Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

Cabal looked at Bose, his expression entirely neutral. Then he said, ‘Herr Bose is correct. Shadrach is dead. The loss of the money he carried may present a problem later. Currently, however, we do not have time to discuss that, or what a splendid chap he was, or whatever other reason is making you stand there impersonating a guppy, Herr Corde. We must be gone immediately.’

The wind was rising, and both the Audaine and the galley to which she was grappled were being driven to the lee shore, close by the end of the wharf and the start of the sea wall. All they had to do was wait a couple of minutes, and they would be in position to jump ashore and make off. Corde started for the quarterdeck, but Cabal stopped him, and instead they went into Oleander’s cabin, a much shorter jump from its bow windows down to the shallows. It also meant they didn’t have to watch Oleander and his men engaged in a loathsome, nightmarish fight with the inhuman slavers, a fight rich with blood and ichors, desperation and despair. Finally, Cabal’s plan furnished him with an opportunity to repair their financial misfortunes by breaking into the captain’s strongbox and stealing a quantity of gold coin.

Corde watched him with evident disapproval, but did not stop him. He only said, ‘The captain’s been good to us. He’s out there right now, fighting for his life.’

Cabal finished stowing a heavy purse in his Gladstone, and said, ‘He will shortly be dead, and won’t care. Or he will have defeated the slavers and will be in a position to loot their ship, in which case the loss of this footling quantity of gold will be galling but hardly devastating. In either event, our need is greater than his.’ He paused as the ship shuddered, and grated against the pebbles of the harbour beach. ‘Ah-ha. Our cue to run away like cowards and thieves.’

The great escape was miserable, wet and tiring. They trudged to freedom. Bose and Corde walked with their heads bowed, the better to ignore the torn sky and the wounded Moon. It seemed that lunar cities had decent fire-fighting arrangements, as the red dots grew fewer by the minute. Presumably even as the three men waded through the shallows by the sea wall, and marched with squelching steps up the mole, bloated white Moon toads in brass helmets were hosing down their predictably Cyclopean buildings. They would have to do it themselves, as it was hard to believe their slaves would be in any hurry to help. They would be standing by with space marshmallows on sticks, having the one and only good time they could expect as thralls of the toad things.

Cabal kept his head up and disregarded the heavenly apocalypse as easily as more mundane folk might disregard an unremarkable cloud. He had seen inferno and tempest, and had not only looked into the abyss but the abyss had looked into him, and then made disparaging comments. Some charred troposphere and a smoke-damaged Moon were hardly worth a footnote.

The guards in the watchtower were not of the same liver – should they have livers at all, which seemed unlikely – and were howling skywards with their facial tentacles in sinusoidal agitation. As a race, it seemed they were not used to suffering reverses, and would probably be sobbing into their beer analogue for many months to come.

Cabal’s party followed the path around the outside of the wall, then stayed close to it until they came to a tumble of rocks that gave them cover to break away and head into the countryside. Even when they got a safe distance from the wall, however, they did not speak, Bose and Corde because they were subdued by what they had so recently experienced, and Cabal because he was Cabal and felt little need to jabber incontinently for the sake of conversation.

It was only when they had walked for some hours that Corde broke the silence. ‘The expedition is a disaster,’ he said. ‘We have lost one of our number, and who knows what else we may have lost?’ He looked to the sky, but the rent in the atmosphere had healed with only a dispersed, jagged pink line to show it had ever been there, and even this was slowly dissipating.

Cabal stopped walking and leaned against a dry-stone wall bordering a farmer’s field. ‘You mean Shadrach’s money?’

‘No! No, I do not!’ Corde was speechless with rage for a moment, then blurted, ‘I mean our minds, our very souls. Why did we ever come here?’

‘The Phobic Animus,’ said Bose, quietly, settling himself on a boulder by the road.

‘Yes, I . . . I know that, Bose. I don’t mean . . .’ Corde shook his head, tired and defeated. ‘We must go back.’

‘I agree,’ said Cabal.

‘You would,’ said Bose. Both Cabal and Corde looked at him with some surprise. Finding himself suddenly under observation, Bose couldn’t meet their eyes, so he addressed the turf at his feet instead. ‘You have made it very plain from the earliest stages of this venture that you thought us foolish and our quest pointless. I have no doubt that you’ve only stuck with us so far because of your own curiosity about the Dreamlands. We were foolish to leave the Silver Key in your hands, but I think . . . we all thought . . . that by your own lights you were honourable. Well, I release you from any remaining responsibilities. Take Mr Corde, and get back to the waking world. There is no use you both dying for a cause you do not believe in.’ He straightened his legs and slid off the boulder to land on his feet. He took a deep breath, and started walking again.

‘Wait, Bose. Wait!’ called Corde, to the little man’s back. ‘Where are you going?’

Bose did not turn, but kept walking. ‘To the Island of Mormo, in the Cerenarian Sea. I shall find it, and the Phobic Animus, and then I shall try . . .’ He stopped walking. ‘I shall try very, very hard . . . to destroy it.’ He began walking again.

They watched Bose walk on without them in silence for a long minute. ‘Hmm,’ said Cabal.

‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake,’ said Corde. Then he started running after Bose. ‘Bose! Mr Bose! Gardner! Wait!’

‘Hmm,’ said Cabal again, and walked after the pair of them.

A hundred yards later he caught up with Corde and Bose, who were having a heated discussion. Bose was saying, ‘Shadrach died for this. I cannot just give up immediately afterwards, as if that counts for nothing. I do not weigh my life as worth more than his. I must go on, don’t you see?’

‘Damn you, Bose!’ It was hard to be sure if Corde was angrier with Bose or himself. ‘Damn you! We’ll all die in this misbegotten world if we don’t leave, can’t you see that?’

‘No. No, I don’t. Although I would be happier if Mr Cabal were to stay with us, or me, if you insist on returning.’

‘Me?’ said Cabal, intrigued. ‘Why me?’

‘You saved us all against the spider-ant-baby things, and against the black galleys. And without you we would never have known that our goal lies on Mormo.’

‘Hold hard,’ said Cabal, raising an admonishing finger. ‘I had nothing to do with what happened back there.’

‘Didn’t you? I’m not so sure, Mr Cabal. I saw the hand of Divine Providence in what happened. Perhaps not the divinity that we usually look to, but any port in a storm, eh?’

Cabal’s face hardened; he had been trying hard to forget about his inadvertent calling down of Nyarlothotep in the Dark Wood in the irrational but fervent hope that if he forgot about it so would the god. Unfortunately, it seemed likely that Bose was correct. It was stretching coincidence a little far to believe that the sky had just decided to split open and the Moon to explode at that exact moment on a whim. It seemed that Cabal was still being monitored by a supernatural force that, for reasons that remained alien and indistinct, had taken an apparently benevolent interest in his activities. There seemed to be no reason for it – Nyarlothotep was a deity more than usually well disposed to incandescent levels of mindless terror. Why it would see fit to aid an expedition to destroy the well of all irrational fear was a mystery, and perhaps one that transcended the human mind’s ability to comprehend, even if it was explained very, very slowly with diagrams, models and glove puppets. Probably quite frightening glove puppets.

‘The . . . entity to which you are referring, Herr Bose, is notoriously fickle. It did not intervene in the nameless city.’

‘But that wooden monstrosity just fell over, didn’t it? What caused that?’ said Corde.

Cabal looked at him in offended consternation. They had not spoken of that night again, except in the broadest terms, Holk’s death still throwing a pall upon events, but he had not realised that they thought the sinew-wood giant’s fall was due to natural, supernatural or otherwise non-Cabalian causes. ‘It just fell over ,’ he said icily, ‘because I was on its shin, waggling a knife around inside its knee joint. I don’t suppose either of you noticed that, due to all the intense skulking you were doing at the time.’ This was slightly hypocritical of Cabal, who had done a great deal of skulking in his life, and was probably regarded as something of a master of the form among the skulking fraternity.

Bose nodded thoughtfully, but Corde was stung. ‘Are you suggesting that we are cowards, Cabal?’

‘Not at all,’ said Cabal. ‘I am stating it. Bose at least has the grace to admit it, by act if not by word. He has never pretended to be anything he is not. Apart from a magistrate,’ he conceded, gesturing at Bose’s judicial robes, ‘but that was rather thrust upon him by the Dreamlands. Reach for that sword, and I shall kill you where you stand.’

For Corde’s hand had strayed to the hilt. It wavered there for a moment, then fell by his side.

Once he was satisfied that Corde would not sully his discourse with any further murderous intentions, Cabal continued, ‘That, Herr Corde, was reasonable caution. Your behaviour in the presence of Ercusides’ great scarecrow was not. Any lucid, rational eye would quickly have discerned the thing’s nature and evolved a strategy for dealing with it, as I did. I required no external agencies to do so.’

Yet as soon as he had said it he doubted it. He had not thought through every detail of that night, but now it occurred to him that there was a speck around which his deductions had been built, a few words of forewarning that had given him a head start on the truth. He thought of a whispering inhuman voice beneath a temple to a forgotten god in a city with no name: ‘Remember Captain Lochery.’

He had focused purely on wondering how the ghoul had even known of the captain and that Cabal was acquainted with him. He had concluded that the ghouls’ unnerving ability to go almost anywhere and anywhen that amused them had been the cause of it, and that the ghoul was merely using the captain as an example of their wide-spanning intelligence, and as a warning to be careful. Now that he paused to consider his memories of the ensuing ratiocinations, however, he realised that the unusual nature of the captain’s leg had flickered through his mind. This, truly, had been the seed from which his deductions pertaining to the true nature of the mysterious wamp-killer had sprung, the moment he had clapped eyes upon the evidence of Ercusides’ exercises in arcane woodwork.

This was a disturbing revelation in itself, and Cabal hushed Corde’s simmering outrage with an impatient flutter of his fingers and a pneumatic pffft of the type used for shooing off cats. Cabal needed to think, and he didn’t need a histrionic solicitor distracting him while he did it.

The truly disturbing element, however, was the nature of the hint. It had been cryptic to the point of abstruseness, and not a reasonable bet for a hint to most people. For Cabal, and Cabal’s thought processes, however, it had been precise and exact. How could some cadaver-chewer have known that? Unless, and he did not enjoy the thought, the ghoul had not been a ghoul at all. Nyarlothotep famously had a thousand avatars, a thousand faces to present, a thousand masks to wear. This was only a figurative figure, however: Nyarlothotep in reality had far, far more. It did not stretch credibility in the slightest to suggest that the ghoul was one of them. If anyone could gauge a clue with such terrifying meticulousness, surely it had to be a god.