Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey

by Dennis Detwiller

Despite the success of the Al-Azif, and the book’s spread beyond the Caliphates to the foreign West, and finally to the East, the moment never arrived; the time when the humans would descend into fits of madness in such numbers that could allow the gates to swing wide. Every time release seemed close, something happened, some turn that pulled the rift back closed.

  By then, most copies of the book were known under a singular name, despite various editions: Necronomicon.

  The shop was old by human standards. The building it was in had been constructed a year before the crusaders seized the city, and was used as a field headquarters for a madman in steel plate who wore Muslim fingers in a loop around his belt as a prize. He died in the building, a few years later. A fifteen-year-old boy cut his head from his shoulders in one clean swipe.

  Later, during the civil war that followed, it served as a larder, holding boxes of goods. A cadre of men with hooked pikes stood guard while the city burned, so the rich could eat, while the poor rioted and starved.

  When the Ottomans seized the city, the building fell within the lands of some secondary clark, and its lease was auctioned to a family of some note. Later, nearly two centuries later, it would become a bookstore, run by an insignificant second cousin of this family. This bookstore was a place where old tomes found their way, a sinkhole itself with a painted green door, simply called The Bookstore, and known to all in that area of the city.

  It sold nearly nothing, and its owner subsisted on the dwindling fortunes of his family. At night he pored through the books and made his notes and made the signs and sigils that showed him the gates and the keys to the gates.

  It also was, by happenstance, the only place in the world that a complete, perfect copy of the Necronomicon remained.

  The man stepped from the train in Istanbul, his face set, his eyes behind folding spectacles a bright, clear blue. In his long jacket, he had a hunting knife and a small automatic pistol fastened to him, just in case. Just two years before, in 1925, he had been stabbed in New York City with a weapon called a pranga. The wound it left in his chest was like the hole from some giant lion’s tooth.

  He had shot his way out of the hotel room there, bleeding, and killed four men in ceremonial robes. During his escape, he stumbled over the entrails of his dead friend, splayed across a bed in some sick display of worship.

  Today, his group still tracked those involved, and it was that grail that had brought them here, on the train, on the Express moving from the west and to the east. They fought all over the globe and closed the gaps that the cult opened. They found the gaps. They located and killed the men who attempted to fumble at the locks to the powers beyond the world.

  But the man was weary. It was only recently that he had begun to see the true sprawl of history, and how the horrors stretched over it, a theme that covered everything, maws clamped closed beneath every human act—a seeming foundation that was waiting to snap open. Nothing they had done, in the many years he and his group of compatriots had hunted the worshippers of these powers, had made a single difference in the final outcome. It was just a matter of time.

  He was fragile and weary and old. What had filled him with purpose once—the preservation of the world of men—now filled him with dread.

  He had recruited, fought beside, and lost too many people along the way, and maybe, he thought for the first time, he might be on the wrong side of this fight.

  When he stepped from the train into the old city, this thought felt like a truth. A reflection played across his glasses, a green door across the plaza, past a gate. As he watched it, the green door opened, showing a black hole in space.

  He began to walk toward the green door, and a thousand gibbering things in the beyond roiled in their pleasure.

  THE LOST STATION HORROR

  GEOFF GILLAN

  I HAVE NOT LONG BEFORE that malevolent shifting thing I glimpsed in the volcanic depths of the earth beneath southern Bulgaria comes to claim me. The angles of this cell alter each time I close and open my eyes and the arm I no longer have itches and writhes, a fulcrum trying to twist my whole body no matter how I turn. I pray that at least I might have carried this madness with me and that nothing still lives in that wilderness to bring ruin on the world; pray that once I have gone all trace of its evil will depart from this world. I know I will not live long enough for the guillotine’s blade to be my end.

  I have written repeatedly, warning the directors of Brand and Company to cease their construction, expunge the whole site, and trust nothing that comes out of it, but they ignore me. I have heard that the chief engineer spits when my name is spoken. They doubtless all consider me an insane monster. Well, I have not long to brood on any shipwreck of my reputation; greater evils than calumny await. My last hope is that this is considered a dying declaration, and might spur them to seal up the way to the entire plateau and find some other route through to Sofia.

  But I doubt it. The Orient Express will have its way.

  Damn their train and their progress.

  This was the opposite of my opinion when I arrived at the town of Z_____, a young engineer basking in the privilege of joining in one of the great engineering feats Europe has seen: the construction of the first continuous train link through Bulgaria from east to west, forming a line across the whole of Europe. The recent success of the Compagnie International des Wagons-Lits’s fabulous Orient Express ensured it wished to offer one continuous journey by train, from Paris to Constantinople. The current journey had to be made by coach beyond Nisch in Serbia, before the passengers could again entrain at Tatar-Bazardjik in Bulgaria, a wearisome trip through often mountainous and hostile terrain. Nagelmackers himself had accompanied the surveyors laying down the new route, and a great part of the line fell to the Bulgarian State Railway to construct. Its success was a matter of great national import to the now-independent Bulgarians, freshly liberated from the Ottomans and determined to show their worth.

  My task was to work on a railway station in the hinterland, whose construction had recently run into trouble. The Bulgarians knew that to simply throw down rail lines was not enough. The track had to be maintained and repaired, the engines and rolling stock serviced, the whole new rail artery through their country kept alive and pulsing. Even if the Orient Express was to make few stops in Bulgaria, other local services must use the line, or else the cost would hardly be worth it. For this a series of stations at strategic intervals must be planned and erected. It was to one of these, in the Pazardzhik region of Bulgaria, around Belovo, that I was sent.

  The Bulgarians had contracted my services through the German firm of engineers for which I worked. The Ottomans had established a tradition of using European expertise, especially German and Italian, and the new Bulgarian king was a German princeling, so our two countries’ links were strong. I was dispatched to the nearby village of Z_____to assist the chief engineer. I was one of the new breed of practical rather than scientific engineers. At thirty I had eschewed wife and family to focus utterly on my career. My friends thought me single-minded and even dull, but now I was vindicated surely, in being hired as assistant engineer on one of the age’s most ambitious projects.

  The chief engineer met me in the town of Belovo with reports and instructions. He was an inspiring and energetic fellow I had long known by reputation and greatly admired, and he promised me an assistant in the village. The construction of the station had begun on a plateau beyond a newly blasted tunnel but recently a subsidence had bought the entire thing down, even cracking some of the nearby rock. A new building had been commenced farther along, on what was considered more stable ground, but there were rumors of tremors and other movement. I needed to determine if the new station would be sound. It would be costly and difficult to reroute the line over such rugged country—more tunnels and bridges would be needed to avoid to steep a grade in the lines—and someone senior among the Bulgarians was determined to create a station here instead.

  “Perhaps he is from here originally. They
are not a people who forget their roots,” the chief engineer suggested.

  “What am I to do then?”

  “Find a solution that is practical. The geologist’s report has been little help. They tell us the area is volcanic and might experience tremors. Well, you could say that about the whole place. Maybe there is something more here, or some deficit in the station’s design. We’ve started the second foundations but we need an answer fast.”

  He paused for a moment and moved his jaws as if chewing over his next words. “Your predecessor Hartz was lost when the wall of the first station fell in.”

  “Lost? You mean killed?”

  “I mean lost. Perhaps he fell into a crevasse that later closed. We never found him.”

  Then he gave me a hard and appraising look that, I must admit, made me uncomfortable. “Don’t listen to the wild tales some of the workers are telling. We have had deaths; all engineering projects of this size have deaths. But some of the men are spooked. We’ve had threats of violence—so many that we’ve had to hire a private firm to put down some of the unrest. It has all been very regrettable.”

  “Have they some strange fancies about what we are doing? Surely the tremors alone would not lead to such behavior.”

  The chief engineer shrugged. “The region’s folklore says it was created when God got tired of carrying a bundle of rocks and let them fall onto Bulgaria and lie there. Strange fancies are in the air. But the workers have been toiling long hours under impossible conditions and they are, perhaps, overwrought. Just don’t get drawn in. That’s my advice to you.”

  He would himself be drawn in no further on the subject but promised to come and check on my progress in a few days, after he had attended to other problems farther along the line. I was left to continue my journey to the village of Z_____alone and spend my first night in a modest hostelry in fruitless speculation.

  By morning all that had seized me was not dread or even apprehension, but an intense ambition. Might I be the one to solve the dilemma halting our progress and make a name for myself in the company—or even, more widely, in my profession? I was entertaining these jejune fantasies while shaving, when came a knock at my door. This was my fateful meeting with Orrin Lester Leacock.

  He stood in the doorway, a slender figure wearing rugged workman’s clothes and a green Tyrolean hat, carrying a canvas bag bulging with instruments and brimming with rolled-up plans. He was fair and his face was narrow with a shallow forehead and long nose that gave him a thrusting appearance. The hair under his hat was dark blond. His eyes were muddy blue, as though some tainted substance had mixed with their natural color. I noticed, too, that his pupils were always dilated and incredibly wide, like an animal’s. He confessed later that, as a child, he had stared too long at the sun, causing this strangeness, but it leant him an intense and discomforting appearance. He stood awkwardly, tilted at an angle askew. I don’t believe I ever saw him straighten, I recall now with a shudder.

  Leacock introduced himself in German that was clearly English accented, though solid enough. My own English was fluent so I proposed we converse in his native tongue, which pleased him. He was a young man, hardly twenty-five, but his appraising gaze seemed knowing in a way that belied his years.

  We passed a few pleasantries and over breakfast at the hostelry went through the geologist’s report. Leacock’s enthusiasm for his work was strong, his energy and excitement exceeding my own. The light of some greater purpose lit his eyes when he thumped the table to make a point, and he was full of intense speculation about drilling into other areas of the rock around the plateau to resolve the issue. He expounded a strange theory that the angles of the digging were important and would somehow liberate us from our dilemma.

  “Don’t you think there is a plan to the world, an arrangement of angles and joints like there is any colossal structure?”

  “You mean God’s plan?” I smiled indulgently. It seemed a silly question.

  “Not that. A plan to the universe itself. A blueprint of connections and portals that would lay this universe bare—lay it open to other, greater places—if only it could be discovered.”

  I let him ramble on a bit longer, but my mind had drifted back to the engineering problem at hand. I confess I paid scant attention to the details of what he said, more fool me. It seemed, at the time, the kind of mad fancy the young dream up before experience and knowledge teach them otherwise.

  A train whistle summoned us to the temporary rail that had been built outside the village where a small locomotive was used to transport supplies and the workers billeted there back and forth to the work site. The village had a rough-stoned, red-roofed peasant charm. I wondered how much it might retain once the rail brought the world to its door, but such is the price of progress.

  We quickly left the village behind and toiled up the grade to the site, via a new tunnel that had been only recently blasted, and which some suspected had caused the previous cave in. Muckers were still at work in the tunnel clearing the loose dirt and debris, and some scaffolding still remained, but we passed through smoothly enough. The geologist’s report did not support the digging here was to blame; certainly I noticed no cracks or fissures in the tunnel walls, which even lamplight would have shown, had they been serious enough.

  Once out of the tunnel we came onto a broad plateau, an expanse of rock and wild bush that commanded a breathtaking view across the hilly country beyond. The station was designed to sit on this plateau, and the open stretch after the tunnel was wide enough to allow good visibility, paramount in railroad station design for the safety of passengers and workers. The original station works slumped at the northeast end where it has collapsed against a massive spur of rock rising from the ground, as if leaning drunkenly against this great stone wall for support. The new station foundations were being dug to the northwest. Past this, the smoothness of the plateau broke down and the dummy rail ran through a long gulley to where a new bridge was being erected to cross a small creek and maintain the grade of the line to a tolerable degree.

  The locomotive stopped near the original station and we alighted. On closer inspection I could see it was a complete ruin. Considerable work had been done on the foundation and exterior walls, but now the foundation cement—a mixture of concrete and aggregate of stone in these parts—lay cracked like a broken and discarded bowl. The walls had tumbled all in a northerly direction, so that the northern wall had fallen into the natural spur of stone, which sat high and broad above the plateau. A jagged rend gashed the rock vertically, either from the impact or the initial movement of the earth. It was almost wide enough for a man to pass through. The whole place had an evil aspect, as if some superhuman malignancy had smote the earth and work of man alike.

  The now-broken station walls had been constructed of granite and local stone, and I could see sheet metal had been prepared for the roof. This was unusual: most of the stations I had passed on the line were simple wooden affairs, lucky even to have a warehouse or a siding. This had been planned on a grander scale, with a large central passenger area, a supporting warehouse for baggage and goods, and a separate siding granting access to a maintenance shed and water tower, for the upkeep of trains. Immediately I was reminded of the chief engineer’s assertion that some powerful person was lobbying behind the scenes, for such a remote village station should normally not expect so grand a station. Perhaps the Orient Express was intended to stop here.

  Leacock interrupted my speculations by introducing me to the foreman, a doughty Bulgarian named Dimova. He was an older man with the florid beard and mustaches of a runaway pantomime devil; he reminded me of pictures of the ancient Bulgar warriors that drove the Byzantines before them in the forging of their medieval empire. Brusquely he showed us around the site and explained our presence to the men. Leacock seemed well known by everyone. I remarked on this and Dimova noted that the man had been my predecessor’s assistant also.

  Leacock and I spent a week investigating every aspect of the sta
tion collapse and the site, including the tunnel- and bridgeworks nearby and the surrounding geology. There seemed no obvious reason for the violence beyond freak chance or act of God. No immediate tunnel blasting or tremor was felt prior to the splitting rock and the station’s collapse, which had happened in the small hours in the morning while a skeleton crew was on duty. While work had progressed digging a foundation trench for a new building little effort had been made to reclaim parts from the lost station. For days I wondered that it had not been cleared away. As the men came to know me better, and seemed pleased when I demonstrated my rudimentary Bulgarian, they revealed why.

  No one wanted to go near the area around the collapsed station. Over the last few weeks there had been eleven deaths. All major constructions have deaths. They are regrettable but the dangers of the work are too great to avoid them. These were different, though. First, the sheer number in that amount of time, especially when they were unrelated to the initial station collapse, was unusual. Second, all the deaths had occurred within a few hundred feet of the lost station. And third, perhaps I should call them disappearances or, to use the chief engineer’s word, losses, since not one single body had been found. This tally included Hartz, my predecessor. I tried to draw them out on what had happened. No one would speculate, but there was a lot of frightened mumbling and signs to ward off the evil eye.

  Most strange of all were the repeated sightings of what they called “a man of angles.” Shifting and twisting and never standing straight, it seemed to appear at the corner of one’s eyes only to vanish when one turned to look at it. No two people had a common description of the thing, except that its shape was impossible to determine, for it was never static, and that even the most fleeting glimpse left the viewer overwhelmed with a sense of revulsion.

  After hearing these stories, I began to sleep poorly. My dreams were plagued by visions of the thing that the men had described. Like them, I remained tantalized; even in my dreams, it stayed out of focus and just at the edge of my vision. One night, having given up entirely on sleep, I walked out of the village and up to the camp. The night was cold and seemed to magnify the stars. I felt insignificant under their myriad stare. As I stood shivering I became aware of a sound that resembled a chant, repeated over and over, coming from within the broken rock at the work site. I thought at first it was the men of the nightshift, but this sounded like no work song in any language I had ever heard. The syllables were alien and guttural, the rhythm impossible to predict, even with repetition. Worse, when I remarked on the sound to a man tending one of the mules near the camp, he replied, “What sound?” in honest confusion.