'IT IS THE Devil’s Arse—d’yavol skaya zadnitsa—and you must think with every breath: double woollen underwear, precise layers, puttees, felt under boots; scarves wound around your jacket, throat and face—company-issue greatcoat, snowshoes, ushanka, at least three pairs of gloves—and, always, your carbine greased, cleaned and loaded—cradled, slung, or close enough to be grabbed, shouldered, and fired in a second.’
‘Move with exact, deliberate care, every single time you operate the levers; attend to the telegraph, or effect repairs to ground frames—and if you venture outside to draw water, secure supplies, check or thaw points: become two men—one of you constantly watching the forest line and the route back—however short; the other intent on your task. Clear?’
The Trans-Sib Commissar paused—not for dramatic effect—but out of kindly concern, for he knew that nothing—no company manual, no imprecations, no set of ordinances—could prepare the keen young signalman for the white, illimitable madness; the appalling silence and brutal cold of Siberia—or for its hellish summers when the tundra boiled with mosquitoes and the ground liquefied to a sodden mess.
The row of clocks on the panelled wall measuring time across zones from Balashika to Vladivostok ticked softly, and a log shifted in the grate. Outside, four floors below, the lamps were being lit, and glimmering buttery yellow. Trams bustled and clanged along the Moscow streets: workers hurried home in the soft spring rain.
The kid looked tough. He reckoned Voitch knew the risks—forty degrees of frost could shatter teeth: birch sap exploded; a second’s distraction meant snow blindness, disorientation and certain death; touching bare metal ripped flesh from fingers and palms.
But the file had Voitch assigned a year in Kasovo-Novy: the remotest government signal box on the route—nearly three hundred miles from even the tiniest settlement—and the Commissar added one final, solemn warning.
‘There may well be nights when you will not sleep—outside hacking ice, tethered to your cabin, blow torching frozen points, repairing connecting rods—and then you could well meet yourself. He will have your face, memories, habits—and he will not leave. Siberians have a thousand names for their frost sprites, forest devils, witches and demons—they are simple people, far from progress, enlightenment and rational culture—Erlik, Chudo-Yudo, Moroz—but that’s the one that has them shitting themselves, even more than starving wolves: self-haunting; the persistent, illusory other self—utterly real, obliging, helpful or mocking—and, of course, impossible.’
‘That’s when you telegraph for help, or if the ice has collapsed the wires or cracked the insulators—stop any train with fog detonators on the tracks. You must get out. There will be no disgrace or penalty—none.’
Signal and Telegraphy Box 2257 was found in impressive order when Voitch took up his assignment, one shatteringly pristine morning in the autumn of 1904.
Signalman Jurij wore his high-collared tunic and coat to hand over keys, tokens and report books to Voitch, as the 0-8-0 Izhitsa class locomotive’s crewmen unloaded grease and oil cannisters, paraffin, cartridges, detonators, bow saws, axes, and twenty ration bales—each one loaded with canned meat and cabbage soups; a thousand neatly-packed matches sealed in wax wrappers; fifteen pounds of oatmeal, rye and sugar; seven bricks of black tea and ten pounds of chocolate—stowing them carefully above the tappet locking hatches in the straw and felt-lined brick base below the lever frame.
Jurij—beaming affably, his face brick-red, wind-bitten, and sporting a luxurious beard—had barely twenty minutes to effect the changeover, as the Izhitsa’s driver gestured irritably at the dropping pressure gauge. After telegraphing news of the relief, they shook hands, and Jurij, already tasting the cucumbers, mint and apples in his Krasnogorsk suburban garden, offered some brisk advice as Voitch accompanied him back to the engine, the air around the boiler plates quivering from its heat.
‘I had a pleasant enough duty—a kind year: the snows stayed only from September to May. They say the tundra freezes to a thousand feet below us! Twice, it reached minus twenty-five but I was snug enough. Concentrate! Allocate your time with great care—cooking, tending the stove, chopping firewood, mending clothes, keeping lamps trimmed, writing reports, operating the telegraph and levers: move with precision outside—remember—feet and hands, feet and hands!
The double tracks curved away into the endless forest—larch, spruce, fir—all massed for a thousand miles.
‘What are those circular dents on the chimney cowl?’ asked Voitch.
‘Bears!’ grinned Jurij; ‘they clamber onto the roof—especially if you fry reindeer meat or canned pork!’
There was no Comfort Class for company employees, but his bunk on the crew change train was clean, and the embroidered counterpane Voitch had slept under for nine nights nizhny uroven’—downline—evoked pangs for the homely comforts he would miss so keenly.
With the supplies stacked, the crew re-boarded. The giant locomotive barked, hissed, then reversed west—there was no passing loop at Ustroytsvo 2257.
Voitch watched it achingly for a moment, until it vanished, leaving a smudge of steam among the thinning trees. For some minutes the rails sang, carrying the Izhitsa’s fading vibrations—then there was only his own breathing, and the faint crackle of dead birch leaves in that terrible immensity.
Snow sidled down, stinging his face.
The silence claimed him.
Concentrate!
He found it worked best to compartmentalize tasks—and thought of them as closely-stacked transparent boxes, like so many glass fish tanks—allowing him to glance at multiple essentials as he worked: attending to telegraph requests for clearance, he could set his pocket watch against the chronometer. Writing up traffic and message records in the ledger meant the upper frame set room’s stove was opposite him, and he would automatically check the height of the stove’s log stack alongside it. When inspecting and greasing the lever frame links, he looked into the remaining supply bales, pencilling levels on the waxed cartons. Each time he locked and set the signal tappet levers—scarlet, blue, yellow or silver, with their bright brass grips—he instinctively glanced left to right, making certain all twenty-seven were checked, neutral, or blocked.
For company he had the approaching tremor, then the splendid roar of freight and passenger services howling past—engines and carriages frosted and fringed with icicles: at night, a zoetropic whirl of a gauntleted footplate crew, demonic in the firebox glare; elegant diners attended by waiters poised in white tailcoats; darkened sleeping sections—then the two red stabs of the tail lamps punctuating the dark, narrowing, merging; suddenly obliterated.
There were the downline trains feeding the cities, their huge waggons seeded with hand-hewn brown, bituminous and coking coals, rumbling westward.
He saw little of the forest’s inhabitants other than their prints, and droppings staining the snow—when schedules left time to chop wood or circuit the signal box to clear icicles as winter deepened. In the evenings when he sat by the wood burner, eating stew, dunking rye bread in black tea, or grimacing as he downed the stipulated daily tot of lime juice: he often heard the crick-cricking of passing reindeers’ hooves and the gruff snorts they exchanged.
Sometimes he woke in the grey light that passed for night, and heard the far-off, sobbing howls of wolves.
Once, when he looked up from pushing home a lever, he saw a lynx saunter across both trackbeds. It moved like dappled liquid silver, pausing at the treeline to look directly back at him, its green eyes ablaze with utter indifference.
Each train was preceded by a jangle of bells and flickering telegraph needles to verify line clearance and signal setting. Voitch worked the levers in turn, locking them securely, noting traffic types and times—a purposive, orderly, calm, predictable routine.
Until one Sunday in late January 1905—when Father Georgy Gapon’s Saint Petersburg petitioners were met with four volleys of rifle fire from the Imperial Guards outside the Winter Palace, and Cossack cavalry hacked down fleeing workers with their sabres.
A thousand were killed or wounded—and the world turned upside down forever.
There followed four days’ silence, with points locked and signals levelled—Outer, Home or Routing—and all traffic sided.
Then the telegraph clattered into a frenzy—the box cabin reeked and fizzed with electrical ozone, each signalling seeming to cancel out the previous one:
All depots attacked. Riots in Petrograd.
Resume traffic: prioritize Imperial Units.
Do your duty—stand by!
Priority to Imperial troop and supply trains.
Then three days of nothing: the wires seemingly silent from Moscow to Vladivostok.
Voitch—now increasingly frantic—systematically checked the telegraph components—discs, needles, wiring, electro magnets—with the sickening, almost convulsive, dread that somewhere, on the Up or Down line, trains might be roaring towards double impact. The needles insisted both lines were clear: there were no coded bell rings—to signify up or down line traffic; routine or specials.
Until: Stachka! Stachka! Stachka! Strike! Strike! Strike!
Sent in burst of twenty minutes, at intervals of an hour for a further three days.
Baffled and fearful, Voitch took refuge in his logbook entries, polishing brasswork—and checking his company-issue rifle; cleaning it from stock to muzzle, smoothing the bolt with oil until it slid home at fingertip pressure. Taking care to ensure the safety catch was snug and tight, he unscrewed the trigger guard, carefully setting it aside. If he had to shoulder and fire in freezing temperatures after removed his outer fur mittens—it should be possible to keep his gloves on—and react faster.
At first light on the morning of the fourth day:
Order restored. Open Witch Breath on signal—prioritize specials from 04.45 tomorrow.
Voitch shuddered, and flinched at the order: this meant switching open a branch line some three hundred and fifty yards east—winding three hundred bitter miles to Dykhanie Ved’my—a Reform Camp for madmen, heretics, intellectuals, dissidents, pamphleteers.
Rumours can penetrate even the outer walls of Hell: the White Guards were savages—appalling torture was inflicted on the wretched, starving prisoners: there were rumours of cannibalism and other horrors.
He slept fitfully, then rose and dressed by firelight, lit lamps in the gantry and prepared to set signals and switch points. The 04.45 howled past, and Voitch tried to blot out images of the wretched human freight contained inside each frost-caked, covered goods waggon, their doors chained and padlocked. He shut his eyes momentarily and saw the brake van pass—planks had been crudely hacked out on either side, and the black snouts of heavy machine guns protruded.
Four more ‘Specials’ followed throughout the day; the last one at midnight.
That night the wind howled savagely, gnawing at the cabin, and Voitch had scant sleep, waking intermittently to check the levers, telegraph or his cabin fire.
Then the points jammed.
He telegraphed instructions to side all traffic immediately, and received acknowledgement. Could the control rodding be warped or frozen—too severely for the compensator to correct? It had been comparatively mild, only minus twenty, but if the switchgear had frozen half open, he would follow the well-established procedure: crunch through the snow, carrying his pack, rifle, fully-laden with the brass blow torch and a cannister of kerosene strapped to his back; thaw the points and ground frame lever, then return to send the ‘Way Ahead Clear’ signal.
Voitch always felt like a deep-sea diver when he prepared to go outside: clumsily bulked and padded out by three layers of wool, felt and kapok. He rigged canvas slings for the kerosene cannister, blowtorch and rifle; unbolted the cabin door, and stepped into an intensity of white.
There had been a light snowfall overnight, and a grey haze to the south-west suggested more within the hour, but his progress was steady and methodical—he tried to match effort to exhaling to avoid moisture rapidly freezing on his heavily-muffled face and beard. He paused every few minutes to scan the treeline, and to check the sky. Within half an hour he had reached the spur.
His first impression was that there had been some kind of localized, heavier snowfall or drifting at the junction—a shallow cutting which ran off into the forest. There were curious hummocks of snow, wind-scoured, tapering like fat teardrops, rippling the cutting’s banks.
One lay across the points.
He paused, unslung his pack, then he noticed a curious black, semi-circular shape sticking out from this snow-mound—it took some seconds to identify.
It was a boot heel.
Sweating under his reindeer furs, with panic scalding through him, Voitch scraped away the snow, working upwards and outwards—wincing as he uncovered something scarcely recognizable as human—waxy, blue-black; frozen in ice and agony. It was an adult male, stripped to fouled underwear, his face shattered and pulped by fists or rifle-butts, or both. Then he understood—and his senses reeling with horror, he rose slowly and looked beyond at the other snow-hummocks, stretching to the bend in the track and the forest’s edge:
Bozhe, pomiluy ikh dushi! Flung from Reform Camp ‘Specials’. There must be hundreds of them.
He had to move the body clear from the points and work the switch gear; suppressing the urge to vomit, he took it by the ankles. It was paper-light, and as he gently pulled it to the track side, he sobbed.
A whispering skitter of snow at the forest’s edge—grey blurs flickering, weaving between the birch trunks—he glimpsed their breath; gaunt, slicked fur: wolves!
They slipped back into the shadows: ‘…become two men—one of you constantly watching the forest line..’ Voitch unslung his rifle, flipped off the safety catch, pulled off his heavy mittens suspended on a neck cord, and aimed at the treeline—turning quickly to cover both edges, the muzzle sight pin faltering between vertical slashes of barred shade and bright birch trunks: nothing.
He carefully placed his rifle, bolt upwards on the snow.
He knew he had seconds. Sluicing the points, track rails, switch gear and levers with kerosene until he had shaken the cannister empty, Voitch primed the blow torch, then thumbed the nozzle’s flint igniter spindle—a spurt of flame roared out of it. With no time to adjust the jet he played it onto the track surface and points. Instantly a barrier of rippling flame—the heat blasting him backwards—leapt up between the cutting and the treeline. He saw them, blurred by the heat: eight of the brutes—snarling, poised to dash at him. It was deep winter, and they would be desperate with hunger—maddened by the scent of heaped corpses. Praying aloud, he shouldered the rifle and fired, four rapid, crashing shots, working the bolt; each ejected cartridge hissed at his feet. Bullets smashed into trees or sent up spurts of mixed snow and earth: one creature yelped, fell, and bit savagely at its flank. They paused. The flames, exposing bright, sizzling rails, subsided.
Voitch cradled the rifle in his arms clamped against his chest, abandoned the cannister and blow torch—then ran, plunging back through his outward tracks.
He flailed up to the top of a short rise, then looked over his shoulder at the wolves behind the fast-dispersing black smoke—four were tearing at the nearest mound, pulling something foul and glistening from it. Three others watched him.
He jolted, slithered and plunged on until he reached Box 2257, tore open the door, flung it shut and made all secure. They had not pursued him. He staggered towards his bunk, pulling at his scarves, dropping the rifle with a clatter.
Broken by horror and revulsion, Voitch fainted.
It was late summer: he and his brother Misha were laughing and splashing in a stream, holding each other’s wrists and twirling round, sending up blooms of mud: the light filtered through the tree canopy—he could smell cut hay.
When the room beneath the lever gantry swam back into focus, all was calm and still; lamplight and fire glow played on the timber panels. The rifle was back up on its wall clips. A mug of black tea steamed on the locker at his bedside.
But I have not lit the lamps, re-stacked the fire or brewed tea.
It sat on the edge of the bed, indistinct, almost shimmering.
His fourteen year-old self.
The telegraph bell pinged the warning patterns; a dozen sectors were already sending over and over:
Is all well? Verify line clear. Privet tam vnizu! Hello down there!
It wouldn’t stay still long enough for Voitch to discern more than the thing wore the shirt and britches his mother made for him; it was barefoot, agitated—and, yet, laughing, though soundlessly—he could even see the strings of saliva between its teeth as the mouth opened, soft and pink. Mocking? Scornful? He couldn’t tell.
You are my distress and shock and solitude—vanish! He urged aloud.
Snow pattered against the windows. Suddenly, it moved with terrific agility, scampering upstairs to the gantry, and he knew—he knew—it was intent on havoc.
Voitch, reeling, slapping his face to wrench himself out of the intensity of the illusion—scrambled after the apparition, up into the control room. It tore between the levers, wrapping its frail body around them, pushing or pulling; clanging them shut or open in a murderous, deliberate frenzy. Each one, slammed home or opened in the gate, meant a collision or derailing—colliding flesh and metal, appalling carnage; hundreds killed or maimed—by him.
There was but one way to stop it—and he tore down the gantry steps to recover the rifle, sliding home the bolt as he tore back upstairs—the telegraph warning pattern bells already clamouring frantic confusion and alarm as terror surged along the line.
Five days later, the requisitioned train stood, its exhaust panting in the great silence, braked outside the signal box at Kasovo-Novy.
Unit 2257 scarcely resembled anything man-made; more a formidable ice-grove: entirely encased in thick, pillared ice from the chimney cowling to the base bricks. Guttering, roof tiles, galvanized sheeting had all been torn loose by the cumulative weight of icicles, shattering onto the frozen snow. The sergeant waited on the footplate as the District Engineer, accompanied by two Imperial Guard conscripts, rifles unslung, approached the cabin door.
They used their rifle butts and entrenching tools to hack though the encrusted ice, ready to blast the door loose with a powder charge—but found it wrenched half open—as if brutally forced from the inside. The conscripts entered warily, knocking loose the icicles with their bayonets, yelling: ‘We are your relief! Show yourself!’
It was the District Engineer who half-hacked, half-slithered to the top of the gantry stairs and saw that all twenty-seven frost-rimed levers were locked shut and secured with taut, lashed ropes.
In the centre of the lever frame, where the ropes met, was a figure couched in ice.
But it was the colour of ice star-patterned on the walls above the frozen shape which caused him to cry out: Gospodi pomiluy!
It was a slick of crimson, flecked with congealed streaks of pale grey.
Cursing and sobbing, the Engineer gently cleared the snow from the crouched figure with his fur mittens.
Voitch had secured the ropes around his waist—and the rifle was jammed, muzzle upwards, between his knees, both frost-blackened hands clasping the trigger.
The sergeant on the locomotive footplate was shading his eyes against the low winter sun when the first of the conscripts ran outside into the white light, yelling the news of their terrible discovery.
Snow sidled down and began to settle.
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