I know not what answer I gave, only that I flew back to my room in terror. Only Leacock’s urgings in the morning drew me out.
From then I determined I needed to learn the secret behind these strange stories. My hope of sanity seemed to demand I solve it for the no-doubt mundane mystery it had to be.
Since the collapsed station lay at the heart of it, I went to give it a closer inspection. I told no one lest they try and dissuade me, since there was a suggestion it might yet be unstable. It was easy enough to go alone, since the workers avoided it always. I sent Leacock a spurious message about my whereabouts and climbed onto the rock itself, from which I could lower myself into the fissure.
Bulgaria is rich in natural caves, many unmapped, and I wondered as I moved in the dark if the station fall had not opened access to a heretofore-undiscovered one. The way was almost entirely blocked but I could step down into the darkness and found that a crude passage opened before me. I had to squirm between rocks to navigate it. I went as far as I felt I could go and then turned to look back out and see how far down I had come. Suddenly I was seized with a strange vertigo. The rock’s angles were skewed by the light of my torch. Standing there and looking back along my path, it was as if the rock bent in toward me, and around me what was left of the broken station walls sloped this way and that, not upright and skewed exactly, but both and neither, as if it were a mad scarecrow in a breeze, with arms akimbo that twisted first one way and then another. The odd sense of movement was not all. It was as if the parts of the station and the rocks that I could see were merely a façade, a curtain separating me from a place beyond that obeyed no human laws. This sensation, combined with a sudden and most unprecedented sense of claustrophobia, unmanned me. I shrieked and scrambled for freedom and air.
I wanted no more to do with that rock beneath the station. Instead I would turn my attention to the station itself. I went in search of the original plans, for the chief engineer had wanted me to see if there were an inherent flaw in the station’s plan, but also because I was curious to see if some aspect of its initial design could help me to comprehend some of the strangeness around the site.
For some reason I felt compelled to keep this activity from Leacock, though I could not say why. I waited to the end of the shift and went to the small office in the village. The company had set it up to handle some aspects of the job and manned it with clerks to keep its papers and plans for the region. It was already late and so I was trusted to stay and keep searching while the clerks went home.
I went through the plans, starting with the most immediate—including the new design for the relocated station—and working back to the original design for that first station. It was in all ways exactly like any other architects plan: a simple building with some engineering considerations for its role as a station, such as train egress and water supply.
I rose from the filing cabinets and boxes I had been rifling to see a succession of lights coming from the direction of the work site. Going closer to the window I could see it was a group of workers, all holding lanterns, marching down to the village. As they got nearer, I could see they were headed toward the office. I started out to meet them, a sense of alarm and panic already gripping me.
“We have found them, we think,” one of them cried.
“Found whom?” I asked. “The missing men? Which one?”
“We don’t know for sure. There was another subsidence at the old site, and the crack has opened wider. No one will go down without a manager, and we can’t find the shift man. Will you come?”
I said that I would, of course, and sent a worker on horseback to find the chief engineer and the senior company official near Belovo, to rouse them and bring them to the site at once. When he set off on his mission, the rest of us went back to the railhead and, on handcarts, sped up to the tunnel and through to the plateau and site. Had I known what awaited me, I should have stayed where I was, or in a cowardly fashion offered to get the officials myself.
Around the collapsed site a small knot of men awaited. I was surprised to find Leacock among them. He appeared exhausted, drained even. All of his youth and energy looked to have fled.
“Where are they?” I asked.
The foreman Dimova took me aside and we climbed up the original crevasse, which was now wider. Other cracks and fissures ran through the rock. He held his light up and I could see the passage I had initially traversed. It had opened up farther, creating a black road into the earth that spilled down into what looked like steps. Unlike earlier, the rock appeared to be steaming hot.
“There was no one working here, but we can make out what we think is a body. The men won’t go down.”
I had no desire to go into that place again, but my duty insisted. “Will you come with me?”
Dimova nodded numbly. I took him with me as I started out, pausing only to determine that the new heat was not dangerous. Leacock followed, too. We crept down into the fissure. Leacock and I carried lanterns. Dimova knew where the body had been seen. As we climbed I noted his clenched teeth and trembling jaw. The thought of descending here seemed to fill him with complete dread.
We came upon the body a few minutes later. It was at the base of these crude steps and lay on a raised piece of rock, a natural platform, with a drop beyond. It was indeed a vast natural cave system we had uncovered. I believed I could also see light coming from another place in the east. Unnatural heat and steam rose up here and wilted us. But I scarcely noticed. I think someone could have applied a hot iron to my forehead while I beheld that body and I would have barely flinched.
The thing no longer resembled a human, not in its general shape. Oh, it was a man all right; it was impossible to argue otherwise. It had limbs and features of a sort and hair and the other human traits. What robbed it of its humanity were the angles into which its form had been twisted. Do not misunderstand that I am speaking here of bent limbs and spine or those mundane breakages that can cripple or kill a man in a cave in. His very flesh had been made over into something else, so that the fundamental shape of his being no longer conformed to humanity’s template. It was as if someone had used a human body as the building blocks from which to construct something else: a collection of angles and lines so utterly inhuman, as to dispense with the body’s humanity forever.
Worse, these angles and lines shimmered and moved. The poor man was clearly dead, but there could be no doubt some alien force was animating him. As we watched with horror, his head, if head it can even be called, rotated and twisted and spun as the body below and beside it twitched and writhed.
The patterns the thing formed were hypnotic, so fantastic that I could not pull myself away. The others had wildly different responses. Dimova lurched to the side sobbing, then threw himself over the gap past where the body lay. He fell shrieking and, more alarming still, singing all the way down. Leacock arched his body back and roared out a laugh—a gust, a gale of a laugh that had malice and triumph and no humor in it at all. “It has come! It has come at last!” he hooted. He bent and somehow scooped up the broken shimmering thing. With inhuman strength and speed, he lurched up the natural stairs and away.
The removal of the body brought me back to my senses. Had it been up to me I would have left the thing where it was and used dynamite to bury it forever. Surely no good could come of Leacock’s flaunting this twisted horror to the men. As I turned to go after him, I realized I had already lost him. The stupor had held me in its grasp too long. I would never catch him in the struggle up the rock.
Then I noticed that, in his haste and madness, Leacock had dropped his pack, the one stuffed with books and plans he always carried. On the curled underside of one the rolled plans a heavy pencil mark denoted the site I had earlier been seeking information on. I should not have recognized it had I not seen its notation recently in the mundane version in the office. I plucked it out.
The plan was covered with eldritch writing and arcane symbols. It described some great cosmic pattern overlaying
the site and the architectural plan that made my mind reel to contemplate it. Worse, this plan was not the only one. His pack contained similar plans for other, older structures, some going back years.
I made my way back toward the opening. Some shreds of lucidity and reason must have remained to me then, for I scooped up the pack as evidence, before I went.
At the site I could not guess at the horror that awaited me. If Leacock had some of the crew previously in his allegiance it mattered not now. The sight of the twisted man must have driven them all insane, for all stood behind him, raving and gnashing their teeth like maddened beasts, as Leacock leapt and cavorted in front of them. He crooned to his terrible gods and promised these mindless men favors from powers that, as far as I could discern, would care little for their existence, let alone their prosperity. I called to the men to come to their senses; they parted around Leacock and came for me. It was the warped thing itself that stood now and thrust out its hand—and bid its mad disciples bring me down.
The workers began to ring around me, blocking my way across the plateau to the tunnel and any hope of escape back to the village. Then I recalled the lights I’d seen from the east while in the cave the first time. Perhaps I could scramble back there and escape in the direction of the tunnel. I looked wildly about in the flickering lamplight and dived back into the crevasse.
I clambered and slithered along, hoping desperately to find another passage. Hands snatched at me to drag me back, and I felt a backward lurch. But they had only Leacock’s pack. I let it drop behind me and scrambled on. The difficulties that impeded me I hoped would now slow my pursuers. I pushed myself into hollows of rock and gaps between boulders I would never have attempted to navigate otherwise. It was in suffocating darkness that I plunged into the strange passage.
I crawled and pushed ahead farther than I had dared before. Before me was light, the light of that other passage, I hoped—for what other light could it be in this desolate place? As I drew on toward it, the small point of light, about the size and strength of a lantern glow, expanded and bent. The light came rushing to me and accelerating away simultaneously. One part of my mind knew I was trapped in the constraints of a recent rock slide while the other wholly refuted this, for before and around me the walls and floor and ceiling bent and angled in preposterous, giddying ways. I cried out and tried to shield my eyes. Nothing I beheld made sense, as the laws of all normal physics suddenly exploded into imbecility. Yet this was not the worst of it.
The strange surroundings I found myself in were but a portal to a great chaos of surfaces and angles, turning and meeting and shimmering into infinity, another world beyond this one. Then I saw the angled man, his body twisted and tortured in cruel and alien ways. I saw by his eyes he was not sane and that he felt every twinge of change and wrack I could see him perform. Nor was he alone. Dozens of his fellows, all twisted to conform to the vertiginous properties of this world, danced and swayed around him. I felt myself pitched into that fathomless existence. It was as if I flew below my previous vantage point yet looked down on it at the same time. Far below, clawing up yet right above me, gibbered another form. The place was alive with these gigantic, squamous green-gray beasts with an elongated, obscene head and flaccid, drooling mouth, whose barbed and gnashing teeth poked through its own flesh. Even as I watched, this monstrosity grabbed with ridged talons for an angled man, tore him apart, and stuffed large, bleeding chunks of him into its maw.
I was seized with an insight that must have blazed with the last of my sanity fled. The angular men were the workers, prepared for this harsh environment so they could traverse it successfully. But not as equals, explorers, or even mere denizens. They—we—were also being shaped into food, raw sustenance for the titanic beasts that dwelt here.
With even greater horror I felt a tearing pain in my right arm, and looked down to see it being twisted and warped in the same way as the flesh of the angular man. I screamed, but no sound could be heard in those strange climes. Then a beast turned its baleful yellow eye upon me. Never had I experienced such evil intent coalesced into one look.
A rush and booming echo surrounded about me and I was pulled out of the clutches of that thing and back into my own world. A rock wall had collapsed and uncovered the original passage I had sought to the light. I had not totally entered that alien world after all.
Maddened and shivering, my arm an agony, I clawed my way up and out into the gaping rock east of the fallen station. Suddenly there was light: real light, not the unnatural effluvium of those visions that had assaulted me while I stumbled through the black. I could hear the men roaring behind me. Ahead of me sat a foreman’s cabin, a rough affair of wooden stilts and canvas. Next to it was a handcart on the rail track that led to the tunnel, the same kind of cart the men and I had ridden up there. On it was strapped boxes of dynamite.
I no longer cared for my own safety. That may have been mad, but I suspect now I was beyond sanity at that moment.
Grabbing up the top box of dynamite, I hurled it at the men approaching me out of the crevasse. The box split, enough for me to see the sticks of dynamite poking through the wood. I lit a stick from the second box and pitched it at the first. My attackers apparently cared as little for their own safety as I did for mine and came rushing on, right over the dynamite at the point of detonation.
Even now I am not certain I ever heard the blast. The pressure on my ears and the percussive thrust that smashed me back into the makeshift cabin and brought the whole thing down upon me dominated my senses.
I lay in a mess of rock, canvas, wood and limbs, painted with the gore of more than a dozen men. How long I was there I cannot be sure. When my senses cleared I struggled to my feet. Nothing moved around me.
The dynamite blast had also brought down the whole original spur right onto the station structure, the entire thing now a ruin. My eye detected movement as I surveyed the wreckage. Among the scrum of fallen men, Leacock crawled slowly and painfully. He must have been shielded from much of the blast by the bodies of his allies, or simply by the vagaries of chance. The rock fall had injured him more. I stood over him, a wrench in my hand. I must have grabbed it from the worker’s cabin but I do not recall picking it up. The police did not believe this claim.
As I watched, his bones and flesh shimmered and twisted, conforming to angles unlike any the human body ever took. I struck out at him without hesitation or remorse. It was as if a dam had burst. Again and again I smashed the wrench into his head. Even when he no longer writhed or screeched, I continued to smash at him. When I was done, I could find no sure sign of his head, just a glutinous mass above his now-red collar that showed shards of bone and some teeth. A single eyeball swaying by a long red sinew hung off the wrench when I pulled back that mortal implement. Perhaps I fainted then. I cannot say I felt guilty; that would be a lie. But the intense swell of violence and hatred that electrified me also overwhelmed me. When I came to my senses, Leacock still lay bloodied at my feet. His body was normal now.
Voices sounded beyond me. The engineer and manager I had sent for must have come up during the earlier part of the ordeal, only to be turned back by the blast. I heard someone shouting orders. I sat down on the broken rock to await them. While I waited, I found a workman’s hacksaw for hewing beams for the scaffolding. They tell me I was laughing as I cut the twisting, disobedient flesh of my arm from my shoulder.
They attended to my wound and turned me over to the police when they found the dynamite and the dead men and the murdered Leacock. Leacock’s plans, of course, along with any peculiarity in the original station, were destroyed. I imagine they will also blame the missing men on me, too, despite the fact that they were missing long before I arrived.
As a German national working for a German company, I was sent home for justice to be dispensed. My story alarmed the locals in Bulgaria and they were glad to be rid of me rather than have me repeat my claims in open court. The German authorities lost little time finding me guilty of Leac
ock’s killing, guilty, too, of sabotage and base treachery against the company that had hired and sustained me. Once the verdict was in, they could do little else but sentence me to death by guillotine.
The company has continued with the station at the new site, damn them. They have moved farther out onto the plateau and shifted the rail line just a little. They are praying, I suspect, for no tremors.
Soon the Orient Express and other trains will run regularly through that benighted place. I cannot believe they will escape unscathed. Something unnatural and unpitying waits deep under the earth to devour at least some of the unfortunate souls that pass within its grasp—and we have allowed it egress to our world.
I would write more, warn you of the other things I saw in those plans I took from Leacock’s pack for stations all across Europe, but this will have to be enough.
Already my one hand is twisting out of true.
BITTER SHADOWS
LISA MORTON
THE DOOR TO THE COMPARTMENT burst open just before midnight. Georges looked up from his Paris newspaper, startled, heart thrumming in time to the tracks beneath the train.
Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey Page 3