton, although I am no mere senseless machine. You can think of me as a historian, specializing in the representation of trains in the visual arts. My particular focus is non-virtual mediums from the nineteenth to the twenty-third centuries. Hence my passionate interest in your painting Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway. As I said, an extraordinary Temporal Inflection.”

  “I do not understand one jot of what you are prattling on about, Mr. Hermes. Not one jot. And I do not care for it. What in the devil is Rain, Steam and … and the rest of that drivel you mentioned? Release me from this immediately.”

  “I promise that I will do so soon, Mr. Turner. I beg your indulgence a little longer. I have dreamed of this encounter a great deal. It is the climax of my scholarship. You see, your painting renders a turning point that, upon hindsight, has led to the train you are experiencing now. Over the centuries, it has become a chronohistorical threshold, so that we can say, ‘Yes, this future was seeded then. We began imagining this future then.’ And I must remark, the hare was a brilliant touch. It justifiably drew praise at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1844.”

  Turner resumed his seat, fatigued and bewildered. The only rational explanation was that he lay in the grip of a powerful hallucination. A train made of glass with no wheels or tracks. Bath to London in ten minutes. A voice in his head jabbering about bizarre, impossible things.

  “This is not real,” Turner whispered.

  “It is, and it is not. The nanites you breathed in have allowed me to manipulate certain centers of your brain and play for you a quantum-sensory video I prepared. You have my word that I will emend your memories precisely so you suffer no recollection of this. Otherwise, the chronohistorical damage would be … incalculable.”

  —— «» ——

  With a snort and a cough, Joseph Mallord William Turner jerked awake.

  Mr. Hermes still sat across from him, smiling as if he looked upon an amusing child.

  “I must have nodded off.” Turner straightened himself in his seat. “Terribly sorry, Mr. Hermes. Rather rude of me, to be sure. I blame my advanced years.”

  “It is of no matter, sir. We had a most enchanting conversation about painting and locomotives. We are nearing London now, and I must transpose soon after we arrive. Thank you, Mr. Turner, for the honor and pleasure of your company. I will cherish the memory of our meeting for all my days.”

  “You are kind to an old man. Do take my card. If you are ever inclined to visit my studio, you will be welcome.”

  Turner stood, produced a small silver case from the inside pocket of his coat, opened it, and held his card toward Mr. Hermes. The gentleman took it almost reverently, his attention fixed wholly upon the card and the hand presenting it.

  “A good day to you, sir,” Turner said, replacing the silver case in its pocket.

  “And to you, sir,” Mr. Hermes replied in a hushed tone, gazing still upon the card.

  Stepping into the aisle, Turner proceeded to the back of the carriage, where he found young Mr. Darbyshire reading a book of poetry. As he sat, he observed that it was a volume of Wordsworth.

  “You are an admirer of Mr. Wordsworth, I see. A proper English poet. Very keen eye for landscape. He has a fine sonnet on railways, I recall.”

  Thomas Darbyshire glanced up from the book. “Welcome back, Mr. Booth. The Wordsworth is at my father’s insistence, though I am becoming sensible of his virtues. Has your journey been pleasant?”

  “Quite, yes,” Turner said, looking out the window to his left.

  Through the rain, he could discern the edges of London in the distance ahead. As he looked upon the rapidly approaching city, he felt as if the final piece of the puzzle slid into place. In that moment, he apprehended he was between the past and the future, and the train hurrying east to the great, boisterous, clamoring city was carrying him from one to the other.

  The problem of speed was not, in fact, a problem at all. On the contrary, it was the very essence of the painting.

  As the train hastened across the land and over bridges, it smudged out the past and propelled him to the future. Both were shadowy and obscure. There was loss along with the inexorable forward motion of progress.

  Turner smiled mischievously, as if appreciating a particularly witty quip.

  He would put the hare in the painting, scurrying ahead of a black, nearly formless train upon the bridge.

  Was the poor creature doomed? Did it hera
ld a grand new age?

  Let everyone make it out as they wished.

  —— « o » ——

  Michael Johnstone

  Michael Johnstone has short stories published in On Spec, Tesseracts Twenty: Compostela (EDGE; ed. James Alan Gardner and Spider Robinson), and Andromeda Spaceways Magazine. He teaches speculative fiction as well as nineteenth-century literature at the University of Toronto.

  Website: www.michael-johnstone.com

  Twitter: @mikejwrites.

  The Boy on the Train

  by Neil Enock

  The screech of steel on steel echoing through the tunnel was the first sign. After years of silence, the tracks had only recently started to complain as the train rounded the curve into the area under the Zone. Then the lights flickered, and the train seemed to shudder. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and forced herself to relax into her seat. When she opened them, she gasped involuntarily.

  The wispy apparition of a young man had again appeared in the aisle in front of her, walking along the train car, clearly searching for something or someone. She stood up and ignored the curious stares of the other passengers as she waved and tried to get his attention. He did not respond, so she gave up, stood still and let her inner scientist study him. He appeared to be in his mid-twenties, with dark hair and twinkly brown eyes. He wore a colony ship uniform, but the regulation boots were different. Suddenly, he vanished!

  Abruptly left staring at her reflection in the window, she turned away, only to face a train car full of people staring at her. Clearly, they had not seen the boy. Self-conscious, she half smiled, half grimaced and quickly sat down, landing squarely in the lap of a sleepy old mine worker.

  “Mmmm.” He roused. “Hello?”

  “I’m so sorry!” She tried to get off and almost fell. Smiling, he steadied her then slid aside to make room for her on the seat.