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

by Dennis Detwiller

  “Knights are needed—” the whispers came from every crevice in the ruins “—for a new Crusade. Men who would kill or die for Britain, but who have no love for England. All who oppose us will fall like wheat before the scythe. We could be the ones who gather the harvest, old boy.”

  Glendower gave no answer. He lit a match and launched a few rocks at the largest of the creeping larvae wriggling among the ruins. He could see the sky was paler, but that meant nothing here.

  “I took a great chance, trying to talk to you, for old times’ sake. You were a lion in your time, and I could’ve used who and what you know at home to reconquer the Empire from the head down. But if you’re going to be a—”

  “Oh, I am.”

  “Right. You may as well know, then. Only initiates under the influence would be brought here in their sleep. They were promised they could return upon their deaths, but their oath of fealty was hardly enough for the Old Man of the Mountain. So they were ritually murdered here, as you will be.”

  Following the winding defile, Glendower ran into an ancient Christian temple. Shattered idols paved the aisle between crooked columns that bore white tapestries emblazoned with red crosses, and mosaic floors inlaid with images of the Holy Grail and the Crucifixion were encrusted with septic, ritually spilled filth. “You may as well wake us up, so we can have it out proper. Nothing you can show me in here will make me believe—”

  “You needn’t believe in any of it, you poor fool. You only have to die here to wake up. Every time you lay down to sleep, your dreams will bring you back here. Every time you close your eyes, you will be delivered to us … and it won’t be all milk and honey.”

  Glendower scoffed, “It’s hardly been anything at all, but cheap theatrics and yellow treachery.”

  He passed through chapels crowded with idols—of a headless man of red agate, with a golden hand outstretched; a toadlike, brazen giant with webbed claws holding out the small, charred bones of the last infants it had claimed as its just tribute. But all these false idols were arranged like serfs or slaves, an audience before the great central dais that was dominated by a small mountain of obsidian floating just off the floor and carved into the cruel, cold features of a god of war.

  “Baphomet,” said Glendower, “innit?” Hardly seemed prudent to speak the god’s true name aloud, in this unholy place. He had been lucky to survive encounters with the cult in its other incarnations, in Egypt and China. “You lot never do seem to pick a winner, do you?”

  It made a measure of sense indeed, if one pried beneath the surface of that ancient travesty, the purge of the Templars. Captive knights confessed under torture to participating in a Mystery cult that spurned Christ and worshipped a goatish deity from the East whose idol was a great, black human head. The confessions were as vague and rife with contradictions as any testimony obtained under torture. No evidence of the wild orgiastic rites they described was ever uncovered in Europe or the Holy Land. But if Templars and Assassins alike had sinned and blasphemed in the fastness of this rotten old dream, then perhaps their wholesale elimination was not so rash a miscarriage of justice after all. With every step toward the dais, the flagstones shuddered and burst with gusts of charnel decay. Everywhere underfoot, the mummies of holy crusaders surged out of their crypts to split open and vomit torrents of overgrown grave worms. The incarnated greed of the grave, they boiled out of the tombs and reliquaries, devouring each other and growing larger even as they came writhing across the treacherous floor to converge on Glendower.

  Leaping from the shallow rows of limestone pews that shattered under his weight, he came to crouch atop the wet red altar at the head of the temple.

  “I did so hope you would see it my way.” Morrison stepped out from behind the floating idol, wearing clerical vestments and holding a curling, serrated dagger like an ibex horn. “Baphomet was only one of His faces,” he said, circling Glendower at a cautious distance, a patient smile on his face. “Of all the Outer Gods, only He has deigned to walk among men. He ruled over ancient Egypt as the Daemon Sultan, built and buried a capitol greater than Memphis for his tomb. As a god of the Mongols, he once accepted the blood sacrifice of thirty thousand men and women in a single day. On a thousand other worlds, he’s worshipped by gents who can fly between the stars, do you understand? It’s not just this world we gain, if we’re on the right side. It’s everything, you barbaric Welsh buffoon, and you have no idea how big that is.”

  Glendower lunged at Morrison but fell short, sliding halfway into a shallow crusader’s tomb bubbling over with fat white worms. “I have some idea how big you still are,” Glendower said in a low, defeated voice that drew Morrison a fatal step closer. Stumbling, he steadied himself by plunging his arms into the overflowing crypt. “And I reckon you’re still not too big to kill, at least not yet.”

  Morrison grinned as he brought down the dagger. Glendower flailed backward, arms high above his head. The crude, curving blade sank deep into Glendower’s chest. It would have pierced his heart, had he stood still for it.

  Just as the knife pierced his flesh, Glendower laid into Morrison with the great two-handed bastard sword he’d found in the crypt. Its huge, wild weight smashed Morrison to his knees and clove his torso in half from the right shoulder down to the top of his sternum.

  “Call Him now, boyo,” Glendower said.

  Gasping, flopping backward, Morrison tripped and fell into a crypt and sank out of sight in the churning sea of worms.

  Glendower swore in ten tongues as he pulled Morrison’s dagger out of his chest. It hurt as badly as getting stabbed ever did, but he wasn’t coughing blood, for a mercy. The shredded sleeve of his coat served as a compress.

  With his good arm, he took a wrought-iron candelabrum stand and used it to stab and sweep a path through the rising flood of bloated worms. After several near-disasters, he alit on the only apparent exit, a corkscrew staircase behind the dais that bored into the vaulted ceiling.

  He raced up the stairs and entered a chill tunnel in the glassy black rock. Bouncing from wall to wall in his staggering exhaustion, he despaired of light and fresh air, and felt no relief even when the tunnel ended at the head of a narrow trail along the face of a sheer cliff. The chill, whistling wind of that great, empty sky was somehow more oppressive than the confines of a coffin.

  I’ve got to wake up, he told himself. But for all its unreal atmosphere, this nightmare seemed quite resolutely real to his ragged, beaten body. Morrison had found some method of making this place his own, playing his games in a mad attempt to kill Glendower or force his fearful loyalty. Clearly, the mad bastard hadn’t known him very well, after all. Funny how facing danger together could make one think his mates were more than brothers. He’d thought he knew Morrison a good deal better, too.

  As if reflecting his tortured thoughts, the trail twisted and twitched to the top of the cliff, and Glendower sat gratefully upon a rock outcrop to take stock of the terrain. Looming on the distorted horizon, the Assassin’s pleasure pavilions beckoned, but when Glendower turned his back on them, he caught sight of something he couldn’t refuse so easily. The trail wound down from the dizzy heights to the shore of an inland sea. The depths of the sea were obscured by the moon’s reflection and by leaden archipelagos of cloud, but as he descended, Glendower watched the play of moonlight on the strangely gentle ocean. He could only pray that it was fresh water, but he had no reason to expect any mercy.

  When at last the trail ended in a spill of gravel that he rode down to the edge of the gray water, he felt some little gratitude to find the water brackish, but not salty. Certainly they’d have better refreshment at the pavilions of milk and honey, but he knew just enough about the true nature of Morrison’s master to warn him against calling there.

  Horrors from Outside and savage butchery he could abide if he had to, but temptation of any kind was something else again. Avoiding it made the worst places home for the Welshman, and his service something as frightening to his paymasters in
London as he was to the Empire’s enemies.

  He’d hypnotized himself into a fugue of self-pity as he cleaned and bound his wounds while absently watching the horizon, the strange illusion of convexity to the great lake that made Glendower think he was seeing the curvature of this tiny, lost world.

  Then the moon went behind a cloud, and Glendower got a glimpse of what he was drinking from. When the play of silvery light was doused, the gray waters revealed strange and hideous things skimming on its viscous surface and coils of red veins like submerged mangrove forests, and moving across the face of the waters like a phantom moon, like some predator bigger than any wave, was a great black whirlpool encircled by a gold-flecked brown corona.

  Glendower retreated from the shore, climbing high enough to confirm his initial, absurd impression. The circle of gold-rimmed blackness that swept across the great gray sea was the iris of a colossal eye.

  Studying the craggy rocks, he belatedly saw the signs: the fluted black spires along the shore that he’d mistaken for charred trees or chimneys of lava rock—eyelashes—and the water he’d so gratefully drunk—tears.

  He was certain enough that it couldn’t see him. For all its impossible size, the eye had looked human. It wasn’t the color of Morrison’s eyes, which were a faded blue-gray. Perhaps he walked on the infinite face of Baphomet. If this were the true birthplace of the Assassins, then perhaps it was the original Old Man of the Mountain himself.

  Fair enough, then. If this were the Old Man’s mad dream, then one only had to figure a way to wake him up.

  Morrison’s voice came from on high again, but now it sounded weak and distant, a fading train-whistle on the wind. “My loyalty to the Crown was still a going thing. War between East and West is coming, inevitable … They know it. We could’ve led a new Empire to greater glory….”

  Shaking his heavy head, Glendower paced the cliff face overlooking the shore of the eye. “And with both sides worshipping the same greedy bastard god, the sacrifices would run on time, no matter who won.”

  He found a few stands of twisted, bone-dry wood and wedged the branches into the cracks in the stone. Morrison didn’t answer right away. Maybe he was otherwise engaged, out there in the waking world with a knife to his old captain’s throat.

  The desiccated wood absorbed his water avidly, swelling like automobile tyres and widening the cracks in the lip of the cliff overlooking the eye.

  “You’ll live to regret this, old boy,” Morrison said, just over Glendower’s shoulder. The captain wheeled about, but Morrison was nowhere in sight. Instead, he faced a horde of tottering skeletons in the tarnished chainmail of Templar knights and the black embroidered rags and leather armor of Syrian Assassins. Their gnawed and polished bones were knitted together by knots of tomb-worms that clung to their limbs and animated them in grim parody of the flesh they’d devoured, wriggling in eyesockets and waving from gaping jaws in hideous imitation of facial features. Glendower dodged blind, halting sword thrusts, then lashed out with the sacrificial dagger, chopping through flimsy human wreckage and flinging the phalanx of decay back upon itself.

  Clumsy as they were, he was pushed steadily back toward the edge of the cliff. Wherever their claws raked his unprotected flesh, the wounds blackened instantly and sent threads of infection coursing into his blood. His limbs began to falter, weakened by sickness as well as fatigue. He felt the edge of the cliff under his trembling heels and the oddly sweet sea breeze racing off the face of that awful ocean at his back. He tried to believe that Morrison had been lying when he fed him all that rot about this place. Every time you close your eyes, you will be delivered to us….

  A shrieking, concussive wind nearly hurled him into their teeth. All fell silent, and Glendower turned to see something like a waterspout erupt from the black vortex of the awesome eye.

  So violent was its agitated ascent from the convexity that spawned it, that Glendower mistook it for a black cloud, but as it rose and drew nearer, he saw that it was somehow a thing of restless flesh, clawing its way up toward the gray emptiness of heaven. Wings seemed to sprout, wither, and disintegrate with each stroke, and its half-formed body was at once solid and gas, worm and bird, machine and demon. The only constant was the infestation of scarlet eyes casting a lambent glow from what served it for a head.

  Glendower almost relished this fresh impossibility, but before his attackers could take advantage of his awestruck paralysis, the eye-born horror had vanished into the clouds, the uncanny echoes of its shrieking and an errant rain of tears tumbling down in its wake. Then all sound was drowned out by the cannonade of boulders fracturing. The cliff subsided and tipped to spill the worm-ridden horde toward him in a grisly avalanche.

  With a last desperate burst of energy, Glendower leapt into the teeth of their tumbling swords, climbing over their helmets and shields as they fell, springing with arms thrown wide to catch the jagged lip of the new cliff-face.

  He never reached it. Falling short, he watched in a kind of dilated, paralytic terror as the edge passed beyond his reach. Just below him, the plummeting rain of boulders struck the placid surface of the sleeping eye—

  Curling in anticipation of impact, Glendower rolled and struck his head upon the polished teak paneling of his compartment aboard the Wagons-Lits car.

  The shock of waking brought a series of seizures, mad, breathless laughter alternating with shivering and flashes of feverish nausea. His brain was a brick, his body clammy with tepid sweat, and his hand went reflexively to press at a stabbing phantom pain in his chest.

  The compartment reeked like an abattoir. He looked for something to be sick into, then to open the window, but it was already open. In point of fact, it was gone. Frigid alpine wind gushed in the gaping hole, but did little to remove the stench that wafted from his traveling companion.

  Lieutenant Morrison leaned back on his couch with the ivory-handled knife still resting in his hand. His chin rested on his chest as if he might wake up at any moment, or as if he were intently considering the ghastly trench in his torso.

  The traitor had been opened from clavicles to crotch and inspected with all the diligence of a Bolshevik customs officer. All the major organs along the digestive and pulmonary routes were bisected and turned inside out like a smuggler’s pockets, and a compact, swirling smear of blood on the curtain beside the missing window looked as if someone had wiped the gore away from something small and probably quite precious.

  In its mad rush for answers, his disordered mind seized upon Morrison’s preposterous story about the stone from the Ka’aba. Kidney trouble, Glendower thought.

  Nothing could explain why they had stepped over him to do their grisly work, and hadn’t troubled to cut his throat. Stranger still, the narrow window had been thoroughly smashed out to effect the murderer’s escape, but no sign of entry, not even a sliver of broken glass anywhere in the compartment, remained. But that was mad, though no more nor less than the observation that the brackish dampness that saturated Morrison’s clothing and the curtains had a horribly familiar odor.

  Glendower closed the curtains and covered his old friend with a carriage blanket, then rang for the conductor. When the knock came, he cracked the door and studied the smiling Frenchman in the corridor before he ordered a bottle of brandy and requested a telegram to London the moment they reached Sofia.

  The conductor was almost embarrassed to correct the captain, but they would be arriving in Vienna quite shortly. He had knocked to alert the travelers that the train’s bar had been restocked in Sofia last night, but received no reply.

  Biting his lip as he worked out the code from the cipher in his head, Glendower made out the message on the conductor’s pad and passed it through the slitted doorway, mindful to block any view of his traveling companion.

  Nose wrinkled, the conductor turned to leave when Glendower caught his arm.

  “Scratch the brandy,” he said, his eyes straying back to the corpse and the ivory pipe still resting in its blood-flec
ked hand. Every time you close your eyes … “Turkish coffee. Hot as hell and black as the Devil, and keep it coming till Paris.”

  A FINGER’S WORTH OF COAL

  RICHARD DANSKY

  IT WAS IN BRATISLAVA WHERE they put the fireman off the train, with the help of two burly passengers and a rather larger contingent from the local gendarmerie. The incident caused no small amount of scandal among the passengers, at least those who were aware of the disturbance, as it isn’t often that a screaming, thrashing man covered in coal dust and blood is hauled bodily from his station by officers of the law. In an odd reversal of fortune, those impecunious enough to have purchased berths in the cars closest to the locomotive had the best view of the proceedings, which made them suddenly and briefly sought after by the curious among the wealthier travelers. Later, over drinks in one of the dining cars, more than one witness suggested that they’d seen the man, a thick-legged Magyar who’d come on board with the lumbering Hungarian 4-8-0 engine they’d acquired in Vienna, contorting in inhuman fashion and heard him screaming in a language that none of them could either translate or identify. This odd fact was later confirmed by those same two burly gentlemen, who after some delay had returned to the train and were now being feted like conquering heroes.

  Graciously, the two—one a lawyer named Higdon with a London legal firm on his way to Istanbul on business; the other, Walters, the stolid personal assistant to a certain professor of natural sciences en route to a series of speaking engagements in Sofia—allowed the other passengers to purchase refreshing beverages for them in exchange for further details of their adventures.

  It seemed, said the professor’s assistant, that the fireman had abruptly begun acting as if he were possessed. When pressed for details as to what this meant, he rose briefly and demonstrated, flailing his arms, then commented that it was as if the man had somehow become unacquainted with the proper use of his limbs. In addition, he said, the man had been seen swinging a coal shovel about and generally screeching in what could be understood as no human tongue. His assistant had tried to restrain him and had gotten a vicious blow from the shovel in return. He, too, had been taken off the train, albeit on a stretcher, and it was doubtful as to whether he’d survive the night.