Jack raised his pistol and took aim at the Dutchman.
Boom.
And again: Boom.
Too many shots, Jack realized as he snapped awake.
The thunder of yet another shot echoed through the train car, chasing the sounds of Hendriks’s screams from Jack’s head. He bolted out of the compartment and found them wrestling in the corridor before an open cabin door. Mr. Braithwaite held a pistol and one of the sleeping car attendants struggled to take it from him. The gun discharged again and blew another hole in the ceiling. The pistol then clicked empty; Jack rushed forward and punched Mr. Braithwaite in the jaw, collapsing him to the carpet.
A glance inside the compartment told him the entire story. Rizzo and Mrs. Braithwaite lay there, dead, arms wrapped around one another. Each had been trying to shield the other from the shots that spared neither of them. The skinny attendant picked up the pistol and looked at Jack like he was trying to remember something, something like shoot Jack, even though he couldn’t understand why.
Jack stumbled away.
The bronze urn sat atop the dining table. The squid-head was carved of bone. No chisel marks marred its surface. Its mouth tentacles flowed down over the barrel shape of the jar like thick droplets, its almond eyes flat and dispassionate. Something about it looked more human than animal, the way the bone hinted at neck and shoulders before the strange cap melted into bronze and unfurling tendrils.
Jack brooded alone in the dark of the empty dining car, taking swigs of whiskey whenever the buzzing wormed its way back in. The scar under his chin itched.
“You have to leave,” a soft voice said. Constance stood at the end of the table, her blue-eyed gaze constantly flitting to the urn. “Is that it?” she whispered. “The Major mentioned—”
Jack knew the power it held on the uninitiated, and even more the siren allure to black cats. He’d spent enough time in its company to resist displaying it in the open. Mostly. Instead, he rested his hand on the octopoid crown. Constance blinked and looked at Jack.
“The … others. They think you’re responsible for their nightmares,” she said.
“I am. You know I am. You’ve been sharing my dreams, too.”
“Your nightmares, you mean.”
“Can’t be nightmares when that’s all you got left to dream about.” Jack slid the urn back into the haversack. Voices grew louder in the adjoining car. Angry voices. Constance glanced over at the door before looking back at him, almost pleading.
Jack had no reason to rush. No reason to be frightened. Old fears got washed out in the presence of more ancient ones. “If I drink, I can keep the curse down a good deal, but this close to Constantinople,” Jack explained, “damn thing gets to where I can’t hold it in. Won’t be long before the other passengers come after me.”
“Then why are you here?” she demanded.
“’Cause I gotta end it. I’m just so damn tired of moving around all the time. And—” He took another swing with the flask.
“And?” she said helplessly.
“And I thought we’d be in Constantinople fast enough. Maybe I was being foolish, or maybe just plumb desperate, but I tried by ship. Steamers. Carts. On horseback. On foot once, avoiding all the main roads. But they always came after me, like the smell of me gets stronger the closer I get. And the closer I get, the more people want to rip me limb from limb, though they can’t figure out why. On the outskirts of the city once, there was a wall of them. Just waiting. That was the closest I got that time.”
“How do you live like that?”
“I move around. France is a safe bet for me. It’s far enough away that I can drink the hum into silence and French folk figure they don’t like me on account of them being French,” he said in a soft chuckle.
“They’re coming,” Constance said, looking at the door. “Please, you must leave.”
“I got no place left to go and this thing’s stuck to my hip.” He nodded to the haversack. “That’s why the Major’s committed to the Ridges. I took it from him thinking I was relieving him of some burden and now everyone involved in that fiasco’s a raving lunatic. Except me.”
“They’ll kill you!”
Jack looked at her. He hadn’t heard that kind of concern from anyone in a long time. He slid out from the booth and cupped her chin between his rough forefinger and thumb. “Ain’t we a pair?” he said. “You ain’t scared of me like them, are you? Is that because you care, or because of the drugs?” She made to answer, but he touched her soft lips with his thumb. “Don’t. You’ll break my heart either way.”
The door at the other end of the dining car burst open. Nigel and Mr. Becker stood ahead of the tired-eyed waiters, sleeping car attendants, and a few of the bachelors who were courting Constance’s favor not a day ago. They wore an expression he’d become accustomed to, one he’d seen a dozen times before.
Constance pushed him, screaming at him to run. He saw the gun come up in Nigel’s hand, his eyes runny and sagging under the nightmares. The gun was aimed at Jack, until Constance stepped in the way.
How Jack wished he could have warned her, told her he wasn’t in danger, but there wasn’t time. The bullet caught her in the back of the head and sprayed her blood and her brains onto his shirt. He caught her dead body as it fell into him, her blue eyes frozen wide in surprise. Another shot rang out, shrieking past his ear.
“They can’t kill me,” he would have told her. “I done worse to myself than shooting. It won’t do no good.” Then he would have pointed under his chin, against his scar, and cocked his thumb like a hammer.
But it was too late for all that now. Constance slid to the floor without another word, and another of Nigel’s shots went wide. The mob pressed in, eager to rip out his throat. Nigel stumbled under their feet with a cry as they stampeded over him. Bone snapped loudly, and Nigel shrieked again.
They couldn’t hurt him, but they would kill each other trying to get at him. Jack knew that, and cursed himself for thinking it’d be different this time. He turned and jumped atop the dining table, his feet almost slipping on the tablecloth. Reflected in the window was the waking dream—of the Major screaming and pulling at Fahd, at Hendriks falling from the rope, of the tentacles reaching for them as …
Jack threw himself at the memory with a cry of anger, haversack clutched to his chest, out the window in a shower of broken glass. The wind screamed at him and he tumbled into the darkness, his body breaking on its way down the rocky hill. To Jack, though, he was falling back down that damn stairwell again.
Jack came to, howling at the pain of his bones knitting back into place and the suturing bite of what felt like a thousand needles stitching his flesh together. His hands shot out over the gravel bed, fingers clutching sharp rocks until he found the cloth strap of his haversack. He pulled it to him and wept as the whistle of the Orient Express faded to silence in the distance.
Then he was alone.
Again.
For God knew how many more years, decades, centuries to come.
When he could finally feel his fingers again in that dark ravine, he sat up and fumbled for the haversack’s flap and opened it. He couldn’t see anything in that darkness, and even Constance’s face was already fading under the weight of the chamber and the faces of the Major, Hendriks, Morrow, and Fahd. His fingers touched wet clothes that smelled of spilt whiskey, before closing over the cold bone and metal of the urn. He pulled it out and in one stroke, clubbed it on the rocks between his legs, and hammered again and again, trying to break the seal, trying to remember Constance’s face, trying to destroy whatever kept him imprisoned in this cage within a cage.
“Come out!” he screamed at whatever vapors lay trapped within the urn. “Come out and kill me, God damn you!”
He stopped when he broke his third finger against the rocks and the urn slid, undamaged, from his numb hands. And there he sat, in the cold, in the dark, forever trapped in the chamber alongside the other men: Hendricks and Morrow dead and likel
y pulled through the grate of small holes by the tentacles. Fahd, he’d heard, was a hermit who clawed his eyes out every night in some cave in Arabia Felix, hoping that tonight would be the night they didn’t grow back. The Major was entombed in the Ridges, babbling about prophecies and the rise of the Old Ones. And him, custodian for an urn that didn’t want to return to the one place it belonged.
Jack stood up, his bones aching and his skin tingling from its fresh scars. It was time to go. Maybe this time he’d find Henri du Lac and ask him some pointed questions, like why the black cats had been invited into this fiasco. Was Henri really a broker for his clients, or was he an agent of Chaos or something else entirely, something that wanted to see this misery played out? Jack figured the answer would trouble him more than help, however.
So maybe instead, he’d travel farther away, back to America with his banknotes, and wait to see what the twentieth century would bring. He’d already seen the steamship and modern steam train, and there was talk of airships now. With a bit more patience, perhaps he’d see the rise of something new that would get him inside Constantinople, back inside that chamber. Maybe then he’d know peace. Maybe they all would. Jack knew he had years left before that time came. Years of lonely patience.
Like a black cat, he slunk off into the night once again, praying he wouldn’t lose patience again and try to reach Constantinople before he was absolutely certain people wouldn’t die in the process. Praying the next time, it would finally be different.
THE FACE OF THE DEEP
C. A. SULEIMAN
THE INSIGNIA GLEAMED LIKE A dying star, and in that moment it seemed to Alfred Pendleton that never in his life had his eyes beheld anything quite so magnificent.
That the man from whom it dangled, Sir Roderick Ulman, was Pendleton’s superior in their corner of the labyrinthine bureaucracy that was the British Raj only made it that much more striking to look upon. The two grinning men on either side of Sir Roderick were dressed normally for what had proven itself a bitterly frigid “cold season” in this part of Eastern Europe, but in place of his usual dark suit, waistcoat, and derby, the knighted man between them was draped in a set of elaborate vestments: a mantle of blue satin lined with white silk; a golden collar patterned with alternating lotuses, roses, and palm branches; a cross-body sash weighted by a pair of hand-stitched tassels. And, of course, the insignia itself, a sunburst of gold with a central ring that housed a five-pointed star decorated with brilliant diamonds.
“Gentlemen, I’m afraid I—” Pendleton began, but stopped himself short when his eyes fell upon the legend emblazoned on that insignia. Victoria Imperatrix, it read. The reality of the scene began to swim into focus…
“By Jove, I—” blustered one of the other men, his cheeks ruddy in the lamplight of the railway carriage.
“Wait for it, Blakely,” the middle man interrupted, and then, back to his guest: “Pendleton, do you recognize this? Blakely here seems to think you do.”
“I believe so, sir,” he replied. “That is the crest of the Order of the Indian Empire.”
“The Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire, my good man,” Blakely corrected, offering an accusatory poke with his glass. A drop of brandy spilled over the frosted lip and splashed on the floor of the private salon car.
“Quite right,” said Sir Roderick. He stood up straight, chin out, upper lip stiff as the Queen’s corset.
“Of course, sir,” Pendleton said, nodding, “But why wear your order regalia here? Now?” While decorum demanded the question be asked, he was certain he knew what answer was forthcoming.
“Blakely here thinks you already know. He thinks you ask out of modesty.” At this, the inebriant nodded his support; a bead of drunken sweat clung to the corner of his mustache.
Pendleton cast a sidelong glance at the third man—Algernon Coffin, his name was—who had thus far said nothing to him, neither in this car nor earlier in the day, when the two met while boarding the train. Taller than the other two, Coffin had pallid skin and a form to his features that was both overly angular and drawn-out, as if some troubled creator had been overcome by a desire to combine all the most striking characteristics of a draft horse and a piece of courtyard statuary. Now that he actually looked at the man, Pendleton observed that he too held snifters of brandy, one in each white, distended hand. The openly celebratory air in the forward salon of the Express was as evident as it was unsettling—at least to Alfred Pendleton.
“I cannot say I do, sir, but at a guess … well, it appears that you are considering nominating me for initiation into your order?” A statement, but framed in the interrogative.
“Not ‘considering,’ no,” Sir Roderick corrected. “And not ‘nominating,’ either. No.”
“Love for two, old boy!” Blakely hooted and spun himself around in place, twice, taking one gulp from his glass at the conclusion of each rotation. When he was finished, his glass was empty and his face was, impossibly, even redder than it was before.
The mantled Knight Commander continued undeterred. “No, Pendleton. All the considering was done weeks ago. You’re not being nominated. You’re being initiated.”
Pendleton’s mind raced. “B-But,” he stammered, “one must first be nominated by an existing Knight Commander or Grand Commander, no? And I—who nominated me?”
Sir Roderick smiled. “Your appointment came from the top down, old fellow. The formal initiation awaits you when we arrive in Paris, but we wanted to break the news early. You are now a Knight of Her Majesty’s Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire.”
Pendleton stared again at the twinkling insignia. “I don’t know what to say, sir.”
Blakely leaned forward and, with a stern aspect and a tone of dire portent intoned, “Say that you’ll drink with us. Like a proper Englishman.” This he followed with a wink.
“Of course,” said Pendleton. Apparently, Blakely found this reply amusing; he broke into an unbridled chuckling fit that persisted the better part of a minute, during which time the tall man handed out fresh snifters for all. For his part, Pendleton spent the interval resuming his marveling at the Knight Commander’s regalia.
“It’s the vestments you like, isn’t it?” Sir Roderick’s voice was low and somehow conspiratorial, and he rubbed his sash with one hand as he spoke. “The insignia. The sign.”
Pendleton found himself blushing, and it confused him terribly. “I grew up watching men of the Order bear it proudly, sir. The Duke of Cambridge was himself a Grand Commander, and never has a man struck a figure of such English grandeur as he did, especially decked in the full ceremonial dress of his lordly station.”
“Well, then you’ll be happy to know,” sputtered Blakely, halfway through his eighth finger of brandy, “that your own impending regalia travels with you. Every precious thread sits in an upright storage trunk in the rear baggage car, and if you—”
“Cambridge, you say?” Sir Roderick interjected. “If I’m not mistaken, Pendleton here matriculated himself at Cambridge, did you not?”
Pendleton nodded. “Indeed I did, sir. At King’s College.” The glass of rich brandy looked almost as good as it felt in his hands.
“Another pasty Eton boy?” Blakely howled. “What in God’s name sent you to this far-flung corner of Her Majesty’s global estate?” The fact that they were all now speeding through the frozen highlands of Tcherkesskeuy, and no longer in, or even anywhere near, the Empire of India, was immaterial to the jubilant Briton.
Pendleton looked up. “To be perfectly honest, I just wanted to make a difference.”
All three of the men before him laughed. The sound was sudden and humorless.
“That, you have,” said Blakely. “That, you most certainly have.”
Blakely raised his glass and took a drink.
“Just so,” Sir Roderick agreed. “And that’s why today, you join the ranks of the august.”
The Knight Commander raised his glass and took a drink.
Mr. Coffin, the talle
st man, said nothing but raised his own glass as well, and together, the four men drank to the Order and to the Queen, and they drank to empire.
The news was so unexpected, so suddenly exhilarating, that even if he hadn’t gone on to consume so much alcohol, Pendleton doubted he would have remembered much more of what transpired in the private salon car they had arranged to be attached to the Express back in Bucharest. Dim and already fading were his recollections of brandy, the vociferous regalement of tales of life inside the Raj, and little else, thanks to his state of mind.
For ease of transfer—and probably for nod to station—the car had been slotted near the front of the train, ahead of the first baggage car, and the newly minted member of Her Majesty’s order stepped shakily from its rear vestibule now, his head swimming. His own compartment was in the last sleeping coach, also the penultimate car, down at the other end of the train. The walk would do him good, no doubt. It wouldn’t merely clear the cobwebs and help him get his train-legs back underneath him, but it might also pump some much-needed blood to the cogitations of a mind that had grown restive of a sudden. There was so much to consider now. This appointment would change everything for the man whose mother called him “Little Alfie.”
When he first started back, Alfie intended to simply to get to where he might put his feet up, perhaps with a stop off at the dining car. (Some cravings rose only as sobriety fell, he’d found.) Halfway through the forward baggage car, however, a notion took root in him. Blakely had said the regalia that would be awarded him was already on board, and after watching Sir Roderick stroll around in his, nothing would suit Pendleton better than a quick peek before bed. If only just to see it, to touch it, for himself …
Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey Page 14