Fatigue chased Jack to the edge of exhaustion, his mind numb and dizzy. Constantinople lay within reach, and each hour closer to the City on the Seven Hills made the hum in his skull grow louder. He was safe in Paris, safe from the effects of his ordeal, but out here, he was taking so many risks and it was becoming more difficult to keep the situation from unraveling. He needed to keep it locked up inside, but Constantinople had a way of unscrewing his head and letting the genie out.
Farther down the corridor, where the shadows made a wall, a door opened and clicked shut. Jack cocked his head, listening, watching. A delicate scuff of slippers against the patterned carpet whispered to him. The darkness shifted around the emerging silhouette like India ink bleeding into a water droplet, unsettled and effluvial, reaching out for purchase with its tendrils. Jack squeezed his eyes shut before opening them again. The chimera vanished and the figure materialized.
Constance, Jack realized. He straightened up and pulled his legs in. “Ma’am,” he said, but she stopped him from standing with a raised hand.
“Your poison?” she asked, her accent a lilt from the Midwest. She nodded at the flask pressed like a bible between his two gnarled hands. “Or your salve?”
“Both. Irish whiskey,” he said. He tipped the flask at her, but she demurred with a sluggish shake of her head.
“I prefer opium.”
Jack instantly saw it in the dreamy glaze of her wet blue eyes. He supposed he should have raised an eyebrow or acted surprised, but the fatigue weighed too damn much for him to shrug off and muster anything worth a damn. “Does it help?”
“Some nights,” she said. She motioned to the cushion next to him, and Jack pulled the haversack down to between his legs as she took a seat. Her shoulders slumped, her mouth slightly open, her eyes fixed on the wall, or beyond it. Jack thought the latter as he sat again.
“Not tonight, huh?” he said.
“No,” she whispered. “I’m haunted, Mister Andrews. Haunted by that man’s snoring.”
Jack chuckled and her smile deepened as Nigel snorted loudly in his sleep.
“I’m in the cabin next to his,” Jack said. “Never trust a man who sleeps that deeply.”
“He does sleep rather well for a black cat.”
Jack nodded in agreement and took a swig of the whiskey, quick as that, but not quick enough. Constance stared at his chin and touched under her jaw. She moved languidly, her voice tarred. “That’s an unusual scar,” she said. “It looks like a star.”
Jack rubbed it, the skin smooth and dead to the touch. He had wanted to hide it, but no hair would grow there. It looked more conspicuous when he tried.
“A souvenir,” he allowed.
“Constantinople.”
Jack turned and studied the woman. Friends, when he’d still had them, told him he had the sort of gaze that made most folks uncomfortable, but Constance had obviously seen its like before. She could probably even throw one back with the best of them; most true black cats could. Facing the unknown had a way of killing something inside you. Or maybe it was the opium that made her indifferent. “Pish,” she said. “Even if I weren’t acquainted with Major Sumter, you’re not beyond the reach of idle gossip, Mister Andrews.”
“You know the Major? Is he—?”
“Alive? Or sane? I saw him at the Ridges,” she said with a shrug. “At least it’s not Bellevue. Such a terrible, terrible place. All that madness, you know. It comes out. No matter how tightly you cork the bottle. It still leaks.”
“I guess,” Jack said, staring at the floor. “What’d he tell you?”
Constance seemed to consider her answer before nodding to the flask.
“Only if you call me Jack,” he said, offering it.
She nodded with a smile and took a delicate swig, wiping an errant droplet from her chin with her knuckle before handing it back. “Pardon,” she said. “He was so far gone, it took a while to piece his story together. He told me that a shop owner was expanding his basement when a hole opened up into some ruins.”
“A well. That’s right,” Jack said. “The Major was in good with the sultan or a minister, so he got us a look.”
“A look,” she said, her voice pulled to a strange distance and distorted by harrowed memory. “It always starts with a look or some trifling curiosity. I suppose that’s always the rub. Well, after that, the Major’s story becomes a little vague. Something about a Byzantine chamber and twelve urns capped with—what did he call them again—figureheads?”
Each word took a hammer to Jack’s mind, breaking whatever flimsy walls he’d managed to erect to hold back the memories. He could still smell the dust and stagnant water of untreated centuries as he was lowered down the dark well, the rope cutting into his hamstrings; then the chamber beneath, its barrel walls covered in serpentine shapes that were at once body and limb all rolled into one. There were also the holes in the walls that swallowed the light of his lantern. Beyond them, the whispers and sloughing, wet sounds of movement and the stench of swamp sulfur.
“What did the Major say about me?” Jack asked, clearing his throat.
“Some good, some bad. It depended on how lucid he was.”
“Then it’s probably all true,” Jack said, smiling despite his leaden muscles.
“He said you saved them.”
“Did I?” Jack responded, whispering. He stood with a groan, suddenly eager to depart Constance’s company and the conversation. “Then how come nobody’s left but me?”
Standing cost him more than he realized, and he swayed. Enough for her to steady him with a hand on his hip. The heat took to his head. Had it really been that long since someone touched him? “Ma’am,” he said with an awkward tilt of his head.
“It’s Constance, Jack.”
He shouldered the haversack. “I think it’s time I got some sleep.”
“Jack? Why on earth are you going back?”
“Unfinished business,” he said.
“Our lives are unfinished business,” she said. “Some by choice. Some not. Leave yours to choice, sir. Please. The Major told me what happens when any of you approach Constantinople.”
“I got a lot of regrets,” Jack admitted. “Least I can do is lay some to rest.” He staggered back to his room, more drunk on fatigue, but he did look back once, just to see if she were still watching him, just to see if he had her eye. She smiled at him, sadly it seemed, but at that moment, Jack could live with it.
The dreams came, as vivid as ever, and there were times in his compartment that Jack could see them with his eyes open. When the dreams first began, years ago, he thought they existed to haunt him, and then to taunt him. He watched and rewatched, powerless, as the remaining explorers dropped into the well and down into the ancient chamber beneath it. He should have warned them, begged them to pull him back up when he laid eyes on the place. His intestines crawled in his gut like maggots in a bag. Everything about the place felt wrong: the chamber smelt of brine and urine-soaked rock and the sulfur of swamp rot; the serpentine walls seemed to squirm, and many holes stared back at him.
Eventually, over the years, he realized there was nothing personal in the nightmares. The wasp that paralyzes the spider and impregnates it with larvae doesn’t hate the spider no matter how horrible the fate. And what happened to them in Constantinople, down in that chamber wasn’t vengeance or curse or retribution. The terrible dreams continued, but he didn’t see them as torture, but as theater of the witness. Only in hindsight, from this vantage, did Jack realize that the serpent walls of the conical chamber looked more like tentacles, that the almond-shaped holes were eyes belonging to faces he could barely see crushed under the mass of uncoiling limbs, that the so-called well was in fact a forgotten stairwell stripped of its steps.
But he couldn’t see any of that at the time. None of them could. They only saw the twelve bronze canopic jars atop the pedestals that ringed the room. Here was no collection of baboon-, falcon-, and jackal-headed guardians. The figures that to
pped the urns were mockeries of nature, creatures decidedly more alien and monstrous—and far older than the dynasties of the Nile.
Jack had come to realize that what happened in Constantinople was them falling prey to the wasp with all its indifference. That was little comfort, though; indifferent as its attacker may be, the spider is still consumed alive and from the inside out. Its fate remains horrible all the same.
By the time they’d left Vienna and were racing along the rolling green hills of Hungary, the mood on the train had soured. Jack drank alone, slumped over the table with his elbows holding him up, the conversation having moved away from him to other tables. Lively chatter had filled the dining car and smoking room last night, but in Jack’s compartment, Rizzo tossed and turned behind heavy curtains, softly moaning and mewling in quiet terror. Even Nigel’s snoring in the adjoining cabin had stopped, given to near derisive snorts of startling dreams.
This morning, the empty gazes and uncomfortable hush betrayed all. Red cradled Mrs. Braithwaite’s eyes, and Rizzo offered flat, reassuring smiles whenever she glanced at him. When she didn’t, his mouth drooped and his eyes sank back to the nightmares plaguing him. Mr. Braithwaite watched these exchanges between black cat and wife with tightly crossed arms. Meanwhile, Nigel’s dry analysis and dissertations on the various empires of the Fertile Crescent fell on numb ears, not that he seemed to notice. His chatter had become a mania.
Constance, pale-faced and hollow-eyed, chased the food around her plate with her fork and never seemed to catch it. The three bachelors who sat at her table nervously tried to fill the slack with questions and conversations, but their hearts weren’t in it either, and they soon fell silent.
Almost nobody made eye contact with Jack, and their gazes squirmed away when they realized he was looking at them. Jack couldn’t say he blamed them. He was sure all this misery was his curse leaking out of a widening crack in his soul. Being so close to Constantinople made his skin itch. The buzz in his skull electrified the nerves in his scalp and set them to dancing. He couldn’t sleep, felt too impatient to eat. Now everyone felt the same way.
It was all happening again.
Something caught Jack’s attention. From the table behind of him, two couples—the white-haired Beckers and the Kleins, who dressed in all the audacity of morticians in mourning—spoke in quiet tones. Jack caught the softer lilt of Austrian German and an opportune word here and there. Jack took a hard swallow of his remaining wine and turned to face them.
“I’m sorry for intruding, but you good folks are getting off at Budapest?”
The Kleins looked annoyed at the imposition, and the heavy-bosomed Mrs. Becker blushed in embarrassment, but Mr. Becker nodded and smiled thinly, making an effort to look at Jack. “No,” he said over halting English. “But the Kleins say to go.”
Jack didn’t hesitate. “Listen to them. You’re not safe here anymore.”
“We pay good money,” Mr. Becker began. Jack cut him off politely as he could muster.
“What’d you pay for? The promise of stories about the other-wordly?”
This time, it was Mr. Klein who nodded. “Ja. Herr du Lac promised us—” He hesitated. Was it a loss for the word or embarrassment?
“Promised what?” Jack pressed.
“He promised—” again the hesitation, but Mr. Klein pushed through it “—he promised a look at … Leben nach dem Tod?” he said to his wife.
“The afterlife?” Jack said. Then it struck him. “You’re all spiritualists?”
“We are,” the Kleins said in unison, but Becker shook his head. “We just wish for proof,” Mr. Becker offered. He patted his wife’s hand. “We are not so young”
“You’re not gonna find it here. All you’ll find in our yarns is a reason to doubt your faith. Get off at Budapest and don’t look back,” Jack said, standing up. He made to leave, but everyone was looking at him now. They’d overheard him, his voice louder than he intended. Their expressions weren’t so much neutral as they were reptilian and so familiar to him.
“This goes for all of you who got no reason to be here,” Jack added. Constance shook her head; a warning, he saw, but he didn’t stop. “Get the hell off this train, ’cause it’s only gonna get worse.” But everyone stared back in a way that felt like someone had ripped their humanity out by the roots.
Jack stormed past the tables, grabbing the bottle of red wine from the startled waiter on the way out of the dining car.
He hated getting drunk off red wine. It colored his teeth the losing side of an ugly brawl and he never had time to ease into his inebriation. It overtook him. Right now, though, they were rolling out of Budapest, the train lighter by a dozen rumps, and all he wanted was to wake up in Constantinople and …
… and do what?
He didn’t know, but there had to be a reason why he couldn’t stay in Constantinople after what happened. Why he and others were forced to leave. The mob that chased them out of the city and the flashes of violence that harried them across Eastern Europe were not stewed in anger or rational thought. It was as though the body of humanity were trying to violently expel anything unclean, and Jack and the others were certainly unclean.
Jack took another swig of the half-empty bottle of vin d’Avignon and felt his thoughts swim in the stew of his brain. He sat on the bunk of his sleeping compartment, the patterned curtains blurred behind the haze and the dreams that came to him even while awake. The chamber’s wall seemed to lie just inches from his fingertips, the Major and the others echoes that surrounded him and bled into the darkness. The wine did nothing to stop the memories anymore and did nothing to dull the influence of Jack’s curse over the other passengers. Not this close to Constantinople.
He could see the Major, his great gray mustache a skirt under his hawkish nose, his brow crinkled in delight as he approached one of the canopic jars. The squid-head atop the urn stared back with a flat gaze of carved bone, and the lantern light played across its porous surface.
Jack sighed. Go back to Constantinople and do what? he wondered again. Go back down that well, back into that chamber? Maybe the clues had been there all along, there for him to see after the fact, in the theater that replayed the performance again and again until the audience knew the lines and parts as well as the actors.
Their stage had been the chamber—a cage, Jack suspected, set within a larger chamber like those Russian nesting dolls. Or perhaps they stood within the heart of some god deep beneath Constantinople, buried back when it was Byzantium; something ancient impaled by Byzas of Megara with the foundations of the city to keep the ancient leviathan trapped. That’s what the Major thought afterward, as his sanity escaped him.
The only thing left unanswered was the part each had been assigned upon that fateful stage. Was he the tragic fool for not telling them to run after they first set foot down the well? Or was it Hendriks, the Dutchman, who peered through a hole in the cage and leapt back, shrieking in terror and knocking an urn off its pedestal. The vulgar vapors that leaked from the broken insect-headed seal glowed with greasy light, a rainbow drenched in fish oil.
How that bulldog Morrow had screamed when he reached for the fallen urn and that wisp of light darted for his fingers. His skin turned to rot, the sudden rents in his flesh flowing with thick tar that Jack knew had once been blood. Then Morrow’s hands and face sloughed off as the rot overtook him. What was left of him dissolved as Hendriks, still mad with animal terror, scrabbled and clutched at the rope like he’d forgotten how to climb.
Something outside the cage moaned and creaked, an ancient ship in a starless sea, and the whole chamber rumbled at their intrusion. Another jar tumbled and shattered, spilling effluvial vapors that reflected colors skipping madly along a dark spectrum.
Perhaps, in that moment, it had been the Major who played the part of the fool when he grabbed the squid-headed urn and shoved it into his worn haversack.
Jack nudged the aged haversack with his feet, to remind himself it was there, the
urn, unbroken and unbreakable, as though hardened by the Major’s theft of it. So then, what would he do when he reached Constantinople? Return the urn to its rightful place? Beg forgiveness from something that didn’t see with human eyes?
Maybe that wasn’t the point. Maybe—the terrible thought suggested itself to him—maybe your curse is so pointless as to be cruel.
He tipped the bottle toward his mouth and a trickle wet his lips. He left it on his bunk as he pushed the curtains aside. The other bunk lay empty, Rizzo gone and no longer bothering with the pretense of sleep. Or perhaps Rizzo couldn’t stomach Jack anymore. That was part of it, too, part of being so close to Constantinople that people’s indifference turned to hostility, turned to murder, turned to all-consuming, gibbering fear.
Outside the compartment window, night escorted them, but the countryside was one he couldn’t identify. He only knew their location by the press of “that city” in his thoughts. We’re closer than ever, Jack admitted before the wine finally put him to sleep.
Boom.
Jack drew the hammer back with his thumb and fired the Colt Paterson a second time. The murky tentacles wormed their way through the holes in the chamber walls.
Boom.
One of the tentacles exploded into a meaty stub and snapped back into the darkness. He aimed at another tendril snaking for the Major, who was dragging Fahd away from the broken urn. Fahd clutched his fissured face, but he’d taken less of the vapor than Morrow or he, too, would be dead; Fahd’s screams suggested he wished he were.
Boom.
The chamber shook as the thing beyond the walls pitched and raged against their cage. Jack’s next shot went wild and more tendrils slid through the many holes like blind snakes that probed the air wildly. The Major made to grab the rope, but Hendriks shoved him away and screamed for the men upstairs to winch him to safety. The rope lurched, yanking the Dutchman up a handful of feet. As the Major went for the rope again, Hendriks kicked him away with a rabid fury.
Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey Page 13