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The Trains That Climb the Winter Tree

Tom Doherty Associates

It was the middle of the night when the elves came out of the mirrors. Everyone in the house was asleep. Outside, the city slumbered. Silent as shadows, the warriors went from room to room. Their knives were so sharp they could slit a throat without awakening their victim.

They killed all the adults.

The children they spared.

The bodies were carried away, back through the mirrors. Four of the elves swiftly stripped naked. They put on the adults' nightclothes over their sexless bodies. Their own clothing they hid at the bottom of dresser drawers where the children never went. Then each one slowly and carefully assumed the form and features, down to the most intimate details, of Father, Mother, Grandmother, and Great-Aunt Adelaide.

Meanwhile, the other warriors were fetching boxes from the far side of the parlor mirror. With preternatural grace they removed from them tiny, toy-sized locomotives and passenger cars, boxcars, coal hoppers, refrigerator cars, gondolas, tank cars, flatbeds piled high with logs, floodlight cars, mail cars, ore cars, cabooses, and a tiny string of circus cars with gorillas in cages and giraffes poking through the roofs. ... Unwrapped tissue paper foamed up into drifts, which were then whisked magically away. Clever elfin fingers assembled tracks and placed alongside them stations, houses, bungalows, garages, churches, restaurants, fruit and vegetable stands, a roller rink, a grain elevator, a lumberyard, a coaling station, factories, water towers, and a central roundhouse with a turntable. Bridges spanned imaginary rivers. Tunnels split papier-mâché mountains. The transformers were hooked up, the electrical connections made, and the trains set in motion.

Then the elves left. The four who remained went to three separate bedrooms where they lay down and pretended to sleep. The one who was not Father pretended to snore.

It was Christmas Eve, and nobody outside the house knew that life inside it had changed forever.

* * *

Roland was the first one up on Christmas morning. He tiptoed down the stairs from the attic room, which he shared with Benjamin, and then quietly past Sasha and Zoë's room on the second floor, so he wouldn't wake up any of his siblings. Roland was seven and he saw things differently. Just before falling asleep last night, he had told himself to wake up fifteen minutes before any of the others so he could see the toys and the decorations before they came down. Christmas didn't look like other days. He wanted to see it clearly, and it distracted him when other people were there.

And, oh, he did see it clearly! Roland froze in the doorway, letting Christmas morning wrap its glittery tentacles of light about him. The tree was a vast darkness spangled with multicolored stars brighter than anything in the winter sky. The packages that Jolly Father Nicholas had piled so high were candy-colored, troll-haunted mountains! And through them ran a train.

What a train it was! Crossing gates clanged shut as it slammed past. It flew through forests of birch and spruce and stopped at coal hoppers to take on fuel and at log hoppers to unload. Tiny plastic cows shuffled on and off cattle cars. Commuters waited patiently at stations that twinkled with lights. The train rattled over trestle bridges, disappeared into tunnels, reappeared from under overpasses thronged with cars, and thundered past night-silent gas stations and factory buildings. There was a wee village that was the exact twin of the one lying outside Roland's front door, right down to the sizes and types of the trees, and the train paused there, directly in front of the house, as if waiting for somebody to emerge and climb aboard. Then, with an impatient puff of smoke, the black locomotive chuffed and chugged and tugged the train away.

Off it sped to lands unknown.

After the track left the village, it wound through the living room, under the divan, past the farms that lay beneath the big upright radio, around Mother's potted sansevieria, between a water tower and a single forlorn custard stand, and into the shadows of the tree and the piney fragrance of its branches. And then, amazingly, the track turned and twisted and ran up the tree. It spiraled around and around the trunk, showing here and there a glint of bright metal before disappearing entirely into the wintry darkness. Did it ever come down again? Roland wondered. He was the kind of child who enjoyed logical puzzles and took forever solving them because he saw far more possibilities than the other children did. He didn't assume that just because something acted in a way contrary to all prior experience, that meant it was impossible. The universe made sense; deep down inside, Roland was sure of that. But it wasn't necessarily a sense that you understood.

He crawled under the tree and felt around, careful not to dislodge a single snow covered ball, though the needles scratched his hands. The tracks went up. But no tracks came back down.

Of course, there could be a turntable for the train at the top of the tree, just as there was one in the train yards near the village. Or possibly the track simply looped around on itself there. Roland had just straightened up and was about to go to the kitchen to get a chair so he could look when he heard a tiny train whistle behind him. A twenty-five-car freight train shot out of the tunnel and between his legs and, with an I-think-I-can chug-chug-chugshug, began to climb the tree. He stuck his head deep into the resinous branches and watched, open-mouthed, as it wound up the trunk. The train lights quickly dwindled and winked out, leaving behind only the diminishing sound of the train's tiny steam engine.

What fun, thought Roland. He wondered where it was going.

A hand closed on his shoulder. "Would you like to get on?" asked Aunt Adelaide. "Would you like to ride to the top of the winter tree?"

Something was wrong. Sasha woke up knowing that for a fact.

It was a dreadful sensation to have first thing on Christmas Day. But Sasha couldn't shake it. Zoë shrieked and Benjamin whooped as they tore open package after package, and Mother looked on with that foolish-sentimental smile she got at times like this, and Father puffed on his pipe, and Grandmother rattled about in the kitchen, preparing an elaborate breakfast while Great-Aunt Adelaide pleaded with her to just this one think of herself, May, and for pity's sake watch the children open their presents, it only happens once a year. Then Benjamin pushed Zoë away from the train set so he could play with it himself, and Zoë started to cry, of course, and Mr. Chesterton, newly let in the back door after a night spent outside, ran in frantic circles and then lost a fight with a tangle of ribbons that Zoë, her tears forgotten already, had draped about him. "What a madhouse!" Father grumped, and stomped angrily away. Young though she was, all this was an old and familiar tradition to Sasha.

Nevertheless, something was not quite right.

In part it was the presents. They were truly surprising presents, unlike anything the children had asked for.

There was a giant rubber ball for Benjamin, patterned in harlequin diamonds of hundreds of different colors so bright they hurt the eyes. It was bigger than a Saint Bernard, and so heavy that you'd think there was a lead weight at its core. Nor could Benjamin or his sisters figure out how so large and heavy a thing was meant to be played with. When he kicked it, Benjamin howled with pain and grabbed his toe. "It's not broken," Mama said with a gentle smile. "I know that next time you'll be more careful, dear."

Benjamin placed his hands flat against the ball and gave it a shove. Then he leaped back in surprise. "It's very cold!" he said. "My palms hurt."

Papa chuckled, and his eyes twinkled just a bit. He gave the ball a quick kick with his foot, and it flew across the room and hit Mr. Chesterton, who yelped. "Goal!" said Papa, and he laughed.

Zoë got a paper sculpture kit with a rainbow sheaf of sheets and a set of X-Acto knives. Mama guided the toddler's chubby fingers around a knife and showed her how to cut. "She's such a smart girl, my little Zoë," Mama said, and went to heat up some hot chocolate. Sasha hovered over her baby sister and, the instant that her attention wavered, snatched the knives away and hid them.

And Sasha got a baby doll that cried real tears when you pinched its arm. It was wondrous. Sasha had never even known there was such a thing. She pinched it over and over, and it cried and cried.

But after all the packages were opened, Sasha, sitting with a new pair of flannel pajamas neatly folded in her lap and the baby doll lying beside her, could not feel the holiday spirit. It was as if everything were happening on the other side of a sheet of glass.

A terrible emptiness gnawed at her. Something important was missing, she thought. Something was horribly wrong.

But what?

Christmas Day seemed to last forever. After the presents, there was a heavy breakfast of neeps and tatties and blood sausage and haggis and toast, with bread pudding and black coffee for dessert. Sasha had been hoping that Aunt Adelaide would make her favorite hoe cakes, with syrup and round spicy pork sausage and fried green tomatoes, and shoofly pie and a cherry pie too, because it was Christmas, and clabber with brown sugar, and maybe a surprise dish that Sasha had never even seen before. But Grandmother ruled the kitchen that morning, and Sasha left the table feeling leaden, and strangely empty for someone so full.

Then there were lively outdoor games of battledore bashing and leap-the-creek with Papa, who never seemed to know when enough was enough. Dinner went on for far too long, and it came far too soon after breakfast.

But eventually the light faded from the chilly sky and it was time for everyone to come inside for sardines and porridge. That evening, after Sasha had dried the dishes, she told her parents she thought that maybe she had a headache and she was going to her room to lie down.

She went upstairs, and Mr. Chesterton pattered along after her. The pervasive sense of wrongness she had felt all day had grown stronger, but it receded a little when she opened the door to her bedroom and went inside. Her toys and clothes looked just the same as always. She had left her new doll downstairs; she wasn't sure she wanted to be alone with it.

When she lay down on the bed, Mr. Chesterton climbed up after her. He didn't curl up on the counterpane as usual. Instead, he rested his chin on his front paws and watched her steadily, through apprehensive eyes.

She pulled his head onto her lap and petted him. He was warm and furry and drooled a little and smelled comfortingly doggish. For the first time today, the pane of glass between her and the rest of the world was gone.

Sasha hugged the dog to her and tears came into her eyes. "Oh, Mr. Chesterton," she whispered into the soft ruff of his neck, "something's wrong, and I don't know what to do."

"Stop strangling me," Mr. Chesterton said irritably, "and I'll tell you."

Sasha made an eep noise and let go of his neck. Animals talked all the time in her storybooks. But all the storybooks in the world couldn't prepare somebody to accept it when it happened to her. "You talked!" she said. "How can you be talking?"

The dog looked disgusted. "There's really no time for all this. We've got to save your brother."

"Benjamin is in trouble?"

"Not him. The other one, the little guy with the funny haircut. Smells like denim and peanut butter all the time– Roland."

"I've got two brothers?" Nobody in any of her storybooks ever discovered that she had an extra brother. But all the silence in all the storybooks in the world was no more preparation for it happening to her than the talking animals had been. Nevertheless, she was pretty sure that Mr. Chesterton was really thinking of Benjamin. Maybe he smelled like a different person when he ate peanut butter. Mr. Chesterton was only a dog after all.

"I may be a dog, but I can tell the difference between a kid who smells like peanut butter and one who smells like Duco cement." Benjamin had taken a recent interest in Renwal kits of aircraft carriers.

"Oh-kaaaay," said Sasha. Now she realized that she had another, even more difficult, concept to accept. A talking dog, okay. She could accept a talking dog. But could she accept a talking dog that could read her mind?

"Are you going to stumble over every new idea, or are you going to get cracking and save Roland before it's too late?" Mr. Chesterton said impatiently. "You've got about three hours, while the elves are amusing themselves by draining the blood from the neighbors' kittens. After that, it may be too late for all of you. And Roland is the key. Otherwise, they wouldn't have sent him up the Winter Tree."

He hopped down from Sasha's lap and went to the box where she kept all her doll clothing, everything that wasn't currently being worn by one or another of her dolls. In a kind of fury, he rifled through them, briefly holding up items of dress and impatiently flinging them away.

"Baby clothes!" he growled. "What am I supposed to do with baby clothes? Don't you have any grown-up dolls? One with a bit of masculine sartorial flair, perhaps?"

"Well, there's this," Sasha said doubtfully. She pulled Benjamin's Halloween costume out of a box on the closet floor. He'd gone as Mr. Bojangles, the famous tap dancer. "A costume? Am I a mountebank, then, to be clad in entertainer's motley?" But Mr. Chesterton tried on the checked trousers, and they fit to his irritated satisfaction. The green vest, he conceded, suited him rather well. And the homburg, once he donned it, didn't look at all as tawdry as it had in the box. "It's not the clothes," he said, surveying himself in the mirror. "It's how one carries oneself." Then, on all fours, he bounded out of the room and down the stairs.

Sasha followed.

"Hand me down the glass cane on the mantelpiece," Mr. Chesterton said. "The one your mother never lets you handle."

Stretching up on her tiptoes, Sasha did as she was told. Once Mr. Chesterton had the cane in his paw, he got up on his hind legs. Standing thus, he was even taller than was Sasha herself. Dressed as he was, and holding the cane in such a dapper manner, he looked almost human.

A bell clanged directly outside the house.

"Ah," Mr. Chesterton said. "Right on time."

He opened the front door.

A gleaming black locomotive with bright brass trim waited at the curb, on tracks that had never been there before, white smoke puffing impatiently into the night from its stack. Behind it was a short train of three wood-sided passenger cars, one sleeper, and a dining car, all painted green-and-gold, and a bright red caboose. From the platform of the caboose, the brakeman swung his lantern, urging them toward the front-most car. The conductor leaned down to help them aboard. "'Evening," he said. "How far are you folks going?" He did not so much as blink at Mr. Chesterton's appearance. For him, apparently, an elegantly dressed dog walking on his hind legs was an everyday occurrence.

"All the way," Mr. Chesterton said. He gestured brusquely toward the horizon, where a vast, star-flecked shadow dominated the sky. It took Sasha a moment to realize that the shadow was a tree, larger than anything this side of the moon, and that what looked like stars were actually ornaments. "Right straight to the top." He handed the conductor a pair of pasteboard tickets.

"Right-oh, sir!" The conductor briskly punched the tickets, led them to the sleeping car and opened a compartment door. Then he saluted snappily, spun on his heel, and was gone. With a jerk, the train started forward.

The car was empty save for the two of them. Sasha stared out the window at the passing town with its neat houses like cunningly-detailed toys, each with a tidy yard no larger than a handkerchief and trees so small she could have picked them up with her hand and stuck them in a pocket. "Where are we going?" she asked.

"To see the Big Guy," Mr. Chesterton said. "The lord of all things, who lives in the sky."

"Do you mean ... God?"

"Don't call him that," Mr. Chesterton snapped. "He's nothing of the sort–though he'd like you to believe he is."

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Excerpted from The Trains That Climb the Winter Tree by Michael Swanwick, Eileen Gunn, Gary Kelley. Copyright © 2010 Michael Swanwick and Eileen Gunn. Excerpted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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