Kristie didn’t know who Elizabeth Miller was, and only had a faint idea that Herzog was a director, but she resented his enthusiasm anyway. “Well, you didn’t manage to get us Joel Schumacher in Bucharest. Or even a very good print of his movie.”
He shrugged and slugged from the fresh wineglass that had appeared at his elbow. “I didn’t plan this tour. I don’t know jack about The Phantom of the Opera. I was supposed to get a month off in Romania. I’m only on this train because my bosses at SFB made me ride shotgun to save a few bucks.”
“You mean, because nobody planned this tour,” Lee interrupted, his tone far from light now. “They had to run the train they’ve leased back to Paris anyway and decided to throw a random playpen of cultural detritus together at the last minute, a bento box of nostalgia rattling quaintly along an irrelevant siding. They just pack extruded pop product into retro hipster railway cars, and set it up to drug the sensibilities of people gullible enough to spend a year’s wages on tickets to a lowbrow musical they’ve seen a dozen times—a musical with no real connection with the Orient Express except its appeal to the same infantile brand-name fake history.”
Eldon began a half-hearted apology, or maybe it was corporate sloganeering, but Kristie rolled right over him, raising her voice and glaring at Lee. “Apparently the Guardian research budget doesn’t even extend to a library card. Read a book for a change, not just a book review. Gaston Leroux was a Paris reporter on the Balkan beat. He covered Turkey and wrote firsthand reports of Armenian massacres. He rode this train both directions for years, writing his copy on the train desks. Maybe he wrote stories in this very car. Then, in 1907, he suddenly gave up journalism and wrote his first bestseller, The Mystery of the Yellow Room. He kept riding this train, though, maybe from superstition, or maybe because he—” Kristie took a ragged breath “—he, too, thought it was something special, an escape to inspiration.”
Lee put his drink down on the bar with a too-audible clack, and paused momentarily. “You can’t escape on a train. Much like a Phantom of the Opera enthusiast, it can only go one place. I, by contrast, am going elsewhere.” With that, he stalked off, heading for the knot of admirers around Carla Hotchkiss.
Eldon handed Kristie a full wineglass. “You deserve that, after that speech. Look, I’m sorry about Lee. You Phantom fans are all right, I guess.”
Still fuming, Kristie drank without tasting. “You should put that on the brochure.”
Eldon held up a hand. “No, seriously, it’s refreshing. You all dress nice, and you’re way better than the Agatha Christie people. Every one of them is eighty if they’re a day, and they all have special food requirements, and they tip like it’s 1930 and so the staff hates them, and that’s even before they start pretending to be murdered. They all think they’re hilarious. God, I hate that tour. It’s like a rolling Alzheimer’s ward. We do get to use the Thirties cars, though, instead of these. Makes for a change.”
He had another refill, and his voice raised a bit. “Now, the Graham Greene fans on the Stamboul Train tour are pretentious dicks like Lee, but they know how to tip. They know how to drink, too. They also cheat on their wives and get depressed, just like Graham Greene narrators. They probably blame the train. The Ian Fleming wannabes on our From Russia With Love tour don’t have wives, of course—or they don’t bring them—and we don’t stock sexy SMERSH honey traps, more’s the pity. They want it to be 1960, or at least they don’t want to believe they’re seventy. They all dress like early Sean Connery and look like really late Roger Moore. They do insist on the high-end drinks, though, so we can charge a premium and I don’t have to drink this swill.”
He scowled at his glass and held it up to the light, gold shining in its ruby depths. “This swill is the Phantom special. We forklift on six-dozen cases of cheap Shiraz, because none of you can tell the difference. We can just say it’s French and everyone is happy as long as they don’t take off its mask. Nostalgia wholesale at four euro the bottle.”
Kristie snapped her head back as though he’d slapped her. “Sneer all you want, but if it hadn’t been for the Phantom, for him, your precious Dracula tour would have been empty.”
“Bullshit! Stoker wrote Dracula fourteen years before—”
“Yes, but it was only after Universal made a million Depression dollars by re-releasing the Lon Chaney Phantom with sound that they realized horror could still sell tickets. That was 1930, and that was the year that Universal greenlit Dracula. Stoker’s only good book didn’t sell for beans. Leroux wrote a dozen bestsellers.”
Eldon just stared at her. She felt cold, and alone again. “It’s all because of the Phantom. All because of him.”
Kristie suddenly found herself choking back tears. She dropped her wineglass and heard it shatter behind her as she fled the saloon car. She played the Japanese original cast recording in her cabin all night, eagerly falling into the music behind the alien words while the train wheels beat out the percussion.
In Venice, a stagehands’ strike meant they couldn’t even tour La Fenice, and the planned performance at the opera house of songs from the 1976 musical had to be canceled. Instead they watched the 1943 Universal Phantom of the Opera on a flatscreen in the Sofitel’s biggest function room. The sound and lighting seemed fine, the projector behaved. Kristie could easily accept Claude Rains—no Gerard Butler, he!—as a pale nonentity. She chalked that up to the script, not the DVD. Kristie had seen the film plenty of times, so she tuned out the weirdly altered plot—What kind of publishing house keeps acid on the desks? The Phantom is Christine’s father? Why Circassian dances instead of Faust?—and focused on the occasional production slips. She smiled when she realized that Nelson Eddy’s hair dye turned bright blond in one scene, and once more saw the famous “extra shadow” in the basement.
According to film legend, that was the shadow of Lon Chaney, Jr. The alcoholic Chaney was angry he didn’t get the chance to play the Phantom, his father’s great part, so he would show up on set unannounced. Both that legend and the screenplay of the Universal version seemed to emphasize weak heirs and destined roles, as though the Phantom were part of some hidden royal lineage, a king as well as a masked stranger. Kristie pondered the strange family echo of what she thought she had seen in Budapest, with the rival singers as sisters and the intrusive Child. She thought that would make a good blog entry, if the Wi-Fi ever came back on.
She saw Eldon on his cell phone—his worked!—but after he hung up he didn’t say anything to her except “Sorry it wasn’t the Hammer version. Couldn’t find a copy in Venice. Out of print in region two or something.” Kristie didn’t reply. He probably didn’t have time to talk. He was scrambling for something else for that evening’s stop in Milan. If the stagehands struck La Fenice, they were striking La Scala, too, and there went their one-night production of Phantasia.
Instead, it was back to the cinematic well. But this time, Eldon really came through. The busses still seemingly took forever to travel from the train to an auditorium outside the city center. A college building, surrounded by some kind of half-frozen canal, she thought. There was a genteel English scholar there to greet them, somehow connected to the silent film festival at Pordenone. In his soft voice he explained that Mussolini’s government had suppressed this cut of the 1925 Phantom of the Opera shortly after its premiere in Naples. The “Yellow Cut,” he said, had only recently been rediscovered and the festival or someone had restored the film stock and score. The government crackdown had been so complete that nobody knew who had originally recolored it and assembled its soundtrack. Indeed, nobody quite knew exactly when the Yellow Cut had been made, or even when it had opened, but it was probably after Universal struck the 1930 “international sound version,” because it had a synchronized music track. Instead of the usual Gounod score, this print played to a selection of works by the Neapolitan baroque composer Benvenuto Chieti Bordighera and the Russian modernist Alexander Scriabin—both of whom, the Englishman noted, died very young, and insane.
Scriabin had a powerful “mystical chord” experience in 1907 that convinced him that all musical keys had innate colors. 1907, Kristie mused, the same year that Leroux suddenly abandoned journalism. The pieces in this film, apparently—she found it hard to make out the almost-whispered details—were in D, which was yellow.
This cut of the film definitely kept the eerie atmosphere of the other versions she’d seen. The title cards were in Italian, of course, but Kristie knew the story well enough to follow along. Bordighera’s strings picked and whined, introducing the strange figure with the lamp, who stands on what might be battlements or cellar arches, and invites the viewer inside. The strange letters come insisting on performing a specific “dramma,” Christine sings to an invisible voice, the fall of the chandelier removes her rival. Then, with the sudden advent of color footage in the Bal du Masque scene, Scriabin’s music breathed into the film.
The yellow tint showed up not on the Phantom, as Kristie had half-expected, but on people who would soon meet him: the stagehand who gets hanged, on the Comte de Chagny—called the Comte de Castaigne in this version—when he leaves the box, and, of course, on Christine. The violins and pianos moaned and dueled beneath the Phantom’s arrival at the ball, and shrieked at the inexplicable sight of the skies above the Opera House shown in photographic negative, with black stars in white space. They groaned at his unmasking and throughout the dreamlike voyages into the hidden chambers beneath the Paris Opera House. The film’s unknown editor must have liked the negative effect because he repeated it nonsensically in the Phantom’s grotto, on the ceiling above the Black Lake.
The story concluded abruptly, not with the usual desperate chase to the Seine but with the Phantom enthroned on his organ bench, Raoul “Castaigne” and Christine before him on their knees, pleading for Raoul’s life. A final minute or two of footage, which Kristie recognized from the 1925 original ending, showed Christine giving the Phantom a ring. But the scene had been recut in this version from its original intent—a regretful departure—to become something like a proposal of marriage. The film rattled out and the screen went dark in the silent room.
For once, Kristie realized distantly, not even Carla said anything.
She remembered nothing of the bus ride back to Milan Central Station, heard only Scriabin and Bordighera. She got off the bus in a daze and pushed her way past fans whispering and milling around the platform. The train’s steam vaporized freezing rain, and Kristie saw the station bathed in a gray projector light streaked with pale fire, as though the film still rattled around her. As the minutes crept by, building another unfathomable delay, her fellow tour members began to murmur and buzz, and Scriabin faded. Any minute now, Carla would bray something, and the moment would be lost.
The train pulled forward, then backed on its haunches. They weren’t letting anyone board for some reason. Kristie spotted Eldon, talking to Lee at the far end of the platform. Just before she set about shouldering her way toward them, the train gave a lurch and the wind blew a blinding wave of sleet onto the crowd. There was a scream at Kristie’s left ear, and a spasm of motion, and a grinding noise like shearing crystal, and a whistle, and a splash of blood that fanned out on the locomotive. At first Carla was nowhere to be seen, but Kristie soon saw where she’d gone.
The crowd shrank back from the scene instinctively, the fear of death overwhelming even their tourist urges. They pulled Kristie back with them in their undertow, the last notes of Bordighera lost as the shrieks died down and became babble. She somehow heard Lee’s nasal tenor clearly: “Now there’s an idea, Eldon. An Anna Karenina-themed train tour.”
Kristie still hated Carla. If she’d been the center of attention before, she dominated every conversation tonight, a night that was supposed to be the tour’s Bal du Masque, when personalities melt away. This was supposed to be a night to talk about, to invoke, to live in the world of the Phantom, here in this perfect Art Nouveau décor, this cloak of the Romantic past. Most everyone was dressed in period costume, a slow mingling dance of bold blue and purple and green gowns from Worth or Doucet or the Web equivalent. The men got off cheaper, mostly in black tuxedos accessorized with the occasional opera cloak and half-mask. The lamps reflecting off the wet train windows turned the bar car into a chamber of mirrors, an endless Impressionist sea of color, filled with yellow Monet light.
Even dead, though, somehow Carla still managed to spoil things. If there was anything worse than Carla going on about how wonderfully, completely devoted and involved and connected she was, it was everybody else doing it, competing to share Carla stories and recall every detail of her conversation from the night before. Kristie wouldn’t have minded the worst kind of one-upmanship, or the most tiresome recounting of an Emmy Rossum sighting in Los Angeles. She wouldn’t even have minded yet another argument about whether Love Never Dies was heresy or homage, if it didn’t have to be about Carla’s opinion of the sequel. Why couldn’t this night be perfect? Why couldn’t everyone just agree to talk about the Phantom? Why couldn’t these people just listen for a change? Kristie felt as though some obscure bargain, made for her benefit, was being violated with no concern for precedent. She had listened to the music, hadn’t she? She had taken her steps in the dance, hadn’t she?
She looked desperately around for anything that was right, true to the night she had spent everything for. A bearded man in a brown-gray suit caught her eye by not catching her eye. He wasn’t darting glances everywhere. He was just writing in a notebook with a fountain pen. He was playing it very cool. He was fortyish, and a little on the heavy side, but not so much for a fan. He’d trimmed his beard, maybe even waxed it a bit. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles and a starched collar. Kristie moved toward him. Even with everyone else distracted by Carla’s accident, she couldn’t believe he hadn’t drawn an audience. Every detail worked.
His sack coat, that of a moderately successful middle-class gentleman, was authentically Parisian cut. She’d seen a hundred like it in the Belle Époque fashion books she pored over during late nights in the costume library at the Clarke. It was also authentically frayed, threads parting over shiny brown cloth. It looked like he’d worn it regularly for weeks, not like he just put it on for a con weekend once every six months. Lying on the table, his satchel was the same way: leather, with just enough mileage on it to be a real piece of luggage, but without the powdery, almost moldy sheen of a century-old antique. The three books inside looked period, too. They were bound in yellow paper, not pre-printed dust jackets.
Kristie moved closer and peeked over his shoulder. He was writing in French, of course. She read a few lines: … barbouillé de notes rouges. Je demandai la permission de le regarder et je lus à la première page: Don Juan triomphant. It was, of course, a page from Le Fantome de l’Oper. She must have made a triumphant noise of her own, because the writing man stopped and looked up. For just a second, Kristie thought she saw stark fear twist his placid features, but he composed himself quickly enough that she decided she was mistaken.
He stood and, in French, offered her a seat at his table. Grateful as she seldom was for those endless school lessons, Kristie thanked him in the same language and introduced herself. He made a slight bow. “Delightful to meet you, Mademoiselle. Permit me to give my name as well; I am called Gaston Leroux.”
Even though she had expected it, the name still thrilled her and she decided she could play along. “Oh, but this is incredible, Monsieur Leroux. I’m a great devotee of your works.”
He lit up with real interest, as his shrug showed he had heard such things before, of course, and dismissed them. What an actor, she thought, even his writer’s mask was perfect.
“Can you tell me what you are working on now? Some new thrill, perhaps?”
Instead of bragging about his new masterpiece, as Kristie expected, he looked down, not so much shy as apprehensive. She followed his gaze to the pages under his left hand, which were spotted liberally with crimson. He had apparently drunk a considerable amount of the
Shiraz, she decided.
He came to a sudden decision, perhaps made bold by the wine. He looked up and met her eyes straight on. “I am working on an exorcism, Mademoiselle. I saw a play, some years ago, staged after hours at the Opera by a coterie of—well, do you recall that business with de Guaita? No? No matter. Providentially, a light exploded and the counterweight of the chandelier fell and the play was left incomplete. For ten years I thought to purge it from my mind, although I must have dreamed it a thousand times. I traveled all over the world, on this train, on ships, to outer Siberia trying to escape. And then Huysmans died, his face rotted away by unnatural cancer. That was three years ago, and I knew I had to exorcise that vision or meet his fate. My first attempts were partially successful, but I must lance the poison soon. I do so here, perhaps hoping the iron of the rails or the constant motion of the carriage will contain it.”
He reached across the desk and into his bag. Again Kristie saw that lightning glimpse of terror in his eyes, as though he had touched some venomous thing in the satchel, but when he looked her in the face he had once more mastered himself. He held two books bound in yellow paper out to her.
She read the titles: Le mystère de la chambre jaune, or The Mystery of the Yellow Room. Le roi mystère, or The Mysterious King.
“My first two attempts. Both worthwhile in their way, but useless to me now. But perhaps you, who are devoted, as you say …”
Kristie tried to demur.
“No, but I insist. You should have them. You especially. I am sure of it.” He bent over the books and scribbled first in one, then the other.
She looked at the books, riffled through the pages. They smelled new, but somehow richer than even new paperbacks. When she looked up again, four or five fans drew her eye as they stumbled toward her, only to camp out on another table and begin talking loudly about Carla. She turned back to say something arch in French to the writer, but he was gone. She craned her neck and scanned the car, but could see no brown suit, no sign of him.
Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey Page 6