Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

They had been on the road for only a minute or two when Cabal saw the skull. He signalled the sergeant to form a perimeter while he examined it.

‘It’s a city of the dead,’ muttered Corde. ‘A skull is hardly a surprise.’

‘You forget the story, Herr Corde,’ said Cabal, not paying him much attention as he crouched by the skull and examined it cautiously. ‘Whatever happened to the citizens of this place ultimately, the point is that they all vanished from the city beforehand. Besides, this skull is evidently not human.’ He pushed it over with the tip of a stick and examined the jaw. ‘It is similar to a bat skull, but obviously much larger. The orbits are atrophied. This creature had no eyes.’

‘A wamp!’ gasped Bose.

‘Well, of course it’s a wamp. Why do you think I’m not touching it directly? What intrigues me is how it died. The skull is broken.’

‘It’s how they breed,’ said Holk. ‘They can burst out of the skull of anything that’s dead in an abandoned place like this. If the skull’s big enough to house a new wamp – and a human skull works fine – they just grow in there and smash their way out when they’re ripe. They can grow in adult wamp skulls, too. They’re not fussy.’

‘They lay eggs in skulls? I’m confused,’ said Shadrach. ‘How exactly do they reproduce?’

‘They don’t,’ said Cabal. ‘Spontaneous generation. It doesn’t happen on Earth but, as has been made apparent to me on many occasions so far, this is not Earth. An abandoned place of foul repute and a large corpse. That’s all you need for a wamp infestation. However,’ he tapped the broken side of the skull with the stick, ‘this skull has not been burst from the inside. It has been smashed from the outside. Nor is the damage directly over the brainpan. The fact that there is no skeleton or bones around is also significant. This wamp was killed with great violence, and the skull damaged in such a way as to prevent a new wamp forming in it.’ He straightened up and looked around, throwing the potentially contaminated stick into an overgrown garden as he did so. ‘We must consider the possibility that wamps are not the main threat here. There may be something or things here that efficiently hunt wamps and that are, in all likelihood, not going to want to be our friends.’

Three hundred yards further up the hill they found a more complete skeleton, albeit one that somebody had played ‘She loves me, she loves me not’ with. Cabal stood by one of the skeletonised legs while the others located others, around the roadsides. None was closer than three yards to its nearest neighbour. ‘These limbs were torn off and thrown away when they still had flesh upon them,’ said Cabal. ‘See? The bones lie close to one another as they did in life.’ He walked over to the torso and skull in the middle of the avenue. The skull had been crushed in the same way as the previous example. ‘This creature was torn limb from limb while it was alive. So, we can conclude that whatever killed it was very powerful physically, and entirely undaunted by the diseases wamps carry.’

He looked up the hill and then back in the direction they had come. ‘Interesting.’

‘Interesting?’ said Bose. ‘Mr Cabal, I must admit that I have been in a state of trepidation verging on fear ever since the matter of these wamp creatures was first raised. Now you tell us that this city contains something that preys upon them – that preys on monsters – and you characterise it as “interesting”?’

‘You seem pale, Herr Bose. Something you ate, perhaps?’

‘There was nothing wrong with that Hasenpfeffer ,’ said their resident cook, from his position on the perimeter.

‘ Hasenpfeffer ?’ said Cabal. ‘I’m very familiar with that dish, but it’s a rabbit stew. I haven’t seen any rabbits, just those furred creatures like wingless turkeys . . . Oh.’ He considered for a moment. ‘They were delicious.’ He turned his attention back to Bose. ‘My apologies, I interrupted your panicking.’

‘I am not panicking!’ shouted Bose.

Somewhere off to the east, there was the sound of collapsing masonry.

‘No rubble’s fallen since we arrived,’ said Holk, tersely.

‘The stuff must fall over occasionally,’ said Shadrach, the paragon of reason. ‘It is a ruined city, after all.’

‘It may be a coincidence that it happened at the same moment Herr Bose gave away our position,’ said Cabal, picking up his bag and starting to walk up the hill at a quick pace, ‘but it may not be. It would be nothing more than a practical application of the rational caution that you are so quick to espouse if we were to start running. Now .’ He did so, the mercenaries – professionally attuned to danger as they were – joining him in a dogtrot.

Messrs Shadrach and Bose looked at one another in astonishment before looking to Corde, only to find him already well up the road, running also.

Then more rubble fell, to the east, but now it was closer. Shadrach and Bose decided that keeping their dignity came a poor second to keeping their limbs attached to their torsos, and set off after the others as quickly as their robes would allow.

The change from a stealthy progress through the totterdown city into a headlong charge did not reduce the tension that ran through them in the slightest. Headlong charges do not offer many opportunities to look back and, on the snatched glances they did take, they saw nothing but the empty houses and tenements, eyeless yet noble in their slow death. Of the wamps, they saw no living examples, but every alleyway and courtyard seemed to contain their skeletons, all torn, all smashed. The expedition saw them and their sense of growing threat intensified with every snapped bone. There were no longer any unexplained sounds to haunt them – or, at least, none that could be heard over the sound of eight men running – but this did not settle their nerves: if there is one thing more disquieting than an unexplained sound, it is a silence after an unexplained sound.

Around them, the city became steadily grander and more impressive as they passed fallen gateways that marked off the different areas. Each gate had been more massively built and heavily ornamented than the one before as they progressed from being simply markers to show where the scum lived, to actually restricting access to keep the scum out. Cabal ran by a basalt basilisk lying on its side at the end of a line of rubble where a gatepost had fallen, the basilisk’s beak open in challenge, but gagged with a growth of dandelions. On its head was a diadem of gold; one of the mercenaries paused by it, and made to lever it off with the tip of his sword, but Holk swore sharply at him, and the man ran onwards with only one regretful backward glance.

They arrived at the corner of a plaza close to the top of the hill, and as they turned it, the ones at the front came to an abrupt halt, the others piling into them with cries of mixed anger and dismay.

‘The greatest temple of the most regal canton, wasn’t it, Shadrach?’ said Cabal. ‘Does this qualify?’

The great cathedrals of Europe are massive affairs, and would frequently have been larger yet, but for the soil beneath their foundations being unable to bear their prodigious weight. Aachen, Paris, York, all have mighty houses of worship that are known throughout the world. Yet if the Kaiserdom of Aachen, the Cathedral of St Peter in York, and Notre Dame in Paris were placed side by side, there would still have been room for a horse track and a shopping precinct within the temple to an unknown god before them.

‘That’s . . .’ started Corde, but words failed him.

‘Cyclopean?’ suggested Shadrach, who read a lot.

The temple was a vast circular building, as far as could be made out, with a large flight of steps, as wide as a football field is long, leading up to a colonnaded terrace upon whose rear wall was the temple’s main entrance: massive twin doors of wood and brass. The colossal edifice was topped with a shallow dome that glowed with the reflected light of the Dreamlands’ sun upon copper that had never and would never suffer the touch of verdigris.

Behind them, some five or six hundred yards away, and perhaps a hundred yards from the road, whose head they had reached, stood a thin, delicate tower that must once have been the domain of an ancient sorcerer or mystic. It rose above its neighbours unbowed and unmarked by the passage of the ages, a fine stalk broadening to a complex series of petal-like walls in different stones, a great stone flower topped by a peacock palace. Sergeant Holk was covering their backs, so he was the only one facing in the right direction to see it when the tower abruptly lurched bodily to one side, stood as if in injured dignity for a long second, then fell headlong and out of sight behind the closer buildings. A second later, a muffled whump reached them.

‘What was that?’ squeaked Bose.

Cabal watched a plume of brick dust blossom out into the wide avenue behind them. ‘Good news, Herr Bose. It definitely wasn’t wamps.’

Without another word, they ran across the plaza for the temple, passing wamp bones all around.

Chapter 8

IN WHICH CABAL HAS A SURPRISINGLY CIVILISED CHAT WITH A MONSTER

The great size of the temple on the hill confused the eye as they closed on it; they had preconceptions as to the limits of heavy stone construction and therefore the greatest size the temple could realistically be. The Dreamlands, however, was always pleased to squash the preconceptions of the waking world, blithely ignoring building restrictions, health and safety considerations, and – most rudely – physics. The overall effect was to reproduce one of the most common and least enjoyable of dream experiences: running very hard yet barely seeming to get anywhere. The square before the temple simply could not have been that huge, the temple could not have been so vast, yet the square was, and the temple was, and the flagstones beneath their feet seemed never to end as they ran and they ran and they ran.

And then, as is also the way of dreams, they were suddenly there, so abruptly that there was not even the sense of having covered the last hundred yards. They ran up the steps, all ninety-nine – Cabal counted – and arrived in front of the great entrance into the building.

‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ gasped Corde, as he tried to recover his breath. ‘Have you ever seen such enormous doors?’ Behind him, Shadrach and then Bose staggeringly reached the top of the steps and promptly fell down, wheezing pathetically.

‘Yes,’ said Cabal, as indeed he had. ‘But they had the decency to have a porter’s door set into them. How is anyone supposed to open these things for worship? Did they have mammoths for ushers?’ He turned and looked out across the square, which, typically, now didn’t seem anywhere near as enormous. The glare from the morning sun on the pale stone made his eyes water, and he instinctively felt for his glasses in his jacket pocket.

As he did so, something twisted uncomfortably in his mind. Something like déjà vu , except instead of having the sense that he had done all this before, he had an unaccountable sense that he had never, not even once, in all the time that they had been in the Dreamlands, checked his pockets for their contents. It didn’t make sense, and almost immediately small fragments of memory, like ants, clustered around and he thought, perhaps, that he had after all. Yet the scent of an unreliable recollection, a false memory hung around it, and it was with considerable effort that he pulled himself back to the present. He found he had his blue-glass spectacles out, and was staring at them as if he had just noticed that he had eight fingers on that hand. How many fingers did that hand have? Eight. No, five. That was right. Five. Five phalanges; four fingers and an opposable thumb. That was what he had. He counted twice to be sure.