For such blessings, he was occasionally grateful.
He looked back and forth across the room. Only one student raised a timid hand, a reedy young man with too much hair and not enough chin. One was good enough to start with, he supposed, and pointed. “Yes?”
“Professor.” He hoisted himself to his feet and assumed a declamatory pose. “Today you told us about fossils forming in different strata according to the time period in which they evolved. What do you have to say to anomalous fossils, like human footprints next to dinosaur ones, or the human skeleton workers supposedly discovered in a coal car on a train? What about those?”
Rather than respond, Madison reached down into his pocket and pulled out a watch. It had seen hard use, as the marks of careful repair from some devastating accident attested. Carefully, he popped it open, feeling the reassuring whir of gears and wheels in the palm of his hand, the steady progression of time.
“I’m afraid we don’t have time for questions after all,” he said, and turned and walked away.
BOUND FOR HOME
CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN
THE LATE AFTERNOON SUNLIGHT GLINTED off of the rooftops of Vienna, casting long September shadows onto the cobblestone streets. Harry Houdini sat in the back seat, twisted slightly to one side to make room for the travel cases beside him. In the front, his publicist on this trip, an enterprising young man named Ned McCarty, rode with the driver. Harry listened to Ned’s easy banter, so confident at the age of twenty-two, and wondered if he had ever been as light-hearted as that. Ned spoke almost as little German as the driver did English, but somehow the two had struck up an easy camaraderie that Harry envied. When the driver pulled up to the train station, Harry was glad to have that particular journey over, even as he felt such dread about the one he and Ned were about to begin.
The auto had barely rattled to a halt before Harry unlatched his door and clambered out, closing it behind him. The sun had slid farther toward the horizon and dropped just behind the train station’s roof, silhouetting the building with golden fire and casting the street where Harry stood into deep shadow. Beyond the station, visible past the platform, the Orient Express awaited, hissing and smoking in preparation for departure, putting him in mind of a sleeping dragon. He took half a dozen steps toward that station and the platform and then hesitated, full of a trepidation he could not name.
Ned and the driver took the bags from the car and set them down. Harry glanced over in time to see Ned giving the man a tip and receiving a hearty pat on the back in return.
“Thank you,” Harry said, touching the brim of his felt hat in a little salute.
The driver waved in reply and climbed into the car, which gave a full-throated roar as he started it up. A moment later it clattered away, a strange sight amidst the horse-drawn carriages and carts on the street. Harry turned his attention back to the train station, auto-mobile and driver forgotten.
“You speak German,” Ned said, frowning at him. “You couldn’t bid him farewell in his own language?”
“I speak rotten German,” Harry replied, “and not much of it. Besides, I’m an American. I speak English. We hired him to drive specifically because he spoke our language.”
All during the exchange, Harry’s gaze never strayed from the sight of the Orient Express, seething and steaming as it awaited them. He had admired machines and mechanisms of all kinds throughout his life—ingenuity intrigued him—and a machine as beautiful and powerful as this train impressed him. The handful of days he had spent in Vienna had been a pleasure thanks both to the loveliness of its architecture and to its near-constant gastronomic delights, particularly the tortes at Gerstner on Karntner Strasse. The night he had attended the opera with the city’s mayor had been the one disappointment. The performance had bored him, and he had spent its duration wishing that he had been the one on the stage, playing to a packed house at the Wiener Hofoper. But it wasn’t just the beauty of Vienna that made him reluctant to leave.
“Harry?” Ned said, nudging him.
“Hmm?” Harry glanced at him and realized that Ned had picked up his own valise and travel case and stood waiting, while Harry’s own bags remained on the ground beside him.
“Do you want me to get a porter?”
“You’re the publicist, kid. Do you want the Great Houdini to have his picture taken carrying his own bags?”
He smiled, just in case Ned hadn’t caught the sarcasm. On stage he would always be the Great Houdini, and he played that up for the crowds on the streets and in the bars in order to feed his fame. But sometimes he grew tired from the effort it took to inhabit the role. Ned hadn’t known him very long and he didn’t want the kid who was supposed to be drumming up the Great Houdini’s press to think that the Great Houdini believed his own press.
Ned studied him for a second or two, troubled and unsure. “You’re right,” he said. “Herr Diederich will have some journalists to see you off, for sure. Let me get the porter.”
Harry shook his head and bent to hoist up his bags. “Forget it, kid. It’s the Orient Express, first class. I won’t have to lift a finger while we’re on board unless it’s to cut my steak. I can carry my own damn bags.”
Weighed down with his cases, wishing he had packed fewer shirts, he started toward the front entrance of the station. He passed out of view of the platform and lost sight of the waiting train. A shiver went through him.
“You all right, Harry?” Ned asked as they approached the front doors, the people around them all in a hurry, whether they were arriving in Vienna or departing.
“Might be coming down with a cold,” Harry replied.
“It’s not that,” Ned said. “You seem … well, I’ve never seen you nervous before. If I had to guess—”
Harry raised his chin a bit and gave the kid a hard look. “I’m fine.”
An older man came out through the doors and was polite enough to hold one open for them.
“You know you don’t have to do this,” Ned said. “You’re feeling ill, right? We can cancel.”
Just inside the station, in the midst of echoing footfalls and the susurrus of voices, Harry paused to glare at him, using anger to hide the battle he was waging in his heart.
“How would that look? For Pete’s sake, Ned, you’re the damned publicist!”
For more than a decade, as he toured the world, Harry had been challenging local constabulary to lock him up in order to establish his reputation as an escape artist. In time he had begun to accept challenges from ordinary citizens. Most of them he ignored, because once he had publicly accepted such a challenge, anything other than success would be an embarrassment and a black mark on the image he had worked so hard to build. Sometimes, however, he simply could not resist.
Ned glanced around to make sure they were not being overheard and then shuffled toward a wall, tilting his head to indicate that Harry should join him.
“You’re on edge,” Ned whispered. “If it’s not the escape that’s got you worried, do you mind telling me what the hell it is? Take me into your confidence. It’s the only way I can do my job properly.”
Harry took a long breath, fighting the tension in his back and arms, forcing himself to exhale. He glanced past Ned and saw Herr Diederich across the station. The Vienna banker stood with several others whose clothing and bearing marked them as similarly wealthy. They were surrounded by a small gaggle of perhaps half a dozen reporters, all of them hanging on Diederich’s every word, save for a smartly dressed young woman with her auburn hair caught up in a tightly knotted bun. Of them all, it was she who spotted Harry, and she gave him a small, knowing smile, as if to say she didn’t blame him for hanging back and delaying his exposure to the small circus that awaited his arrival. That smile charmed him, even from thirty yards away.
He turned to Ned, studying the young man’s earnest blue eyes and the neat little mustache he had grown to make himself look not quite so young but which had had precisely the opposite effect. A young man, but smart and loy
al.
“The reporters are coming over,” Harry said quietly. “They’ve seen me now and will be upon us in moments. But you deserve an answer, Ned, and it’s a kind of confession, I guess. I lived in Appleton, Wisconsin as a kid—”
“I know that.”
“—but I wasn’t born there. My real name is Erik Weisz. That’s Hungarian, my friend. I was born in Budapest and spent the first four years of my life there. I remember almost nothing of that period, of course. The Orient Express, the journey we’re about to embark upon … for me it’s boarding a train that’s bound for home, and it makes me feel like a charlatan.”
Ned gaped at him. “Wow, Harry, I had no idea.”
“Now that you do, you won’t speak a word of it to anyone. I’m no charlatan, Ned. I’ve worked as hard as I know how and nearly died a hundred times to get to where I am. But you wanted to know what’s gotten under my skin, and so I told you. It’s Budapest, kid. It haunts me.”
“You could have refused to—”
“But I didn’t,” Harry interrupted. “And we’re here now, so let’s give ’em a show.”
Before Ned could reply, the reporters descended upon them, firing off questions that Harry ignored with a magnanimous smile until Herr Diederich pushed through them with his rich friends in tow and put out a hand to shake.
“Mister Houdini, what a pleasure,” Diederich said in thickly accented English. “The train is to depart soon. I was afraid you would not make it in time.”
“Not make it?” scoffed a gray-bearded man with spectacles and a ruby pin in his lapel. “You thought Herr Houdini had decided to break his word, that the challenge had frightened him away?”
Bristling inside, Harry managed a smile. “Not at all, my friends.” He glanced at the charming woman with the auburn hair, saw the notepad and pencil in her hand and realized for the first time that she was one of the journalists. He liked that: a girl with pluck. “Just saying farewell to lovely Vienna, in case I never see her again.”
The reporters exploded with excitement at this, as they always did whenever he dangled the possibility of his own death in front of them. The reaction never failed to elicit a strange combination of amusement and disgust in Harry. Only the lady journalist, in her smart suit with its buttons in a severe, slashing line down the front of both jacket and skirt, seemed to hang back, waiting for an opportunity to strike.
“Anna Carter of the Boston Globe, Mister Houdini,” she said in the first lull. “Do you mean to tell us that a challenge this dangerous, circumstances in which most men would face almost certain death, doesn’t intimidate you at all?”
The question quieted them all as they awaited his answer. Harry directed it toward the lady who’d posed it.
“My dear Miss Carter,” he said. “The Great Houdini is not ‘most men.’”
Harry enjoyed the rocking of the train and the way the candle on his table in the dining car seemed to stay still, only the flame wavering back and forth. The first class dinner menu had been extensive, but he had chosen the duck with traditional Austrian dumplings and cabbage. Ned had ordered wild boar and somehow managed to consume the entire dish. He had a prodigious appetite for so thin a man, and Harry envied him his youth.
“How do you find the duck, Mister Houdini?” Anna Carter asked, over the rim of a glass of Piesporter she had been nursing for half an hour.
“Delicious, Miss Carter. And your veal?”
“Very tender,” the reporter replied. “Honestly, I never expected to experience a meal so fine in such circumstances. The cuisine onboard a train generally leaves much to be desired.”
Harry smiled at her, but not only her—his gaze took in Ned as well as the four other journalists at the table. “Perhaps you ought to travel in better company.”
Anna arched an eyebrow. “Duly noted.”
One of the others—the gentleman from the Times of London—asked a question to which Harry only half paid attention. Ned jumped in to answer, giving Harry the opportunity to take a sip of water. He’d have preferred a whiskey, but drinking with his life on the line had never seemed a good idea. As it was, he had eaten perhaps more than he ought to have, in his effort to contribute to the convivial atmosphere at the table. Diederich and the others had gone along with Ned’s request for them to dine with the reporters instead of their hosts, so he thought he ought to make the best impression he could muster. There was no point in having reporters around if he couldn’t use them to the greatest advantage.
“So, Mister Houdini—” began Herr Kraus of Wiener Zeitung, an Austrian paper.
“Harry, please.”
“Harry,” Herr Kraus went on, his accent thick but not impenetrable. “Tell us: The escape you will attempt tonight … is it really a challenge for you, or merely something arranged to keep your name in the papers?”
“Herr Kraus,” Ned began, but Harry held up a hand to forestall any protest on the publicist’s part.
“No, it’s a fair question,” he said, noting the spark of curiosity in Anna Carter’s eyes. He glanced at Herr Kraus before addressing the entire table. “I’ll admit that some of the challenges I’ve accepted have turned out to be simple enough for one of my abilities. But Herr Diederich and his confederates have gone to great lengths to make this more complicated than escaping from a jail cell. They’ve bolted a platform on top of this train. I’m to have manacles placed on my wrists and ankles, the chains looped through clamps that are welded to the platform. I will be blindfolded, hands behind my back. There is a tunnel forty miles or so outside of Istanbul whose ceiling is quite low—low enough, in fact, that if I am still on that platform when we reach the tunnel, I will surely be killed.”
No one at the table spoke. For journalists, this was a small miracle. It took Harry a moment to realize the reason—he meant what he’d said and that startled them. Of course he had a dozen ways to escape the trap, had trained most of his life for just that sort of thing, but he had never done anything like this on top of a speeding train before.
“Aren’t you afraid of dying?” asked the man from London, after another moment’s pause.
“My good man,” Harry replied. “I have no intention of dying, but if tonight is the night death comes for me, fear will hardly save me.”
A waiter arrived, a swarthy, thinly bearded man in wire-rimmed spectacles. He kept his dark eyes averted as he began to clear plates and glasses.
“Perhaps it’s time to inspect the platform and the chains,” Ned suggested.
Harry waved a hand. “I’ve done it already, while you were resting. We’ve an hour before the challenge begins. I recommend coffee and whatever pastries the chef has provided, though I myself must abstain in preparation.”
Another waiter arrived to inquire as to whether they desired sweets or hot drinks. He had the dignified air shared by so many of the staff, that of one who found nobility in service, proud of his station. Something tickled the back of Harry’s brain and he glanced around in search of the other man, the one who’d cleared their dishes. The dark-skinned man—of Middle Eastern descent, he believed—had kept his eyes downcast in a conspicuously subservient manner, nothing like the others. And yet, hadn’t there been just the hint of a smile on his face, as if he had taken some private amusement from the moment?
Harry spotted him farther along the car, where Diederich and the others who had funded the challenge sat, already enjoying dessert. The strange waiter delivered a small metal pot—perhaps of hot cocoa, a tradition in Austria—to the man beside Diederich, and then made his way toward the far door of the car, where the chef and his assistants were at work. As he passed through the door, the man gave a single glance backward, and Harry frowned deeply. Had he seen that face somewhere before, those dark eyes, the long, thin nose, the brows with their almost diabolical natural arch?
“Mister Houdini?” a voice whispered beside him. “Harry?”
He turned to see that Anna had shifted her chair nearer to his. Ned had begun to pass after-dinne
r cigars around to Herr Kraus and the reporters, who had all slid back from the table and begun a loud conversation about the most extraordinary stories they had ever covered for their respective papers—providing an opportunity for Ned to amplify just what an amazing feat they were to see that very night.
“You don’t like cigars?” Harry asked Anna.
Her smile held a hint of admonition. “Why haven’t you tried to seduce me?”
She said it so quietly that for a moment he thought he had misheard.
“I’m sorry?”
Anna’s hazel eyes sparkled with a hint of green, the wavering candle flame throwing suggestive shadows upon her face.
“Oh, it’s not an invitation, just a matter of curiosity. Every other man here has at least made overtures, but not so much as an inquisitive glance from you.”
Harry inclined his head in a polite nod. “I never practice the art of seduction before ten P.M., I’m afraid. In any case, I reserve my earnest attentions for Missus Houdini.”
The appreciative look she gave him held a distinctly American frankness.
“A happily married man, huh?” Anna said. “I figured them for a myth.”
“Not a myth, Miss Carter, though perhaps very nearly extinct.”
They were interrupted by much shuffling and murmuring as Diederich and his associates rose from their table and came along the car toward them.
“The time has come, Mister Houdini,” Diederich said in his wonderful accent.
“Now?” Ned said, brows knitted in consternation. “We’re not scheduled to begin for three-quarters of an hour, at least.”
The imperiously mannered white-bearded gentleman to Diederich’s left sniffed dismissively.
“Our speed is greater than anticipated,” he said. “If you are to have the agreed-upon interval before we reach the tunnel, we must begin in twenty minutes. Thirty at most. Surely if we are willing to give you more time to avoid being smeared along the ceiling of that tunnel, you do not object?”
Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey Page 20
