Then it was gone.
She had placed it square. It could not have slipped. The only way for it to vanish was for the Tongue to writhe, to arch, for the stony jaws to gulp.
Time collapsed inward. The corner and its carvings were swallowed in an angle she could not comprehend with a sound beyond sound, a vast, fathomless, maddening roar. She understood at the last possible moment, turned and ran. This Shadow Sophia existed only for her. Now that it was no longer required, it was imploding into the Void. The bottom of the pit rose to meet her racing feet. Mosaics, gold, porphyry, and foxfire crumbled and collapsed. She fled back up the stairs. The stone gullet closed behind her, ceiling, steps, and walls crushed silently together like rotten teeth.
She reached the top and leaped for the pivoting gravestone with a breathless gasp of despair. To her relief, her clawing fingers held and the counterweight swung. She hauled herself up over the edge. Her feet dangled over wet stone fangs that snatched at her toes. She threw herself from the brink.
The gravestone swung closed behind her. She lay on her back, legs sprawled, gulping for air. She was so certain it was still day outside that it was a shock to realize it was night. Moonlight shone through the windows above. The interior of the Hagia Sophia was dark. The crowds were gone.
She pattered down the stairs and across the shadowed nave to the great doors, one small being beneath the immensity of the dome. She hauled at the doors, breaking her fingernails, until she realized they were locked. She darted to a small side door, pulled the bolt back and slipped outside. The night air was warm and scented with roses. A lamp post stood in a brave pool of light, gilding the dusty grass.
She ran straight to the lamp post and embraced the cold metal, rejoicing in the brightness.
The Hagia Sophia stood behind her, calm and eternal, no matter darkness or light. At last the numbness of the gulf fled. Exultation filled her. She had done it. Her sacrifice was accepted. Daddy was gone, for ever and ever. She had escaped. She had survived.
She slumped, boneless, and slid down the lamp post to lie at its iron foot, bathing in the pool of light. Daringly she let her thoughts leave the groove of years, jump the iron rail, and run wild in any direction they liked.
A distant, thin wail reached her ears: the whistle of a train. She remembered that the Orient Express departed Istanbul at midnight. She climbed to her feet. She was going to catch that train. She was going to see the Jubilee.
She trotted past the surreal, colored glow reflecting from the Nightly Disco thumping in the Basilica Cistern and along Yerebatan Street. It was uphill all the way and very steep. At first she moved from one lamp post to the next, bathing in each pool of light. Then she gained confidence and went steadily in a straight line.
The train whistle sounded again. It was later than she thought, and she could not miss this departure. As she turned onto Ankara Street she found strength for the last flight. Her arms were pistons, her legs were circles of steel. Each gasp of breath was an engine rasp.
She reached the white and red brick walls of Sirkeci Station, no longer her terminus, but the platform for her new beginning. The departure hall has dark and silent. There was no bustle, no one to take her ticket. Puzzled, she hurried onto the platform. The carriages gleamed blue and gold as kindly darkness hid their rusted age, but they were locked.
There were only two passengers on the platform. Waiting for the train. Waiting for her.
Her legs buckled but the paralysis of nightmare seized her and forced her upright.
The books said there would be ripples from the Act, spreading outward in a circle through time; some into the past and some into the future. Now the future was her past. It had always been too late.
The Skinless One gave her a loving smile and extended a wet red hand in welcome. In his other hand he held the Mims Sahis. The crocodile stood on its hind legs. Its black pebble eye surveyed her, unblinking, with all the brute, mindless indifference of the universe.
She opened her mouth to scream. All that came out was the shrill, demented whistle of the train.
STAINED WINDOWS
JOSHUA ALAN DOETSCH
I USED TO BE INSANE.
I got better.
The cure is worse than the disease. Cures are terrible things. They’re not chicken soup or twelve-step programs. Hello, my name is John and it’s been seven months since I last flayed a vagrant to see if monsters were hiding under his skin. I also have a drinking problem, but it’s not my worst trait, and it’s not the point.
This is the point:
I used to be mad.
But I got better.
The Orient Express rocks. I’m in a corridor. Must have lost myself staring out a window into the rushing black. I shake my head, humming the tune to a half-forgotten song that might have gone something like: “The fireflies jarred us all up.” How did I get here? The scenes of my life always just begin, but I fumble for what came before. Lost transitions. Fugitive hours.
The woman. The girl in green. Half a carriage ahead. Every step is a sway of her dress, the green of the deep sea, and a defiant bounce of her scarlet hair, cut in a flapper bob. How long have I been following her? I find a notepad in my pocket, but can no longer decipher the scribblings, the pages traced over with spirals, the nib of my pen stabbing, bleeding black ink through—page on page—the echo of spirals.
“Hey, aren’t you—?” A man squeezing by in the corridor. Australian from the accent. He uses my name, not the one on my passport. With a wink, he introduces himself as a fellow scoundrel in the brotherhood of larceny. If we had a secret handshake, this is where we’d perform it. We don’t.
“Pulled a few jobs myself,” he croons with onion breath. “But nothing like you. Can’t believe it. The man himself. The gentleman thief.”
He rambles on as she rambles away. He’s followed my career: the famous diamond in London, the bird statuette in San Francisco, the paintings from the impenetrable mansion of a French nobleman. Amazing! Brilliant! He even saved a few newspaper clippings. He asks for my autograph. We both chuckle. She’s getting away.
“What’s the secret?” he asks.
He means the big cons, the grand jobs—the flare and panache, being both famous and anonymous, a celebrity shadow—and vanishing from jail the one time it managed to embrace me. I try keeping the girl in green in view as she enters the next coach. All these encounters feel repeated, rehearsed. Everything is déjà vu. The universe teeters on the tip of my tongue. I mutter something about misdirection.
“Ah, right, too right,” my fan says. “You studied with them magicians and escapists, eh?”
“Escapologists,” I correct. I also studied with a voice actor, a contortionist, a professor of Japanese wrestling, a chemist, a forger, an art historian, and a pearl diver who could hold her breath for eleven minutes—all part of my methodical apprenticeship, years of self-discipline to be in all ways different from the thug looming before me. All he ever studied was the requisite force to make a club crack a skull.
I extricate myself from the brute. He nods, pointing at his nose conspiratorially. He’ll tell his friends he now knows the secret. “Misdirection,” he’ll say, which isn’t any more insightful than saying, “I know how it works: it’s a trick.” I smile encouragingly. He’ll be sleeping in striped pajamas within a month. He’s the guy they always catch to make society feel better, because they can’t catch me.
Misdirection is a truth, but it’s a tiny truth magicians let slip to feed the brains of laypeople, to make them fat and content. The dupe who thinks himself clever ceases the effort of being clever. See? The illusion’s the thing.
The real secret isn’t sleight of hand. It’s timing. To have the maneuver done before they perceive it’s doing—in the casual moments before: an opening joke, an introduction, or while taking off a jacket. Then comes the heightened instant. They hold their breath, cease to blink, knowing your hands are moving too fast for them to perceive. They try to figure how you slipped the po
ison into the lunch in front of them, when you’ve already put it in their breakfast. All that gaudy patter, pageantry, and spectacle—they just drown in that, and it does not matter how sharply they dissect it. Their intelligence is being used against them, in a circular motion, as they concoct complex plots and skullduggery to decipher.
But it’s already done. Already too late.
There are other secrets. Deep secrets. In my most recent performance, I stole a book in Istanbul. A special book. There are people after me. I really should not have opened that book. I saw the nighted worlds lurking in its pages. How, then, can I be sane?
I found the cure. I saw something. What did I see?
Cures are horrible things. Cures is an anagram for curse.
But please understand: I used to be as insane as they come. I used to stick thumbtacks through my tongue so that I could better explain the Truth to the weeping children whose beds I hid under.
I quicken pace in the wake of the girl in green.
Down the corridor. So many doors.
I like trains. All these disparate people—the diplomats, gunrunners, and spies; the somebodies, everybodies, and nobodies—from the world over, nothing in common but a rocketing roof for a mayfly moment.
Every door is a window, every window a story. Some leave their doors a hair open, and I feel obliged to look. Voyeurs. Aren’t we all?
A cracked door. A young couple argues. Newlyweds? A secret affair?
Another door. A woman sprawls in a chair, head thrown back with opiate moans, syringe gleaming in her hand like a dead pixie.
A closed door. Behind it, someone mutters, “The anachronisms. Oh, the anachronisms are compounding.”
A door opens. A dwarf peeks out, the metal submarine shape of a kazoo held between his lips. He looks one way, then the other, before his head flashes back inside. The door closes. The clicking of locks always sounds like a whispered dare to me. I can hear the membranophone nocturne playing within, ridiculous and sad.
I like windows. Fragments without context. In medias res. I remember my dream-plagued childhood, the hours staring out the passenger window of automobiles. But never stained windows—no—I recall the long Sundays at church, and how I hated the colored glass—pretty and opaque and stifling. I longed to hurl my hymnal through the painted panes and see what lay beyond.
A porter knocks on a door and delivers a carafe of mineral water to an old, regal woman in furs.
“This train, it goes in circles, always in circles,” she says in a thick accent. Exiled Russian nobility?
“Madame, I assure you, our train runs in a straight line,” says the porter with a congenial smile. The old woman takes her water and slams the door in his face. I give the porter a sympathetic nod.
“Do you have the time?” I ask.
“It is eleven past eleven, sir.”
“A.M. or P.M.?”
“Sir?”
“Never mind. Travel is playing havoc with my sense of time.”
“Perhaps my time piece is malfunctioned, sir. Chronography is not our specialty.” His smile never changes, his facial muscles like pressed glass.
I move on, following liquid green memories.
An open door. Inside, a squat, old man in a tall top hat. A German doctor. Have we met? He opens a large, mysterious cabinet, revealing a gaunt, pallid young man, eyes closed and hands folded, sleep-standing. The doctor urges, and the sleeper speaks in a somnambulist trance, “Wir ertrinken alle in der Flüssigkeit, die uns nicht sterben lässt.”
A sluicing sensation, behind my eyes. I shake my head. What is happening? Things used to be easier. I used to be insane. I used to stare at piles of feces, for hours of monomanic fascination, finding all the hieroglyphic secrets of the cosmos in the coils and bumps.
Down the corridor. More doors. Lots of windows. Lots of stories. No clocks, but there is a countdown, and I don’t want to be on the other side of the chime. Yet curiosity is my oldest vice.
Into the dining car, crowded and opulent. The infamous and the anonymous fill large, cut-velvet armchairs. A famed Dutch dancer draws admirers closer with the slow, exotic motions of a carnivore plant. A Brit pins and mounts the specimens of a butterfly collection right at his table. I barely catch the meaningful glance between the collector and the dancer.
All those arthropod limbs and wings give me an inexplicable shiver, so I turn to admire an art deco frieze, Bacchanal figures worked in glass—a man in the center and a woman on each side, all nude. The man plays a flute to the sky. The women hold great clusters of grapes.
Sitting beneath the frieze, the lady in green smiles at me.
“From your wanted poster, I thought you’d be taller,” she says.
“Well, I try to be,” I say, taking the opposite seat.
I tell her my name. She tells me hers.
“Pretty name,” I say. “Unusual. Reminds me of the Latin word, ululare.”
“Oh,” she coos in three syllables. “Latin. You’re a fancy flimflammer. What does it mean?”
“To howl or shriek.”
“I like that.”
“I like your eyes. They’re the same color as your dress.”
“I like your eyebrows, they arch sly like wary black cats.” She reaches across the table to stroke my right eyebrow. It arches.
“Maybe we should run a tally, then let each other borrow our best parts.”
She bites her lower lip. My toes curl. “Maybe we should have a drink first,” she says.
“Don’t know if that’s a good idea. I’m in AA.”
“Is that your room number?” She looks confused.
“No,” I chuckle. “Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Really? They started a few years back and … I’m an alcoholic.”
“I pegged you as a Scorpio.”
I lean in closer, over the table. “I have the oddest feeling,” I say. “Like we’ve known each other a long time.”
She leans in closer still. “I’d say that’s a line, but—”
“But you feel it, too.”
“Yes.”
“We’re dancing around it.”
“What?”
“The point.”
“And what is the point?” she says like a dare, like a clicking lock.
We take each other’s hand. The momentum is too strong now, a centrifugal force pulling us together. I use both eyebrows.
“I used to be insane,” I say.
She squeezes my hand. “Me, too.”
“But I got better.”
“Me, too.”
“That seems … unlikely.” I grin.
“It does.” She smirks.
“I mean, I was deranged. I used to shove mirror shards into my eye sockets, like razor monocles, so curses would reflect back on others.”
Her foot pokes mine playfully, under the table, as she says, “Applesauce! I was crazier than a shit-house rat. I used to eviscerate Teddy bears with a scalpel, yank out their fluffy innards. Then I’d fill the cloth husks with grave worms, sewing it all up. I hoped the bears would rise and walk and keep me company on lonely nights.”
We both release a long-held breath with a hiccuping laugh.
“It’s not the worst thing I’ve done,” she says, playing with a steak knife.
“Same here.”
“We have so much in common.”
“There’s something else,” I say. Our eyes wander over the rest of the dining car. The collector methodically eats the specimens from his mounting board; a colorful wing hangs from his mouth as he crunches. The dancer is gone, as are her admirers, though their clothes remain in neat piles. We both hold onto something ticklish in our throats, like a private joke.
My lips hover over her ear. “I think everyone else on this train is loosing their mind.”
“And they’re getting worse.”
“While we get better.”
“Inverse curves.”
“Sounds sexy when you p
ut it like that.”
“Does erudition coax you to barneymugging?”
“I like brains and legs when they’re attached.”
We release our giggling fits, then catch our breath.
“Something awfully bad is about to happen on this train,” she says. We grin at each other like teenagers. “We should be more afraid than this.”
“We’ve already been mad.”
“It’s strangely calming.”
“‘The worst had fall’n which could befall—He stood a stranger in this breathing world—An erring spirit from another hurled—A thing of dark imaginings…’”
“What’s that?”
“It’s from a Byron poem. My father liked rhymes. He’d have me memorize them. A sort of game.”
“Oh? That sounds nice.”
I remember the bump-scrape, bump-scrape up the drunken, dizzying stairs, the rhymes oozing from his reeking lips, the rapping at the red, red door. “No,” I say. “It wasn’t.”
“I am not afraid!” screams a man at the head of a dinner party on the other side of the car. “I can never be afraid!” Thick strands of spittle punctuate his words. The others answer, first with words, than with screams, cursing the International Sleeping-Car Company—then laughing at the grotesque faces they make at one another.
“I get to feeling like the thing that’s about to happen,” says the girl in green, “is inescapable.”
“No such thing,” I say with no small amount of professional pride. Something a little like hope and a lot like audacity swells between us. Nevermind the nightmare slow-blossoming around us like a maggot bouquet.
“Let’s discuss this further over that drink,” she says, and all the universe is her green eyes. “You can tell me how you lost your mind. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
“You’re an enabler.”
“No, I’m a Taurus, and I have a flask of pretty good rye in my room,” she says, getting up. “Compartment C-19.”
“Really? That’s the room adjoined to mine. All this time and the only thing separating us was a communicating door. The latch is broken. I was going to get a porter to fix it.”
Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey Page 28