Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

by Jonathan L. Howard

  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.

  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 p
retend’, 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!’