Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute jc-3-1

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Corde watched him with evident disapproval, but did not stop him. He only said, ‘The captain’s been good to us. He’s out there right now, fighting for his life.’

  Cabal finished stowing a heavy purse in his Gladstone, and said, ‘He will shortly be dead, and won’t care. Or he will have defeated the slavers and will be in a position to loot their ship, in which case the loss of this footling quantity of gold will be galling but hardly devastating. In either event, our need is greater than his.’ He paused as the ship shuddered, and grated against the pebbles of the harbour beach. ‘Ah-ha. Our cue to run away like cowards and thieves.’

  The great escape was miserable, wet and tiring. They trudged to freedom. Bose and Corde walked with their heads bowed, the better to ignore the torn sky and the wounded Moon. It seemed that lunar cities had decent fire-fighting arrangements, as the red dots grew fewer by the minute. Presumably even as the three men waded through the shallows by the sea wall, and marched with squelching steps up the mole, bloated white Moon toads in brass helmets were hosing down their predictably Cyclopean buildings. They would have to do it themselves, as it was hard to believe their slaves would be in any hurry to help. They would be standing by with space marshmallows on sticks, having the one and only good time they could expect as thralls of the toad things.

  Cabal kept his head up and disregarded the heavenly apocalypse as easily as more mundane folk might disregard an unremarkable cloud. He had seen inferno and tempest, and had not only looked into the abyss but the abyss had looked into him, and then made disparaging comments. Some charred troposphere and a smoke-damaged Moon were hardly worth a footnote.

  The guards in the watchtower were not of the same liver – should they have livers at all, which seemed unlikely – and were howling skywards with their facial tentacles in sinusoidal agitation. As a race, it seemed they were not used to suffering reverses, and would probably be sobbing into their beer analogue for many months to come.

  Cabal’s party followed the path around the outside of the wall, then stayed close to it until they came to a tumble of rocks that gave them cover to break away and head into the countryside. Even when they got a safe distance from the wall, however, they did not speak, Bose and Corde because they were subdued by what they had so recently experienced, and Cabal because he was Cabal and felt little need to jabber incontinently for the sake of conversation.

  It was only when they had walked for some hours that Corde broke the silence. ‘The expedition is a disaster,’ he said. ‘We have lost one of our number, and who knows what else we may have lost?’ He looked to the sky, but the rent in the atmosphere had healed with only a dispersed, jagged pink line to show it had ever been there, and even this was slowly dissipating.

  Cabal stopped walking and leaned against a dry-stone wall bordering a farmer’s field. ‘You mean Shadrach’s money?’

  ‘No! No, I do not!’ Corde was speechless with rage for a moment, then blurted, ‘I mean our minds, our very souls. Why did we ever come here?’

  ‘The Phobic Animus,’ said Bose, quietly, settling himself on a boulder by the road.

  ‘Yes, I . . . I know that, Bose. I don’t mean . . .’ Corde shook his head, tired and defeated. ‘We must go back.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Cabal.

  ‘You would,’ said Bose. Both Cabal and Corde looked at him with some surprise. Finding himself suddenly under observation, Bose couldn’t meet their eyes, so he addressed the turf at his feet instead. ‘You have made it very plain from the earliest stages of this venture that you thought us foolish and our quest pointless. I have no doubt that you’ve only stuck with us so far because of your own curiosity about the Dreamlands. We were foolish to leave the Silver Key in your hands, but I think . . . we all thought . . . that by your own lights you were honourable. Well, I release you from any remaining responsibilities. Take Mr Corde, and get back to the waking world. There is no use you both dying for a cause you do not believe in.’ He straightened his legs and slid off the boulder to land on his feet. He took a deep breath, and started walking again.

  ‘Wait, Bose. Wait!’ called Corde, to the little man’s back. ‘Where are you going?’

  Bose did not turn, but kept walking. ‘To the Island of Mormo, in the Cerenarian Sea. I shall find it, and the Phobic Animus, and then I shall try . . .’ He stopped walking. ‘I shall try very, very hard . . . to destroy it.’ He began walking again.

  They watched Bose walk on without them in silence for a long minute. ‘Hmm,’ said Cabal.

  ‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake,’ said Corde. Then he started running after Bose. ‘Bose! Mr Bose! Gardner! Wait!’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Cabal again, and walked after the pair of them.

  A hundred yards later he caught up with Corde and Bose, who were having a heated discussion. Bose was saying, ‘Shadrach died for this. I cannot just give up immediately afterwards, as if that counts for nothing. I do not weigh my life as worth more than his. I must go on, don’t you see?’

  ‘Damn you, Bose!’ It was hard to be sure if Corde was angrier with Bose or himself. ‘Damn you! We’ll all die in this misbegotten world if we don’t leave, can’t you see that?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t. Although I would be happier if Mr Cabal were to stay with us, or me, if you insist on returning.’

  ‘Me?’ said Cabal, intrigued. ‘Why me?’

  ‘You saved us all against the spider-ant-baby things, and against the black galleys. And without you we would never have known that our goal lies on Mormo.’

  ‘Hold hard,’ said Cabal, raising an admonishing finger. ‘I had nothing to do with what happened back there.’

  ‘Didn’t you? I’m not so sure, Mr Cabal. I saw the hand of Divine Providence in what happened. Perhaps not the divinity that we usually look to, but any port in a storm, eh?’

  Cabal’s face hardened; he had been trying hard to forget about his inadvertent calling down of Nyarlothotep in the Dark Wood in the irrational but fervent hope that if he forgot about it so would the god. Unfortunately, it seemed likely that Bose was correct. It was stretching coincidence a little far to believe that the sky had just decided to split open and the Moon to explode at that exact moment on a whim. It seemed that Cabal was still being monitored by a supernatural force that, for reasons that remained alien and indistinct, had taken an apparently benevolent interest in his activities. There seemed to be no reason for it – Nyarlothotep was a deity more than usually well disposed to incandescent levels of mindless terror. Why it would see fit to aid an expedition to destroy the well of all irrational fear was a mystery, and perhaps one that transcended the human mind’s ability to comprehend, even if it was explained very, very slowly with diagrams, models and glove puppets. Probably quite frightening glove puppets.

  ‘The . . . entity to which you are referring, Herr Bose, is notoriously fickle. It did not intervene in the nameless city.’

  ‘But that wooden monstrosity just fell over, didn’t it? What caused that?’ said Corde.

  Cabal looked at him in offended consternation. They had not spoken of that night again, except in the broadest terms, Holk’s death still throwing a pall upon events, but he had not realised that they thought the sinew-wood giant’s fall was due to natural, supernatural or otherwise non-Cabalian causes. ‘It just fell over,’ he said icily, ‘because I was on its shin, waggling a knife around inside its knee joint. I don’t suppose either of you noticed that, due to all the intense skulking you were doing at the time.’ This was slightly hypocritical of Cabal, who had done a great deal of skulking in his life, and was probably regarded as something of a master of the form among the skulking fraternity.

  Bose nodded thoughtfully, but Corde was stung. ‘Are you suggesting that we are cowards, Cabal?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Cabal. ‘I am stating it. Bose at least has the grace to admit it, by act if not by word. He has never pretended to be anything he is not. Apart from a magistrate,’ he conceded, gesturing at Bose’s judicial robes, ‘but that was r
ather thrust upon him by the Dreamlands. Reach for that sword, and I shall kill you where you stand.’

  For Corde’s hand had strayed to the hilt. It wavered there for a moment, then fell by his side.

  Once he was satisfied that Corde would not sully his discourse with any further murderous intentions, Cabal continued, ‘That, Herr Corde, was reasonable caution. Your behaviour in the presence of Ercusides’ great scarecrow was not. Any lucid, rational eye would quickly have discerned the thing’s nature and evolved a strategy for dealing with it, as I did. I required no external agencies to do so.’

  Yet as soon as he had said it he doubted it. He had not thought through every detail of that night, but now it occurred to him that there was a speck around which his deductions had been built, a few words of forewarning that had given him a head start on the truth. He thought of a whispering inhuman voice beneath a temple to a forgotten god in a city with no name: ‘Remember Captain Lochery.’

  He had focused purely on wondering how the ghoul had even known of the captain and that Cabal was acquainted with him. He had concluded that the ghouls’ unnerving ability to go almost anywhere and anywhen that amused them had been the cause of it, and that the ghoul was merely using the captain as an example of their wide-spanning intelligence, and as a warning to be careful. Now that he paused to consider his memories of the ensuing ratiocinations, however, he realised that the unusual nature of the captain’s leg had flickered through his mind. This, truly, had been the seed from which his deductions pertaining to the true nature of the mysterious wamp-killer had sprung, the moment he had clapped eyes upon the evidence of Ercusides’ exercises in arcane woodwork.

  This was a disturbing revelation in itself, and Cabal hushed Corde’s simmering outrage with an impatient flutter of his fingers and a pneumatic pffft of the type used for shooing off cats. Cabal needed to think, and he didn’t need a histrionic solicitor distracting him while he did it.

  The truly disturbing element, however, was the nature of the hint. It had been cryptic to the point of abstruseness, and not a reasonable bet for a hint to most people. For Cabal, and Cabal’s thought processes, however, it had been precise and exact. How could some cadaver-chewer have known that? Unless, and he did not enjoy the thought, the ghoul had not been a ghoul at all. Nyarlothotep famously had a thousand avatars, a thousand faces to present, a thousand masks to wear. This was only a figurative figure, however: Nyarlothotep in reality had far, far more. It did not stretch credibility in the slightest to suggest that the ghoul was one of them. If anyone could gauge a clue with such terrifying meticulousness, surely it had to be a god.

  Once one accepted in principle that their expedition was being protected by the Crawling Chaos (one of Nyarlothotep’s many names, along with others such as the Black Pharaoh, Ahtu, the Grey Man, Loki, the Child of Eyes, the Bloated Woman, Anansi, the Dweller in Darkness, the Smiling Killer, Tezcatlipoca, and Dave in Accounts), abandoning it became problematical. Nyarlothotep might just shrug and leave them to it, or he might take offence and then revenge. Given that Nyarlothotep’s revenge would likely be biblical in scale, Dadaist in commission, and cruel enough to make de Sade wince, not offending the god seemed very sensible.

  Cabal had many faults, several of which were also capital crimes, but he was in no wise indecisive. He shouldered the baldrick to which his Gladstone was attached, and started walking again. ‘Come along,’ he said. ‘I am not abandoning our quest, and therefore will not be finding a reciprocal gateway for the Silver Key. Without it, you are trapped here, Herr Corde, so I suggest you have little option but to accompany us.’

  Corde was furious, but still he did not reach for his sword. ‘Don’t I have any say in the matter?’

  Cabal stopped to look at him. ‘You have no say, but perhaps you do have a choice. Come or stay.’ He considered. ‘Yes, that covers all the possibilities.’ Cabal made to start walking again.

  ‘One day, Cabal, you will have your comeuppance.’

  ‘Is comeuppance some mealy-mouthed way of saying die? One day I shall die, yes, and given my profession, it will likely be sooner than later. But it will also likely be random and stupid and pointless. It is to war against the very irreversibility of such deaths that I do what I do. In all your days as a solicitor, Herr Corde, I doubt you even once pressed the war against death with a minute of your time or an iota of your energy. In real humanitarian terms, your campaign against the Phobic Animus is the most selfless and noble thing you have ever done or will ever do. Do not miss your chance to be useful.’

  If the logic convinced him, he did not nod. If the sentiments mollified him, he did not smile but, none the less, Corde followed, and the remaining 75 per cent of the Great Phobic Animus Hunt walked on.

  Just over two weeks later, Corde died. It was random and stupid and pointless.

  The icy atmosphere within the party had thawed a little, at least on Corde’s part. Cabal was capable of only glacial coldness and incandescent fury; convivial warmness was well beyond him except as an exercise in play-acting. They had made good progress to the Karthian Hills, and the ease of their passage via the kindness of passing caravans, both commercial and military, had given them the easiest leg of their adventures to date. They had bought supplies at cost from the rearguard baggage wagons of a column of húskarlar accompanying a king on royal progress around his lands before saying their goodbyes and climbing into the hills.

  The Karthian Hills were painfully bucolic and picturesque, as if planned by John Constable. Every view was striking, every weather condition heart-stopping, the light never anything less than blooming. It was like walking through an art gallery that contained only one piece, but one that surrounded the viewer and altered from one moment to the next, from one masterpiece to the next. As is usually the way in art galleries, they soon settled into a routine of largely ignoring it, but the transcendent beauty of their surroundings could not help but have a mellowing effect on them. Even Cabal found less to be sarcastic about, and so sank into a somewhat resentful quiescence, like a dormant volcano fondly remembering its last pyroclastic flow in which it had buried several hundred people, and now rather looking forward to its next.

  There were farms and orchards in the hills, and the people were friendly, refusing as often as not to take payment for the food they gave the travellers. Bose was able to shake off the recent horrors they had witnessed as easily as a young child might, and took to chattering to Corde, or to himself, or to Cabal, which was much the same as chattering to himself. Corde bore the empty conversation well, ignoring much of it, and responding briefly and thoughtfully when the subject touched upon something that interested him. They did not speak of Shadrach. He was gone, and they did not care to consider how that had happened, or the consequences in the waking world when they returned. It would indeed have been easier if only his spirit had entered the Dreamlands, for then his body would have simply died in its sleep and there would have been a coroner’s report of natural causes. Explaining a disappearance would probably turn out to be trickier.

  Instead, they liked to consider what the world would be like when the Phobic Animus was finally destroyed. Strangely, despite all their preparations beforehand, they had never truly been examined the actual results of a successful expedition in anything but the vaguest terms of a ‘golden future’. Now that they applied themselves to it, they were pleased and somewhat relieved that they could perceive no deleterious ramifications. Well, almost none.

  ‘Nobody will care to read ghost stories again,’ said Bose, as they walked. ‘Perhaps just for reasons of literary enjoyment, but certainly not to get the shivers because no one will believe in ghosts any more.’

  ‘That,’ said Cabal, in one of his rare utterances, ‘would be foolish. One should be cautious of ghosts, for they certainly exist.’ He flexed his shoulder and winced slightly as he said it.

  Typically, he would not expand upon the subject having dropped such a boulder into the pool of their conversation, so Corde and
Bose had to content themselves with telling one another ghost stories, both ‘true’ and fictional. Cabal sniffed disdainfully during some of these tales, and not during others, by which standard they came to understand which were most likely, given their taciturn companion’s experiences. By this method, they amused themselves to the tops of the Karthian Hills.

  The view from up there of the land ahead was less salubrious than that of the land behind. Off in the distance the rolling landscape grew less marked, and the colour drained from it by degrees until the verdant hills gave way to the pale brown sand dunes of the Cuppar-Nombo Desert. Nor was this shade of brown the usual golden brown of Earth’s more scenic deserts, but rather the bland light brown of cold café au lait, a tired, sad colour, too depressing even for hospital walls. All three men looked at it, and all three drew long breaths that they allowed to sigh out of them as if they were deflating. Why the founders of Golthoth had decided to build their city in such a vile environment when the beautiful Karthian Hills were so close was a mystery for the ages. Perhaps the land had been different then; perhaps the Karthian Hills had belonged to some enemy; perhaps the Golthothians really, really liked nondescript brown sand.

  Whatever the case, there was a strong sense that their pleasant interlude was drawing to a close, so they settled down to have possibly their last meal without sand in it for a while. They opened their jars and unwrapped their linen parcels, made a picnic of sorts upon the grassy swathe, and chatted about this and that as they ignored the brown expanse and ate their bread, cheese and salted meat.

  They had just been discussing the careers that would abruptly wither away once fear was removed (fortune-telling, several branches of insurance sales, and a large part of the Stock Exchange, the latter principally comprised of fiscal pirates on a monetary sea kept profitably choppy by groundless panic and thick-pated optimism; Cabal asked if there was an equivalent form of the Phobic Animus that encouraged such wide-eyed hopefulness, and if so, would they be hunting this cosmic Pollyanna next?), when Corde noticed that the slice of meat he had just that moment arranged upon a cob of bread was no longer there.