Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Cabal had already made some rough guesses as to the dimensions of the rooms, and he could not help but notice that they were growing steadily larger, unlike the external dimensions, which apparently tapered to a small lookout on the highest floor. Apparently, playing merry-hob with dimensions had been Hep-Seth’s major stock-in-trade, and based on this conjecture he had already made a guess as to what the next floor would reveal.

  Neither was he incorrect, as they climbed up into Hep-Seth’s laboratory. It was a large room, some hundred feet in diameter, windowless yet illuminated by good, unwavering lights that seemed simply to emanate from the air close to the ceiling. In the centre of the chamber was an iron spiral staircase that seemed likely to re-enter the normal dimensions of the exterior at its peak and open into the small lookout deck. Cabal walked a few yards into the laboratory and looked around, uncertain what he should be searching for. Looking back, however, he spotted Bose’s head from the nose up just peeping out of the stairwell.

  ‘Is it safe?’ asked Bose, a waver in his voice.

  ‘That I cannot say. If you specifically mean, Is there an ancient sorcerer up here who is outraged by our intrusion and means us harm? the answer is no. Neither is there a body. The signs are that the tower is abandoned, just like the rest of the city. Hep-Seth either didn’t need this place any more, or died elsewhere and never returned. I cannot say which.’ He grunted irritably. ‘Do come out from there, Bose. I feel like I’m talking to a mole.’

  As Bose crept up the remaining steps, like a man entering a maiden aunt’s sick room, Cabal turned his professional eye upon Hep-Seth’s arcane paraphernalia. He was inwardly disturbed by how little of it he could recognise. There were several things whose function he couldn’t even guess at, and his ignorance chafed at him. Nor were they even comfortable to examine visually, their edges, angles and vertices behaving in ways so strange and ill-mannered that Euclid would have been brought to tears.

  ‘This is the work of a man who was obsessed with reaching the Island of Mormo,’ he said, half to himself, this being the half from which he expected a sensible conversation.

  ‘Eh?’ said Bose, the half from which Cabal expected nothing, so he ignored him.

  ‘A genius, judging by his work here. A genius of dimensional engineering. If he wants to go somewhere, he doesn’t call a taxi. He wants to go somewhere none can go, because nobody knows where it is. And he speaks of a . . .’ He had been turning, slowly, as he talked, his eye sweeping around the room, and now he stopped and stared. ‘A seven-sided gate.’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ agreed Bose, standing by a structure that, to the unjaundiced eye, looked a great deal like an asymmetric seven-sided gateway standing by itself some twenty feet from the nearest wall. It was made from thin, lath-like girders of a brass-like metal that was not brass but a strange alloy that Cabal had encountered once before in unenjoyable circumstances. ‘That’s what your head in the bag said, anyway. But what does it mean?’

  Cabal walked over to him, grasped him firmly by the back of his collar, and twisted him to look at the structure. ‘Count,’ he commanded.

  ‘One!’ squeaked Bose. ‘What’s got into you, Mr Cabal? There’s one frame sort of thing! Should there be more?’

  Cabal gave up and let him go while he himself stepped away to weigh up the next move. The gateway was as ambivalent to reality as anything else in the room, seeming to change form within flashes of perception, as if unable to decide whether to be two faces talking or a vase. In this case, however, the choice was between being one asymmetric seven-sided gateway and being any of a vast number of similar but different seven-sided gateways. Looking upon it for even a minute was very uncomfortable, as if the intellect was firmly and methodically unplugging and replugging the cables on the switchboard of the mind into new and ontologically challenging configurations. With difficulty Cabal managed to look away from it, and instead found himself gazing at the cheerfully gormless face of Bose, thereby going from the sublime to the ridiculous.

  The work of creating the necessary gate of dubious physicality within the gateway built for it was not going to be a sudden great revelation any time in the next few minutes, so Bose repaired to the sorcerer’s bedchamber to snore gently upon grey-silver samite sheets miraculously untouched by the passage of time, another boon of the tower’s curious reality. Cabal, meanwhile, settled down in the laboratory with what writings of the great man he could find, and started sorting them into piles of graduated usefulness. Even for a man of Cabal’s voracious intellect, this proved difficult. He was a long way from his specialities, and his problems were compounded by the growing realisation that Hep-Seth was not only a leading light in his field but that he was the only light. His notes used forms and nomenclature that were unique to him because he had originated this whole thaumaturgical subset of theory. So, Cabal not only had to evaluate the notes, but he also had to learn a new and novel lexicon in which to do it. Muttering sourly to himself, he began to pore over the papers in the full knowledge that he might be days or weeks about it. Happily, they had discovered a large store of fresh food that was as fresh as the day the fruit had been plucked or the animal slaughtered. It was another of Hep-Seth’s innovations, like the privy, applying the extraordinary to the mundane; neither had he overlooked a seemingly boundless supply of fresh, cool water. They would not starve here, at least.

  The next morning – the rooms’ mysterious lighting helpfully waxed and waned to give a sense of the time of day outside – found Cabal surrounded by notes in his own writing and possessed of a grudging admiration for Hep-Seth, albeit one overmatched by a solid dislike for the man based on his inability to write a glossary of terminology and leave it out where some passing necromancer might find it. That he himself wrote notes in a dead language and then enciphered them did not strike him as blinding hypocrisy: he could be executed for necromancy, whereas somebody who could create such magical conveniences as instantaneous travel, perfect food preservation and unblockable toilets had very little to fear, except being mobbed by a loving population.

  Bose came in, the very epitome of ebullience and – in rapid succession – wished Cabal a good morning, asked him if he’d cracked the secret of turning the gateway on yet and, even as Cabal was looking for something heavy and spiky to throw at his head, patted it for purposes of illustration, thereby activating it.

  Cabal froze, a heavy, spiky thing in his drawn-back throwing arm, and gawped at the shimmering portal that had appeared as easily and without fuss as blowing a soap bubble. The heavy spiky thing fell from his hand to heavily spike the floor.

  ‘How . . .’ He seemed momentarily incapable of forming the simplest sentence. ‘Gateway . . . How? Created . . . did . . . How?’ He leaped to his feet, the laboratory stool of Hep-Seth clattering over behind him. ‘How in the Nine Circles of Hell did you manage to conjure the gateway, you dim-witted buffoon?’ he roared, forgetting both diplomacy and some much more cutting insults in his passion.

  On the other hand, it would have been wasted effort. Bose’s ability to miss, misunderstand and generally remain unscratched by the most jagged verbal barbs transcended the usual simile of ‘water off a duck’s back’. In comparison to his happy indifference to insult, a duck was made of sponge with blotting-paper feathers.

  ‘I just tapped it, old man,’ said Bose. ‘Hadn’t you tried tapping it yet?’

  ‘Look at this!’ demanded Cabal, gesturing at the dozens of closely written sheets arranged into neat piles upon the table. ‘Look at all this! This is just basic theory, the very least I would need to understand before going on to intermediate theory, then advanced theory and, finally, the extreme edges of theory where Hep-Seth was working before I could even think of touching that damnable thing! No, “just tapping it” was weeks away.’ He swallowed, and took several deep breaths. ‘Get your things together. We don’t know how long the gateway will remain open.’ Bose opened his mouth to say something, but Cabal interrupted him: ‘If you were about to say that
if it closes before we’re ready you can just tap it again, don’t. It would be more than your life is worth at present.’

  They had few belongings by this point in any event, the few knick-knacks that Bose had collected being abandoned aboard the Audaine, while Cabal kept all he needed, and several things he might, in his Gladstone. It was the work of a moment to find something similar to a carpet bag in Hep-Seth’s wardrobe (he was, it seemed, especially given to very high collars and wide sleeves judging by its other contents), and to load it with food, water and wineskins. Then they stood before the coruscating light contained within the shifting heptagonal gateway and paused a second. Cabal could not help but be reminded of a similar occasion, weeks before, when they had stood before a similar gateway in an Arkham garret – and just look at how that had turned out. Then, they had been hounded by a ghoulpack and time had been pressing. Now, the only pressure upon them was the possibility of the gateway closing, and that did not seem quite so urgent. Cabal had a sense that if he went through that wavering sheet of distorted reality, things would change, hugely, radically, in ways he could not predict. It was an irrational feeling, and normally he would have crushed it easily, but in that place it circled inside his mind, making his neck tense and uncomfortable, and he knew the Phobic Animus was at work again.

  He considered briefly whether he should allow Bose to go first or give him a firm shove into the portal, should he demur. It would be pointless, however: there was no easy way to tell if a disparition was disintegration followed by a distant reintegration, or just disintegration followed by nothing at all. Besides which, the odd ill-formed conviction of change that flittered around his mental battlements, like a translucent sheeted ghost, assured him that the change would not simply be one of being alive to being dead. So, he took a deep breath in through his mouth, let it out through his nose, and stepped into the gateway.

  It was a lot less pleasant than travel via a discorporated poet. Cabal had a momentary sense that he had turned to very fine sand, and that the sand was falling away from him. He especially resented it when his eyes flowed away from him like pollen in a breeze, but a moment later the rest of his skull followed and it subsequently became difficult to resent anything very much. He did wonder distantly if this was the nature of the change he had intuited, that he would spend the rest of eternity as a cloud of minutely powdered necromancer, wafting around the cosmos and unable to get very concerned about anything any more. He felt he should be concerned that he couldn’t be concerned, but he couldn’t be concerned enough to care, so he wasn’t. A Jovian perspective, to be sure, but one hard to become enthusiastic about if the job didn’t come with thunderbolts. But then he considered ‘enthusiasm’, and found his own memories of it drained of colour, dimensions and veracity, like a badly written strip cartoon in a cheap newspaper.

  Falling apart had been so easy. Mildly disconcerting to begin with, but one got used to one’s molecules going their separate ways, and then the atoms within those molecules trailing off by themselves, and then the electrons and neutrons, and the strangeness and charm, and down ad infinitum in far less time than it takes to say ad infinitum.

  Coming back together, on the other hand, hurt like blazes.

  There was sun, and there was sand, and there was a screaming, burning man being reforged from the stuff of creation, and he was not enjoying it in the slightest. It would have been a boon if his nervous system had re-formed a little later in the process than it did, but that’s magic for you – even when it’s helpful, it finds a way to be surly with it. Thus his nerves were in place to tell him just how shatteringly painful it is to be glued back together from cosmic clay and fairy dust. The only positives about the experience were that it was educational – being reconstructed is precisely this painful – and it was short.

  Johannes Cabal flopped on to the beach, eyes wide with still vibrant memories of recent agony, and rolled on to his back, his hands clenched tightly enough for his fingernails to draw blood from his palms, his face in a humourless rictal grin. He had no idea how long he lay there, the sound of the waves breaking as ignored as the azure sky his eyes saw but did not comprehend. Then he blinked, and sense began to return to him.

  ‘Gosh,’ said a familiar voice. ‘That stung a bit, didn’t it?’

  Cabal sat up. He was on a beach, a beautiful beach of golden sand, beneath a golden sun. It would have been idyllic but for the presence of Bose sitting on a nearby rock, a man with the ability to render the greatest wonders prosaic by his mere presence.

  Reaction to the translocation set in a moment later: Cabal leaned over and vomited upon that golden sand, which was not improved by the addition. When he had finished bringing everything up, he felt febrile, weak and oddly ashamed, so he scooped sand over the vomit to hide it. He fumbled in his pocket to find his blue-lensed glasses and put them on to conceal his reddened, watering eyes and save them from the strong sunshine.

  ‘It stang a bit?’ he managed to say. ‘How are you so composed, Bose? That was the single most unpleasant physical experience I have ever suffered, and I’ve had some bad ones, believe you me.’

  Bose shrugged. ‘Yes, it was rather horrid, wasn’t it? But I was here for a full hour before your arrival, Mr Cabal. I’ve had a chance to get over it. Where were you?’

  ‘Where was I?’ Cabal rose shakily to his feet and dusted himself off. ‘Neither here nor there, it seems.’ He looked around. The beach stretched for about a mile in either direction before vanishing in the curve of the coastline. It gave way to palm trees, then thicker vegetation as it rose up sharply towards a great rocky crag that formed the centre of the island, assuming it was an island and not some promontory on a larger landmass. Directly between them and this feature, however, there was no forest at all, but only a hill of bare rock into which a crude zigzagging path had been carved. At its head, some five hundred yards up the rockface was an equally primitive great stone face cut from the living rock, a demoniacal countenance with a cave entrance for a mouth, befanged, behorned and terrible in its clichés. Cabal had seen a few scary cave entrances in his time, and this one scored low points for originality.

  ‘This is Mormo, I presume?’ he said, semi-rhetorically, as he expected little insight from Bose. ‘I would hate to have to enter some hideous cave of secrets and face whatever terrors it contains, and then for it to turn out to be the wrong one.’

  Bose shook his head. ‘Can’t say, old boy. But unless you plan to make a boat or just settle down here, I don’t suppose we have much choice but to investigate it.’

  ‘No,’ admitted Cabal. ‘I don’t suppose we do.’

  The day was still young, and Cabal felt enervated by the trip and empty by its effects, so they took a little time to eat slowly some of the food they had brought with them, and regarded the cave mouth frequently with guarded suspicion as they did so, just in case the Phobic Animus came galumphing out to share their meal and then, in recompense, kill or unhinge them with a torrent of pure fear. It did not, but the possibility that it might took away most of the small pleasure to be had from eating outside.

  It was, however, an eminently suitable time to reflect on how far they had come, and the travails they had undergone to be on that beach. Or just to look at the sea and say how pretty it was, which sufficed for Bose.

  Cabal ignored him, a skill it had taken little effort to bring to a high finish. For his own part, the forebodings he had experienced within the tower of Hep-Seth now doubled and redoubled. There was a terrible sense of imminent change, and not a change that he would care for. He was inevitably reminded that the thirteenth card of the tarot deck, Death, signified sudden change that was usually only a figurative death. Usually, but not always. That uncertainty between the metaphorical and the actual had never concerned him quite so much before. Death was waiting for him here; if he had drawn a card at random from a tarot deck right that moment, he would have been more surprised if it had been one of the seventy-seven others.

  The sense
was not rational, so he could not analyse it rationally. It was subjective to the final degree, so the only metric for it was previous experience. Was the sense imposed, or was its genesis within him? He could not tell. It might just as easily be the influence of the Phobic Animus demonstrating that it had subtleties beyond mortal terror. Cabal drew a long draught from his waterskin, and replaced the stopper with an awareness that this might be among his last acts.

  ‘Come along, Herr Bose,’ he said, as he stood and beat the sand from his seat. ‘Our destinies, or something along those lines, await.’

  The climb up the pathway did not take nearly long enough, and almost before they knew it, they were standing in the mouth of the great stone head. The daylight did not extend very deeply inside, and from what they could see, the interior was not a natural cave but had been cut from the stone of the hill.

  Bose squinted into the darkness. ‘I can’t say I fancy going in there, Mr Cabal. It’s awfully gloomy. We shan’t be able to see our hands in front of our faces. I suppose we could try and make flambeaux.’ He looked around and found a bit of dry wood, presumably carried up into the cave during a fierce storm in some bygone year. ‘If we find another stick like this, and wrap something around it that we can set fire to . . . ?’

  Cabal said nothing, but took the stick from Bose, and opened his bag. Instantly, cool green-blue flames licked up from inside. Cabal took out the eternally burning head of Ercusides, and stuck it on the end of the stick. ‘There,’ said Cabal. ‘That will do nicely.’