I heard the trains long before I ever saw them. The clacking of their passage through our valley echoed against every wall of every house, but the trains themselves were hidden from view at the bottom of a dry, meandering ravine that skirted the town proper. When I was ten years old, I made my way to the old watering tower, long disused, that still stood with its chalky red paint flaking off above the tracks. From then on, from that vantage point, I watched the trains pass by underneath, whenever I could get away from chores and school. Their schedule was irregular, or at least I could never determine a rhythm, but they normally passed through at least twice a day. Sometimes the trains even stopped, though our town had no station and they never offloaded or took on any cargo, or passengers. We were a forgotten wayside, our meager and occasional needs for outside goods met by lorries coming from the next town over.
I took longer than I should have done, to realize that the trains should not be making the noises that they were. The rails that went through our valley were nearly seamless, welded into an unbroken double line. Our even climate helped, I'm sure, reducing the need for expansion joints. There weren't even any switching-points in our stretch of track. And yet... the bogies clicked and clacked whenever the trains were rolling.
I can't say exactly when, but eventually it dawned on me that the wheels themselves were talking. Notches cut into the steel made noise every time that part of the wheel kissed the rail. And together the wheels of the cars in the train sang a pattern.
Even after that epiphany, though, figuring out what the trains were actually saying was tough sledding. I had no experience with codes and ciphers, and had to teach myself from the books in our town's tiny library (there were two, one a nearly-useless children's guide and the other an abstruse treatise on electro-mechanical rotor cipher machines, written in a nearly-impenetrable jargon that was itself a code my teenaged brain repeatedly failed to comprehend).
But I cracked it, I did, finally. My readings of the scientific text eventually began to make sense. The trains were using a polyalphabetic substitution cipher, to which the locomotives were the key—the cars changed every time, of course, but the locos were few and their contributions invariant. I began to be able to translate their clicks and clacks into words—in good old British English, thank goodness, groups of four letters per carriage, no additional encryption applied. Mostly they were just lists of destinations and contents, sometimes known hazards that lay ahead, but occasionally there were notes of a more personal nature, being passed along from town to town. Those were almost more cryptic than the trains' own cipher.
TELL AUNT MARY THAT EVAN HASR ECOV EREDThat one made some sense, but what was I to make of
PURP LEAN DGOL DTRE SSES MAKE COME BACKor
ONLY THER AINS AYSW HENT OGOT OBED?
I filled notebooks with their calls, and grew to recognize the voices of the individual locomotives, and even to anticipate their conversations, at least to some extent. My favourite—the one that carried the most friendly, chatty sentences—was number 996. And so that was the train I chose when I decided to speak back.
There was a shortcut, you see, that I could take to get from one side of the town to the other before a slow-moving freight train could make it through. Number 996 also seemed to stop in town more often than most, which was a factor in my decision. So... the next time 996 came and stopped, I pedaled madly to the far end of town, down the steep trail to the rails, and began laying shillings on the track as quickly and precisely as I could.
It was a short message but even so I almost got caught while pushing my bike back up the side of the ravine. The coins I'd laid spelled out,
HELL OIMJ ACKI LIKE YOUR TALKI heard my own words click back to me as the train lumbered out of town. It didn't pause, or even slow down, so I had no idea whether anyone had heard. Not then, anyway. Not that day.
But then... the trains stopped coming.
Nobody knew why, except me. No one in the town had seen me laying shillings on the rails. I kept silent, while my compatriots speculated. But I knew. When the days stretched into weeks, into months... well, I kept up with school as well as I could. My parents thought I was mooning about a girl, but there were no local girls who interested me. I didn't know what to do. There wasn't anyone in town who could help—there was no stationmaster, of course, because there was no station. The librarian who had checked out the books to me didn't know why I had stopped coming either. I was alone.
* * * *
And then, as suddenly as they'd stopped, the trains started coming again. The locos were all different, at least to start with, but the cipher they used hadn't changed. It was as if they—whoever they were, whoever sent the trains—had decided I didn't matter. I hadn't said anything to anyone, after all—that much was true. And I didn't try to send any more messages. But... still, I listened.
Which is how, when I heard Number 996 come back, I was ready. Late at night, that one, clacking away...
JACK JACK JACK JACK JACK JACK
* * * *
The train stopped at the far edge of town, near the spot where I'd started laying those shilling all those months ago. It stopped, and I knew Number 996 was waiting for me. I rode my bike through the darkened streets of my town as quickly as I could, knowing she couldn't wait for long, skidding down the trail to the tracks and leaving my bicycle by them as I swung up onto the last car in the string.
My parents would worry, of course, but they'd figure it out eventually. And maybe, one day, the trains could carry a message back from me to them, telling them that everything had turned out, after all, just as it should...
* * * *
—9/14-21/2016, inspired by the tales in Three Moments of an Explosion
by China Miéville, and posted as a review on Goodreads shortly thereafter.
©2016, 2018 Alan P. Scott. All rights reserved.
Last updated September 24, 2018
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ascott@pacifier.com