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

by Dennis Detwiller

  Because I know now why the shape of the creature seemed familiar. I see the same shape every day as I look out the window of my little flat. The same humped mass that is the silhouette of Mount Leone.

  I want to believe it’s over. That Tom, in his inexcusable bravery, sacrificed himself so that we could kill it. But as I stare at the mountain, the warm chocolate tasting like iron in my mouth, I wonder if perhaps the thing we killed was only a small piece. The heart of a greater living thing, which is the mountain itself. I think of the rivers of hot, rust-red water being pumped out of the mountain’s depths and into the streams, carrying the mountain’s essence with it. If the mountain has a heart, then we have given it veins.

  And if the monster was the heart of the mountain, what is the mountain the heart of?

  I watch the mountain.

  And I wonder.

  DADDY, DADDY

  PENELOPE LOVE

  Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

  —Sylvia Plath, “Daddy”

  Why did he curse that his daughter wasn’t a son? […] what devilish exchange was perpetrated in the house of horror where that blasphemous monster had his trusting, weak-willed, half-human child at his mercy?

  —H.P. Lovecraft, “The Thing on the Doorstep”

  PARIS WAS ON STRIKE. THERE were no taxis and the metro was closed, so she ran all the way from the Gare du Nord. Her heavy nylon backpack banged painfully against her spine. Daddy always said she was useless and now she was going to miss the train.

  Protesters filled the streets, stopping the traffic. They held placards with a red hand. Arrête! Horns blared and drivers cursed as she dodged between the cars. She gulped gasps of filthy air from the piles of uncollected garbage that filled the streets.

  She arrived panting at the Gare de l’Est with her crumpled ticket clutched in her sweating hand. The station was built in the glory days of train travel, a vaulted cathedral-like space. She could not share its calm. It was bang on departure time, and she braced herself for one last mad dash through the ticket barrier and onto the train. She arrived on the platform wheezing and pop-eyed, dragging her backpack, clutching at her half-cramped side.

  Her heart soared as she spotted the handful of the gold and blue carriages waiting ahead. She had longed for a glimpse of something rich and beautiful all her life. Then her hopes collapsed. The carriages were dirty and dented, tacked onto the back of a long string of freight cars. There was one sleeper and no restaurant. The engine was an old workhorse. All glamor had long since fled the Orient Express. The general strike had crippled the remains.

  Newspapers were preparing the great train’s obituary: Orient Express 1883-1977. The future belonged to the Concorde.

  The staff would not let passengers board and the hours dragged. Incomprehensible announcements filtered around the vast space. Dirty daylight seeped into the stain of night. She changed her last few pounds into francs, and bought a half-bottle of wine and some stale bread. She sat twelve hours on the station bench.

  At midnight she went to the toilet, washed her face and gazed at her reflection in the cracked glass. She was slight and skinny with short-cropped fair hair. The harsh Australian sun had darkened her face but the pale skies of Europe had washed away the tan. Now her skin looked merely soiled. Her large eyes were pale blue. She wore dirty purple flares and a floral top whose once-bright colors had faded. Everything about her felt scraped and mean. The only thing with any weight was her backpack.

  The staff finally let the passengers onto the train an hour before dawn. She got on at the first carriage and dragged her pack down the aisle. Hurrying passengers shouldered her aside in their rush to grab seats. She squeezed through a door between the cars and along a narrow corridor through the sleeper.

  Everywhere were signs of faded grandeur. Frosted glass, etched with art deco designs, had missing panes plugged with paper. Graffiti was carved into the inlaid timbers. The leather seats were old and cracked. Everything was covered with gray dust. The staff were surly and indifferent, their uniforms ill-fitting. She could have wept with weariness and disappointment.

  She reached her sleeping compartment at last. The upper half of the door was frosted glass so she could not see inside. She hauled it open. Four bunk beds were crammed into the narrow, stuffy compartment, but only two were occupied. The man on the top right bunk remained a stranger to her—a dim mound huddled under the blankets. The youth in the bottom bunk was thin and dark and French. He glanced up with a smile that died as he took her in. “Ça va?” he asked, eyes wide.

  “Tired,” she mimed. She tilted her head against her hands and closed her eyes. She dumped her backpack on the dirty floor, in the savage hope that someone would steal it, and thumped full length onto her own bunk on the bottom left. The sheets were dirty. A shudder passed along the length of the carriage. The train moved out. She stretched her weary limbs and slept.

  She woke with a scream at an alien station. She found herself on her feet, so dazed with shock that she could not remember standing up.

  The man on the top bunk was gone. The youth in the bottom bunk had pressed himself up against the wall.

  What did he think? That she was mad of course. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she implored. She touched her head. “Bad dream,” she explained.

  He surveyed her with frightened eyes then gestured at the door. It was ajar. He edged along his bunk, away from her. There was a chill draft swirling in the fetid air of the sleeping compartment and the floor was marked by wet, muddy tracks that stopped at her own feet. She had not been asleep. She had just come in from outside. Where had she been?

  The train groaned and stirred like a wretched beast. It crawled painfully from the platform. She watched the rain-bleared station disappear from view. The spires of the Duomo pierced the night. She had just left Milan.

  Memory returned. She had been to the Cimitero Monumentale. In that vast graveyard she had spoken to Others. The Others had spoken to her and touched.

  Suddenly furious, she dropped to her knees, tore open her backpack, and hauled out the jar. She held it in both hands and shook it. “Daddy, you promised!” she shrieked.

  The jar was heavy in her hands, most of the weight of her pack, with white lettering on a yellow and red label: Vegemite.

  Daddy did not reply.

  The youth slid from his bunk and fled.

  She set the jar down with a vindictive thump. She sat on her bunk with head in hands and muttered to herself, rocking back and forth. “Daddy, you promised you wouldn’t do that again, you promised you promised,” she moaned in time with the wheel beats.

  It was like this for as far back as she could remember. Daddy was sick all the time, but he never got better. Daddy was old, so old, but he would not die. She remembered the first lesson he ever taught her. “People get old,” Daddy said, his eyes blazing with contempt. The hate was the only young thing in his aged face. “They get old and they die. Even Daddies have to die some time,” he told her, but he would not. He would live on and on.

  The house was a brick bungalow in a prosperous part of town. It looked sane enough from the outside. Within, things invisible stalked from room to room.

  Daddy was furious that she was not a boy. A man’s brain had unique and far-reaching powers that made it easier for Daddy.

  She was not the last attempt. Her little brother—

  She winced. Daddy forced the Unborn too hard. Mummy bore a crippled, clawed, wrinkled thing with a swollen head. “Fluid on the brain,” the doctors said. It lived only a day and she was glad. She would have died of fright if they had brought it back home.

  After that Daddy was very angry with Mummy. Mummy fell sick so she had to take to her bed. She grew thin and crippled. Her skin turned gray. She crumpled up like a question mark. Her gray skin slowly dried and powdered to a dust that sifted over the floors and furniture and filled the house.

  She used to rest beside Mummy on the bed and stroke her crippled hands. Even when Mummy
could no longer speak they could talk to each other with their eyes. They both knew that when Mummy was gone she would be left alone.

  At last Daddy said that it was time for Mummy to go. He brought an oblong box into the house and nailed Mummy inside, ignoring his daughter’s protests.

  “Mummy’s not dead. Mummy’s not dead. Look! Her eyes still move,” she had shrieked, until he lost patience and locked her in the shed. When he let her out after a day and night, the box was gone. She heard Mummy screaming in her head for months and months. But after a year the screams weakened. And then, after a long silence, she supposed that Mummy was dead.

  That was when her training really began. She was Daddy’s little girl now. For ever and ever. Daddy made her read aloud to him from books written in a language she did not know and which he did not bother to explain. She would not understand, he said, with her weak, female brain. Never had she been so terrified and so bored at the same time.

  Daddy made her memorize the nonsense words and recite the meaningless sentences over and over again. If she forgot any he beat her, or worse. She was eager to obey, in dread of the final punishment. The heavy weight that bore down on her was not only physical but mental, crushing breath and spirit, until only a squeak, a scrape of herself was left; a writhing fragment that fought without thought to survive, like a half-crushed centipede.

  Daddy made her draw the circles and make the signs then chant the Dho formula and sit inside the circles while he sat outside. Then she must sign and chant until their positions reversed; until she sat in Daddy’s body on the outside looking in. Then Daddy sat in her chair and she watched his sly, rictus smile spread over her own face.

  He drove her to it. She had no choice. His old body was failing so she knew he was preparing to make the switch. He would take her body but this time make the change permanent. She would be shut out, left to gibber alone in the Outer Dark.

  She crept up on him when he was asleep. She stabbed him in the chest. The blade grated and bounced against bone. He woke and shouted and held up his hands. She stabbed, blinking and gasping as the knife finally cleaved the meat and blood spurted into her eyes. She kept stabbing and stabbing and stabbing and stabbing until she was sure he was dead. Then she buried him in a shallow grave in the back garden.

  She told the people who came calling that he had gone on a trip.

  For a few days she felt such exquisite light-heartedness and relief. She ate bread, butter, and Vegemite in a joyful feast. She had run off the tracks that he had laid down for her since before she was born. She was free and there was no one in her head but herself.

  It did not last.

  She should have known that death would not stop Daddy.

  The third night after she killed him he came back, pounding on the walls of her mind with his fists. He threatened to drag her from her own body and thrust her into the rotting corpse buried in the dirt. That was when she used the carving knife on herself. But she was not thorough. She woke in the hospital with her wrists bandaged.

  The hospital was a low pale brick building in a square of brown grass. The wards smelled of dishcloths and disinfectant. It was here that she met Nazir, with his gaunt face and scarred shoulders. He wasn’t mad. He had tuberculosis. He smoked incessantly and hoarded the stubs in Coke cans. He gave her the hint. They watched TV together in the patients’ lounge. She had never seen a color TV before. She told him her story. He laughed at her, then gestured at the screen. Women marched across the surreal colored glow, banners and placards high. They linked arms and sang “I am Woman, I am Strong.” The police bore down with batons and riot shields and broke the protest apart, then pursued the survivors with fire hoses. Bloody water flowed.

  “They made the same mistake as you. You can’t confront the Man,” Nazir scoffed. “You can’t win. You need to pretend to go along then jump the rails at the last turn.”

  When she got out she did as Daddy said. She dug up the corpse, cut it up, and burned the pieces in the fire. She scraped up the ashes, crushing the bones that had not fully burned. She chanted the Dragon’s Head Ascending, and turned the ashes into a fine, grayish dust that sparkled as she sifted it from hand to hand. Essential Saltes, just like Daddy called it.

  She did not know if she could chant Dragon’s Head Descending, or bear to see Daddy rise from the Saltes alive with dead eyes, sagging skin, and rictus grin. To her relief he did not tell her to do that. Instead he told her they were going on a trip together, they were going all the way to Europe. A train trip to Istanbul. They would take the Orient Express, for it stopped in a few cities where he wanted to get some things. He even allowed her to buy a return ticket to go to England to see the Jubilee. The train would arrive in Istanbul at six in the morning and depart at midnight, straight back to London. Imagine. There, she had said he wasn’t a good Daddy, and all the time here was Daddy planning this nice thing. They had to take the Saltes with them but they couldn’t be seen. She had to hide the Saltes.

  Hide them.

  She bought a large jar of Vegemite and scraped the black paste out. She poured the Saltes into the jar and then scraped the paste back in again. The smell made her retch—charcoal and brewer’s yeast and death. It worked, though. Her passport was checked and luggage searched again and again, but no one questioned the Jar. Everyone accepted her explanation that she could not travel without it. Australians and their Vegemite.

  She came out of her reverie. She was alone in the sleeper. The train had been halted for some time. There were guards in the corridor. Now the train lurched into life with a weary hiss and writhed on through two lines of concrete and barbed wire fences: the Iron Curtain. Gray hills rolled by outside the window as the train hauled itself along an incline through the border with Czechoslovakia. They had changed engines somewhere along the line. The diesel whistle was an exhausted wheeze.

  With a prickle of her spine she realized Daddy was still absent. Lately, he had been gone for longer and longer periods. Perhaps death was finally wearing him down, weakening him like Mummy; or maybe he was off somewhere, preparing. His absence made her bold. Daringly, she allowed her thoughts to run from the grooves she forced them onto, the tracks that were ever-so-carefully fixed around the boundaries of her innermost self. She reached into the front pocket of the backpack. A crackle of paper rewarded her touch and she rolled her eyes in a kind of ecstasy.

  She pulled out the map and unfolded it. It was a map of Istanbul, the end of the line, and so frequently consulted that the paper was tearing at the creases. Daddy had made her trace a route through the streets in bold red pen. She had done as he said, but it was in Daddy’s crabbed handwriting. From Sirkeci Terminal she must turn right down Ankara Road to the shore, then catch a ferry across the Golden Horn. The train and ferry numbers were lettered in Daddy’s Latin. Finally her path would lead to the abandoned cemetery below the Galata Tower.

  Daddy said there was a surprise at the end, a present for Daddy’s little girl. She could guess. This was the red-marked route to death.

  Now that she was certain she was alone she thought openly, with a rush of implacable hate. She had stopped Daddy from transferring himself to her body directly. He had to travel to this cemetery to make the change, where the angles gave him the best chance of success. If she went there she would never come back. Her eye fell on the Jar and she gave an involuntary, horrified, despairing giggle. Daddy would have her body, and she would be lost in brewer’s yeast and bone grit.

  She stared lovingly at the map. Surely Daddy had decided she was beaten. He must no longer fear her disobedience if he used her body to leave the train in Milan.

  Yet, what if she did not turn right toward the Golden Horn when she left Sirceki Terminal. What would happen if she turned left? She would do as Nazir had said and make a last-minute detour from Daddy’s tracks. She eyed the map luxuriously, then traced the line with her finger. She would go left down Ankara Road to Yerebatan, past the Basilica Cistern to the Hagia Sophia. There lay her destination
, not the great museum itself but the Shadow Sophia that lay beneath.

  Daddy had made her repeat nonsense words in languages she could not understand, yet never realized that she was smart enough to work some words out. She had learned. The Shadow Sophia was her real destination. This was why she had so tamely tagged along with Daddy, and endured his midnight stops, on his European vacation.

  The Shadow Sophia was not safe, of course, and she must offer living sacrifice. She zipped the Jar back into her pack. She had a sacrifice—Daddy was alive all right. The books said there would be ripples from the Act. The ripples would spread outward in a circle through time, so some of the ripples traveled away from her and some toward her. The ripples would be traveling even now, she hoped, from that longed-for point in future time and place.

  She didn’t know what shape these ripples would take, or what price she would have to pay. She only thought that it could not be worse than the price she was paying already.

  Daddy took her body again in Zagreb, and this time it was worse. She woke at the bottom of the six thousand steps, in utter darkness, with something wet and sinuous nuzzling her face. The heavy weight of the pack ground against her spine. She knew not to speak. She clapped both her hands over her mouth to prevent a shriek and ran back up the steps.

  The stairs were uneven—cold, clammy stone, worn with countless treads. They got steeper as they rose. She climbed until a gray light assaulted her eyes. She ran out into the misty rain of a Czech graveyard.

  She ran as if on rails, following the trail of her own footprints in reverse. She tried not to look at the amorphous marks beside her own tracks. At last she came to a proper road and flagged down a car. She spoke wild English to baffled foreign faces, traced a circle with her arms to mimic a train, and hitched a ride back to the station.