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

by Various Authors

  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 arrived finally to 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 set to it 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 I and Gunnar had had intimate intercourse with each other and prevention had somehow let us down, but anyway, there Rupert now 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 for 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 still was 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, and was willing to go for a ride with him when he asked me.

  We were driving along small roads 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, and six weeks later the doctor confirmed it.”

  —From the unwritten Dream Diary of E.N.

  * * *

  I woke up from my thoughts.

  Farther off the sheep had suddenly began baaing wildly. I saw them start to come tumbling down the slope as if they were suddenly in a big hurry to get somewhere.

  “The train is coming,” Rupert said.

  Only now I noticed that there were little decorative Donald Ducks on his picnic tie—he hadn’t completely forgotten his childhood after all. A gust had arisen and was intently tugging at his tie and making his white lapels flap like the wings of a large white butterfly.

  “What did you say?” I said.

  “The train is coming,” Rupert repeated still smiling and pointed somewhere towards the sheep. I put my sandwich down and turned to look.

  The railway ran along the ridge of Sheep Hill; from the cool darkness of the spruce forest it dived down to the clearing and disappeared finally in a long cold tunnel excavated through the Sheep Rock whose mouth stood above us, breathing darkness, on top of the high embankment heaped out of big stones. The growing metallic clang and the rumble of hundreds of metal wheels against the iron rails muffled the protest of the affronted sheep. A fast red electric engine emerged. After it an endless line of dark goods wagons rattled towards the clearing.

  I instinctively glanced at my watch: the time was 1:27.

  The rhythmic noise chased the sheep; finally it filled the whole scene and buried the cries of the sheep under itself like an avalanche. Rupert took the hand of his fiancée, kissed her and then said something I didn’t hear. She laughed. A nervous butterfly fluttered over our party, and its brown dryness made me think of falling autumn leaves.

  The train now drew a moving line the length of the whole clearing. Wagon by wagon it pushed itself above us into the tunnel and eclipsed the sun burning above Sheep Rock, offering instead a hypnotically quick dark-bright dazzle. Dust from the embankment began to fall on us. I glanced upwards with a mild resentment and thought that I definitely ought to cover our sandwiches before they started tasting too sandy.

  Then something broke loose of the train’s dark shape and started to spin down towards us.

  I followed the track of the object on the blue skies, now grey with dust; it rotated and whirled and got bigger all the time. I stared at it spellbound. Suddenly I realized it was coming towards us and would probably fall right in the middle of our picnic.

  I opened my mouth to yell a warning to Rupert and Birgitta, but instead inhaled dust and could for a while get no sound out of my throat because of a fierce fit of coughing. To crown it all the dust blinded my eyes and I could do nothing but cough and fling my arms about and hope that my companions would realize they ought to move back.

  Among the clank and rumble I discerned a muffled crack, like the sound of a breaking egg.

  I tore my running eyes open and saw faintly how Rupert waved his arm, as if greeting an old acquaintance he hadn’t seen for years, and an object the shape of a marrowbone rebounded off his head into the brook. Rupert fell on his back in the grass. Birgitta’s shrill whimper penetrated my ears through the train’s monotonous chant.

  “Do we have eggs in the basket?” I yelled idiotically and started to cough again.

  The girl kept shaking her head and pointed with a trembling finger at Rupert who lay on the slope, limbs spread out, and seemed to be asleep. When one looked closer at him, one could see that his hair’s recently so neat part was now missing completely.

  * * *

  Birgitta started a furious legal campaign against the State Railways.

  State Railways admitted that the metal object which had broken Rupert’s skull had indeed originated from the train rushing past us, to be exact from the locking system of the twenty-eighth goods wagon of the train. The Railway attorney expressed his surprise that a part had come loose at all, since that was in principle impossible for the train had been duly and carefully checked before departure according to all possible railway traffic regulations. It sounded as if he were insinuating that actually we should be under suspicion for some malicious act cleverly sabotaging their precious train. The part coming loose troubled the SR very much. But for Rupert’s sake the railway people seemed not to lose a single night’s sleep—when the insincere platitudes were peeled off, the basic attitude of the SR seemed to be Shit happens, so what? You should have kept far off our railway!

  In the past I’d have wanted to go into a blind rage and tear the attorney’s self-important head off his weak shoulders, but the dinosaur seemed to have disappeared from inside me and instead of empowering rage I only managed to
feel enormous fatigue and defeat.

  About indemnities no consensus could be reached: Birgitta demanded thirty million, and the Railways did not want to pay a penny over hospital expenses—just paying the hospital bill was already proof of the extraordinary benevolence of the SR and exceeded all legal obligations, said the Railway attorney and chided us for our greed. Birgitta swore to me, gasping for breath, that she would make the Railways pay dearly and would even destroy with different tactical lawsuits the whole Finnish railway system, if nothing less would make the SR take full responsibility for Rupert’s skull fracture and its possible consequences.

  I presumed that Birgitta would calm down in time and her storming holy rage would quieten, and after five months that was it: she phoned me, embarrassed, and told me that she had no more strength any longer to attack the windmills. I said that as far as I was concerned the mills could turn and the trains could move, what had happened could not be undone.

  When Rupert woke up he did not recognize Birgitta. He just stared at the walls of his hospital room, ill at ease, twiddled his thumbs and finally asked Birgitta, who was trembling by the bed, if ma’am happened to have any “Chicago” chewing gum with her, please.

  “And that damned brand of chewing gum hasn’t even been produced for years!” Birgitta sighed when we sat in the hospital cafeteria and wondered at the turn things had taken.

  The doctors had said that Rupert would never remember Birgitta, not really. The part of Rupert’s brain where all the memories of Birgitta had been located had suffered irreparably serious damage.

  “As far as I am concerned he is then sort of dead,” the unhappy fiancée stated, and since I could invent no reasonable counter-argument to that I stuffed my mouth full of the bun I’d bought in the canteen.

  Besides the Birgitta-memories the destroyed bit of his brain had stored Rupert’s whole legal learning and some other rather important matters. Rupert did remember me, though. Just after the chewing gum Rupert had started to ask for his mother. And he remembered the Lola brand of chocolate (although that was also out of production, as we later found out to Rupert’s regret) and Donald Duck and trains and the death of his father and all the nightmares of his childhood. Actually he remembered everything quite excellently—up to his ninth year.

  For understandable reasons the engagement lapsed. Rupert returned to the home of his childhood. He had spent altogether six months in the hospital. During the while the summery land had shrivelled up in the leafless squeeze of winter.

  It took time to get used to the creature who wandered in silence around my house from one room to another. He didn’t speak much, just sometimes asked me to bring some sweets from the shop or inquired after his things long since discarded. It was Rupert, and it was not. It was some kind of an anachronistic person: the being had the exterior of the grown-up lawyer-Rupert and the frightened eyes and mind of the child-Rupert already once left behind. It kept watching the courtyard out of the windows nervously cracking its finger joints and sneaking around like a ghost. It brooded over thoughts hidden from me. It was scared of its own image in the mirrors since that had become unfamiliar and strange to it.

  I’d have screamed if I’d have had the energy for such behaviour, but I was tired and apathetic and thought I’d never have the strength any more for any dashing enterprises. The air I breathed was thin and stuffy.

  “Rupert,” I said finally. “It can’t go on like this for much longer. Something has to happen. Something.”

  I didn’t know myself what I was actually trying to say, and certainly I’d been speaking more to myself than to my son, but the anachronistic Rupert looked at me and nodded as if he had known exactly what I meant.

  * * *

  Months passed outside the house. Inside it the time had at first stopped and then gone definitely haywire when the anachronistic Rupert returned home.

  I stayed at home with Rupert. I didn’t even see Miriam except a few times in passing: in the supermarket, out in the village, on the road, at the watchmaker’s. Sometimes I doubted whether we had ever known each other, so distant we had become. I didn’t ask her for a visit, and she was intelligent enough not to come without invitation. I simply lacked the energy to talk to people, to explain all the time to myself and to others Rupert’s present appearance and situation and the type of his brain damage; I couldn’t stand people’s empathetic, watery looks; I did not want to see my son through strange pitying eyes that made me only feel miserable and sorry for someone who but a moment ago had been a successful lawyer but now was something else completely.

  I have never been a regular guest to the Houndbury parties or otherwise particularly sociable, and now I froze even my scant relations with the local people to a polite level of Seasons’ Greetings. I did not want to look at people’s eyes and realize that nowadays I was “the poor mother of that disabled lawyer” rather than Ms Emma Nightingale. I did not want my son, “that disabled lawyer,” to become one of the established Houndbury oddities. I had to find out something that would help both Rupert and myself to cope with the new situation, I had to find some meaningful solution to it, and I wanted to do that alone, in my own peace.

  In the first week of February Miriam turned up for a surprise visit.

  She had dyed her beautiful golden hair profoundly red. She had put on some weight, but a slight roundness became her and made her look more sensuous than ever. My sensuality, however, was waning. My black hair had acquired quite a lot of grey during the last weeks, and some strange unconscious idea had made me keep my hair short after Rupert’s skull fracture. I’d even lost weight, and had by and by started to notice the first real signs of old age in myself (and only now, bitterly, was I able to distinguish them from the earlier signs of maturity).

  We hugged, and then we kissed, too, although no longer as lovers but as friends, and I thought I felt the light taste of farewell on her lips. We had a cup of coffee, ate some salt crackers and made some small talk.

  Miriam was wondering about the burglary on the Tykebend road construction site; some amount of dynamite had gone missing, and teachers had been told to keep an eye on their pupils in case some of them turned out to have explosives in their desks or bags. I reminded her that it was by no means the first time something like that happened around Houndbury, lately some explosives had been stolen.

  We were appalled by today’s immoral little creepy-crawlies. The stolen explosives had either been sold on, or else there was a rather big cache somewhere close by—very soon a part of Houndbury would surely fly off in the four winds, we prophesied (and I at least was secretly pleased with the idea).

  I asked whether Miriam was still writing her short stories, and she said she was soon going to send some by mail to the publisher. She inquired politely if perhaps I’d like to take a look at her writings and give my opinion. I declined the honour, I didn’t understand one whit about fiction since I read only factual material.

  Suddenly Rupert came out of his room to greet his former teacher. As usual, he wore a white shirt, a waistcoat, a Donald Duck tie and a pair of grey trousers (although he didn’t really feel comfortable in those, as would no nine-year-old boy). At first he sounded thoroughly sensible, even grown-up-like, and Miriam glanced at me with a glad surprised smile: So what’s supposed to be wrong with him? her eyes asked. Then Rupert blew the impression up when he started to ask Miriam about how far behind he was in his math lessons: how many pages had the rest of the class gone ahead while he’d been in the hospital? And could the teacher possibly give him some extra tutoring, for he’d been having difficulties with fractions.

  Miriam snatched her handbag, spluttered some bye-byes and rushed out of the house eyes wet, and left the anachronistic Rupert staring after her in wonder.

  The night noises of the trains made Rupert fall out of his bed, and quite often he had to be patched up with Band-Aids—a grown-up man falls out of bed much harder than a little boy. He stayed very much inside. That was alright with me, I didn’t
want him to go and be mocked and stoned by the neighbourhood kids.

  Always on Wednesdays Rupert went out to the mailbox and came back looking disappointed, and when I finally paid proper notice I realized he was expecting his Donald Duck comics.

  I didn’t know whether I was acting wisely, but anyway I subscribed to the comics again for him after a break of twenty years (although the day the comics came out had been changed to Thursdays, which gave Rupert diarrhea). I saw neither grounds nor reason any more to control what he was reading, doing or watching. As far as Rupert’s imagination was considered, he now had to cope with it himself. Not for a second time could I manage to launch a major offensive against fantasy—my war was over, my inner dinosaur was buried under the avalanche of all that had happened and in the pressure changed to oil muddying my insides.

  Sometimes Rupert leafed through books he found on the shelves: encyclopaedias and biographies and a thick anthology of poetry that probably was a present from Miriam. A couple of times I saw in Rupert’s hands that first law book he had learnt by heart; he fingered it uncertainly and then always put it away without opening it.

  I don’t know how much my son understood of the books he studied or about what had happened to him. Sometimes he seemed like the intelligent and clever lawyer he had been only a few months before, and then he was again a big confused child who wore Armani suits and five hundred mark ties and could ponder for hours the story of “Square Eggs” he had read in the Duck comics. Those two sides seemed to compete over territory inside him, and mostly he was somewhere in between.