Session 52: Last Stop

The train had stopped being a train in any honest sense of the word. It still remembered rails, perhaps, and lamps, and polished wood, and the hush of sleeping compartments at impossible hours of the morning. But it plunged now through a place where rails meant nothing, wearing wings and engines and the bones of a carriage the way a fever wears the face of a man. Beyond its windows lay no sky at all, only the black gulf of Nodens, a depth so absolute the mind flinched from trying to measure it. And out of that dark came the dead and the damned and the hungry things that fly between one dream and another.

Arthur Zorba stood in the middle of it with a cricket bat in his hands.

It had not been there a moment before, but nothing in that place could be trusted to have been there a moment before. The bat had come because some instinct in him demanded a weapon, and the dream, whether out of malice or mercy, had obliged. The thing in front of him was a spectre, a leftover of violence and rage, one more shape crawling through the train’s torn logic. His earlier blows had met only mist and mockery; fists went straight through dead men, and there was nothing in vapour for courage to take hold of.

The cricket bat, though, struck solid.

The impact cracked through the compartment with a vulgar, satisfying sound, and for one glorious instant Arthur felt the old certainty of the body again — that brute, reliable truth that if a thing means to kill you, you hit it first. The apparition reeled. Half-mad with relief, he barked at it like a conductor confronting a fare-dodger.

“You don’t have a ticket for this train!”

Then the bat went to vapour in his hands.

The thing he’d struck was already gone, pitched into the dark by one of the train’s infernal tenders — those hulking attendants whose monstrous faces had terrified everyone earlier and who now, horribly, seemed to be on the passengers’ side. The lull that followed felt worse than the fighting. In the quiet, the roar of distant engines and the thunder of gunfire came pressing back into the senses.

Arthur and Viola Sutcliffe turned toward the front, where the flying engine lurched and groaned. Somewhere up ahead Claire and Per were trapped in the cockpit, driving the impossible machine out over the gulf. From behind them came a cry of fear and pain.

Viola heard it first — or at least was the first to admit it couldn’t be ignored. Arthur hesitated only as long as it took the old habits of dread to argue with the better habits of decency. If this was a dream, then perhaps it would punish them for showing mercy. But if it was a dream, there was still a proper form to things, and a man did not leave another man to be torn apart screaming in the next carriage.

So they went back.

In the bathhouse carriage, Karakov lay pinned under the vengeance of his own life.

The spectres had come through the walls and the roof, Cossacks with the mark of the English pound burning on their brows like a brand fetched up out of hell. They weren’t strangers to him, not exactly. They were the answer to a sum once worked out in ledgers and shipments, in crates of guns and the profits of distance. They were the men who had died so that he could grow richer. The dream had peeled the polite coverings off commerce and consequence, and now the consequence knelt on his chest and tore at him with dead hands.

He had tried to run from them, and not only out of cowardice. He knew what was waiting in the baggage van. There, locked among the luggage, sat the thing he had brought into being — not a trunk, not really an object at all, but his guilt given a shape, his conscience made portable and made terrible. If he could pitch it into the gulf, he might be free of it.

If he lived that long.

Arthur charged in with all the grace of a wounded soldier and all the success of a man swinging sporting equipment at ghosts. Viola came with him, clutching her ashtray like a village matron set on defending propriety against the apocalypse. Their blows didn’t end the assault. The dead were soldiers still, and even dead they remembered how to fight. The carriage came apart around them under cannon fire, wood bursting inward in jagged splinters, steam and smoke and dream-stuff mixing with the stench of old blood.

Then Madame Bruja appeared.

She came up from the rear compartments with her heart-shaped valise held against her, her eyes already doing arithmetic. She watched the struggle a moment too long. Long enough for the dead hands to find Arthur and Viola, for Karakov’s terror to curdle into despair, for it to be perfectly clear that whatever pity had survived the centuries in her had only survived by learning to be choosy about who got it.

At last she sighed.

“Poor Madame Sutcliffe,” she said. “This I simply cannot abide.”

She threw the valise aside, pressed both hands flat to her chest, and pushed her fingers in through her own ribs.

Arthur watched the bones part. He heard the wet crack of her body opening. It hit him harder than any of the shellbursts had — the human form broken open from the inside, not by an attacker but by a will that treated flesh as a coat to be unbuttoned. He started to scream and couldn’t stop, the sound tearing out of him raw and useless while his mind tried to refuse what his eyes kept insisting on.

Viola only watched, with the grave attention of a woman who had seen too much and lived too long and learned that horror usually turns up with bad manners.

Inside the opened chest a heart-shaped gem was burning.

She drew it out. The light it threw was not warm, though it burned — a cruel red brilliance, the colour of buried embers and old sacrifice. She held it up to the Cossack spectres and they recoiled. Their hatred had met something older than itself. They screamed and burned and thinned away into nothing.

Then Madame Bruja’s ribs swung shut again with a run of small snaps and clicks.

Viola asked, with almost unbearable courtesy, whether the woman wanted any help putting herself back together.

She did not. Her body, she said, meant little enough to her. The gem was what mattered. It was what he wanted — the thing he had hunted her across centuries to take. Once she had loved the power in it. Now what she remembered was the grief it had brought, and she had come to throw it into the gulf and be done.

But Walter had spoken to her of the Sedefkar Simulacrum. She knew little about that relic, she admitted, though more than most people did, and the stone might help them against it. Dangerous, certainly. By now danger was the only currency any of them had left to spend.

Viola took it.

It burned in her hand with a pain that begged her to drop it, and yet it left the skin unmarked. That was the worse part — pain that did no injury, a warning with no mercy behind it. She tucked it away somewhere on her person, and Madame Bruja gathered up the valise again.

“A decoy,” she said.

At the front of the train, the cockpit had turned into a battlefield made of air and nightmare.

Claire wrestled the controls while the abyss waited below like a pupil widening in the eye of creation. Per stood lookout beside her, the wind shrieking through a hole a cannonball had punched in the hull. Out in the swarm, winged things broke loose and dove at them: reptilian, worm-like creatures with obscene bodies and a predatory grace. One carried a rider — a skeletal figure in a charred black cloak, still far off, still coming.

Claire needed time. Per needed a weapon.

By the elastic logic of dreams, one turned up: a crossbow mounted absurdly inside the cockpit, with a coral of bolts hung ready beside it. Per took it in both hands, braced himself at the open window, and waited until the nearest creature came close enough that its hide and its eyes and the long neck stopped being an idea and became a target.

His bolt drove in deep.

The thing shrieked and streamed blood from its neck and did not break off. The shot had been better than even Per understood, murderously precise, buried in living flesh, and still the creature came on. Claire threw the plane into evasive motion and pushed it too hard. Some buried instinct — pilot’s knowledge the dream had handed her along with the impossible role — warned her an instant before the engine sputtered.

The plane-train lurched, tilted, and started to spin.

The world came loose.

Per, unstrapped and too near the open window, went out into the black.

For one moment he fell beside the aircraft instead of away from it, hung in the impossible physics of the Dreamlands. He saw the creature he had wounded. He saw the blood still running from its neck. He may even have had time for a grim flicker of satisfaction before it snapped him out of the air, took him in its jaws, and tore his head from his body.

Then Per woke in the dark to the soothing clatter of an ordinary train.

The others had no such mercy yet.

Claire, steadied now by the knowledge that dream-death was not death, brought the machine back under her hands. But heavy impacts began landing on the roof of the cockpit, and claws scrabbled overhead. The surviving winged beasts had seized the aircraft and were hauling it up out of its dive, dragging it back from the gulf. She fought them through the controls. They were monstrously strong; even when she made the whole machine shudder, they held fast.

Henri turned up when he was needed, the way he always seemed to.

He looked worse than before. The immaculate mask had broken open over burn-scarred flesh. His uniform hung in tatters, and blood ran down one arm to drip from the fingers of his white glove. The train and Henri were one thing, he explained. Its wounds were his wounds. Its danger showed on him.

What he brought Claire was not comfort but help. At his whistle the train’s demonic tenders came scrambling onto the roof — the creatures everyone had taken for devils, revealed now as crew — and flung themselves on the winged attackers. Over the cockpit came shrieks and impacts and the wet noise of fighting in the air. Blood sprayed past the windows in brief red fans. The pressure on the controls eased, and the plane was hers again.

Behind her, the baggage van had become the last passage before judgement.

Henri unlocked the compartment where Karakov’s steamer trunk waited. It was scratching from inside. Something flopped and shifted in there, frantic to stay. Arthur saw his chance, got a window open, and threw out his own offering — a vial of yellow mist, mustard gas made into a symbol, a whole war’s worth of horror shrunk down small enough to hold in one hand. He gave it to the gulf. The act was almost embarrassingly plain; no ceremony to it, though Henri mourned that such things were normally done beautifully. There wasn’t time for beautiful.

Karakov dragged the steamer trunk to the side door and leaned out to be sure nothing was waiting to snatch it back. The air beyond was clear.

He shoved it into the void.

The trunk came open as it tumbled, and what spilled out of it was rats.

Not dozens. Not hundreds. Thousands on thousands, a filthy avalanche of trench rats grown fat on the dead and dying, pouring out as though from the belly of the war itself. For one hideous moment they formed a living bridge back toward the train, a writhing grey-brown rope of them desperate to climb home into his life and finish what was left of it. Then gravity and dream and Nodens took them, and they fell away into the dark and rained off into nothing.

For Karakov, the guns went quiet.

The weight in his chest eased. Then it stopped.

He simply was no longer on the train — an old man dying in his own bed, having finally set down the guilt that had chased him all those years.

The dream wasn’t finished with the rest of them.

The door between the baggage van and the cockpit slid open, and the red-eyed sorcerer was standing in it.

He was cadaverous, draped in blackened ruin, his stare burning with a patience that had outlasted empires. Arthur knew him, though in dreams knowing a thing tends to come too late to do you any good. This was the pursuer. The one who wanted Madame Bruja’s stone. The one for whom centuries had apparently been no obstacle at all.

“Where is it?” he asked.

Madame Bruja lifted the heart-shaped valise.

“It is here! This is what you have chased me for!”

The bluff only worked if someone believed it — if someone behaved as though the valise mattered more than her own life. Viola, carrying the real stone hidden on her, stepped into the creature’s path with her ashtray purse. Whether out of courage or reflex or the deep, ingrained habit of putting herself between a brute and another woman, she hit him.

The blow landed. His head lolled to one side.

Then he turned those burning eyes on her.

“Pathetic,” he said, and spoke a word.

Arthur watched Viola Sutcliffe melt.

Her flesh softened and ran and sloughed off the bone like wax under a terrible flame, sliding down in glistening folds, smouldering and sparking, slumping around the frame of her skeleton. It was past battlefield horror, past injury, past any of the categories the mind keeps on hand to protect itself. It was not death as men understand death. It was a thing done to a body specifically to insult it.

Something in Arthur broke open again.

Death magic. The conviction landed on him with absolute force. He was cursed by it. They were all cursed by it. Death had stopped being an event and become a substance, a spell, a weather that had found him out and would never let up. He screamed and scrambled backward, stumbling through what was left of Viola, running from the red-eyed thing and the certainty it had just planted in him.

The stone slipped free of her remains.

Madame Bruja and the sorcerer grappled over the empty valise, she shrieking and cackling in triumph as he understood at last that he’d been cheated. But the true prize had never reached the gulf in Viola’s keeping. It lay there among bone and melted flesh while the train hurtled on toward its end.

Arthur burst into the cockpit, wild-eyed and raw-throated.

“Claire,” he gasped, “there’s a terrible monster on board. Get us somewhere safe.”

Claire, ringed by flying horrors and still reeling from Per’s disappearance, had little patience for fine distinctions between monsters. The only safe place left was the abyss itself.

Henri urged her on. The gulf waited below, inky and absolute. The tenders fought above. The red-eyed sorcerer raged behind them, Madame Bruja laughed in his face, and Viola’s remains slid back and forth across the floor with the lost stone riding along. The train groaned like a living thing bent on finishing its last duty.

Arthur, desperate to be useful and far more desperate not to look behind him, helped Claire steer. Out among the impossible debris of the dream a submarine rose up through the clouds like a lunatic trespasser from some other nightmare. He caught sight of it in time and shouted a warning; Claire corrected, fought the yoke, and drove the plane-train down.

The abyss came up to meet them.

For a moment everything seemed to happen at once — Claire screaming at the controls, Arthur shrieking beside her, the sorcerer howling over the empty valise, Madame Bruja’s laughter cutting through the carriage like a blade, the tenders and the winged beasts tearing at each other overhead, and the gulf yawning open underneath, wide enough to swallow guilt and trauma and fire and every fragile human hope of ever understanding any of it.

Then there was blackness.

They woke in their beds.

The train was only a train again, rumbling along the tracks in the dark before dawn. The steady rhythm of wheels and rails came back as though the universe had never once forgotten how to be ordinary. Half past four in the morning, or thereabouts. Per, who had woken earlier from his private death, had had time to pull himself together. Walter slept on, untouched, having held out against whatever the dream had set in front of him.

Still, it had left marks deeper than bruises.

Viola woke with her joints loose and painless. Strength had come back to her limbs, or something close enough to strength. The cane she had thrown into the gulf had carried off more than the picture of her own infirmity. For now, at least, time had let go of her a little.

Arthur woke changed in a quieter way. The grief was still there. The memory of the war was still there — no gulf could unmake the dead, and it shouldn’t. But the involuntary terror, the uncontrollable flinch at loud noises and at violence, the old shell-shock machinery that had kept his body a battlefield long after the armistice, that was gone. The blame he’d carried for things he could never have controlled had gone down into Nodens’ dark with the vial of mustard gas.

Claire had set down her burden too: the goggles, the guilt of helplessness, the old wound of having been no use in war and horror. Per had given up the image of Professor Smith’s house in flames, and may by doing it have cut loose the attention of whoever had set the fire — though what that cost, or invited, none of them could say.

Karakov didn’t wake among them, because Karakov had already woken elsewhere — if waking is the word for an old man whose heart stopped the moment his guilt finally let him go.

And Viola did not have the stone.

That prize had been lost in the last of the violence, never carried into the gulf in her keeping. Whether they’d been denied a salvation or spared a curse, none of them could yet tell. Somewhere out in that impossible dark, Madame Bruja’s heart-gem was still beyond their reach, and the red-eyed sorcerer was a horror not finished, only escaped.

The Orient Express carried them on toward Lausanne.

There, waiting past the exhausted edge of the nightmare, lay the next thread: Edgar B. Wellington, the stranger who had written asking after the Sedefkar Simulacrum, the old scroll, and the last resting place of the lost Arabian artifact. The waking world had come back to them. Innocence had not. The dream had taken what they offered it, spared what it chose to spare, and left them knowing that some journeys go on even after you’ve fallen into the abyss and come back up breathing.