“Don’t bother,” she says, leaving in a swirl of liquid green.
I’m nearly out of the dining car when I look again at the glass art frieze. The man is now sitting on an altar, playing his flute to the sky. The women, on either side, are now holding ornate daggers instead of grapes.
“Admiring the Bacchanals?” says the deep grind of a tectonic voice. A fat man in a red fez overflows from his luxuriant chair like a greedily poured drink. “Fine work, very fine.”
“By Rene Lalique himself,” I say. “Very avant-garde.”
“You know your art, but then, it pays to in your line of work, hmm?”
“Weren’t the women holding grapes instead of daggers a moment ago?”
“I don’t believe so. I do have reason to believe that you possess a certain book and are in need of a buyer.”
I take a seat with the corpulent man. He gives me his name. I give him mine. I notice the bluish silver medallion he wears, pressed with the likeness of the god Neptune. The corpulent man notices my notice.
“Oh, this? A keepsake bauble, a reminder of home. You look pale, friend. When was the last time you saw the sun?”
“No date comes to mind. You said something about a buyer?”
He nods. “Indubitably, friend. I represent parties interested in acquiring your tome.” He gives me a figure.
“That’s generous,” I say. “Do you know what the book is actually worth?”
“That, my friend, I refuse to even speculate.” The corpulent man picks at his food, one pinch at a time
“I have a buyer. Just have to make it to the end of the line.”
“I have reason to believe, dear friend, that you will not make it that far.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No, heavens no, friend, not from me,” he says, shaking his head. His jowls quiver with hypnotic plasticity in a face that barely contains him. “I have reason to believe that there are other interested parties aboard the train, more zealous, less interested in making offers.”
“Tell me about your buyers.”
The corpulent man regales me with stories hatched and cross-hatched with cloaks and daggers, with clandestine encounters, with aliases, cryptic leads, globetrotting chases, near misses, dust-shrouded tombs, back alleys, words whispered from dying lips, convoluted plots, Tarot decks of archetypes, and whole pantheons of MacGuffins. As he talks, the corpulent man feeds, one finger-pinch of food at a time. I try to pretend not to notice that the tiny morsels he picks go not into his mouth, but into his right ear. It is the ear facing away from me in his profile, so I cannot see the food dribbling out, can assure myself that I do not hear chewing under the words, can assure myself that it is a trick of the lighting, that when he talks, there are no odd undulations beneath his shirt.
The corpulent man stops, mid-sentence, tripping over a detail and then another. “No … rather … I … I have lost my place.” He takes my hand, looks to me with watery eyes, voice suddenly higher. “Have we met before, friend, my dearest friend? I feel we have known each other for several lifetimes. Could I induce you to hide within the folds of my coat?” A thick fluid salivates from his ear.
I take back my hand and stand. “I have a prior engagement, but I’ll think about your offer.”
“Yes. Do. But think quickly. Time and tide wait for—”
“Do you have the time?”
The corpulent man pats his pockets. “Eh, no. My apologies, friend. My fob watch stopped.”
In the glass frieze, the women have plunged their daggers into the man on the altar as he plays his flute to the sky. I slip out of the dining car. There are no clocks, but there is a countdown.
Down the corridor.
Muffled fragments of a man’s voice from compartment B-67:
“… experiences few men have ever had … plenty of nourishment … nothing to fear … All transitions are painless … When the electrodes are disconnected … especially vivid and fantastic …”
The door opens, and a young, urbane man, fashionably dressed, with dark mustache, emerges.
Down the corridor. Static and feedback hiss from the door on my right. A familiar voice swims in the static. The Mocking Voice says:
“Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.”
My mouth tightens. I quicken pace. Two doors down, on the left, the static hisses and the Mocking Voice continues:
“He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away….”
I run. The Mocking Voice follows. How long has it chased me? Every door is its mouth:
“For though my rhyme be ragged,
Tattered and jagged,
Rudely rain-beaten,
Rusty and moth-eaten,
If ye take well therewith,
It hath in it some pith.”
Down the endless corridor. Rhymes and rhymes and the Mocking Voice calling my name. One thousand years later, I knock on the door of C-19.
She pours our drinks, while I try and fail to recall the opening of the door. She puts a record on a phonograph, and something jazzy plays out of its blunderbuss mouth.
“Coffin varnish?” she says, handing me a glass.
“I really shouldn’t.”
“Don’t be such a Missus Grundy!”
“What decade are you from?” I ask.
She smiles and shrugs, and the rye burns good all the way down. Then she sways. Oh gods. The way she sways—so elementally ever-present in her skin, reveling in every molecule. Some people go their whole lives without enjoying their own body half so much as she delights in a single sway. She takes my hand, and then we’re both swaying to the music.
I twirl her, and she leans into me, back to chest, carrying me away on the tide of her hips, and I ask, “So, what was yours?”
“Mine?” she says. “Mine was a cult.”
“A good cult or a bad cult?”
“Ba-a-a-ad,” she brays like a she-goat. “Every last one of them was a wrong number.”
As we dance, she tells me about her roaring days, and falling in with a crowd seeking starry wisdom.
“I gazed into a stone, in the dark, and something the size of a planet slid greasily into my skull. And that was that.”
My hand finds heaven in the inches of the small of her back, as I pull her closer, she whispers to me, voice vibrating against my neck, “And what was yours?”
“Mine was a book.”
“That how it goes with you?”
“Yeah. It’s either women or booze or books.”
“Booze and the blowens cop the lot,” says the Mocking Voice in the static of the phonograph.
I flinch.
“What was that?” the girl in green asks.
I shrug. We sway. I tell her of my love of books, leather and spine—how my brain claptraps every little factoid of the rare editions. Of all the treasures I pilfer, I prefer the rustle of pages to the clink of coins. One day, I dared to filch the rarest of tomes. In a hotel, in that choking room with yellow wallpaper, I opened the book like a door, and brain pathogens in its grammar opened an event horizon in my head.
“And that was that.”
I remember that first night perfectly. An officer of the police came into my room, and I sang a prehistoric lullaby that ate him in the dark. I tore into the night, into the geomancy of the city streets. I came upon a man working the graveyard shift of a newsstand. I slaughtered him. Sobbing, I begged his severed head to make it all make sense again. He looked sympathetic. All the howling nights after that bleed together.
“I still have the book,” I say as we sway. “There are people after it. After me.”
“I think mine are after me, too,” says the girl in green, with a semi-embarrassed scrunch of her face.
“And here we are dancing.”
“I’m no canceled stamp.”
We let the motion of the train grind us together. I wonder what she was like in her bedlam nights. Had she ever degloved
someone’s face?
I dip her and say, “Two recovering lunatics romancing each other.”
“Tale as old as time.”
“The Gershwin Brothers should write it as a musical.”
“Who?”
“Nevermind.”
“You ever feel guilty about your line of work?”
“Misers live in terror of losing their hoard, and I liberate them from their fear.”
“You rationalize even better than you dance.”
“The criminal is the creative artist, the detective only the critic.”
“You even stole that line, didn’t you?”
“Everyone’s a copper.”
She laughs, and it sounds like victory.
“Booze and the blowens cop the lot,” repeats the Mocking Voice from the phonograph mouth.
“That’s not supposed to be on that record,” she says.
“It’s just a voice that’s been giving me the tail.”
“Oh,” she says with a nonchalance that makes me wonder what’s been haunting her on this train.
The Mocking Voice straddles the music, saying:
“Suppose you screeve, or go cheap-jack?
Or fake the broads? or fig a nag?
Or thimble-rig? or knap a yack?
Or pitch a snide? or smash a rag?
Suppose you duff? or nose and lag?
Or get the straight, and land your pot?
How do you melt the multy swag?
Booze and the blowens cop the lot.”
I try to ignore the voice, to talk over it. I tell her how I inherited the entire estate of my father’s disease with drink—how alcohol, when combined with the accelerant of certain kind of women, made me combustable.
The Mocking Voice continues:
“It’s up-the-spout and Charley-Wag
With wipes and tickers and what not!
Until the squeezer nips your scrag,
Booze and the blowens cop the lot.”
I yank the record and dash it against the wall.
“Sorry,” I say.
“S’alright,” she says.
And then it calls my name, the Mocking Voice, says my name, over and over in the static-hiss of the emptied phonograph, says my name the way my father used to.
“A man of words and not of deeds—is like a garden full of weeds,” it says. I shiver. That deadly rhyme. I hear father’s footsteps limping up the endless stairs—bump-scrape—bump-scrape—the pounding at the red-red door. My hands find my face. I feel lampreys wriggling in my veins. I—
The Mocking Voice chokes to a comic muffle. I look up. A rag is stuffed in the phonograph mouth. My green-eyed girl winks at me with cartoonish exaggeration.
“Jeepers creepers, but I was getting sick of listening to him,” she says, and, just like that, everything is impossibly all right.
We sway again, and she hums her own music—amidst all this, she can just hum her own music. We neck and giggle at the Muffled Voice. She twirls and her dress swishes around her in a slow, underwater swirl.
“I like the way you do that,” I say.
“And here I was hoping you’d love me for just my brain.”
“Gouge out my eyes let’s see where the night goes.”
“Fuck-a-vous! Who says romance is dead?” We kiss, hard. She gives me a dangerous look. “Oh, I’ll cop your lot.”
Down the corridor and up the spout.
Where was I? Oh, right. We agreed to escape. We’ll meet back at her room. We each have something to check out first. We each have our own scabs to pick.
A man stands, like a wax museum display, in front of the door of that imperious Russian woman. It’s the conductor himself. They all look the same to me, the conductor and his porters—mustache, waxen face, and never-changing smile.
“Have the time?” I ask
“It’s eleven after eleven, sir, on the button.”
He tips his blue hat and we make small talk.
“How long have you been a conductor?”
“Since they took my wings, sir. Now I ride the train. My accommodations are the same as the passengers. I do miss my wings….”
“When was our last stop?”
“Some time ago, sir.”
“Where?”
He tells me the name, but his words buzz like cicadas. I stumble away, assaulted by chitinous vibrations on the inner ear. From behind her door, the old woman shouts, “We’re going in circles!”
I hear knocking and the conductor saying, “I must ask you to please be calm, Madame. Don’t make me take off my face.”
The dinning car is empty.
Trains are the only confined spaces I enjoy. Claustrophobia and freedom in a speeding paradox. I’ve paid more than one writer to give me a thinly disguised presence in the mystery pulp pages. My reputation says that it was bravery that released me from all those handcuffs, tight spots, and the felon’s cell. But that’s not true. It was fear.
Windows are important. I have to look through them to reassure myself. Objects flicker-flash by in the ever-looping night, like rattling film over the projector lamp. I stare freely outside, yet I feel the noose tightening. I think I know why.
I find what I need on the table. I pray that it will give me answers, but I don’t pray too loud, because you never know who’s listening. An abandoned newspaper. I open it. I turn the page. Nothing. I crumple it and throw it away.
Useless.
I look at menu after menu. I rip each one up.
Useless.
I tear all the paper I can find, cursing. This used to be easier. I used to be insane. I used to be taunted through invisible holes in my walls by incomprehensible demons that weren’t there or woken in the night by rats with human faces.
But I got better.
I found the cure.
Now I’m taunted by newspapers and menus.
In the glass frieze of the Bacchanals, the man is laying on the altar. The women have opened him with their daggers. One pulls out his insides, the other is doing things to his remains that would make a cadaver blush. The man still has his face and hands, still plays his flute to the tentacular sky.
Sitting on the floor, the abandoned red fez with a crushed crown offers me no answers.
Why do they all leave their doors open?
Another door ajar. Ululating, infant gibberish from within. I peek inside. An old, wrinkly man stares at me, nakedly, from a large bathtub with clawed feet. Water sluices onto the floor with the rocking of the train. He splashes, smiling, the high-pitched baby jabber coming out of his whiskered face.
I close the door.
Another room. Empty. On the desk, a bible, a proper book, leather and spine, hefty and full. That will do. It’s weight feels reassuring. I flip the pages. I flip a few more. I tear out the pages, page after page.
“No, no, no!” repeats a voice in the room, and the mirror over the fold-out washbasin informs me that the voice is mine.
Crackle-bzzzzt-hiss, says the large radio in the room. Crawling out of static thick as reptile afterbirth, the Mocking Voice says:
“A man of words and not of deeds
Is like a garden full of weeds.”
My father’s favorite rhyme. After a night’s debauch, it was always a race between the rhyme and his heady reek to announce Drunk Daddy slamming up the steps.
“And when the weeds begin to grow
It’s like a garden full of snow.
And when the snow begins to fall
It’s like a bird upon the wall.”
Bump-scrape. He’d limp-lurch up the stairs. Bump-scrape. The drink turned him into a hopping, bulgy-eyed frog-man. Bump-scrape. I’d clutch my blankets and pray.
“And when the bird away does fly
It’s like an eagle in the sky.
And when the sky begins to roar
It’s like a lion at your door.”
There would be a pounding at my red-red door. Sometimes he finished the poem. Sometimes the red-red door gave
in.
“And when the door begins to crack—”
I tip over and slam the radio down. “Jiggers, fellers!” whines the static. I kick the radio. I flip it over, face up.
“What’s up, Doc?” says the Mocking Voice.
“Who are you?” I interrogate the machine.
“Vampyroteuthis infernalis. Ain’t I a stinker?”
“Who are you?” I punch the machine.
“Don’t kill me, Doc. I’m just the message.”
“You mean messenger.”
“That, too. And you are all the enclosed. You are all just ghosts drowning in meat.”
“Who are you?”
“You know me, Doc. I’m the rhyme, and I’m coming up your steps.” The Mocking Voice laughs, and all of the Orient Express laughs with it.
And I’m running, and I’m running, and I’m running.
Room B-68. When did I come in?
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” says a bearded, grizzled man.
On the desk is a ghostly bust of Milton, a phonograph with a dictaphone attachment, and several waxen cylinders of the kind people once used to make voice recordings with. He tells me his name. I tell him mine.
“You’re an escapist?”
“Escapologist. Actually, I’m a thief.”
“You break out of systems. Very good. Please, sit.”
I get comfortable. The train rocks. Red drops pitter-patter on the floor.
“I used to be insane,” I begin. “And now I’m not.”
“You want to know why?”
“Yes.”
“What would knock the sane mind mad and the mad brain mended?” He shifts thoughtfully in his armchair, his handsome robe sliding enough to reveal the red spirals etched into the flesh of his body—I imagine they cover every inch. As he talks, he carves a new spiral into his forehead with a penknife.
“Tell me the first early memory that comes to mind now,” he says.
“Catching fireflies.”
“Go on.”
“I’d put them in mason jars. I’d carry them with me on summer nights, till their lights went out. The cicadas were so loud.”
“Cicadas?”
“Yeah. I’d nearly forgotten. My mom had this thing. She didn’t like me sitting out too long, at night, listening to the cicadas. She didn’t think their buzzing voices were entirely … wholesome. She’d nag the way some mothers nag their kids to get out of the bath before their fingers prune. It was hard not to hear the cicadas. They were as loud as gas-powered chainsaws.”
Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey Page 29