Death on the Arkham Express

by Byron Craft

  Ann and Alvin were dutifully waiting on the open-air platform when I returned. The train went into a curve and slowed to a grating metallic halt. I craned my neck and peered around the cars. We were positioned by a water tower. We had stopped at one of the small solitary station houses. I watched as Conductor Passworthy climbed over the coal car. His meticulously cleaned and pressed blue uniform covered in coal dust. Passworthy swung the water tower spigot arm over the tender and began watering. “Time for our evacuation,” I declared.

  ***

  I looked on from one of the windows in the deserted dining car. The place where all this craziness first began. At least everyone would be safe now. The door to the small wood frame station house was opened, and from my vantage point, I observed the remaining passengers from the Arkham Express file inside. It was overcrowded, but most managed to gather around the pot belly stove. It wasn’t The Plaza Hotel, but it would be warm and safe until the railroad provided additional transportation. I was reasonably certain that none of them was the culprit. I had spent a good deal of time questioning the few travelers left on the Express, and if my hunch was right, the perpetrator didn’t stand around the cast iron stove.

  Ann Hoade and Alvin Nash begged to stay on board with me, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Against their protests I made them gather up their possessions and scram. Ann gave me a peck on the cheek along with a parting comment, “You take care Mister Detective.”

  Alvin was less schmaltzy, “See ya in the funny papers, Copper.”

  I was alone except for the engineer and Passworthy, the conductor. Oh yeah, and there was Nigel too. No amount of persuasion on my part would motivate him to get off. I thought about forcing him at gunpoint but soon gave up on the idea after he beseeched me to let him stay saying that he needed to get to Providence as soon as possible. Something about a horror writer conference there.

  As the train slowly pulled away, I realized that I hadn’t seen Lady Blue amongst the people crowding into the station house.

  ***

  It was after 2 am. I was gonna take a rest, with my eyes open. I was traversing the Pullman Car to First Class going to my compartment when I saw her. Lady Blue was sitting in the same spot when I first met her. She peered into the open pages of “Wuthering Heights” with eyes that observed something else.

  Lady Blue didn’t notice me. Having nothing better to do, I amused myself by studying her without appearing to do so. She was no sweet patootie. Not a nice clean Campfire Girl and if we were to talk once again, I wasn’t sure how to handle her. Play to your strengths, I decided, that’s what my old man always said. She gazed up at me and seconds past before she spoke. “Hello, Detective,” she looked tired. I was dead tired too from chasing ghosts all night.

  “Why didn’t you get off with the rest of the passengers?”

  “There is death out there. It is too cold for me.”

  “There is death everywhere you go, Sister.”

  “I am taking the Express to its final destination, Arkham. I have work to do.”

  “I didn’t like her use of the words “final destination.” When she uttered the phrase, it felt like someone walked on my grave. “A smart lady like you can get work anywhere. Arkham ain’t a sweet place to get employment.”

  “If you haven’t noticed there is a depression. On what corner do you want me to beat my tambourine?”

  To use the obvious metaphor, she was a closed book. “Before, all I wanted to do was ask you some reasonable questions.”

  “To do with the matter in hand, the deaths on this train?”

  “You bet. It was simple and straightforward. The examination wouldn’t have taken more than a couple of minutes.”

  “An excellent pretext, but a pretext all the same.”

  “For Pete’s sake lady just answer me one question. Earlier this evening, did you notice anyone enter the Pullman from the dining car?”

  “A few minutes ago, I did.”

  Evasive again, but I followed her lead. “Who?”

  “That writer gentleman. He passed just here,” she said at last pointing to the carpeted pathway between the Pullman seats. “I had a curious impression. It was as though a wild animal, a savage beast passed by me. And yet he looked altogether respectable. The body as a cage can be most respectable, but through the bars, the wild animal looks out.”

  “That sounds cracked, lady.”

  “It may be so, but I could not rid myself of the impression that evil had passed me by very close. I have merely outlined a poet’s reactions.”

  A poetess. She’d been puttin’ her peepers too long into Brontë's works. And I prevaricated too long; I cut to the chase. I removed the torn strip of blue silk found in the ladies’ john from my coat pocket and dangled it in front of her nose. “Explain to me why I found this bit of your dress in the ladies’ washroom?” I thought that would catch her off guard, make her slip up. No such luck. She didn’t miss a beat.

  “A woman does not discuss her toilet with a man, let alone a stranger. I am not in the habit of reviewing my private affairs with the police.”

  “When this iron horse gets to Providence the police maybe prying into your private affairs. The big house can be a lonely joint.”

  “I don’t buy it, but your approach has softened since our last conversation, Detective,” she leveled a shrewd smile on me.

  Again misdirection, she was a sly devil. “I get a little soft in the head every winter; it’s the Christmas season.”

  “Merry Christmas you Lug.” Lady Blue laughed. Her laughter slowed like a phonograph winding down. It was mirthless, and it gave me the shivers. Her eyes began to close, and I believe she fell asleep.

  I looked down my nose at Lady Blue’s dress, that book she’d been reading, and the strip of silk in my hand. The answer to my fifth question almost rocked me off my feet. They were all the same color and shade as the peculiar bluish pus that coated Wheatcroft’s dead hands, the meat cleaver, and that copper paperweight.

  ***

  I stretched out on the cushioned bench next to the window in my compartment. I just finished sharpening my knife, a stiletto, on a whetstone I kept in a carryon bag. I reviewed multiple times everything that the crazy dame in blue said to me while dragging the blade across the stone. Was Nigel the guy I was after all along or was she throwing me a red herring? When Fraley had his skull bashed in Nigel had a rock-solid alibi. I retracted the blade and slipped it into my shirt pocket.

  I had drawn my .45 and laid it on my lap, my hand on top of the gun, and my finger on the trigger. I needed to rest, but sleep was out of the question until I reached home. I figured if anybody came in and saw me there accidentally catching a few winks they’d think twice about disturbing my beauty rest.

  There was a knock. “Come in,” I said. I lifted my .45 and pointed it at the door. It slowly slid to one side. Nigel Guest strode into the compartment. He seemed to bring a part of the night with him. He looked around briefly and plumped heavily down on the furthest sofa bench surveying me with frightened eyes. He removed a handkerchief from his jacket pocket and mopped his brow. It wasn’t warm in my compartment, if anything it was a tad on the cool side.

  “Pleased to see you,” hopelessness oozed from Nigel’s pores, then he plunged into a recital. “There is a form that is formless! It feeds.”

  I didn’t know what he was smoking, but he was loopy, talking crazy like the lady in blue. “Hey Pal, this is the third decade of the Twentieth Century not one of your cheap stories.”

  “I know that you think me insane,” he said after a brief pause. “Did it ever occur to you, my friend, that force and matter are merely the barriers to perception levied by time and space?”

  “Not since my first wife.”

  Nigel ignored my lame comment. He exhibited a painful expression pressing the hankie again against his forehead. “They slither down from the stars, through rotting black gulfs, and stalk us.”

  “Cut the crap; you’re scaring me!” I kept
my gun pointed in his direction. Any moment, I judged, he could fly off the handle and come for me. Nigel Guest was minus an athletic build, but after my run-in with the possessed Railroad Dick, I wasn’t taking any chances. “Try to make some sense, Nigel.”

  The corners of his mouth curled into a smirk; the lips remained horizontal. “Lovecraft himself humorously referred to his mythos as ‘Yog Sothothery.’” A dark expression replaced the halfhearted smile. “But there the comedy ends because I do not think that they are evil. Not in the sense that we comprehend evil. In their spheres, through which they move, there is no thought, no morals, no right or wrong as we understand it.”

  He was making my skin crawl. In his warped, twisted way was he attempting to reveal the murder culprit? “Okay, I’ll play along. What are they?”

  For a moment he seemed to recover his sanity. “A horror beyond anything your prosaic brain can conceive.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Even with an eighth-grade education, I knew what “prosaic” meant.

  “All human brains are prosaic,” he explained. “I meant no offense.”

  “None taken.”

  Nigel’s short-lived sanity slithered away. “What if, parallel to life we know, there is another life that does not die, which has the elements to destroy our lives? Perhaps another dimension, a different force that forages other lifeforms.”

  “I hope you’re reviewing one of your plot synopses with me or I’m going to have to get you a straitjacket!”

  “I hear them breathe.” The train plunged into a tunnel. Outside the white snow beneath the dark early morning sky was abruptly engulfed in black. The engine’s noise and the clickety-clackety along the rails amplified to a roar. Nigel’s monotonous voice softly droned against the racket. “. . . devouring hopes, dreams, fears, secrets.”

  My ears were greeted by a moment of peaceful silence and a gentle metronome undercurrent of “tchjk, tchjk,” when we exited the tunnel.

  I turned from the view and observed Nigel crouching by the compartment’s window staring at the opposite wall with feverish eyes. He suddenly screamed, “The thing wants room. My head cannot hold it. The pain is horrible!” He dropped the handkerchief and tightly clapped his hands against his head. “It is cold as ice. It makes a noise like a great big fly. It’s sucking and sucking and sucking.”

  Nigel tumbled off the seat opposite me. I shouldered the .45 and rushed to his side.

  He let loose with a soft whimper, “The earth will die screaming.” With his last breath, his stare beheld something that wasn’t there, “Beware of the Doels.”

  ***

  Without my aide-de-camp, Alvin Nash, I had no idea where the railroad stashed their mail sacks. I pulled the blanket off the upper bunk and wrapped Nigel’s remains in it. I tied the bedspread corners tight around his body and proceeded to drag him out of my compartment.

  There was something not right with the movement of the train. The night—the vast night started to brighten. We were slowing down. The flickering movement of a sign came into view through the many casements along the first-class passageway, “Providence.” I watched the teeming activity of the station slip by through a windowpane. A handful of commuters on the boarding platform gaped and pointed at our passing. The Arkham Express slowed considerably, but we did not stop. We plowed on at a reduced rate maintaining our northeasterly route. The Providence Station should have been our next scheduled stop. Was the locomotive out of control?

  Farther down the hall I noticed that the door to compartment number seven was wide open — the private compartment of Lady Blue. The light was on. I let the bundle I was lugging drop and headed for the open doorway. She sat there as pretty as you please. Only Lady Blue didn’t move or flinch when I stood in the opening facing her. She was expressionless — the parody of a statue.

  “We meet again,” I gave her a lackadaisical salute.

  “A terrible and unspeakable deed has been done,” she spoke with the same husky tone, drawn-out and sluggish. There was something unusual about that voice. I got wind of the notion that it came from a different direction.

  “Switching from poetry to prose, sister?”

  “It wants to wallow in the night, to procreate.”

  It wasn’t a fanciful notion. Lady Blue’s voice lacked the common characteristic we all experience while conversing. My blood ran cold. When she talked, her lips didn’t move. There was no facial expression at all when she spoke. I summoned up the inner cop and took a step into the compartment’s interior. It demanded investigation. A little voice told me not to. Her head did not turn to follow my movement. Blue Lady never altered her gaze from the opened doorway. I took another step toward her then halted. Ruffles in the blue silk dress parted on her left side. My throat went dry. I swallowed hard. I wasn’t staring at a lady’s underthings nor bare skin. There was a gap where undergarments or flesh should have been; a dark crevasse in her side that seeped blue bubbling jelly.

  I stepped back, falsely reasoning for a split second that she needed medical attention. I gave up the brainchild the moment it entered my head. It became obvious right away that Lady Blue was not human. I wondered if she had ever been living at all. I detected movement out of the corner of my eye to the right. Instinctively I drew my weapon. It was that same brown crap that I believed I imagined slithering along the woodwork. It ran down the compartment’s mahogany window casing and deposited on the purple cushioned seat. The damn thing had to be six-feet long!

  There was a chambered round in the .45, and I had replaced the two slugs employed to plug holes in the heads — eight in the clip and one in the chamber. Nine rounds I could let loose as fast as I could pull the trigger. I pointed the gun at the brown snake with a shaky hand.

  The brown thing did not coil upon the purple sofa, rather it bent and formed to the bench like a child at play creating a seated human shape with a pipe cleaner in a toy car. But it wasn’t a snake! A tube-shaped body segmented akin to a one-foot diameter godawful worm. The nightcrawler exhibited a belt-like glandular swelling of muscles that flexed, and a pair of arms outstretched. The puffiness ceased. There were arms with three-fingered hands, then the action repeated, and there were legs with oversized feet and enormous toes. Between the legs was an anal segment with bristle-like hairs.

  If I shot the thing would the effect, I reasoned, be like using a pile of manure for target practice. I decided it was worth a try. I was attempting to take aim at the monstrosity, trying to decide which part might contain a vital organ, when the top outer layer of cylindrical muscle inflated into a bloated fleshy lobe. An eye formed with a toothless mouth below.

  “Shooting me will accomplish nothing. My existence will soon expire,” the words formed in a moist sloppy orifice. Was I off my noodle? One of us was, and it sure wasn’t him, her, it, or whatever? I had to be hearing things. Because wrapped within those sloppy syllables was the voice of Lady Blue. Right then and there, between the smell of death and stumbling against corpses, I wished I had jumped from the train at that small station house along with the rest of the passengers. The hitch was in my giddy-up. I plopped my backside down on the bench opposite the talking nightcrawler. To say that I was at a loss for words is an understatement.

  ***

  The clickety-clack along the rails sledgehammered my skull. The one big eye of the giant segmented earthworm stared at me. “There is a force that emits energy which passed from my world where it creates a new form of cell life.”

  I was powerless to speak, immobile, fixed to the bench where I sat.

  “They have broken down all barriers.”

  Still glued to my seat I kept my gat pointed at the tube-shaped cowplop. Each segment enabled the worm to move. It expanded and contracted conducting respiration through pores in its dark brown skin. Night Crawler must have utilized a transport system composed of fluid, either that, or they didn’t use toilets on his “world,” because a wet spot expanded around it on the purple cushion. There was a smell; like freshly tilled
soil and rotting leaves.

  I decided to give the damned a chance. If I ever write my memoirs no one will believe that I talked to a worm. “There’s a poor chap out there,” I pointed vaguely toward the door and the bundled-up Nigel. “He was fighting off something—I don’t know what. Little white worms in his skull?”

  “Mind parasites,” Night Crawler’s voice still had that far away eerie element that was feminine.

  “What is a Doel?” Normally I’m very direct when interrogating a suspect. Fire a loaded question smack dab between the perp’s eyes. In Night Crawler’s case, it was a lousy metaphor. However, it is also difficult to ascertain if I caught the big worm off guard, although he did answer the question directly.

  “A terrestrial word of yours. Our race is the Megadrile. We have studied your kind from afar for a very long time and until now never interfered. We learned of the term from our observations. It comes from your ancient Greek language. No such life exists in your world, only viewed sometimes in the dreams of the very few, your highly sensitive artists and makers of stories. They move through geometric curves and angles.”

  “So, what are they?”

  “Doels are tiny, flesh-devouring creatures who inhabit our plane of existence. On our world, their lifeforce is pure energy. Doels are invisibly shrouded in night and chaos. Unfortunately for your kind, once they cross over into your domain, the Doels’ energy seeks to reside and feed in human neural tissue, especially of the brain and spinal cord, that contains cell bodies as well as nerve fibers. They can animate a host when the need arises. Doels eat their way into corporeal form multiplying until the host ceases to be useful.”

  I thought that Nigel had scared the crap out of me with his morbid ramblings, but his prattle paled by comparison to our confab. Fear mixed with apprehension drove me to continue the dialogue. “My friend said that there is no thought, no morals, no right or wrong as we understand it.”