“Lord of the blast men.” Tom’s smile widened. “Chief banger and firebug.” There was a smudge of grease along the left side of his jaw, as if he’d reached up to scratch his chin and hadn’t bothered to wipe it off.
“Mister Halsham will help you familiarize yourself with the camp. After that, your role will be solely in the hospital unless you are called for. Understood?”
Angled slightly so that von Kager couldn’t see him, Tom rolled his eyes.
“Perfectly,” I said.
“Come on, then.” Tom placed a hand on my arm and turned me toward the door. “Let me show you around.”
Von Kager made no goodbyes.
When we were safely outside the house, Tom gave a loud laugh and released my arm, slapping me lightly on the back. “He’s a barmy one, isn’t he?”
The tension of von Kager’s office left me in a rush, replaced by a new sort, and I found myself returning his smile. “He seems more like a prophet than an engineer. Or maybe an mad emperor.”
“Around here, he’s all three.” Tom looked me up and down. “So you’re the new doctor, eh? Tell the truth, I thought you’d be older.”
Tom couldn’t have been more than thirty himself, and I’d have been hard pressed to guess which of us was the senior. “You’re not the first,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe how often an old woman’s refused my treatment, demanding to see someone with spectacles and a beard.”
Tom laughed again. It was such an easy sound for him, so natural. I felt myself standing up straighter in response, growing more confident.
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that here. Most of the men will be happy just to have someone who knows what he’s doing. The last doctor was a Swiss bloke who seemed to think laxatives were a panacea.” He touched my shoulder again. “Come on, let me show you the dig.”
We walked through the camp, toward where the rail line disappeared into the earth. Above us, Mount Leone was too close to see as anything but a hunkered mass of stone, but I’d seen it well enough from the train: a craggy, pyramidal blade that thrust into the sky like an alpine ziggurat, brooding and picturesque.
“There’re about three thousand workers in total,” Tom said, gesturing to the rows of boxy wooden barracks. “Most Italian, but some Swiss in there as well.” He frowned. “More now that Kager’s brought in the military to put down the strikes.”
“He mentioned that. Have there been many?”
“A few,” Tom admitted. “Excavation’s a rough job, and this one more than most. Nobody’s ever bored a tunnel this long before. It’s dangerous.”
“The dust?” I had no idea how long the workers’ contracts ran, but it was easy to imagine that most of the men were afflicted with some degree of miner’s phthisis—the dreaded “black lung.”
Tom bobbed his head. “That’s part of it. But this dig’s had more trouble than most. A few years back, we hit a river—a goddamned river! The rock around it was all rotted out and kept collapsing on us no matter how much we timbered, and we only made it a hundred and fifty feet in six months. That was when von Kager started getting frantic. In the end, we had to encase that entire length of the tunnel in granite eight and a half feet thick.”
“Good lord.”
“You said it,” Tom agreed. “And then we started hitting the hot spots. You know much about mining, Doctor?”
“Nothing at all,” I said. “And please, call me William. Will’s even better.”
Another smile. “Will, then. Most folk presume that it’s cold underground—water out of a well’s cold, right? But once you get that much mountain on top of you, it insulates, trapping any geothermal heat, as well as heat generated by the dig itself. There are spots down there that hit a hundred and thirty. Some of the men think they’re drilling into Hell itself. No joke.”
“They’re superstitious, then?”
“All miners are superstitious. Comes with the territory. Take the hot springs we hit earlier this year—a near-boiling system of streams that flooded the tunnels so badly we had to put in gates and start pumping out into the rivers. But that wasn’t enough. Turns out there are big iron lodes down there, and the streams picked it up, turning the whole thing rust-red.” His grin widened. “Imagine you’re an Italian miner, Will. Suddenly the drill starts screaming and you’re awash up to your waist in scalding, red, metallic-tasting liquid. What would you think?”
Of course. “Blood.”
Tom chuckled. “Half of them were willing to face down the soldiers rather than go back in. ‘The mountain’s bleeding,’ they said. ‘We’ve wounded the lion.’ Fortunately, the engineers were able to get the pumps in place before Kager got truly desperate, but still—it’s a messy business, drilling through a mountain.”
We had exited the barracks and were now in the structures closest to the tunnel itself, buildings that resounded with shouts and engine hums and the clang of metal. Tom led me up the ramp to one of the largest structures. “Here,” he said, “you’ll find this interesting.”
Inside, the heat and humidity hit me like a wave. We were standing amid a forest of taut ropes—dozens of them, each padlocked to a bolt in the ground. Walkways and low benches cut through it at regular intervals. Looking up, I saw a series of large pipes running across the ceiling. The ropes were looped over these like pulleys, and from their ends dangled a tremendous number of shirts, trousers, and small bundles, creating a false ceiling of fabric several feet above our heads.
“What is it?”
Tom beamed. “It’s the workers’ clothes and possessions. Each of the shower houses has them. When a miner comes up out of the dig and rinses off the dust, he unlocks his rope, pulls down his clothes—all warm from the steam pipes—and sends up his wet mining clothes. By the time he comes back for his next shift, they’re dry again. Plus, it makes theft far more difficult.”
“Ingenious,” I said, and meant it.
“Thank you.”
I took another look at his smile, and it clicked. “You invented this?”
Tom nodded proudly. “Von Kager wasn’t keen on it to begin with, but when I explained that wet clothes would make the workers sick, he came around quick enough.” He laughed. “He’s a strange one, but he’ll do anything to make the tunnel go faster.” He led me over to one of the large canvas flaps that opened into the rest of the building. “We’ve got both hot and cold showers so that the workers coming off-shift don’t go straight from the heat of the tunnel to the chill of the alpine air.”
He lifted the canvas, revealing a large, steaming shower room filled with men in various states of undress, the dust sluicing off them in thick gray rivulets. I struggled to maintain a purely clinical eye.
“Yes, of course,” I said. “Very sensible.”
“I thought so,” Tom said, and let the flap drop. The corner of his mouth was still twisted up in a hint of a smirk.
He led me out of the shower building and turned me back toward the heart of the camp. As he did, I caught sight once more of the tunnels themselves, both the main bore and the smaller ventilation shaft to its right, both yawning like the throats of great beasts.
Tom followed my gaze. “I don’t expect you’re interested in touring the tunnels themselves? Six miles of dark is a bit much for some people.”
I shook my head, relieved, then asked, “Only six? I thought the tunnel was supposed to be twelve miles long.”
Tom nodded. “It is. We’re only half the operation over here. The rest of the men are drilling from the Italian side. We should meet in the middle in less than a year.” He extended a finger on each hand and brought their tips together. “Right smack in the center of the mountain.”
“Ah,” I said, embarrassed at my ignorance. “Of course.”
Another touch on the center of my back. “No problem, Doctor. I doubt you’ll so much as set foot in the dig while you’re here. Like Kager said, your job is elsewhere. And having said that …”
He walked me back through the makeshift
town, pointing out the mess hall, the commissary, and other notable landmarks. At last we stood in front of the hospital. Before entering, I paused to pull out my pipe for a smoke—and stopped short.
“Damn,” I said. “My matches are in my luggage. David took them to my quarters.”
“Here.” Tom produced a pack and tossed them to me. I tamped and lit, then attempted to hand them back, but Tom put his hands in the air.
“Keep them.” He pointed at his chest. “Blaster, remember? I’ve got more fire than I know what to do with.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thank you.”
There was a pause.
“Right, then,” Tom said. “Be seeing you around, I suspect.”
“Be seeing you,” I agreed, but Tom had already turned and begun walking away.
As the weeks rolled on, I got to know several of the other Englishmen in the camp. I was also surprised to find that David, the young Swiss soldier who had greeted me, was absolutely passionate about cards, with a good humor that remained intact even when he was losing terribly. Yet as much as these acquaintances flourished, I still found myself associating primarily with Tom, when I wasn’t busy with the hospital.
The hospital: Two long rows of beds, with thirty-two in total. Thirty-two beds for fifteen hundred men. The medical supplies were well stocked, but my nurse and orderlies were all Swiss, and like von Kager did little to hide their casual disdain for the uneducated Italian workers. Not exactly a welcoming place to convalesce.
Fortunately, injuries had been light. I was given to understand that the early days of the dig had been terrible—a constant parade of shattered limbs and blackened lungs—but the five years since had given time for safety systems to be improved and ingrained, and the use of water with the drills cut down greatly on the dust.
Most of my patients spoke no English, forcing me to rely entirely on my Swiss orderlies to translate, yet on one particular day I had just taken over splinting a broken leg when the patient surprised me by thanking me in my own tongue.
“You speak English?” I asked.
“Solo un po’.” He gave a gap-toothed smile. “A little.”
“Better than most,” I said, and dismissed the orderly, happy for the chance to communicate directly for once. I cast about for some common ground, then noticed the old rust-colored stains smudging the lower half of his uniform. “Were you here when they broke through onto the hot springs? That must have been a sight.”
His smile disappeared, and I realized I’d blundered straight into the Italian superstition Tom had warned me about.
“Is not right,” the man said, shaking his head.
“What—the tunnel?”
He nodded. “Tunnel bad. Mountain bad.” He reached for a word. “Cursed.”
“I see.”
“Leone sleeps,” he pressed. “Bad to wake. Tunnel wake.”
“Were you one of the strikers, then?”
He frowned, then bobbed his head again. He pointed to the bridge of his nose, and I noticed the telltale bump of a poorly healed break. “We try. Kager no listen.”
“So why stay?”
He looked at me like I was an idiot. “Contract,” he said. “We—” Then he cut off, his expression contorting to one of unambiguous loathing.
I turned and found Hugo von Kager standing in the doorway, glowering.
“Doctor Cantor,” he said. “I see you’ve already encountered the ingratitude of our workforce.”
Behind me, the worker moved to stand. I put one hand on his shoulder and shoved him firmly back down. “They’re just stories, Director.”
“Stories have a way of causing delays,” von Kager said. “Setbacks. I can do little to stop these … people—” he glared at the Italian “—from spreading their rumors, but I trust that you and your staff are above such things.”
“You have nothing to worry about,” I said honestly.
“That’s for me to decide,” von Kager said. Then he turned and disappeared out the door.
Four months in, I finally broke.
Tom and I had eaten dinner together as usual, and when a discipline issue among the soldiers removed David from the evening’s plans, Tom and I had foregone cards in favor of splitting a bottle of halfway decent brandy. When all that remained in the bottle was the smell, we’d tossed it and gone for a walk up the side of the mountain, in search of a point where Tom said he often went to think and get away from the noise and stink of the other men.
We spent the better part of an hour following game trails and scrabbling up scree fields in a most undignified fashion—made even less dignified by the hot liquor sloshing in our bellies—but at last we reached the overlook. Here the trees stopped short of a little ledge, a solid slab of rock projecting up and out of the mountain’s side. My natural—and in my opinion, sensible—aversion to heights kept me well back from the edge, but Tom would have none of it. He grabbed my arm and pulled me out till our toes fairly hung over the drop.
Below us, the mountain fell away. Down in the valley, the lights of the mining camp glowed like a fire died to embers, yet the sound of it was swallowed up by the night, the mountain catching it and reflecting it back. From up here, it was at once immediate and impossibly distant, like the stars themselves. As above, so below.
“Wow,” I said.
“Amazing, isn’t it?” Tom turned toward me, face a charcoal sketch in the starlight. “I thought you’d like it.”
Suddenly I realized just how close we were standing—arms almost touching, close enough for me to smell the sweat of his climb up the trail.
Then we were kissing, hard, heedless of the empty space inches from our feet. My fingers buried themselves in that black hair, grabbing, pulling him in. His mouth was on mine, then on my neck, then my shoulder, then—
Mouths. Hands. Warmth. A release that peeled me inside out.
Afterward, we lay on a bed of our jackets, curled together with his arms wrapping me up from behind. The warmth of us radiated out into the alpine sky.
To my shame, I began to cry.
“Damn,” I whispered, “damn damn damn.”
“Shh.” Tom’s breath was soft and hot in my ear. He stroked the hair on my temple. “It’s okay.”
“I tried so hard.” My breath came in little ragged hiccups. “How did you know?”
Tom laughed quietly, but it was a kind laugh. He leaned over me so that I could see his face. “You had the look of someone who was running from something. And, well … some things just don’t stay buried.”
“They should,” I whispered.
“No, they shouldn’t.” Tom’s body tensed. “Things are what they are, and just because you won’t let yourself look at them doesn’t mean they aren’t there. You can’t spend your whole life hiding from the truth.” Then he relaxed and smiled. “Who was he?”
“A patient.” The words were out before I could stop them, and even as they left my mouth, they tugged the rest with them—a long chain sliding up out of my gut. “At Saint Francis’s, the hospital where I worked in London. I had never … but he knew, too.” I closed my eyes, not wanting to see any of it. “He was a minister. The papers picked up on it. My family, the other doctors—everybody knew. The patient—Charles—took a position in India somewhere. I never saw him again. But I still had to live with it. When a friend told me about the tunnel project, it seemed like the best thing for everyone. A fresh start.” The tears redoubled. “And now I’ve gone and done it again.”
“No,” Tom said firmly, taking my chin and turning my face toward him. “We did it. And what we do is no business of anybody but us. Do you understand? Out here, we’re our own men.”
Even through my tears, the word we sent a little shiver of excitement through me. I swallowed hard. “Do you really believe that?”
“I do,” he said, and leaned down to kiss me. It was softer this time, without urgency or need. Just a kiss, but if anything it warmed me more, flooding my veins.
It went on for a lo
ng time. Finally he pulled back.
“Do you want this?” he asked.
I thought of the pack of matches he’d given me my first day, how I’d secretly refused to use them after that, instead carrying them around with me like a talisman. I felt the square of them in my pocket, pressing against my thigh, and knew I’d already made my choice.
“Yes.” The rush of the word was so powerful, I said it again. “Yes.” Then, more hesitantly: “But this has to stay between us.”
“What, you don’t want to notify the papers?” He chuckled, then drew me close again, pressing my face into his shoulder and his own into the top of my head.
“Between us,” he said. “Just you, me, and the mountain.”
Tom and I spent our nights together as often as we dared, which was as often as our shifts lined up—roughly every three days.
While we continued to eat together, either alone or with other friends for the sake of appearances, we didn’t dare spend time in each other’s quarters. Tom’s bunk was one of several in a barracks shared with three of his men. As the head of medicine at the camp, my quarters were more private—a cramped little one-room cottage with a bed so close to the stove that the blanket was studded with spark burns—but my position meant that anyone might come knocking on my door in the middle of the night. We didn’t dare risk it.
Instead, Tom was his usual resourceful self. As blasting master, he was the only person other than von Kager with a key to the explosives storage bunker, a cinderblock affair set on the tunnel side of camp but far enough way from any other structures to protect it from the threat of fire—and us from being overheard. There, in the midst of enough dynamite to bore a hole to China, he built a little nest of pillows and blankets stolen from the commissary. It was cold, and dark, and smelled of chemicals and cement.
It was wonderful.
Lying in the dark, or perhaps with a lantern turned to the lowest guttering flame, we would talk for hours—about our pasts, our families, our philosophies, or anything at all.
“Geology?” I asked one night, long after we’d snuffed the lantern on the pretense of going to sleep. “I figured you for chemistry.”
Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey Page 24