The Toynbee Convector

The ghastly man had been carried back to his own compartment.

Reaching it, Miss Minerva Halliday peered within.

And there the strange man lay strewn, his eyes wilted shut, his mouth a bloodless wound, the only life in him the joggle of his head as the train swerved.

My God, she thought, he’s dead!

Out loud she said, “I’ll call if 1 need you.”

The maître d’ went away.

Miss Minerva Halliday quietly shut the sliding door and turned to examine the dead man—for surely he was dead. And yet.…

But at last she dared to reach out and to touch the wrists in which so much ice-water ran. She pulled back, as if her fingers had been burned by dry ice. Then she leaned forward to whisper into the pale man’s face.

“Listen very carefully. Yes?”

For answer, she thought she heard the coldest throb of a single heartbeat.

She continued. “I do not know how I guess this. I know who you are, and what you are sick of—”

The train curved. His head lolled as if his neck had been broken.

“I’ll tell you what you’re dying from!” she whispered. “You suffer a disease—of people!”

His eyes popped wide, as if he had been shot through the heart. She said:

“The people on this train are killing you. They are your affliction.”

Something like a breath stirred behind the shut wound of the man’s mouth.

“Yesssss.… ssss.”

Her grip tightened on his wrist, probing for some pulse:

“You are from some middle European country, yes? Somewhere where the nights are long and when the wind blows, people listen? But now things have changed, and you have tried to escape by travel, but…”

Just then, a party of young, wine-filled tourists bustled along the outer corridor, firing off their laughter.

The ghastly passenger withered.

“How do … you …” he whispered, “… know.… thissss?”

“I am a special nurse with a special memory. I saw, I met, someone like you when I was six—”

“Saw?” the pale man exhaled.

“In Ireland, near Kileshandra. My uncle’s house, a hundred years old, full of rain and fog and there was walking on the roof late at night, and sounds in the hall as if the storm had come in, and then at last this shadow entered my room. It sat on my bed and the cold from his body made me cold. I remember and know it was no dream, for the shadow who came to sit on my bed and whisper… was much… like you.”

Eyes shut, from the depths of his arctic soul, the old sick man mourned in response:

“And who … and what … am I?”

“You are not sick. And you are not dying … You are—”

The whistle on the Orient Express wailed a long way off.

“—a ghost,” she said.

“Yesssss!” he cried.

It was a vast shout of need, recognition, assurance. He almost bolted upright.

“Yes!”

At which moment there arrived in the doorway a young priest, eager to perform. Eyes bright, lips moist, one hand clutching his crucifix, he stared at the collapsed figure of the ghastly passenger and cried, “May I—?”

“Last rites?” The ancient passenger opened one eye like the lid on a silver box. “From you? No.” His eye shifted to the nurse. “Her!”

“Sir!” cried the young priest.

He stepped back, seized his crucifix as if it were a parachute ripcord, spun, and scurried off.

Leaving the old nurse to sit examining her now even more strange patient until at last he said:

“How,” he gasped, “can you nurse me?”

“Why—” she gave a small self-deprecating laugh. “We must find a way.”

With yet another wail, the Orient Express encountered more mileages of night, fog, mist, and cut through it with a shriek.

“You are going to Calais?” she said.

“And beyond, to Dover, London, and perhaps a castle outside Edinburgh, where I will be safe—”

“That’s almost impossible—” She might as well have shot him through the heart. “No, no, wait, wait!” she cried. “Impossible … without me! I will travel with you to Calais and across to Dover.”

“But you do not know me!”

“Oh, but I dreamed you as a child, long before I met someone like you, in the mists and rains of Ireland. At age nine I searched the moors for the Baskerville Hound.”

“Yes,” said the ghastly passenger. “You are English and the English believe!”

“True. Better than Americans, who doubt. French? Cynics! English is best. There is hardly an old London house that does not have its sad lady of mists crying before dawn.”

At which moment, the compartment door, shaken by a long curve of track, sprang wide. An onslaught of poisonous talk, of delirious chatter, of what could only be irreligious laughter poured in from the corridor. The ghastly passenger wilted.

Springing to her feet, Minerva Halliday slammed the door and turned to look with the familiarity of a lifetime of sleep-tossed encounters at her traveling companion.