The journalists all laughed good-naturedly, though the white-bearded man had not so much as smiled. And I thought it was the Germans who have no sense of humor, Harry thought.
“By all means, sir,” he said, rising from his chair with an affectionate glance toward Anna. “By all means.”
The blindfold posed no problem. Harry had spent countless hours practicing his craft in the dark, sometimes upside down, inside a tank full of water, or both. The speed of the train did not trouble him either, but its swaying and juddering did offer a challenge. He had a lock pick secreted beneath his tongue and several others in the lining of his clothing, including the cuff of his left coat sleeve. His hands were shackled behind him and the chains had been drawn taut enough that he was on his knees on the platform. In truth, if not for the fact that he wanted his challengers to feel as if they’d gotten their money’s worth, he could have escaped in under a minute. Instead, he struggled and strained against his bonds, testing the chains, purposely crashing onto his side as the train jerked around a curve, when actually he was simply trying to adapt to the unpredictable shimmy and shudder of the Orient Express.
As the wind whipped past him, buffeting his face and making his coat billow around him, Harry heard voices murmuring in a strange sort of rhythm. A frown creased his forehead. He knew he was not alone atop the train car; Diederich and his associates had installed three platforms instead of just one, with Harry shackled in the middle and delicately-carved wooden chairs bolted to the other two, four each, so that the financiers of this feat could watch from ahead and behind. In the dark, with only the bright moonlight to illuminate the showman, they would not be able to see the finer elements of his escape. If he could hide lock picks from a theatre audience, he could do it atop a speeding train in the dark.
The journalists had not been afforded seats. Instead, they had been told they were welcome to view the event but would have to take their chances. Only Herr Kraus and Anna Carter had dared spend so much time exposed atop the train without any way to anchor themselves. Harry admired their courage and wished them well. For his part, Ned had returned to the dining car for a drink with the other journalists. He would handle the questions during and after the escape but Harry did not want him to take any unnecessary risks.
Now, though … that chanting … what in God’s name were they up to, these men? Trying to break his concentration? If so, it wasn’t very sporting of them.
The voices grew louder, all rough, guttural syllables that sounded like gibberish to him, and he realized they were indeed hoping to throw him off his game. A ripple of anger went through Harry. This might have been all in good fun were it not for the fact that they were hurtling at top speed toward a tunnel whose low ceiling would turn him into a red streak along the train’s roof. Diederich and Wagner and the others would abandon their seats and retreat safely down the iron rungs between train cars, never risking their own destruction. Would they leave him up there, if their nefarious chanting achieved its purpose of distraction? Ordinarily he would have said no, but he seemed the type who might actually enjoy the notoriety of having posed the challenge that killed Harry Houdini.
To hell with them, he thought.
Working quickly, he pulled his wrists taut against his shackles and twisted his right hand so that he could snag the cuff of his left coat sleeve with his fingers. In a heartbeat he’d plucked the lock pick free of the lining, careful to keep his hands turned so that those behind him would not glimpse a glint of moonlight on the pick. He shifted his head, tossing it as if attempting to free himself from the blindfold but really only drawing their attention away from his hands and toward his face.
With swift precision, he slid the pick into the lock on the manacles around his wrists. He heard Kraus ask about the purpose of the chanting, but it only grew louder. It occurred to him, just for a moment, that he had heard it before. In the back of his mind, a memory began to rise. Harry pushed the distraction away, tugging against his bonds, hearing the chains clank against the hooks to which they had been moored. But he had stopped listening to the sounds of the train, stopped paying attention to the rattle and judder of the cars ahead of him, and so was unprepared when their car suddenly shunted to the right, switching tracks.
His wrists clacked together, twisting the lock pick from his hand, and he lost it.
“Shit,” he muttered under his breath, his anger growing.
A dozen options presented themselves in his head, various ways in which he could still manage his escape. Some required physical contortions that would likely tear his jacket, for which he had paid handsomely. The chanting—the familiar, rhythmic chanting—infuriated him both because it was irritating and because it had achieved its goal. The bastards had distracted him enough that he had not only dropped his first pick but he had lost track of time. How long, now, until they reached the tunnel? He wasn’t sure.
He opted for the quickest escape, which would also be the most painful.
Bracing himself on the platform, knees apart, he shifted his upper body, took a deep breath and exhaled, and then thrust out his right shoulder, dislocating it completely. Harry bit back a roar, allowing only a grunt. Trembling, breath coming in hitching gasps, he raised both arms and brought them over the top of his head, back to front. The damnable chanting faltered for a moment.
With a twist of his arm and another small grunt, he popped his shoulder back into the socket. His lips were stretched into a rictus grin to hide the pain. He’d dislocated both shoulders on occasion but had never learned to fully disguise the extent of his discomfort.
The chanting grew louder, but now Harry didn’t care. On his knees, he rested a moment, shackled wrists hanging before him.
“Enough games,” he muttered as he reached up to tear away his blindfold. The wind shearing across the top of the speeding train whipped at him and stung his eyes but he blinked them clear and then froze, shocked into paralysis by the scene that the moonlight revealed.
Diederich and two of his confederates sat on the chairs bolted to the platform ten feet ahead of him, along with a fourth observer—the swarthy waiter with the thin beard and wire spectacles. Confusion sparked in Harry’s mind, but the others arrayed on the roof of the train ignited that confusion into a conflagration. In the space between his platform and the next, and arranged in a ring that encircled his position, were another dozen figures, cloaked and hooded in heavy black fabric run through with strands of moonlit silver. They were on their knees, palms upon the metal roof of the hurtling train, heads hung low so that their hoods hid any hint as to their identities. The chanting came from these hooded men, who it seemed had also hastily painted a scattering of arcane symbols on the roof around him.
Memory rushed in as if some barrier had been holding it back and now it flooded his mind. Two years past, on a visit to Egypt, he had endured a night of terror unlike anything else he had ever experienced. Lured beneath the sands, under the pyramids, he had been knocked unconscious and woken to find himself a captive, surrounded by creatures with human bodies but the heads of beasts, the intended sacrifice in a nightmare ritual that opened an aperture in the fabric of the world as some ancient, malignant presence—some dark god—attempted to slip through. Harry had escaped, of course. He had survived and immediately begun to obliterate the memory from his mind, doubting and undermining the experience, persuading himself that it had been a nightmare or drug-induced phantasmagoria, the result of some malicious attack by the guide he had hired to bring him safely on a tour of Egypt’s most ancient sites.
His guide. Abdul Reis el Drogman.
Harry snapped his gaze back toward the platform, staring at the swarthy man beside Diederich. Take away the spectacles and the beard, account for the passage of time … Harry knew him now. Abdul Reis, here.
Panic set in.
Abdul Reis saw the recognition in his eyes and offered a sinister smile as the others continued their chanting. Harry stared past him and Diederich and the others, watching
the nighttime horizon. There were low hills around them and many ahead. How far to the tunnel? He had no idea.
“Son of a bitch,” Harry hissed, glaring at Abdul Reis.
Shoulder throbbing, he went to work, shifting his tongue around to force out the thin lock pick he’d hidden in the corner of his mouth moments before they shackled him. His heart hammered in his chest; this was no longer a game. He took the pick from his mouth, listened for the jerking and rattling of the train car ahead of them and managed to keep his balance like a sailor getting his sea legs. Barely glancing at the cuffs, he picked the lock on his manacles and slipped them off, allowing them to drop to the platform with a heavy clank.
Diederich slid forward in his chair, gripping its arms, his eyes lit up with alarm.
“Stop—” he began, but Abdul Reis clamped a hand on his wrist and gave a silent shake of his head, and only then did Harry truly understand who had been the mastermind behind this madness.
Abdul Reis raised his other hand and gestured. Behind Harry there came a scuffling and a cry, and he thought that over the wind he could hear someone calling his name.
Even as he sat down on the platform, working the pick into the lock on his ankle shackles, he twisted round to look behind him. The rest of the circle of hooded acolytes looked identical to their fellows, but toward the rear of the car, Diederich’s remaining confederates stood in front of their chairs, restraining a pair of captives.
“Make no further attempt to escape, Mister Houdini!” Abdul Reis said, shouting to be heard over the wind. “Or they both die!”
Ned McCarty and Anna Carter struggled against the men who held them, but there was little they could do. Both had their hands bound behind their backs. Anna had been tightly gagged, but the gag on Ned had slipped down to his neck; he had been the one to shout Harry’s name.
Anna had been stripped to her white underthings, baring her pale flesh to the moonlight. In the short time during which they had shackled Harry and he’d been feigning difficulty with his escape—while he had been putting on a show for them—these chanting madmen had painted her skin with the same bizarre sigils that had been drawn onto the roof of the train. She hunched slightly, grimacing as if in pain, and he realized that her bucking against them was not an attempt to free herself but a series of paroxysms caused by crippling pain in her gut. Bright, bloody crimson lines showed where the flesh of her abdomen had been cut and the skin peeled open in folds like flower petals.
“Anna!” Harry shouted. “Ned, don’t let them—”
Ned lunged forward, fighting his captors, and wrested himself free. He turned and drove himself at one of the cultists holding Anna, trying to knock the man from the speeding train. The cultist turned to defend himself, holding an ornate, curved dagger. Ned collided with him and they both went down. Harry felt a surge of hope, before the cultist tossed Ned aside, the dagger jutting from his chest. Harry screamed his friend’s name. Wide-eyed, Ned stared pleadingly at Harry for a moment, all of the strength leaving him … and then his killer hurled him over the side of the moving train. His body tumbled off into the night and was left behind in the wake of the rattling locomotive.
Harry sneered at the killer, ignoring the hooded men and their benefactors, Abdul Reis forgotten. Ned was dead, and Harry understood that the only chance Anna had of surviving to see the sunrise was if he were free. He bent to unlock the shackles on his ankles and one of the cultists rushed at him. Harry swayed with the rhythm of the train and when the man leaped at him, he twisted aside, grabbed the man’s wrist, and used his momentum against him. The man sprawled across the roof, slid and tried in vain to get a grip before he, too, fell over the side and into the dark. As another cultist moved in, Harry unlocked his ankle shackles. They clanked to the platform as he stood, facing Ned’s murderer and his compatriots.
“Let her go!” he demanded, knowing even as the screaming wind stole his voice away that he could not intimidate them, not one man against so many.
Still, he intended to save her, whatever the cost.
Harry stepped off the platform, advancing toward the back of the train car, and two of the hooded acolytes that separated him from Anna and her captors glanced up, flinching at his approach. One of them was the Austrian journalist, Herr Kraus.
The other had the head of a tiger. Its black lips curled back from its fangs in a low growl as it began to rise.
Harry heard the ratcheting of the car ahead of theirs and braced himself as the train jerked to one side, following the tracks. Jostled, the tiger-headed man went back onto his hands and knees. Harry took two long strides and lunged between him and Kraus, landing just in front of the platform where Ned had just been murdered. The chanting increased in volume and speed.
He caught a few words on the wind and glanced back toward the front of the train. Abdul Reis had spoken.
“Not this time, Houdini,” the Egyptian shouted. “This time, you will die.”
Abdul Reis barked an order and the two men holding Anna drove her forward and shoved her at Harry, who caught her even as the collision forced him backward. He fell with her wrapped in his arms, the two of them sprawling past the hooded ones and crashing to the platform atop the coiled chains Harry had just shed.
Anna’s eyes were bright with pain and she screamed against her gag. He tugged the cloth down and her words flowed in a frenzied, anguished torrent.
“It hurts. Oh, Harry, it’s tearing me apart inside.”
Harry shushed her as he worked her free of her bonds. On his knees now, holding her, he turned to glare at Abdul Reis.
“What did you do to her, you monster?”
Abdul Reis only smiled and gestured to the others. The chanting grew louder still, the acolytes lowering their heads so far they could have kissed the metal roof. The words had changed, and so had that guttural rhythm. Their ritual had entered a new phase.
Anna screamed and thrashed against him.
“Damn you, take me! You wanted me for your sacrifice!” he roared at the Egyptian. “Take me!”
The smile vanished from the Egyptian’s features, replaced by open loathing and malice.
“You misunderstand, Houdini,” Abdul Reis called to him. “You are the sacrifice. You have always been the sacrifice. You have escaped death again and again, and each escape has made your life force more powerful, more radiant. Your death will be a beacon, sure to guide the Old Ones into the world.”
“Then let Anna go!” Harry shouted.
“No, you fool,” the Egyptian said. “You are the sacrifice, but she is the door!”
Anna cried out to God and threw her head back, going rigid in Harry’s arms as her eyes rolled up to their whites. She bucked, thrusting her abdomen upward, and he looked at her pale, smooth belly to see that a pulsing, bloodless slit had appeared there, a vertical mouth that began to open.
With a grunt of revulsion, Harry released her and tried to scramble away, but in the same moment a pair of thick tentacles slid from the pouting slit of her abdomen, probing the air like dogs seeking a scent. The chanting grew louder and Harry could hear the laughter of Abdul Reis as the hideous tendrils extruded farther, joined now by a third.
Jerked forward by the things forcing themselves from within her—no, he thought, not within her but somehow through her; she is only a door into this world from some vast, chaotic other—Anna looked down at her naked, obscenely split belly and began to scream as madness took her. She whipped her head around, eyes wild and searching, and locked her gaze upon him.
“Harry,” she whimpered. “Please, Harry.”
He twisted around, scanning the tracks far ahead in search of that tunnel, wondering how long before it would smash all of them from the roof of the train. He saw that they were approaching a bridge that spanned a deep river gorge. Regret and guilt swept him as a terrible decision presented itself. Harry tensed, crouched on the roof, balancing himself with his hands.
With wet, sticky sucking noises, the tentacles shot farther from
Anna’s belly and seized him, slithering and coiling around him like serpents. Harry tried to fight them but his struggles only caused them to tighten. The thick, mottled tendrils dragged Harry toward her even as the slit in her belly grew, splitting her breastbone so that it seemed the entirety of her was opening to him, trying to pull him in.
A noxious, stinking gas exuded from that hole, the stench of some hellish otherplace, and as he gazed inside of her, the moonlight revealed nightmare things that had never existed in this world, other shapes that made his mind scream with their impossible geometry.
“No,” he grunted, as the chanting reached a fever pitch.
His hands wrapped around Anna’s throat almost of their own volition. Her eyes rolled back again and she jerked in his grip. Harry felt her life pulsing in the veins of her throat and he knew he could end it, knew that he had to end it, not just to save himself but to prevent the abominable others from being birthed into the world through the vast womb that her body had become.
Yet he could not. He thought of Ned, barely more than a kid and now dead because he had joined Harry on this journey. And then he thought of Bess, his sweet Bess, his best friend and staunchest ally, the foundation of his life. He had to get home to her, and to keep the world unmarred by the unimaginable malignance of the Old Ones.
Tentacles squeezed him, crushing the air from him, and he felt his body pressed to the moist, stinking gap in Anna’s belly like some obscene lover.
The train began to rattle across the bridge. Beyond it he could see a low, narrow tunnel cut into the rocky face of a hill. Time had run out.
Harry counted to four, prayed they were over the river, embraced Anna Carter, and then pistoned his legs to hurl them both off the side of the train. He heard Abdul Reis scream in fury as they fell, and then he could hear nothing but the air whipping by his ears and the slippery squirming of the tentacles around him, pulling him into those sucking, wet folds.
Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey Page 21