Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

Surviving fragments of Cyril W. Clome’s manuscript for The Young Person’s Guide to Cthulhu and His Friends: No. 1 Great Cthulhu

Now, best beloved, let us consider Great Cthulhu. He is the greatest of the Great Old Ones and is a god. Yes, he is. A real god. Not one of those pathetic gods that depend on silly people having ‘faith’ in them (‘Faith’ is a word that means ‘having to pretend’, O best beloved). Not one of those stupid, weak, powerless gods that simpering people invent to try to keep them warm in the endless freezing void of the true reality, in the aching futility of our fleeting, impotent lives. We know a song about that, don’t we?

(Text illegible due to scorching)

No, Great Cthulhu does not need us to worship him – he is real whether we do or not. But we better had, because one day he will wake in his cosy little sunken city of R’lyeh (which is at 47º 9´ S, 126º 43´ W in the South Pacific Ocean, make a note), have a lovely big yawn and a stretch I should think – ‘Yaaaawwwwwwn!’ – and then kill everyone. But if you’ve been good little boys and girls and worshipped him properly, he might not kill you first. Isn’t that splendid?

Chapter 3

IN WHICH CABAL LEADS AN EXPEDITION BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP

The mountain stood taller than any mountain had any right to stand without liquefying its own base with the sheer weight of rock upon it. Even close by that base, the four men looked out and stood speechless at the astonishing vista spread before them, like the world before gods. Well, three of them stood speechless with awe, the fourth was entirely preoccupied with beating dust from his trousers where he had stumbled on escaping the rapidly closing Gateway of the Silver Key.

‘My God,’ breathed Corde, finally rediscovering speech. ‘It’s . . . magnificent. I never dreamed . . .’

‘No, you doubtless have,’ said Johannes Cabal, as he smacked dust from his calves. ‘You have forgotten it, though. That is the nature of dreams.’ Finally, about as satisfied as he was going to be without a valet with a clothes-brush to hand, he straightened and took in the vast world that stretched out before them. He sniffed, stuck out his jaw and picked up his Gladstone. ‘If it were a view in the waking world, I would be impressed. As it is, it is the shared fantasy of a hundred billion sleepers. Impressive in its own way, but I shan’t be buying any postcards.’

‘A hundred billion, Mr Cabal?’ said Shadrach. ‘You are mistaken. There are not even two billions in the world today, and fewer than half are sleeping at any one time.’

Cabal turned to him and gave him the sort of look a teacher might give a disappointing pupil before correcting him, and then thrashing him. ‘You are correct in as far as there are no more than two billions in the world. You are in error if you believe that I am only considering the Earth.’ He paused and looked Shadrach up and down. ‘What in the name of Azathoth’s little drummer boy are you wearing?’

‘What am I wearing? That’s an . . . Good Lord!’

Shadrach no longer looked nearly so much like an undertaker. Instead, his clothing fell more into the category of ‘gorgeous’, not a description that had ever before been attached to him in all his years. He wore a burgundy simarre in the Tudor style, trimmed with fur of a curious pattern, over a doublet of cream samite, slit upper hose of the same burgundy but with a brave crimson silk within, black lower hose double gartered in yellow, and square-toed shoes. He reached up and removed the slouching brown velvet cap from his head and looked at it in wonder. The overall effect was of a successful merchant of the sixteenth century, an Antonio before all that unpleasantness with Shylock.

‘I – I don’t understand,’ stammered Shadrach, his usual bloodless composure shattered. For his answer, he received an equally astonished cry from Corde as he, too, discovered a change in his wardrobe.

Corde’s profoundly unenterprising twill three-piece, trilby and woollen tie had been replaced with something altogether more dashing. Again the tone was a strange mix of very late medieval and Tudor, but the cut seemed to owe more to the cinema: a brown leather jerkin with slashed sleeves over a white doublet, black breeches and knee boots, a sword at the hip, a soft black hat with a black feather tipped in red, held in place by a small brooch of a dagger bearing a single tiny ruby.

After all the crying out and holding out of hands in astonishment, Bose’s thunder had been too thoroughly stolen for him to do much more than look down at his own clothes and mumble a slightly surprised, ‘Oh.’ For he, too, had experienced a transformation. Gone were his previous clothes which, while conservatively stylish and expensively cut, had not made much of an impression on anyone. Now he wore a simarre much like Shadrach’s, but where that had complacently proclaimed wealth, this was of profound blackness, such that the moleskin collar seemed verging on the gaudy. The whole ensemble, from shoes to the four-sided flat hat perched upon Bose’s surprised head, was black, the only touches of colour being his pale face, the wide red-gold chain he wore running across his shoulders and down to a medal in the middle of his chest, and the blue carbuncle in the ring he wore upon the middle finger of his gloved left hand.

They spent some moments gawping at themselves and one another before turning their attention to Cabal who, they were confounded to discover, was still dressed much as he had been back in Arkham, although a scuff on his right shoe’s toecap that he had suffered on the street was now gone and a button on his left jacket cuff, formerly depending upon a loosening thread where it had caught in a doorway, was now perfectly secure.

Bose spoke for them all when he said, ‘I don’t understand, Mr Cabal.’

For his part, Cabal seemed to find something secretly amusing about the whole scene, although the smirk was in a sense psychic, for his expression did not change at all. ‘Herr Shadrach, you remind me of a portrait by Holbein the Younger. A successful merchant. Tell me, did you ever harbour ambitions towards a mercantile life?’

‘No,’ said Shadrach, immediately. Then he frowned. ‘Well, briefly . . . once, long ago. When I was a boy, I visited my uncle’s warehouse. He was a trader in teas and bric-à-brac from the Orient. He travelled a lot. I wanted . . . My father told me not to be foolish. There was a family business to inherit, his business.’ Shadrach paused, looking at his hands. ‘Shadrach and Son, undertakers .’ He looked up at Cabal, frowning. ‘Is this . . . this what I could have been?’

‘You could have been anything, but you wanted to be a merchant, evidently. Herr Corde, I surmise, read far too many twopenny papers when he was young.’ Mr Corde was not listening. He had freed the sword from its scabbard and, while not fully drawing it, was admiring the blade. It shone white and blue as it caught the light, steel of such beautifully patterned perfection that the swordsmiths of Damascus would have torn their beards in frustration at the very sight of it.

‘You, however,’ said Cabal, turning to Bose, ‘you, sir, intrigue me. What is your heartfelt boon? Your great sublimated desire?’

‘Well,’ said Bose, before becoming distracted by the gold chain. He lifted the medal and tried to read it, without success. ‘Well, I was thinking that, perhaps, one day, I might like to be a magistrate.’ Everybody looked at him. He blushed and smiled awkwardly. ‘It’s good to have an ambition.’

Cabal nodded. ‘A chain of office, of course. Another historical trapping. The Dreamlands seem incapable of letting any lily go ungilded.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Shadrach, profoundly uninterested in Bose’s long-term ambitions to hand out small fines and morally improving lectures in court. ‘But what about you, Mr Cabal? Why haven’t your clothes changed?’

Corde slammed his sword back into its scabbard with jaunty gusto. ‘Because you’re already what you want to be, eh, Cabal?’

‘Just so,’ said Cabal, and this time the spectre of a smirk flittered around his mouth. He turned to look down the slope of the valley, and the smirk diminished to nothing. ‘Now, to business.’

He reached down for his bag, and paused. It seemed that he had not managed the transition into the Dreamlands quite as unaltered as he had thought. The bag was open, as it should have been. He had left it open on the floor of the garret, the Silver Key lying within. When he had abandoned his post at the top of the stairs, he had dropped his pistol in before snatching up the bag and throwing himself into the vortex. The Key, he was relieved to see, was still where he had left it. His cane still remained secured to the bag by the leather straps that ran up the sides. Of his gun, however, there was no sign. Instead, lying along the open maw of the bag, like a stick in a toothless dog’s mouth, there was a sword, scabbarded and attached to a belt.

Cabal bit back a snarl. Of course the Dreamlands would not tolerate something so prosaically mechanical as his Webley. Here, progress was held back by a vast romantic inertia as great as that of the mountain on which they stood. One day, it might finally allow flintlocks, perhaps at some future date when the waking world was using death rays and germ bombs.

Cabal took up the sword by the belt and strapped it on. It hung neatly at his left hip, and added a pleasing weight to his stride that he knew a real sword would never match. Demonstrating none of Corde’s bashfulness, he drew the blade in a swift motion and tested its balance. Predictably, it was perfect, although it was no sort of weapon that he had ever held or even seen before. It was a rapier of sorts, but of a combative nature rather than for fencing: flat-bladed with a shallow curve that swept up to a right angle a finger’s length from the sharp tip. Cabal slashed and thrust at the air for a few seconds. An interesting weapon, he concluded. At heart a rapier, but with just enough sabre in its family tree to allow the easy hacking of unfortunates when the mood took one.

He returned it to its scabbard with precision, and looked up to see Corde watching him with interest. ‘You’ve fenced before, Cabal?’

Cabal noticed that familiarity was breeding sufficient contempt for them no longer to address him as ‘Mr Cabal’. ‘I have. Have you?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Corde drew his sword, and it was as different from Cabal’s as a Viking one-and-a-half-hander bastard sword is, unsurprisingly, from a rapier with a bit of sabre on the side. ‘Nothing like this, I grant you.’ He whirled the sword in the air and it seemed for a moment that its path was made of a gleaming arc of solid steel. He swept it back again and then around his head, his eyes filling with undisguised joy. ‘It’s wonderful . . . wonderful!’

Suddenly his sword stopped in mid-air with a sharp cry of steel on steel. Cabal stood with his own once again drawn, halting Corde’s in an exact parry. ‘It is a dream, Corde.’ He lowered and scabbarded it. ‘Time is pressing, and we shall have plenty of time for you to demonstrate your dazzling swordsmanship. I would remind you that we have an entire world to search and we are by no means immortal.’ He took up his bag while Corde reluctantly slid his blade into its scabbard.

Cabal took out his folder of notes on the Dreamlands and found a flattish section of ground on which to unroll a map.