Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

Harwell’s expression showed dawning comprehension. ‘The land of dreams . . . the land of . . . Of course! It explains so much! My dreams, my visions! I understand now!’ He looked frantically around, turning on the spot. ‘Where is it? Where is this gateway? It must be near – I can feel it.’

Cabal meanwhile had accepted the Key from a reluctant Shadrach and was in the process of sliding it from the long chamois envelope in which it was kept. He let it lie in his hand for a long moment, feeling its weight wax and wane, watching the bittings ebb and flow, like crystals melting and re-forming. It was silver, certainly, but only in colour. What it was made of was an entirely different question.

He tucked the envelope into his coat pocket while taking a firm grip of the Key. ‘Yes, Herr Harwell. The Gate of the Silver Key is very close indeed.’

Harwell turned to him, his next question already forming on his lips, but he never had the chance to voice it. For Cabal raised the Silver Key to head height and, without hesitation, drove it between Eldon Harwell’s eyes.

There was no crunching of bone, no spraying blood or cerebral fluid as the Key slid through skin, subcutaneous fat, flesh, skull and brain. There was no sound at all, but for the collective horrified gasp of shock from the onlookers. It is not true to say that the Key’s passage between Harwell’s frontal lobes left no mark: the flesh and bone crumbled and melted into thin white smoke and what was left was nothing more or less than a neatly defined keyhole. None of them thought this strange at the time, but only afterwards in reflection; at that moment it seemed that the keyhole had always been there, obvious and apparent to them as soon as they had seen Harwell, yet somehow they had forgotten about it. It was a curious, half-formed memory, their first experience of the nature of the Dreamlands while waking, as its influence escaped through the opening gate into the mortal world like jasmine-scented air escaping a garden.

Only Cabal and Harwell made no sound, until Cabal turned the Silver Key in its lock and Harwell made a soft sigh as of realisation or perhaps recognition. Certainly, his eyes widened as though he could see things that had lain hidden from him his whole life. ‘It’s . . . beautiful,’ he whispered, and a solitary tear rolled down his cheek as the confused miasma of half-glimpsed possibilities that had haunted him since that night at the Pickman Gallery finally grew sharper in focus. ‘It’s all so . . .’

Then his face grew tense, the skin pulled back against the bone. ‘There’s something else, something else . . .’

Cabal finished turning the key and gently withdrew it from Harwell’s head. The keyhole remained, and from it lines of liquid light rolled up vertically across the centre of the brow and down along the ridge of the nose.

‘The Gateway . . .’ said Corde. ‘The Gateway of the Silver Key.’ The silver line of light was extending over Harwell’s head and down his chest, the glow becoming fiercer as it travelled. ‘I’d naturally assumed—’

‘Walls do not dream,’ interrupted Cabal, and Corde fell silent.

The line had almost bisected Harwell and with every inch the line travelled, his expression of disbelief warped slowly into horror. ‘No . . . no! I can see it! I can see it! I cannot . . . must not . . . God help me!’

‘What can you see?’ demanded Cabal, standing close to Harwell. He noted that the stricken man’s eyes seemed to be growing further apart. The gateway was opening.

‘I see . . . it all!’ Harwell’s eyes were focused on something far beyond Cabal, beyond the grubby little room, beyond this world and the realms of space that it sits within. ‘Oh, mercy! Is there no mercy?’

And, with that, the tips of the line of light joined, the Gateway of the Silver Key opened wide, and that was the end of Eldon Harwell. He became something, but what it was, living or dead, was without definition. He shattered into crumbs that sublimed into gas that smeared into liquid that sublimed into something else again until all that was left was the gateway, burning in the air with the light of a bright afternoon into a dirty garret at midnight.

‘You . . .’ Bose was, for once, lost for words. ‘You killed him.’

Cabal shrugged, as if Bose had accused him of using the wrong spoon at dinner. ‘He was already dead. He’d allowed certain conceptual theomorphs to take residence in his mind. He would have killed himself or been killed within a few months in any case. At least this way he served a purpose.’ He noticed some pieces of paper lying on Harwell’s writing-table and studied them for a moment. ‘He was a poet. No loss, then.’

‘You are a cold man, Mr Cabal,’ said Corde, not entirely disapprovingly.

Cabal did not answer. He was looking at the portal, stepping around it to gauge its width. ‘This will not be a quick passage. I estimate it will take approximately a minute for each of us to complete the transition from here to there. We must start immediately.’

‘We are leaving now?’ Shadrach was shocked and a little angry. ‘When we came on this little reconnaissance of yours, you gave us to believe that we would only be confirming the location of the gateway.’

Cabal waved a complacent hand at the tall, glowing ellipse hanging in the centre of the floor. ‘As we have.’

‘But what about our equipment? Our preparations? You are asking us to plunge into the unknown!’

‘This entire expedition is a plunge into the unknown, Shadrach. Your equipment is useless. Your preparations are moot. The Dreamlands shall provide. The one thing they cannot give us is time.’ He walked to the window and gestured for the others to join him. He drew the curtain back far enough for them to look out into the street. From the graveyard, dogs that were not dogs were streaming, running straight for the building in which they stood. They made a sound as they went, a strange gruff mewling unlike anything any of the men had heard before. It took little imagination to discern shifts in intonation that sounded worryingly like language.

‘Why are the streets empty of people?’ asked Bose. ‘It’s not that late. What . . .’

Cabal picked up his Gladstone bag, opened it and removed his revolver. ‘Because we are in the borderlands of dream and nightmare, and in nightmares, there is never anyone there to help. Is anyone else carrying a gun?’

Shadrach, Corde and Bose shook their heads. Cabal growled with displeasure. ‘Gentlemen! We are in the United States of America. Going armed is virtually mandatory. Quickly, then. Through the gateway. I shall hold off our visitors.’

He was halfway through the door on to the upper landing when Corde called after him, ‘What are those creatures?’

‘Ghouls,’ said Cabal, and then he was gone.

Cabal looked down the stairwell, and weighed up the options for defence. It was not the first time he had fought in very similar circumstances and the knowledge that he had survived that time lent his actions confidence. He opened the revolver’s cylinder and checked the load before reclosing it with a purposeful click. The sound of scrabbling at the door grew as the ghouls wrestled with distant memories of when they were human and knew how door handles worked. The door was locked – Cabal had made a point of securing it after they entered – but he knew the ghouls’ impatience would overwhelm their caution soon enough, and then a cheap door with a cheap lock would present no barrier to them.

Nor did it. The scrabbling at the wood became faster and more violent and then, suddenly, the door was smashed open to the clatter of the striker plate on the tiled hallway. Cabal hoped for their sakes that Messrs Shadrach, Corde and Bose were making their way through the gateway because he would be needing it himself soon enough, and if any of them was not through by that time, he would personally ensure that they became the expedition’s first casualties. The Gateway of the Silver Key was no longer just the immediate goal of their plans, it was now their only route to safety. Cabal drew back the revolver’s hammer and aimed down the stairwell.

The black tide of fast-moving shadows swamped the lower flights, swirling anti-clockwise up the well. Cabal held his fire – he had only six shots and doubted he would be afforded an opportunity to reload. It was when they reached the landing below him that he aimed at the first ghoul up the flight of stairs directly beneath him, and shot it through the back of the head. The .577 round proved as efficacious against the vile dun-coloured rubbery hide of the ghoul as it ever had against Deep Ones or, indeed, people. The discharge was staggeringly loud in the confined space, and the plume of smoke that jetted down served to add to the creatures’ confusion as their comrade slumped and rolled back down among them, leaving much of its vaguely canine face on the step.

Behind him, he heard Bose say, ‘Mr Shadrach is through, Mr Cabal! Quickly, Mr Corde! Your turn!’

Cabal performed a rapid mental calculation and decided that he would have to hold the ghouls off for a little longer than he had hoped. Down below, he could hear chewing. Ghouls are a notoriously unsentimental race, and once one is dead it is immediately redefined in the minds of its friends and colleagues as lunch. It would seem that even their great desire to reach the gateway before it closed came second to a quick snack.

Cabal drew back the hammer again, the loud click as the lock engaged serving to reconcentrate the minds of the ghouls marvellously. There was some muttered speech, a disgusting meeping and glibbering that appalled Cabal’s linguistic sensibilities. It appalled him even more to have to speak in the same tongue.

‘You down there,’ he garbled, aware that his accent was poor. Silence suddenly fell. ‘I have no argument with your people. Go back, and no more need die.’

‘You have the gateway,’ barked a voice, presumably that of the pack leader.

‘What need you of the gateway? Your people can travel to the Dreamlands easily. The gateway is ours for the moment. Leave us in peace.’

There was a pause. Then the ghoul said, ‘I know you.’

Cabal’s eyes narrowed. He could feel an uncomfortable tension uncurling like an electric eel across his neck and shoulders. It took him a moment to realise that it was fear. He stamped it down immediately: this was the very irrational terror that caused the Fear Institute so much exasperation. Yet it was the irrationality of it that concerned him more than the way his heart pounded or the sweat that suddenly beaded his cool brow. He had encountered ghouls before, and they had never given him more than momentary inconvenience. Why was he afraid?

With an effort, he brought his mind to bear on the situation at hand. This ghoul was a cunning one, but not nearly cunning enough. It would engage his curiosity to take him off guard and then charge the stairs. He braced his gun hand and prepared to fire. ‘I don’t know you.’

‘You would not, but you knew me once,’ said the ghoul, and it said it in English. ‘Oh, you knew me once, Johannes Cabal.’

Silence fell once more. The moment drew out. ‘You knew me once, Johannes Cabal,’ the voice repeated. Still, there was no reply. On the stairs, a hideous hiccoughing growl arose. The ghoul was laughing.

In the garret where Eldon Harwell once lived, and where a police investigation would later find no clues as to his disappearance but a bloodstain on the stairs that analysis showed not to be human, the Gateway of the Silver Key flickered and extinguished. Of Harwell and his four mysterious visitors, there was no trace.