A few minutes careful work gave me a map of the ridges. They didn’t mean anything in themselves, but I followed the strongest ridges with a greasepaint stick and returned to my dressing room to hold the paper up to the light, viewing it from the reverse side. You see, the ridges were just were the metal had been pushed back by characters being driven into the metal of the outside of the hoop, driven in at the tip of a cold chisel. A particular type of chisel sanctified in a process whose details have no business being repeated in a tale for a Christmas Eve.
The characters were easy to make out, all the more so as I’d been expecting them ever since I’d seen that hoop with its characteristic sheen of the metal of Leng. It’s a difficult metal to lay hands on. No forge in this world can make it. You have to go… elsewhere. It is very necessary for some effects that, even by a necromancer’s standards, are unsavoury. The metal hoop constituted something called the Maw of the Clathik. A clathik, for your information, is an ugly beast with the body of a bull, the face of a boll weevil and a hide that can only be described as rugose. It eats spiritual energy, quite literally draining souls through its tubular mouth. The hoop used the name only partially figuratively; its function was essentially the same. Once every 2300 days, the hoop would become active, looking for a soul to devour. Standing on it was as deadly as travelling through it. Setting it under a stage was an inspired touch. These things always work better with an audience, usually of cultists. It’s to do with empathic resonance, the more observers you have the better. Having a poor hapless theatre audience to generate an empathic wave was ingenious, I’ll grant him that.
Oh yes, Maleficarus had certainly picked up a few new tricks on his travels. Conjurors getting ideas above their station is far more common than you might think. They usually start young, performing minor vanishes and transmutations in the parlour to the wonderment of their families. There’s something in the bafflement of an audience that is intoxicating. It is the faintest scent of power. A few go further – the illusions become grander, the audience becomes larger. Finally, they’re being paid to perform, but the real reward is the gasps and the sighs of disbelief, the slightly nervous laughter of people seeing things that cannot be. But smoke and mirrors can only take a man so far and he gets to thinking, if an audience will respect this fakery, then what might be possible with true magic? How much larger the audience, how much deeper the respect?
It is a madness, of course. To meddle with such profound and dangerous forces simply for personal gratification is pure folly, worse than suicidal. But vanity can do it to a man and Maleficarus was such a man, it seemed. He had pulled too many rabbits from too many hats; insanity had claimed him.
Show me a stage magician who values the writings of Dee over Houdin, the works of Simon Magus over John Maskelyne, and I shall show you a disaster in the making. In this case, alas, the disaster had already occurred two decades before.
The dressing room door swung open and there was nobody beyond it. It appeared the late magician was summoning me for another interview. Late in a very loose sense if my suspicions were correct. I folded up the piece of paper and pushed it in my pantaloons for safekeeping before walking outside. The door to the prop store was already opening as I picked up the electric torch by the star trap mechanism and walked into the darkness. The torch was almost no use, its tired yellow beam seeming to grow weaker by the second as the batteries exhausted themselves.
The magician’s spirit didn’t waste any time with pleasantries. “You were warned,” it whispered harshly in my ear.
“Yes. I believe I was.”
“You will die.”
“We all do, Maleficarus. Even you, despite your best efforts.” It seemed that this wasn’t going to be one of those chinwag sorts of séances. I decided to leave and walked unhurriedly to the door.
I had just reached the door when a massive blow caught me between the shoulder blades, picking me up and carrying me ten feet or more before dumping me to the floor. It’s difficult to describe the nature of the force that struck me. Although it carried the force of a bull’s charge, it didn’t strike me quite instantaneously. There was a sense of being borne aloft as if picked up by a high wind. I felt more like a kite than a victim right until I crashed into the floor and was sent sprawling. I was on my feet again in a second, whirling to face the open door to the prop store. But there was nothing there.
“You were warned,” the voice repeated, its anger grating over my bones. It seemed foolish to argue the point. Instead I ran for the stairs. I didn’t even get close.
The force of Maleficarus’ wrath entwined around my legs like a quicksilver cat and I fell again. This time it held me and I was dragged back across the floor. As I tried vainly to stop myself, I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye. Can you imagine a sandbag walking, Parkin? That’s what it looked like. Like rats in sacks, sandbags were processing from their pile in the corner and into the pile on the cradle of the star trap. It took me a moment to understand Maleficarus’ intention, but when I did, I redoubled my efforts to escape. The weight in the cradle had been carefully calculated to impel me with just enough force to make a dramatic entrance through the trap and no more. Too much weight meant too much acceleration. If I hit the star trap too quickly, my skull would crumple faster than the leaves could move aside. Maleficarus was engineering another accident. This one wouldn’t be on his schedule and would doubtless be less efficacious than the previous sacrifices to his ambition, but I don’t think that really concerned him very much by that point. Almost below the limit of hearing, I became aware of a throbbing of syllables; an incantation delivered with the sheer melodrama only a stage artiste would feel necessary. He was awakening the Maw. Not only did he intend to kill me, he also meant to burn my soul for his greater glory.
I am a necromancer. At that point in my life I was a necrothologist. The difference is largely technical to the layman and I won’t bore you with definitions. I was already aware of many different methods of “raising the dead” to use a vulgar term and also very aware of their shortcomings. Maleficarus had lighted upon a technique of granting immortality and decided that the great cost was acceptable to him. In a real sense, after all, he wasn’t paying it himself. Usually, the sorcerer wishing to use the Maw is dependent on having reliable servants who will carry out the rituals and sacrifices over an extended period to give him his second life. History has shown that the servants are far more likely to take the money and run rather than get involved in a drawn out series of murders. Very wise of them, too. Maleficarus had undoubtedly shown great ingenuity in dispensing with the servants in favour of a machine placed in such a place that the sacrifices would willingly line up to die on his behalf.
I wasn’t familiar with every nuance of the ritual he was using, but taking a soul once every 2300 days seemed to increase its effectiveness. If he’d decided to kill me a thousand days into the cycle, I doubt he would have been so keen to use the Maw to finish me. As it was only a few days, he didn’t seem to mind using it and then starting again. Just my luck.
I was abruptly pulled into the air and hung windmilling ridiculously in that silly costume for a moment before I was thrown headlong into the star trap’s frame. I managed to twist so that I didn’t crack my head against the supports and took the blow on my upper back instead. There was a fierce pain and a sense that something had given way; my scapula as it turned out. Pensey’s electric torch fell from my hand – I’d utterly forgotten I was holding it – and rolled across the platform. It was strange that, at the moment before my utter extinction, even as I saw the safety case around the trap’s lever swing open with no hand upon it, it was strange that I should be thinking of Mr Pensey’s torch and its remarkably rugged construction. As Maleficarus pulled the lever, I moved my foot and kicked the torch so it rolled up against the support at the edge of the platform. The catches disengaged and the platform shot upwards.
Very nearly five inches it got before the torch hit the underside of the lowest
horizontal strut and the whole thing stopped dead.
I lay, silent but for my laboured breath, bundled in the frame of the trap. Maleficarus was silent, his fury scenting the air like ozone. Above me I could hear the pattering of the actors’ feet, the laughter of the crowd. Behind me, I could hear the faint buzzing of the cue warning from my dressing room. Then, in front of me, from the open door to the prop store, I heard knocking.
It shouldn’t have surprised me. This whole rigmarole – I almost said pantomime – had been in the pursuit of immortality. Immortality as a creature of flesh and blood, not a ghost. It made sense that he was keeping his body somewhere near. I felt his presence fading from the air as his wretched excuse for a soul condensed and curdled back into the body he’d abandoned a generation before. I suspect he’d been planning a more triumphant return to his mortal coil than the hasty one I’d forced upon him, but needs must when the devil – or at least a demon king – drives.
I tried to get to my feet but the pain from my shoulder was agonising and I slumped back down while it stopped battering me. I had come close to fainting from it and that – given an imminent visit from a mad revenant – would have been inconvenient. In the prop store, the knocking became a pounding. It only served to confirm my suspicions, although I might have preferred a less threatening form of endorsement. I determined to get up and out of there, injury or not, and cautiously started to get out of the trap cage. I’d hardly begun when the pounding terminated with the sound of, somewhere in the darkest recesses of the store, a theatrical chest being thrown upon. It seemed that Maleficarus had finally managed to get out of bed. I redoubled my efforts to escape.
I could hear everything through that door: the clumsy staggering fall as he clambered out, his body not nearly as responsive as he remembered it; the slow, scraping advance as he half walked and half dragged himself towards the door; his hissing voice as he heaved air in and out of lungs as dry as coral on a museum shelf. “You were warned! You were warned!”
Well, yes, I had been. The irony of it was that I’d had no intention of halting his experiment. I just wanted to understand what he’d been up to, observe his progress and then leave him to it, perhaps with the occasional follow up visit. His current exertions and my broken shoulder blade were all the result of a misunderstanding and Maleficarus jumping to the conclusion that I’d wanted to stop him. Silly man.
A tattered, semi-mummified hand gripped the doorframe of the prop store, yellowed bone showing through the parched skin. I didn’t entirely understand how any further sacrifices were going to repair the damages of time, but I guessed Maleficarus hadn’t really thought that part through in any great detail. Perhaps he wanted to look like a scarecrow. People are strange, after all.
I had the strongest feeling that things were going to become very unpleasant very quickly. I managed to get onto all fours in the bottom of the cage – all threes, that is – and started to crawl out. I was very conscious of getting too close to the Maw; it glistened and lights swam beneath the iridescent surface of the metal. It also seemed to be salivating, but that could have been an illusion of the light. I looked up as I got halfway out and saw Maleficarus bearing down on me. He was a terrible mess; at some early point of his voluntary death, parts of him had liquefied in the way that putrescent flesh does and made awful stains on his clothes. He’d decided to entomb himself in his stage clothes, naturally. I was glad the top hat was missing, but the dinner suit suitable for a minor dignitary at an ambassadorial function and the opera cloak with silver clasp were in evidence. Not in evidence were swathes of skin, muscle tissue, his lips and his eyes. He didn’t seem to need any of them but if he was expecting immortality to get him an indefinite season at the Palladium looking like that, he’d been wasting everybody’s time and a few people’s lives for no good reason.
Despite being dead, he still had a good turn of speed and I realised that I could not hope to outrun him while injured like that. Instead, I held my position and waited to see what he intended to do. If he’d just brought something heavy or pointed from the store, he could have killed me then and there but, as was apparent from his whole scheme, he was prone to the idée fixe. He’d awakened the Maw, and that was how I was to die. He ran at me and I raised myself to a sitting position better to meet his charge. Then I changed my mind and ducked.
Maleficarus hit me at a dead run and his shin caught my shoulder. That wasn’t pleasant. Despite the sensation of having two disparate slabs of bone that were theoretically meant to one and the same grate against each other in my upper back, I heaved myself forward and out of the cage, slapping Pensey’s torch clear with a harsh blow as I passed. My feet were still on the platform as it started its ascent, but my chest was on the floor and I felt the platform scrape up my instep and clear.
Of course, Maleficarus was aboard. Of course, he weighed less than me being semi-skeletal and all and the platform had been counterweighted for my mass. Of course, he’d been adding more sandbags still so the platform rose like a shell from a mortar. Of course, the Maw was waiting.
Maleficarus had a deal with the Maw. He would feed it once every now and then, it would supply him with much of the energy it harvested and keep some back for itself as a retainer. This arrangement had never been drawn up with the possibility of Maleficarus himself being fed to the Maw. The Maw devoured his spirit and then, as per the deal, gave most of it back. It then took it again and gave most back. And again and again and again. It’s a small miracle, I’ve always thought, that calculus allows an infinite number of operations in a finite period of time, that Achilles can catch the tortoise after all, just in time for them to shin up the asymptote together. Being devoured by a Maw is reputedly agonising beyond belief. You can draw your own conclusions as to what it feels to be devoured an infinite number of times in perhaps a quarter of a second. And good riddance.
“What happened to him?” asked Parkin.
“What? After he exited the other side of the Maw? Why, he was shot through the star trap and showered over the entire stage and the first three rows of the audience in a hail of desiccated body parts. The parents were not impressed.” Cabal examined the bottle. “Oh. We’ve run out of brandy too.”
“I’m very sorry, Cabal.” Parkin pulled himself up from his slump and stretched. “I’ve drunk you out of house and home.”
“Oh, not at all.” Cabal was more than ready for bed. He felt like he was going to be sleeping a long time. “It’s been enjoyable, I suppose. In a cathartic sort of way. I don’t get many opportunities to discuss my work.”
“No, I imagine not. It’s been interesting. Horrible, but interesting.”
Cabal saw him to the door. Parkin stood on the doorstep and drew on his gloves as he looked into the black sky, the stars twinkling as harshly as glass splinters in the freezing air. “Goodnight, Sergeant Parkin,” said Cabal, stifling a yawn.
Parkin took a step forward and enjoyed the sound and sensation of the freezing snow crunching under his foot. He checked his watch and raised an eyebrow. It was past midnight. “Merry Christmas, Johannes Cabal,” he said turning. But the door had already closed and he could just make out the clicks of the bolts being thrown. Moments later, the downstairs lights started to flicker out. Parkin smiled. “I hope you have a Merry Christmas one of these years, Cabal. I really do,” he said to himself. Then he turned his face to the direction of the village and started the long walk home, a home of warmth and of family.
THE END
Author’s Afterword
Hello. I hope you enjoyed the story.
I have no idea why I’m so fascinated by the theatre. I don’t go very often (although I would like to), I’ve never really acted, I don’t come from a theatrical family. Yet I keep going back to it. I’ve a new series character Richard Malengine who’s a Victorian actor turned master criminal (his first published outing is in the Schemers anthology from Stone Skin Press, plug, plug), I’ve set a couple of scenes in roleplaying games in theatres, and here w
e have Johannes Cabal, hardly the most frivolous person, running around in tights and greasepaint. I can’t account for it; I’m just fond of the theatre for some reason.
This was the second Cabal to be published and its venue was the same as the first, “H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror.” It has significance because it indirectly led to the publication of the Cabal novels, by a strange and unexpected path by which it was liked, generating an interest in a full novel, which led to it gaining the interest of an agent, who passed it onto another agent, who took me on as a client, and who sold the novel to the publishers. If you’re reading this because you enjoy the novels, the path to them really started with this story.
JLH, November 2013
The Johannes Cabal Stories
(In Publication Order)
“Johannes Cabal and the Blustery Day”
“Exeunt Demon King”
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer
Johannes Cabal the Detective
“The Ereshkigal Working”
Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute
Exeunt Demon King Page 3
