Session 47: The Empty Valise

The men’s saloon of the Dreamlands Express had taken on the quality of a stage—lamplit, intimate, thick with cigar smoke and unspoken rivalries. Velvet seats and polished brass gleamed beneath a ceiling painted in muted constellations. Outside the wide windows, the impossible countryside of dream rolled by in hues too saturated for waking eyes. Inside, the air was brittle with accusation.

Mironim-Mer had risen from his chair at the moment Walter’s trembling, sermon-laced indictment reached its climax. One heartbeat he was the courteous Sarrubian traveler—elegant, aloof, golden-eyed. The next, the shape of him ruptured like a mask torn away.

Limbs elongated with a wet, cartilage sound. His coat split along seams that could not possibly contain what swelled beneath. A crustacean carapace rippled across his shoulders; claws burst from fingers that had moments before held a glass with aristocratic delicacy. His eyes, once molten gold, flared with a hellish red luminescence that stained the walls like a spreading wound.

Claire screamed first—raw, animal terror. The shriek echoed down the carriage and shattered whatever pretense of civility remained.

Arthur did not scream. He stared.

“Where did Mironim-Mer go?” he asked hoarsely, as if the monster before him were merely an interruption to a man who must surely still be somewhere nearby.

The thing that had been Mironim-Mer leapt the low table in a single, obscene bound and descended upon Madame Brugia. It did not slash at her throat. It did not rend her flesh as a predator would. Instead, its clawed appendages grasped for the heart-shaped valise she clutched against her breast.

She was quicker than her age suggested. With a hiss, she swung the valise behind her and drew it close, bony fingers whitening as they locked around its handle.

The claws tore into her dress.

Fabric split. Threads fluttered. And yet—no blood flowed.

Walter was already moving. His instincts leapt past terror to doctrine. He vaulted the table, breathless prayer spilling from his lips, and skidded behind the bar. The seltzer tank hissed as he fumbled with it, fingers slick with urgency.

“The Lord will watch over your coming and going,” he gasped, making the sign of the cross over the nozzle.

The creature ignored him. It burrowed its claws into Madame Brugia’s chest with mechanical persistence, as though her body were merely an obstacle to be disassembled.

Suttcliffe, practical as ever, seized a heavy glass ashtray from a nearby table and hurled it with remarkable accuracy. The ashtray struck the monster’s carapace with a dull crack. It did not break. It did not seem to wound.

Arthur, driven by instinct rather than comprehension, reached for the weight of his service revolver—only to draw instead a hand crossbow, alien and archaic in his grasp. The Dreamlands mocked his expectations even as it armed him.

He loosed the bolt. It skittered wide, vanishing into the smoke.

Walter returned, holy water sloshing in a glass. He smashed it against the creature’s back with a cry of invocation. The glass shattered, slicing his palm; blood welled and ran freely down his wrist. The water drenched the thing’s coat and shell alike.

It did not smoke. It did not recoil.

It simply continued its assault.

Karakov drew a curved cutlass from nowhere—dream logic supplying steel to match his fury—and brought it down upon the creature’s head. The blade glanced off with a ringing clang, as if striking iron.

Mac, face pale but jaw set, threw himself at the monster’s back, fists hammering uselessly against its chitinous hide. The Sarnathians, so recently amused observers, retreated with narrow-eyed caution as gunfire and glass cut through the air.

Per, reeling from his own near-collapse, steadied himself against the bar. He had watched too much to mistake what stood before them. The red eyes. The transformation. The rupture between identity and flesh.

Quicksand. He imagined it. The floorboards dissolving into sucking mire.

Nothing happened.

His strength was nearly spent.

Instead, he conjured vines—thick, green, impossible growth erupting through the saloon’s polished floor. They coiled around the creature’s legs and torso, tightening with dream-born insistence.

The monster strained. Its red eyes burned brighter.

Then Madame Brugia did something stranger still.

Though her dress hung in tatters and her chest gaped open in a way that should have spelled death, she straightened. Her voice dropped into a register that did not belong to frail lungs.

She spoke a single syllable.

It was not a word of any earthly language. It was a sound like stone grinding beneath deep water, like wind through an ossuary.

The creature shuddered.

“The mark of your master is upon you!” she cried. “He will find nothing!”

With a violent gesture she tore open the valise and let it hang.

Empty.

“It is nothing!” she screamed. “Tell him—nothing!”

The red light in the monster’s eyes faltered.

For a heartbeat, something else flickered there—recognition, perhaps. Confusion.

Then the glow faded entirely. The shell collapsed inward. Limbs shrank. Claws became fingers once more. The carapace softened into cloth and bone.

Mironim-Mer lay in the grasping vines, breathing shallowly, golden eyes staring up in bewilderment.

Silence pooled in the saloon.

Only Walter’s labored prayer and the faint drip of blood from his palm disturbed it.

Mironim-Mer blinked. “I… was reading,” he murmured. “In my compartment. I do not understand. How did I come here?”

Arthur produced a painting from his pocket—oil on canvas, impossibly vivid. It depicted the creature as it had stood moments before: red-eyed, bloodied claws raised. Mironim-Mer recoiled from it as if from his own corpse.

“Red eyes,” he whispered. “A man… in Delethleen. His face was charred. He spoke to me. I cannot remember what we said. But I remember his eyes.”

Walter did not soften.

“You are possessed,” he declared. “A vessel. A conduit.”

Mironim-Mer bristled, pride and alien dignity returning even through his confusion. Yet he did not deny the lapses in his memory—recent days marked by strange absences, missing hours, fractures in continuity.

Madame Brugia, composed now despite the ruin of her attire, discarded the empty valise and prepared to withdraw.

“He is a pawn,” she said coolly. “Show him understanding.”

Her chest remained torn. No blood stained the floor.

When she left, the air felt colder.

Walter retrieved the Sarrubian book from Mironim-Mer’s compartment—strange illustrations of purple seas and tall-masted ships adorning its pages. No pentagrams. No obvious sigils of damnation. Yet he insisted upon custody, binding it with string and pressing a cross against its cover.

Mironim-Mer agreed to relinquish it only until the end of the journey.

The vines were cut away.

The saloon gradually resumed its shape: overturned chairs righted, shattered glass swept aside, schnapps poured with trembling hands. The Dreamlands Express continued its passage through impossible landscapes, indifferent to the violence it had hosted.

And beneath the surface calm, a new understanding took root.

There were forces aboard this train that wore human faces until the moment they did not.

There were marks placed by unseen masters.

And somewhere beyond the rolling horizon of dream, something with charred skin and red, devouring eyes had learned how to reach across worlds and make a puppet of the living.

The journey was far from over.