Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute (34 page)

There was a short, awkward silence. ‘And the Phobic Animus?’

‘That? Oh, there isn’t one, not in the convenient package that the Fear Institute believed. No, irrational fear is always where everybody thought it was – sweating away in the human heart. Once I became aware of their brave little project, though, well, it was so convenient to my plans I just couldn’t
resist. I recovered the Silver Key from its last owner – that was Hep-Seth incidentally, and you were right, he
is
at the bottom of the crevasse – then inveigled it into the hands of the Fear Institute.’

‘And sent them to me,’ finished Cabal. ‘I shan’t bother asking why – you’ll only get all mystical.’

‘Reasons and reasons. But you might understand one.’

Bose looked steadily at him, and Cabal thought he caught the scent of brimstone. ‘This “thought experiment” of yours,’ he said slowly. ‘Just how hypothet—’

‘I told you we weren’t done at the time, Johannes Cabal,’ said Bose, but his voice was not his own.

Cabal swallowed very carefully. ‘So,’ he said tonelessly, ‘what now?’

‘What now?’ Bose’s voice was still of the pit, flaming and dangerous. Suddenly he smiled and sat up. ‘How would you like your heart’s desire?’

As Johannes Cabal gathered himself up from the grass, he wondered just how many times he was likely to be translocated around assorted plains of existence in his lifetime. He looked around as he dusted himself off, peeved but unsurprised that the Phobic Animus, or Nyarlothotep, or Gardner Bose Esq., or whatever else it might be styling itself this week, had not allowed him to keep his bag. The loss of Ercusides he could manfully bear, but the loss of his notebook, phials of reagent, his death’s head cane and, worst of all, the Silver Key were nuisances great and small. He was wondering how likely recovering them might be when a large crow settled on a nearby boulder, eyed him with mercenary glee and croaked loudly, ‘Kronk!’

Cabal almost groaned with rancour and disappointment. He recognised the crow. He recognised the rock on which it was perched. He knew exactly where he was, and he knew that his bag and its contents were lost beyond any reasonable chance of recovery. It was very annoying, but there was nothing to be done about it, so he put them aside in the vast mental jumble room he kept for memories of abject failure, and set his face towards a new day. He was nothing if not a pragmatist.

He allowed the crow to perch upon his shoulder as he walked along. The last time he had been coming this way, it had been to meet Messrs Shadrach, Corde and Nyarlothotep at the pub in the village. How long ago it seemed. Now they were all dead or alive in some metaphysical way that he doubted was expressible to poor creatures like himself. Whom the gods would destroy, the ancients tell us, they first make mad. Cabal often wondered why they would bother destroying anybody whose sanity they had already shattered. It seemed petty, but then, that was gods for you.

The house was just as it always was: bleak, solitary, and with a perilous front garden. He went up the path, ignoring the tiny eyes that watched him from within the shrubs and beneath the ivy, unlocked the door – hardly necessary, but old habits die hard – and let himself in.

And there, in his front hall with the black-and-white tiled floor, he stopped and stared in utter astonishment at what lay before him. For there, just by the mat, was an envelope.

It made not a ha’penny of sense. He collected his post, what little there was of it,
poste restante
from the post office in the village, both because he didn’t care to have more people than necessary coming to his house, and because the post
office did not enjoy having its postmen eaten by the recalcitrant fairies and other little folk of Cabal’s front garden. For a while, he had trained the garden folk to acknowledge a list of people they should let by, which included the postman, but the training required constant refreshing as the gossamerwinged little proponents of chaos tended to forget it at the first hunger pang. Then there had been a moderately ingenious attempt to kill him by a disgruntled relative of somebody or another that he’d dug up for research material: they had dressed as a postman and actually made it into his house before becoming research material themselves. It was all too distracting, so he had made a
poste restante
arrangement, and everybody was about as happy about it as they were likely to be.

The envelope had not therefore been delivered by a postman, or anybody else who might reasonably be considered edible to tiny mouths full of very sharp tiny teeth. He looked suspiciously at the crisp white envelope for a second longer before reopening the door and calling into the front garden, ‘Who has been to the house?’

‘Nobody,’ came a plaintive chorus of small voices. ‘We are
ever
so hungry, Johannes Cabal.’ Cabal grunted dismissively, and went back indoors. The garden folk were lousy liars, and on this occasion they seemed to be telling the truth. He crouched by the envelope and tried to see if there was anything obviously dubious about it, such as razors or the faint shimmer of a dried contact poison, but he could see nothing. Finally picking it up gingerly between finger and thumb, protecting his skin with a handkerchief, he took it up into his attic laboratory.

The letter remained inscrutable to close observation under
lens and ultraviolet light. Finally, wearing his heaviest rubber gauntlets and an army-surplus gas mask, Cabal opened the envelope with his favourite Swann & Morton No. 22 scalpel, being careful to cut the paper at the opposite end from the flap. Inside he saw nothing more malevolent than a folded sheet of foolscap parchment, which he removed with tweezers, and opened gently for fear of triggering some trap so subtle as to baffle conventional physics and, indeed, common sense. But then, as Cabal knew full well, nobody ever died from being
too
careful. Well, apart from that man who suffocated in cotton wool, but he was an idiot.

The sheet of parchment was, however, looking much like a sheet of parchment at present. That wasn’t to say it was harmless: there are certain runic patterns that can draw the attention of unwelcome supernatural attention on whoever has the misfortune to look upon them, so Cabal continued to be delicately cautious long after the point when he had disproved the possibility of every form of magical trap known and several more open to conjecture. Finally, even after he had conceded that the letter was merely a letter – though it bore no name and address, and had somehow been posted without the knowledge of his front garden – he still felt misgivings as he opened it fully and studied its contents.

At first he thought he must be mistaken. Surely it was only a similarity in cursive styles. But as he read the short note of a little more than a hundred words that began with no greeting and ended with no signature, he recognised naunces in phrasing and came to the inescapable conclusion that it had been written by himself. He had no memory of ever doing so, however, and the content was of such startling originality that he knew he never had. He tore off the gas mask and
gauntlets and read it again, and then again. It was ingenious, it was radical, and he knew in his heart that it was effective. What had Nyarlothotep said as he mooched around on his throne in the form of the inoffensive Herr Bose?
How would you like your heart’s desire?
The note contained the basic principle for perfect resurrection, the secret of raising the dead just as they had been when they were alive – physically, mentally, spiritually.

Cabal took down his laboratory logbook from the shelf and opened it at a fresh page. All the experiments previously, all those years of work, were now as dross to him. Now he could see the beginning of the true path to his goal. He hung up his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. There was still much to be done, but now he knew what he knew, the fire burned in him again. This time he would succeed. One day, perhaps not so very far away, depending on where his researches led him, she would rise again, and she would see and speak and think, and Cabal would feel happiness for the first time in so long. He paused, angrily wiped at his eye with the heel of his hand. He was shaking. He had no time for this, he told himself. No time. There was so very much to be done.

It was true: there was a very great deal to be done. The note – which Cabal painstakingly transcribed into three different notebooks for fear that it might vanish as mysteriously as it had appeared – was only a beginning, an inspiration to explore some principles that might have been disregarded indefinitely without the note pointing out a subtlety to their applications that opened vast new vistas of fruitful research. But the note was short and of no help beyond putting him on the right path. More researches were necessary, more experiments,
which meant more danger. Now, however, he knew the perils were worth it. No more stealing obscure books at great personal risk when he knew they would lead only to dead ends. No more canoodling with demons for scraps of dubious information.

Cabal did wonder, though: if Bose had been telling the truth in his little ‘thought experiment’, and he was also Satan, and Satan was therefore not a fallen angel but just another face of a trickster god, as Tezcatlipoca, Loki and Anansi must also be, what were the demons of Hell in reality? It was an intractable problem. There was only one sure way of knowing and that would involve communicating with Nyarlothotep, who would likely be in neither such a jovial frame of mind nor form should they ever meet again. Cabal’s best guess was that the demons in that case would be constructs or creatures corrupted so thoroughly that they were no longer aware of ever having been anything but demons. It would be the final humiliation, that the eternal suffering of the damned in Hell was simply stage dressing. Ultimately, however, it was irrelevant to his current researches, and he considered those hapless multitudes only for a moment before moving on.

Early experiments were encouraging, and as Cabal’s confidence in this new direction grew, so did his intolerance of distractions. He purchased a new Webley .577 and a replacement for his sword cane. Soon he was using both.

A seventeenth-century painting of the theologian Johannes Valentinus Andreae included a scrap of paper carelessly thrown on his desk that contained a complex diagram showing the relationship between certain esoteric humours. Cabal went to the private house where it hung and cut it from the
canvas with the sword cane. When the owner attempted to stop him, Cabal shot him dead with the Webley.

Then there was the time a year later when Cabal was cornered by armed police in the chemical-engineering building of a university. He escaped by converting a fractional distillation column the size of a three-storey house into an impromptu explosive device and hiding behind a heavy concrete wall when it detonated. A dozen bystanders were injured, three fatally, and four university buildings burned down, but Cabal escaped with the materials he had sought, so all that was of no import.

Three years after that, it was necessary to relieve some inbreed – a member of the aristocracy, which is to say much the same thing – of a gem recovered from a meteorite four hundred years previously. It comprised the centrepiece of a tiara that left a vault only for very important occasions, and Cabal waited impatiently for such an occasion to arise. Finally, a benefit dinner for some worthy cause (Cabal thought it might involve orphans, but he was not overly interested) was announced at which some dowager somebody of somewhere would be wearing the tiara. The next morning, the newspapers were agape at the mass murder of everybody at the dinner through the agency of poisonous gas. Some days later, during the investigation, the tiara was recovered from under a side table where it had been carelessly thrown. The central gem was no longer in its setting.

And so it went on, an outrage here, an atrocity there, punctuating the onward and upward progress of Johannes Cabal the necromancer. His path was clear, and if anyone ventured upon it and became an obstruction, they were removed as quickly and economically as swatting a fly. Where
Cabal walked, he left gravestones and woe, yet he did not care and he did not pause. Where once he had killed with at least an iota of regret in aiding his ultimate foe, Death, now he murdered easily and without hesitation.

For the first time in his life, he was buying new fifty-round boxes of ammunition annually. He was on his third new sword cane, the first having been lost during an escape, and the second’s blade having snapped in the ribs of a museum guard. Sometimes when he looked in the mirror to shave, Johannes Cabal saw his ultimate foe right there, looking back at him. He shrugged inwardly, and carried on shaving. None of that mattered, he knew. None of those people mattered. He had a plan, and it was more important than anything else in the world.

Nor were his crimes limited to the mundane world. He summoned the demon Lucifuge Rofocale for the second time in his life, and as the demon was halfway through saying, ‘Oh, it’s you again. Have you got your dread rod with you this time?’ Cabal shot him through the head with a bullet made from the metal of Leng, sanctified on a lonely beach by Dagon himself, who had no love for demons. Lucifuge looked surprised, then dead, and Cabal hung him by his feet from a nearby tree for his blood to drain into a bucket. He left the demon dangling upside-down, the last droplets of his black blood tainting the soil. The carrion crows gathered around, but none cared to sample that particular dish.

Satan did not turn up that night, all in a bate because Cabal had killed one of his. Cabal hardly expected him to, because in his mind’s eye he could see Satan sitting in his great basalt throne by a burning lake of lava, and – in some lights – he looked just like Mr Gardner Bose.