“My name is Helen Harrison. I’m American by birth, but have been working in Europe for several years.”
“And your profession?”
“I’m a thief.”
He wasn’t shocked; he was, instead, pleased that she was at last confiding in him. “A very particular kind of thief, I’d imagine.”
“Yes. I work only for select clients, who pay me well to deliver special items.”
Georges looked up from the eye-hole and nodded at her bag. “Like that relic.”
“Precisely. I was hired by a collector in Istanbul to steal it from a cult in Greenland. Those three men who pursued me … their clan is very old, dating back to when their land was known as Hyperborea. Their god has a strange name.”
Helen struggled to remember, and Georges intervened. “Shaurash-Ho.”
“Yes, that’s it. How did you know?”
A chill crawled over Georges’s shoulders, an icy spider. “I heard it last night. In a dream. I know that’s impossible, but—”
Helen interrupted. “It’s not. I’ve seen many strange things on the jobs I’ve performed. When I took this piece from its altar, I saw something I can only call a living darkness. I almost understand why the other name for this god was ‘Bitter Shadows.’”
“‘Bitter Shadows’ …” The name slotted perfectly into both Georges’s dreams and his own life; it felt like an apt description of the films that had nourished Georges for so long, but so long ago.
He nearly stopped cranking as he struggled to rise above his reveries, stumbling over his words. “I am a rationalist. I do not believe in magic, except that which is created by trickery.”
“Haven’t you felt something since we’ve been on this train? Something shifting.” Helen rose and paced, and when she held his gaze again he saw realization there. “Georges, I think I’ve been deceived as well.”
“How so?”
“My client, he paid me three times my usual fee for this job, and now I suspect that was to buy my complicity. What if his intention all along was that I release something dreadful?”
Georges looked up from the camera, confused. The image he’d seen on the film had been darkening, as if something were filling the compartment. “I don’t—”
He broke off as he tried to look at Helen, and she simply faded from his view.
Alarmed, he returned his attention to the camera’s eye-hole; he saw the sides of the train dissolving like one of his camera effects. The train had stopped moving. It was surrounded now by a dark and mist-shrouded forest.
He kept turning the handle, advancing the film; he sensed that what was happening was more than all the hundreds of recordings of storms and laughing couples and horse-drawn carriages he’d made, even more than the monsters and devils of his imagination. This was real.
Through the camera’s lens, he saw neither the train nor the woods, but an alien plain populated by amorphous shapes that writhed with some sort of organic energy. The gaseous pools were coalescing into something with solidity. This new mass was dark, huge, winged—
Shaurash-Ho.
Fully formed, the eldritch nightmare lumbered forward, moving closer, but Georges swallowed back his panic, forcing his attention to stay on his task as cameraman. This was no mere puppet of wood and cloth, but a god, captured on film.
Shaurash-Ho stood before him, surrounded by noxious yellow gases and scorched pits full of corpses, dead fingers still curled around knives and guns; the god stood over the hell of the Great War, bloated but never sated. Georges tilted the camera back and up, trying to capture its size on his film. The god looked down at him, blinked its three eyes, ground its tusks into something that might have been an obscene smile—
Georges staggered back as something struck his eye. He lost his hold on the camera, one hand instinctively flying to his face, anticipating blood or pain … but there was none. His heart hammered, but finally slowed as he realized he was alive, still whole.
Shaurash-Ho and the otherworld were gone, and, lowering his hand, blinking, Georges turned to see Helen beside him, her eyes wide, mouth agape.
“What—?” She seemed to be unable to form words.
Georges, remembering, looked at the footage counter on the camera. He had used virtually the entire magazine.
“I did it.”
Helen looked at him, perplexed. “Did what”
“I filmed it—Shaurash-Ho.”
Sagging onto the bench, Helen’s fingers moved as if trying to capture fleeting thoughts. “But there was only mist.”
Georges gestured at the camera. “No, there was more, and the camera saw it all! It was here, and now it’s on my film.”
“You filmed Shaurash-Ho?”
“Yes. Do you know what this means? I have captured something on film that no one living has ever seen. When I share this with the world, it will change everything.” As the full import of that settled on him, so did exhaustion. Utterly drained, Georges slumped down beside Helen.
“Something else happened to us, Georges.”
If she said more, he didn’t hear.
Georges awoke to find the train conductor standing over him in concern. “Do you hear me, Monsieur? Ahhh, good, you’re coming around.”
He was on the bench in his compartment, leaning against the window of the train. He shook himself and sat up, looking around; the camera was still there, but Helen was gone, as was her bag.
“What happened?”
“We seem to have passed through some pocket of gas. Possibly an unexploded bomb of some sort left over from the War went off and released something. If you’ll excuse me now, Monsieur, I must check on the other passengers.”
The conductor left, and Georges tried to remember. His recollections were disorganized and fuzzy, but one thing floated to the surface: the camera. He had filmed the manifestation of a god.
He was about to rise when he heard a crinkling sound under his fingers. Looking down, he saw a small scribbled note, written hastily on the reverse side of a Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits menu.
My Dear Georges,
I apologize for what I have taken from you, but I am going to be in need of funds if I am to seek revenge on the former employer who used me. Yes, I understand completely now: He had no interest in the carving as an objet d’art, but only wanted it removed from the safety of its altar in order to release the evil it contained. I’m not sure yet what exactly I’ve done, but I fear the consequences of my actions and so I mean to do what I can to make amends. I am truly sorry, Georges. I know you have no reason to trust me, but I hope you will believe me when I say that I wish we’d had more time together.
Yours,
Helen
His heart in his throat, Georges Méliès crumpled the note as he leapt from the bench, but he saw immediately what he’d missed before:
The film magazine was gone. With Helen.
He felt it, then: the particle of Shaurash-Ho that now resided within him. That was what had struck him as he looked through the lens—or perhaps it had already been there and was merely awakened now by so direct a vision. The Great War had made an opening and the freed Shaurash-Ho had filled it, leading them all into a new age of darkness. He wondered about his own place in this new reality: Had he given his audiences a speck of hope by delighting them with whimsy, or had he laid the groundwork for centuries of empty cinematic spectacle? Was this the true failure of his life?
Georges disembarked from the train at the next stop. He took his clothing, but left the camera. He neither knew nor cared where he was; he only understood that he would catch the returning Orient Express back to Paris. He wanted nothing so much as to burn the last copies of his old films, the ones he’d held onto out of some vain hope of becoming a filmmaker again. He would spend his remaining days fighting the grain of despair blossoming blackly within him, and questioning the part he’d played in unleashing a grim, violent future.
A future of bitter shadows.
LA MUSIQUE DE
L’ENNUI
KENNETH HITE
CORYDON: Then, sister, you have seen the face of Truth.
CORDELIA: Glimpsed—only glimpsed. For just one moment, the Mask slipped and I gazed upon the void.
—The King in Yellow, Act 1, Scene 1
THE TRAIN WINDOWS SHOWED NOTHING but streaks of mist and blackness, and the Wi-Fi had been dead since Budapest. Kristie looked at the blank face of her phone and sighed. It’s not as though she had any one to call anyhow, but she would have liked to update her blog. “Daaé and Night” was the best Phandom blog in Canada, maybe in North America, and she had spent months teasing—and, yes, taunting—her readers with promises of posts from the exclusive Orient Express “Return to the Phantom of the Opera” tour. Six cities! Four nights! Everything authentic and high-end! Including, apparently, authentic 1910 Wagons-Lits railroad cars with authentic 1910 Wi-Fi connectivity and cell reception. The cars were beautifully restored, it was true. Mahogany and marquetry wood paneling, real leather and period fabrics instead of printed vinyl. Aubusson carpets and Lalique screens, brass fittings and warm yellow light erasing the memory of off-white fluorescents. While the train moved, especially while it moved through the night between cities, Kristie could imagine herself back in 1910, back in the Belle Époque, without even closing her eyes. That part of the trip was living up to the promotion.
The two stops so far, on the other hand, had seemed weirdly slipshod for such a grandiose package. The locomotive lurching forward in sudden clouds of pale steam, too old or cranky to crouch stable at the platform. Busses delayed or idling, taking strange routes through cobbled streets with high concrete or low brick walls to either side. Lots of standing around in empty squares and bridges at weird hours of the day and night, winter leaves or dusty newsprint pages she couldn’t read blowing around them in circles. Everything had to be coordinated around train schedules, she guessed, and that was throwing things off. Maybe it was just the way those countries were—Kristie was from Montreal and had never been east of London until this trip. But even when the bus finally arrived and then dropped them in front of the correct strangely alien façade, she couldn’t escape into the Phantom’s world the way she wanted.
They were supposed to start with the Joel Schumacher movie, shown in Bucharest’s best cinema palace. Maybe it was, but it seemed echoing and cavernous, and smelled like something had died there a long time ago. Worse, the movie was a Romanian print, with Romanian subtitles—Kristie supposed she should be thankful nothing was dubbed—and she found the long strings of utterly foreign words distracting. În somn uoht cântat, în vise yhtill venit— who could pay attention to the singing with that alphabet soup there? The projector or the lighting faded the costumes, too; they looked like tinsel and motley. Somehow even Gerard Butler seemed pale and distracted on screen, something Kristie would never have thought possible.
In Budapest, they saw a performance of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical in the Madách Theater. Kristie knew that this was supposed to be a rare “non-clone” show, with different direction and sets and costumes from the standard production, but what was that Child doing in the story? The singing was all in Hungarian, so she couldn’t tell. Nor could she tell if Christine and Carlotta were supposed to be sisters in this version as well as rivals. In fairness, the Madách had magnificent acoustics, the sound somehow enveloping her in a way that even the Pantages couldn’t manage. The Hungarian Phantom, too, drew her in, beautifully singing lyrics she couldn’t possibly understand even though she knew them by heart. She hummed the music under her breath, feeling her pulse and heartbeat match the rhythms. But again, the lighting was weird. They used a gel that washed out the Phantom’s Red Death costume completely, leaving it looking a dirty yellow-white instead of full-blooded scarlet.
After the shows, when she tried some good-humored nitpicks out on her supposed fellow fans, they just stared at her or changed the subject. Nobody else agreed things were sloppy or off-kilter, or maybe they were too easily faked out to admit it, the phonies. Kristie had read these same people arguing online about the minutiae of Ramin Karimloo versus John Cudia for hours on end, but now they just gushed like tourists about how wonderful everything was. It was as though being on a real, live—and beautiful—train was draining their judgment even faster than it drained their checkbooks.
Which was, she knew well, pretty fast. When Kristie had first read about the Orient Express Phantom tour, she couldn’t get it out of her mind—the vision of gowns and china and wineglasses and the Paris Opera House at the end of the line. She spent three weeks of blog posts talking it up, sending in links and hoping for a free ticket from the organizers. She heard nothing. Then she panicked, worried that the tour would sell out and she would have to beg for updates from other blogs, that “Daaé and Night” wouldn’t be part of the greatest Phantom experience since the Royal Albert Hall twenty-fifth anniversary performance. She just had to go. She had her grandmother’s money still, and her retirement savings account, so she could just barely afford it after all the taxes and fees and airfare. After she hit Purchase she drank too much chardonnay and posted an entry headlined That’s why they call it “life savings,” isn’t it? and that got retweeted a lot and then she really had to go.
So she went, to sit alone in a century-old railway car while people chattered and babbled about a play they apparently hadn’t even bothered to really watch. Kristie drained her glass. Money, stress, jet lag, the weirdness of apparently not really knowing anyone from the Phandom world she’d spent her life in. It would all be worth it, still, if she could just see the Phantom for real, if this Europe could get its act together and show her something perfect that she hadn’t seen five hundred times before, if being here meant she could just touch his world of romance and doomed love and opera cloaks.
If that stupid bitch Carla Hotchkiss would shut up for ten minutes.
Carla hadn’t just been at the Albert Hall performance. She’d been in it, in the chorus but on stage, and she didn’t let anyone forget it for a minute. Although she was born and bred in Fayetteville, Arkansas, she put on a fake English accent and drawled anecdote after anecdote about her time “in West End, don’t you know” and about “dear Sierra, she was all nerves but you could never tell unless you’d seen her backstage” and about “the divine Mister Crawford, he asked us to call him Michael you know, so giving.” Her blog was like that, too, and because she knew people in the trades, she got some plum interviews and some exclusive pictures.
Kristie had to link her, but she sure as Hell didn’t have to listen to her. Not tonight, on their first social night in the legendary saloon car of the Orient Express. Not after eating coq au vin off bone china plates, plates in which kings and emperors had seen their faces. So instead, she avoided her fellow bloggers and her friends and readers, who might not, she had realized in a distant epiphany, be either of those things. She drifted toward the bar, toward two thirtyish men who hadn’t let themselves be drawn out of alcohol’s orbit by the promise of first-hand anecdotes about “dear Sierra.” The taller of the two looked nothing like a Phantom fan, but the slender idler next to him had more than something of the musical theater aficionado about him. Kristie kept her opening line anyhow. “Do you suppose the Orient Express turned the Wi-Fi off so nobody could email them to complain that their Wi-Fi sucks?”
The slender one turned his brown eyes to her … yes, to her satin Pinet reproduction shoes first. Bingo. “Actually, you should write your email to SFB. They’re the bloated hospitality-entertainment conglomerate that currently battens on your alienation. Eldon here can give you their address. Or you could just take his card.”
The taller man, who wore an aggrieved look and a tailcoat slightly too old to be rightly period, took a pull of his wine and scowled. “Jesus, Lee, save some for the article.”
“Can’t do it, I’m afraid. Too much truth, too few column inches, even online.”
The tall American looked at Kristie’s tits first, but covered well en
ough. “Eldon Bryant.” He gestured with his glass. “I’ll be your cruise director. Please hesitate to ask. This is Garrick Lee, who will spell your name wrong in the Guardian after the tour is over.”
Lee seemed just as in love with himself as Carla, but at least his English accent was real.
Kristie handed him her card. “As long as he links my blog, he can spell my name any way he wants.” She gave another one to Eldon, who actually looked at it before putting it in his vest pocket.
Lee gestured airily with a fresh drink. “So you sublimate your alienation by sharecropping in the Andrew Lloyd Webber factory greenhouse, do you?” The light tone only took some of the sting from the question.
Kristie began her well-rehearsed reply. “Actually, I first met the Phantom in Fisher’s Hammer film, and then I read the Gaston Leroux novel and found out how wrong Hammer got it.” Then her frustration took her off-book. “Between them, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Terence Fisher certainly make the case that the British just can’t read.” Eldon smothered a laugh in his glass as Lee narrowed his eyes and she continued, warming to her subject. “Webber’s music, though. It doesn’t need to fit the novel, because somehow it fits the novel’s meaning, and its time. It’s not ashamed. It fits the atmosphere … it’s like the novel and the music come from the same alien world, the same beautiful alien world of this train. And if it’s alienation to want to go there, well….”
Eldon interrupted with sudden energy. “That’s the same thing Fisher does with his Dracula. He just tosses the book aside and goes right for the real meaning of the story, the cruelty and power of this foreign aristocrat, this stranger who brings death with him.” He briefly seemed to remember a plan to remain uninterested, and his voice softened before gathering speed again. “Dracula is my real line. I just finished the Orient Express Dracula tour last week: London to Innsbruck to Budapest to Bucharest to Varna, all the stops and everything first class. We recreated the exact menu from Harker’s meal at the Golden Crown. We had Elizabeth Miller, and in Munich Werner Herzog showed us his cut of Nosferatu.”
Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey Page 5