Was it only that, though? Mankind was acquiring new knowledge, new technologies, faster than we knew what to do with them. Europe was poised on the brink of war, despite our ‘War to End All Wars,’ in part because our many advancements had made killing too easy. The world was shrinking, shoving civilized man and savage together, each alien to the other, and in almost every instance the result was hatred and violence!
Progress was orderly, progress followed patterns. Yet in the end, what did it bring into the world? Chaos. Entropy.
I shook my head, even forced a laugh. Clearly Harold had gotten to me. Yes, I could see how it all made a twisted sense, but still it was only the raving theory of a diseased mind.
“You’re suggesting,” I said eventually, hoping I’d misunderstood it all, “that it was the clash of order and chaos intrinsic to progress itself that called to this entity?”
“Who can say? Perhaps we called to it. Or perhaps we created it!” He was beginning to lose his composure. His voice shook, his jaw trembled. “In either case, it is here now! The railroads are its veins, the telegraph and telephone wires its synapses! We gave life to the pattern, and we gave it thought, and now it sees us! It sees us!”
Brakes squealed a banshee’s cry, and the entire car shuddered. We had reached Munich.
“We’ve no more time!” Harold shouted. “If we hold Rintzler beyond his stop, if the German police believe something’s happened to him, it’ll only bring further troubles down on us later. I wish I could have spared you this, that my warnings had gotten through. But they did not, and you have traveled long enough in searching for me that you, too, may now well be part of it.
“Listen! Svetomir will take care of you until you’ve adjusted. He and I have become close. Do not stop moving. Do not leave the train unless you must, and then only briefly. Once a man has become part of the pattern, it takes note of him far more readily when he breaks it. Not immediately, not always; sometimes we have moments, sometimes days, but never, I think, any longer than that.”
The whites of his eyes burning with their own light, he rose. “Be well, Timothy.”
I felt more than dizzy, as though my body were running a fever to ward off my brother’s madness. “What … what are you—?”
“It’s my fault you’re here. I can, at least, spare you an even worse fate.”
He pulled the door shut behind him, and I heard something click. He’d locked me in!
This being my room, I obviously had my own key, but it took me a moment of fumbling to find it. By then the hallways were bustling with passengers departing or boarding. Of my brother—or, for that matter, Detective Ritzler—I found no sign. The porter, however, whom I now presumed to be Svetomir, found me in the crowd.
“Where are they?” I demanded before he could utter a word.
“Did Harold not explain?” he asked sadly. “He agreed to place himself in the detective’s custody, if you would be left alone. Ritzler may certainly renege in the future, but for now, as Harold is the man the railroads consider the true threat—”
I shouted something at him, though I’ve no recollection of what, and was already shoving my way through the throng. Down the steps, knocking over baggage and elbowing disembarking passengers, utterly oblivious to the shouts and remonstrations I must surely have evoked. Steps to platform, platform to lobby. Where space opened up for even a few paces, I ran; where it did not, I continued bulling through by sheer force.
I wonder now what sort of sigil my haphazard course might have etched across the crowd.
In such chaos, in such a throng—and in a structure with so many exits—I should never have found them. Through chance or fate, however, I spotted them atop a set of squat, broad stairs. They were passing through the station doors at the very instant my brother was noticed.
I’ve no idea what Detective Rintzler saw. I know only that, when I departed, he was collapsed in the doorway. Before the concerned citizens gathered about him, I saw the glazed and empty stare of what, at best, must have been catatonic shock.
Nobody else, of all the myriad men and women whose business took them to or from the station that night, appeared to have seen anything out of the ordinary. They reacted not one whit, save to the fainting policeman; their oblivious, uncaring faces were a hideous counterpoint to the scene through which they passed.
Perhaps it was too drastically removed from their own patterns for them to recognize.
I can only describe what I, myself, saw. Or what, at any rate, I think I saw.
From the grumbling and growling traffic in the street beyond, a motorcar pulled up to the curb nearest Harold and his unwelcome companion. It was no make with which I was familiar, in a metallic hue some vague point between silver and steel. By the reactions of everyone around, it was just another vehicle, a driver arriving to collect a fare.
I, however, saw something else entirely. Much is lost to me. Although I’m certain I saw it quite clearly, I couldn’t begin to say what drove the vehicle—only that it was by no means a man! I’m not entirely certain whatever it was didn’t sprout from the car itself.
I have but a moment of clear memory, and I can only hope it was more hallucination than truth.
The rear door swung wide, stretching a thin membrane that appeared to connect it to the car. Within, a gaping maw of darkness, a void that seemed to fall away forever. Only sporadically, when the lights flickered just so, could I make out any more, and nothingness would have been preferable. A slick palpitation, easily missed, suggested some great orifice, flexing, swallowing. Protruding through that split, black flesh, if flesh it was, were an array of … tarnished iron teeth? Gears? I couldn’t tell, knew only that they appeared to rotate, tearing with each revolution, dripping fluids organic and chemical, grinding against unseen obstructions.
And Harold. His posture stiff as any corpse’s, his hands held before him—palms upward, as some reluctant supplicant—Harold strode right up and fed himself to it, allowing those rotating jags and half-seen limbs to haul him inside. The door slammed behind him and the car was gone, just another part of the nighttime traffic.
I said nothing to Svetomir as I slouched back aboard the Orient Express, nor he to me. He merely guided me, an arm around my shoulders, to the private room I had taken. There, sitting folded upon the tiny table, was a porter’s uniform.
I knew precisely what it meant: Do not leave the train.
Slowly, I removed my coat. I gazed at it a long moment, turned to hang it up—and then dropped it to lie crumpled on the floor. I threw open my trunk, reached inside, and many of my possessions followed the coat. Toiletries. Clothing. Letters.
I wanted no neatness around me, no order. Not anymore.
Only then did I reach for the waiting uniform.
“One of Harold’s,” Svetomir said then. “It should serve well enough until we can acquire some more properly fitted to you. It is an unrewarding position, but it gives you reason to be here, and that is paramount. We will ensure that all the necessary paperwork and forms are on file. Nobody of import should notice anything amiss about you.”
I nodded dully. It sounded to me an unpleasant life, eternal service and drudgery—even if I could restrict myself to more luxurious lines such as the Orient Express—but after what had been done to Harold….
Yes. Done to him. You see, as that one terrible memory grows slowly clearer, I have come to realize that I misspoke when I said he “allowed” himself to be taken. In that last moment before he vanished into that monstrous thing that was no car, through blurring eyes and broken nerves, I would have sworn I saw cables, wires, ripping through his skin like veins given life, reaching upward into the impenetrable dark, where some malevolence steered him, limb by limb, a living marionette, to whatever nightmarish, unfathomable hell awaits us all outside the pattern.
BLACK CAT OF THE ORIENT
LUCIEN SOULBAN
THE AGENT’S SMILE NEVER WAVERED, not when Jack Andrews pushed the leather folder back across t
he table with a “no thanks,” and not when the black-haired man tilted the folder open to flash him the banknotes. The powder-blue print, stamp, and signature marked it as Banque de France tender, and the five hundred-franc stencil made Jack hesitate. A flash, and the notes vanished under the leather cover, too fast for the other tables to see. The agent’s crooked smile widened under those wire-framed spectacles, and he echoed Andrew’s thought.
“Oui, it is a small fortune for a man in your—” he looked at the stained and aging bricks of the basement pub before concluding “—position.”
“I was going to say you got some kind of brass, flashing that much money in here.” Nobody else seemed to notice, though. The other patrons sat with stooped shoulders, trying to auger something in their beers. The strangled light from the gaslamps on the walls kept the meeting to a comfortable anonymity and the man closest to them slept face down on his table, a thin line of spittle pooling on the wood.
“I didn’t catch your name,” Jack said. He reached for his cork pipe in the ashtray, willing his hand to sobriety calm, but the whiskey tremors rattled his fingertips and his tongue rasped in his dry mouth. In the distance, the war drums pounded in his head. Soon they’d reach the gates of his temples.
It’s been too long. A couple of hours at least since my last swig, he reflected.
“Monsieur Henri du Lac.”
“All right, so, Henry,” Jack said, sucking on the pipe and drawing in a calming measure of the earthy smoke. “This isn’t a good idea and let me tell you why. The money’s pretty and all, and I am partial to blue, but, I’m a bit of a—”
“Bad luck charm?” Henri concluded. “A black cat, yes?” He pulled something out from his striped jacket’s pocket and dangled a rabbit’s foot at the end of a silver chain. “I am prepared.”
Jack had to laugh, and yet Henri disquieted him with his gaze scalpel-like under those spectacles. A man like that, Jack suspected, always noticed the details, including the ones you kept buried. “Like I said: brass. So what would a gent like yourself want with the likes of me?”
“To hire you, of course.”
“Nah,” Jack said, pushing away from the table. “I wouldn’t feel right, robbing you like that. You go on and find yourself a better breed of bad luck.”
“I’ve already hired them, Mister Andrews. Black cats like yourself whose brush with the unknown has turned them into magnets for the supernatural. None of them, however, have your penchant for misfortune.”
The man at the table next to them started from his drunken sleep, screaming and thrashing, trying to ward off some nightmare clinging to him. His glass shattered on the floor and he fell backward, scrambling away from his table. Everyone shot up from their chairs, except for Henri. The man on the floor gasped and clutched at his own dirty shirt. He was breathing at a sprint, his eyes too wide and too awake.
Henri remained smiling and pushed the folder forward, this time flipping it open with the cover blocking the pub.
“You see?” the Frenchman said. “I know people who would pay to hear your story. An experience like that—?” He trailed off.
Jack understood. The five hundred-franc banknotes and the promise of what all that money could buy made him wet his cracked lips. No more basement pub swill and piss. Maybe a bottle of strong golden Kentucky bourbon. Or Maryland rye. Just so long as it’d been poured from home. The eggshell envelope also stared at him, stamped with two heraldic lions clutching the company crest of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits et des Grands Express Européens. But it wasn’t the words on the envelope that made him hesitate. It was the words he knew were inside the envelope, on the ticket.
The Orient Express.
The man on the floor was still gasping as others helped him up.
Constantinople.
The man’s eyes remained wide. Jack knew the look of terror well. He’d seen it in the faces of friends, but unlike them, this drunkard could drink the nightmare away and dull his senses until he remembered nothing, felt nothing.
Back to where it all started.
Jack picked up his button-down canvas haversack from the side of his chair, his worldly possessions in one hand. Du Lac continued smiling and Jack wondered if going back there might finally bring it all to an end or if he was lying to himself yet again.
No train could match the Orient Express in opulence and comfort. Hell, Jack thought, it’s nicer than any lodgings I’d ever had on either side of the Atlantic.
The two four-wheel bogies made the ride as smooth as a skater gliding at the Glaciarium. Jack kept expecting the white-jacketed waiters to spill some of the red they poured for the passengers, but their steady hands matched the train’s sure footing and the dining car’s white table cloth remained immaculate.
Jack nodded for another glass of red from the mustachioed waiter heading to the back of the car and continued half-listening to the conversation at his table. Rizzo Bianco made being a black cat sound adventurous, thrilling even, to the couple at their table. Rizzo’s peppered mustache danced on the roof of his thin lips and his eyes sparkled as he spoke with an Italian lilt that Jack was sure women found romantic.
“… as Miss Marjorie, protesting loudly, distracted the museum guard away from me and the display case….”
The couple at their table of four, the Braithwaites, listened in rapt interest. Mrs. Braithwaite’s mustard-gloved hand hovered over her young, pouty mouth as she stifled a shocked titter. These were Henri du Lac’s clients, rich couples and bachelors living vicariously through the adventures of black cats like Jack and Rizzo.
Their fortunes made them bored with the world. Now they’re looking to escape in our stories and damned if we aren’t looking to escape from ours.
The other tables likewise sang with their own music. To Rizzo’s baritone came the bass of the corpulent Nigel Hughes from the two-person table across the carpeted aisle. The large man spoke in Oxford tones both informative and dry on the subject of the Arabian Peninsula and the time he glimpsed the sands unearth the strange lights of Ubar.
Behind Jack another black cat, Miss Constance Ford, held court at a table of three bachelors and another two across the aisle with an enthralling, earthy alto. Jack had to admit, her tone intoxicated him in a way that made him feel young and old at the same time. He’d forgotten he could feel that way, but he couldn’t see her returning the sentiment once those pale blue eyes fell on his weathered face with its fissure-deep wrinkles and nose scarred from booze. Heck, he thought, I can barely keep the dirt off my sleeves and she keeps herself immaculate.
His own table had gone silent and Jack turned to find the Braithwaites and Rizzo staring at him expectantly.
“Pardon?” Jack said.
“My lovely wife was asking what turned you into a black cat,” Mr. Braithwaite asked, his face a ruddy ruby in the white setting of his trimmed whiskers and hair. His starched collar was high and tight.
“Oh,” Jack said, shifting in his seat. “Not much to tell. I was never a lucky man to begin with. Guess the Good Lord decided I could stand to shoulder a bit more misery.”
The smile wilted on Mrs. Braithwaite’s lips when she realized Jack wouldn’t be as forthcoming as Rizzo had been. Jack could see their disappointment, could hear it when Mr. Braithwaite cleared his throat and smiled politely.
“The trip is long and my friend, he is saving the best stories for later, eh?” Rizzo said quickly.
“Of course,” Mrs. Braithwaite said, excusing herself as she and her husband left their seats on their side of the table. Rizzo watched them leave with a polite smile before the look soured.
“Are you stupido, my friend? Or idiota?”
Jack studied the man, wondering if he should just punch him in the jaw, but they were fifty hours shy of Constantinople and that was the closest Jack had been to the seat of the Ottoman throne in years. Already, the pressure tightened the screws to his temple, but he couldn’t afford to turn back now. He was committed, mind and body.
“Why?” Jack said, his voice low. “’Cause I won’t cater to these folks or their bored lives?”
“Bored, rich lives,” Rizzo corrected. “You heard about the train robbery last year? On the Orient, eh?”
“You mean that Greek fellah? So?”
“That filthy Greek bastard derailed the train, punched his own man who shot one of the passengers, and freed the hostages with five gold coins each. That is what these good people want: An adventure. A story like this, eh?”
Jack leaned forward, his elbows on the table in a manner he figured most civilized folks would likely have found shocking. “They don’t got a clue what adventure means. I been listening to you, making it all sound pretty, but I didn’t hear mention of how many people died on your escapades, or worse. Tell me something. You ever see the shadows slither? Or see those bastards with eyes like goddamn fish?”
Rizzo’s Adam apple danced with a hard swallow, the color draining from his flesh. He no longer seemed in his mid-thirties, but much, much older, his eyes retreating into the back of his skull like that would help him un-see the things that haunted him.
“Si,” he admitted, his voice a soft croak.
“Then why are you lying to these folks?”
“Because,” Rizzo said, his voice choked on whatever temple dust still coated his windpipe, “they would never believe us. And I would never stop screaming if I did.” With that, the Italian scuttled from his seat, his olive skin a decidedly paler shade.
Jack caught the looks from the other tables. Nigel barely paid Jack a glance as he went back to describing some Pre-Sumerian ruins in Jabal al-Druze. Constance, however, seemed to be scrutinizing him carefully. Jack wasn’t sure what to do with her gaze or the extra hammering it put on his heart. Flustered, he went back to drinking, the world down to just him and his glass. Drunk, he wasn’t much company, but sober he remembered things far too well and made others share that, too.
Night found them in the foothills, somewhere in the fertile river lands of Baden-Württemberg. The train rolled along at a steady clip, and Nigel kept pace with his deep snores. Jack sat on a white recessed couch clothed in fleur-de-lis stitching, in the junction of the split corridor that ran down either side of the car. Even here, Nigel’s snorts followed. As though understanding his plight, the occasional sleeping car attendant with his pillbox hat who wandered by was sure to offer Jack a sympathetic smile.
Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey Page 12