The session opened with the characters facing an immediate dilemma: the disposal of one Luigi Martinelli, deceased. At SIZ 90, Luigi had been imposing in life. As a corpse, he was monumentally inconvenient.
They'd wrapped him in a bedsheet—now thoroughly saturated with his blood, the fabric clinging wetly to his contours—and dragged the massive corpse along the corridor. The body left a dark, glistening smear across the carriage floor, accompanied by the sickening sound of dead weight scraping over wood, punctuated by the occasional wet thump when Luigi's head lolled against a doorframe.
Stealth, it turned out, was a luxury they did not possess. The rear door swung open with a damning creak—and at that precise moment, La Dona del Garda's compartment door opened. The stunning woman emerged from her compartment like an apparition, her silk robe catching the lamplight, her dark eyes already narrowing with suspicion at the scene before her.
Pierre was already moving, his body a barrier between her and their grim cargo. She stopped, tilted her head with predatory curiosity. “Pierre.” Her voice was honey and threat. “What is all this commotion about?”
Every second stretched impossibly long. Pierre smiled—charming, disarming, perfect. “Our fellow passengers, I'm afraid. Rather inconsiderate with the hour.” His voice never wavered, even as his pulse thundered in his ears.
For one agonising moment, La Dona's gaze held Pierre's—searching, questioning. Then, with the ghost of a smile playing at her lips, she withdrew into her compartment, her silk robe whispering against the doorframe. The door clicked shut with a finality that felt like a stayed execution.
Potential crisis averted, poor Luigi's corpse was heaved from the speeding train. The massive body hit the embankment with a wet crunch, skin splitting open on impact. He tumbled down the rocky slope, each rotation accompanied by the snap of ribs and the thick, meaty sound of tearing flesh. His head struck a rail tie with a hollow crack, the skull giving way, spilling its contents across the gravel. Limbs bent and broke at impossible angles as momentum carried the ruined carcass forward, leaving a glistening trail of blood and worse things in the moonlight. Finally, what remained of Luigi Martinelli came to rest in a twisted, leaking heap beside the tracks—reduced to so much broken meat and shattered bone, already attracting the first opportunistic flies of the evening.
The characters decided to return to their own compartments to get a ‘Power Nap’ prior to the train arriving at Svilengrad station. George Banks hung up his jacket in his small wardrobe and felt something cold. “I didn’t bring my leather jacket” he thought. Opening the wardrobe door wider revealed the true horror of what hung within: an entire human skin, carefully flayed, suspended from a wooden hanger like some obscene garment. The face hung slack and deflated, eye sockets gaping emptily. Arms dangled at unnatural angles, fingers splayed as if reaching out in a final, desperate plea. The dim light caught the translucent, parchment-like quality of the flesh, and there was the unmistakable copper tang smell of old blood. George fainted in horror.
George came too twenty minutes later, consciousness returning like a slow drowning. His mouth tasted of copper and bile. The wardrobe stood open—the thing on the hanger swaying slightly with the train's motion, as if breathing. He forced himself upright, stumbled forward, and slammed the wardrobe door shut with trembling hands. His cabin mate, mercifully, remained asleep.
The walk to the Salon car was a blur of lurching corridor and pounding heart. George barely registered the other passengers. At the bar, he didn't ask—he demanded whiskey, his voice hoarse and desperate.
His fellow investigators were already there as arranged. They took one look at George—pale, wild-eyed, his clothes dishevelled—and knew something was profoundly wrong.
“There's a man's skin,” George said, the words tumbling out, “hanging in my wardrobe. The entire skin. Like a... like a suit.”
Silence. Then sharp intakes of breath. Helmut set down his glass with deliberate care. “Show me”.
The wardrobe door swung open.
Helmut had prepared himself, but nothing could have prepared him for this. The skin hung there, impossibly intact. Not flayed—removed. Every finger articulated. The face slack but recognisable. This wasn't butchery. This was precision beyond surgical capability, beyond human skill entirely.
“This is ritual work,” Helmut whispered, his voice tight. “Occult. It has to be.”
He forced himself to look closer, cataloguing details with clinical detachment even as revulsion clawed at his throat. The quality of the cuts. The impossible completeness. The way the eye sockets seemed to—
Wait.
The face. Those features. The build of the shoulders.
Horror bloomed cold in Helmut's chest. “Gott im Himmel...” his face ashen. “This is Emile Soucard. The Calais conductor.” The man who should have been walking these corridors. The man no one had seen since yesterday.
The skin swayed gently on its hanger, arms hanging limp, fingers slightly curled—as if still reaching for a ticket punch that would never come.
Helmut returned to the Salon car, his face carved from marble. The other investigators looked up expectantly—then their expressions shifted as they registered something broken behind his eyes.
“It's Soucard,” Helmut said quietly. “The conductor. Every inch of him. Flayed with a precision no surgeon could achieve.” He paused, his hands trembling slightly. 'This is ritual murder. Occult work of the highest—and darkest—order.”
The words hung in the air like a curse. Someone's glass clinked against the table. Outside, the night rushed past, indifferent.
“We need to dispose of it,” someone finally said. “We can't let it be found.”
Helmut nodded. “Pierre's compartment. It's already compromised with Martinelli's blood. We seal it, claim—"
“Absolutely not.' Pierre's voice cut like a blade. He leaned forward, his urbane composure cracking. “I will not sleep in a room with that... that abomination hanging three feet from my bed. I don't care what logic suggests. No.”
The argument escalated—harsh whispers in the lamplight, each man's nerves fraying. Finally, the only solution presented itself with terrible clarity: the skin would join Luigi in the darkness beyond the train.
Back in George's compartment, they stood before the wardrobe like pallbearers at a grotesque funeral. Helmut reached for the hanger with hands wrapped in a towel, unwilling to touch the thing directly. The skin was lighter than expected—hollow, empty, obscene in its weightlessness. It swayed as he lifted it, the arms drifting outward as if embracing the air.
The window fought them—stuck, painted shut—until finally it shrieked open. Cold night air flooded in, carrying the rhythmic clatter of the rails.
They didn't speak. Couldn't speak. Helmut held the thing out into the rushing darkness and let go.
The skin caught the wind immediately, billowing like a sail before the night swallowed it. For one horrible instant it seemed to hover there—arms spread wide, face turned back toward the train—before momentum seized it. It tumbled violently through the air, limbs flailing in a grotesque parody of life, before striking the embankment with a wet slap. The hollow form rolled and flopped down the slope, limbs twisting at impossible angles, catching on rocks and brush. Finally it came to rest beside the tracks—deflated, boneless, draped over the stones like discarded clothing. In the moonlight, the empty face stared upward, mouth hanging open in eternal, silent accusation.
The window slammed shut. No one met anyone else's eyes.
Miraculously, Sir Robert Harrow remained untouched by the night's horrors. He slumbered on in gin-drunk peace, the empty bottle clutched against his chest like a glass talisman. The darkness that moved through the train had simply... passed him by.
The Orient Express glided into Svilengrad station with mechanical precision—exactly on schedule, as if the night's horrors were merely figments of fevered imagination. Dawn had not yet broken; the platform existed in that liminal hour between night and morning, lit by lamps that cast everything in stark, unforgiving relief.
The investigators had gathered in the salon car, positioned near the windows like sentries. They watched the platform with predatory focus, searching for... what? Shadowy figures? Furtive movements? Signs of the conspiracy hinted at in Soucard's cryptic telegram?
What they found instead was chaos.
The platform teemed with life—dozens of passengers jostling for position, porters shouting in Bulgarian and Turkish, luggage carts rattling across the concrete. Families. Businessmen. A group of students laughing too loudly for the hour. The fourgon doors stood open, railway workers loading and unloading cargo with practiced efficiency.
It was all so... normal. So aggressively mundane.
The investigators exchanged troubled glances. This wasn't right. Soucard's telegram had suggested darkness, secrecy, danger. Not this carnival of ordinary travellers going about their ordinary business.
“Where are they?” someone muttered.
Movement caught their attention—but not on the platform. Helmut was already gone from the salon car. None of them had noticed him leave. By the time they spotted him, he was halfway across the platform, moving with purpose toward a small building marked with the universal symbol for telegrams.
“Scheisse,” someone hissed. “When did he—"
But Helmut was already disappearing through the telegraph office door, leaving them scrambling. One by one, they descended from the train into the cold morning air, the crowd swallowing them immediately. The platform felt wrong somehow—too busy, too loud, too alive. As if the station itself were performing normalcy, desperately trying to convince them that nothing was amiss.
