The train was eerily silent. No passengers gathered in the parlor car, none walked the narrow halls. From time to time I heard the faint sound of weeping coming from a sleeping compartment, so soft and despairing and full of impossible longing. I cannot tell you what words accompanied this scattered chorus, but I recognized the music of frustrated desire.
The heartbreaking sound only strengthened my resolve. This was not a song I intended to sing.
The Indian woman began to shed her clothes before I could open her compartment door. I pushed her inside, ignoring the feel of fine silk and warm brown flesh beneath my hands. In moments she was entirely naked, a sight that surely would have riveted me had there not been one far more compelling beyond her compartment window.
The train had stopped. How had I not realized this?
We had cleared the gorge and entered the foothills. An expanse of meadow flowers carpeted the hill that rose toward the skyset clouds. And on this hill perhaps a dozen passengers gamboled like sheep or strode purposefully in various directions. Three young women—by their simple gray gowns, I judged them to be ladies’ maids or governesses—were viciously stoning a stout matron. The maharajah, as naked as his faithless wife, chased an equally unclad English beauty who did not look averse to being caught.
I shook my head in astonishment. This was madness. Why would the chef du train order an unscheduled stop?
The astonishment on the Indian beauty’s face as I backed out of her compartment would have been amusing, had I time to dwell upon such things. I shut the door a heartbeat before the she hurled herself against it, shrieking like a scalded cat.
The noise did not rouse the nun, nor did she respond to my knock. The sleeping car attendant was soundly asleep, three empty bottles of an excellent pinot noir at his feet. I liberated the key ring from his belt, but this was not necessary. The nun had left her door unlocked.
For a long moment I stood in the doorway and gazed at the red scene beyond. The stavrophore, this most pious of nuns, lay on her narrow cot, an expression of beatific joy on her bloodless face. A long knife impaled both her bared feet. A smaller knife had been driven hilt-deep into one of her outstretched palms.
She was dead, of course. She might have survived the self-inflicted stigmata, but not the knife that opened her side.
I closed my eyes and breathed a long, heartfelt sight of relief.
It was Lent, and a woman so pious would never taste meat. The madness infecting the train was none of my doing. I’d feared it might be, after seeing the insanity of those who’d tasted the creature’s flesh: the chef, the Indian woman, probably Tomas.
Upon consideration, this made good sense. After all, I, too, had eaten the creature’s flesh, and I was in full possession of my senses. I hoped the same could be said of Emile—at least, until our contest played out to completion.
He was in the kitchen car, of course, sharpening his knives with grim efficiency. As the Holy Mother had observed, what is sacred to one man might not be revered by another, but Emile and I worshipped the same gods.
“I know your secret,” he said as I entered the car. He slammed a bone cleaver into the cutting board hard enough to send wooden chips flying. “I know what manner of meat you used this morning.”
This was impossible, of course. He couldn’t know what sort of creature had yielded the collops.
“Who was it?” he demanded. “Victoir? Giles? Perhaps one of the passengers?”
I stared at him, not believing I heard him aright.
“Did you not understand the question? Very well, then, I will put it to you more clearly: Whom did you kill this morning?”
Now I knew that Emile had lost his wits. I had been trapped for days. The creature had been dead for days before I butchered it.
Hadn’t it?
“I suppose it’s of no consequence,” the madman muttered. “One beef tastes much like another, does it not? It’s all in the sauce.”
He wrenched his cleaver from the cutting board and pushed open the door to the pantry.
Tomas lay as I had left him. Whether or not he still breathed, I could not say. Really, how could I be sure of anything?
No, that was not entirely true. I knew beyond doubt that I had won and Emile had lost. I knew that which I desired above all things would be mine.
No one would believe Emile’s story. He would be disgraced, discredited, cast out. The man might be many things, but when it came to food, his integrity was absolute. He would be forced to admit that he could neither identify nor duplicate the taste of shaggy ink cap mushrooms. Whatever tales were told of this trip, I would be recalled as the better chef.
As the cleaver flashed down, I drew in a long breath, savoring the remembered fragrance of that elusive, delicious sauce.
INSCRUTABLE
ROBIN D. LAWS
ADOPTING A MODE OF ADDRESS he fell into with comfortable regularity, Sir Russell spoke of Phut as if he were not present. “Time and again, he’s proven himself damnably useful. However off-putting his aspect. Hah, Phut?”
Phut held the stolid expression that tamed a face men otherwise found unnerving. For the benefit of Sir Russell’s traveling companion, he essayed a minimal nod. Between master and manservant an economy of communication prevailed. The need for overt response from Phut to any of Sir Russell’s statements or requests had long since been set aside. What Phut was required to do, he did, and that was all.
As was his habit, Sir Russell had chosen the dining car’s earliest midday sitting. He tucked into his veal stroganoff. Across from him sat Stephens, who had ordered the roast chicken. Before Phut sat a plate of lentils, overlaid with buttery asparagus spears. Though indifferent to food, Phut assumed from the bright green coloration of the stalks that they had been expertly prepared. Sir Russell and Stephens made subdued sounds of pleasure as they ate. They raised their glasses of claret.
“To halcyon days,” said Stephens.
“Indeed,” nodded Sir Russell.
Sir Russell, Phut gathered, knew this man from a place called Eton. He understood this to be an indoctrination center, where boys were molded into masters of empire. In this it resembled the youth barracks of Sparta, or the madrasas of Syria’s hashishin. Caste mutuality permitted Sir Russell to allude indiscreetly to his true business in Turkey. Stephens’s position, whatever that was, in turn allowed him to infer that Sir Russell’s trip had nothing to do with lepidoptery, but was instead undertaken at the behest of Whitehall. They spoke of the matter in an oblique way, mentioning stickiness, a thorn in Earl Curzon’s side, and a necessity for discreet removal. Phut had yet to suss out the full details. He would do so, as he always did, before it mattered. Which in this case it might not, given what awaited in Istanbul.
Sir Russell returned to his subject: his own cleverness in retaining Phut as a factotum. “Never has a good deed so repaid itself than on the day I saved him from that mob in Selangor.”
Stephens turned his head sidelong, so he would not appear to be staring at Phut in all of his spectacular, mesmerizing ugliness. Phut was barely four feet tall, his skin weather-hardened and dark-complected, his fingers stubby and tipped by immaculate, lacquered nails. His unblinking eyes burned like brown fire. A sparse mustache sprawled obscenely atop his thick upper lip. Jagged yellow teeth poked out from a pronounced overbite.
Stephens noted Phut’s charcoal-colored wool suit, correctly suspecting it as the handiwork of the Savile Row man both he and Sir Russell used. Superbly fitted to his irregular frame, it minimized, but could not conceal, an assortment of humps and bulges.
(What Stephens could not guess was that these adjustments to his malformations also hid the modifications Phut had made to the lining of his jacket, to hold pouches of powders, along with less subtle weapons of his trade.)
Sir Russell twisted noodles around his silver fork and speared a piece of veal. “What taboo he’d committed to so rile his countrymen he’ll still not speak of.”
Phut was not, in fact, from
Selangor, or for that matter from any part of Malaya. Like other of Sir Russell’s misapprehensions about him, it suited Phut’s purposes and took no effort on his part to sustain. Phut belonged to a people scattered widely across the globe, united by ancient blood and an older language, spared the degenerate taint of mere humanity. Neither was Phut his real name—though it would do for the time being. As presently configured, his own vocal apparatus could muster only an approximation of the necessary sounds.
“For the price of a few well-placed revolver rounds, I earned his constant fealty,” Sir Russell told Stephens. “I saved his life once, he saved mine—how many times now, Phut?”
Phut neither spoke nor gestured.
Sir Russell counted on the fingers of his right hand. “The boar in Andaman. The knife-man in Bombay. The hotel fire in Honduras. That skirmish with the tongs in Tsimshatshui—that counts as two separate incidents. And if you number Sarajevo as a legitimate ambush, the total comes to six. Not a bad arrangement, hah, Stephens? Perhaps you should look into getting a native valet.”
“The cost of acquisition seems parlous,” Stephens said. Though roughly Sir Russell’s age, his slimmer build and milky-smooth fingers marked him as a man of inaction. “And truth be told, I lack your propensity for needing my life saved.”
“That is just the icing on the cake of such a fellow’s utility.” A serveur appeared to refill Sir Russell’s glass. “That visage of his, that implacable mask of a face. One can neither help but stare at it, nor allow oneself to be seen to stare. A magnificent distraction he is. To put a negotiating partner off his stride, all I have to do is introduce him to Phut beforehand. Throughout our discussion, Phut’s countenance plays at the mind, haunting, vexing. It took me months to get used to it, myself, hah, Phut?’
Phut made no response.
“In his ugliness there is great profundity. A majesty, if you will. A living paradox sits before you. You’ll not soon forget him, now that you’ve seen him, will you?”
Stephens muttered an embarrassed demurral into his wine goblet.
“Don’t worry about Phut’s tender sensibilities. I assure you he has none. Isn’t that right, Phut?”
Phut nodded.
“That is the second, and deeper, of Phut’s ineffable qualities. Even more so than the conventional Asiatic, his inner musings remain impenetrable. Drawn from a deep well of understanding, I dare say, one that, perhaps, eclipses our flat-footed questing for practical advantage. Though he is an unquestioned master of the train schedule, of the hotel reservation, of launderers and suppliers, within his stolid chest resonates the heart of an instinctive man. A mystic in an age of accountants. There is something boundless in him, wouldn’t you say?”
“I daren’t venture to gainsay you, Beaky. On this or any other matter.”
Sir Russell swirled his Bordeaux and inhaled its aroma. “Or mayhaps he thinks not at all, and forces us to project our own doubts onto those impassive features—that great crag of a brow, the appalling graveyard of teeth. But as the yogis would have us believe, in the absence of thought enlightenment lies. So perhaps to be limited is in some sense the same as being limitless, hah?”
Phut leaned forward to cut an asparagus spear into bite-sized chunks. He sipped from his glass of still water. Sir Russell never offered him wine or spirits. The slight mattered not. Since his awakening, Phut had been staunchly abstemious, allowing himself nothing stronger than the occasional solitary lager in the heat of a tropical day. Alcohol affected his people more strongly than it did humans, clouding the intuitive senses. Dulled awareness risked defeat. Manifold forces converged, and mistakes made now could redound for an aeon to come.
Sir Russell lowered his voice. “I’ll confess this to you, Stephens. As odd a duck as Phut here is, as illimitably alien as his consciousness might be, there are a dozen of my dearest friends I’d leave on a sinking ship, rescuing him before them.”
“Present company excepted, I hope.”
“Naturally so, old chum.”
Sir Russell straightened himself against the plush back of the dining car chair. “In my peregrinations, I’ll frankly tell you, I have unlearned more than I have learned. One certainty after another has fallen away from me, when confronted with the deuced mystery of existence. Yet if there’s one nugget of wisdom I can claim to have acquired along the way, it’s this—loyalty is preferable to friendship. Infinitely so.”
“Can a friendship not also be loyal?”
“Not in the same way, Stephens. Like a plant, a friendship requires constant watering. A marriage even more so.”
“How is Cecily, by the way?”
Sir Russell waved the question away. “The same, Stephens, the same. But you deflect my point. With admirable cheek, but deflect it all the same. A friendship is a constant exchange, a quid pro quo, provisional by the moment—”
“That’s a grossly cynical view of human relations, Shepstone. You—”
“Let me complete the thought. Loyalty draws from a deeper well. It is allegiance devoid of tit for tat. It does not weigh itself. It merely is. Hah, Phut?”
Phut raised his water glass to him. By Phut’s standards the gesture was unusually expressive. Sir Russell flushed, a broad grin breaking across his face.
The interior of the dining car darkened as the train rattled through a tunnel. As it cleared the opening, a shaft of sunlight flashed through the window, highlighting a diner seated on the other side of the car. Phut had seen the man before, as he had surveyed all of the dining car’s inhabitants.
But now the flash of solar illumination afforded Phut a second chance to perceive him, this time less with his eyes than with the intuition of a sliced and slivered instant. Insight wriggled between Phut’s vertebrae like a parasite, alerting him to a troubling kinship.
Phut took pains to conceal his reaction. He gazed aimlessly through the dining car. (As he would have been, absent this distraction: they now spoke of proposed reforms to the civil service and how they might be derailed.) In quick snatches, Phut took the measure of the alarming figure.
Unlike Phut, this diner did not, or could not, disguise his interest in his quarry. He gazed at Sir Russell with a frank relentlessness. Phut could not place his ancestry. He could pass for a national of any of the Mediterranean or Near Eastern lands. Yet something about his physiognomy contradicted that. Beady eyes glared out from beneath a thick ridge of bone. His jaws thrust forward, and there was something indefinably odd about the angle of his ears. Still, in contrast to Phut’s, this man’s ugliness was unremarkable. He looked somewhat brutish, but would not seem out of place in a souk or on a pier.
Here, in a luxury dining car, he seemed to regard himself as out of place. Bullets of sweat ran down his neck and soaked into his starched collar. He tapped uneasy fingers on the white tablecloth. His loin chop and potatoes sat all but uneaten on the plate in front of him. With hairy fingers he reached for his glass of white wine and downed it in a single gulp. The serveur materialized over his shoulder to refill it, startling him. He clutched reflexively for a bulging object concealed under his jacket, over his chest, then, as quickly, withdrew his hand.
Though Phut did not glimpse it directly, the man quite evidently carried a pistol.
Tickets on this train were expensive. This was not his world. He would have been sent. An agent of others.
His interest in Sir Russell might mark him only as a cat’s-paw in the workaday schemes between nations. Sir Russell was meant to sweep a pawn from the board, to remove a small thorn from the foreign minister’s side. This man could be working for him. That would be the parsimonious explanation.
Yet, Sir Russell’s prophesied role meant that other possibilities had to be considered. Phut’s people were not the only ones who meant to shape the nature of the next cycle. Phut had rescued Sir Russell many more than five times, from forces whose very existence eluded him. A man with a gun staring at him en route to Istanbul, on the brink of the alignment, might easily be a piece in the g
reater game.
Who he represented might or might not decide Phut’s counter-move. The train’s confines limited options for attacker and defender alike. Still, as Phut waited, and studied, there was nothing to be lost by enumerating the possibilities. Phut had surprises sewn into the lining of his coat. If this man was of the cosmic battle, he might also wield unexpected weapons. It would be better to be ready than not.
Phut ruled him out as one of the sea people, those who yearned for a flooded aeon, with cities thrown up from the ocean floor and the seven continents sunk beneath the waves. A part of the gunman, he sensed, bore the blessing of inhuman blood, but those features were neither fishy nor frog-like.
Neither did his motions match those in the ninth planet’s thrall. His muscles flowed properly, with no particular lag between thought and action. Phut had never heard of a possession by the clawed ones that would pass prolonged inspection in a well-lit location.
The gunman’s evident volition also argued against other forms of possession, whether by sorcerers or by long-dead races welling up through the joins of time.
An answer nagged at him, as from behind a gauzy curtain. If he stopped trying to force the revelation, maybe it would come to him. He strove for calm, reminding himself that in time all would be revealed, and he would know what to do. The prophecy demanded it.
“Phut!” Sir Russell exclaimed.
Grimacing, he snapped his attention back to his master.
Sir Russell chuckled. “It’s not like you to be lost in thought.”
Phut positioned himself to keep the gunman at the periphery of his vision.
“All that talk of consciousness, was it? Had you daydreaming, did it? Some day I would like a complete accounting of your philosophy. A bracingly taciturn series of dicta, I wager.”
Mimicking patience, Phut folded his hands and placed them in his lap. Whatever his point was, Sir Russell would return to it eventually.
“The festival of the dead we attended in Sarawak,” Sir Russell said. “Was that a Dayak ceremony or Iban?”
Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey Page 9