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

by Dennis Detwiller

  “No.”

  “Just as well. It probably wouldn’t do any good.”

  “What is going on? Who are they?”

  “I am very sorry, George, but something I have become involved in seems to have followed me and found me. I didn’t want to expose you to any danger.”

  “Danger? What sort of danger?”

  Just then a gloved fist smashed through the glass of the door, reached in, and undid the lock. Four or more hulking brutes, distorted or twisted somehow in the way they moved, invaded the compartment and seized hold of Professor Lindsay. Henderson couldn’t see more than that. They did indeed have rough sacks over their heads. When he made to protest, then went to the other man’s defense, one of them seized him by the lapels and shoved him backward against the wall so hard that he lost consciousness.

  It might have been hours before he awoke. When he did, it was dark. He fumbled around for the light and turned it on. He saw Professor Lindsay’s briefcase on the floor, the contents scattered, but he paid no attention to that.

  He called out, “Help! Help! I need help here!” but there was no reply, only silence. That was, to overuse the term, very odd indeed. He could feel the motion of the train, but there was no sound at all. He heard himself moving around, his own gropings and footsteps. He could hear himself shout. He heard the door slam against the side of the compartment when he pulled it open and swung it to one side. So, no, he hadn’t become deaf. Possibly he was injured. Possibly he had a concussion. There was some blood on his face.

  He called out again, and made his way down the corridor, banging on one compartment door after another, but there was no response, and no sound at all but that he made himself. He reached the dining car, and it too was empty.

  He thought that maybe he was still unconscious, dreaming. This was indeed like a dream, one of those drifting, slow-motion nightmares one has, in which time and distance aren’t right.

  He struggled back, in the darkness, to his own compartment, and then to the one next to it. He knew what he had to do. He had no idea how he was to rescue the professor, but he had to try.

  He banged on the door. He shouted for whoever or whatever was in there to come out and fight, if they had to.

  And the door swung inward, and he stumbled into the compartment, which, as in his dream, was much larger on the inside than it possibly could be, almost cavernous, as if—Henderson, telling me this, could not quite find the words for it—it occupied a “different kind of space.”

  Hands seized hold of him from every side. He confronted the dozen or more figures in strange garb, with misshapen sacks over their heads. He saw the book, and the candles, and he observed that the pages of the book were blank and that the whole assembled company looked on him expectantly. If Professor Lindsay were among them, he did not see him. That was a small comfort, but he hardly had time to think about it, because he saw now that whatever was under those sacks was so distorted, so strange, it could not be human at all. The way the lumps, the shapes moved—

  “Come, sir,” they all said at once, “you must unmask!”

  And they unmasked, and his sight, his mind were blasted. What he saw revealed he could not entirely describe. Not human faces at all. Some of them bestial, some almost fish-like, some covered with tentacles like squids or cuttlefish, but always shifting, bubbling, like waxen masks melting and forming new shapes even as he watched. Once they were all faces like those of enormous bats, shrieking at him in a high-frequency tone that made his ears bleed.

  Somehow—he never quite understood it himself—he was able to break free of their grasp. He said that the figures holding him seemed to dissolve, as if they were not quite solid, or made of matter as we know it. But he admitted it was only by what he tearfully described as an act of craven cowardice that he managed to escape. That is, he gave up all hope of saving the professor, and turned from that room and clawed his way back to his own, then threw up the window and hurled himself out, regardless of the consequences.

  “And that is not a very satisfactory conclusion to my account,” said George Henderson, as he told me this. He was calm now. But he seemed reluctant to say anything more.

  No, it was not satisfactory. I already knew some of what had happened thereafter. He never got to Constantinople. The train must have, by sheer chance, slowed down just then, perhaps going around a curve, because he was found alive, albeit grievously injured, on a leaf-covered hillside. When those who discovered him rifled through his pockets and determined that he was an Englishman, not a Turk, they bore him up in an improvised stretcher made of a cloak, and took him to the headman of a village, who placed him in a cart and sent him to a priest. For Henderson, it was all pain and delirium. He could not report accurately where he had been or what happened. Much later, he ended up in a hospital in Bucharest, and later still was transferred into British custody and sent home on a steamer, via Athens. If he could not remember much of his adventure, it was merely taken to have been wild and terrible, but not unnatural, for he had a perfectly natural explanation for some of his predicament. He had coincidentally blundered into the start of the first Balkan War. Possibly the train was boarded by partisans of some sort, looking for Turks. It was never held against him that he had not completed his scholarly mission, and, of course, shortly after his return to England and his recuperation was complete, the Great War broke out, and there was no question of another trip to Turkey. His colleagues welcomed him back at the university, and he rose up the ladder of academic success at a considerably slower pace than once anticipated, but steadily enough.

  It was only with almost infinite patience and tenderness, because I had been his friend for so long, that he eventually confided in me anything more.

  First of all, there was an entire episode missing from his story as he had first related it. After he had returned from the dining car in the darkness, but before he barged into the compartment into which, he was certain, the abducted professor had been taken, he went into his own compartment, and sat down, holding his head in his hands, trying to think, to figure out what he should do next. Probably he did have a concussion. His head hurt terribly. He was bleeding from his nose. Therefore he could not be sure of anything he saw or heard. He became the most unreliable of narrators.

  He said that he felt a hand on his shoulder, and looked up, and Professor Lindsay was before him. The light was still on in his compartment. He could tell that it was he, even though the professor wore a sack over his head, and peered out through crudely cut eyeholes, and the shape beneath the cloth bulged and moved strangely.

  “You deserve an explanation, my boy,” said Lindsay, and he did explain how he had been led astray, if that is the right word for it, by his own close textual studies of ancient languages, how he had discovered languages beneath other languages, roots within roots, unsuspected codes and ciphers within the most esoteric writings, until ultimately the meaning of meaning itself was deconstructed, and unfathomable chaos revealed. On this matter, he had first consulted a noted specialist in mental diseases in Vienna, as he grasped to understand how, as he put it, some people’s minds—those of persons usually accounted insane—“vibrated” differently than most, and could perceive things others could not. But the Vienna man was obsessed with earthbound, carnal explanations, and was quite unable to follow the path of Professor Lindsay’s brilliance. Therefore Lindsay moved more into occult circles, and eventually made contact with a very secret brotherhood that included among its members a certain Jedediah Orne, who claimed to be over two hundred years old, and who revealed to Professor Lindsay secrets of the universe itself that staggered his imagination.

  It was no coincidence that Lindsay was on the train bound for Constantinople. The Brotherhood knew about that book. Henderson needn’t have worried about a tedious work of theology. It was as he had speculated, transcribed in the late fourteenth century, but the content was incredibly ancient, older than mankind, and the key to everything. The title, only an approximation transmi
tted through half a dozen languages, was something like, perhaps, The Book of the Undying Hands. It was not deemed expedient that the Brotherhood should just steal such a thing. Instead, they proposed that one of their number gain access to it and translate it. Perhaps, once Henderson had started, he could even apply for Professor Lindsay to assist him. That was the plan, even though Lindsay had at one point broken with the Brotherhood, then come to view them as his rivals, then to fear them. He had tried to get away from them and obtain the book for himself, but that was all settled now. They were reconciled. He hoped, sincerely, that Henderson could be persuaded to join him in the endeavor, to whatever awesome and indescribable end it might lead.

  That was why Henderson had actually entered that other railway compartment, not to rescue Professor Lindsay, but to join him, for he was indeed a willing Wagner to Lindsay’s Faust. He all but worshipped the older man. He would have followed him anywhere.

  It was only decades later, when the scandal finally broke, when something horrifying was found in the cellar of an old farmhouse that he maintained as a private retreat in Yorkshire, and because of what that thing said before it was destroyed, even as Jedediah Orne and other confederates around the world were systematically hunted down and destroyed, that George Henderson’s academic career came to an abrupt end. It became all too clear how far he had followed in his mentor’s footsteps. Professor Lindsay had disappeared in 1912, in the Balkans. No trace of him was ever found. But Henderson carried on. He even claimed that Professor Lindsay visited him in the night when he was alone in that farmhouse, and more secrets were revealed. Sometimes Lindsay brought with him his companions, who were not human at all and never had been, and who, on great bat-like wings, soared in the darkness between the stars into abysses beyond the capacity of even the most densely coded, secret language to describe. Always, Professor Lindsay wore a sack over his head. But he spoke with the same voice. That was how Henderson knew it was he.

  “What about the book?” I asked him at last.

  “It’s all rubbish.” Henderson laughed again, and again, harder and harder. “All lies. Everything I have told you is a lie! Do you know what that book was really about? It was a treatise by a fourteenth-century Greek monk who proposed to utilize the anti-gravitational properties of the coffin of Michael Paleologus to rise above the moon and visit the angels. Can you imagine that? I’d like to see the angels. I really would. If only the black spaces were actually inhabited by angels! Ha! Ha! I want to see the angels!”

  His laughter became so intense that I thought he was having a fit and I called for help, and he was immediately taken away, as it is against practice in a madhouse to allow the inmates to become too excited.

  I am afraid that in my several subsequent visits, I got nothing out of him at all.

  THE GOD BENEATH THE MOUNTAIN

  JAMES L. SUTTER

  THE WORLD IS BUILT ON patterns. From the shapes of rivers and coastlines to the fractal fronds of a fern, cycles repeat themselves, shifting only in scale. It’s part of what allows small things—a smile, a book of matches—to have such a great impact. Tom taught me that.

  And I wish to god he hadn’t.

  The ground trembled.

  For a moment, it felt as if I were still on the train, the deck rolling beneath my feet as it wound its way through mountain pass after mountain pass. But no—there was the train behind me, stopped at the last spur before the tracks entered the dark maw of the tunnel. Was it merely my land legs returning after so many days of travel?

  A puff of smoke and dust from the tunnel mouth solved the mystery. As it cleared, a line of dirty men in coveralls lit lanterns and loaded onto motorized carts that carried them forward into the darkness.

  “Herr Cantor!”

  The little man running toward me was as different from the filthy miners as night from day. Blond, blue-eyed, and clad in a spotless uniform, he could have been a recruiting poster for the Swiss military. He stopped a few paces from me.

  “It’s ‘doctor,’ actually.”

  “Of course.” His English was flawless. “My name is David. Please, follow me.” Without pausing for a reply, he lifted my bags and began leading me through the camp.

  The Simplon builder’s camp was a maze of muddy streets cutting between identical, flat-walled wooden boxes housing dormitories, cafeterias, and machine shops. Men crowded the streets, either coated in gray dust and dark oil or else freshly scrubbed clean.

  Somewhere in there was my hospital. No doubt it would be a far cry from Saint Francis’s, but given the circumstances, a shack with a few cots was better than nothing. A chance to start fresh.

  I had presumed David would lead me straight into my exile, but instead, the building that rose up before us could only have been the director’s residence—a miniature chalet, its smooth timbers and tall windows peering out over the shacks around us, none of which rose above a single story.

  The inside of the building was significantly less elegant. The few pieces of furniture in the foyer and sitting room were expensive, but only emphasized the emptiness of the place—no art on the walls or rugs on the floor, no sign of anything approaching a personal touch. Even the angles of the furniture seemed awkward, as often facing the blank walls as each other.

  We passed through the cold rooms and down a short hall, stopping before a door.

  “The director is waiting.” David showed no sign of entering himself. “Your luggage will be waiting for you in your quarters, and I’ll let the hospital know to expect you.”

  “Thank you.” When it was clear that no more words were forthcoming, I stepped forward and opened the door.

  Inside, the office was the exact opposite of the rest of the house. Paper lay everywhere, with blueprints, diagrams, reports, and more tacked to walls or spread out across the desk and its single chair. Books of all shapes and sizes spilled off of shelves, from journal-sized notebooks to hefty engineering texts and a huge, leather-bound monstrosity that seemed more appropriate for a church altar. Behind the desk, a wall-sized topographical map of Mount Leone hung so cluttered with overlapping markings and arcane engineering diagrams that I had to blink back a moment of vertigo.

  Director Hugo von Kager was a big man, neither fat nor muscular but simply large, with a lion’s mane of black beard and unkempt hair. It was the sort of beard you saw in paintings of Zeus or Jehovah. A god’s beard. And as far as the Simplon workers were concerned, this man was God. The Simplon Tunnel project had many backers and interested parties, but von Kager was the architect and crew chief, the man responsible for seeing it through.

  He stood behind the desk wearing a gray waistcoat and matching trousers, ignoring the chair as he scribbled lines on yet another piece of paper. I shut the door behind me and stood, not wanting to disturb him. I needn’t have worried. After a moment of being utterly ignored, I cleared my throat.

  “Seven and a half years.”

  The voice that emerged from that thicket of beard was iron-hard, yet smooth as well, contradicting the barbaric visage.

  “Excuse me?”

  He looked up then, meeting my gaze. Immediately, I was forced to revert to my original impression. Those dark eyes burned, lending his face a fevered, furious intensity.

  “It was supposed to be completed in five and a half. Five and a half years to bore through the roots of Mount Leone in the longest tunnel ever carved by man. A hole through the heart of the world.” Thick brows like night-black caterpillars curved down and met above his nose. “But still we are not complete.”

  “You’re close, though,” I ventured. The man who’d offered me the position had emphasized that fact, not realizing that a potentially long stay abroad was the job’s biggest appeal for me. “I’m sure your men—”

  “The men are swine,” von Kager snapped. “Italians, mostly, but that’s no excuse. They’re weak and cowardly, afraid to even enter the tunnel. I give them everything they could want: food, housing, medicine—” he gestured my direction as if
I embodied this last “—and still they rise up against me in their ridiculous strikes. They force me to bring in the military simply to make them do their jobs.”

  “I see.”

  The truth was, I knew remarkably little about the job I’d signed on for. I’d heard vaguely of the project: a grandiose attempt to bore a rail tunnel for the Orient Express from just outside Brig in Switzerland all the way to Domodossola in Italy. Beyond that, though, I’d been focused on my own problems. There were men to be treated, and money to be made, all far off in the Alps somewhere. That had been enough.

  Von Kager waved the matter away irritably. “None of this is your concern. You will be taking charge of the hospital on the Swiss side. Whatever supplies you need will be provided, but your objective is to keep the men healthy and working. If I believe that you are encouraging them toward sloth, you will be dismissed without hesitation.” He waited, eyes boring into me.

  “Understood,” I said.

  He nodded sharply. “Good.”

  There came a knock at the door, and a man entered.

  He was beautiful. There was simply no other word for it. Taller than my own modest height by several inches, he was lean enough that corded muscles stood out on his bare forearms. Beneath streaks of gray dust, his hair was jet black, his eyes nearly so, and his skin a healthy olive. His features were sharp and angular, delicate without being effeminate.

  God have mercy.

  He stuck out a hand. “You must be Doctor Cantor, then. I’m Tom Halsham. Please to meet you.”

  His voice startled me so much I almost forgot to shake his hand. “You’re English!”

  The left half of Tom’s mouth quirked up—a scoundrel’s grin. The sort that made you feel like he was bringing you in on a secret.

  “Several of your countrymen have taken positions in my operation,” von Kager said. “Mister Halsham is our master of demolitions.”