Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

And so, on the morning of the fourth day, the expedition embarked upon its journey to the ruins by the Lake of Yath, with Holk and one of the mercenaries riding in the vanguard, the other two in the rearguard, and the four explorers in file in the middle, Corde to the front. Oriab Island was no small rock in the sea, and they knew it would take four or five days to reach the lake, even assuming easy going and no unwelcome adventures en route .

For his part Cabal bore it all with the same grim detachment that he had brought to the ocean journey. He was intrigued by so much in this world that he had little time for the small-talk of the others. He was interested in the way that distant places were not merely distorted by the haze of the air but – to his eye – seemed actually unfinished. There was nothing he could definitely give a name to, but there was a distinct sense that details clustered on these far vistas as they were approached, like coral accruing around a simple rock. He was surprised to find Bose, of all people, thinking along the same lines.

‘Well, they are the Dreamlands, I suppose,’ said Bose, swaying gently from side to side in time with his zebra’s gait. ‘And what we can’t see close to has no need of . . . I have no idea what to call it . . . this stuff of dreams, until it’s right there in front of you.’

‘I’m not sure that is how it works,’ said Cabal. He did not need to refer to his notes: he had reread them so many times by now that they were thoroughly ingrained in his always rapacious memory. ‘We are not dreaming the Dreamlands. Others dreamed them before us, and the superimposition of their dreams has given it permanency. One may dream of the Dreamlands, but the Dreamlands are not a dream.’

‘Yes,’ Bose conceded, ‘yes, that is very true. We, for example, are awake.’

We hope , thought Cabal, giving inner voice to the most recurrent of his concerns.

‘Well, whatever the metaphysics of it,’ said Bose, rising in his stirrups to look ahead, ‘it is beautiful here. Great men must have dreamed some very wonderful dreams to have wrought such a world.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Cabal, for this had raised another concern: a suspicion verging on a certainty that the majority of the creation here was not of human origin. He had not spoken again of what had happened in the Dark Wood, but it rarely left him. Nothing else of the same sort had happened since the dislocation in time and space, and the destruction of the spider-ant-baby things, and the others seemed to have forgotten about it. Cabal had not, any more than a man kneeling in prayer would forget if the clouds parted, God Almighty poked his head out, and demanded, ‘Yes? What is it?’

He had gained the attention of a god, and could not be sure that he had lost it, or would ever lose it. On a purely pragmatic level, if he had not called for the intervention of Nyarlothotep, they would doubtless all have died in the wood. He still wondered, however, if being prey to a spider-ant-baby thing was potentially preferable to whatever the infamously capricious god might visit upon him in return for the favour.

The small column rode on, and on, and on.

One of Holk’s men turned out once to have been a restaurateur who – while under the influence of an experimental mixture of spices – had been murdered by a jealous sous-chef . The spices had included some unusual powders from the Orient, and as a result the restaurateur was sitting up blinking in the Enchanted Wood while, back in the waking world, the dirty deed was done. Divorced from his body and therefore a now permanent immigrant to the Dreamlands, he had briefly considered setting up a restaurant in Hlanith before realising that all he had ever really wanted to do in life was strap on a sword and do some serious swashbuckling. The swashbuckling had quickly deteriorated into roister-doistering, and thence to lying in gutters outside alehouses. Cirrhosis of the liver being unknown in the Dreamlands, this was a career path he had heartily enjoyed, right up to the moment when he had run out of money and had had to go back to full-time swashbuckling until he had made enough to be a drunk again.

This was all of very little interest to those around him, except for the detail about restaurants because he was a very decent chef. As a result, the evening meals were of surprising complexity, sensually challenging, and the uncontested highlight of every day. His pièce de résistance was the-thing-I-shot-with-my-crossbow-au-vin , which was universally praised on the second evening.

On the third evening, just as it was growing too dark to travel further, they crested a hill and saw, glittering beneath the light of the Dreamlands’ large and disquieting moon, the Lake of Yath stretching out before them. Perhaps four miles away, visible as a hulking mass of shattered rooftops and fallen columns showing pale, like bones in a giants’ graveyard, stood the unnamed city of legend and dread. Certainly Sergeant Holk regarded it with stony-faced stoicism, but his gaze moved constantly, looking for the shadows of nine-legged things scuttling around the archways and byways.

‘We should go back half a league,’ he said finally. ‘We don’t want them knowing we’re here. Getting most of this hill between us and them should hide us from them until dawn.’

Nobody argued. Even Cabal forwent the opportunity to make a snide comment about Holk’s bravery because, having seen what the slightest wound from a wamp could do, he knew that almost any precaution could be regarded as reasonable. So they turned their zebras and cantered back down the hillside to make camp near a stream, their fire masked from the hilltop by a copse of trees. They ate quietly that night, and the guard rota was arranged more carefully than previously.

When morning came, none were dead, or alive and mortally diseased, or alive and rotting, so they regarded their precautions as effective. They rose, performed their morning rituals, ate, organised their equipment with great thoroughness, and then struck camp. Foreboding hung upon them like a cloud as they rode back up the hill and down the far side.

Cabal had gone to great pains to discover everything that could be discovered about the mysterious nameless ruined city while the expedition was being prepared in Baharna, and had raided every library and archive he could find, including several that were not open to the public. The collected intelligence thus uncovered agreed on three main points:

The city was in ruins.

The city’s name was unknown.

The city was a tad mysterious.

As far as could be ascertained, the city had once been a great conurbation, renowned far and wide for the strength of its commerce, the creativity of its artists, the skill of its artisans and the depths of its depravities. In its hubris, however, its collective wisdom had been insufficient to stop it angering something or somebody.

Probably a god.

Probably Nyarlothotep.

Cabal had paused when he saw this, closed his eyes for a long moment, breathed heavily, then returned to his reading.

The somebody or something had sent a monster or, if it really had been Nyarlothotep, assumed the form of one of his larger and more antagonistic avatars. Beneath a red and gibbous moon, doom had crawled from the lake and crept through the city, entering every home and every hostel, every bed and every cradle. By dawn, the city was dead and empty, with not a person or animal left in the place. A merchant caravan that had left the day before and had returned after a night of vile portents was the first to discover the horror.

It was not the first time such a fate had befallen a city in the Dreamlands – Cabal noted that the tale was very similar to the infamous fate of Sarnath – but this event seemed to predate even that. The lesson seemed to be twofold: do not anger the gods, but if you must, at least make sure your city isn’t next to a lake, as that’s just asking for trouble.

The lake looked, if anything, more forbidding than it had the previous evening. The sun was barely above the horizon, so was too low to cast its light directly upon the waves that jagged across the surface to lap at the banks. It left the waters themselves dark and unknowable, doing little for the approaching men’s mood. The Lake of Yath was huge, only the distant hills and mountains giving any indication that it was not a sea, and its depths could only be guessed at.

‘The hermit moved here only about three years ago,’ said Corde, repeating a briefing he had already given before they had left Baharna and again the previous night as they ate. ‘He is believed to reside in a temple on a hilltop in the most regal canton. Presumably some aspect of the temple, its construction or perhaps its significance, keeps creatures like the wamps at bay. That would be useful to discover straight away, as it would give us a secure camp overnight. Failing that, we must be out and clear of the city by dusk.’ He looked at Holk, the image of exposed ribs covered only with scarred pink skin evidently large in his mind. ‘That is imperative, for all our sakes.’

The city walls were still standing in long stretches, but breaches were common and large. They found a tumbled gatehouse with the remains of a tariff-taker’s house outside and hitched their zebras’ reins to a dead tamarind tree that grew by the ruin. Then, heavy with misgivings, they picked their way over the rubble and entered the nameless city.

Cabal had wandered around a few ruined villages and towns in his time, but this was the first city he had entered that still looked anything like a city. Nature reclaims quickly, especially when there is sufficient water to support significant plant growth. Oriab was a temperate island, with no shortage of fresh water, yet the city seemed in remarkably good condition. Scrubby grass grew in patches by the roadsides, ivy tangled the statues, bushes grew at cornices, and some buildings even had trees thrusting up through shattered walls, but it all seemed very mannered and controlled to Cabal’s eye, as if it were the work of an artist portraying an abandoned city rather than the natural actions of time.

‘Sergeant,’ Cabal addressed Holk. He spoke quietly: the city pressed tightly upon the nerves and there was a sense that speaking loudly or even normally might somehow awaken the place. ‘How long ago was this city abandoned?’

Holk did not answer for a moment as he adjusted the buckler strapped to his left forearm. ‘Centuries ago, Master Cabal. Perhaps millennia.’ He drew his sword – his men already had theirs in hand – and scanned the rooftops for movement.

‘Impossible,’ Cabal said. He turned to Shadrach, Bose and Corde. ‘This place would be a forest in less than two hundred years.’

‘On Earth , Cabal,’ said Corde.

‘Yes,’ admitted Cabal. The way this place failed to behave scientifically never ceased to irritate him. ‘On Earth.’

The city clustered up the hillside above the lake. On their approach, they had seen the remains of the docks and the simple housing that huddled near them. It seemed likely that the ‘most regal canton’, in Shadrach’s phrase, would be at the top of the hill, and this area they therefore headed towards as quickly as they dared. They discovered a great city square and followed a broad road that led straight up the hill from there. Holk made a point of keeping the party in the middle of the road: if there had been any risk of coming under arrow or quarrel fire, he would have used cover, but as the primary concern was wamps, some dead ground between them and any potential ambush places could give them vital seconds. At least they had light: there was barely a cloud in the sky, and the sun made the pale volcanic stone of the buildings gleam.