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Madness on the Orient Express
is published by Chaosium Inc.
Madness on the Orient Express and Introduction
©2014 by James Lowder.
Cover illustration © 2014 by Victor Leza
All stories are original to this collection.
All stories are © 2014 by their respective authors.
Similarities between characters in this book and persons
living or dead is strictly coincidental.
www.chaosium.com
This book is printed on 100% acid-free paper.
FIRST EDITION
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Chaosium Publication 6057
Published in December 2014
ISBN-10: 1568823991
ISBN-13: 9781568823997
Printed in the USA
To Lynn Willis,
for getting the train rolling.
CONTENTS
Introduction by James Lowder
There is a Book by Dennis Detwiller
The Lost Station Horror by Geoff Gillan
Bitter Shadows by Lisa Morton
La Musique de l’Ennui by Kenneth Hite
A Great and Terrible Hunger by Elaine Cunningham
Inscrutable by Robin D. Laws
Engineered by Ari Marmell
Black Cat of the Orient by Lucien Soulban
The Face of the Deep by C.A. Suleiman
Demons Dreaming by Cody Goodfellow
A Finger’s Worth of Coal by Richard Dansky
Bound for Home by Christopher Golden
On the Eastbound Train by Darrell Schweitzer
The God Beneath the Mountain by James L. Sutter
Daddy, Daddy by Penelope Love
Stained Windows by Joshua Alan Doetsch
Contributors’ Notes
INTRODUCTION
JAMES LOWDER
AS AGATHA CHRISTIE’S HERCULE POIROT famously notes in Murder on the Orient Express, “The impossible could not have happened, therefore the impossible must be possible in spite of appearances.” Odd as it may seem at first glance, H.P. Lovecraft might have agreed with the fastidious Belgian sleuth on this. It would be in the definition of the impossible where the two formidable intellects would find themselves in for some spirited debate—and in describing just what an encounter with the newly expanded possible would mean for the human psyche.
Lovecraft was no mystic. Neither did he distrust science. As a young man he wrote a number of essays on the subject, particularly on astronomy, for newspapers such as the Pawtuxet Valley Gleaner and the Providence Evening News. Throughout his career he maintained that science was a valuable weapon against the forces of ignorance and superstition. Fellow foe of charlatans Harry Houdini (who makes an appearance in this volume, courtesy of Christopher Golden) even hired Lovecraft and C.M. Eddy, Jr. to write an entire book bashing superstition. Sadly, Houdini’s death led to the project being abandoned.
For all that he championed science, though, Lovecraft recognized its dark side. The horror in his stories is not derived from the discovery of the impossible, the intrusion of the unreal into the mundane, but rather from the realization that the universe contains truths far beyond humankind’s comprehension. And science sometimes plays a vital role in that awful realization. It’s in the “piecing together of dissociated knowledge,” as his narrator notes at the start of “The Call of Cthulhu,” that the scientist “will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.”
Which brings us back to the Orient Express.
In real life and in art, trains have often embodied the promise—and peril—of technological advance. Like much of the innovation firing the Industrial Revolution, the train unlocked new opportunities for wealth and travel, but also created incredible chaos, uprooting populations and blighting landscapes. By the late 1860s, for example, the California Board of Agriculture estimated that fully one third of the state’s forests had been harvested, much of that for use by the railroads. In this anthology, stories such as Geoff Gillan’s “The Lost Station Horror” and James L. Sutter’s moving “The God Beneath the Mountain” explore the idea that work on or around the rails might lead to unwelcome discoveries, while Ari Marmell’s “Engineered” pulls back to examine the implications of the rail system as a whole.
Along with unrestrained scientific endeavor, the most certain path to uncovering some unwelcome truth about the universe in a Mythos tale is for a character to venture beyond his “placid island of ignorance” and encounter a foreign culture. “Searchers after horror,” notes the narrator of Lovecraft’s “The Picture in the House,” “haunt strange, far places.” Here, the Orient Express serves as a perfect vehicle for such excursions, designed as it is to bridge the West and the East. This movement into mystery forms the central action for many of our stories, most notably Penelope Love’s “Daddy, Daddy,” Lucien Soulban’s chilling “Black Cat of the Orient,” and the aptly titled “On the Eastbound Train” by Mythos legend Darrell Schweitzer.
As is sometimes the case with the anthologies I edit, Madness on the Orient Express came about because of a casual comment at a convention—Gen Con, in this case. I was chatting with Chaosium owner Charlie Krank about the way in which publishers were using Kickstarter to fund anthologies, and Charlie revealed that he was, indeed, looking into launching the company’s next projects through the crowdsourcing platform. He was hoping for a positive reception, and we left the possibility open for me to put together a related anthology, should any of those Kickstarters take off.
A couple hundred thousand dollars in Kickstarter support later, here we are.
Specifically, this anthology was created as a stretch goal for the campaign to fund a reprint of the classic Horror on the Orient Express roleplaying campaign for Call of Cthulhu. So thanks are immediately due to all the backers who got behind that project and allowed us to create this collection of original stories, and to the folks at Chaosium: Charlie, Meghan, Mike, Nick, and Dustin. Thanks are also due to the designers of the original Horror on the Orien
t Express campaign and to Chaosium editor extraordinaire Lynn Willis.
The designers for the first incarnation of the Horror on the Orient Express adventure grew out of the thriving Australian convention scene of the 1980s. As Mark Morrison explains in an article for the British fanzine Dagon, the lack of a game manufacturer presence meant the local cons were very much focused on getting enthusiasts together to play. Morrison and a growing circle of friends—known as the Cthulhu Conglomerate—became ambassadors for the Call of Cthulhu RPG, and eventually published designers in their own right. After turning down a proposal for a Europe sourcebook from Morrison and Christian Lehmann, Lynn Willis countered, as was his wont, with a brilliant alternative: an epic adventure set aboard the Orient Express. No fewer than eighteen people contributed to the original published adventure, including Cthulhu Conglomerate founder Mark Morrison and horror fiction legend Thomas Ligotti, and two authors you will also find represented in this anthology: the aforementioned Love and Gillan.
Whether in a roleplaying adventure or a short story, the nature of rail travel makes it amenable as a setting for storytelling. Train travel takes time, and the train itself is structured so that passengers can get up and move around. This gives a storyteller some room to pace a tale out, and to grant her or his characters some changes of scenery along the way to the resolution. There’s also the motion, a fact that continues to make speeding trains a standard trope for adventure stories in all media. The only limitation placed upon the writers for this collection was that their works somehow involve the Orient Express and the Mythos. Our authors have taken full advantage of all this freedom, exploring both the inner working of the train (Elaine Cunningham’s “A Great and Terrible Hunger”) and the mystique attached to the Orient Express itself (Kenneth Hite’s “La Musique de l’Ennui”), with other entries ranging in tone and approach from Cody Goodfellow’s two-fisted pulp yarn to Joshua Alan Doetsch’s surrealistic nightmare.
The last warning whistle has blown, and we need to get underway. So please have your tickets at the ready and settle in for a journey across unexpected landscapes to a destination that—well, we’ll just let you see it for yourself when you arrive. We can promise this, though: murder will be the least of your problems on this trip aboard the Orient Express.
THERE IS A BOOK
DENNIS DETWILLER
THE BOOK WAS WRITTEN BEFORE it could be written.
Before the dominance of any single life-form on Earth, the book was already, waiting for a hand to transcribe it. It hovered, before the first sludge crawled from the oceans, before the Earth cooled and the sun lit and the worlds upon world were spat from a rip in the nothing.
It was there.
The ideas it contained were a primer for this universe. The things for which it was messenger had long arrived at their places in the beyond, and waited for it to herald their coming in the existence that would be.
It is hard to describe something that transcends the world it finds itself in, but the book is this. A puncture through, a hole to the labyrinths of alien thought beyond the veil of this transient edifice of order.
The book was an agreement between inhuman powers; which might come first, which would come last. Because to them time was merely a measure of patience. All was visible before them; time and order nothing but a vast field of movement that hovered and shifted and shifted back, and beyond it—what they longed for—absolute freedom.
The book manifested on Earth because reality is thin there; it’s a cosmic sinkhole, a place where things congeal like clots of blood drawn to the edge of a drain. The entire universe beyond it, ready to despoil and ruin, is blocked to powers beyond, so they circle and wait for the way to open.
Their plans were laid before the Earth’s mantle cooled.
For eons, millennia, epochs, the book was nothing more than a series of thoughts waiting for a mind, a series of movements waiting for some dumb limb to make them, a series of actions waiting for bodies to execute.
Then, man.
Humanity, the winner of endless biological conflict, crept across the face of the globe like a stain. First as ape-men that crooned at the moon and smashed each other’s heads in, then crawled through the jungles and stacked rocks and cried to the sun in worship, piling bodies in great mountains.
Then those that slept in high grass and ate seeds and berries and meat, when they could find it, hiding from marauders with skull-painted faces who hunted them, leaving bleached white bones gnawed clean in their path.
Then the snows receded, the Earth warmed, and the minds of men grew. It wasn’t long until man discovered they could sow seeds wherever they went, that the seeds could be carried, interbred, harvested. Food became plentiful, and men knew leisure for the first time.
Time passed. Buildings came, and then the stories.
The clock that was the book ticked away, counting, waiting. But even the things beyond grew impatient. The book grew impatient too, wanting to serve its function. It saw man as a blunt instrument, a method to fashion an escape for those it awaited, something with which it could pry the locks on the blue world and complete its purpose: the release of those it served into a universe ready for ruin.
Its first attempt to transcribe itself was in a fertile place, where men worked metal, burned children alive for luck, where they tracked the stars for the first time and scribbled notes down on clay tablets that baked in the sun.
There, it found a man named Asu, leapt through his hand onto the tablets and left him reeling. By the end, after the pictures came, Asu was a madman, his mind scorched by the secrets of the keys and gates that held the powers waiting beyond.
The tablets grew in notoriety, a disease of ideas that crept out and infected hundreds and then thousands of men. War and slaughter and hatred followed. Before the rituals from the book could be enacted, Asu and his followers were hung from gibbets and cut open. A campaign to destroy the tablets and all copies was undertaken.
The book had acted too soon. The plague it started spread too fast and collapsed upon itself, leaving only bodies, ashes and death.
But clay tablets are small, they are resilient.
They are easily overlooked.
Not all the tablets had been smashed. Once, a man raced through the streets of a city, pursued by the king’s guards, carrying a pail with a set of the tablets, spilling them as he ran. Three nights before, he had inscribed markings in the dirt, seeing signs and portents that showed the truth in the letters. His face and arms were covered in the dried blood of his family, whom he had murdered and then devoured, and his eyes were mad.
When the guards cornered him, he was run through by spears and fell into the well at the center of town. Later, they would fish his body out and, eventually, the pail. But the tablets—nine of them—would remain at the bottom.
Nearly two thousand years later—the span of a blink to the things beyond—a young man crawled through the ruins of Babylon with a spade and books of his own. He was a scholar, a peaceful man concerned with the study of the past and the meaning of man’s future. He was a man of letters, someone ahead of his time, who saw mankind’s ascent from the dirt as assurance of some meaning, the first steps toward a grand enterprise in the future.
He was wrong.
As he had done many times before, he dug the artifacts up from the dry well. Before, the tablets he had uncovered were lists, receipts of centuries-dead merchants, a glimpse into another time. Not this time. This time he uncovered the nine tablets. Long he had worked on the language of the ancient peoples of the world. In the city of peace he had stitched together earlier learnings to translate the newfound tablets.
Finally, in Sanaá, he scribbled down the first words of the translation in a finely made book of linen and goatskin, and as his hand placed them on the page, it shook. The ideas of the tablets opened the gap in the world, and the rest of the book came through. The young man was changed. When he finished, the book was scrawled in smears of ink and drawn in gouts of his own
blood. For the first time since the assembly of the ideas of the book, its full concept had transited into the world.
What followed was madness.
Alhazred was his name, though some also called him mad, and his book entered the hive of knowledge of the city of peace just like any other book; it was a place that valued knowledge and ideas as things separate from reality. Something to be considered and stored and looked to. This was before they realized an idea alone could kill, that a concept was a weapon, that a thought could mean death.
In Baghdad, the book was copied, like any other book, and it spread to hundreds, and then thousands, and finally tens of thousands. Within a year, it had moved through the centers of knowledge, and Alhazred meant prophet or criminal to all.
His version of the book, the Al-Azif, was synonymous with death and madness.
His list of offenses had grown too vast to be ignored by the Caliphate, and they moved to eliminate him. Possession of the book was designated a crime. Tens of thousands who read it rose up in orgies of murder and debauchery and in turn were suppressed or killed. The book was burned, but through followers it mutated into codes and cyphers so it might be hidden in plain sight and spread farther. Different versions were produced to foil the censors. From nine clay tablets it had bloomed into nearly eight hundred different volumes, scrolls, and manuscript fragments.
Alhazred died, but the book to which he had given form remained. Finally, it had found its way permanently into the world.
In all their machinations, the things from beyond never before considered the possibility of something working against them.
They could see the vast expanse of time at once. A field of existence that unfurled and spread and was drawn taut around the world. There, in the darkness as their plans through the book rose and crumbled, they began to suspect they might not be able to see everything after all.
That something else might be involved.
Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey Page 1