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

by Dennis Detwiller

  “Curious thing,” interjected Higdon, clearly tired of having Walters relate the lion’s share of the tale, “was that after they took the man to the police station, he just collapsed. No more screaming, no more of that damned animal talk. No, sir, out like a candle in a stiff breeze, that one was. Couldn’t wake him up or get a word out of him, either.” A bevy of young ladies traveling together heard this pronouncement and cooed in the lawyer’s direction; their fluttered eyelashes told him how very impressed they were with this new tidbit. He flushed, and smiled, and wriggled up a bit straighter in his seat.

  Walters coughed slightly, and all eyes turned to him. “Actually,” he said, “there was one thing the man muttered after he stopped struggling. Under his breath, though, so I’m not surprised you missed it, Higdon.” The lawyer stopped flushing and started glaring, but Walters ignored him magnificently.

  “What was the word, dear boy?” asked the professor himself, a balding yet thoroughly mustachioed man named Madison. “You must share.”

  Walters nodded. “He said—well, whispered really—one thing. One word before he slipped away.”

  “Yes?” Even the lawyer was leaning forward now, and if the young ladies had been dewy-eyed before, now they were positively limpid.

  “He said something that sounded like ‘szen.’”

  “Ah,” said Professor Madison, and sat back in his chair. “Of course he would.”

  “It’s nonsense,” blustered the lawyer.

  “No,” Madison countered. “It’s Magyar.”

  “What does it mean?” twittered one of the young ladies. “Something dark and mysterious?”

  “It means,” Madison said, “coal.”

  “I suppose it wasn’t entirely necessary to embarrass Higdon like that, was it?” asked Walters as he and his employer picked their way back toward one of the restaurant cars for their evening meal. Ordinarily, Madison had confided in his man, he would have disembarked for his evening repast, as he had quite been looking forward to a meal at Traja Muskieteri, and perhaps finishing his evening with a pajgle or two. The incident of the fireman, however, had quite put a pall on the day, to the extent that very few of the passengers had disembarked even with the announcement that there would be an extended stay while the police examined the scene for evidence. That they had found nothing in no way reflected on their thoroughness, nor on their enthusiasm, which was much remarked upon by the passengers. Indeed, they had taken so much time that it was now well past six, the train’s departure having been delayed nearly half a day by the police investigation.

  Now, however, it seemed that whatever conclusions there were to be drawn had been drawn, and the Orient Express had been released to seek its destiny farther down the line. At the front of the train, the lumbering 4-8-0 bellowed its discontent with the state of affairs. Clearly, someone had been found to feed it the coal it desired, and the engine was stoked and ready to travel.

  Madison stopped to regard his protégé as the train lurched slowly into motion, jerking unsteadily forward as it restarted its long journey to Istanbul. “Embarrass Higdon? I supposed we did, at that. Not that he didn’t deserve it, mind you—the man’s a bully and a fool, only interested in making himself look more dashing to a gaggle of silly young things. Such habits are unbecoming, and should be discouraged wherever possible. I marvel that a reminder of the perils of this sort of behavior would be necessary after Boston.”

  Walters, whose thoughts had briefly drifted to the young ladies in question, shook his head. As for the brawl in Boston, he had the two twisted fingers on his right hand to remind him of that folly; they had never properly healed after he stepped in to silence a brute muttering obscenities at some schoolgirls.

  The train had started moving, the click-click of the wheels coming faster and faster until they blended into a satisfying hum. And for an instant, the hum became something more, a buzzing that filled his brain; all around him was not the luxury of the finest passenger rail Europe had to offer, but rather a vista ancient and green and poisonously alive. Then it was gone, and all that was left was the train, and the professor, and a vague sense of unease.

  “Is something wrong?” Madison asked, but Walters shook his head. “Nothing, I’m sure,” he muttered.

  “Dinner, then,” said the professor, “and then I’ll need to prepare for those talks a bit. You might want to spend the evening reading about the geology we’re passing through. Fascinating stuff, really.” It was not, Walters knew, a suggestion.

  “Of course, Professor,” he said. “To the dining car?”

  “To the dining car.”

  Walters read until late into the night, long after Professor Madison had himself turned in. The minutiae of the fossiliferous coal swamps that dotted the region were less than enthralling, and yet he pressed onward, lest he fail to acquire the breadth of knowledge Madison required in his assistant. After all, the professor was a man of many and varied interests, some of them esoteric, and to apprentice under him was to need to know a veritable cornucopia of disconnected facts and call them forth at a moment’s notice.

  Twice more, as the train adjusted its speed for some curve or bridge, he had those faint, unsettling visions, but they vanished quickly. No doubt brought on by thoughts of the ancient landscapes he’d been reading about, he told himself, and eventually folded himself up for bed. The book he’d been attacking lay discarded on the floor, its impressive color plates of ancient insects and lumbering amphibians temporarily forgotten.

  And it was only as consciousness faded that he remembered, dimly, that the buzzing and the first vision had come well before he’d read the first page.

  “Ahem.”

  Walters looked up; Professor Madison did not, instead choosing to concentrate on the pfannkuchen that comprised the largest part of his breakfast. Standing ostentatiously by the table was the lawyer, Higdon, whose piggy gaze was focused on the professor with an expression of triumphant contempt.

  “Can I help you?” asked Madison.

  Higdon’s gaze swiveled over to where Walters sat, the demolished remains of his breakfast spread out before him. “Oh, I don’t think you can. You certainly can’t help that poor fellow back in Bratislava?”

  “The fireman?” Walters asked. “Is there a new development?”

  “More like a final one,” Higdon puffed. “He’s dead, you see.”

  “Dead?” the professor interjected, putting down his paper and looking up from his apple pancakes.

  “Oh, quite so.” Higdon stopped for a moment, looking around as if to ensure the whole car could hear him dispensing a little tidbit of knowledge the so-wise professor did not possess. “Word just just came over the telegraph. Flung himself out a window in the hospital once he understood that the train had left without him. Shouting ‘Szen, szen, szen’ the whole time, too. Loved his work a little too much, I guess, eh?” The last was accompanied by a buffoonish chortle, and then the lawyer turned to go. Walters rose to go after him, but Madison put a restraining hand on his arm.

  “Let him go,” the professor advised, but Walters pulled away.

  “He’s damned rude.”

  “As you noted, we did embarrass him. Only natural of him to try to get back.”

  “Yes, but to use a man’s death to do so? Despicable!” Walters glared at the other passengers who’d been watching the drama; most of them had the common decency to flush and look away.

  Madison raised a solitary eyebrow. “You’re not going to get us thrown off the train, are you? The last time you thrashed a man in a dining car, it cost us two days’ layover in Cincinnati.”

  “He swung at me first, as you may recall,” Walters retorted. “And, no, I merely intend to express my dismay at his rudeness, and perhaps to call him a blackguard, a rake, and a cad.”

  “If you must.” Madison sighed and hoisted himself to his feet. “As for me, I’m more interested in what Higdon said than in why he said it. Szen indeed.”

  But Walters was already gon
e, headed for the rapidly closing door at the end of the dining car. He passed through it and across the swaying gap, into the next car where he fully expected to see Higdon forcing his unpleasant company on some passenger or other.

  Instead, there was nothing. Travelers sat here and there at tables, sipping drinks and playing cards or reading novels, but of the brusque solicitor there was no sign. Nor did the door at the far end of the car appear to be in any state of activation.

  “You,” he said, and wheeled to face a porter. “A man came through here just now. What happened to him?”

  The man shook his head in confusion. “No man came through, sir. I’m sorry, sir, but you must be mistaken.”

  “But I saw him,” Walters protested, to no avail. The porter was firmly polite but quite certain no one had passed him. In fact, the door hadn’t even been opened until the young gentleman came through. If he wanted to ask the other passengers….

  “Very well,” Walters said, perplexed, slipping the man a crumpled banknote by way of an apology. He thought about heading back to breakfast, but his irritation with Higdon’s bad behavior had settled in his stomach like a knot, with no chance now to exorcise it. Better, he thought, to return to the compartment, retrieve the book, and resume his studies whilst the train chugged onward. His course decided, he nodded to the porter and made his way through the car.

  But still, Higdon’s disappearance nagged at him. Where could the man have gone? Surely he hadn’t jumped from the train between cars, and yet, he’d evaporated as surely as water left on a hot stove. The whole thing felt unreal, the train and everything on it suddenly taking on the cast of ephemeral phantoms, as solid only as smoke.

  The steady thrum of the train’s wheels sang counterpoint to Walters’s internal debate as he passed out of the car and on to the next one, a buzzy hum that made stringing together complex thoughts impossible.

  The new car was mostly empty, at least—the side route through Bratislava was not the most popular, he knew—and the absence of fellow travelers was a relief. Even the porter of this car had abandoned his station, no doubt for one of the innumerable cigarette breaks that were as much a part of Eastern Europe as crumbling signs of Turkish occupation.

  A couple of old men drowsed at a table by a window, neither of them conscious of the scholar’s passing. He gave them a nod as he trudged forward, bracing himself as the train threw itself around a curve and into a long, level straightaway.

  As it did, the humming grew stronger, a low, insectile sound that persisted underneath the normal clank and bustle of the rolling stock. Walters could feel the sound now as well as hear it, could sense it climbing up from the carpet and through the soles of his shoes. Shaking his head, he took another step forward and immediately regretted it. His left foot felt leaden, his right tingled uncontrollably to the point where it went numb and he lost his balance. Pitching forward, he caught himself with a splayed right hand against the doorframe, which proved to be a mistake.

  Instantly, the twisted fingers gave way and his palm felt as if he were grasping a handful of angry hornets. Sting upon sting upon sting bit into his flesh in rapid succession. The sensation crawled up his arm, climbing nerve to nerve until everything below the shoulder was a ball of agony. The force of it was enough to drop him to his knees, driving the breath out of him in a singular grunt. He held there for a moment, unable to make the muscles of his arm work well enough to pull his pained fingers away before the torment crept up his legs as well. Marching forward like jungle ants, the feeling crawled along every limb, meeting and twisting together in the space around his heart. Slowly he sank to the floor, his vision blurring as the buzzing grew louder and the pain crept up his spine to electrify the very base of his brain, and then …

  Then suddenly he wasn’t on the train at all. With no wall to brace against, he toppled down into a thick, oozing mud. The painful tingling in his arms and legs had stopped, however, and after a moment of wondering exactly what had happened, he pulled himself up out of the muck.

  Kneeling—he didn’t quite trust himself to stand—he wiped mud from his face with his good hand, marveling at the clingy qualities of the thick, black stuff. It was not the mud that truly startled him, though; it was what was growing out of it.

  He saw now that he knelt on a small island or tumulus in the middle of a vast swamp, one that positively thrummed with life. Gleaming insects in iridescent green and blue and gold swooped and swarmed, dragonflies cutting the thick, steamy air with doubled wings and a steely sense of purpose. Everywhere, plants rose up out of the discolored water, an explosion of greenery reaching upward to a thick canopy that nearly shut out the sky. These were not trees, though; instead, they could only be titanic ferns or cycads, whose golden trunks speared up from black water to disappear in the canopy overhead. Some, he guessed, were over two hundred feet tall.

  Which implied that the creatures swooping among them were huge as well—surely too huge to fly. And yet there they were, larger than birds, wings beating the thick, rich air.

  Now that the visual shock was done, the sounds of his surroundings had a chance to assault his ears. And what sounds they were: the buzzing of those titanic insect wings, the thick sounds of muddy water flowing, the croaking of frogs, and in the distance, the wet bellows of massive beasts yet unseen. But just as disturbing were the sounds that he did not hear. There was no birdsong, no scuttling of squirrels in the “trees” or mice in the ferny undergrowth.

  And, of course, no sounds of men. No thunderous engine, no clack of wheels over well-laid tracks, no voices calling or axes cutting into ancient, unfeeling wood. The entire scene sounded unfinished, absent so much of what Walters realized he took for granted. All evidence of mankind was absent, and he was utterly alone.

  Or nearly so. He looked around at the island he stood on, a hummock a few hundred feet across rising up out of the muck and yet made largely of muck itself. Too many steps in any direction would lead him off its edge into the turgid waters, and his imagination quickly conjured the sorts of creatures that might dwell under the surface in a place like this.

  Yet, in the mud he saw footprints—shod ones. They circled his position, he saw, then led away toward the water’s edge. Treading carefully, he followed.

  The prints were deep, deeper than his own, which implied a heavier man had made them.

  Higdon had been larger than he, Walters recalled. His shoes might have made tracks very much like these.

  Six feet from the water, the tracks stopped.

  More accurately, they vanished, wiped out by a greater disturbance. The ground had been torn up here, obliterating any record of the man’s passage. Instead, there were great, sharp gouges dug into the earth, ones that looked suspiciously like the work of massive claws. There was a familiar scent here, too, coppery but faint. He started to kneel down for a closer look, but some primal sense of danger stopped him, some unsuspected clue that told him he was in terrible danger.

  The insects, it seemed, had found him.

  He turned as a gleaming battalion of dragonflies plunged toward him, mandibles clacking with hunger. Questions of where he was became academic as he threw himself down to the ground, just under the first wing of swooping predators. They buzzed past as he rolled to his knees, then wheeled about in obscene formation to come around for another pass.

  Then they were upon him, diving for his face and the tender softness of his eyes. Crouching down, he swung wildly at them, hoping to drive them away. One fist connected with a shocking thwock, the sound like that of wood on wood, and a monstrous bug spiraled down into the mud. Quickly, he smashed down with his fist and was rewarded with a satisfying crunch of chitin and a spray of foul-smelling innards. But that was just one of hundreds, and even as it twitched its last more swarmed to the attack.

  One fastened on his forearm, its mandibles plunging down through the fabric of his shirt to pierce the meat underneath. He flung it away, but there was fresh blood in the air now, and more and more insect
s converged on him. Swinging, flailing, he was blinded by the cloud until inevitably he lost his balance, falling back into the warm, wet mud. He tried to escape, but the sucking, gooey muck held him tightly. The insects, sensing their prey was helpless, dove in for the kill. Walters shuddered as the ravenous jewels descended upon him.

  And then, from somewhere very close, a monstrous, bubbling roar split the air.

  The dragonflies reacted instantly. They stopped their aerobatics, holding position like a deadly curtain of the aurora while the roar sounded again. Then there was a sudden, sharp crack, and one of the dragonflies disappeared in a cloud of foetid vapor. A second sound, and another one burst, and then they were flying in all directions, a frantic explosion of vanishing color.

  Desperately, Walters pulled free from the muck and scrambled to his feet to face the new danger. What he saw defied rational description. Rising up out of the water was a creature, green-skinned and rubbery, with a rough slash for a mouth that extended halfway around its bulbous head. Its front two feet rested on the island itself and they were heavy and clawed, barely supporting the beast’s pendulous belly. It chewed, its lower jaw cycling in an odd, circling motion as what was undoubtedly one of the dragonflies crunched between its teeth. From nose to tail, Walters estimated, it was at least twelve feet long.

  The real monster sat on its back.

  It was huge, a wet gray cone that rose up to a series of four odd points. What only could be described as tentacles drooped from these, and Walters could not fail to note that the two extended in his direction ended in lurid claws clutching odd silvery objects. A third blossomed into a cluster of bright red mushrooms, while the fourth was festooned with bulging, inhuman eyes. They stared at him for a moment, during which time Walters got the shuddering sensation that the thing was studying him as he himself had studied amphibious specimens staked out in dissecting trays, pondering where to make the first incision.