In the mornings, before leaving for business, the locomotives gathered behind the hangar, released steam and smoke into the sky, drank engine oil and told stories. Naturally, Chu-Chukhin was the most cheerful and talkative. Chu-Chukhin that morning celebrated exactly one month since he settled in the depot and treated everyone to the machine oil he had brought from the flight yesterday.
– Good is not enough! – the locomotives praised him.
– You should leave it for the evening, – others hinted that they had prepared a festive dinner.
– I’ll bring more, – Chu-Chukhin answered them and joyfully sent thoughts into the sky. “I’ll take two carloads of firewood and I’ll definitely pick it up on the way back.”
– Aren’t you afraid to ride along unknown paths? – a cat passing by, nicknamed Oil Can, asked him. The cat worked here as a mechanic, wore oiled overalls, checked the bearings of steam locomotives before setting off on a voyage, and lubricated everyone with his oil can, which is why he got his nickname.
– Yes, after the Lost Swamps, the Cemetery of Old Locomotives and Baba Yaga, I’m no longer afraid of anything! – answered Chu-Chukhin.
– Baba Yaga?! – one of the locomotives was surprised. – And who is it?
– How? – now Chu-Chukhin was also surprised. “Didn’t I tell this story?”
It turned out that no, he didn’t tell. And then, a lover of various stories, Chu-Chukhin began.
– This, I tell you, my friends, is a very interesting and educational story. This happened about a month ago, just before I got here. Then I was a traveling locomotive who sleeps on sidings, and when he’s not sleeping, he rolls wherever his eyes look, refueling with whatever comes to hand, and undergoes technical inspections from time to time, which is why I get sick often. And he doesn’t have any mechanics at all.
I was driving that day, it seems, from the direction of Poltava. I had been driving for a long time and it began to seem to me that the road was going somewhere in the wrong direction, somewhere to the side. Then I stopped, looked around, thought a little and went off the rails. The weather was beautiful, the sun warmed my sides, the breeze easily drove back the smoke escaping from the chimney. In this weather it was nice to take a walk in nature. Walk a little, and then get out on the tracks in the right place, stand on them with your wheels and move on.
I didn’t want to waste half the day making a big detour and only reaching the desired point in the evening. Judging by the map, and I always travel with a map, here it was possible to take a shortcut through the forest and in an hour reach the necessary paths, and from there it’s just a stone’s throw towards Kyiv.
From the very first minutes it began to seem to me that something was wrong with my card. I only found out later that the map of these places was drawn up by the military and, of course, they compiled it in such a way as to hide everything that they did not want to show – depots, hangars, warehouses, and military equipment that once stood here, and, Of course, the railroad diagram was also drawn incorrectly. I didn’t know about this and naturally trusted the card, which had already helped me out more than once.
I descended from the embankment, galloped through a shallow swamp, from hummock to hummock, from bush to bush, in one place I even had to wade into the swim. True, it wasn’t deep there, only half the wheel. And having passed the swamp, he got out to the edge of the forest. I somehow didn’t like the forest right away. Thick, gloomy, silent. The old trees immediately closed their crowns over my chimney, and not even a ray of light broke through their foliage. On a fine sunny day it suddenly became dark, damp and uncomfortable. I wanted to turn back, but something wouldn’t let me. I think it was some kind of witchcraft. Probably some kind of magnetic witchcraft that pulls ships aground and lures planes into air pockets.
There was talk about magnetic witchcraft, to which all metal objects, and even more so steam locomotives, were believed to be susceptible, and everyone took it seriously.
“And the further I made my way through the thickets, the more I was drawn forward,” continued Chu-Chukhin. “And the thickets were getting denser, I had already scratched all my sides, hit a tree trunk once or twice, dented the ramp guard, dented the cabin, and even began to limp on a couple of wheels. And when light began to break through behind the dark green foliage, I was happy and ran faster, not even paying attention to the fact that it was squelching under the wheels, and with every meter I began to plunge deeper and deeper into the dirty swampy water.
And then, up to my very axis in the water, I got out of the forest, and there, on one of the hills, an old woman stood and picked berries. I don’t know what kind of berries they were, but there was almost a basket full of them. The old woman was thin, hunched over, with a large nose and hooked long arms, and from under her burgundy scarf a strand of ashy gray hair was sticking out.
The old woman straightened up slightly, looked in my direction and spread her arms:
– Oh, how did you get here, my dear?! – she shouted. – You can’t come here.
– It is forbidden! It is forbidden! – her two cats shouted. One was black as night, the second was probably once white, but he lived for a long time in the forest and in the swamps and therefore got pretty dirty. I somehow didn’t notice the cats right away; they were probably somewhere nearby, behind the hill.
– Why? – I was surprised, blinking my eyes from the bright sun, getting out of the darkness.
– And that’s why! – the old woman pointed forward.
I didn’t immediately make out where she was pointing, but then, when my eyes got used to the sunlight, I saw a terrible picture. If earlier I heard that there is somewhere in the sea where magnetic witchcraft attracts all lost or sunken ships and this place is called the cemetery of lost ships, then I saw something similar here. Only here there was a large endless swamp, overgrown in places with small bushes, covered with mud, marsh grass and something else that grows in swamps, and in the middle of all this lay old, rusty steam locomotives. Most of them went deep under the water and only their roofs protruded to the surface, somewhere locomotive pipes stuck out, right in front of me, about a hundred meters away, only the wheels protruded from the water – the locomotive must have turned over and was lying upside down. There were locomotives of all possible models here, there were a lot of them. They leaned on each other, pressed their sides, noses, and dived under each other. In the distance I even noticed an armored train. His rusty guns were looking in my direction and it was creepy.
– You can’t go there, my dear! – the old woman smiled and offered to go up to her hill. – There is death there. Certain death for any locomotive that gets there. Just recently, in my memory, one just like him stepped into a swamp, but he couldn’t get out. The swamp dragged him away and swallowed him whole.
– How can this be? – I was surprised. – How does this happen?
– I don’t know. – answered the old woman.
– A terrible secret! – the black cat purred.
– Yes, I see, you’re already worn out,’ the old woman shook her head, lisping from time to time. ‘He wandered into lost places, but at least he found us, – Grandma said. – Don’t be afraid of us. We are locals, we have lived here for a long time, we know all the ins and outs. Let’s help someone who is lost.
– We’ll help. – the light cat purred and rubbed against my wheel. – And the wheel is broken!
– Oh! – the old woman perked up. – How is it broken? – ran up to me. – It’s really not good with the wheel. Needs treatment.
– You need to treat, you need to treat. – the cats agreed with her.
– Shall we help the engine? – the old woman asked the cats.
– We’ll help, we’ll help. – they purred and began to wink at her somehow mysteriously.
– Do you understand mechanics? – I became interested too.
– Why not! – the old woman was surprised. – We understand. And we understand a lot of things.
– So you are mechanics! – I burst out. Although the hunched old woman and two cats didn’t really look like mechanics.
– Almost. – the black cat purred. – We are more than mechanics. We have mechanical magic. We repair using the power of spells, decoctions, tinctures, oil mixtures and other technical substances unknown to backward science.
– Wow! – I was surprised. -Where is your hangar?
“It’s not far, my dear,” the old woman entered the conversation. – Here, not far. Just about thirty minutes to walk through the forest and we’ll be there. – she narrowed her eyes.
– What about half an hour, we’ll get there faster. – the black cat picked up, licking his lips for some reason.
– We have everything ready there, – the old woman did not stop talking all the way. – We’ll give you a poultice, change the oil, straighten the metal with tinctures, dissolve the rust and build up the metal in these places. – We understand a lot about these matters. – she whispered.
I’ll say right away that the forest was the same – gloomy, cold, damp and dark. The branches still closed over the pipe, not allowing light to pass down; the underbrush covered the entire space between the tree trunks. We walked along a green tunnel. It even seemed to me that it was as if the trees parted to the sides just for us, opening a passage, but never opening the branches above us.
I listened with half an ear to the old woman, looking around all the time. It seemed to me that from there, from behind the bushes, from behind the tree trunks, from the darkness, someone was watching us. And there were a lot of observers there, several behind each tree. They were all angry and were ready to jump out and attack. Now I understand why the old woman from time to time stopped telling me about her mechanical magic and shushed me towards the forest. She probably calmed those who were sitting there.
The cats walked nearby, proudly raising their tails. One is to my right, the other is to my left.
“But we’re almost there,” the old woman pointed forward. – Here is our hangar – a hut.
Something loomed ahead, occupying the entire passage. It was an ordinary wooden hut. Ordinary but not quite ordinary. An old tree covered with moss in the dampness. The only window had not been washed for a long time, and the roof, made of reeds, had darkened and required replacement. The Khatynka swayed from time to time and from the outside it seemed that it was breathing.
– How will we all fit there? – I was surprised.
– Don’t worry about that, honey! – said the old woman. – Here, look. – and she suddenly whistled. Her whistling immediately made my ears clog, and when she stopped, I couldn’t hear well for some time.
– Hey, wooden one, turn your front to me, your back to the forest! – the old woman shouted. At that moment it seemed to me that I had already heard this phrase somewhere, but I just couldn’t remember where.
The “wooden” trembled, groaned and, to my surprise, began to rise. The Khatynka rose upward, pushing branches to the sides, and then the trees themselves. The trees diverged as if alive, the branches prudently bent to the sides, and those that did not have time simply broke under the pressure of the hut that had begun to move.
