Sunday Short: The Demon on the Orient Tomb

A Rotting Mystery Featuring Zombie Hercule Poirot

The Orient Tomb only ran twice a year. No schedule. No return. And always under a blood moon.

It wasn’t for mortals.

Its carriages were gilded with coffin wood and whispers. Its wheels shrieked in cursed dialects. And its route—somewhere between Budapest and Bangkok—twisted through realms forgotten by God and Google Maps.

It was marketed, elegantly, as “The Last Ride You’ll Ever Love.”

Tonight’s guest list included witches on holiday, demon nobility, and spectral influencers. But no one expected a death.

Well, except for Zombie Hercule Poirot.

He boarded at Station M (short for “Malediction”), wearing a decaying trench coat and a hat two centuries out of style. His mustache had thinned with the years, but it still curled proudly like it solved its own crimes.

“Welcome aboard, Monsieur Poirot,” said the conductor, a polite ghoul missing his left jaw.

Poirot nodded once, sniffed the air.

“Blood… sulfur… and bad coffee. A murder is near.”

The conductor handed him a parchment envelope.

Inside: one death certificate. Blank. Fresh. Waiting to be filled.

Poirot sighed. “So it begins.”

By the time the train passed through the Gates of Lament, the victim was already twitching.

Lady Morana von Krull, a banshee socialite with a scream that could strip paint, had collapsed in the bar car during a tarot reading. Her eyes rolled black. Her mouth filled with ash. She turned her head, screamed “I am many!” in three voices, and then impaled herself on a crystal decanter.

The guests applauded at first.

Then she didn’t get up.

Poirot found her corpse still whispering.

That was a problem.

“She is not alone,” he muttered. “She is... possessed.”

And worse still, the spirit had escaped her body before anyone could trap it.

Which meant…

“It is still among us,” Poirot rasped.

The Suspects:

Father Damien, a disgraced exorcist who now freelanced for cursed weddings. He had a holy water flask and a suspicious twitch.

Salim the Serpent Charmer, a Southeast Asian cryptid with hypnotic eyes and a cobra named Mimi who slept like the dead—and may have been dead.

Miss Chiara Bones, a ghostly influencer known for her “afterlife aesthetic.” She livestreamed the murder, but her crystal-cam only recorded static and the sound of backward chanting.

Chef Beelzebabe, the train’s infernal chef, who claimed her soups “only screamed during prep.”

The Ticket Inspector, a faceless figure in a blood-red uniform. They asked no questions. Just collected “souls validated by death.”

The train thundered on through a corridor of shadows.

Poirot narrowed his foggy eyes. “The demon is hiding. But not to kill. It wants… to arrive.”

If it reached Bangkok in a suitable host body, it could merge fully with the realm of the living—and unleash hell in the land of mango sticky rice.

The perfect vessel?

“Someone powerful… decayed enough to let evil in... but not yet destroyed.”

He stopped.

“Oh… non.”

The next hour blurred in blood and banishment.

One guest caught fire while brushing their teeth.

Another was found whispering to a mirror, offering it their liver.

Someone’s shadow strangled them mid-snore.

Poirot gathered the guests in the dining car.

“Ze demon is close. It feeds on suspicion, silence, and sarcasm. And... it has tried to possess me.”

They gasped.

Poirot pulled out his own exorcism notes—written in bile and ink. He tied a charm of burnt sage to his wrist and smashed open a can of “emergency holy mist.”

He lit a match.

Then he lit himself.

The flames danced around him but didn’t burn.

From his mouth, two voices screamed.

The demon surged—but Poirot, ever precise, used his last unrotted finger to draw the banishment sigil on his chest.

The fire went out.

The demon… vanished.

Everyone cheered. Even Mimi the cobra hissed politely.

Poirot slumped into a velvet armchair.

“My moustache,” he wheezed, “has never felt so violated.”

But Then...

As the train neared its final stop in Bangkok, Poirot’s reflection flickered in the mirror of the first-class bathroom.

It smiled.

He did not.

His eyes pulsed red, just for a moment.

And deep in his chest, something whispered:

“I am not gone. I am… comfortably seated.”