Some of the Best from Tor.com: 2014: A Tor.Com Original

by Various Authors

  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 got 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 already 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, altogether from a couple of years, and it also included a chaotic explanation about the trip he had made that night.

  It’s very improper to read other persons’ diaries, and of course 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 when a child nor 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 I think the past has nothing to give us, no more than an outdated mail-order catalogue.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 see 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 consciousness has crumbled down as unnecessary, and 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 first started to feel the temptation to do that. 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 12 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 kilometres to go or maybe even a hundred kilometres (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 kilometres 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 further 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.

  I lay behind the top of the ridge under juniper bushes and watched how one train again 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 sort of woke up 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 at 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 closer.

  Sometimes one can find all kinds of things there. Once I found from the snow a bit of paper that turned out to be a thirty years old 3rd class train ticket from Helsinki to Oulu. Now I found no tickets, but there was a dead cat. I rather think it was our neighbours’, 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 the other way. If a train had come towards 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 39 degrees, and by a side glance I thought I saw all kinds of strange things in the shadows of the thicket, things I don’t like to remember, and afterwards I realized 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 obviously sort of asleep, and people can control them just like a sleepwalker can be manoeuvred.

  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 15 wagons after it—I counted them. They were not passenger carriages but empty open trucks 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 I went the first time 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 any 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 anyway 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 casseroles under my chair and fetched myself a big portion of chocolate mousse with a straight face.

  1.20.1976, Observations of a Ferroequinologist:

  I dreamt 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 dreamt 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 draught of the train. Both of them were quite good looking, but I liked more the one with the golden hair.

  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 already 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 sort of 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 on the rails. Somehow it made the gate rise before its time and it 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 register plates and bloody bits of Dad were falling along the tracks. I saw a loose hand fly into a ditch. Dad was smashed all into 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.

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

  Yesterday I went to the library and looked up in a dictionary what “Ferroequinologist” 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 dreamt 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 travelled home by train, though there was no railway station in Houndbury and for the last forty kilometres 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 the 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 faculty 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 9 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 for instance attached a bell on his door and another one on his window and hid his shoes for the night. But of course 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 encyclopaedias, and there it lay forgotten several 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 when he would be 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 the best grades
, and for a graduation present I bought him a golden 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 together 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 that she would become an exceedingly reliable and refreshing life partner to Rupert, and surely also 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; and dating openly in a small village like Houndbury would have provoked too much talk and fuss, my friend was after all a teacher and thus sort of 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 in the end, 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, and I started to suffer from a delusion that my son had somehow disappeared from the earth 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 colours, 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 in the picnic basket 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 small roads until we came to the foot of Sheep Hill. It rose as a gently sloping green field towards 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.