The Death of Me: A Tor.Com Original

by Howard, Jonathan L.

  “No game,” said Cabal in a low, dangerous voice. “No game? You have … manipulated me right from the moment I first saw you. Induced me to draw false inferences. I should have thought something was wrong. The black landau, the black horses, the silent coachman, the widow’s weeds—it was all so much more … banal than I would have expected.”

  “Then why did you believe?”

  “Because … because supernatural entities insist on melodrama. I’ve met Satan. Did you know that? He is such a drama … What is the phrase?”

  “Queen?” She seemed amused.

  “Yes, just so. Brimstone, devils, fiery depths, cribbage. It is all so theatrical.” He considered. “Well, perhaps not the cribbage. I think that’s more of a hobby. But the point is that when a mysterious funereal black carriage materialises out of thin air, abducts me, alters the passage of time, and its occupant lectures me on fate and life expectations, I apply Occam’s Razor and arrive at the obvious solution.”

  “Which was…?”

  “Which was that you are Death.”

  “I never said it,” she said, serious again.

  “You didn’t. You just implied it with sledgehammer subtlety and I accepted it, based on the evidence. There was only one other alternative, and that I proved was not the case. At least”—he took the piece of cold iron from his pocket and held it up—“I thought I’d proved it.” He watched her. She seemed calm, but her eyes never wavered from the small bit of metal. “You are of the Fay, aren’t you? I admit, you still have me at a loss to explain the lack of reaction. The metal should have burned you.”

  “You have a reputation for great deductive powers, Mr Cabal. I shan’t insult you by offering a solution.”

  He hardly heard her. The threads were finally coming together. “Unless, of course, you are not of pure blood. Your mortal heritage would prevent the worst physical effects.”

  She nodded. “Your reputation is well-earned.”

  “I would thank you not to patronise me, fräulein. I have killed on your behalf. I am not happy about it.”

  “Jones was a murderer, and you were his employer, Cabal. You should be thankful that you are not sharing his fate.”

  “I should kill you.”

  “You should not. You would surely die in the attempt, especially without Jones’s filthy knife.” She saw Cabal’s expression. “Oh, with Jones dead, the defences he’d placed upon his shop collapsed. It was searched as soon as you had skulked out of the door.” Cabal began to protest that he did not skulk, but she talked over him. “I would have been far more surprised if you had not taken the knife with you.”

  Cabal weighed the piece of metal in his hand. It seemed altogether too feeble an ace to do him any good at this juncture. He slid it back into his pocket. “This all seems very calculated.”

  “It has been planned for a long time. You should be flattered, Cabal. Both the Seelie and the Unseelie Courts cooperated in this. It takes a great deal to make them sit down together.”

  “But you … you planned this for them. I have had dealings with the Fay before. They lack the detachment shown here. It would have all been hellhounds and ogres if left to them. The piece of theatre with the life line”—he paused to look at his palm— “very cunning. You made me aware of my own mortality and the mechanism to make me fear for it all at the same time. How did you prime Jones? His paranoia was quite evident. What did you use? A few anonymous letters? Some carefully ambiguous evidence that I was planning to betray him to the Fay? No wonder he was so fascinated about what comes after life. No wonder he startled so violently when I mentioned that, once, I had no soul. Proof positive to his terrified little mind that I am as you. I might have been able to calm him except, thanks to this verdammten line you placed on my palm starting to disappear, I was convinced that I was going to die within seconds, apparently at Jones’s hand. And while we were both…”

  “Panicking?”

  “Distracted from rational thought, we attacked each other. How could you be sure Jones would be dead at the end of it all, though.”

  “You had a gun, he had a knife. It was the probability.”

  “But, if I’d not been able to reach my gun in time…?”

  “He would have killed his only client. He would have had no reason to carry on harvesting us. Either way, we win. There were plenty who hoped that you would kill each other.”

  “And you? I can’t help wondering why you have bothered to intercept me now the deed is done. The only conclusion I can reach is that you intend to kill me too. Perhaps crow a little of how clever you have been, but kill me nonetheless.”

  “I’m not the crowing type,” she said, and Cabal was more sorry than he had been at any point since entering the carriage that he did not have Jones’s cold iron blade. “Nor am I a killer. I researched you very carefully before arriving at this stratagem, Cabal. I have no need to kill you, or even the desire. My father was a poet, my mother Leanan-sidhe.”

  “A vampire, then.”

  “A muse. I understand the human soul, even one as ill-used, as lost-and-found as yours. That is why I am going to let you go. One day you may understand why.”

  “Deferred gratification. The story of my life.” He opened the door. She had promised him his life but she was, after all, a woman. The fact that she was half-Fay didn’t help her reliability.

  As he made to step down, he paused. “A moment,” he said over his shoulder. She raised an eyebrow. “You say that you are half-mortal, half-Sidhe?”

  “I hope you don’t intend your parting comment to be something spiteful about mongrels, Mr Cabal?”

  “Not at all. It occurs to me, though, that even if cold iron does not burn you, its touch should have still been agonising. Yet, you did not flinch.”

  “And what does that tell you?”

  He stepped down, closed the door, and doffed his hat. “Auf Wiedersehen, fräulein. Most respectfully, I hope and trust that we don’t meet again.”

  “And yet you say ‘Auf Wiedershen.’”

  He ignored her evident amusement. “May I know your name? Just so I can add you to my lengthy list of people to avoid.”

  “Myghin,” she replied, her humour undiminished. She pronounced it May-xuhn. “I have a title, too, but I’m not a one to stand upon ceremony. Slane lhiat, Mr Cabal. May we never meet again, for the best of reasons.”

  She sat back and the coachman, acting on an unheard signal, drove on. Cabal watched the black coach travel down the dusty road until it was lost in a moment of heat haze. He was unsurprised when it failed to reappear.

  * * *

  It took him almost a hundred minutes to complete the walk home. He paused in his front garden and looked at the shrubs he knew sheltered small, villainous fairies. “Have you been talking to strange ladies?” he asked, neither expecting nor receiving an answer. He unlocked the door and went in.

  After a cool bath, he retired to the parlour with a simple supper of cold meat, bread, and a pot of tea. As he ate, he started to transfer notes from his daybook to the permanent record book, but gave up after a few minutes. His heart really was not in it. He sighed and went to the window to watch the shadows cast into the valley by the low sun. It had been, he concluded, a strange day. Even by his standards.

  Finally he walked to the shelves and took down a book he hadn’t read in years. He settled himself back at the table, took a sip of tea, and started to read.

  “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.”

  Copyright (C) 2013 by Jonathan L. Howard

  Art copyright (C) 2013 by Greg Ruth

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  Johannes Cabal:

  The Fear Institute

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  Copyright © 2011 by Jonathan L. Howard

  Chapter 1

  IN WHICH THE FEAR INSTITUTE VISITS AND C
ABAL IS CONFRONTED BY THE POLICE

  It was not such a peculiar house in and of itself. A three-storey townhouse – four, if you counted the attic – Victorian in design, tall and thin and quite deep. To the fore, a short path ran from the door (to the left of the frontage) perhaps ten feet past what might have been intended as a rose garden in some long-past year. Now it was overgrown, but in a strangely artful way, as if chaotic minds had planned a new and not entirely wholesome horticulture for the little garden. Indeed they had, but we shall return to that aspect of the house shortly.

  Although at one point it had clearly been a middle terrace house, its neighbours were no longer in evidence but for broken half-bricks protruding from the end gables. A single house, the lone survivor of a terrace, marked darkly with the smoke of nearby industrial chimneys, a short front garden and a somewhat longer back one, the former bounded by a low wall, the latter by a tall one. Not a common sight, but neither one to excite much comment in the normal run of things. If, that is, it were sited within an industrial town or city. It was not.

  The house rose solitary and arrogant on a green hillside some few miles from the next dwelling. The nearest factory chimney capable of layering the soot on the house was further still. If one were to see the house in its rural location, apparently scooped up by some Goliath and deposited far from its proper place, one might feel inclined to investigate, to climb the pebble and earth trail that leads to the garden gate, to walk up the flagstoned path beyond it, and to knock upon the door. After all, somebody must live there. The building is well maintained and smoke curls from its chimney.

  This is an inclination to be fought at all costs, for this is the house of Johannes Cabal, the necromancer. There are all manners of unpleasantness about the place, but the front garden is the foremost.

  Johannes Cabal was sitting in his study, making notes in the small black book that he customarily carried in the inside pocket of his jacket. They were pithy to the point of acerbity – Cabal was not in a good mood. That in itself was no rarity, but he was particularly ill-tempered today as his latest attempt to secure – which is to say, steal – a rare copy of de Cuir’s very useful Enquêtes interdites had failed. Cabal was used to his frequent necessary descents into criminality coming to nothing, but it especially galled him on this occasion.

  ‘Verdammt kobold,’ he muttered, as he crossed a ‘7’ with unnecessary vigour. He had faced many horrors in his life, many ghastly supernatural guardians, but this was the first time he’d been bested by a blue goblin, especially one with poor diction.

  The blue goblin (specifically – as may be understood from Cabal’s mutterings – a Germanic form known as a kobold), had acted as a guardian of sorts for an unusual library. Where most libraries are content to sit by or near a road, this one had occupied a pocket existence of its own, slotted neatly between the world of men and the world of the Fey. It was an extensive and useful library, but it did not encourage lending or even browsing. After a few bruising encounters with heavy volumes flung at him from shelf tops, Cabal had discovered the book he sought and made a hasty but victorious retreat. His victory lasted exactly until the moment he had had the time and leisure finally to examine the looted book and found that it had unaccountably become a small manual on the subject of waterproofing flat roofs. He belatedly thought of the Fey’s ability to alter appearances, and then he thought of a kobold vivisection, which cheered him up a little.

  So absorbed in his writing and muttering was he that the pebble that bounced off the window failed to draw his attention. The second, thrown vigorously enough to threaten the glass, succeeded. Cabal sighed, put down his pen, took up his revolver and went to the window. Given that it was pebbles rather than bricks, and given that nobody who lived within ten miles would be so stupid as to irritate Cabal, who was not only a necromancer but, in the vernacular, ‘an utter bastard’, it seemed likely that the thrower was a child on a dare. Cabal intended to shoot to miss, albeit narrowly. He was therefore surprised when he saw three soberly dressed men standing on the other side of the garden gate. One looked like an undertaker and Cabal, who had had a similar experience once before, checked his pulse just to be sure. Pleased to find he wasn’t dead again, he went to the front door.

  The three men, who had been watching the house with polite if slightly distant attention, now turned it upon Johannes Cabal. They saw a clean-shaven man with short blond hair, physically in his late twenties though he carried an air of cynicism and worldliness that would have seemed premature in a man twice his age. They saw his black trousers, black waistcoat, thin black cravat, white shirt, tartan slippers, and they saw his enormous handgun.

  The last time Cabal had been to the gunsmiths’ in town to buy more cartridges for it, the man behind the counter had told him that the pistol, a Webley .577 Boxer, was ‘guaranteed to stop a charging savage’, according to the literature. Cabal had replied he didn’t know about that, but it could stop a Deep One with its dander up and that was good enough for him. The man behind the counter had considered this, and then talked about the weather. It was, in short, a fierce and unfriendly gun, and its very appearance was usually enough to cause nervous shuffling among spectators. The three men, however, seemed no more put out by it than by Cabal’s slippers, and those hadn’t caused any obvious consternation either.

  Cabal considered. He did not encourage visitors, he had no colleagues per se, he had no friends, few acquaintances, and his family were all either dead, or had disowned him – or were dead and had disowned him. Occasionally other necromancers turned up to try to steal his researches in much the same way that he tried to steal theirs, or assorted self-elected paragons of virtue arrived to slay him as if he were a dragon. He was not a dragon; he was a much better shot than most dragons and the paragons’ last sight was of the fierce and unfriendly Webley .577 Boxer and Cabal’s irked face sighting over the wide muzzle at them. The three men seemed to fit none of the categories. ‘Who are you?’ asked Cabal. ‘What do you want?’

  One of the party, a short middle-aged man with receding hair, snowy mutton chops, and the open, sanguine air of a defrocked priest spoke up: ‘We wish to make you a proposal, Herr Cabal.’

  ‘A proposal?’ Cabal pushed his blue-glass spectacles back up his nose and regarded the trio suspiciously. ‘What sort of proposal?’

  ‘That,’ interrupted the tall man in the top hat, who looked like an undertaker, ‘is better discussed in private.’ He pursed lips that looked well used to it. ‘Our immediate concern is to reach your front door.’

  ‘My front…? Oh!’ Cabal understood and laughed. He looked down. Just over the tile-ridged edge of the garden alongside the path was a faded circular for patios and conservatory extensions. There had probably been others, but they had blown away long since, this one staying only because it was trapped beneath a discarded human femur. The surface of the bone was pocked with tiny bite marks. He looked back up at the men, a sardonic smile on his face. ‘You’re concerned about the denizens of this little plot. Gentlemen! They are only pixies and fairies! You’re not afraid of them, are you?’

  ‘Yeah! We’re harmless!’ piped a tiny voice from beneath a hydrangea, until it was shushed by other tiny piping voices.

  For his answer the tall man stepped back and read the notice on the gate out loud: ‘No circulars, hawkers or salesmen. Trespassers will be eaten. We are not afraid, sir. We are showing rational caution.’

  ‘Yes,’ conceded Cabal. ‘Put like that, I see your point. Very well.’ He spoke to the garden. ‘Let these men by.’ There was a muted chorus of dismay from the hidden watchers, but the three were allowed to walk up the path unmolested. By the time they reached the doorstep, Cabal had already gone inside.

  He was waiting, seated, in his study when the three men caught up with him. They stood gravely clustered around the door, unable or unwilling to sit without their host’s invitation. Cabal was entirely unaware of a host’s duties, and contented himself by sitting with one leg crossed over
the other and the pistol held idly in his lap. He looked at the men and they looked back at him for several uncomfortable moments. ‘Well?’ he said finally.

  ‘My card,’ said the funereal gentleman, producing one from his pocket and offering it. Cabal did not rise to take it, but suffered the man to advance, hand it over, and then withdraw in the manner of a priest delivering a votive sacrifice.

  ‘Mine also,’ added the third man, speaking for the first time. He had, to Cabal’s eye, the air of a recovering alcoholic who now ran a small printing company dedicated to the publication of religious tracts.1 He, too, had mutton chops, but these were black and as lustrous as a dog’s coat. His eyes were quick and dark, and he wore the disreputable shortened form of a top hat known as a ‘Müller’.

  ‘Mine too!’ added the one with the appearance of a disgraced priest.

  Cabal studied the cards casually. ‘So, you are Messrs Shadrach,’ he thumbed the card from the top of the small pile and allowed the funeral director’s card to flutter to the floor, ‘Corde,’ he dropped the former alcoholic’s, ‘and Bose.’

  ‘It’s pronounced Boh-see,’ said the unfrocked priest, although – disappointingly – it appeared from his card that he was actually a dealer in artworks.

  ‘You were never a priest, were you, Mr Bose?’ asked Cabal, just to be sure. Mr Bose shook his head and looked confused and that was that.

  Mr Corde was – equally disappointingly – a solicitor and not a reformed alcoholic publisher of religious screeds, but Mr Shadrach really was a funeral director. This also disappointed Cabal, whose grave-robbing activities in search of research materials were often complicated by the eccentricities of those who carried out the burials. One doesn’t want to spend all night excavating down to a coffin only to discover that it is lead-lined, sealed with double-tapped screws, and proof against crowbars.

  ‘All very good, but none of which answers the question that I believe I implied when I said, “Well?” An art dealer, a solicitor, and a funeral director. What business have you with me, sirs? Indeed, what business have you with one another?’