Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey

by Dennis Detwiller

  “What have you got there?” It was Eldon, holding out a glass of pale golden wine to her. “This is the Tokay. The good stuff. Like in the novel.”

  Kristie accepted the wine and, she decided, the implied apology. “Merci. They’re books. Gaston gave them to me … I mean, the Leroux cosplayer. He was over there.”

  Eldon looked blank and, after a cursory glance in the direction she pointed, passed the volumes to Lee, who hovered in the background. “I can’t keep track of everyone here, sorry. For all I know or care, we’ve got freeloaders on board. The head count never matches. I just thank God I don’t have to take tickets.”

  Lee was paging carefully through the books. “These are first editions. They’re in really good shape, too. Probably pull a good price on eBay, especially autographed like this.”

  “What? Autographed by a cosplayer? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “That ink is brown. It’s dry. It’s old. And your name’s not … what is that? Camille? Cassilde? He pretended to ‘autograph’ them to mess with you. Playing.” He held the books out toward her, languidly dismissing them already.

  Kristie took, almost snatched, them back, then held them up like a pair of aces. “Why would he play a prank on me with two expensive antique books?”

  Lee didn’t quite sneer, but he didn’t try to keep the condescension out of his voice, either. “He probably just wanted to get in your pants. Or crinolines, or whatever. He’ll ask you for them back at the end of the trip, tell you it was a joke. One super-fan to another.” As Kristie stalked off, she could hear him say in that same tone, “Shame you didn’t think of it first, Eldon. She might have shagged you just to spite Carla.”

  That night Kristie cued up her bootleg recording of the final Toronto show on the iPod, Halloween 1999, the one with Paul Stanley of KISS as the Phantom and Melissa Dye as Christine. But the battery kept cutting out or something as the train syncopated around her. What came through her earbuds as she drifted into sleep sounded more like the saw and whine of the Scriabin she had heard in Milan, over the bass moan of the wooden Wagons-Lits cars hurtling through the wind and dark.

  On the fourth night, Kristie finally experienced the Paris Opera House in person. She had seen pictures, of course, and the sets designed to duplicate it in movies and on other, lesser stages. She had posters of it on her walls and owned whole coffee table books devoted to the building. She had seen it in dreams, she now realized, almost all her life, and especially for the last three nights. The tour ended here, at what was now called the Palais Garnier, after its architect, Charles Garnier. She remembered from her books that he had built a villa in Bordighera in Italy, in the native town of the mad composer whose work she had heard as a soundtrack in Milan. His palais had once held prisoners of the Commune in its dungeons; it now held not the opera but the Paris ballet. Tonight, thanks to some hidden machinations behind the scenes by SFB, it was again an opera house, staging Gounod’s Faust to climax the tour in a spectacle of sound and scenery.

  The Orient Express had carried her here, like an ark floating on the flood that followed the ruin of the Belle Époque in madness and war. It had carried her and only her. None of the rest of them had noticed the signals on the track. Like Lee and Eldon said, they were just ignorant puppets on a fancy stage set. She lost count of how many chandelier jokes she heard, and soon tuned the clacking of the tourists out entirely.

  The trip from the Gare de l’Est to the Opera took no time and all the time, Kristie floating past the glowing balls of street lamps in the fog. She supposed she got on the bus and off again, but she could barely see the ground. The ice left it slick and black, the streets like canals running toward some enormous ebon lake. The sky was mist and clouds and snow, lit dirty white from below, with patches of darkness barely visible.

  The fog parted once, revealing a full moon so close and so large that it seemed to block the Eiffel Tower behind it.

  Against the backdrop of the crowd dressed again in their finest garb, Kristie flowed up the steps into the crush room, then up the grand staircase to her box, number five. She heard an unpleasant sound, tenor complaint, but it faded to insignificance. She looked out at the swells of Paris society, applause crashing below as the overture started, and wished for opera glasses. She so wanted to see the faces of the performers, but they blurred with distance and delight.

  During the third act, as Marguerite sung her ballad to the King of Thule—reading Thale in the misprinted program—Kristie got up from her seat and moved into the corridor. At a specific turning, she remembered a scene from the film in Milan and pressed four gold ornaments that together made up a certain Sign. When the door swung open, she heard the brief moan of Scriabin’s viol. Then she descended the staircase within, all the way to the fifth sub-cellar.

  There, surrounded by the Black Lake, stood the Phantom, his face invisible behind a smooth surface of pallid ivory or porcelain.

  Kristie desired only to cross the Black Lake, and she dropped the two slim books she carried into its inky waters in her haste to do so. She did not know what craft had carried her to her Phantom, but her feet were dry when she approached him, the mystical chords of Scriabin pounding in her brain and filling her eyes with yellow light.

  She reached out her hands and grasped the pallid mask, inhaling the rot and mildew that poured off the Phantom’s tattered robes and offered up the smells of a century or more in Garnier’s deepest, most secret places. She breathed deep and pulled.

  She pulled, and then stumbled back and screamed.

  The figure wore no mask.

  A GREAT AND TERRIBLE HUNGER

  ELAINE CUNNINGHAM

  TOMAS BUSTLED INTO THE KITCHEN car, a smirk on his too-handsome face and a full dinner plate in his hands. He slid the rejected meal onto the service ledge in front of me and announced, “From the viscount.”

  A moment’s silence fell over the bustling kitchen. Even the chef du cuisine ceased his grumbling long enough to eye the flawless presentation. Of course there was no fault to find. The salmon had been impeccably prepared—poached in wine and resting in a small pool of sauce verte au pain beside a mélange of tiny buttered vegetables. Viscount or not, sending back the fish course all but untouched was an insult I could not take lightly.

  “What reason did he give?”

  Tomas performed one of those expressive Gallic shrugs. “He is a viscount. What reason does he need?”

  Emile, my fellow subchef and the bane of my existence, dipped a spoon into the rejected sauce and touched it to his tongue. One eloquent eyebrow rose.

  And so, it must be said, did my hackles. “It is a classic sauce, properly prepared!”

  “Bread soaked in vinegar, blended into an emulsion with olive oil, tarragon, garlic, and a pinch of salt,” Emile recited in a bored tone. “I can even tell which vinegar you used. Doubtless you assumed a vinegar infused with dried tarragon would deepen the flavor of the fresh herb, rather than muddy it.”

  I could refute none of this. “The sauce is correct.”

  “Most certainly, if by ‘correct’ you mean it is a dull and lifeless copy. Where is the moment of discovery, the lingering delight of an elusive melody? Taste this.”

  He thrust a spoon at me. I took it from his hands and sampled the green sauce. For a moment, irritation succumbed to pleasure. Without a doubt, the foundation herb was sorrel. Nothing else could duplicate that particular not-quite-lemon tang. Emile had contrived a sauce with a pleasantly rich mouth feel—a spoonful of crème fraîche, perhaps?—a hint of sweetness beneath the sour, and a fresh, bright note I could not identify. Delicious!

  Infuriating.

  “Lime,” he said, clearly enjoying my reaction. “Sorrel and lime. Inspired, don’t you agree?”

  “It will do.” The chef, a bear-sized Burgundian, spoke without looking up from his work. “Sauce a turbot filet and send it out.”

  “Already done.” Emile slid a newly prepared plate onto the ledge.

  Tomas cleared his
throat.

  The chef huffed and began over-salting the contents of a square metal box. “Well? What is it?”

  “The maharajah requires lamb curry again for tomorrow’s dinner. For him and his wives.”

  Finally the chef glanced up. “All of them?”

  “All.”

  The Burgundian threw both hands high and shook them in wordless supplication. “I ask you, what sane man keeps seven wives? And such women! They look like sylphs but eat like sows.”

  I’d heard much about the Indian rajah’s beautiful wives, but of course I had not seen them. The subchefs had no occasion to enter the dining car during meals. Neither did we venture into the sleeping coaches at any point during the journey. Only the most highly ranked staff—the chef du train, the chef du cuisine, and sometimes the maître d’hôtel—rated a compartment, and only when the train was not fully booked. The rest of us slept in hammocks slung between the racks of the restaurant car, rising before dawn to replace beds of canvas and hempen rope with the finest damask and porcelain and crystal. A necessary transformation, but of course Emile liked to mutter about the unearned privilege of the wealthy. He is a fool in all matters except food. The train’s passengers had purchased the right to expect luxury, and it was our job to provide it, flawlessly.

  “There is insufficient lamb,” I said.

  “Of this I am aware.” The chef reached for the pepper mill and cranked it with grim enthusiasm. One of our English passengers refused to eat anything prepared on the train, insisting upon “authentically Oriental” meals from the Pere Palace Hotel in Constantinople. The chef, naturally, took insult—not only at the slight to his art, but also the indignity of serving reheated food. In a small act of vengeance, he seasoned each boxed meal to the point of inedibility. So far the Englishman had found nothing amiss.

  “What shall we do?” I asked.

  The chef slammed down the pepper mill. “A man cannot think in this kitchen for all the chatter! We will purchase more lamb, of course. Surely there are sheep near Ploesti. As for the other thing,” he said, looking meaningfully from me to Emile, “you two will make an end to this rivalry before we reach Vienna, or one of you will not continue on to Paris.”

  We murmured respectful assent and I applied myself to the frantic pace of dinner preparation. But when a task has been performed many times, the hands remember and the mind is free to roam. There was much to ponder, for the chef’s ultimatum troubled me. Try as I might, I could think of no circumstance under which I might be reconciled with Emile. Neither could I devise a plan that would guarantee his ouster. Perhaps his thoughts followed similar paths, but nothing more was said on the subject until we began to plate the cheese course.

  “I propose a simple contest,” Emile said.

  “Oh, do you?”

  “I assure you, the rules of the game are entirely in your favor. I have made certain observations—one might even go so far as to call them insults—about your ability to cook with originality and inspiration. If I cannot prove my words, I will withdraw them and make public apology.”

  This, I had not expected. The man’s arrogance was boundless—he was French, after all—and our rivalry permitted no such concession. I was skeptical, certainly, but I will admit to a certain curiosity.

  “Go on.”

  “You will create a dish of your choice. I will reproduce it precisely, and then I will improve upon it. If I fail at either task, I will name you the better cook and seek other employment in Vienna. But if I succeed—”

  “It will do,” the chef said. “Dietgar accepts. I will judge his dish and Emile’s response to it.”

  The rest of the kitchen staff applauded. Later they would probably lay bets. I had little doubt how the odds would fall.

  We two had similar training, similar experience. I am Belgian, which would count against me in some men’s eyes, but Emile’s primary advantage lay in his uncanny ability to name the ingredients in any dish he tasted. It is said that the great Mozart once attended the performance of a symphony and after the concert wrote down the music, entirely and precisely, from a single hearing. Emile is no Mozart, but his gift was formidable enough to inspire a moment of dread and doubt as I pondered the wager.

  But only a single moment. I knew myself to be the better man, and the desire to prove my supremacy burned in me like a fever, like thirst, like lust.

  So I smiled at Emile and said, “You will enjoy living in Vienna, I think.”

  We reached Ploesti around eight o’clock the next morning. The station was tiny, but the town itself boasted two impressive buildings: Pilishor, the summer residence of Rumanian boyars, and Castel Peles, a newly built monstrosity well suited to the king and queen who inhabited it.

  Grandiose but strange, the castle resembled something a giant child might build from mismatched blocks. Here it resembled a medieval German town, there a French chalet. One wall boasted classical marble pillars, another flaunted a modern expanse of glass. Many spires rose into the sky, ranging in appearance from English clock towers to an Oriental minaret. On a fair day, this monument to hubris and lack of taste was almost amusing, but a storm was brewing over the Carpathians, and under the strange yellow-gray sky the castle looked distressingly like a monster stitched together from many parts.

  While a few passengers took in the dubious sights, two porters sought out a local butcher shop where, according to the stationmaster, excellent lamb could be had. Since it was my task to pack the meat in ice, I paced the platform as I awaited their return. The porters made short work of the errand and came back at a run, arms laden with packages and eyes casting uneasy glances at the lowering clouds.

  As we left Ploesti we passed several tall wooden derricks—rigs of the wells sunk deep into the earth to obtain the oil that the Americans call petroleum. I hate the sight of them, and not only because I can never pass one without envisioning gallows awaiting a hangman. Some nights, when the chorus of snoring handymen and baggage handlers keeps sleep at bay, I think of those wells and wonder what other things, either treasures or terrors, they might unearth. Mind you, I am not a fanciful man, but there is something about Rumania that inspires dark imaginings.

  The next stretch of the journey was usually the least pleasant, with the possible exception of the Black Sea crossing. Nearly two hundred miles of track threaded through a narrow defile between the Miroch range of the Balkan Mountains and the Carpathians. The track ran very close to the Danube here, built on piles of rock—remnants of cliffs and outcrops reduced to rubble by blasting. Small avalanches were not uncommon. Progress was, of necessity, slow and halting.

  So it came as no surprise when the train screeched to stop during the breakfast preparation. Chef sent Giles, the youngest of the waiters, to fetch details. The lad scurried back in moments, shrugging off his tailcoat as he came.

  “A landslide ahead,” he said. “Can’t tell you how much of the track is blocked—can’t hardly see my own boots in this fog. The chef du train wants every man you can spare to help clear the way.”

  “I see you have already volunteered,” the chef said dryly. He tipped his head toward the cleaners. “Take Yves and Victoir. Oh, and Dietger, you may go as well.”

  My wellspring of outrage threatened to overflow, but I schooled my face to professional calm. “Since there is no other man here by that name, am I to assume you are speaking to me?”

  A sour expression crossed the chef’s face. “Mind your tone, Dietgar. And you, Emile, stop smirking. Dietger is bigger and stronger, that is all. To work, all of you!”

  There was nothing for it but to leave the train and do as I was told. I took the leather gloves one of the baggage handlers gave me and stood for a moment to watch the men hauling away stones. I was somewhat mollified to note that nearly all the staff shared my assignment, but my pride was pricked by that fact that I was consigned to unskilled labor and Emile was not.

  The main pile of rubble stood a few scant feet from the engine, but more rocks littered the
track ahead. How far the damage went, I could not tell, for the rails curved before disappearing into the deepening mist. I picked my way westward, thinking to begin at the farthest end of the landslide so that I might work alone, at least for a short while.

  But I was not the first to choose solitude. The mist swirled to reveal small, dark-clad figure. As I drew nearer, I realized to my surprise that the worker was a woman wearing the habit of an Eastern Orthodox nun.

  She bent to pick up a large stone. Being a man of proper sensibilities, I rushed to take her burden from her. As her eyes met mine, I observed that she was young, certainly no more than thirty, yet she wore the garments that proclaimed her a stavrophore—a nun who has reached an exceptional level of piety and discipline.

  She tossed the stone aside and gave me a smile of unexpected charm. “Oh, was that the rock you wanted? I do apologize.”

  “No, Holy Mother, I—”

  “There are many more,” she said as she reached for another. “Perhaps, in time, you will find another to your liking.”

  “I was going to say that this is not work for you. You are—”

  “A nun, yes,” she said with a hint of impatience. She hurled the second rock. “And as such, I am no stranger to hard work.”

  “I was going to say,” I repeated in a tone firm enough to forestall further interruption, “that you are a passenger.”

  “Ah.” For a moment, the merry light in her eyes threatened to push back the fog. “Now there is a holy state indeed!”

  I could not decide whether or not she was mocking me, so I responded only with dignified silence.