V THE LONG VERSION
Tuesday 12th February 1923
Escape plan: Moving closer to the cottage in the woods, it becomes apparent that the place is more of a shack; and one in a ruinous state. Ludwig can hear the sound of bubbling water. Moving around the shack, Ludwig and Pierre spy the phony waiter running toward a boat moored on the shore of a narrow river. Ludwig pulls his Luger and opens fire. The waiter drops but regains his feet having been only grazed by the bullet. As the man climbed into the boat and pushed himself out into the river, Ludwig fired again but this time missed. The man motored down river to complete his escape. An escape no doubt planned in advance of his deeds aboard the train. A quick inspection of the shack revealed signs of recent use but nothing that suggested permanent occupation and no clues to be found.
The Express moves on: Ludwig and Pierre hurried back to the Express. Cartwright had done much to delay the train from moving off before we could return. Letty and Father Mika were attending to the maître d’ and calming shocked passengers, including Dr. Jordanov. Banks had inexplicably disappeared—again. We later learn that Banks isn’t the only person missing from the train. A cleaner went missing too, at Pirot, the last stop before reaching the Bulgarian border.
A terrible fate: Having been involved in an altercation on his train and being responsible for bringing the Express to an emergency stop, we are questioned by the Conductor. Explanation given, we are thanked for protecting the serving staff and passengers in the dining car. We mention the bloody hatchet and our fear that the perpetrator may have gained his waiter’s disguise by murderous means. A search of the mail car confirms our fears. The body of a genuine waiter, clumsily hidden, is found wearing just undergarments and bloody from fatal wounds. Inexplicably, the waiter’s right hand is missing—hacked off above the wrist. The severed hand is nowhere to be found. The Conductor starts to look faint. The more we tell him and the more we show him the paler he gets.
The chaos factor: Getting back to Dr. Jordanov, he is still visibly shaken. We order him a brandy. He tells us of an upsurge in violent behaviours in Sofia recently but he didn’t expect to experience such acts being committed here on the Express and away from the city. We cannot help but consider that violence and chaos have been a theme everywhere we’ve been in relation to our mission to collect the parts of the Simulacrum. Might Sofia be experiencing such chaos due to the presence and influence of another piece of what we seek?
SOFIA
Welcoming committee: Due to the delay caused by our emergency stop, the Orient Express pulls into Sofia at 7.15pm, fifteen minutes late. We alight onto a snowy station platform and, along with Jordanov, are promptly detained by police to be questioned about the circumstances of the delay – punctuality being the pride of the operator, Compagnie Internationale de Wagons-Lit, and rash acts of violence being the purview of the Sofia police. We find ourselves in the confines of the station master’s office, commandeered as an interview room, in front of a police inspector and two armed officers.
Interrogation: The inspector is a stern ex military man, Major Vasil Christova, mid-forties, distinguishing facial scar, salt and pepper hair and a thick boot-polished moustache. He asks us who we are, where are we going, what happened aboard the train, how long will we be staying in Bulgaria? Cartwright speaks up and provides the same story to Christova as we gave earlier to the Conductor, who will no doubt be asked to corroborate our account. The Major seems not to be phased by the gruesome detail of murder and severed hand. A number of similar acts of abhorrent mutilation have occurred across Sofia recently. There has been a steady rise in brutal violence in the city over the last dozen years, culminating in body parts being taken from victims—like trophies. There have been kidnappings too. Christova suspects white slavers and anarchists to be behind these crimes; he calls them The Butchers.
Nothing to see here: After more than an hour’s interview, we are free to go. As Christova climbed into the passenger seat of a waiting police car we cannot help but notice how his junior officers show no respect to the man. Pierre pipes up: “If you need us Major, we will be staying at the Hotel de la Bulgarie”. For most of the last hour Pierre had been surreptitiously leafing through a glossy flyer collected from the station’s information stand, advertising the most luxurious hotel in Sofia. After missing out on staying at the Europa in Belgrade, Pierre was determined not to miss out on the greatest luxury that Sofia has to offer.
Breathe in and budge up: Sofia is not a safe place after dark. Jordanov offers to drive us to wherever we wish to go; his car is in the station car park. Six of us, including Jordanov, and our entire luggage collection squeeze into the vehicle and we drive away. It’s a little before nine o-clock and the streets are almost deserted; shops and restaurants are closed and shuttered up. It's only a short drive to Jordanov’s comfortable looking townhouse. He recommends a nearby family-run guesthouse named The Fireside and even offers us the loan of his motorcar to get there. We thank him profusely and promise to return the car in the morning. A bitterly disappointed Pierre screwed up the Hotel de la Bulgarie flyer and tossed it out of the car window.
The Fireside: The guesthouse is pleasing; it is warm, comfortable and homely. For a reasonable sum of Bulgarian Leva we are able to rent the entire top floor—three bedrooms and a shared bathroom. We enjoy an evening meal of rustic fayre prepared by our hosts and afterward decide to take the late night air. We walk along dark and snowy cobbled streets. Sofia’s night-time skyline has relatively few lights for a city of its size. The shadowed minarets of mosques stand out, along with the steeples of churches. Many of the local streets are claustrophobic, dominated by tall but narrow black-beamed buildings whose upper stories seem to lean over the thoroughfares. There is nobody about. Everything is shut. As the bitter wind begins to pick up we decide to cut short our evening walk and return to the warmth of our rooms.
Disturbed in our sleep: Letty is restless; struggling to sleep. Her attention is suddenly grabbed by a tapping sound and then a delicate but definite thud from inside the room. She sat up and switched on the electric bedside lamp. As she did so a severed hand crawled up onto the bed and dextrously leaped on to her – clawing at her face. Letty screamed and drew her revolver from beneath her pillow. She pulled the trigger. She could so easily in her panic have blown away half of her own face. Fortuitously however, she succeeded in blowing apart the hand. In the Germans' room, Ludwig was woken by the feeling of alien fingers fish-hooking him; pulling him up from his slumbering position. An unmolested Father Mika continued snoring in blissful ignorance. In the room next door, Pierre and Cartwright were awoken by their own dismembered assailants. Pierre managed to hold off the hand that tried to close its fingers around his throat. Cartwright attempted to pin the hand that attacked him to the bed with his swordcane. The hand however jumped to his face and gouged out Cartwright’s right eye. The eyeball was dextrously flipped until it rested in the open flesh of the hand’s severed wrist stump. Quickly skin grew over the eye to become an eyelid. Cartwright screamed in agony as his own eye blinked at him from the severed wrist stump of the dismembered hand.
And then they were gone: As suddenly as they had appeared, the severed hands, except the one destroyed by Letty who could still be heard screaming deliriously, rushed to escape the rooms. Ludwig’s enemy crashed through the leadlight glass of his window. The hands in Pierre and Cartwright’s room dashed up the inside of the chimney breast; taking with them Cartwright’s eye.
Aftermath: Letty ran barefoot outside into the snow but could find no trace of the hands. Ludwig did his best to care for poor Cartwright. He used laudanum-soaked bandages to treat the empty eye-socket while himself imbibing the last of his raw opium to treat his own shock. Ludwig administered a sedative to Cartwright, who before drifting into an induced sleep, started to hallucinate and babble, “I can see. I can see. In the street”……and then “I’m in a car. A man is driving” Cartwright was blissfully unconscious when the police arrived. Our host had summoned them due to the commotion. We tell the police some of us were attacked in our rooms. Unfortunately we were sleeping as it began and our rooms were in darkness. We cannot provide a description of our assailants or guess at any reason for the unprovoked assault.
Wednesday 13th February 1923
The next morning: Waking a little later than is usual, the smell of delicious cooking wafts from downstairs. Leaving Cartwright to sleep in for while, the rest of us assemble for breakfast. When we finally wake him Cartwright begins to babble again, as if talking us through a strange dream – “I’m out of the city. I’m being driven across fields. In the open country….” We raise Cartwright from his bed. Ludwig uses some more of his precious laudanum tincture to treat Cartwright’s eye socket and lessen the pain. We decide to head over to the Alexander Hospital in the hopes of scrounging a glass eye. However, the language barrier and the apparent wish to admit the patient for treatment puts us off and we instead settle on buying Cartwright a fetching eyepatch. As we’re shopping, Letty takes the opportunity to purchase a new outfit for herself – an ill-fitting gentleman’s suit with an extortionate price tag.
Dr. Jordanov: Following our late breakfast, an aborted hospital visit and a trip to the shops, it’s after midday when we return Jordanov’s motorcar to him as we’d promised. Dr. Jordanov lives alone. His living room is spacious, clinically clean and tidy. Our host fixes us some hot benitsas and steaming mugs of Turkish coffee. Cartwright blurts out: “A prosperous village. The mountains!” Jordanov looks at him. Cartwright lifts his eyepatch, “They took my eye!” Jordanov, having barely recovered from yesterday’s shock, almost dropped his coffee as he recoiled in horror.
The monograph: After finishing his coffee, with shaking hand, and re-gathering his wits, Jordanov turns the conversation to the Dzhudzheta Idol. As he mentioned on the train yesterday, if we’re going to locate the idol we need to consult Ivo Penev’s monograph, The Dzhudzheta Idol—Evidence of a Civilization Older than Mankind. Jordanov has at least one copy of it somewhere in his house. In complete contrast to the neat and minimalist living space, every other room in Jordanov’s house is muddled with disorderly piles of books, papers and boxes; with over-crowded areas bursting with menagerie and in every room are shelves bowing under the burden of weighty texts and artefacts. Our search takes most of the afternoon but we manage to recover three copies of the monograph – two printed in Bulgarian and one Russian translation. The monograph is dated 1908. It doesn’t escape our attention that the date coincides with the start of the violence that the police inspector, Major Kastova, told us has plagued Sofia.
Terrible events: From the monograph we learn that Penev sent the idol itself to a man named Todor Mateev at the University of Sofia ‘St. Kliment Ohridski’ (Софийски университет „Св. Климент Охридски). Jordanov pales at reading this, “I knew Dr. Mateev. He was a good man. But then one day he brutally slaughtered his wife and two young sons. When the police came to arrest him, Mateev was wearing their skins. He rushed at the police who shot Mateev dead”. Jordanov paused, and then continued, “a couple of years later, Mateev’s research assistant, a woman named Raynar Isaev, committed suicide. She stabbed herself through the eye with an ice pick. She had complained for years about insufferable headaches. The pain must have driven her mad”.
Can we borrow the car again? Jordanov becomes upset. He needs some time alone now. He telephones the university to make an appointment for us to meet a Professor Academician Chedenka to continue our investigations. Without us having any clear connection between the tale we’ve just been told and the person we’re being sent to see, we leave Jordanov with his thoughts and take his motorcar again. As we drive away through the sleet and rain Cartwright calls out “I’m in a cave made from living stone!”
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