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

by Dennis Detwiller

The train whistle sounded to depart as she arrived. She bolted along the platform, brushing past guards who tried to stop her, and threw herself aboard the last carriage as the wheels turned and clacked. She fell face-first to the floor. The passengers turned in silence in their seats to regard her. They had all changed since the last time she had been here. She knew none of them.

  She picked herself up and hurried along the aisles to the sleeping car. She needed quiet to gather her scattered self. The backpack zip was broken, and the flap gaped with each step, like a mouth. A black glob of Vegemite was smeared on the lip.

  She burst into the compartment. The blank faces of four total strangers confronted her. “But—but—this is mine,” she told the girl in the lower left bunk, whose soft, damp face was perched incongruously on top of a vast kaftan.

  The strangers were puzzled. She showed them her ticket. Then they were sympathetic. They pointed out the date. She thought she had been gone only overnight. She had been in Zagreb five days. Her train had left without her.

  They were Londoners, with stiff, blank faces and clipped voices. The girl was Alice. The men wore tie-dye T-shirts, denim bell-bottoms, and Chelsea boots. They were going to Istanbul to smoke hashish and then head farther east. Oh, how she envied their straight-forwardness. They laughed and sang. They had friends in the compartment next door. They shared joints and a battered paper-back of The Lord of the Rings. They drank gin. They befriended her. Whenever they saw the conductor coming they sent her to the toilet to hide.

  The toilet was horrible. It stank. The cubicle was a dark, enclosed space. The window was boarded up but a little light reflected from the tarnished mirror. The toilet had no seat. Some boards were missing from the floor and she watched the gravel of the train tracks roll hypnotically beneath. The door would not lock. She kept it closed by bracing herself against the handle, with one foot wedged against the base of the toilet, one against the basin stand.

  That night Alice let her share the bunk. They slept head to toe. The train ran beside a road. The streetlights filtered in racks through the slats of the thin blinds, over and over again. Even in her sleep the thin, repetitive, winking light mesmerized her. It was like an epileptic dream.

  When she woke before dawn she was alone. She thought her companions had left the train but then she saw their packs and belongings were scattered around the compartment. A bottle of gin lay spilled by the door.

  The Londoners came back once it was light. They entered the compartment in a huddle, as though numbers gave them strength. Their faces were white and strained. They would not look at her directly. They grabbed their belongings and returned to the compartment next door.

  Alice lingered in the doorway.

  “Did I scare you?” she asked Alice.

  “I am not scared of you,” Alice said, softly.

  What had they seen last night? She could guess: Daddy sitting upright on the bunk. That rictus grin.

  One of the men came back and caught Alice’s arm. He spoke softly. She heard “crazy bitch” and “bad trip” before he led Alice away. She was alone again but she was used to that.

  Rain fell endlessly, blurring the windows. The train ran through wild mountain peaks and steep valleys where trees had been felled and left to rot where they lay. Then the tracks ran across a desolate plain with concrete outcrops where cement factories poured filthy smoke into the gray sky.

  At midday, Bulgarian customs guards boarded on the train.

  She rushed for the toilet but a guard stood in front of it. “Passport please,” he said. He was a thickset, ugly man with a pockmarked face and a spotless uniform of shiny, green serge. A machine-gun swung at his hip. She turned to run the other way, but guards blocked the passage behind her.

  She walked slowly to her compartment, the guard behind her. She handed her passport over. He looked at it and frowned. He had a peasant face, suspicious and bewildered. He carried a clipboard that he laboriously consulted. He spelled his letters aloud as he wrote. He picked up her pack and rummaged within. He drew out the Jar.

  “Vegemite,” she said. Useless. She was behind the Iron Curtain. He had never heard of the breakfast spread. He looked at her blankly then his face closed over in suspicious stupidity. She mimed eating. “Yum yum,” she said.

  He set down his papers and unscrewed the Jar. He took a sniff and reared back, wrinkling his nose. What if he took a taste? She bit back a wild, hysterical laugh.

  There were loud voices from the next compartment. “You can’t do that. We’re British!” There was the sound of a scuffle and a heavy thump. Alice screamed, shrill and high.

  Her guard dropped the Jar and left the compartment, heading to her neighbor. She did not wait for him to return. She grabbed her belongings, fled to the toilet, and braced the door. She heard more shouts, in English and Bulgarian, and then the sounds of a fight. More guards piled in, then a line of heavy bodies thumped past the toilet and onto the platform. She did not venture out until the train started moving again.

  She slid into her own compartment. She wondered if the guards had taken all the Londoners away. After she sat down she heard a muffled, continuous moaning through the thin timber partition between the compartments. Someone was still there. She rooted through her pack for something to help but found nothing to give.

  The train traveled across Bulgaria in fits and starts. It was shunted aside for hours not once but twice. The moans and sobs continued from next door. At last the wretched day darkened. She lay down and closed her eyes, willing for time to pass quickly.

  She wished the moaning would stop. Surely the injured man must sleep.

  Yet the moans sounded so near, as if he were lying with her in the bunk, his hoarse breathing whistling in and out. She stiffened. Rank breath poured over her. She was sure that a thing crouched over her, one bloody hand on her shoulder, moaning softly and constantly in her ear.

  She woke with a start. Moonlight came through the slats in her thin blinds. Nothing leaned over her. She gave a great gasp of relief, swung herself upright, and switched on the light.

  There was nothing in her compartment, and no sound from next door.

  Her mouth was dry. She headed for the toilet. The cubicle had got worse in the night. The stench had redoubled. The bowl was clogged and overflowing with filth. Stinking liquid crept across the floor. She turned on the tap. Brown fluid trickled out. Gagging, she looked up. A huge, bloody palm-print was smeared on the polished glass of the mirror, three times her own hand-span.

  She reeled out and staggered to her compartment. A glance at the compartment next door revealed a figure standing behind the frosted glass, a bulky, shadowed shape with hanging head.

  She had slipped inside her own compartment before she realized the shadow was too large, and had stood too still, to be a living human being. Her mind flew back to the bloody handprint. She mustered all her courage and stepped into the corridor. The shadow was gone. She raised a hand to knock on the glass then bit her lip and backed off. She had nothing to give them. They would not want to see her again.

  The train reached the Turkish border in the night. The next morning she opened the blinds to blinking brightness. Minarets greeted her dazzled sight, and a great swathe of blue sea shone along the horizon. With a final, weary wheeze and whistle, the train shuffled into Sirceki Terminal five hours late. She had reached Istanbul, the end of the line.

  She heard a stir from next door; a sickly scuttle. She couldn’t let the injured man fend for himself. She slung her pack over her shoulder and stepped into the corridor before the pane of frosted glass. She braced herself for rejection and knocked.

  There was no response.

  “Do you need any help?” she asked. No answer.

  A conductor hurried past behind her, a lanky man with dapper hair. She stopped him.

  “The people—” she pointed “—here.”

  “They were taken from the train in Bulgaria,” he said, in perfect English.

  “What—all?’
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  “All.” He unlocked the door. The compartment was empty, the bed stripped and luggage gone. There was a bloodstain on one pillow but it was old and brown. She stared, befuddled.

  “Was it locked all the time?” she asked stupidly.

  He was eyeing her carefully, clearly failing to recognize her as a fare-paying passenger. “Were they friends of yours?” he asked.

  “No. No,” she shrank backward. If the Londoners had all left, then who had moaned in her ear and stood with hanging head behind the locked door?

  She ran from the train.

  The solidity of the platform felt unreal after the constant rocking of the wheels. The air was full of an unfamiliar softness and warmth. She could smell the sea, and see the salt glitter in the air. The amplified roar of a thousand minarets called the faithful to mid-morning prayer.

  Sirkeci Terminal was a grandiose dream built in the style of an imagined Orient. Its red and white patterned walls were inset with arches topped with round windows, and its clock tower resembled a minaret. She rushed down the platform without pausing to buy a drink, although her throat was tight with thirst. She hurried through the bustle of the departure hall, and stumbled out into the bright light of Ankara Street.

  Traffic ran in every direction between the canyons of buildings. The streets were a maze. A motorcyclist turned in front of her with a startling horn blast, forcing her to stumble back to avoid being struck. The cyclist mounted the pavement then roared off the wrong way up a one-way street. Pedestrians hustled past her. Turkish pop music blared from every shop front.

  Here I am in Istanbul, she thought. Just like Daddy wanted. Then she braced herself, and turned left.

  She walked down the street, dazed at her own daring, at every step expecting to be thrust back on her proper track. Nothing happened. She saw a café and went in, hoping her handful of francs would buy her a drink.

  She realized as soon as she was inside the cool dimness that she had made a mistake. Turkish men sat over coffee and hookahs and glared at her in surprise and contempt. Clearly only a Western infidel slut would ever dream of venturing into this sacred masculine space. The café was a long, low, dark room, with a beaded curtain at the back. Beyond the curtain she could see soft green light and hear a tormenting trickle of water. A garden and a fountain lay out there.

  “Drink,” she appealed to the waiter. He shook his basilisk head.

  The sound of water was torture. She stepped through the curtain at the back. The beads rattled against her face. She shut her eyes as she passed through and for a moment she was blind. When she opened her eyes she found herself in a small green oasis surrounded by a high brick wall. A long timber table was set amid green ferns and roses. In the dim green light strange birds were singing.

  At the table sat a skinned man, an écorché, a flayed figure, seven feet tall. She could see every exquisite detail of bone, muscle, and sinew. The scent of roses could not hide the reek of formaldehyde. On the table before the flayed figure lay a mummified crocodile.

  She thought they were anatomical figures until the crocodile twitched its tail. Then the flayed figure smiled and held up one huge, wet, red palm.

  She fled. She ran the length of the long, dark room, straight past the outraged men. She hurled herself from the doorway. She saved herself from flying into the traffic only by seizing hold of a lamp post, so that her force and velocity flung her around to face the café again. She was in time to see the door slam closed.

  She turned onto Yerebatan Street. It was downhill all the way. She hurried past old timber houses that had once been beautiful but were now derelict. Hungry machines were clawing them to splinters and combing through their timber bones. Bleached apartment blocks rose amid the rubble. The blocks were inhabited but unfinished, with wire mesh and struts poking from the crumbling concrete. Whole faces of the new buildings eroded away into dust. Dust blew in the hot wind and plastered her cracked lips.

  Two domes soared ahead, one rusty red, one cool and blue. The Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque. She quickened to a jog.

  She dreaded at any moment to be suddenly stopped, or worse that Daddy knew what she was doing and had devised a suitable punishment. She ran past the locked entrance to the Basilica Cistern. Discos Here Nightly—a gaudy, torn sign flapped in the hot wind. She found herself in a garden of parched trees and dust-covered grass.

  The great rust-red dome was now directly before her. It was surrounded by four smaller domes, each topped with azure copper and the slender spires of four minarets. She headed up the steps, through the great doors, and into the Hagia Sophia.

  She was stunned by a sense of vast architectural tranquility. She stood in an immense space bathed in distant, ethereal light. The soaring vault of the dome dwarfed the whispering crowds of tourists and touts. On the walls were gold-washed mosaics of Mother and Son, and six-winged Seraphim; the emperor Justinian held a mosaic model of the church while the empress Zoe, in gilt robes encrusted with jewels, held out a gilded scroll.

  For a moment she halted, awed. Peace everlasting. Then her neck cricked. She rolled a dry tongue around a dry mouth. She remembered. She hurried on.

  She climbed the stairs to the immense balcony that ran around the sides of the dome. A corner of the gallery was screened with temporary wire builder’s fencing, faced with orange plastic. She looked around to ensure she was alone, then tiptoed to the fence. She found a rip in the plastic and peeped within. Writing was carved into the stone wall, low down and to the left: Enrico Donaldo. Her heart soared. She had found the right place. It looked like a grave but it wasn’t. It was an eighteenth-century folly, a memorial to the blind and vindictive Venetian Doge who led the Fourth Crusade. It was built over a secret entrance but the architect had left clues for the initiated to follow. Take that, Daddy, she thought triumphantly.

  She tugged aside the concrete-weighted iron leg of the temporary fence and slipped inside. She knelt by the grave and pressed the corner of the marker. With a grating rumble the tombstone moved, pivoting vertically into the ground. She laid herself flat, thrust her pack through the gap, and gently let it drop. It landed below with a soft thump.

  The gap was just wide enough for her to slip through. She crawled in backward, feet first, hands clutching at the stone lip. Her feet groped for ground, but found none. She lowered herself carefully until her body was hanging from her hands. Then her grip slipped.

  With a shriek she fell half her own length. She landed on a smooth surface and rocked on both ankles, then collapsed to her knees. She slammed her hands down to stop her forehead smacking the stone.

  The stone slab overhead pivoted shut. All light was quenched. She slung her pack over her shoulder and groped her way down a narrow, circular set of stairs. It was claustrophobic, like descending a gullet, although there was a source of light below, faint and green. The circling stairs inspired dizziness as implacably as a whirling dervish. She stumbled, rather than stepped, down and down until she reached the bottom.

  A poisonous green luminescence came from fungus growing on the walls. The foxfire gave off just enough light to see by. A vast hall spread out before her. She took one step forward, then threw herself backward as the floor fell away into emptiness. She knelt and groped to find a vast pit. The glow of decomposition filled it like water. Foxfire lapped against the walls, revealing an expanse of mosaics.

  The mosaics were old, faced with porphyry and jade and gold; men and women. Giants. They were naked and their bare feet dangled, toes pointed, poised and confident. In their hands they held models of buildings, dungeons, and torture machines. They held tiny figures of the dead. They grinned implacably above the murdered, the staked, the tortured, and the skinned. She looked away. She had seen enough. She was in the Shadow Sophia all right.

  She skirted the poisonous green pit, warily, crawling. She squashed pulpy fungus beneath her palms and knees. Putrescent slime smeared her skin. She crept around the gulf, her back aching, her knees and palms raw. Slowly the weig
ht of her pack grew, crushing her, bearing her down until she slithered with her chin barely clear of the floor.

  Daddy had realized what she was doing at last. It was his weight pressing down on her from above. But he did not call a halt or order her to turn back. After the first agony of discovery, faint hope crept into her heart. Perhaps he could not. There was a bitter taint in her mouth. She tasted it, puzzled, a long time before she realized what it was.

  It was fear.

  Daddy was afraid.

  There was something in this place that even he could not face.

  She almost turned around and crawled straight back out. If Daddy was afraid she had no chance. Then she reached the far side of the pit. In the giddy rush of her relief she made the mistake of looking down. The mosaics on this side of the pit were recent. She saw a grinning man in Western suit and bowler hat holding a model train. There were the blue and gold carriages; she saw the rich people cavorting within. These were not the dalliances she had always imagined but the writhing contortions of the damned. She glanced at the last figure; just a look. The last figure had no skin or face.

  She turned her back to the pit and saw that she had reached the end of the hall. Floor, ceiling, and walls all converged and twisted into a monstrous corner, an angle that was at once obtuse and acute. It made her eyes ache and her brain burn just to look at it. At this angle all humanity ended. Tentacles of stone writhed. Fanged maws snarled open. Globes of leprous fungus hung from the jaws like slime, and dripped. One petrified tongue jutted from the corner, the center of a vision of cosmic chaos, with galaxies writhing around it. The root of the tongue fell away into the darkness of the utter abyss. She looked up, just once, to see that the glistening stone cacophony rose for as far as she could see. Then she looked down, grimly. She dropped her pack. She rummaged for the Jar and held it up, in offering.

  She hoped for one final triumph, for Daddy to plead and beg. She was disappointed. She thought she heard one whimper, far off. That was it.

  She placed the Jar upon the upward curve of the Tongue. The black and yellow gleamed incongruously amid the glistening green-tinged gloom.