Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

by Jonathan L. Howard

Perhaps, he concluded, wars could only start here for aesthetic reasons. Tawdry little land grabs simply didn’t happen because they were revolting and wrong. Noble crusades and heroic ventures, on the other hand, were romantic and right. Perhaps, Cabal thought, when he had more leisure he might try his hand at starting a conflict here, just for purposes of scientific enquiry. The Trojan model looked simple and effective. He made a mental note to foment a war at some point, and returned his attention to finding the inn.

  It took another twenty minutes to locate the place, ten of which were spent in a small square, the centre of which was a compact but beautiful garden, arranged around a statue of a middle-aged man of patrician features, dressed in a toga. The statue was of striking craftsmanship, but the reason for the pause there was because all of the party – Cabal included – were astounded to discover that they were able, at some curious subconscious level, to hear the statue think. Several people were gathered around, sitting on the pale wood benches that bordered the square, in poses of deep concentration, ‘listening’ to the thoughts and occasionally nodding in slow comprehension.

  When one of them arose from his meditations to make a few notes upon a waxen tablet, Corde asked him, ‘That statue, how is it that we can hear its mind?’

  The man laughed, a small polite laugh of the type reserved for ignorant foreigners, and said, ‘That is not a statue. It is the great thinker Arturax, he who has travelled so deeply into the inner realms of thought and intellect that he has been transfigured by the very nature of his ideas. He has no need of food, drink or rest because such things are animal and unsuited to a man of thought. Thus, he has dispensed with them. He is a hero to all mankind, as he addresses question after question, slaying them with his wisdom.’

  ‘These problems,’ asked Johannes Cabal, ‘I was wondering, do they include how to deal with urban pigeons?’ But his colleagues shushed him and took him away before the student of Arturax could hear.

  The inn was called the Haven of Majestic and Bountiful Rest and, worse yet, deserved that name. Cabal rarely visited inns, except to secure the temporary services of ratlike men with names like Tibbs, Feltch and Crivven to do the basic shovel work in moonlit cemeteries when he was in too much of a hurry to do it himself. The inns such men frequented in turn had names like the Friendly Gibbet, the Sucking Wound and the Sports Bar, vile places with vile clientele. The Haven, by contrast, was a lively, bustling place full of open-faced men and more than a few women, all wearing bright silks, drinking golden mead and ice wine, singing risqué but by no means obscene songs, and never getting more than pleasantly tipsy. Even the sawdust upon the saloon-bar floor was fresher than that in a busy woodwork shop. Bose and Shadrach were delighted to see it thus, Corde seemed slightly disappointed, and Cabal simply scowled, as was his wont.

  The food was good, the drink was good, and the company was bearable, so Cabal bore it where once he might have gone to bed, leaving the others with an unspoken curse to be visited upon their next of kin. Two hours later, Bose waved over Captain Lochery, fresh from completing the offloading of the Edge of Dusk’s cargo and looking for a soft berth for the evening. As they were buying, he joined them with the practised alacrity of a seaman who scents free booze and, in return for a drink and a meal, regaled them with tales of the Dreamlands’ seas. These frequently ended with the words ‘. . . and he was never seen again’ so Cabal quickly lost interest. He was on the point of going to his room when he noticed that Lochery was – while cheerfully telling nautical tales of shipwrecked desperation, ingestion by sea monsters, the sodomite proclivities of pirates, and some unexpected combinations of these elements – feeding his right leg.

  ‘Captain Lochery,’ said Cabal, as he watched the man offer a piece of sour bread to his calf, which gratefully devoured it, ‘I cannot help but notice that you are feeding your leg.’

  ‘Aye,’ said Lochery, unabashed. ‘It gets hungry.’ In explanation, he rolled up his right pantaloon leg to reveal what Cabal had assumed would be pale flesh but was actually a beautifully carved wooden prosthetic. In the outer right calf there was a small hole, and from this hole an inquisitive rodent’s face was peering out at them.

  There were cries of astonishment from the others, but Cabal went down on one knee to look more carefully. ‘I don’t recognise the species. It looks a little like a guinea pig, and a little like a dwarf rabbit, but is barely bigger than a hamster. What is it, Captain?’

  ‘Guinea what was that? Rabby? I don’t know anything of those, Master Cabal, exotic though they sound. But this is a dreff. They’re only found on this island.’ He slapped his thigh, but gently, so as not to disturb the creature. ‘I lost this leg when I was a lad. One day out from here. The weather was strange, and the creatures of air and water were disturbed. My ship – she was the Fool’s Wager out of Ulthar, under Captain Mart, dead these twenty years – was attacked by seagaunts.’ Some interested bystanders made a sympathetic groan. ‘Twenty or thirty, driven mad by the green sun.’

  ‘I’ve heard of nightgaunts,’ said Cabal. ‘Slick, rubbery, faceless black creatures with horns and wings. What are these seagaunts?’

  ‘Much the same,’ said Lochery, ‘except at sea. They fell on us. I saw poor old Jecks Pilt borne off by them. They tried to do the same to me, filthy flapping things, but I got a deadman’s grip on the rigging of the foremast – she was lateen rigged, by the bye – and I was not going to let go, not with Jecks’s screams still echoing in my ears. But the ’gaunts, they wanted something for their trouble. So . . .’ He waved at the wooden leg.

  ‘Well, Captain Mart, he was a good man, he said to me, “You’re a sailor through and through and no leg-thieving seagaunts are going to take that away from you.” At least, that’s what he said later, ’cause I’d flaked out at the time from loss of blood. Anyway, he had a favour owed to him by a sorcerer in the city, and he took me to him – big tower at the northern end of the Spice Quarter, some dodgy evoker’s got it now, last I heard – and he comes up with this little beauty. See, dreff live in trees from the Sinew Wood, south-east of the Lake of Yath. The trees can move, but they got no brains. The dreff have brains – pretty good ones, considerin’ how little they are – but they can’t look after themselves. So, the dreff and the sinew trees are sort of . . .’ He looked for the word.

  ‘Symbiotes,’ supplied Cabal, intrigued by the insight into an alien ecology.

  ‘Pals,’ continued Lochery. ‘Now, this sorcerer says dreff are clever and they know a good thing when they see it, which is a roundabout way of saying that they train up easy. Keep ’em fed and happy, and they’ll be your pals for life. This little fella in here, Checky, he knows that when I throw my hip forward, it’s walking time, and he makes the leg – finest sinew wood, this is – shift at knee and ankle. Fact is, that he just seems to know now, we been together so long.’

  He fed the dreff the last of the sour bread before gently nudging its head back in and bunging the whole with a stopper perforated with air holes. ‘They live about ten years. Takes about six months for you to understand each other, and they go a bit mad a few weeks before they die, sleeping a lot, making the leg bend all ways, so you know it’s time to get to the Sinew Wood with a box trap and some sour bread. They love the stuff.’

  He looked off into the middle distance, lost in the past. ‘But you know the worst part of all of this? Not my leg, no, there’s people suffer worse. No, I still think of Jecks, the poor sod. You know what?’

  The rhetorical question was interrupted by Cabal rising. ‘He was never seen again. Goodnight, gentlemen. An early start tomorrow.’

  Chapter 7

  IN WHICH THE EXPEDITION EXPLORES A NAMELESS CITY OF EVIL REPUTE

  ‘Wamps,’ said the sergeant, as he checked the ties on his scabbard.

  ‘Wamps!’ replied Bose, hand held up.

  ‘Wamps,’ said Cabal, ‘are a species. Not a greeting.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Bose, unabashed. ‘They sound rather harmless, though, don’t they?�
� He tested the name several times with different intonations, each implying wamps were cuddly, warm, docile and fun to have around the house.

  Sergeant Holk, a man with his experience measured in scars and a hard, weather-beaten face, looked at Bose as a father might look at a child who wants a wolverine for Christmas, ideally one with rabies. ‘They’re bigger than a man. They have nine legs and heads like great bats with no eyes at all. They’re disease-ridden killers . . . Just a scratch from one can kill you, even if it takes a year of miserable, agonising sickness to do it.’

  ‘Do be quiet,’ said Corde. The sergeant’s predilection for gruesome hyperbole was proving counterproductive. It was Corde who had found him at one of the ill-regarded dives he was becoming quite adept at locating. The sergeant had agreed to tell them what was known of the empty and partially ruined city to the east in exact, non-folklorish terms for he had been there.

  So far his advice had been very much of the ‘Don’t go there’ variety, of which the presence of wamps was the newest variant. Warming to his theme, the sergeant said, ‘Six years ago, I went in there with a platoon to raid the old library. Special commission, you see. We got the scrolls we went in for, but it was dusk by the time we were ready to move out. The wamps ambushed us. They’ve got a few brains, and they don’t fight like animals. They’re cunning, see? They can creep up walls and drop on you from above. That’s what happened to us. Thirty of us went in, only four of us got out.’

  ‘Without a scratch, I presume?’ said Cabal, drily.

  The sergeant just laughed and pulled up the left side of his jerkin. Beneath, the flesh was not simply scarred but missing down to the ribs, which showed as slats beneath a thin covering of skin. His audience watched, fascinated, as the slats rose and fell with his breathing. ‘No, sir. Not without a scratch. Within half a day, that scratch was a mass of worms. The chirurgeon had no choice but to cut out all the tainted flesh before it spread. I cursed him. Gods, in my delirium, I cursed the eyeballs from his head. But he saved my life.’

  Shadrach was caught in the flux between repulsion and fascination. ‘Worms? You mean maggots, surely?’

  ‘I mean worms. Filthy, fat things that swallowed strings of my flesh at one end and shat out pus at the other.’

  ‘But where did they come from?’

  ‘From the same place a worm that causes a toothache comes, Shadrach,’ said Cabal.

  Shadrach looked sourly at Cabal. ‘Don’t talk nonsense, man. Worms don’t cause toothache. That’s an old wives’ tale.’

  Cabal made a noise often heard from the parents of ungifted children just before explaining for the tenth time why it’s bad for Timmy to put Timmy’s arm in the big fire. ‘Herr Shadrach . . . this is a world in which old wives are authorities. How many times must I reiterate this, gentlemen? This is the Dreamlands, where theories of micro-organic infection carry far less weight than the realities of myth. In the waking world, one may profitably avoid plaque and gingivitis. Here, dental hygiene consists of avoiding the attention of tooth worms.’

  The sergeant listened to this, nodding with approval. ‘Flossing helps,’ he added. ‘They hate that.’

  ‘It all sounds a bit dangerous,’ said Bose, quietly.

  ‘It all sounds remarkably dangerous,’ corrected Cabal. ‘We don’t even know if this marvellous hermit is still alive, or can help us if he is. Perhaps we should look elsewhere for data.’

  Shadrach took a firm grip on the edges of his simarre and jutted out his jaw. ‘Mr Cabal. We have crossed a sea to find this man. If you had any caveats with this plan, the time to say so has long since passed. We are committed, sir! We are committed!’

  ‘Are we? Are we indeed?’ Cabal could feel an old and pleasant feeling stirring in his breast. He had shown great patience with these fools to date. He had not failed them or abandoned them. Neither had he murdered even a single one of them. Yet for all these kindnesses he had received no thanks, only whining and, now, undiluted stupidity. The delightful sensation he could feel was his temper slipping the leash.

  ‘Your argument is as specious as it is fallacious. I do not give a damn that we have crossed a sea to be here. By your logic, if one was to circumnavigate the globe before being given the option of jumping off a cliff or not jumping off a cliff, you would fling yourself off immediately because – oh, my goodness – you’ve gone all that way and it would be a shame not to do something memorably stupid at the end. Not memorable to you, of course: you’d be dead. But everyone for miles around will always remember the day the idiot from afar threw himself to his death because, well, it would have been a shame not to.’

  ‘Mr Cabal!’ Shadrach was scandalised.

  Bose, meanwhile, had become very wide-eyed and was muttering, ‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen!’ under his breath, while Corde and the sergeant were smiling.

  Shadrach was appalled that Cabal – a hireling, for heaven’s sake – should be so . . . ‘The impertinence, sir!’

  ‘Are you going to challenge me to a duel, Shadrach?’ Cabal drew back the edge of his jacket to show the hilt of his rapier. ‘I very much hope you are.’

  Corde stirred himself enough to step between them. ‘That’s enough, gentlemen. I think Mr Cabal is simply giving vent to some inner issues.’

  Cabal’s face tightened. ‘I am angry, Herr Corde,’ he said, in a severely calm tone. ‘Not flatulent.’

  Corde ignored him. ‘But he makes a valid point. Rational caution, eh? Remember that? These ruins out by the lake are not safe, not even close to safe. I think we must still go there – pace, Herr Cabal – but we must take every precaution and learn all that we may. For example, Sergeant, you said the wamps only attacked you on the way out. Was that because darkness had fallen?’

  The sergeant nodded. ‘Like I said, they don’t have eyes. They don’t see like we do. They can see in the dark, and they know we can’t. I can’t say if they hate the light, but I’m sure they love the dark.’

  ‘There, then.’ Corde held his hands wide in a supplicatory gesture. ‘We have the beginnings of a plan. Nobody has to go jumping off any cliffs.’ He considered momentarily asking Shadrach and Cabal to shake hands and make nice, but one look at their faces, Cabal’s particularly, dissuaded him immediately.

  Cabal released the edge of his jacket to cover his sword’s hilt once more, and as it was apparent that this – a tacit agreement not to run Shadrach through right this minute – was the closest he would be offering in the way of an olive branch, it was duly accepted by all present, again tacitly.

  ‘So,’ he said, his narrowed eyes never leaving Shadrach, ‘of what does the rest of this plan consist?’

  As it transpired, it was not nearly so much a plan as a list of things to be careful about. They would be careful about the wamps. They would be careful to get in and out during daylight. They would be careful never to split the party. They would be careful not to tickle any dragons, antagonise any ogres, irritate any trolls. They would also – and this was Cabal’s contribution to the plan – be careful to let somebody else go first.

  Sergeant Holk was apparently used to the role of professional Judas goat and was easily able to lay hands upon a likely trio of bullyboys to traipse into danger in return for a decent reward. Shadrach was irked that he had to use more of his gold than he felt comfortable about to change what had first been envisaged as a relaxing stroll into a scenic set of ivyentwined ruins to seek the counsel of a wise old man, and had now taken the character of an armed assault upon a Hellmouth.

  Certainly the logistics of the matter had stretched out over three interminable days while equipment and mounts were secured. That the mounts were zebras did nobody’s humour much good.

  ‘They look ridiculous,’ said Cabal, on the morning the expedition left Baharna from the Lava Gate in the eastern wall. He was standing by his zebra looking at it at least as caustically as it was looking at him. The irony that he himself was dressed entirely in black and white passed him by, his self-awareness not being of a high
enough pitch to detect this resonance. The zebra, on the other hand, felt a nebulous sense of indignation that it would be ridden by another zebra, albeit an odd bipedal one with not much of a mane. This indignation would have manifested as kicking and biting among the zebra’s Earthly brethren, but the zebras of the Dreamlands are a breed apart, intellectual and dignified by their own lights, so it communicated its disdain with a basilisk stare accompanied by a monstrous and lengthy micturition, during which it did not even blink.

  Holk’s three handpicked men – Cabal had watched him pick them out of the gutter outside an alehouse, and Holk had definitely used his hand to do it – were looking more presentable now that they’d had a chance to sober up and were wearing a uniform of sorts. Holk had found a reliable manufacturer of good cuir-bouilli armour and bought four suits in a striking shade of crimson. Corde, who had gone along on the shopping expedition, had bought himself one in grim sable, set with acid-blacked studs. He developed an inordinate attachment to it, and wore it with great frequency even while they were within the safety of the city. ‘I’m just wearing it in,’ he would say, but no one believed him. For his part, Cabal purchased a leather strap that he used to make a baldric for his Gladstone, allowing him to carry it slung across his body, and so leaving his hands free.

  And so, on the morning of the fourth day, the expedition embarked upon its journey to the ruins by the Lake of Yath, with Holk and one of the mercenaries riding in the vanguard, the other two in the rearguard, and the four explorers in file in the middle, Corde to the front. Oriab Island was no small rock in the sea, and they knew it would take four or five days to reach the lake, even assuming easy going and no unwelcome adventures en route.

  For his part Cabal bore it all with the same grim detachment that he had brought to the ocean journey. He was intrigued by so much in this world that he had little time for the small-talk of the others. He was interested in the way that distant places were not merely distorted by the haze of the air but – to his eye – seemed actually unfinished. There was nothing he could definitely give a name to, but there was a distinct sense that details clustered on these far vistas as they were approached, like coral accruing around a simple rock. He was surprised to find Bose, of all people, thinking along the same lines.