Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute jc-3-1

by Jonathan L. Howard

  And as in contemplation of matters arboreal Cabal sat and mused, the Dreamlands sudde

  Chapter 4

  IN WHICH THE FAUNA OF THE DREAMLANDS PROVE UNPLEASANT

  nly changed. It was not a slow transformation but, rather, the abrupt sense of dislocation one might suffer when feeling tired on a train journey, closing one’s eyes momentarily, and reopening them to discover that one is two stations past one’s destination and can’t go back until you reach Crewe. Suddenness and shock are conjoined in that moment, and that was what the four hopeful adventurers experienced when, abruptly, they found themselves no longer on the river but standing in a small clearing in a wood. They reacted differently, as befitted their humours. Shadrach cried out and whirled around as if beset by invisible imps. Corde’s hand fell upon the hilt of his sword, and he looked about, alert and ready. Bose simply stood stock still while his face warred between two expressions of astonishment, one wide-eyed and open-mouthed, the other furrow-browed and jutted-jawed. The resultant facial indecision caused his ears to flap slightly.

  Cabal, for his part, stood very, very still. Only his eyes moved as he gathered data in an attempt to deduce what had happened. To one side of the clearing, the tree cover seemed thinner, and the sunlight penetrated, as if they were by a larger clearing or even at the edge of the wood in which they had unexpectedly found themselves. Ignoring the others, he moved quickly that way, pushed by a barrier of bushes between the trees and found the latter case was true. Before him was the bank of the Oukranos, the river stretching away to the other heavily forested bank. There was the flow, running from right to left (Typical, he thought. We are in the Dark Wood), and there was the fishing boat, beating into the wind and the flow as it headed back upstream, presumably returning to the jetty at which they had first seen it. Shadrach appeared at his elbow.

  ‘Hey! Hey! Halloo! Come back!’ he shouted, but the fishermen just waved and grinned. Shadrach’s shoulders slumped. ‘They’re grinning at us. Is that a friendly grin, or a wicked one?’

  Cabal was otherwise preoccupied. ‘“Halloo”? “Halloo”? Has anyone ever actually responded to that cry with anything but derision?’

  ‘The hounds like it,’ said Shadrach, somewhat ruffled. Cabal did not reply, but simply looked at him as a lady mayoress might look at a good-hearted but simple-minded orphan on a civic visit to the county and district simple-minded orphan facility. ‘I’m a member.’ This did not seem like news to Cabal. ‘A member of the Ochentree Hunt.’

  ‘Tally-ho,’ said Cabal, in sepulchral tones. ‘But, to answer your question, those are wicked grins. Definitely.’

  Corde and Bose joined them as the boat turned a bend in the river and slid out of sight, the crew still waving, still grinning, still wicked.

  ‘What happened just then, Cabal?’ demanded Corde. ‘How did we end up here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Cabal, opening his bag. It was interesting that he still had it, he thought, that both he and Corde still had their swords and, by the look of it, that Shadrach still had his purse full of coins.

  ‘You don’t know?’ said Corde, putting his fists on his hips, unconsciously striking an heroic pose. ‘We hired you because you were supposed to know your way around this place . . .’ He paused at Cabal’s index finger, raised in admonition.

  ‘No,’ said Cabal. ‘You secured my services – and do not refer to me as a hireling ever again – on the basis that I have dealt with unusual circumstances of a supernatural type before, and have survived with life and mind intact. As I emphasised at the time, I have no direct experience of the Dreamlands, and my knowledge is strictly second-hand. This was accepted by all of you, and it is rather too late in the proceedings to start whining about it now.’

  Corde lifted his chin, the better to glare down his nose. ‘I was not whining about it,’ he said, nettled.

  ‘You were whining like a teething baby,’ said Cabal, watching Corde’s hand drift to the hilt of his sword. ‘Herr Corde. If you show steel, I shall kill you.’

  Corde’s hand paused. ‘You’re very confident about that, Cabal.’

  ‘Why should I not be? I have had practical experience of fighting with swords, as distinct from fencing for sport. I am still here. You may draw your own conclusions.’

  ‘Gentlemen! Please.’ It was Bose, moving between them. ‘We are marooned and lost in a hostile land! Now, surely, is not the time for divisions within our party? United we must stand, gentlemen, for the alternative is oblivion.’

  Corde’s hand twitched, then fell back to his side. Cabal, who had been on the point of verbally agreeing with Bose, instead kept his silence and allowed a carefully pitched mild smirk to cross his face. Thus, he was in the happy position of allowing Corde’s own pride to infer that Cabal considered him a coward, without actually having to go to all the trouble of implying it. It was the most effortless insult he had ever delivered, and its elegance charmed him.

  Apparently unaware of the current of animosity that still ran between Corde and Cabal, and the potential differences it augured for the future, Bose seemed pleased by his peacekeeping efforts. ‘Mr Cabal, time seemed to jump. Is this something that you have ever read of in this or any similar context?’

  ‘It is not, which is suspicious in itself. One would expect such an effect to have been mentioned at least once in the great heap of portentous drivel that has been written about this place. Furthermore, it is not simply a skip forward in time, or – strictly speaking – the subjective perception of time that they use here instead of the real thing.’

  Shadrach was nodding. ‘The fishermen. They seemed completely unmoved by what had happened. Indeed, they seemed party to it.’

  ‘Exactly so,’ said Cabal, quickly regaining the expositional high ground. ‘It is hard to imagine a chain of events by which all four of us would meekly agree to be marooned in the woods, so one is drawn to the conclusion that this has been engineered in some way by an external agency.’

  ‘To what end?’ asked Shadrach.

  ‘With that sort of ability, why didn’t this hypothetical agency of yours just kill us?’ said Corde, dismissively. ‘I don’t believe it.’

  ‘Believe what you will. You are in error if you attempt to ascribe Earthly motives to every mind in the Dreamlands. This could all be in the nature of a prank. Our death was not sought, only our inconvenience.’

  ‘A prank?’ This concept clearly did not sit well with Shadrach. If the Dreamlands were home to entities that could make time hiccup for a bit of a jape, then what they were capable of doing when they applied themselves hardly bore thinking about.

  ‘Or a distraction, or a pleasantry, or a comment, or something that cannot be interpreted by the human mind.’ Cabal shrugged. ‘Or it may just have been a fluke. A random fragment of awareness that momentarily settled upon us, Azathoth belching, the stars being not entirely wrong. Who knows? I doubt any mortal does. Whatever the intent, we must deal with the results. The very inconvenient results.’ He took the map from his bag and unrolled it once more. ‘Yes, there we are. The Dark Wood. We shall have to walk to Hlanith.’

  The others gathered around, crowding into Cabal’s personal space and galling him immeasurably. ‘Whereabouts are we in the woods?’ asked Bose.

  ‘Somewhere.’

  ‘How far away is Hlanith?’ asked Corde.

  Cabal measured out the distance from roughly the middle of the long length of riverbank where the Dark Wood met the Oukranos to the dot labelled ‘Hlanith’ between finger and thumb, then held up his hand. ‘About three and a half centimetres, I’d say.’ He rolled up the map, put it back in its tube and restored it to his bag. ‘You really must grasp the overriding principles at work in this place. Distances are measured in the difficulty of travel, time is measured by a sense of being either quick or slow. This is a world of subjectivism, loathsome though that may be.’

  ‘So the journey to Hlanith is what? Quick or slow?’

  Cabal gestured carelessly at t
he trees standing densely behind them. ‘Is that not already painfully apparent?’

  They tried to stay on the riverbank as they headed eastward, but quickly ran into an inlet that forced them inland. It was little more than a stream, but the cut it had created was steep and sharp and looked to be a great deal more trouble to climb out of than fall into, so nobody argued with taking the diversion. Soon, however, the wisdom of not risking the inlet became questionable.

  The trees grew closer, the areas between them populated with bushes and tangles of high weed and briars. There seemed to be few paths, whether made by animals or people, and the ones they did find wound randomly about until they petered out into undergrowth and shadows. Cabal had anticipated the journey to Hlanith taking some time, but in the face of the extraordinarily hard going, he was forced to re-evaluate his estimate from ‘some time’ to ‘some considerable time’.

  It was dark in the Dark Wood, indicating that in the Dreamlands, at least, things functioned as advertised. It was not simply the dappled verdant darkness of a normal wood, however, but a heavy, hungry darkness that seemed to sap the brilliance of every ray of sunlight that somehow penetrated the canopy of leaves until the light fell upon the ground attenuated and ghostly. No insects buzzed, no animals cried.

  ‘Anybody frightened yet?’ asked Cabal, suddenly, from a position of scientific curiosity.

  ‘We do not succumb to fright, Mr Cabal,’ said Shadrach, not at all convincingly. ‘Only rational concern.’ The grunts of agreement from his fellows lacked conviction also. These grunts are worth mentioning if only because, if there had been a little less disconsolate grunting, they might have heard the crying a moment earlier, and subsequent events might have gone a little better for them.

  It was Bose who heard it first, pausing and looking off to one side, while waving a hand for silence. ‘Can you hear that?’ he asked.

  The others listened intently. The woods were unnaturally quiet, but even so the sound was distant. ‘Good heavens!’ said Shadrach, finally. ‘It’s a baby! Do you hear it?’

  ‘I hear it,’ said Cabal. ‘And it causes me rational concern. We should be going.’ He took a moment to gauge the direction the crying was coming from, then pointed diametrically opposite. ‘That way. With speed.’

  ‘It could be a child, lost and frightened,’ said Corde, unwilling to take any advice from Cabal. ‘We should investigate.’

  ‘Excellent idea,’ agreed Cabal. ‘You investigate just what sort of child can move through this difficult terrain with such remarkable rapidity while the rest of us run away.’

  It was true: where a moment before it had been necessary to demand silence and yet still barely hear the crying, now it was easily audible and becoming louder by the second. There was also the unpleasant realisation that more than one voice was crying.

  Corde blanched and made to run, but paused as the sound spread around them as quickly as a forest fire. They were being flanked. ‘Oh, my God.’

  Cabal, too, had given up hope of escaping on foot. His sword was already in his hand as he scanned the trees. ‘You know,’ he said, with a tone of mild distraction, ‘people keep saying that, but he never turns up.’

  Corde did not reply, but his sword was drawn in a moment, and he fell into a fighting stance that, to Cabal’s mixed surprise and relief, looked competent. Bose and Shadrach inspired less confidence, having drawn the curved daggers that had come with their costumes (Cabal could not bring himself to think of their clothing as anything other than fancy dress). They stood there, eyes wide, the largely ornamental daggers held as awkwardly as if they had just been drafted in from the street to murder the Duke of Clarence. Cabal expected little of them apart from acting as distractions to whatever was coming. With luck, they would be identified as the easiest targets and attacked first, giving Corde and himself a moment’s advantage.

  But the attack didn’t come immediately. ‘Back to back, gentlemen,’ said Cabal, tersely. ‘Cover all approaches. No, Shadrach on my left, Bose the right.’ This left Corde directly behind Cabal; it seemed better to have two weak 90-degree arcs in their defence than the uninterrupted 180-degree arc that would result from Shadrach and Bose standing together.

  ‘Come on,’ he heard Corde growl. ‘Show yourselves.’

  Cabal didn’t bother commenting upon how one should be careful what one wishes for, partly because it was rather trite, but mainly because they had come on and shown themselves.

  He heard Shadrach gasp, and Bose sob with rational concern.

  The things were not children – or, at least, not human children. They had cherubic faces and golden curls upon their alabaster pale brows, and lips as red as rose petals. Their compound eyes, however, went a lot of the way towards ruining the effect, as did the large chitinous bodies split into two tagmata in the same way as a spider, but with only six legs, much like an insect. The angelic little faces were mounted at the front of the cephalothorax, just as a true spider carries its seeing and biting apparatus. Unlike a true spider, however, the creatures made as ungodly a din as a kindergarten at feeding time. An unhappy simile, Cabal inwardly admitted.

  They crept out from between the trunks of the trees, and peered down from the boughs, each at least a yard long. A swift count gave Cabal a result of eleven, approximately ten more than he felt they could comfortably deal with. Perhaps, he thought, they would be lucky and the creatures would not be as formidable as they looked. Perhaps, and there was a degree of irrational optimism here, they would not even attack, but were just gathered around out of natural curiosity. Then one of the creatures let out a scream like burning cat, and leaped in a single effortless strike at Bose.

  Bose, to his credit, saw it coming. Bose, to his debit, reacted by moaning and fainting. The creature sailed through the space where he had been a moment before and crashed into Shadrach’s back, sending him sprawling with a shout. Two more darted out from the trees at the defenceless undertaker, but were met by Corde’s steel. He roared and whirled, hitting the first hard across the side closest to him, severing two legs in a spray of brown ichor and sending it rolling and shrieking miserably into its partner. This one scuttled quickly over the wounded monster only to be met by Corde’s second blow, delivered down and across. The creature slumped, its legs spasming madly as its baby head sailed across the clearing to strike a tree trunk with a wet thud.

  The creature on Shadrach’s back was far too excited by having a helpless victim to hand to pay any attention to the fates of its siblings. It gripped him fiercely by the shoulders, the barbed claws along the inner edges of its forelegs stabbing him painfully through his layers of clothing and making him cry out. Its mouth opened wide and a wet proboscis, tipped with a flexing rasp, slid smoothly out and towards the base of Shadrach’s skull. In a small part of a moment, the proboscis was joined by a second, but whereas the first was tubular and pulsingly organic, the second was flat, and steel. The creature was clearly baffled to find the tip of Cabal’s rapier driving out from between its eyes, but after a moment it seemed to conclude that it had been stabbed through the top of its skull where the face joined the carapace and the sword tip was merely exiting. In this, it was correct and died in a state of intellectual satisfaction, a nice enough way to go.

  Corde stamped down on the intersection between the body segments of the creature whose legs he had cut off and was rewarded with a satisfying squeal of pain that ended abruptly with a crunch of splintering chitin. He stepped back to his mark and fell once more into a ready position. ‘Eight to go,’ he called to Cabal.

  Cabal grunted in reply, secretly quite relieved that he had not got as far as fighting Corde earlier; it might not have gone as well as anticipated. Not that he felt that it had extended his life by very much; Bose and Shadrach’s limited usefulness in the fight had already been expended, which left Corde and himself to deal with the remaining spider-ant-baby things. The creatures seemed surprised with the speed by which three of their number had been dispatched and the remainde
r hung back, communicating with one another in a high cacophony of whines, screams, sobs and howls in a language that was both complex and uniquely irritating. The next attack, Cabal had no doubt, would be well co-ordinated and tactically sophisticated. He hefted his sword and wished once again that it was still a pistol.

  The assault would certainly come in the next few seconds, and when it did, Cabal and the others would die. Therefore, waiting was a poor decision. Any chance of survival depended on taking the initiative. It fell into two categories: attacking first, or escaping. Escape was clearly hopeless: even if they were somehow to break the cordon around them, they would still be stumbling around in this warren of a forest, an environment that the creatures knew well and were admirably adapted to. Therefore, the best chance was to combat them somehow. Sheer force of arms would probably fail, but perhaps a bluff might work. The creatures had a level of intelligence, it seemed and a language. If a species has speech, it can be lied to.

  These were the Dreamlands, after all. The place was littered with ancient sorceries and all that airy-fairy nonsense, Cabal reasoned. He was a magician of sorts, and even if his magic depended more on extensive laboratory time and a lot of glasswork than on waving staffs around and calling down damnation upon his enemies, the creatures were not to know that. He racked his mind for a suitable abjuration, quickly reaching down to pull his cane from the straps on his Gladstone. He levelled it at the nearest creature.