The fall seemed to go on for eternity. Just before they struck the water he drew a ragged breath and held it, and then they plunged into the cold, deep river, the current carrying them swiftly away from the train bridge. Submerged, dragged along the river bottom, Harry fought against the tentacles and against Anna’s flailing arms, but he did not strive for the surface. Instead, he struggled to stay down. The Great Houdini could hold his breath for a long, long time.
As they floated upward, he twisted in the water and kept her down, until at last Anna went slack in his arms and the tentacles loosened their hold and began to withdraw.
The river swept them into a shallow pool near its bank, scraping them against the rocks, and Harry dragged Anna up onto the shore. He could see the long slit that stretched from her groin to her throat, peeling her open. Nothing shifted in the dark, glistening cavity within her. He could see gray organs and pale bones, but whatever passage had opened inside of her, that door had closed with her death.
Harry wept into his hands, shaking with sorrow and fury.
When he could catch his breath, he lifted his gaze and stared upriver at the bridge spanning the gorge. The train would be far away by now. It would arrive in Istanbul without him. The homecoming he had imagined was not to be, and yet he had no intention of completing the journey. Home had taken on a new meaning for him, not his childhood home, or even the place he and Bess had made a home for themselves. He had caught a glimpse of what waited outside of his reality, and it had made him understand that the whole world was his home, and he would do anything to defend it. He would meet Abdul Reis el Drogman again. He would seek out every occultist and sorcerer, expose the charlatans and destroy the true practitioners, until he found Abdul Reis, and then he would kill the Egyptian.
For this had been no dream. He would never be able to persuade himself that it had been a nightmare, nor did he wish to. Anna’s death demanded that he remember. More than that, he had seen the nameless things moving on the other side of the door that had opened inside her, and he knew those things could never be allowed to come through.
Harry Houdini sat bloody and bruised on the bank of an unknown river and pondered what would have to be his greatest escape. He understood now that he was still a prisoner, bound by a future whose chains would continue to tighten around him until at last either he or his enemy, the diabolical Abdul Reis, was dead.
Only then would he truly be free.
ON THE EASTBOUND TRAIN
DARRELL SCHWEITZER
IT IS AN UNDERSTATEMENT TO phrase it that some years ago my colleague Henderson encountered something odd on a train in the middle of the night, while hurtling through the wilderness of Eastern Europe. An understatement, because that’s not the whole of it, though that much is true. It was a long time ago. He is retired now, albeit not for the usual reasons; but he was a young man then, a newly minted professional scholar. If the details are somewhat confused, that is because he volunteered them to me in a disjointed manner, with a great deal of effort on his part. His face went pale as he spoke, but was slick with sweat. This most well-spoken of lecturers stuttered and stammered. I cannot deny that it must have been more than odd to step out into the corridor of a racing, swaying railroad carriage and find oneself face-to-face with something so utterly inhuman that it might not even be accounted alive in the usual sense. That can only be described as terrifying.
But I am getting ahead of myself, as did he, when he told me this. Let me try to arrange things in their proper sequence.
George Henderson was, I say, a young man then. Having defended his thesis and taken his degree in the summer of 1912, only months later he found himself on the Orient Express, bound for Constantinople (as it was still called in those days) on a decidedly plum assignment to examine a unique medieval codex within his area of specialty, a bizarre volume that had been unearthed in an ancient, remote monastery and was now made, rather mysteriously, available to one selected scholar by invitation of the Turkish government. It may be true that certain relatives of his in the Foreign Service “pulled strings,” as the expression has it, though there is no doubt that he was fully qualified for the job.
Did I mention that Henderson was—I mean, is still—a brilliant man, who was expected to rise to the very top of his field very quickly? Yes.
So there he was, as another expression would have it, with visions dancing in his head like a child on Christmas Eve, not of sugarplums, but of something more on the order of some fabulous piece of lost classical literature, something to make his reputation and career then and there and forever.
Of course he knew perfectly well that it could well turn out to be some dreadfully dull theological work in impenetrable, late Byzantine fustian.
He could hope, though. There was the odd detail, that the item was described in the papers sent to him as being bound in thick leather and clasped shut with an elaborate lock made of the bones of two human hands—which the Turkish excavator (one suspects, looter) had managed to smash. That did at least seem to promise something more exciting than theology.
He could also wonder why the Turks would only allow one Western scholar to see it, rather than just publish the thing.
As the familiar landscape of France, Germany, and Austria slid by, he could only putter with his notes and look out the window. He found it difficult to concentrate.
In Vienna he had the extremely pleasant surprise of being asked to share his second-class compartment with none other than Professor Augustus Lindsay, the Augustus Lindsay, whose own startling career had led him to considerable fame and even notoriety in scholarly circles.
At this point Henderson interrupted himself and went on at great length about what a remarkable man Augustus Lindsay was. Lindsay was quite a bit older. George had studied under him as an undergraduate, first ancient languages, then more recondite matters bordering on the metaphysical. For all his effusive praise, he was vague on the details. With increasing excitement, he described the man: a tall, gaunt figure with remarkable presence that was hard to describe—something in his manner, in his voice—to whom Henderson had looked up as a mentor, and, I think, a kind of father-figure. But I won’t go into that. Suffice it to remark, as Henderson did, “If he were Faust, I would have been his Wagner—willingly.”
“Professor? Good day, Sir!” Henderson said as the newcomer entered the compartment.
The other laughed and said, “Good day to you, Professor. Yes, I know I can call you that now. I am quite proud of you, George.”
They greeted one another warmly, effusively.
There followed much amiable small talk, both over a meal in the dining car, and once more in their compartment: the usual academic gossip, catching up on old times and old friends and the like. Professor Lindsay was curiously evasive, though, about the reason for his own presence here. He wasn’t merely on holiday, but something more like a sabbatical, for research purposes of his own. Henderson had heard from the faintest whispers back home that the university hierarchy expressed less than unreserved approval. But of course Professor Lindsay’s position was such that he could not be seriously challenged.
All he could gather was that the older man had been in central Europe for some time, first in Prague, and had doubled back to Vienna before heading east again to the ancient, former abode of the caesars and basilei that was now, of course, synonymous with Ottoman sultans and the Sublime Porte.
Henderson was dying to know what Lindsay was working on, and when they got back to their compartment after dinner, he asked him directly. But it must be admitted that, particularly in his youth, Henderson was not an assertive fellow, and certainly incapable of forcing his will on his former mentor. Lindsay merely made a theatrical wave with his hand and remarked that their destination had quite enough mysteries, intrigues, and secrets for the both of them.
Henderson offered no resistance when Lindsay turned the tables and steered the discussion to the subject of his research.
“And I suppose you ar
e hoping to discover an original manuscript in the handwriting of Homer, my boy …” said Lindsay.
Although Henderson was now, technically, a colleague, he so readily fell back into the student-teacher relationship that being called “my boy” did not even give him pause.
“That would be nice.”
“Highly unlikely, you must admit, given the date of the thing.”
“Late fourteenth century.”
“The Paleologus period, then,” said Lindsay, with disdain.
“That is the date it was written down, yes, but the content could always be far older. In any case, what of it?”
“I must admit,” said Professor Lindsay, “that I have always despised the Paleologoi, cravens and villains the lot of them.”
This caught young Henderson by surprise, such a conventional bit of judgmental morality coming from a man not noted for his intellectual conformity. “Surely this is just Gibbon’s prejudice. I should think you would account at least Manuel the Second as noble and Constantine the Eleventh as decidedly heroic—”
“But their progenitor, Michael the Eighth sold his soul to the Devil. He put a curse on the whole damned line.”
“Well he did restore the Byzantine Empire. It lasted another two centuries.”
“There are some things, my boy, that are not worth doing, not after you have accounted the cost, whether they are reassembling shattered empires or translating forbidden books. It takes a larger context to understand if what we do is for good or for ill—”
This was the first thing to cast a pall over the otherwise holiday atmosphere of the excursion, like a cloud passing over the sun. Initially, Henderson thought the older man was joking, so incredible did it seem that Professor Lindsay would intone in the manner of some Sunday preacher that There Are Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, but he actually seemed to be in considerable earnest.
That was when the notion first occurred to Henderson, absurd as it might have seemed, that Professor Lindsay had something to hide.
This was reinforced a moment later when Lindsay looked up with a start, and Henderson followed his gaze. Someone was standing at the door of their compartment. The door had a pane of semi-opaque glass in it, so only a vague outline was visible. There was no knock. The figure just stood there in the corridor, as if peering in.
“Hello?” Henderson called out. “Can I help you?”
He rose to go to the door, but Professor Lindsay grabbed him by the wrist with surprising strength and held him fast in his seat, whispering, “For God’s sake, don’t.”
“What is it, Professor?”
“Just leave it.”
So they remained as they were for several minutes, while Henderson looked on, utterly bewildered, in silence, while the figure at the door was joined by a second, and a third, and it seemed to Henderson that something about these outlines was not right, distorted in some way.
Then they were gone. The door to the compartment next to them seemed to open and close.
Professor Lindsay let go of his wrist.
“I think I am due some explanation.”
“Perhaps you are and perhaps you shall have it in good time.” Then, despite Henderson’s half-hearted protests, Lindsay launched into a seemingly ridiculous and irrelevant story about how the first Paleologan emperor Michael the Eighth had not only sold his soul to the Devil, but was so wicked that, when he died, the earth would not receive his coffin and, of course, Heaven could not, so it floated about four feet above the ground.
“What would you say,” asked Professor Lindsay, “if I told you that I have seen that coffin? Would you believe me?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Well, my boy, you should at least think about it. There are more things in Heaven and Earth and all that. Mister Jedediah Orne, an American gentleman I stayed with in Prague, showed me quite a few things that you might find hard to believe.”
“Should I know of this Mister Orne?”
“I hope not. Now, I have said too much. I think we should turn out the light and get to sleep.”
Abruptly, Professor Lindsay shut out the light. There was nothing for it. Henderson undressed in the dark and crawled into his berth.
But he didn’t sleep, not for a long time, and even after that, not well. He kept hearing noises through the wall, shuffling sounds as if several persons were perhaps dancing without music, and there were even rhythmic thumping. When he finally did get to sleep he had an unpleasant dream in which he entered—or was forced to enter—that compartment next door. Somehow it was much larger than seemed possible for a railway compartment, an almost-cavernous chamber, in the middle of which stood a strangely carven stone altar with candles set on it around an open book, a thick codex with a broken clasp made of human bones. Gathered around this were at least a dozen persons, one of whom he recognized by his height and by his clothing as Professor Lindsay, even if all of them wore something over their heads, not quite hoods, more like canvas mail sacks with holes crudely cut out for the eyes.
“Come, sir,” someone said to him. “You must unmask, even as we do.”
He was aware then that he had such a sack over his own head, and as he was hustled forward it fell out of position, so he couldn’t see anything out of the eyeholes. He knew he was a prisoner then. He was suffocating inside the sack. Then someone yanked it off fiercely, even as the others removed theirs.
There was a flash of what might have been blinding light. He sat up suddenly in his bed.
Henderson saw Professor Lindsay in a dressing gown, seated at the small desk in the middle of their compartment. He had clearly been up for some time. When he noticed that Henderson had awakened, he said, almost curtly, “Oh, good morning,” and quickly gathered the papers he had been working on into a briefcase, which he snapped shut and locked. “Did you sleep well?”
“No,” said the younger man. “Actually I didn’t.”
“That’s too bad—ah!” Professor Lindsay looked up. There was a knock at the door. Someone was there. Before Henderson could say anything or otherwise react, Lindsay was at the door. He opened it.
It seemed they had reached the Rumanian border. Outside were a conductor and a customs official.
“I am so sorry, sir,” the conductor said. “If you’re not dressed yet, we can come back.”
“No, no, that is quite all right.”
The two were admitted, tickets and passports inspected, and, as they were on their way out, Henderson asked of the conductor, “What is going on in the compartment next door, if I may ask? I heard … noises in the night.”
“I am very sorry if you were disturbed, sir,” said the conductor, “but I really could not say. That compartment is empty now.”
When the two were gone, Henderson asked, “Did you hear anything in the night?”
“No. I can’t say that I did.”
“Do you suppose that compartment really is empty?”
“If the man said so, it must be.”
Henderson himself was not so sure, and not sure why it troubled him. On their way to breakfast he fell a little behind his companion, then paused to try the door of the neighboring compartment as they walked past it. It was locked.
Most of the passengers must have gotten off in Budapest, because now, for all that there might have been several persons raising a racket in the night, the dining car was all but empty. Henderson noted a middle-aged German with an enormous mustache in imitation of his country’s Kaiser, and what appeared to be a wealthy Russian couple; but as these made no attempt to mingle, he and Professor Lindsay otherwise had the car all to themselves. They breakfasted in a leisurely manner. There followed a delay of several hours as the engine was being exchanged for another one, and possibly the border officials took a while to be satisfied. Finally the train lurched into motion again, and throughout the day the view out the window was of the increasingly wilder forests and mountains of Rumania, although neither Henderson nor Lindsay had much opportunity to admire the scen
ery, because their journey descended into nightmare quickly thereafter.
They returned to their compartment. Once more Henderson pressed Professor Lindsay about the nature of his researches, and his reason for traveling to Constantinople at all. He may have been in awe of the man. He may have looked on him with almost juvenile hero-worship, but he was not stupid, and he knew when something was being kept from him.
“My boy, when it is time for me to make an announcement to the world, I shall make it. Meanwhile, I am afraid, I must have my confidences. I’m sorry, but that is all I can say.”
“But surely—”
“Nothing is sure. We know so very little. We drift like specks of foam in a vast sea of ignorance.”
“This isn’t making any sense, Professor.”
“Then I am afraid I have nothing more to say.”
In silence, then, they sat opposite one another for a time. Henderson got out and reviewed his notes. Lindsay actually did open his briefcase in his lap, and examine his notes, but he kept the lid up, blocking Henderson’s view, even as Henderson made his best effort not to seem to be interested. As far as he could tell, some of Lindsay’s notes were old, not on paper at all, perhaps medieval parchment. But he never found out. He never had a chance to retrieve that briefcase.
What happened was that a shadow fell over the both of them. Henderson looked up, and saw that Lindsay was staring at the door with an actual expression of dread on his face. Again, someone stood before the semi-opaque glass—two shapes, three, four. More passed behind the first ones. The door to the adjoining compartment very definitely clicked, loud enough that he could hear it unmistakably above the background noises of the train itself.
The silhouetted figures at the door appeared misshapen, as if, perhaps, they had bags over their heads.
Henderson made no attempt to go to the door. Lindsay sat absolutely still, then whispered to him, as faintly as he could, “I don’t suppose you brought a pistol with you.”
Madness on the Orient Express: 16 Lovecraftian Tales of an Unforgettable Journey Page 22
