Fantastic Tales of Terror

by Eugene Johnson

  Harry smiled at her, but not only her—his gaze took in Ned as well as the four other journalists at the table. “Perhaps you ought to travel in better company.”

  Anna arched an eyebrow. “Duly noted.”

  One of the others—the gentleman from the Times of London—asked a question to which Harry only half paid attention. Ned jumped in to answer, giving Harry the opportunity to take a sip of water. He’d have preferred a whiskey, but drinking with his life on the line had never seemed a good idea. As it was, he had eaten perhaps more than he ought to have, in his effort to contribute to the convivial atmosphere at the table. Diederich and the others had gone along with Ned’s request for them to dine with the reporters instead of their hosts, so he thought he ought to make the best impression he could muster. There was no point in having reporters around if he couldn’t use them to the greatest advantage.

  “So, Mr. Houdini—” began Herr Kraus of Wiener Zeitung, an Austrian paper.

  “Harry, please.”

  “Harry,” Herr Kraus went on, his accent thick but not impenetrable. “Tell us: The escape you will attempt tonight . . . is it really a challenge for you, or merely something arranged to keep your name in the papers?”

  “Herr Kraus,” Ned began, but Harry held up a hand to forestall any protest on the publicist’s part.

  “No, it’s a fair question,” he said, noting the spark of curiosity in Anna Carter’s eyes. He glanced at Herr Kraus before addressing the entire table. “I’ll admit that some of the challenges I’ve accepted have turned out to be simple enough for one of my abilities. But Herr Diederich and his confederates have gone to great lengths to make this more complicated than escaping from a jail cell. They’ve bolted a platform on top of this train. I’m to have manacles placed on my wrists and ankles, the chains looped through clamps that are welded to the platform. I will be blindfolded, hands behind my back. There is a tunnel forty miles or so outside of Istanbul whose ceiling is quite low—low enough, in fact, that if I am still on that platform when we reach the tunnel, I will surely be killed.”

  No one at the table spoke. For journalists, this was a small miracle. It took Harry a moment to realize the reason—he meant what he’d said and that startled them. Of course he had a dozen ways to escape the trap, had trained most of his life for just that sort of thing, but he had never done anything like this on top of a speeding train before.

  “Aren’t you afraid of dying?” asked the man from London, after another moment’s pause.

  “My good man,” Harry replied. “I have no intention of dying, but if tonight is the night death comes for me, fear will hardly save me.”

  A waiter arrived, a swarthy, thinly-bearded man in wire-rimmed spectacles. He kept his dark eyes averted as he began to clear plates and glasses.

  “Perhaps it’s time to inspect the platform and the chains,” Ned suggested.

  Harry waved a hand. “I’ve done it already, while you were resting. We’ve an hour before the challenge begins. I recommend coffee and whatever pastries the chef has provided, though I myself must abstain in preparation.”

  Another waiter arrived to inquire as to whether they desired sweets or hot drinks. He had the dignified air shared by so many of the staff, that of one who found nobility in service, proud of his station. Something tickled the back of Harry’s brain and he glanced around in search of the other man, the one who’d cleared their dishes. The dark-skinned man, of Middle Eastern descent he believed, had kept his eyes downcast in a conspicuously subservient manner, nothing like the others. And yet, hadn’t there been just the hint of a smile on his face, as if he had taken some private amusement from the moment?

  Harry spotted him farther along the car, where Diederich and the others who had funded the challenge sat, already enjoying dessert. The strange waiter delivered a small metal pot—perhaps of hot cocoa, a tradition in Austria—to the man beside Diederich, and then made his way toward the far door of the car, where the chef and his assistants were at work. As he passed through the door, the man gave a single glance backward, and Harry frowned deeply. Had he seen that face somewhere before, those dark eyes, the long, thin nose, the brows with their almost diabolical natural arch?

  “Mr. Houdini?” a voice whispered beside him. “Harry?”

  He turned to see that Anna had shifted her chair nearer to his. Ned had begun to pass after dinner cigars around to Herr Kraus and the reporters, who had all slid back from the table and begun a loud conversation about the most extraordinary stories they had ever covered for their respective papers—providing an opportunity for Ned to amplify just what an amazing feat they were to see that very night.

  “You don’t like cigars?” Harry asked Anna.

  Her smile held a hint of admonition. “Why haven’t you tried to seduce me?”

  She said it so quietly that for a moment he thought he had misheard.

  “I’m sorry?”

  Anna’s hazel eyes sparkled with a hint of green, the wavering candle flame throwing suggestive shadows upon her face.

  “Oh, it’s not an invitation, just a matter of curiosity. Every other man here has at least made overtures, but not so much as an inquisitive glance from you.”

  Harry inclined his head in a polite nod. “I never practice the art of seduction before ten p.m., I’m afraid. In any case, I reserve my earnest attentions for Mrs. Houdini.”

  The appreciative look she gave him held a distinctly American frankness.

  “A happily married man, huh?” Anna said. “I figured them for a myth.”

  “Not a myth, Miss Carter, though perhaps very nearly extinct.”

  They were interrupted by much shuffling and murmuring as Diederich and his associates rose from their table and came along the car toward them.

  “The time has come, Mr. Houdini,” Diederich said in his wonderful accent.

  “Now?” Ned said, brows knitted in consternation. “We’re not scheduled to begin for three quarters of an hour, at least.”

  The imperiously mannered white-bearded gentleman to Diederich’s left sniffed dismissively.

  “Our speed is greater than anticipated,” he said. “If you are to have the agreed-upon interval before we reach the tunnel, we must begin in twenty minutes. Thirty at most. Surely if we are willing to give you more time to avoid being smeared along the ceiling of that tunnel, you do not object?”

  The journalists all laughed good-naturedly, though the white-bearded man had not so much as smiled. And I thought it was the Germans who have no sense of humor, Harry thought.

  “By all means, sir,” he said, rising from his chair with an affectionate glance toward Anna. “By all means.”

  ***

  The blindfold posed no problem. Harry had spent countless hours practicing his craft in the dark, sometimes upside down, inside a tank full of water, or both. The speed of the train did not trouble him either, but its swaying and juddering did offer a challenge. He had a lock pick secreted beneath his tongue and several others in the lining of his clothing, including the cuff of his left coat sleeve. His hands were shackled behind him and the chains had been drawn taut enough that he was on his knees on the platform. In truth, if not for the fact that he wanted his challengers to feel as if they’d gotten their money’s worth, he could have escaped in under a minute. Instead, he struggled and strained against his bonds, testing the chains, purposely crashing onto his side as the train jerked around a curve, when actually he was simply trying to adapt to the unpredictable shimmy and shudder of the Orient Express.

  As the wind whipped past him, buffeting his face and making his coat billow around him, Harry heard voices murmuring in a strange sort of rhythm. A frown creased his forehead. He knew he was not alone atop the train car; Diederich and his associates had installed three platforms instead of just one, with Harry shackled in the middle and delicately-carved wooden chairs bolted to the other two, four each, so that the financiers of this feat could watch from ahead and behind. In the dark, with only the bri
ght moonlight to illuminate the showman, they would not be able to see the finer elements of his escape. If he could hide lock picks from a theatre audience, he could do it atop a speeding train in the dark.

  The journalists had not been afforded seats. Instead, they had been told they were welcome to view the event but would have to take their chances. Only Herr Kraus and Anna Carter had dared spend so much time exposed atop the train without any way to anchor themselves. Harry admired their courage and wished them well. For his part, Ned had returned to the dining car for a drink with the other journalists. He would handle the questions during and after the escape but Harry did not want him to take any unnecessary risks.

  Now, though . . . that chanting . . . what in God’s name were they up to, these men? Trying to break his concentration? If so, it wasn’t very sporting of them.

  The voices grew louder, all rough, guttural syllables that sounded like gibberish to him, and he realized they were indeed hoping to throw him off his game. A ripple of anger went through Harry. This might have been all in good fun were it not for the fact that they were hurtling at top speed toward a tunnel whose low ceiling would turn him into a red streak along the train’s roof. Diederich and Wagner and the others would abandon their seats and retreat safely down the iron rungs between train cars, never risking their own destruction. Would they leave him up there, if their nefarious chanting achieved its purpose of distraction? Ordinarily he would have said no, but these seemed the type who might actually enjoy the notoriety of having posed the challenge that killed Harry Houdini.

  To hell with them, he thought.

  Working quickly, he pulled his wrists taut against his shackles and twisted his right hand so that he could snag the cuff of his left coat sleeve with his fingers. In a heartbeat he’d plucked the lock pick free of the lining, careful to keep his hands turned so that those behind him would not glimpse a glint of moonlight on the pick. He shifted his head, tossing it as if attempting to free himself from the blindfold but really only drawing their attention away from his hands and toward his face.

  With swift precision, he slid the pick into the lock on the manacles around his wrists. He heard Kraus ask about the purpose of the chanting, but it only grew louder. It occurred to him, just for a moment, that he had heard it before. In the back of his mind, a memory began to rise. Harry pushed the distraction away, tugging against his bonds, hearing the chains clank against the hooks to which they had been moored. But he had stopped listening to the sounds of the train, stopped paying attention to the rattle and judder of the cars ahead of him, and so was unprepared when their car suddenly shunted to the right, switching tracks.

  His wrists clacked together, twisting the lock pick from his hand, and he lost it.

  “Shit,” he muttered under his breath, his anger growing.

  A dozen options presented themselves in his head, various ways in which he could still manage his escape. Some required physical contortions that would likely tear his jacket, for which he had paid handsomely. The chanting—the familiar, rhythmic chanting—infuriated him both because it was irritating and because it had achieved its goal. The bastards had distracted him enough that he had not only dropped his first pick but he had lost track of time. How long, now, until they reached the tunnel? He wasn’t sure.

  He opted for the quickest escape, which would also be the most painful.

  Bracing himself on the platform, knees apart, he shifted his upper body, took a deep breath and exhaled, and then thrust out his right shoulder, dislocating it completely. Harry bit back a roar, allowing only a grunt. Trembling, breath coming in hitching gasps, he raised both arms and brought them over the top of his head, back to front. The damnable chanting faltered for a moment.

  With a twist of his arm and another small grunt of pain, he popped his shoulder back into the socket. His lips were stretched into a rictus grin to hide the pain. He’d dislocated both shoulders on occasion but had never learned to fully disguise the extent of his discomfort.

  The chanting grew louder, but now Harry didn’t care. On his knees, he rested a moment, shackled wrists hanging before him.

  “Enough games,” he muttered as he reached up to tear away his blindfold. The wind shearing across the top of the speeding train whipped at him and stung his eyes but he blinked them clear and then froze, shocked into paralysis by the scene that the moonlight revealed.

  Diederich and two of his confederates sat on the chairs bolted to the platform ten feet ahead of him, along with a fourth observer—the swarthy waiter with the thin beard and wire spectacles. Confusion sparked in Harry’s mind, but the others arrayed on the roof of the train ignited that confusion into a conflagration. In the space between his platform and the next, and arranged in a ring that encircled his position, were another dozen figures, cloaked and hooded in heavy black fabric run through with strands of moonlit silver. They were on their knees, palms upon the metal roof of the hurtling train, heads hung low so that their hoods hid any hint as to their identities. The chanting came from these hooded men, who it seemed had also hastily painted a scattering of arcane symbols on the roof around him.

  Memory rushed in as if some barrier had been holding it back and now it flooded his mind. Two years past, on a visit to Egypt, he had endured a night of terror unlike anything else he had ever experienced. Lured beneath the sands, under the pyramids, he had been knocked unconscious and woken to find himself a captive, surrounded by creatures with human bodies but the heads of beasts, the intended sacrifice in a nightmare ritual that opened an aperture in the fabric of the world as some ancient, malignant presence—some dark god—attempted to slip through. Harry had escaped, of course. He had survived and immediately begun to obliterate the memory from his mind, doubting and undermining the experience, persuading himself that it had been a nightmare or some drug-induced phantasmagoria, the result of some malicious attack by the guide he had hired to bring him safely on a tour of Egypt’s most ancient sites.

  His guide. Abdul Reis el Drogman.

  Harry snapped his gaze back toward the platform, staring at the swarthy man beside Diederich. Take away the spectacles and the beard, account for the passage of time . . . Harry knew him now. Abdul Reis, here.

  Panic set in.

  Abdul Reis saw the recognition in his eyes and offered a sinister smile as the others continued their chanting. Harry stared past him and Diederich and the others, watching the nighttime horizon. There were low hills around them and many ahead. How far to the tunnel? He had no idea.

  “Son of a bitch,” Harry hissed, glaring at Abdul Reis.

  Shoulder throbbing, he went to work, shifting his tongue around to force out the thin lock pick he’d hidden in the corner of his mouth moments before they shackled him. His heart hammered in his chest; this was no longer a game. He took the pick from his mouth, listened for the jerking and rattling of the train car ahead of them and managed to keep his balance like a sailor getting his sea legs. Barely glancing at the cuffs, he picked the lock on his manacles and slipped them off, allowing them to drop to the platform with a heavy clank.

  Diederich slid forward in his chair, gripping its arms, his eyes lit up with alarm.

  “Stop—” he began, but Abdul Reis clamped a hand on his wrist and gave a silent shake of his head, and only then did Harry truly understand who had been the mastermind behind this madness.

  Abdul Reis raised his other hand and gestured. Behind Harry there came a scuffling and a cry, and he thought that over the wind he could hear someone calling his name.

  Even as he sat down on the platform, working the pick into the lock on his ankle shackles, he twisted round to look behind him. The rest of the circle of hooded acolytes looked identical to their fellows, but toward the rear of the car, Diederich’s remaining confederates stood in front of their chairs, restraining a pair of captives.

  “Make no further attempt to escape, Mr. Houdini!” Abdul Reis said, shouting to be heard over the wind. “Or they both die!”

  N
ed McCarty and Anna Carter struggled against the men who held them, but there was little they could do. Both had their hands bound behind their backs. Anna had been tightly gagged, but the gag on Ned had slipped down to his neck; he had been the one to shout Harry’s name.

  Anna had been stripped to her white underthings, baring her pale flesh to the moonlight. In the short time during which they had shackled Harry and he’d been feigning difficulty with his escape—while he had been putting on a show for them—these chanting madmen had painted her skin with the same bizarre sigils that had been drawn onto the roof of the train. She hunched slightly, grimacing as if in pain, and he realized that her bucking against them was not an attempt to free herself but a series of paroxysms caused by crippling pain in her gut. Bright, bloody crimson lines showed where the flesh of her abdomen had been cut and the skin peeled open in folds like flower petals.

  “Anna!” Harry shouted. “Ned, don’t let them—”

  Ned lunged forward, fighting his captors, and wrested himself free. He turned and drove himself at one of the cultists holding Anna, trying to knock the man from the speeding train. The cultist turned to defend himself, holding an ornate, curved dagger. Ned collided with him and they both went down. Harry felt a surge of hope, before the cultist tossed Ned aside, the dagger jutting from his chest. Harry screamed his friend’s name. Wide-eyed, Ned stared pleadingly at Harry for a moment, all of the strength leaving him . . . and then his killer hurled him over the side of the moving train. His body tumbled off into the night and was left behind in the wake of the rattling locomotive.

  Harry sneered at the killer, ignoring the hooded men and their benefactors, Abdul Reis forgotten. Ned was dead, and Harry understood that the only chance Anna had of surviving to see the sunrise was if he was free. He bent to unlock the shackles on his ankles and one of the cultists rushed at him. Harry swayed with the rhythm of the train and when the man leaped at him, he twisted aside, grabbed the man’s wrist, and used his momentum against him. The man sprawled across the roof, slid and tried in vain to get a grip before he, too, fell over the side and into the dark. As another cultist moved in, Harry unlocked his ankle shackles. They clanked to the platform as he stood, facing Ned’s murderer and his compatriots.