Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

Less dismaying than the cannibalism (though, as he rationalised it, he was no longer truly human and therefore no cannibal), but almost as troubling as the imminent collapse of his mental faculties was the nudity. Ghouls had little use for clothes, a mode that Cabal was sure he would not adopt. As time passed – and in the eternal darkness beneath the worlds, he had no idea how much time that meant – his garments grew constrictive and he felt intolerably swaddled and contained within them. He shed them in an isolated tunnel, and left them there, neatly folded, the last memorial to Johannes Cabal.

It should hardly have surprised him, this change. It was not even unknown in the history of his profession. The basic precepts of necromancy involved hanging around graveyards, tinkering with corpses and inevitably having dealings – friendly or otherwise – with ghouls. Given that the triggering events for a ghoulish transformation are psychic rather than material and include an interest in human cadavers, an empathy if not necessarily a sympathy with ghouls, and the ingestion of human remains, Cabal could only conclude that he should have washed his hands more thoroughly between dissections and lunch. Somewhere along the way, he must have inadvertently enjoyed a morsel of meat that had not come from the butcher. It served him right for eating in his laboratory. Still, it could have been worse. He’d only changed species instead of, say, picking up hepatitis.

So, he sat with the others in a lightless cavern, chewing a media tycoon’s thigh and wondering what would become of him. He had failed. It had always been a possibility, but he had imagined the path would be abruptly halted by his death. It had never occurred to him that he might be turned aside from it, watching helplessly as potential success paled into certain failure. He looked at the others scattered around, industriously rationing out parcels of stolen meat among themselves. He didn’t even need visible light to see them. Everything was limned in a strange and beautiful incandescence that showed details in the most mundane things that he had never dreamed might be there. This was a gift of his new physiology and, it was true, this he did not mind so much.

‘But,’ meeped a voice, ‘you are not happy.’

Cabal turned to see the leader squatting nearby, watching him with calm interest. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I am not happy. I did not complete my work, and soon I will not even be able to remember why it was important to me.’

‘You will,’ laughed the leader, a sound like a choking terrier. ‘You will remember.’

‘But I won’t want to.’

‘You are so sorry for yourself. All your power and knowledge and books, and you are sorry for yourself. We have heard so much about Johannes Cabal. A clever man. A clever man. But sorry for yourself.’

Unused to being chastised, least of all by a creature that used crypts and tombs as All You Can Eat buffets, Cabal snapped, ‘The process is irreversible. Everybody knows that.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said the leader, nodding understandingly. ‘Everybody.’

‘Yes. Everybody. Well, except for Culpins, but his theory of countermorphic residual transfiguration pertained only to lycanthropes, where the process is essentially reversible in any event, not this sort of transformation where, once the new morphic form is achieved, it is retained.’

‘Achieved,’ said the leader, nodding. It looked off into the cavern, apparently already bored with the conversation. ‘Retained.’

‘Exactly so,’ said Cabal. It was nice to use his intellect. It was like looking over the old mansion he had grown up in before being permanently evicted and spending the rest of his life in a small studio flat. ‘Once the full morphotypical state has been . . .’ He paused. ‘The destination is final, but the journey . . .’ He leaped to his feet, and wobbled slightly. His knees were midway through the transformation of bending backwards to bending forwards, and currently bent both ways, which was good for yoga and bad for almost everything else.

‘But the journey may be aborted! Quickly! Tell me! How much longer before I am entirely a ghoul? Days? Weeks? Months?’

The leader looked sideways at him. ‘You do not like being a ghoul?’

‘No. I don’t. No insult intended, but I have plans, and eating people for eternity isn’t among them.’

The leader looked at him fully. Then it grinned the maddog grin that ghouls do so well, exposing every fang it had. ‘That is fine, and we are not insulted. You are Johannes Cabal.’ It gestured at the others. ‘We have enough numbers. There are lots of ghouls, but only one Johannes Cabal. You have at least six weeks, Johannes Cabal. At most, eight.’

Cabal’s initial enthusiasm abated a little in the face of what he needed to do, and the time in which he had to do it. ‘A stabiliser elixir won’t be easy to synthesise. I’ll need a laboratory, chemical reagents, books.’

The leader made a dismissive gesture with a paw. ‘We steal bodies. My people, we have stolen three dead popes. The Vatican was very cross. Glass things, chemicals, books, they will be no trouble. Much easier than dead popes.’

‘Why on Earth did you steal three dead popes?’ asked Cabal.

‘First, to make the Vatican very cross. That was funny. Second reason, delicious.’

Considering the ghouls’ bad reputation, Cabal had found them astonishingly affable creatures: when the leader gathered them together to tell them that Cabal was going to attempt to stop his own transformation, they were not insulted, and when it called upon them to help in any way possible, they were happy to do so. If his life had been a little different, Cabal concluded, being a ghoul really wasn’t so bad. While they were intellectually stunted, at least by his standards, their aesthetic senses went unblunted. He had discovered one ghoul painting a study of a London Tube station, in which ghouls watched the inattentive commuters on the platform from the shadows of the tunnel. The execution was exquisite, even if the subject matter was not. As a race they were mutually supportive and sanguine in their outlook. Previously Cabal had always reckoned them to be rivals in his graveyard harvests, nuisances at best, dangers at worst. Now, however, he saw them for what they were, stoic opportunists, and he respected them for it. Should his efforts over the next few weeks prove successful, he would be far more tolerant of their activities, and never shoot one again. Unless really irked.

First, it was necessary to possess a copy of the thesis, published to universal dismay by Erast Culpins, renowned lycanthropologist, son of a Russian émigré and a Kentish haberdasher, and now a permanent patient of Brichester Asylum. This the ghouls stole, in an excess of mischief, from the Vatican’s very own Index Librorum Prohibitorum . Apparently, the theft made the Vatican ‘cross’. Cabal didn’t care if it made it livid, just so long as he had a copy.

Flicking as quickly as his increasingly long and distressingly rubbery fingers could manage it, Cabal disregarded the other artefacts of Culpins’s peculiar genius – consisting of crude pictures of women bathing amid unnecessarily Byzantine plumbing – and concentrated on the fragmentary references to the metamorphic process. Culpins’s terminology was imprecise and as mutable as his subject, but over the period of fifteen precious days, Cabal succeeded at shaking out the seed of the idea. On the sixteenth day, Cabal drew up a shopping list, and the ghouls were dispatched to gather the items therein requested. They went joyfully, apparently enjoying some petty larceny in their lives to make a change from the drudgery of workaday grave robbing.

There was a rash of thefts not only across the Earth, but across its history, and across the histories of other Earths and counter-Earths, and Earths that never should have been, and Earths that never shall be, as the ghouls happily voyaged through strange dimensions to play in Cabal’s scavenger hunt. They came back, eventually, with many of the things he had requested, some things similar to those requested, and quite a lot of things they had just taken a shine to in passing.

‘Another dead pope,’ said Cabal, to one such returnee. He peered into the sack again and sighed. ‘Though this one shows signs that he wasn’t dead before he was folded up and put in here. I imagine the Vatican was quite cross about this, was it?’ To which the ghoul nodded happily.

As Cabal worked at putting together a laboratory down in the ghoulish caverns, he would sometimes turn to find the ghoul leader there, hunkered down in the shadows, watching his progress in silence. Cabal had noted that the leader was also changing in strange ways, his speech becoming simpler and more like that of the others in the pack. This, he gathered, was because he had once been a man of great intellect himself, but that the steady erosion of his humanity had reached even this last bastion as inexorably as an incoming tide. The ghoul didn’t seem to be so very concerned about it, so Cabal never broached the subject.

‘It’s coming along,’ Cabal told him. ‘I should be able to start experimentation soon.’ He paused in unpacking a condenser tube from its box, stolen from the chemistry lab of a small boys’ public school in Hampshire, and turned to the leader. ‘I am appreciative of all your help in this enterprise, sir, but I must know: why exactly are you doing so?’

The ghoul lifted its long index finger, a finger graced with too many joints to be seemly, and counted, ‘One thing. Johannes Cabal is necromancer. Necromancers get respect from gravefolk. From ghouls. Johannes Cabal needs help, Johannes Cabal gets help. Two things. If Johannes Cabal is unhappy as gravefolk, he should not be gravefolk. Three things. Stealing is fun.’

Cabal nodded, satisfied. He had certainly heard less worthwhile reasons given to commit the most appalling crimes in the past. A willingness to help and a raison d’être for a bit of racial kleptomania were better than most.

The apparatus was constructed rapidly, though some of the more unconventional reagents intended for its retorts took longer to procure. One in particular required special care, and Cabal led a party of ghouls to help him acquire it. He returned sombre and quiet, bearing the skeletal tip of a left-hand little finger. ‘That grave remains sacrosanct,’ he told the leader. ‘Spread the word among the gravefolk: if any break into it – man or ghoul – they will regret it.’ He held up the small bone and regarded it with melancholy. ‘Apart from me, obviously.’

The leader did not need to enquire why, for it had already been informed that the gravestone above the coffin they had so respectfully robbed bore the words,

Gottfried Cabal. Survived by his wife Liese, and son Johannes, gone to join his elder sonHorst in God’s Grace. REQUISCAT IN PACE .

Instead it watched Cabal painstakingly clean the bone and then carefully powder exactly as much as he needed before placing the remainder in a fresh test-tube, sealing it and stowing it in his Gladstone bag.

Cabal’s motivation was high: every day he found it a little harder to remember things or to carry out mental calculations. He was heading towards average human intelligence, and he found the experience stifling and claustrophobic. On the one hand it appalled him that people were content to live with such small intellects, although on the other it went a long way to explaining so many things about society that otherwise defied belief. At least the ghouls seemed as highly motivated as he: he had only to suggest that an item might be useful for a gang to run off and return anywhere from hours to a couple of days later with it in paw. That at least was one less thing to worry about, but the narrow window of opportunity the elixir presented and the impossibility of securing further supplies of some of the reagents needed meant that he had little latitude for supporting experimentation. The few tests he was able to conduct were highly encouraging – it seemed that Culpins’s obsessions with werewolves, plumbing and naked ladies had actually borne fruit – but there could only be a single acid test, and as much as he wanted to hold it off until he could be sure he was doing the right thing, its time was growing inexorably closer.