Exeunt Demon King
by
Jonathan L. Howard
Copyright
Exeunt Demon King
by
Jonathan L. Howard
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.
First publication: “H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror” #3, 2006
Revised 2013
Copyright © 2006-2013 Jonathan L. Howard
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Cover Illustration by Linda “Snugbat” Smith
www.snugbat.co.uk
Christmas comes around but once a year. To Johannes Cabal, this showed shocking over-familiarity and ill-breeding.
Winter as a whole was a trial to him, forcing his attention from his work and to the necessities of running a house as the mercury dropped and the pipes threatened to burst at the first frost. Even when his house – a three storey building apparently stolen from the middle of a row of late Victorian townhouses and dropped on a remote hillside intact down to its small front and back gardens, woodshed and ingrained soot – even when his house was in good repair and proof against the December cold, there was little he could do professionally but bring his notes up to date and plan new experiments for the thaw. It was, after all, terribly difficult to rob a grave when the soil was frozen. Johannes Cabal’s profession was analytical necromancy.
It wasn’t a calling that attracted adoration or even tolerance. It seemed ironic to him, while escaping one torch-bearing mob or another, that doctors were regarded so highly for their stumbling and short-termed treatments when all he wanted to do was surpass their greatest efforts. The man who attempts to cure the common cold is a popular hero. The man who tries to defeat death is hounded from pillar to post. He appreciated that the practicalities of necromancy might be unpalatable to some but, really, what was a robbed grave here, a summoned demon there, compared to the possible gains? Oh, but no. The public could never see past the occasional and unavoidable mistakes, bleating on about how the science of necromancy was somehow intrinsically evil just because some of the higher profile failures had ended up wandering the countryside with a hunger for human brains. Sanctimonious fools, the lot of them.
Still, Christmas Eve, Cabal thought as he looked at the calendar on the parlour mantelpiece. A family time. Usually, his solitary lifestyle was not only necessary to his researches, but very much his preference. Sometimes, though, just sometimes… He sighed heavily. He wasn’t entirely alone, strictly speaking. There were the things in the garden, and the things he kept in the woodshed, but he would rather open a vein than have them tracking grave mould and pixie dust onto the carpets. He’d been forced to take action against the things in the skirtingboards some time before so that only really left the thing in the box. He looked up at the wooden box that sat on the deep shelf above the fire.
“Merry Christmas,” he said.
After a moment, the box started to whistle Good King Wencelas in a melancholy but not unpleasant key. Cabal lowered his head and listened for a few bars. Something like a smile of happy remembrance flickered across his lips, or perhaps it was just the flickering firelight illuminating his face as the daylight died outside.
Abruptly, a sharp knocking at the door made his head snap up, the ghostly smile instantly replaced by his habitual expression of tight-lipped distaste. Cabal wasn’t in the habit of receiving visitors at all, not least because not many actually made it as far as the front door. The garden folk – pixies, sprites and fairies whose activities would have made Enid Blyton very sad – didn’t usually permit it.
On the doorstep, Parkin waited patiently. It had been snowing earlier and he was wrapped up warmly. It hadn’t surprised him at all to see that his where the only tracks that went anywhere near Cabal’s house; quite the contrary. He rocked gently on the balls of his feet and blew out a cloud of hoary breath. In one of the flowerbeds near his foot, something small, fey and unutterably malign moved.
“Hullo, sonny,” said Parkin, apparently sensing the movement by sonar and not even deigning to look down. “Before you get up to any nonsense with fairy–shot or the like, I think you really ought to know my boots are nailed with cold iron hobs.” He looked down, his expression hard. “And I’m more than minded to grind buggers like you to dust with them if you get any bright ideas. Now,” his expression softened to an entirely insincere smile, “how can I help you?”
After a nervous pause, the snowy hedges and borders chorused a shaky, “Merry Christmas, Police Sergeant Parkin.”
“And a Happy Saturnalia to you too. Now piss off out of it before I do you.”
The door opened and Johannes Cabal stood framed there. He was a tall, lean man in his late twenties, blond hair cut sensibly short, blue eyes that had seemed nothing other than cold for a long time. He wore a white shirt but otherwise almost all black; trousers, socks, a black cardigan. Red tartan slippers and an enormous revolver completed his wardrobe.
“Herßliche Weihnacten, Parkin. Forgive the gun, I’d quite forgotten to expect you.”
“Not at all, Cabal. Just chatting with your charming garden gnomes.”
“Not gnomes!” cried the garden folk in horror at the slur, but Parkin had already gone in.
While Parkin made himself comfortable in the parlour, Cabal went off to fetch his annual bribe. He returned to find Parkin singing Once in Royal David’s City with the box.
“Good voice, yon box,” said Parkin, unabashed when he saw Cabal watching him from the doorway. “What’s in it anyway?”
“Nothing you’d want to know, much less see.” Cabal held out an envelope stuffed with banknotes. “Your, ah… Remind me, how do we dignify this?”
“Your very kind contribution to the police benevolent fund,” Parkin said as he tucked the envelope away in his coat. “It might amuse you to know, that’s actually where eighty percent of it does go. I keep the rest as a Christmas bonus, buy something nice for the kids.”
“I find your brand of honest dishonesty endlessly fascinating, Parkin.”
“Aye, well. It’s all in the degree, isn’t it? There’s plenty back in the village get their knickers in a twist every time this place is mentioned. Me and my tiny force of plods, though, we don’t care because you keep your nose clean in this parish. The fact that you don’t elsewhere is what this,” he tapped the safely ensconced envelope, “is for smoothing over. Truth is, I don’t see what it is that you get up to that’s so much worse than what some of those doctors in the city do. It’s all in the degree. Well,” he started to draw his gloves back on, “I’d best be on me way.”
Something stirred in Cabal. Perhaps it was the season and the memories, perhaps it was Parkin’s non-judgemental view on Cabal’s work and unexpected attack on the smug ranks of the loathsome medical establishment, but Cabal suddenly felt the need for some companionship, somebody just to chat to for a little while as the night drew in.
“Could…” Cabal floundered in the unfamiliar waters of social interaction for a moment. “Could I interest you in a drink before you go? It’s a long walk ba
ck to the village, after all.”
Parkin stopped. He weighed Cabal up for a few seconds, then sighed and said, “You’re not going to poison me, are you? That would be a bloody silly thing to do.”
“Poison?” Cabal was taken aback. “Ach, nein! I would not… I only kill in self-defence.” He laughed. Parkin had never heard Cabal laugh before, had hardly thought him capable of it, and its unforced nature did a great deal to reassure him. “My laboratory is, that phrase… in mothballs for the winter precisely because it is such a difficult time to gather specimens.” He shook his head. “You have nothing to fear, Sergeant Parkin. I do not kill casually. I abominate death.”
So, abominating death, Cabal instead turned to the water of life for his guest. Specifically, a single malt that was very much to the sergeant’s taste. Cabal was going to make some tea for himself but Parkin insisted that he would not drink alone and so Cabal acquiesced but insisted on adulterating it with a little water to the mock horror of Parkin although after a couple Cabal decided to forego the water and so they went on and a little while later it was much later and a little while after that it was later still.
It was in the natural silence after Parkin had finished a strange little anecdote about a mad bull, a frightened constable and a weapon usually intended to stop getaway cars by shattering the engine block. They sat listening to the sonorous ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall for a full two minutes. The whisky had given out by this point and they were now enjoying a good cognac. Cabal hadn’t even known he’d had the stuff but Parkin’s honed detective instincts had sniffed it out, along with the snifters to enjoy it in.
“So,” he asked finally, “what’s it like being a necromancer then?”
The alcohol had pleasantly warmed Cabal, but he was still some way short of drunk and that wasn’t a question he cared to answer. Instead, he replied, “You’ve been kind enough to tell me some of your old war stories. Would you like to hear one of mine?”
Parkin was policeman enough to know when a question was being evaded, but he really hadn’t been that interested in the answer anyway. This sounded far more engaging and he said as much.
“Very well.” Cabal took a moment to recharge their glasses while he marshalled the distant events into a narrative order. “When I first decided to pursue this profession…”
“Why exactly did you do that?” interrupted Parkin. “Why did you decide you wanted to become a necromancer instead of, oh, I dunno, a train driver?”
“My reasons are personal,” growled Cabal, the unfamiliar sense of bonhomie slipping slightly.
Parkin wasn’t listening anyway. “I wanted to be a cricketer,” he said wistfully as cigarette card dreams danced before his eyes.
Cabal decided to forge on regardless. “When I first decided on this course, I had no plan. There are no career plans for necromancers. One just has to guess. Extemporise. I decided to attack the problem from one aspect. Not that of the morbidity of the body, but of the longevity of the soul. I decided to become a ghost hunter.”
Parkin looked at him askance. “Is this a ghost story you’re winding up for, Cabal?”
Cabal shrugged slightly. “Why not? Christmas is a time for ghost stories, and mine has the distinction of being true.
"Where to begin? Perhaps with an observation. A word is a word is a word. But words have power and in my own profession I have long since learned to regard them with a cautious respect. Part of that power is that of remembrance. A single word can draw one back to another time and another place, as the scent of a flower can resurrect a lost summer from the sepia depths of the past. Other words, though, can chill the heart and take one straight back to an ugly time, a fearful place. My story starts with such a word." He said it slowly, a small effort of will apparent, each syllable forced over his lips as if he was using his tongue to evict cockroaches. "Pant-o-mime."
An adventurous production of Mother Goose in a small provincial theatre was not my first choice as a venue for spending my time a few days after Christmas (said Cabal). This particular theatre, however, had its interesting aspects. Specifically, it had a death toll.
Actors are a flowery mob, given to exaggeration and hyperbole, but when they talked about dying on the stage in the context of the Alhambra, they were being very literal. In twenty years, four actors had died on stage in a variety of ways, all dramatic, some messy. The most recent case had occurred just before Christmas. The pantomime’s plot – to dignify the excuse for a collection of bad puns, bad songs and low comedy – revolved around a Dame, played by a man, who sells her magic goose in return for beauty. She realises her mistake and spends the rest of the interminable performance attempting to recover it. It is Faust for toddlers. The antagonist is the Demon King, a drunk in a red leotard and curling mustachios.
On the afternoon in question, a dull December afternoon with a sky the colour of oxidised magnesium, the play had reached the point where the Dame foolishly wishes for beauty out loud three times in the gloomy Dark Wood. Her wish is heard and the Demon King appears in a flash and puff of yellow smoke.
As an aside, summoning demons is actually a time-consuming and pernickety business. I feel this production seriously misled its audience. But I digress.
On this occasion, there was a flash and a puff, but no infernal materialisation. Only a muffled cry and sound like somebody taking an axe to a rotting tree stump. There was muttering in the wings. On the stage the Dame ad libbed as well as a man in a dress faced by an audience of primary schoolchildren who know damn well something is amiss can. Then the manager made his way on stage, apologised fulsomely and said that due to a serious technical hitch, the show was being abandoned, full refunds would be made and the management regretted any inconvenience.
There had, indeed, been a serious technical hitch. In case you are unfamiliar with the workings of this particular piece of stage legerdemain, I shall explain. The flash and smoke are primarily there to distract the eye while the Demon King makes his entrance through a trapdoor, a particular type known as a star trap. The model the Alhambra had was octagonal in shape. Each edge of the octagon had its own triangle of trapdoor, the end vertices of each sector of trapdoor meeting in the middle. The trick is that the actor is bodily launched by the use of a rapidly rising platform up through the trap. The leaves spring back like the petals of a blooming flower on impact with the top of the actor’s head, the actor shoots up through the stage and a little way into the air, the trap’s leaves take the opportunity to fall back into place and the actor lands lightly upon them to shrieks from the stalls and cries of uncritical admiration from the circle. All this business is covered by the smoke and dazzle from the flash.
You will appreciate that the platform, a small item not much bigger than the star trap’s aperture, must travel at a fair speed in order to accomplish the effect. The actor’s safety is entirely dependent on the leaves moving up easily as he hits them. On this occasion, you will have guessed that they did not.
As far as could be ascertained, they had not moved a whisker. Not when the actor hit them, not when he cried out in the brief moment of surprise he was allowed, not when his neck snapped nor even as his skull was crushed.
It was a mystery. The trap was checked daily as a matter of course and had always operated perfectly. The police were unable to find any sign of tampering or even of anybody who might have wanted to tamper with it. The theatre was shut for a fortnight as the trap was tried again and again and again and the police cast around looking for suspects, motives and the like. They found nothing and as for the star trap, well, there’s an axiom in science that an unrepeatable result is no result at all. The circumstances of the tragic event could not be repeated and nobody had the faintest idea what could have happened.
Except me. Now I needed to prove my suspicions. That something was afoot was obvious to me. Chance may perform many peculiar acts and extraordinary happenstances, but I doubted that four apparently accidental deaths could be put down to mere bad lu
ck. Not when each had occurred precisely two thousand, three hundred days apart.
The Alhambra was, as I have said, a small provincial theatre of the sort that was undoubtedly a music hall until a few years before. Now it put on rep productions of Shakespeare, travelling murder mysteries and, of course, pantomimes. It lived a hand to mouth existence and a fortnight’s closure, even allowing for the days it would have been shut for Christmas anyway, was more of a drain than it could willingly manage. I expected to find the proprietor a desperate man and I was not disappointed. Mr Curry sat sweaty and unhappy at his desk as I introduced myself. In demeanour, he looked like a man whose dreams were haunted by the bailiff’s knock. Physically, he looked like a shaved panda.
“You’re an actor?” he asked after I had introduced myself.
Given I’d been delivering little other but lies in a convincing manner throughout my introduction, it seemed technically accurate to admit that I was, adding “I’ve come about the vacant role.”
That froze him. “You know,” he asked cautiously, “you know what happened to the last man who took that part?”
I blithely talked of a tragic accident, my understanding that the trap had been thoroughly tested and finished with a statement to the effect that the show must go on.
“It’s a major role,” he said, as if it were Lear, “there’s a lot to learn. Have you ever…”
“Ho ho ho,” I intoned. “I am the Demon King! I come from where it’s hot and wickedness I bring! At this point, the audience should be booing and hissing. I am advised by the script to ad lib some responses.” Curry looked at me, patently baffled. “I borrowed a copy of the script. I have an excellent memory. It did not take very long to learn.”
Curry took a dog-eared script from his desk drawer and slowly chose a page at random, never taking his eyes off me the whole time. Finally he looked down and read, “’Go away, you silly thing!”
Exeunt Demon King Page 1
