The Brothers Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  As the major drove them away, Horst and Richard had little else to do but hold on tight and watch the castle diminish into the distance, a black excrescence upon a midnight-blue field, detailed with flickering yellow from the burning drawbridge. As they watched, however, an uncomfortable realisation slowly dawned upon them. ‘I say,’ said Richard. ‘Is it my eyes, or is that glow staying the same size?’

  Horst himself had been watching how the glow had failed to grow distant along with the castle and had been looking for reference points in the landscape to mark scale. What they showed him was not comforting. ‘It’s getting bigger.’ He turned and found Alisha and the professor looking through the cab’s rear window at the glow, too. ‘It’s following us!’ Horst shouted through the glass.

  The lorry was off the farm track and onto a narrow country road, lined with tall, dense bocage on either side blocking the view. Richard unslung the Winchester action carbine he was carrying and checked the load. ‘If you’ve got any hoodoo to throw around in times of trouble, this would be one of those times,’ he said to Horst.

  ‘Hoodoo? To be quite honest I might well have, but I’ve no idea what it is or how to use it. I only found out how good I am at climbing and going without breath tonight. I’m not actually very practised at the whole “Woo, I’m a vampire” job. Sorry.’

  Richard looked at him curiously. ‘You’re actually rather underwhelming for a Lord of the Dead, y’know.’

  Horst shrugged. ‘What can you expect from a conscript? My heart was never in it. Oh, here we go.’ For the glow had appeared over the top of the hedgerows in their wake. Horst frowned. ‘There’s something up there. In the glow…’ The view was momentarily cut off by an area of woodland, but the glow filtered through it like a mist, implacably closing the distance upon them.

  Richard brought the carbine to his shoulder and worked the action, loading the chamber. He squinted at the strange glow, which illuminated the branches and trunks yet seemed to have no central source of light within itself. ‘It’s in the trees!’ he warned.

  Through the glass, Horst saw the professor’s lips move soundlessly.

  It’s coming.

  The aberrant light closed steadily on them despite the major’s repeated protestations to the professor that the old lorry was already in its highest gear and his foot had the accelerator clamped down to the floor. It was perhaps just as well that they could go no faster in that narrow, twisting lane, the hedgerows and embankments looming at them in the headlights at every turn. ‘God help us if we meet anyone coming the other way,’ said the major.

  Horst thought this was all rather unfair of Fate. He had quite liked the idea of becoming an architect perhaps, or an engineer. At no point had his career plans involved becoming a vampire and ending up pursued by something horrible while in the company of very strange strangers. This was a Johannes sort of job, he felt, and sorely wished his brother were there with him or, better yet, instead of him. Johannes would have identified the glow by now, said something pithily dismissive about it, pulled some useful sort of powder out of his Gladstone bag, and dealt with it, probably while saying something else pithy. All Horst could do was sit there and await a thus far undefined sort of awfulness while underwhelming his companions with his poor monster skills.

  But it wasn’t an entirely undefined awfulness, he realised. The others couldn’t seem to see it, but the glow had a sense of being the surface of something that broke the usual laws of physics, perception, and even perspective. He had a real sense that there was something—somethings—just beyond that surface that wanted to break through. He could see the light bulge in a manner that he could never have described to his satisfaction even given a mountain of dictionaries and thesauruses. It wasn’t that his vocabulary lacked the words; it was that the words didn’t exist.

  ‘They’re coming through,’ he said out loud. The glow was changing shade in places, extra-dimensional stresses pushing the violet through black and into colours that one would hunt for in vain upon the electromagnetic spectrum.

  ‘What?’ said Richard, squinting at the glow. ‘Who’s coming through? What d’you mean?’

  He plainly couldn’t see the stresses in the colours, Horst realised. The others couldn’t see how the colours, glimmering darker than dark, were so close to bursting, like the meniscus of a soap bubble.

  And then they did. The glow vanished abruptly, paradoxically making the night lighter, but this only served to allow them to see what had burst through in greater, horrifying detail.

  The creatures had no right to … no right to anything at all. They had no right to fly, lacking wings. They had no right to breathe, lacking mouths or nostrils or even spiracles. They had no right to see, lacking eyes. They had no right to exist, yet they did, and they came on rapidly towards the fleeing lorry, flying without wings, screaming without mouths, seeing their prey without eyes. Offcuts from failed species, cancers given autonomous life, wriggling, writhing entanglements of animate offal, they descended towards the lorry, dripping acid and hunger as they came.

  Richard responded admirably under the circumstances. He paled, his eyes widened, he mouthed, Oh, sweet Jesus, and then he opened fire.

  The silver long rounds tore through the closest of the oncoming creatures. Its screams rose to an ululating shriek, but it was a scream of fury rather than agony. The fleshy arms, or legs, or tentacles that jutted asymmetrically out from the crooked core of the thing flexed and writhed, but it barely slowed its pursuit. ‘Keep firing!’ ordered Horst, feeling desperately useless.

  ‘Get your heads down!’ shouted Alisha through the glass, and gave them very nearly a second’s grace before shattering the pane with the butt of her pistol. Throwing sacking from the cab floor over the glass fragments jutting up from the frame, she and the professor levelled their guns at the creatures and joined the fusillade.

  The closest of the abominable creatures was receiving almost all the fire. Chunks of writhing flesh were blown from it to land, hissing and fuming, in their wake. Its enraged screaming continued unabated until, with no warning, it dropped from the air and fell heavily into the road like a haphazardly sewn giant squid toy that had been mistakenly stuffed with bowling balls.

  ‘What … what happened?’ said Richard, lowering his carbine.

  ‘Reload!’ Horst ordered him. As Richard started thumbing fresh rounds into the breach, Horst turned to the professor and said, ‘What happened? You weren’t hurting it, and it suddenly died.’

  The professor had broken open his revolver and was slotting in fresh ammunition as he spoke. ‘Perhaps a vital spot was hit although … I don’t know. Those things seem to be made in very general terms, almost as if they are single organs with no specialisation at all.’

  ‘Is that possible?’ asked Alisha as she finished replacing the magazine in her pistol and worked the slide.

  ‘On Earth, only as single-celled creatures like amoebae. But … well, they’re plainly not from around these parts. As for how it died, I don’t think it has any vulnerable points. I think we just filled it with too many holes for it to carry on living, and it was too stupid to know how badly wounded it was until it died.’

  ‘There are another five of them,’ Horst pointed out. ‘Hypotheses later, shooting now? Perhaps?’

  ‘Quite, my boy,’ said the professor complacently, and opened fire.

  It didn’t seem to be how many times the creatures were hit that turned the trick nearly so much as how ragged the storm of bullets had left them. Between loud concussions, Alisha bemoaned their lack of a shotgun; it would have worked nicely against the creatures. But they didn’t have one, nor did they have infinite ammunition. It took approximately a full load from all three weapons to bring down a single pursuer; when the field was thinned to three, the ammunition gave out.

  The hammer of the professor’s pistol clacked down on an empty casing. ‘Well,’ he said, regarding the useless weapon as one might a fountain pen that had run dry, ‘that’s a blessed
nuisance.’

  ‘I’m out,’ said Richard, patting his pockets in a vain bid to find any stray rounds.

  ‘Me, too,’ said Alisha. She slammed the empty pistol into her shoulder holster with an angry grimace. ‘So, I suppose we’re done for now?’

  The surviving aberrations grew closer, a drooling chittering growing under their screams as they scented their prey so near. ‘I fear so, my dear,’ admitted the professor.

  ‘Damn it!’ shouted the major. ‘Railway ahead, we’ll have to turn parallel. They’ll have us for sure! No! Wait!’ When he spoke again, there was a small spark of hope. ‘There’s a train down there, taking on water! Could we outrun them in a train?’

  ‘No idea, but we won’t lose them in this wreck,’ said Alisha. ‘Try for it, Major. What kind of train is that, anyway? A carnival?’

  Horst had been having a hard time taking his eyes off the creatures, but this comment made him spin violently to look forward.

  The hedgerows and trees had cleared to reveal a shallow valley stretching out before them under the moonlight. A meadow lay on their left and beyond that a road and a railway on a raised earthwork. Where the road forked with one arm disappearing into a short tunnel under the rail bed, there was a concrete base up by the rails upon which stood a water tower in a siding alongside the through line. There, by it, was indeed a train.

  It was not a long composition, consisting of an inelegant but practical tender locomotive, three freight cars that bore something like the fanciful lettering style Horst remembered so well from the Cabal Bros. Carnival, a sleeper car, and finally a passenger brake van in the British style. It had come to a halt in the siding beneath the water tower, and it was just possible to discern the figures of the driver and his mate working by the light of paraffin lanterns. Horst’s keen eyesight could make out some other movement in the near shadows cast by the moon across the train, but beyond being able to see the dancing glow of a couple of cigarette tips—one moving energetically while its smoker presumably waved it around expressively as they talked—it was too dark even for him to read the painted legends on the freight cars, although he was prepared to make a confident guess that the last word was ‘Circus’. A very small circus if that was all their gear and personnel, he thought.

  ‘Hold on!’ called the major. ‘Shortcut!’

  They all braced themselves; there was only one conceivable shortcut and it would involve ramming the two-bar wooden fence that separated the road from the meadow.

  The major looked for a stretch that angled slightly towards the road in an effort to make the impact as perpendicular to the bars as possible, swerved away from the fence to the right, and then turned hard to the left. The unexpected right-hand swerve caught Richard unaware and he lost his grip on a welded stanchion in the lorry’s side. As the vehicle ran up the small bank, smashed through the fence, and flicked its tail up as the rear wheels leapt over the top of the bank, he went rolling aftward and was then sent flying over the tailgate by the sudden bounce. He disappeared from view with a despairing cry.

  ‘Stop!’ bellowed Horst. ‘Stop this damn thing!’ He was already on his feet and running back as he spoke. He accelerated his reactions as he approached the tailgate, knowing the rough ground would make the vehicle move unpredictably and appreciating this would be a very bad time to fall over. It was a wise decision; as he jumped to place one foot on top of the metal gate, the lorry’s rear wheels fell into a rut and the gate moved away from his descending foot. Seeing it all move so slowly before him, as sedate as an overcranked movie, it was easy to lower his foot just that little bit faster, using the tailgate as a jumping-off point and leaping down from the moving lorry. He hit the ground hard, rolled, and came up sprinting. The green swathe hadn’t done much for his clothes, a smear of chlorophyll staining one shoulder, but his vanity had long since given them up as a lost cause anyway.

  He couldn’t see Richard—the embankment was in the way—but he could hear him. He was screaming. For a moment, Horst thought Richard must have been injured in his fall, but as he crested the top of the bank, he saw the true reason. One of the creatures had got ahead of its fellows and was on Richard. It couldn’t really be called an attack, exactly, as the creature was making little effort to hurt him. It was simply digesting him where he lay, pinned beneath it. Horst could see its surface was slick with an oily, iridescent sheen as if it were salivating. Rivulets of the substance were drizzling onto Richard and, where they fell, he burned. He was screaming, and the creature was screaming, but where his were in agony and terror, there was an alien exultation in the cries of the monster.

  Horst hit the creature in a hard rugby tackle just above the untidy nexus of its variform limbs. His shirt immediately grew wet with the thing’s slick coating, and then he felt his skin start to burn. The part of his mind—no, the growing part of his personality—that regarded human life as a convenient way of carrying around fresh blood for it sneered at the pain. There is no use for that, it commented tartly, and the pain receded to something unpleasant but distant, like an unpaid invoice from a patient creditor.

  The creature was thrashing beneath him as they rolled into the road. Horst knew it was a living thing, but even without the alterations in his outlook, he couldn’t regard it as deserving of life. It was a virus made massive, a bacterium made greater than man-size. Its life was only infinitesimally more natural than a clockwork mouse, and well-bred clockwork mice did not try to dissolve and digest young men. Horst wasn’t having it. Not only was the creature not of this Earth, vicious, violent, deadly, and disgusting, it was also really getting on his nerves.

  Horst dug his fingers into its flesh, made sure they were firmly anchored, and then tore a limb off. The creature didn’t take kindly to this, making the same ululating cry as its brethren emitted when injured. The stench of his own burning skin choked Horst as he thrust his hand into the open wound in the closest analogue the aberration had to a body and groped around for something vital to crush. There didn’t seem to be anything; just a greasy inner flesh with the colour of old newsprint and the feel of firmly packed scrambled egg. Could the professor be right and these things were no more complex than amoebae? But even an amoeba has a nucleus, he reminded himself, and as he thought it, his hand found something saggy and liquid-filled buried deep inside and he tore it open without hesitation.

  The creature didn’t die immediately, but it did die, its screams becoming attenuated as the poor parody of life that gave it its animus leaked away.

  Horst threw the carcass from him and went to Richard. He was lying on his back, sorely injured, mercifully unconscious, but moaning through it. Horst looked at his own hand, the hand he had used to kill the creature. The flesh had run, and he could see bone breaking the surface here and there. Fumes rose from the destroyed muscles, skin, and fibres. There was no point trying to heal himself for the moment, he realised, not with the acid still upon him. He would let it react away, or evaporate—the great mercy of acids, he remembered from school, being that, unlike alkalis, they were volatile—or, better yet, wash the foul stuff off him.

  Wiping what he could off his arms with strips of his shirt, he lifted Richard and carried him up the embankment with a fast walk. On the other side, he almost ran into Alisha, the professor a few steps behind her. She looked at him and then Richard, and raised the back of her hand to her mouth, the first time Horst had ever seen her register a strong emotion other than anger.

  ‘Oh,’ she said quietly, lowering her hand. ‘Poor Richard.’

  The professor reached them and saw the state of matters. ‘Oh, Lord,’ he said. ‘They did this?’ Horst nodded. The professor shook his head at the wonder and the horror of it. Then he started ambling back to the lorry, gesturing Horst and Alisha to follow. ‘Come along, come along. The other things will be here soon.’ He sounded sick at heart. ‘We must reach the train. It’s our only hope.’

  An Interlude

  ‘If,’ said Johannes Cabal, one finger raised in temp
orisational style, ‘I might momentarily distract you from your lurid and occasionally believable narrative, you mentioned something that intrigued me.’

  ‘Something?’ said Horst. ‘All of that and it’s “something” in the singular?’

  ‘Yes. You mentioned the destruction of the castle’s drawbridge, and this woman Alisha’s offhand implication that she, despite a predilection to blowing up bridges, was not responsible.’

  ‘I’ve wondered about that, too. She had no reason to lie.’

  ‘So, who did it?’

  Horst shrugged.

  Cabal looked at him a little dispiritedly. ‘It never crossed your mind to ask later—and I’m sure there was a later or else your presence here is impressive—it never crossed your mind to make inquiries?’

  ‘How acid. As it happens, I did raise the subject, but no joy. It’s a bit of a mystery.’

  Cabal took up the mug of warm drink Horst had prepared for him from the bedside cabinet and nestled it in both hands. ‘I detest mysteries.’ He took a sip and the focus of his attention shifted quickly to it. ‘How is that my tea tastes of cow?’

  ‘It’s beef tea, Johannes.’

  Cabal regarded the mug with, if not greater acceptance, at least an understanding. ‘Ah,’ he said.

  Chapter 8

  IN WHICH WE ENCOUNTER LADIES WEARING TROUSERS

  The lorry arrived at the base of the rail berm in a spray of gravel as the major jerked the wheel sideways and they skidded to a halt. The two cigarette smokers Horst had spotted on the approach looked down at them in not so much astonishment as suspicion. Horst was slightly surprised himself to discover both were women, although not nearly as surprised as the major was at a telling detail that had escaped Horst.

  ‘Good Lord,’ said the major as he jumped down from the driver’s position to land with a crunch on the gravel track. ‘Ladies in trousers!’