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

by Dennis Detwiller

  “Why? Because I like to blow things up?” Tom laughed. He’d spent hours telling me about the blasting process, the placement of bore holes and careful timing of fuses. “There’s something to be said for chemistry, sure—a blasting master ought to know what he’s working with. But all these explosives are standardized, manufactured in factories somewhere.” His body jostled, and I knew he was gesturing to the boxes around us. “What a blasting master really needs to know is rock. Recognizing the different types of stone, how it’ll shear, how much shaking a tunnel’s ceiling can take before it comes down on your head. It’s not even enough to know the stone—you have to love it.”

  I laughed. “You love stones?”

  His hand, splayed across my stomach, spidered its way lower, and I imagined I could hear his grin. “I thought that was obvious.”

  I batted at him. “No, really—what’s so fascinating about rocks?”

  He gave me a squeeze and reluctantly released his hold. His hands fluttered in the dark.

  “It’s the fractals—patterns that repeat themselves no matter how close you look. Like when you get up close to some trees, you see that each branch has its own smaller branches that look similar, and each of those has branches that look similar—”

  “I’m aware what fractals are, Tom.”

  “Right,” he said, embarrassed. “Anyway, that’s what I love about stone. The patterns. Break a rock down, you get smaller rocks with similar shapes and properties. Push them together, you get a mountain, still with the same properties.” He sighed. “Learn enough about rocks, you understand the whole world.”

  “Oh, you understand everything, do you?” I grabbed his hands and pushed my face close to his. “So surely you understand this?”

  And then there were no more words.

  Shifts never ended early—not under von Kager’s direction. And so it was with great surprise that I looked out the hospital window and saw men streaming through the streets with the shift change still three hours off.

  Fear gripped me. Despite the excitement of my midnight assignations with Tom, the last several weeks had found me filled with an increasing sense of foreboding, a creeping dread all out of proportion to any actual risk. My first thought upon seeing the crowd of workers was that there must have been some sort of disaster—a collapse, another subterranean river that flooded the tunnel, smashing men against the stone or boiling them alive. Tom’s perfect body, battered and broken.

  But no—while some of the men in the street looked confused, no one was racing to tell me to prep the surgery. Once it became clear that whatever was going on wouldn’t require my services, I left the hospital in the charge of one of the orderlies and went to find Tom.

  He met me halfway to his barracks, grinning wide. His hair was still damp from the showers.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “The damndest thing,” he said. “Not halfway through the shift, we broke through into a cavern. Crazy place—all these black crystals, like obsidian but in the wrong shapes, growing out of the stone in prism clusters like quartz. Almost like a geode.”

  “Sounds beautiful,” I said. “But why’s everyone come up? Von Kager will have a fit.”

  “That’s the strange part!” Tom punctuated the point with a raised finger. “Every time we’ve run across a cavern or river in the past, all Kager’s wanted to know is how much time it’s saved or cost us. I swear, if we found Buckingham Palace down there, he’d expect us to cross the courtyard and keep drilling. So we send a runner up to let him know and keep working. But halfway through setting the next charges, in runs Himself with a dozen soldiers! He takes one look at the place and orders us all out. All work is suspended until he says otherwise. He wouldn’t even let me pull the charges we’d prepped!”

  Tom’s wide eyes were eager for me to share the excitement. Von Kager never went down into the tunnel, and the idea of him halting the dig for anything less than the Second Coming was unbelievable.

  “So what you’re saying is that you’ve got nowhere to be for the next few hours.”

  A look of surprise, and then that easy smile again. “I guess you could say that.”

  Neither of us made it to the mess hall for dinner that night. Somehow, once we were tucked away in the bunker, the idea of leaving it for anything—even food—seemed like a terrible waste. So we talked, and dozed, and made love, and let the rest of the world fade away.

  I woke to pitch blackness, unsure what had jolted me so firmly out of my dreams. Then the sound came again. Footsteps on gravel. Coming closer.

  “Tom!” I hissed, grabbing his shoulder and shaking him awake. “Tom, someone’s coming!”

  Tom jerked awake, and we both froze. Outside, the boots—one man, by the sound of it—continued to approach.

  Tom was the only person who could approve the use of explosives, and all distribution of such equipment happened on his shift. There was no reason at all for anyone to be here.

  No reason but us.

  It was happening all over again. They’d find us, and then everyone would know. We’d be sent away—if they didn’t just hang us. The Italians were devout Catholics, and everyone knew God’s judgment on Sodom.

  A match burst to life, and then Tom was on his feet, balling clothes and blankets around the dark lantern and flinging the whole mass behind a stack of crates.

  “Come on!” He grabbed my hand and pulled me back behind a rack of blasting caps and dynamite packed in straw-filled boxes. He pulled me down with him, wrapping me protectively in his arms, just as the match burned down and went out.

  Keys rattled outside. A surprised grunt at the missing lock. Then the door swung open, and light flooded in.

  Von Kager stood in the doorway, one arm holding a lantern high, the other clutching the massive leather-bound book I’d noticed in his office. Instead of his waistcoat and trousers, he was dressed in some sort of dark robe, like a priest’s cassock, but with a hood drawn partway up, leaving only the front half of his head exposed.

  I held my breath as his eyes swept the room. I felt naked, exposed, the rack of boxes a laughably inadequate shield. At any second, his eyes would lock on mine, and then it would be over.

  His gaze reached the gap from which I peered out—and moved on. Satisfied, he set down the lantern and stepped away from us, toward the coiled fuses. He selected several, slipping their loops over his shoulder. Then he recovered the lantern and left, closing the door behind him. Outside, gravel crunched once more, growing fainter.

  Suddenly the darkness seemed crushing. My breath escaped in a rush, and struggled to sit up, Tom obligingly moving aside and lighting another match.

  “He’s gone!” I was grinning now, adrenaline filling me. Match-light painted Tom’s face in sharp lines, and in that moment there was nothing I wanted more than to pull him back down to the floor and make love to him again.

  But Tom wasn’t paying attention. He was inspecting the rack of fuses.

  “Tom?”

  “What was he doing?” Tom lifted up a coil like those von Kager had taken. “These are ten-second fuses.”

  “So? He didn’t see us!”

  Tom went to the door and cracked it, peering out. “He’s going into the tunnel.”

  “Who cares? It’s his tunnel!”

  Tom turned and frowned at me. “His tunnel? He may make the plans, but I’m the blasting master. Nothing goes bang without my say-so. So what’s he doing with fuses? And why was he wearing that robe-thing?” He began tugging on his clothes. “Come on, get dressed.”

  “Why?” The rush was fading, replaced by jitters at how close we’d come, and a growing resentment for Tom clearly not feeling the same way.

  Tom looked at me, and at last gave a tight version of his usual grin. “Because you’re going down the tunnel after all.”

  The darkness of the tunnel was at once claustrophobically close and unimaginably vast, at times threatening to smother me, at others to send me spinning off into an endless v
oid. I clung to Tom’s arm, him and the whine of the mining cart’s motor the only things tethering me, keeping me from floating away into the nightmare nothing.

  “There,” Tom said, and killed the motor. Suddenly I realized that one of the phantom spots of light floating before my eyes was no illusion—up ahead, a pinprick of light must be the lamp von Kager’s own cart. Tom had disabled ours before following into the tunnel, and now I understood why. Down here, even a candle would stand out like a signal flare.

  Tom helped me out of the cart, and together we crept down the last of the tunnel, Tom explaining in whispers how to navigate by keeping one foot tight against the rails of the track. After a few minutes, we were close enough to clearly see von Kager’s empty cart. Beyond it, the tracks ended, the stone turning rougher, the walls less reinforced.

  “Quiet, now.” Carefully, Tom lit our lantern, banking it back to the softest glow, then took my wrist and led me down the last of the unfinished tunnel.

  We didn’t have far to go. As soon as we saw another flicker of light ahead, Tom set down our lantern, and we crept the rest of the way in the dark, moving by feel.

  The light came from a huge crack in the wall, a jagged rent large enough for several men. Crouching on the pile of crumbled stone that had yet to be carted out, we peered through.

  Inside, clusters of black crystals the size of police boxes caught the light from von Kager’s lamp and reflected it around the room. The chamber was easily forty feet tall, a slightly recessed floor with a great glassy dome of a ceiling overhead.

  Von Kager knelt on the right side of the room, before the largest of the crystalline growths, a faceted pyramid climbing twenty feet up the chamber’s wall. His robes, dyed in strange swirls of purple and black, spread out around him in a puddle on the stone, and the massive book lay splayed open at his side. To his left sat the lantern, blazing brighter than it had any right to, as blinding and blue as a magnesium lamp.

  He was manipulating something on the floor before him, and as he raised up part of it I realized it was one of the stolen fuses, uncoiled and woven into a loose knot several feet across. He shifted, and I felt a sudden pang as I recognized the knot’s pattern of interlocking lines from the giant map behind his desk.

  Satisfied, von Kager sat back and touched a match to the end of the fuse. The cord burst to life, spitting and sparking, the flame marching steadily down its allotted path, tracing the burning sigil onto the floor.

  “The time for sleep has passed.” Von Kager’s words echoed off the crystals. The man’s voice had always been strong, but now it was something more. The voice of a preacher.

  “Hear me, dreamer! You that fell from Chaos in the time before time. You that have lain beneath the mountain. You that have heard the piping of the blind god’s court, and who bear his essence. You are the seed, and this world your garden. Awaken!”

  A crack reverberated through the chamber, followed by another. And another. Crystal splintered and fell to the floor like a rain of stars, chiming against the stone.

  Something inside the wall was stirring.

  “Behold the seed!” Kager intoned. “Behold the scion of the Throne of Chaos!”

  With a sound like a thousand windows breaking, the crystal wall shattered, exploding outward in a blast of needles that knocked von Kager backward. He struggled to his knees once more, the blood of a dozen punctures clearly visible on his hands and face, and began to laugh.

  “He comes!” he yelled. “He comes!”

  And in front of him, something emerged from the wall.

  It was huge—easily fifteen feet tall, and nearly as wide. It was humped and distended, a mass of red and yellow flesh like fatty tissue split by a surgeon’s knife, and yet at the same time there was something weirdly familiar about its shape. It rose in a quivering ziggurat, expanding and contracting rhythmically like some hideous organ, and towered over von Kager, who continued to laugh.

  “Master!” he called.

  And that’s when my hand slipped, sending a stone clattering down into the chamber.

  Von Kager whirled, spinning to fix his gaze on the crack where we perched.

  “You!”

  “Bloody hell,” Tom said.

  Above von Kagur, the mountainous thing split open like the petals of a flower, half a dozen glistening lips peeling back and down. Attached to the inside tip of each was a long, thick tendril like a rope of intestine. As Tom and I watched in horror, the thing drew forth loop after twitching loop, writhing them high into the air.

  “Run!” I shouted, shoving Tom backward into the tunnel.

  A tentacle shot across the room toward me, its tip the bulging circle-toothed mouth of a lamprey, but with the hideous dark orb of an eye in its center. The ring of jaws slammed into my shoulder, shearing through cloth and into the flesh beneath, then yanked me forward into the chamber.

  “Will!” Tom launched himself back through the cavern entrance, stumbling down the incline after me as my body hurtled through the air. Just when I thought the creature might be intending to slam me into the forest of crystals on the ceiling, the tentacle released me. There was the briefest moment of weightlessness, of gratitude for this small mercy. Then the ground rose up to meet me, and all my faculties were devoted to learning how to breathe again.

  Somewhere, Tom might have been screaming my name, but my ears were too full of the sound of my impact to tell for sure.

  My eyes refocused to find von Kager between Tom and me, his lips shifting in one imprecation or another. Above him, his monstrosity lurched, tentacles snapping downward.

  Tom never missed a stride. Each time one of the horrifying mouths came slamming down, he jerked to the side at the last moment, the teeth tearing red furrows down his side but unable to find purchase. Still, his eyes refused to leave mine.

  Von Kager moved to meet him, arms wide. Tom continued to run straight toward him—then at the last minute dropped low and to the right. He snatched up von Kager’s lantern from the crystalline floor and spun.

  The heavy steel lantern smashed into the big man’s jaw. Blood and glass flew as the left side of von Kager’s face crumpled around the object. He went down.

  “Will!” My hearing returned in a rush as Tom dove for me, grabbing my hand. “We’ve got to get out of here. We—”

  That’s when it took him. Too nimble for the tentacles while running, Tom had stopped for me. His body shuddered and jerked as they slammed into his back, each impact the meaty thunk of a butcher’s cleaver. His eyes widened. The tentacles lifted him off his feet.

  It was impossible to tell where his scream stopped and mine began. A perfect union of sound, only gradually resolving into words.

  “The charges!” he screamed. “Light the charges!”

  Then the tentacles tore him apart.

  Something broke inside me, then. As the blood of my lover rained down, his pieces drawn into that terrible, petaled maw, my mind refused to give way, to release me into the easy black of unconsciousness. Instead, it focused on his words.

  The charges. Tom was setting the charges when von Kager called them out.

  I lifted myself to my feet and ran.

  There, opposite the cavern’s entrance—holes drilled in the wall in neat intervals, each with a fuse extending from it. I grabbed the whole handful where they came together into a single fat fuse and pulled hard.

  Dirty gray sticks of explosive shot out of their burrows, leaving me holding a tangled medusa’s head of little cylindrical plugs. Ignoring the long safety fuse, I drew out my matches—Tom’s matches—and scratched them to life. Flame kissed the fuses where the strands met and began the careful climb down to their individual ends.

  Across the room, the monstrosity had lurched over to the burned fuse-symbol. As it loomed above the sign, the spent cord blazed back to life, this time with unearthly violet flame that grew steadily as it bounced from crystal to crystal, filling the room with a terrible glow. Above it, the tentacles began to weave themselves
in a matching sign, humming with a high tone that buzzed in my bones. The creature seemed to drink in the light, growing larger.

  One tentacle turned to look at me.

  I wanted to say something. To tell the creature what it had taken from me. From the world.

  I dropped the explosives and ran for the tunnel.

  Behind me, the world exploded.

  Nobody sits with me in the coffee shop. That’s how I prefer it. Even after more than a year in Brig, I still don’t speak the language. Some of the staff know English, but my poor German is a convenient excuse for us to ignore each other.

  Across the street and the stretch of grass that separates us, the Orient Express makes its chugging way down the track, right on time. Brig Station is the last stop before the tunnel, and so it’s barely picked up speed as it slides past, sleek and modern. The faces of the idle rich press against the glass in the carriage windows, staring back at the dour man in the coffee shop window, turning a worn pack of matches over and over in his hands.

  The tunnel was finished, of course. The accident that caved in the crystal cavern and left me half-senseless on the floor of the tunnel was never really examined. When the workers threatened to strike once more rather than burrow through tons of treacherous—some said cursed—rubble, the new project head simply routed around it. On 24 February, 1905, the two tunnels met. Dignitaries shook hands. Champagne was popped.

  Everyone has left. Even David, who stayed on with me a while after the tunnel’s completion, has been recalled to his unit. I think he knew about Tom and me. Maybe he did from the beginning.

  Tom. Sometimes I think about what he said on our first night together, about things not being able to stay buried, about not being able to hide from the truth. I’d wanted so badly to believe him then, despite my fear. Maybe I still do.

  And maybe if I hadn’t, I’d have more of him now than just a pack of matches.

  Mostly, though, I think about the mountain. I look up at it, looming over the little town, and remember what Tom said about the fractal nature of things, how a part can be representative of a whole.