He asks me about my vocation. He begins a new spiral on his left cheek. Lines of red form in his white beard. He hands me maze puzzles on sheets of paper stained red. I take out my fountain pen and solve them all with a rapidity that excites him.
“Very good, very good,” he says. “Maybe you are the one to escape. I suppose it doesn’t matter in the end. There is nothing beyond the train.”
“You sound like the institutionalized. Nothing outside the joint, eh?”
“And you think your brain is free?”
“I believe that reality is just the high-water mark where some other asshole’s audacity gave out.”
My mind was always free. I was always good at getting out of things. I could escape ruts, obligations, and self-identity traps—all the I-dos that map out a person’s life from birth to death. I deftly stepped out of commitments, some of them I regret, but I’m good at escaping regret, too. I just slip out of the noose. I escaped them all and dashed across the world, pissing in the eye of the tyrannous stars.
The man with the stained beard nods.
“So you, you’re some kind of shrink?” I ask.
“An alienist? Oh, no. I’m a folklorist from Vermont.”
I lean forward in my chair. “You said something about the whys.”
“Oh yes. The spirals.”
He points to all the spirals he’s scribbled about his room, explains that the shape of the universe is the spiral. The spiral repeats, from snail shell to hurricane, from galaxies to the tinniest building blocks of all matter. It is the flight path of carrion birds. Everything is the spiral. What if, posits the man with the stained beard, the spiral is a pictogram, drawn by the universe, under manic compulsion, over all reality? The runic story, the only story, of how everything tries in vain to escape the gluttonous gravity of the horrible thing at the center of all. The decaying orbit. The tightening circle.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
He taps the dripping penknife against his teeth. His eyes loose focus. “I … uh … That is … rather … It’s getting harder to … You … Certainly you’ve noticed the anachronisms. I, for one, don’t have the foggiest notion of what a gas-powered chainsaw is.”
“What? What is this train? Are we all dead?”
“Of course not. We are … rather … all alive … or … uh … what theoretically and mentally amounts to alive. I’m sorry. I just. The orbit decays! I can’t …” He trials off and holds his head for several moments. “It was good to talk to you again.”
“Again?” I leap out of my seat. Nostalgia flows through my ventricles as deadly as air bubbles. The universe teeters on the tip of my tongue.
“Do you think this is the first time we’ve had this discussion?” asks the man with the stained beard.
“What—what are you talking about?”
He stabs the penknife into the center of his forehead. “I would like to think that if we drew a radial line outward—” he rends the line through the spiral in a gory gash of exposed bone “—we would find an encounter where I was the lucid one, and you the gibbering madman.”
I want to shake him like a radio, make him make sense of it all. But, with perfect suavity, he bites out his own tongue and spits it at me. He sings a song, but I’ll never know the words. It’s all blood and vowels.
Down the corridor. I can’t hear my own footsteps. I get to my room, and notice the door is just a hair open. Trained senses scream a warning. I kick hard—my legs are well muscled—and the door swings open, slamming something with a wet umph! It swings back again, dangling on one hinge like a hanged man’s neck. Liquid red pools on the floor.
A yellow-robed cultist lays behind the door, sad as a broken Jack-in-the-Box, an obsidian dagger driven between his ribs. A red circle spreads through the yellow fabric. He had been hiding in the shadows, because that is what cultists do. Everything is entirely too archetypal. I think I know why.
“There’s no true excuse yet made for the bungler at his trade,” I taunt down to the dead man. Oh, the familiar rhymes. I’m becoming my father.
Under the robes, the cultist’s naked flesh is wrapped in strands of barbed wire. A short, spastic tale extends from the end of his spine, still curling and uncurling posthumously. Nothing in his pockets but space and questions.
Was I too late?
I yank out my large trunk and open it. Beneath the clothes, inside the false bottom, I find the book. I sigh. The book that started it all. It’s as heavy as I remember. I have to use both hands to lift it. Ancient, of course, it smells like a dead pharaoh’s taint, bound in leather that feels like no cowhide I ever touched. It promises chthonic wisdoms. The night I stole it, when I first riffled the pages with my thumb to listen to the quality of the vellum, I heard the distant moan of omnipotent mollusks like the sea in a shell.
My hand shakes.
The book that drove me insane.
I open it …
My mouth twitches. This shouldn’t surprise me. I mean, I already knew. But the rage comes on all the same, and with a strained curse, I lift the weighty tome over my head and bring it down on the dead cultist. I slam it down again and again, with a meaty squelch, until all that remains is the rhythm and a memory and a stain.
Panting. Now.
“I used to be insane,” I say to what’s left.
My violence must have knocked my pocket watch, hanging from its special hook on the wall, because it swings like a descending pendulum.
11:11
11:11
11:11
The book lies open like an accusation
“Nothing,” I spit. Nothing! No answers, no wisdom, not even any madness. None of the Mesozoic calligraphy that stretched the suture-cracks of my skull and boiled my brain in cuttlefish ink. No words! Just empty pages and perdition, just like the bible, just like the newspaper, the menus, and all documents on this train. In this place, text does not exist. Sunlight does not exist. Glass friezes move more regularly than the faces of clocks and conductors.
My mind sloshes. None of these plots track. I think I know why. I—
I look about the room. It is a mess, but all the mess is mine. The cultist did not so much as overturn my pillows. My trunk’s false bottom is clever—true—but he didn’t even search. Maybe he wasn’t here for the book.
I leap up and tear open the communicating door adjoining my compartment to room C-19.
The girl in green is handcuffed to the pipe of her sink. Black tendrils of mascara slither down her face. A fresh spiral is cut, angry and red, just beneath her collarbone. I think she’s gone, like everyone else, but she looks up, and her green eyes are clear.
I say her name.
She says mine.
“You came back?” she says. “There’s no way out. No way out. No way.”
“Really?” I say. With a flourish that Philistines might call over-dramatic, my fingers dance over her manacles, and they come undone. It can take up to six seconds for me to get out of that particular make and model, but I really want to impress her.
“This is screwy,” she says. “You don’t even know me.”
“I know that we’re riding the raggedy edge, and all you wanted to do was dance,” I say, wiping the inky tendrils off her cheek. “I know that all of our collective damage and fuck-ups fit together like key teeth on tumblers.”
She hiccups a laugh and says, “Yeah, I’m goofy about you, too.” And everything is impossibly all right.
Then two vice grips crush my shoulders and slam me into a wall. The conductor has me by the scuff, looking at me with his waxen smile. “Sir, you are being a disruption, and we must have a modicum of calmness for this journey.”
I slip from my jacket, like a snake out of his skin, but before I can get away, another hand—where did it come from?—grabs my throat and lifts me off the ground.
“Be calm, sir,” says the conductor. “Please don’t make me take off my face.”
That’s when the bottle caves his head. Full wine b
ottles don’t break like they do in the movies. But skulls do. He crumples to the floor. My girl in green stands behind, bottle held like a cudgel, the look on her face is … well, many are the fights I saw in school, and the scariest scraps were between the girls.
I want to say something clever, but the conductor crawls toward us. His smiling face hangs off him, and something writhes beneath. “Sir!” he says. “Madame!” The voice is a buzzing drone.
“Let’s dust!” she says.
I take her hand. And we’re running, and we’re running, and we’re running.
Down the corridor.
There are pleasure sounds, in the long night of the train, and what might be construed as muffled screams. Lots of stories. Lots of paths. No matter where each began, they all go bad on the vine. It comes down in waves. In synchronized patterns. The countdown is done.
Flashes of images. Smiles. Blood. Hair. Leaking fluid from an open eye. Whispers. Chewing. Ragged nails, dark and dripping in the moonlight. Hair covering a jabbering face like a creep show curtain.
The girl in green and I run. Coach to coach, to the back of the train. We’ll leap off the caboose if we have to.
All the compartment doors are open. All these windows.
An open door: A room crowded with people surrounding a paralyzed man in bed. They pass around a dripping knife like a party favor. Everyone has a turn.
An open door: A man holds a severed woman’s arm, injecting it with a green fluid from a large syringe. The dead hand twitches, stroking his cheek comfortingly.
An open door: A young debutant tearfully scrubs at the outbreak of pimples upon her face and shoulders. Each one pops, hatching a new eye.
They are gaining on us. I can hear their footsteps, only they don’t sound so much like footsteps as horn scraping hard rubber or splintery wooden shoes shamble-rattling over a polished floor. We run, but the train is endless—carriage after carriage.
An open door: A mother picks the last stubborn strand of flesh from a little boy’s head. “There,” she says, “was that so bad?”
An open door: A man sits up in bed, pale flesh pocked with barnacle sores, wriggling growths, and sea cucumber discharges. He watches as competing colonies of coral battle for primacy of his chest, spitting up their digestive enzymes in time-lapse warfare.
The train never ends. Ten thousand years later, we arrive in front of the door to my room.
“Impossible,” I say.
We duck inside, close what’s left of the door, and barricade it with my trunk. The conductor and his porters batter the red-red wood, and through the jagged cracks, I see too many sets of limbs, segmented and crustacean-like, and trembling stumps that may have been wings at one time. Their voices buzz in a cicada cadence.
“We’re getting out of here!” I yell.
I lift the heavy, bloody book and hurl it through my window. The glass shatters. Everything shatters. The girl in green screams.
I think of the pickled punks you can see at nickel sideshows. I think of fireflies in mason jars. I remember the cicada voices whispering to me in the darkness, one summer night. I see stars. The gulfs of space. The wells of night. Green sloshes over everything.
Their great wings catch the aether. Pink crustacean bodies. The arthropod angels carrying us. Their faces are not faces, but masses of tendrils that glow in alternating colors, and I can see the syntax in their blinking, a never-ending string of Christmas. Beyond counting. Flying in formation, an endless train. Several pairs of arms each, and in each arm, a cylinder of strange metal, and in each cylinder: a brain. I see them, through their little windows, floating in the green nutrient soup. Some cylinders contain organs of a non-human shape.
The fireflies had jarred us all up. They carry us through the mindless void, past time and matter, into the idiot vortices.
The closest cylinder to me is marked C-19. I’m glad I get to be close to her. She dances and twirls with impossible liquid slowness—so graceful—my girl in green.
I hear her scream my name. I hear them all, through the network, but their voices sound metallic and flat. The conductor says, “Istanbul! Budapest! Vienna! Munich! Strasbourg! Chalons! Paris! Istanbul!”
We’re going in a circle, a ring around a nuclear chaos at the center of all. It mutters. Its radiation poisons the dream train and all of its dreamers. The closer we get, the madder they get, the more lucid I’ll become. I found the cure.
We must get closer. The gravity is irresistible. Our orbit decays. The spiral is absolute. Louder and louder—the thin whining of cracked flutes.
Right now, I’m just going to look out my window on the night drive. I’ll eventually go back to sleep. I’ll rejoin my fellow guisers on the dream train, our little plots repeated in each rotation, our follies in endless loop. They’re mummers plays, a shadow puppet show, a Punch and Judy delight for the audient void. I can almost hear the silent, mocking applause of the thousand-thousand hands that are not hands.
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES
ELAINE CUNNINGHAM is a New York Times bestselling fantasy author whose publications include over twenty novels and three dozen short stories. Most of her novels are set in licensed worlds such as the Forgotten Realms, Star Wars, EverQuest, and Pathfinder Tales. Shadows in the Starlight, the second book in her urban fantasy series Changeling Detective, was included in the 2008 Kirkus list of 10 Best Sci-Fi Novels. Her short fiction explores most of fantasy’s sub-genres, from Arthurian fiction to sword & sorcery. She does not usually write horror, but finds that getting into an Elder Evils mindset is a lot easier than it used to be. For more information about her stories and upcoming projects, please visit elainecunningham.com.
Writer, game designer, and cad, RICHARD DANSKY was named one of the top twenty videogame writers in the world in 2009 by Gamasutra. His work includes bestselling games such as Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction, Far Cry, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: 3, Outland, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist. His writing has appeared in magazines ranging from The Escapist to Lovecraft Studies, as well as numerous anthologies. He was a major contributor to White Wolf’s World of Darkness setting, with credits on over one hundred RPG supplements, and will be developing the upcoming twentieth anniversary edition of Wraith: The Oblivion. His most recent novel, Vaporware, is available from JournalStone. Richard lives in North Carolina with his wife, statistician and blogger Dr. Melinda Thielbar, and their amorphously large collections of books and single-malt whiskys.
DENNIS DETWILLER is a writer, game designer, and illustrator, who works as design director for a major video game company. He writes and illustrates for many publications, is creative director and co-founder of Arc Dream Publishing and Pagan Publishing, and updates his website (detwillerdesign.com) regularly with games, fiction, and art.
JOSHUA ALAN DOETSCH was grown from an experimental pumpkin patch by Monsanto scientists in a top-secret biotech project known only as “Agent Orange.” He was genetically designed, honed, and perfected to do only two things: write stories and strangle kittens. Please, please encourage his writing career at joshuadoetsch.com. His previous publications include the novel Strangeness in the Proportion.
GEOFF GILLAN is the lead author of the first edition of Chaosium’s Horror on the Orient Express for the Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. He has also contributed a Dark Ages adventure and a Gaslight-era sourcebook and adventure for its second edition. His other game credits include many Call of Cthulhu adventures, some for Elric and Pendragon, and the Corum sourcebook (penned many moons ago). He has published a fantasy novel, Envious Gods, in the U.S. and in his native Australia has worked as a writer for television and film. He has a degree specializing in Southeast Asian and Australian history. His second job at age fifteen was at Wyong railway station north of Sydney, which might explain his unhealthy interest in trains. He moves a lot but is currently residing in Brisbane with his wife Cathie and daughters Lucille and Abigail. This is his first published piece of short fiction, but not his first brush with Madness.
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CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN is the New York Times bestselling, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of such novels as Of Saints and Shadows, Snowblind, The Myth Hunters, The Boys Are Back in Town, and Strangewood. He has co-written three illustrated novels with Mike Mignola, the first of which, Baltimore, or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, was the launching pad for the Eisner Award-nominated comic book series, Baltimore. He is currently working on a graphic novel trilogy in collaboration with Charlaine Harris entitled Cemetery Girl. His novel Tin Men will be released in 2015. Golden was born and raised in Massachusetts, where he still lives with his family. His original novels have been published in more than fourteen languages in countries around the world. Please visit him at christophergolden.com.
CODY GOODFELLOW has written five novels—his latest is Repo Shark (Broken River Books)—and co-written three more with John Skipp. He received the Wonderland Book Award twice for his short fiction collections, Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars and All-Monster Action (both Swallowdown Press). He wrote, co-produced, and scored the short film Stay at Home Dad, which can be found on YouTube. He was a contributing editor at Substance, the world’s first CD-ROM zine, and cofounder of Perilous Press, a micropublisher of modern cosmic horror by such authors as Michael Shea, Brian Stableford, and David Conyers.
KENNETH HITE has designed, written, or co-authored more than eighty roleplaying games and supplements, including GURPS Horror, Call of Cthulhu d20, The Day After Ragnarok, Trail Of Cthulhu, Qelong, and Night’s Black Agents. Outside gaming, his works include Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales, Cthulhu 101, The Nazi Occult for Osprey Publishing, and a series of Lovecraftian children’s books. He has several published Cthulhu Mythos short stories, writes the “Lost in Lovecraft” column for Weird Tales, and covered the High Strangeness for ten years in his “Suppressed Transmission” column in Pyramid. Half the podcasting team behind Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff and an Artistic Associate at Chicago’s Wild-Claw Theatre, he lives in Chicago with two Lovecraftian cats and his non-Lovecraftian wife, Sheila.
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