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

by Dennis Detwiller

  Just the one time.

  Something sinister stirred when he made the decision to follow his enthusiasm to the back of the train, however—subtle at first, the phenomenon soon grew into a waking fever dream for Alfred Pendleton. It began with a sound: a slow pulse, a low thrumming that resounded like the beat of a skin drum in the back of his mind. This he took for the opening salvo of a headache he suspected he would regret come morning (as he always paid a price for his dalliances with brandy), and thus thought nothing more of it. At least until the distortion crossed into the realm of the visual.

  In the dining car, he passed by a woman sitting alone at a linen-covered table. She wore a green feather boa and sipped tea from a decorated porcelain cup. As he neared her, he watched as her boa appeared to slip down from around her shoulders, away from her raven tresses; on instinct he leaned forward to rescue the expensive item from the floor, but as he did, the boa transformed into a writhing serpent. Feathers flattened into scales before his eyes, one end rising cobra-like into the air as if to strike him dead, and he pulled up with a start. When the woman looked at him, alarmed, he found that all he could do to acquit himself was to say, “Madame, you’ve dropped your boa.” With an awkwardly polite smile, she informed him that she had not worn a boa this evening.

  No sooner had he escaped the swirling oddity of that experience than he found himself passing through the pair of long sleeping cars beyond the dining car—no disturbance in itself, but in God’s name, the people. Each of those he passed wore the clothes of his day and culture, but all articles hung over skin that was waxy and yellowed, as though jaundiced from an early age. Not a soul registered its ghastly appearance to him in any way, and the first time he saw one’s face, pressed nearly into his own as both maneuvered to pass in the cramped corridor, he had to struggle not to cry out.

  The person standing before him had lost every distinguishing human feature. What had been its face was now little more than a yellowed oval of skin stretched drum-like over a skull bone. The same was true for each of those who followed; some half-dozen before the long and nightmarish walk through the sleeping cars was done. Although featureless, the faces he passed somehow reminded him of those he had seen while working under the Raj in India. Faces he never knew existed until he looked upon them with his own eyes. Faces he would now never forget.

  When he arrived at his own compartment door he stopped to consider briefly whether his state of mind might be indicative of a larger, as yet undiagnosed problem, but he decided that even if it were, he would find no answers in the cramped little room beyond. If his mind was reacting poorly to something in the moment, then it could only benefit from taking the opportunity to lay eyes on his new regalia for the first time—an act that would surely solidify his place in his world. Perhaps even help justify the things he had done. Pressing his passkey back into his vest pocket, Pendleton forsook the warmth of his pull-down bed in the name of discovery and of pride, and continued on down the hall.

  By the time he pushed through to the rear baggage car, with the help and gratitude of a handsomely rewarded attendant, he could no longer feel his own tongue. He could still taste, but that taste came insensate, carried through no vessel of flesh. Even pushing the meat of his tongue between his jaws and biting down produced only the one-way sensation felt in his gums and facial musculature, though he certainly tasted his own blood well enough when it finally spilled out. He was dimly aware of the pain, and of the drum that still sounded in his head, but none of that mattered now.

  He was here, arrived now at the end of the line.

  The last car on the westbound Orient Express was dark and filled to bursting with parcels of varying shape and size, which lent him as he entered a feeling not unlike being trapped in a lift during a loss of power. A lone valiant bulb above the entryway did its best to illuminate the proceedings, but its light was meager and washed out, fading within a few feet from the door. Pendleton wished he’d brought a lamp or at least a candle from his compartment, but he hadn’t, and there was little sense in going back for one now. He knew what we was looking for and it couldn’t rightly elude him for long.

  Between the rows of shelving used to accommodate the smaller and lighter suitcases spanned a clearly delineated aisle, its purpose even called out in the floor decoration, and he was confident that if he stayed true to its course he needn’t worry about his footing. In shuffling steps he made his way down the aisle, feeling all around him as he went: Here, some gentleman’s luxury steamer trunk; there, some gentlewoman’s travel chest. Nothing over which he ran either his hands or his mostly useless eyes matched the description of the thing he sought, and for one horrible moment he considered the idea that Blakely had misspoken and that the cabinet was in the forward baggage car all the while.

  The prospect of having to go back now, past his own sleeping compartment, to where this all began made Pendleton’s temples throb worse than ever before. He set one hand atop a nearby trunk and pinched the bridge of his nose with two fingers of his other. Never had he reacted this way to alcohol, and if this was what it meant to celebrate to excess with Sir Roderick and his kind, then he must make sure to never again repeat the mistake. Indeed, Pendleton now felt so ill at ease that he presently considered abandoning his mission here, despite fruition being so close at hand, in favor of the nicely elevated confines of his bunk. He wanted so desperately just to see his symbol of office, to hold it for himself just once before his rightful ordination, but … perhaps it was time to turn around.

  That’s when realization swelled in Alfred Pendleton’s mind. And when it did, the bewildered Englishman wondered how he could have been so foolish. Blakely had said that the trunk was large and oriented upright, as a proper cabinet rather than the wide-based trunks the wealthy often used for long-distance travel. This meant that what he sought was effectively a trunk lid that was set against a wall.

  In other words, a door, at least after a fashion.

  Stumbling now, Pendleton abandoned the mundane luggage all around him and hobbled straight for the far wall. That part of the coach was lost to a blackness that was all but complete, but even as disorientated as he was, the Queen’s newest Knight needed no light to find a handle. He waved his arms out in front of his body as he neared the wall, sweeping them in wide arcs before him. When his fingers fell by chance onto the handle, a thrill ran like a live current up his arm and swiftly through his body before dispersing as a lingering warmth beneath his feet.

  None can say what Alfred Pendleton saw when he opened that “cabinet” door. It might have been the very object of his heart’s desire: those glittering vestments of his newfound station. The simplest answer is, after all, the most commonly correct one. He might have actually seen them hanging there, seamless perhaps and bathed in a reverent light, beckoning him to reach out and lay at last his hand upon that golden seal.

  Or it might have been a god he found beyond that door. Back home, those who knew him best would whisper that he was haunted by Kali, death goddess of the Hindus—that he secretly feared her like he feared nothing else, and that it was she who called to him that night. And that when he opened that door he saw her framed in terrible glory: hips swaying, black tongue lolling, her white eyes burning, two of her four hands clutching blades dripping with blood, the other two cradling his own severed head at her breast.

  While none could say for certain, those who knew the circumstances best would whisper something altogether different, when they spoke of it at all. Such dangerously learned men suggested that it was neither gleaming regalia nor radiant divinity that Pendleton beheld beyond that door, but an otherworldly window, and that upon that dark horizon sat the source that was the true voice behind the call. Above a sea of faceless faces It floated, that giant proboscidean head atop that anthropoid torso and massive columnar legs, those legions of ashen disciples singing soundless paeans in Its name; how Its slick gray trunk must have ended in a flat disk of a mouth that opened and closed like a lotus flower
, fine rows of teeth fanning out like blades of gleaming grass, opening and closing, opening, closing. Such dangerously learned men might suggest that Its vast and pitiless elephantine bulk was all that ever awaited Alfred Pendleton at the end of the line.

  What is known for certain is that when the railway attendant entered the baggage car some time later, he found the room unoccupied and the back door flung wide open. Frigid air blew through the coach, carrying swirling eddies that covered all the cases and trunks in a fine dusting of snow. Of little Alfie Pendleton, Knight of the Order of the Indian Empire, there never was a sign. The attendant would later swear that in the time it took him to again secure the door, the rear baggage car was filled with the screams of a dying man. When told that this sound was merely the play of wind and temperature in the exposed enclosure, the attendant was heard to reply, “Not the wind.” He never stepped foot in the car again.

  DEMONS DREAMING

  CODY GOODFELLOW

  THE SUN SPARKLING OFF THE waters of the Golden Horn was twice the sight they said it’d be. The asparagus-hued estuary turned to molten gold and the city dissolved in a solution of light and took one away from the seething knots of beggars, pickpockets, and worse that crowded the streets of Constantinople, which was exactly what said unsavory citizens hoped for. No one showed any designs upon the tall, white-blond Welshman in a spotless ice cream suit or the florid, bullet-headed Scot in red sergeant’s tunic who stood beside the wheelhouse of a ferry packet tied off on the Kadikoy wharf, looking nothing like the pirates they were.

  “We’ll give him a few minutes more, then, Gunn,” said Captain Glendower. “Our lad always did cut it close.”

  “Och, ye daft bastard,” Sergeant Gunn growled, “an’ ye take that scunnerin’ janus to your broch, doon a-crye when he bites yeh.”

  “Whatever else he was,” Glendower said, “he was no traitor.” As for what he is, the Welshman thought, we’ll see soon enough.

  He passed a few more oddly cold coins to the ferry captain and closed his ears to the din of the other passengers’ bleating for the boat to put off. Across the vast strait—on what one couldn’t help but think of as the European half of the city—the Simplon Orient Express at the Sirkeci terminal added its steam to the unseasonable soup of ominous clouds over the capital of the newly defunct Ottoman Empire. Its engineers would be less pliable than the ferryman and it would not wait for them.

  For his part, Captain Glendower was at loose ends about the whole business. Studying the baffling myriad of bare and veiled faces, of fezzes, kepis, turbans, and wide-brimmed hats passing on the road, he could kick himself for not having a better sight-picture of his quarry. His old friend would not look the same, if the rumors among the old regiment had it right. But all of a sudden, he knew just where to find Lieutenant Roland Morrison.

  He had only to hearken to the breaking wave of screams and baffled echoes of pistol shots from across the plaza to the steps of the nearby Haydarpasa train station. The sky cracked with a concussion like a thirty-pounder with a fouled barrel going up, like a great calling card writ large in black smoke and shrapnel, then hoisted up above the market stalls and the motley mix of mansard roofs and minarets that made up the Constantinople skyline.

  Glendower nodded to Sergeant Gunn, who saluted and notched his revolver in the ferry captain’s navel. “We’ll shift for ourselves, won’t we, laddie?”

  Reminding himself to have a talk with the sergeant about his coarse manner, Glendower leapt down to the stone quay and thrust himself into the tide of terrified travelers, many of them European tourists utterly out of their depth even without the imminent peril of getting trampled or shot. Glendower turned into the shallow plaza before the train station’s railhead and found the source of the smoke, at least. A private salon railcar of the type used by heads of state was engulfed in flames, and redolent with the rank, rich stink of burnt flesh.

  A thickly bearded Turkish conductor approached him in haste and, catching his eye, led him back around the corner toward the street. The conductor surprised him more than he should have by removing the beard and a false nose.

  “Damn shabby, Morrison,” Glendower said, but the grisly slash of his mouth attempted a crooked smile.

  “It’s hardly over, old man. Look there.”

  A patrol of English infantry trotted across the platform in their cardinal-red tunics. They were searching the crowd and might not have noticed them at all, had Glendower not stopped in mid-stride and waved to them. “Something off about that lot….”

  Morrison’s sidelong glance looked like he was telling a corker of a joke. “They’re not soldiers of the Crown, old boy.”

  As if he could hear them, the color sergeant went for his sidearm. His trio of privates shouldered their rifles like a firing squad. With no cover in reach, Glendower turned sideways to the expected enfilade and went for his own revolver in its tricky shoulder holster under his damnable vest buttons, but he knew there would be no time to draw, let alone return their fire.

  Glendower swiftly made his peace with a soldier’s death, when suddenly, as if it had always been there, the sergeant had the naked steel of a knife jutting from his mouth. The dead man’s spoiled shot went into the cantilevered canopy over the platform.

  The riflemen fired just as Glendower went down with a stiff hand in his back. On his knees, he kept hauling his revolver out of its sheath and got off three shots. One soldier fell with a third eye, and the others were off and gone into the panicking crowd before their mate hit the ground.

  Snarling, “Let’s bloody well have at them,” Glendower started after the fleeing imposters, but the man in the train conductor’s uniform pulled him back and ran at a pace that left no breath for curses and questions.

  Now Glendower took the lead around the inlet from the train station to the ferry wharf. “We’re going to miss the train,” Morrison called out, “unless you’re game to take a boat by force.”

  “No need,” Glendower panted. “The boat should wait for us, even if the train won’t.”

  The mob in the street seemed actively to push them back, but across the sea of faces, he saw Sergeant Gunn leaning on the wheelhouse of the ferry, studiously stoking the embers of his briarwood pipe.

  “They’re damned tenacious, Captain,” Morrison said.

  Glendower said, “Well, they’ll be easy to spot,” just as Morrison picked up a freshly trampled cardinal-red private’s tunic someone had only just dropped in the street.

  “Sanctaidd ffycin cachu!” Glendower snarled in his ancestral tongue, the sibilant curse like a bullwhip. “What have you done this time, you mad bastard? Who are they?”

  The bodies pressed ever closer, strange, fearful faces crushed against their own. Morrison slipped through the cracks in the wall of Turks, while Glendower bulled through every obstacle.

  “Anarchy, chaos, and pagan idolatry,” Morrison tossed over his shoulder. “They’re bloody fanatics, old boy.”

  Glendower drew his revolver, cocked it, and fired twice into the air. “And I’m not?” The terrorized crowd evaporated. Nothing more interrupted their hasty retreat to the ferry, which untied and beat all ahead full against the choppy, wind-lashed Bosporus.

  “Your boyos weren’t all that quick,” Glendower said, taking out his pipe and settling back against the railing.

  Looking chastened for once, Morrison shook his head, his mouth crooked as he stepped aside so Glendower could see Sergeant Gunn slouching against the wheelhouse where he’d been pinned by a long dagger balanced for throwing.

  Glendower pushed Morrison aside and tried to revive the sergeant, who breathed his last in the captain’s face.

  Cold fury roiled under the frigid tone of Glendower’s voice. “Who are they?” he asked again

  “I know how absurd it sounds—”

  “On with it, damn you!”

  “They’re Assassins, Marion. The Syrian Hashishim: slaves of the forty-ninth Old Man of the Mountain.”

  On the train
, Glendower and Morrison retired to a “ladies’ special” sleeper compartment with only an exterior egress and a pass-through for meal services.

  Captain Glendower sat brooding beside the window until the last lights of Constantinople had faded from sight and the window had become a perfect black mirror. He’d had precious little to say on the uneasy crossing and, leaping from the ferry to run into the market, had mutely returned with a suitable coffin. A hired wagon conducted them in tense silence to the Sirkeci terminus and the Saturday evening Simplon Orient Express train, impatiently puffing steam and giving full throat to its final boarding whistle. He had sat in morose contemplation of the retreating platform with his revolver cocked while Morrison tried in vain to make his friend let go of what couldn’t be undone.

  Once underway, they made short work of the only bottle of whiskey on the train until Belgrade. Both declined dinner. Glendower had no appetite, while Morrison pled stomach and kidney trouble. Plenty of fluids were in order, he insisted, to pass the stone.

  By the time they had murdered a case of champagne, without feeling it, the pair had exhausted the old stories of comrades lost, but it was also then that Glendower finally saw nowhere else to go but forward. “Your invitation was vague enough,” he said.

  “You’ll come to understand why I could spell nothing out,” Morrison replied. “I’d heard you’d been cashiered and were seeking new opportunities, but three years in our line is a long time….”

  “Indeed, can’t be too cautious. Three years is a very long time to be down in the arse-end of Christendom. Even before the war was over, we heard you’d met a bad end.”

  Morrison’s grin never touched his eyes. “But you knew better, eh? After that beastly business at Ypres, those fools in Whitehall had to send me somewhere far out of sight. The Empire’s crumbling, Marion. Rotting from the inside out.”