by Nick Marsh
We lay there, shocked, shaken and bleeding. We had succeeded.
Colonel Neville Goodenough’s Personal Notes, Saturday, November 14th, 1925
Well, we are back on the Orient Express, travelling towards the Bulgarian border, to Sofia. Then on to Constantinople, and our eventual fate. So far, we have been successful. Five of the six pieces of the Sedefkar Simulacrum are locked within the fourgon. Why do I not like to think of that trunk? Why do I shudder when my mind dwells upon what lies inside it?
We are now travelling through Yugoslavia. It has some fancy, official name but no one uses it here. Some Serbian policemen joined us this morning at Belgrade and are travelling with the Express as far as the border. Milos has ‘persuaded’ them to ignore our wounds, and he has arranged some ‘items’ to be delivered from his associates in Sofia that he thinks will come in useful later.
Looking through the window as I write I see wide, frozen plains and great pine forests. It looks nothing like England. Unlike me to get maudlin when travelling, but I don’t think that I have ever felt quite so far from home.
I haven’t written much recently. Haven’t really wanted to. I seem to be very tired all the time. Well, not so much tired as... weary. Deep in my bones. The old wound hurts more than ever, but I can’t complain with Violet and Milos nursing their own injuries.
When we returned to Trieste, Milos quickly located a doctor who he assured us would be discreet. The doctor, who seemed not at all surprised to be awakened in the middle of the night, nor by the notes Milos pressed into his hand, examined Violet’s shoulder, and Milos’s leg. Fortunately for both of them, the bullets had passed right through without shattering bone or cutting anything vital. He cleaned the wounds, stitched them closed and assured them they would be fine within a week or so. Violet has been very brave; perhaps she is still in shock.
Perhaps we all are. There is no longer any question – something is following us. And now that we have seen it... what have we become entangled in?
Presumably the Turks (as Milos is convinced that they were) were members of this cult, the ‘Brothers of the Skin’, as the old man called them in Milan. They are becoming bolder – either because we have more of the statue now, or because we are drawing nearer to Constantinople. I don’t know how they knew where we were – do they have a spy on the train?
Their attack seems to have forced the hand of the other player in this game - the thing we saw at the cave. What it is, I do not know, but if it is the same thing we saw at the clock tower, then it has been on our trail since Venice, or before. It could have killed us if it wanted to. It didn’t even flinch at Milos’s bullet. And yet, it retreated. Why?
The only logical answer is that it is helping us. It wants us to find the statue.
And when we do, what then? I cannot imagine such a cancerous creature to be benign. Is it watching us, even now? Is it on the train? We are all in far more danger than we feared.
As a group, we haven’t discussed things. If Professor Smith is correct, the final piece of the Simulacrum – the head – awaits us in Sofia, but we do not talk about it. Betty spends a lot of time in her cabin, and when she does emerge for meals she doesn’t speak about anything of consequence. Last night, at dinner, she barely looked me in the eye. Have I done something to upset her? Or is she finally bearing a guilty conscience for dragging us into this mess?
As for the others – Violet is trying to enjoy the trip, and Grace continues to moon over poor Milos, but all of them are downcast. What happened in the caves hangs over us all. Everything is more serious now.
I haven’t slept since Trieste. Not a wink. I try, but when I close my eyes, I see a dark, wide expanse of white, and I hear a cold, arctic wind. I try to act normally for the sake of the others, but watching that amulet sink beneath the surface of the water... I’ve never felt pain like it. Not even when Lilly passed. It felt like losing her again.
Now, nothing tastes the same, or looks the same. Or feels the same. Nothing seems to matter anymore. I think that all of us are going to die.
Must try and get out of this frame of mind. Writing isn’t helping. Going for a walk along the train. Try and get some air.
Diary of Mrs Betty Sunderland, Saturday, 14th November, 1925
Alphonse was right. Which means that he was right.
The thing we saw in the caves... it’s what they’ve been talking about. The dark and terrible thing that has followed us across Europe. Now I am sure I did the right thing in contacting him. He sent me a letter, waiting for me at the station in Trieste.
I saw that thing. I looked into its eyes. There was nothing but death in them.
We can’t do it alone. We need allies – even if we cannot trust them. I know I have done the right thing. I know I have.
End of Part Six
Interlude – Violet Davenport’s Dream Diary
Another terrible dream. I sincerely hope this will be the last of them.
I dreamt of the cold cellar again, with the bricked-up wall. Years had passed. The place was dark, cobwebbed and deserted. The wall, which I saw being constructed, was now aged and cracked like the others in that gloomy place.
I became aware of a young woman, cowering and terrified in the darkness, staring in terror up the corridor at something I couldn’t see. Her back was pressed up against the wall, which made me wince, knowing what lay behind it.
She was dressed in white, loose-fitting robes, like pyjamas, and I knew that she was a patient in this terrible place. Suddenly, she cried out, an inarticulate howl of fear; this was drowned out by a laugh. A man approached her, tall, bulky, with a ghastly grin upon his face, holding an electric torch in one hand. He called out to her in French, and though I could not understand the words, his tone was mocking, falsely caring. She whimpered as he came closer, and he wagged his finger at her. Then he began to unbuckle his belt. The woman started to scream, but the man was swiftly upon her, his hand over her mouth, pushing her head back. I could feel the poor girl’s fear, but, what was worse, I could feel the animal lust from him too. I wanted to close my eyes, I wanted to disappear, but I could not make it stop.
The man looked into the woman’s eyes, enjoying her terror. He reached down to between her legs – then stopped. His gaze was upon the wall behind the woman. She wriggled beneath him but he ignored her, and continued to peer into the darkness.
The man had laid his torch beside him when he pounced, and now it lay upon one side, illuminating the wall. Something glittered in the darkness through a crack in the masonry. The man laid his heavy hand upon the wall, and flicked at the mortar around the brick. A large chunk fell away easily. He pushed it again, and more mortar fell.
He grunted, his lust replaced with avarice. He pushed his eye up to the crack, but his head blocked the light behind him. Rubbing his chin, he gazed thoughtfully at the wall. Then, abruptly, he picked up the patient and dragged her stumbling back to the stairs.
The scene shifted before me. The wall was there again, and the man too, alone this time, and carrying a crowbar in his meaty hands. He shone his torch into the crack, peering in as best he could. The golden object was still just visible. He grunted in satisfaction, pushing the crowbar into the narrow gap.
I do not know how long he worked at the wall – time in a dream is a nebulous thing – but soon he had broken a hole in it wide enough for even his large frame. The remains of the door that I had seen in my previous dream now barred the man’s entry, but it was old, and rotten, and a few swift blows with his crowbar swiftly cleared the obstruction, revealing the old cell behind. I wanted to scream a warning, even to this terrible man, about what was in there, but the dream did not permit it, nor did it allow me to look away. The man began to squeeze his bulk through the hole he had made into the cell beyond.
Once there, he stood, and brushed himself off, picking up the torch again. He shone it around the corners of the room, before he found the golden thing he had seen through the wall – a large, thick gold ring in the
centre of the room. The man was so filled with greed that he barely seemed to notice that the ring was still worn on the finger of a shrivelled, twisted corpse.
For a second, the man held the torch beam on the face of the thing in the cell, and my soul grew cold. There was no longer any trace of the fine nobleman within those desiccated features. The limbs had warped and bent over the years, so that the thing resembled more a spider, or a crab... or the thing I had seen crawling across the wall of that burning city. Its mouth gaped wide as if in a silent shout of pain and anger, and the dried lips had peeled back to reveal hideous, animal-like teeth.
The man showed not the slightest trace of curiosity as to why such a thing would be walled up in the cellar of an asylum. Instead, he noted the other rings that adorned the other hand of the creature, and smiled as he performed some mental calculation of their worth. Setting the torch to one side, he reached down to a mummified hand, and began to work the ring off the finger, bending it backwards in an attempt to snap it off.
The movement was so swift that I barely registered it. One moment, the man was pulling desperately at the hand, trying to free his prize, and the next he was howling in pain as the thing’s other hand flashed up to grab his wrist, and squeezed. Its grip was so strong that the large man’s wrist was nearly severed, and blood came pouring in a dreadful torrent from the wound as the man slumped to his knees in terror and agony.
The blood pooled on the ground around the shrivelled body, and, as the life ebbed away from the man who had broken in, an awful animation returned to the demon that had been sealed in the room centuries before.
Slowly, unsure on its feet, the crab-creature stood, and gazed in wonder at the hole that was the release from its prison. Its eyes found mine, and the now red and glistening lips widened into a grin.
Part Seven – Sofia
From the Journal of Violet Davenport, Saturday, 14th November 1925
Dear Diary,
Poor Uncle Neville! Hasn’t he suffered enough, what with all the business with the amulet? The Wagons-Lits staff tell us that such a thing has never happened on the Orient Express before. I suppose we can only take their word for it. Auntie Betty says we’re travelling through rougher country now, and such things are to be expected, but as Grace said, what sane person would have expected anything like this?
I’m sorry, dear diary. Mam told me I should always begin at the beginning. We are in Bulgaria now, so I’m told and we’re due to arrive in Sofia early this evening. I’m finding it hard to keep track of all these countries, checkpoints and borders. Honestly, the people look the same, and sound the same – it seems strange that they feel they must distinguish themselves so much from each other. I mentioned this to Grace, who said ‘You mean like us and the French?’ Sometimes I don’t think she understands a word I say. Fortunately Dr Hagge has been very helpful with Uncle’s... but there I go again.
We were approaching the Bulgarian border, at about one o’clock this afternoon, during which time Auntie Betty was attempting to give Grace and me a tiresome geography lesson (why? We get on the train, we get off – it’s not as if we have to drive the thing, is it?) when we heard a familiar uneven tread in the corridor outside our compartment; Uncle’s footsteps, easily recognisable due to his old wound. He had been pacing the length of the train for thirty minutes or so. Auntie Betty told us that he was probably having trouble with his bladder. Milos had said that Uncle was in the salon car until the early hours of the morning, and yet he was still up and ready in the restaurant car for breakfast before any of us. We are starting to wonder if he has slept at all since Trieste.
Then, through the thin compartment door, we heard a sudden throaty yell, and Uncle Neville exclaimed in surprise. A heavy thump followed, and more shouting.
I jumped from my seat and ran out into the corridor. Several yards down the carriage, I could see Uncle Neville on the floor, grappling with one of the porters.
The assailant was lean, dark and muscular. His eyes were wide and he was shouting the same phrase over and over again as held a long, wicked-looking knife to poor Uncle’s throat. Uncle’s neck seeped blood from a deep gash that the man had already inflicted, and he wrestled desperately with the man, trying to pull the knife away.
Auntie Betty screamed in shock as she saw what was happening, whilst I ran towards them as quickly as I could. The crazed man looked up from his victim, in time to receive a solid punch on the chin from Uncle Neville. The door at the other end of the carriage opened, and two more porters ran through, shouting in surprise at the scene and running towards the prostrate colonel and his attacker.
The fellow must have realised the game was up at this point, but he did not surrender. Swiftly, he lifted his knife and plunged it deep into Uncle Neville’s right eye socket. Uncle howled in pain. With a quick flick of his wrist, and a practised scooping motion, the man sliced out Uncle’s eye.
Uncle Neville collapsed back onto the floor with a cry, both hands clasped over his face. I was almost upon the man now, though I had not the slightest idea what I to do next. The rogue took this decision out of my hands. With me on one side, and the approaching porters on the other, he had only one escape. He turned to the window, and slammed his elbow into the centre of the pane. It shattered instantly. Most of the fragments fell outside, but the passageway was showered with shards of glass. Uncle cried out again and rolled to one side. Without a second’s hesitation, the villain leapt from the still moving train, through the smashed window and out into the snow-covered landscape, leaving me grasping at the empty space where he was standing only seconds before.
The Wagons-Lits staff arrived at about the same time as Auntie Bettie. I helped poor Uncle Neville to his feet. He had taken his handkerchief out, pressing it to his face, and was muttering about ‘traitorous bloody foreigners’ whilst I tried to stem the blood. From here on, Auntie Betty became a whirlwind of indignation and accusation, demanding that the train be stopped and a search for the villain made, whilst she and I escorted Uncle to the restaurant car. The maître d’hôtel swiftly tracked down a doctor whom he knew was among the passengers – a middle-aged Danish gentleman by the name of Hagge - whilst the chef de train ordered the Orient Express to halt. Several of the porters and waiters ventured out into the snow, accompanied by Grace and Milos, whilst Dr Hagge attended to Uncle Neville.
By now, Uncle had several fine brandies inside him, and the bleeding had mostly stopped. He winced as the doctor examined him, trying to insist that ‘it was nothing’ and that he’d ‘had much worse in the war’. He kept asking if there was an English doctor aboard, until Auntie Betty told him that beggars couldn’t be choosers, and to stop behaving like a little boy. Eventually, the doctor, a tall, slightly overweight man in a grey suit and wearing a top hat, tapped a badge on his right lapel – it looked like the letters ‘GRI’, surrounded by a silver ring[44]. It must have meant something to Uncle Neville, because he glanced at it, nodded once, and then lapsed into sullen silence, merely wincing occasionally and taking swigs of brandy as the doctor packed the now-empty socket with gauze. I hadn’t realised, up until this point, quite how brave Uncle Neville was, and it made me feel rather shabby when I thought of all the complaining I had done with the little wound I received in the caves.
Meanwhile, the chef de train was attempting to apologise to Auntie Betty, who was talking about telephoning the Times and the British Consulate about Uncle’s dreadful experience at the hands of one of the Orient Express staff. The man, a wiry Frenchman with a pencil-thin moustache, remained remarkably calm under this barrage, politely insisting that the attacker could not have been a member of staff, but must have been some kind of anarchist in disguise. This story, which seemed far-fetched, gained credence when one of the waiters entered the car, carrying a bundle of clothes he had found stuffed under the sink in one of the bathroom carriages – a policeman’s uniform. Apparently the attacker had managed to smuggle himself on board at one of the checkpoints, then changed clothes. But wh
y had he attacked the colonel?
I remembered the phrase the man had kept shouting as he had used his knife, and repeated it as best I could to the maître d’hôtel. It seems that he was shouting, in Bulgarian, ‘Give me your head!’
I shuddered as I looked at the deep cut in Uncle’s neck, currently being stitched by Doctor Hagge, and realised the affair could have turned out far worse than it had already.
At around this time, Grace and Milos returned to the car. The search party had discovered footprints leading off towards a frozen stream, but there they had lost the trail. The search had not been entirely fruitless, however. Grace retrieved a napkin from her pocket, and, after glancing at Milos, who nodded solemnly, handed it wordlessly to Uncle.
Uncle Neville frowned, then opened the napkin. There, in the centre, surrounded by blood, was his eye. The villain must have callously cast it aside as he made his escape. Uncle gazed at it for a moment. His expression was hard to read because of the blood, the bandage over his eye and the effect of the now half-bottle of brandy inside him, but gradually it became clear that he was looking puzzled.
‘What is it, Neville?’ Auntie asked, quietly.
Uncle’s face darkened as the confusion quickly turned to fury and outrage.
‘It’s not my colour!’ he yelled, scrunching the napkin up onto a ball and hurling it across the carriageway. I didn’t have the slightest clue what he was talking about until Milos picked up the napkin and examined its gruesome contents.
‘He is right,’ he said, glancing at Uncle Neville. ‘The colonel’s eyes are blue. This... this is brown.’