A young woman is hustled on to a train by her parents bound for a destination known only as the Ninth Kingdom. An ominous pall of smoke hangs over a landscape dotted with abandoned settlements where the train no longer stops. “It’s the forest fires,” a fellow passenger tells her. “The smoke always blows down from the north this time of year.” Full of little nods towards the uncanny, it could almost be the opening of a Stephen King novel, but “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom” is a short story by Sylvia Plath, which was rejected by a magazine when she was a 20-year-old student and has remained largely unseen until now.
The story will be published next week by Faber, as part of a series of standalone short fiction titles marking the publisher’s 90th anniversary. At the time of writing, Plath was a scholarship student at Smith College, Massachusetts, where – far from “splitting open at my feet like a ripe, juicy watermelon”, as she famously wrote to her mother at the start of her degree – the literary world was not opening up anywhere near fast enough for her.
In December 1952, she was on the brink of the tumultuous year that she would document in her novel The Bell Jar. Within months of completing the story, she would be rejected from the Harvard summer school and would make her first serious suicide attempt, of which she later wrote that she had “blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion”.
It doesn’t seem too fanciful to see the story itself as a thought experiment about just such a journey into oblivion. At one end of the line are Mary’s parents, pushing her to a destination of their choosing with more of an eye to social propriety than to the anxieties of their daughter. At the other is a station of no return, of which she knows nothing except that it lies at the end of a long tunnel. Yet the carriage itself is stuffed with alternative lives: men drinking and playing poker; a mother with a baby in a soiled blanket; two small boys squabbling over a game of tin soldiers. In a note on the original text, Plath described the boys as “present-day prototypes of Cain and Abel” – but they also offer thumbnail sketches of the rough-and-tumble of family life.
Over it all presides an apparently kindly woman who lays aside her knitting needles to buy Mary coffee and chocolate, while offering dark insights into the terrain they are crossing and engaging in increasingly chilling banter with the ticket collector. She briskly rejects Mary’s growing fretfulness: “You let them put you on the train, didn’t you? You accepted and did not rebel.” This knitting woman is a ferryman of souls, updated for the railway age – a nod perhaps to the domesticated myths of TS Eliot’s plays, and a truly creepy embodiment of the seductiveness of rebelling by quitting the train short of its destination. One can see why Mademoiselle magazine would have declined to publish such a nihilistic allegory, while also appreciating its rediscovery today.
Claire Armitstead
‘Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom’
The train was still hurtling through the black tunnel when the squabble started on the seat in front of them. Two little boys were sitting there, across the aisle from their mother who was reading a magazine. They were playing with tin soldiers.
“Give me that,” the bigger boy with the black eyes said to his brother. “That’s my soldier. You took my soldier.”
“I did not,” the pale tow-headed fellow said. “I did not take it.”
“You did too. I saw you.” The older boy picked up a tin soldier and struck his brother on the forehead. “There! Serves you right.”
Blood oozed from a purpling bruise. The younger boy began to whimper. “I hate you,” he whined. “I hate you.”
The mother kept on reading her magazine.
“Here, here, that’s enough,” said the woman beside Mary, leaning forward over the back of the seat. She reached out to dab gently at the blood on the young boy’s forehead with the hem of her white linen handkerchief. “You boys ought to be ashamed of yourselves, making all that fuss for no reason at all. Over a couple of silly tin soldiers.”
The little boys pouted sullenly at the interference and began to play quietly again.
The woman leaned back. “I don’t know what’s the trouble with children these days. They seem to get worse and worse.” She sighed, and took up her knitting again. Outside there was a sudden increase of light.
“Look,” said Mary. “We’ve come out of the tunnel.”
The train had shot into the somber gray afternoon, and the bleak autumn fields stretched away on either side of the tracks beyond the cinder beds. In the sky hung a flat orange disc that was the sun.
“The air is so thick and smoky!” Mary exclaimed. “I’ve never seen the sun that strange color before.”
“It’s the forest fires,” the woman replied. “The smoke always blows down from the north this time of year. We’ll be getting into more of it later on.”
A wooden shack with boarded windows sprang up beside the tracks and dwindled off into the distance.
“What is that house doing out here so far away from everything?”
“That wasn’t a house. It used to be the first station on the line, but now they don’t use it much any more, so it is all shut up. This trip has gotten to be pretty much of an express.”
Lulled by the clocking rhythm of the train wheels, Mary stared out of the window. In one of the corn fields a scarecrow caught her eye, crossed staves propped aslant, and the corn husks rotting under it. The dark ragged coat wavered in the wind, empty, without substance. And below the ridiculous figure black crows were strutting to and fro, pecking for grains in the dry ground.
The train sped on. “I think I will get a cup of coffee in the dining car,” the woman was saying to Mary, then. “Want to come?”
“Sure,” said Mary. “Sure, I’d like to stretch my legs.”
The two of them got up and walked down the aisle to the car ahead. It was the smoker, and the thick air stung Mary’s eyes. Card tables were set up by the windows, and most of the men were playing poker. Waiters in white coats glided up and down with trays, serving drinks. There was the sound of loud laughter, and the clinking of ice cubes in glasses.
“Next car is the diner,” the woman tossed back over her shoulder. She pushed through the door, across the swaying platform, and into the car ahead with Mary close behind.
On red plush loungers the diners reclined, eating apples and plums and hothouse grapes from the bowls of fruit on the polished wooden tables. Languid dinner music drifted from a loudspeaker concealed somewhere in the wall.
The woman stopped at a table for two and signaled Mary to sit down.
“May I take your order?” queried the black waiter in the white tailored suit, the pencil poised in his hand above a tablet of paper.
Mary had not even seen him approach. He had brought ice water for each of them.
“I think I would like a glass of ginger ale,” Mary said.
“I’ll have the usual,” the woman smiled at him.
“Sure thing … coffee, cream, and sugar.”
The black waiter flashed the woman a grin and scribbled hieroglyphics on his paper tablet.
The order came, the coffee steaming in a glazed green pottery cup and the ginger ale, shot through with small silver bubbles, in a tall glass with a red cherry at the bottom.
“How delicious!” Mary cried. “I’ve never eaten in a dining car before. It’s so luxurious.”
“Yes,” the woman agreed, warming her hands about the cup of steaming brown liquid.
“Yes, they do their best to make the ride as pleasant as possible.”
Mary relaxed in the soft ease, sipping her ginger ale. In the subtle indirect light, the cushioned seats were a warm red color, and the music came lilting continually from the hidden loudspeaker. Mary sucked up the last of her ginger ale and tipped the glass so that the cherry rolled down into her hand.
She popped it into her mouth and bit into the sweet fruit.
Outside the picture window the orange sun was sinking in the gray west. It seemed smaller than when Mary had last looked at it, and the orange color was deepening into red.
“Goodness, it’s getting late fast,” Mary remarked, gazing out at the barren, darkening landscape.
“One hardly notices the time go by on this trip,” the woman nodded. “It is so comfortable here inside the train. But we have just passed the fifth stop along the way and that means we’ll be going into the long tunnel soon. Shall we go back to the car?”
“Yes, let’s. Do we pay now?”
“No,” the woman told her. “They will just add the amount on to your bill at the end of the trip.” She rose and started back to the car, planting her feet firmly, one after the other, on the swaying aisle of the speeding train.
Back in their seats, the woman took up her knitting again, and Mary idly watched the sterile farmlands going past. At the end of the car, the baby began to cry, spoiled and petulant.
Three businessmen came down the aisle from the cocktail bar, lurching with the motion of the train and laughing. The lights in the ceiling were hard glaring stars.
“Damn brat,” one man said.
“Yeah, you’re not kidding,” said the second man. And under their gray felt hats all three men were exactly alike. Blundering, lurching, they shouldered through the car, and the baby kept on crying as if it would cry forever.
The train shot into another subway tunnel, then. Dark rocks bulked silent and swift past the window, and the wheels clocked away like the cogs of a gigantic clock.
A vendor opened the door at the front of the car and came swinging slowly along the aisle, crying “Candy, pop-corn, cash-you nuts … get your candy, pop-corn, cash-you nuts … ”
“Here,” said the woman, opening her brown satchel and taking out a worn purse, “I’ll get us both a chocolate bar … ”
“Oh, no,” Mary protested. “Please, I’ll pay for it.”
“Nonsense, dear,” the woman said. “This is my treat. The chocolate will be good for your sweet tooth. Besides, you’ll have enough to pay for by the end of the trip.”
The vendor stopped at their seat and pushed his red cap back on his forehead, sticking his thumbs in his red-and-white striped silk vest.
“What’ll it be?” he began in a routine, bored voice, “We have … ” He paused, looked closely at the woman, then, and burst out into raucous laughter.
“You making this trip again?” His voice dropped to a low, confidential tone. “There’s nothing for you in this load, you know. The whole deal is signed, sealed, and delivered. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”
“Don’t be too sure, Bert,” the woman smiled amiably. Even bookkeepers can go wrong, now and then.”
“Bookkeepers, maybe, but not the boss.”
Bert jingled his black change purse with a sly grin. “The boss has got his all sewed up. Personally, this time, personally.”
The woman broke into rich laughter. “Yes, I should think so, after the mistake he made on the last trip, getting the trains crossed on the higher level. Why, he couldn’t get those people out of the lower gardens now if he tried. They took to the gardens like children, happy as larks. You think they’d obey him and go back on the lower subway where they belong? Not on your life.”
Bert screwed his face up like a monkey.
“Yeah,” he said, subdued. “Yeah, I suppose you gotta get some percentage some of the time.”
“That’s why I’m here,” the woman said.
“I’ll take a chocolate bar.”
“Large or small.”
“Large,” the woman replied, and handed him a quarter.
“Well, bye now,” Bert said, touching his cap. “Happy hunting,” and he swung off down the aisle, calling in a bored singsong, “Candy, pop-corn, cash‑you nuts … ”
“Poor Bert,” the woman remarked to Mary, unwrapping the chocolate bar without tearing the fragile silver foil. “He gets so lonely for someone to talk to on this run. It’s such a long trip that hardly anybody makes it twice.”
She broke a section from the chocolate bar and handed a large piece of the flat brown candy to Mary. The smell of the chocolate rose rich and fragrant.
“Mmm,” said Mary. “It smells good.” She took a bite and let the candy dissolve on her tongue, sucking at the sweetness and letting the syrup run down her throat.
“You seem to know a lot about this trip,” Mary said to the woman. “Do you travel a great deal?”
“Goodness, yes. I’ve been traveling here and there as long as I can remember. But I make this trip most often.”
“I shouldn’t wonder. It is a comfortable ride, really. They do so many nice extra little things, like the refreshments every hour, and the drinks in the card room, and the lounges in the dining car. It’s almost as good as a hotel.”
The woman flashed her a sharp look.
“Yes, my dear,” she said dryly, “but remember you pay for it. You pay for it all in the end. It’s their business to make the trip attractive. The train company has more than a pure friendly interest in the passengers.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Mary admitted with a laugh. “I hadn’t thought about it that way. But tell me, what will it be like when we get off the train? I can’t imagine. The travel folders don’t say anything about the climate, or the people in the north country, nothing at all.”
The woman bent over her knitting, suddenly intent. There was a knot in the thread. Swiftly, she straightened out the wool and went on stitching.
“You’re going to the end of the line, I take it,” she said.
“That’s right, the end of the line. Father said I didn’t have to worry about connections or anything, and that the conductor would tell me where to go from there.”
“The last station,” the woman murmured. “Are you sure?”
“Yes. At least that’s what it says on my ticket. It is such a strange ticket that I remembered the number, red on black. The ninth kingdom, it said. That’s a funny way to label railroad stations.”
“One gets used to it after a while,” the woman said, as if talking to herself. “And to all the absurd little divisions and subdivisions and classifications. Arbitrary, that’s what it is. Arbitrary. But nobody seems to realize that nowadays. One little motion, one positive gesture, and the whole structure would collapse, fall quite apart.”
“I don’t quite see what you mean,” said Mary.
“Of course not, of course not, my dear. I quite forgot myself. I was talking in circles. But tell me, have you noticed, just as you sit here, anything at all unusual about the people on this train?”
“Why no,” Mary said slowly, looking around. “Why no,” she repeated, puzzled. “They look all right to me.”
The woman sighed. “I guess I’m just overly sensitive,” she said.
Red neon blinked outside the window, and the train slowed, shuddering into the station of the sixth kingdom. The car door swung open, and the tread of the conductor came down the aisle to the blond woman up ahead with the red painted mouth, who paled, drew her furs about her and shrank back.
“Not yet,” she said. “Please, not yet. This is not my stop. Give me a little longer.”