Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute jc-3-1

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘What a ridiculous waste of time,’ said Cabal, trying to think of a verbal barb sufficiently sharp to sting even an immortal, cosmically puissant being. It was an endeavour doomed to failure.

  ‘Not for me,’ said Bose. ‘Not a second has passed for me. Or for you, if we’re being pedantic, and I know how much you enjoy your pedantry. Subjective time doesn’t matter a jot, does it, old man? Well, I say old man but, of course, not as old a man as you thought.’

  Bose’s complacency was such that it took a gargantuan effort of Cabal’s will not to stride over to him and slap him as the impertinent schoolboy he was affecting. That would, however, have provided only momentary satisfaction before Bose – it was so hard to think of him as Nyarlothotep – retaliated in some profoundly horrible though topographically challenging way.

  ‘When I’m not running billets doux between my employers, Johannes, I deal in terror, and chaos, and madness primarily. Death also, but that’s just a hobby, really. Sometimes you want something with a little piquancy, though, and despair does it for me. You say what I have shown you is a ridiculous waste of time, but I have not wasted a moment. What you should be realising is that your life up to now has been a ridiculous waste of time. Your goal is unachievable. You will die in misery just as you saw.’

  ‘I will not die in a retirement home,’ said Cabal, ‘surrounded by strangers. Your vision was wrong on that count.’

  ‘Details, details.’ Bose curled his lower lip and wafted his fingers about. Cabal hoped this was an honest response and not a piece of play-acting to counter his own. He dared not test Bose’s knowledge of what Cabal had experienced beyond this without drawing his attention unduly. It would have to do, and he would base his plans on the presumption that the details of the vision were his and his alone. He did this with a degree of trepidation. Nyarlothotep was the most psychologically human of the Old Ones, but the gap in intellects dwarfed that between, say, a border collie and Leonardo da Vinci. Galling though it might be to him, Cabal’s best hope was that Nyarlothotep could not think down to his level.

  Bose’s next comment, however, scuppered at least part of that hope. ‘I know what you’re thinking, though, Mr Cabal,’ he said, with an inscrutable smile. ‘You’re thinking that I’ve actually done you a big favour. I’ve saved you decades in research by letting you live through them in the blink of an eye, and that you can just go home and reproduce the latter stages of your experiments.’

  Cabal’s face was inexpressive, but inwardly he winced. That was exactly what he had been hoping. He was also hoping that this reality was the one he thought it was, and Nyarlothotep had not packed him away into a Chinese puzzle box of nested realities interconnected in unexpected ways from which he would never escape. It was a possibility, and the Dreamlands were the ideal environment in which to make it work.

  ‘The secret you seek is as simple as ABC,’ said Bose, demonstrating godly understatement. ‘It was equally simple to concoct a likely but ultimately fallacious path of research and set you off on it, substituting the happy result that you experienced. It was a happy result, wasn’t it? You must have wept tears of joy.’

  ‘As practical jokes go . . .’

  ‘My whoopee cushion is to die for,’ said Bose. He smiled wistfully. ‘Horribly. Oh, I meant to ask, your brother, was he there?’

  Cabal felt anger flare and took a moment to damp it down again. ‘My brother is dead.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Bose. ‘Running around, drinking blood dead. I’ve heard of that. I may even have invented it.’

  ‘No, not undeath. Not any more. I mean dead. Utterly irrevocably dead.’

  ‘Really?’ Bose rubbed his chin in contemplation. ‘Well, I suppose the line between undeath and death is crossed rather easily, one way or the other. Very well, no brother. Any other family members to haunt your conscience?’

  Cabal could feel his anger squirming its way loose of the leash, a development that probably would not go well for him in the present circumstance.

  ‘I refuse to rise to your childish taunts,’ he said stiffly. ‘You’ve had your fun. I’m going now.’

  ‘Hmm? Oh, yes. Of course. You must do as you see fit. I suppose I should crack on myself. Lots of little errands to run and chores to do that have been mounting up while I’ve been playing with you and those other two animals. Azathoth will want the newspaper reading to him, and Shub-Niggurath always wants help changing the nappies.’

  ‘I’m sure the epithet mother of a thousand young is only metaphorical.’ Cabal paused to consider. ‘At least, I think it is only metaphorical.’

  ‘Oh, don’t I wish,’ said Bose, and sighed. He stirred himself on his throne and sat up. ‘Well, no time for dawdling. You had better see yourself out. I’m bored with being an inoffensive solicitor so I’m going to put on something a little less coherent that will probably shatter your sanity if you look upon it.’

  ‘How exactly do I get off this island?’ asked Cabal.

  Bose’s last few friendly affectations faded away and he looked stonily at Cabal. ‘I wasn’t joking about your sanity,’ he said, in a gravelly voice that no longer sounded much like Bose or, indeed, much like any human. It sounded just like gravel might talk.

  There seemed little more to be said. Cabal nodded curtly, turned on his heel and walked out with dignity, while all the time being unable to shake the thought that his exit looked no more decorous to Nyarlothotep than a cockroach attempting a dignified scuttle. As he climbed the corridor towards the crevasse-edge chamber, he could hear something particularly disturbing happening behind him, something that made wet noises, ripping noises and other sounds he could not categorise but which he suspected were generated by happenings neither common nor comprehensible to a mere mortal such as he. Curiosity is one thing, but there comes a point when a wise man sees all the dead cats lying around the place and thinks, I’ll just get along fine without that particular experience. Cabal hastened his step.

  The sunlight was harsh after the subdued illumination of the ‘Phobic Animus’ chamber, and Cabal flicked his blue-glass spectacles out of his pocket instinctively and put them on quickly. He walked down the zigzag path, and found a boulder to perch upon at the bottom. He would risk re-entering the cave again the next day, by which time even the most sluggardly of multidimensional creatures should have had ample opportunity to change form and leave. He doubted there was much of use in there, but all it would cost him was time and that, at least, he had plenty of.

  He cast his mind back to his early musings on escaping the island and saw little to change his opinion as to the difficulty of the endeavour. He tried to recall if there was anything useful he might gather from a childhood reading of Robinson Crusoe. As far as he could remember, the trick was to avoid being eaten by cannibals, patronise anybody one might save from said cannibals (‘Since today is Friday, I shall call you . . . Man Friday!’; ‘I do have a name, you know. Just because you can’t pronounce it . . .’; ‘Be quiet! I haven’t taught you English yet’), and then cunningly do nothing very useful for years until ftrangely deliver’d by PYRATES. No, that would never do. The local PYRATES were likely to be as bad as cannibals, and that was on the assumption that they weren’t actually cannibals themselves. It was hard to believe, but Cabal had the distinct impression that Daniel Defoe had let him down.

  He sat and watched the sun settle slowly towards the western horizon off to his left. Before him was a vast expanse of ocean without a hint of distant land. Once he thought he saw an island, but it grew closer and, before it finally submerged, he realised that it was actually a sea monster, approximately the size of Rutland. It was a memorable sight, but not one he felt improved him or his situation.

  As the sun started to dip below the water, crabs began to populate the beach. In common with so much in the Dremlands, they couldn’t simply be just like earthly crabs. These specimens had bodies roughly the size of dinner plates, their chitinous armour coloured a dismal brown-orange, puckered like warmed celluloid.
They had four eyes, two mounted on stalks in a decent crably way, but the others were large and human-like, peering out of round openings in the front seam of the carapace between the upper and lower parts. These eyes, occasionally moistened with a meniscus that slid back and forth, looked permanently startled and cautious, but Cabal knew that was just an effect of their setting and nothing to do with their owners’ actual dispositions. As he had no desire to be pincered to pieces by an army of startled-looking crabs in the early hours, he retired to the cave entrance, and blocked off the path with rocks. He hoped the crabs weren’t substantially more intelligent than they looked, and settled down for a miserable night’s sleep in the sandy cave mouth.

  Next morning he discovered some useful information about the crabs (that they had probably intended to eat him if they could, but that their rapacious appetites fortunately far outstripped their intelligence), and breakfast (there was a small pile of crabs lying on their backs beneath the cave mouth that had fallen there while trying to negotiate Cabal’s rock blockade. They were still alive and, if anything, looking more startled than usual). He cracked them open with a sharp stone, which startled them still further, and cooked them on a fire lit with one of his precious remaining matches.

  He decided that he would keep the fire going as long as he could, and start supplementary fires elsewhere. He had no idea how long it might take to get off the island, or if he ever would, and permanent fires seemed like useful things to have. He might get lucky and find a supply of flint, but he probably wouldn’t, and the whole idea of rubbing sticks together seemed very hit and miss. The smoke from the fire might also attract the attention of passing ships, should there be any, bearing in mind Mormo’s reputation for obscurity. Admittedly, given the Dreamland’s tendency towards the dramatic, should any ship come to the island it would probably be full of cannibalistic pirates, piratical cannibals, Jehovah’s Witnesses or similar. That was acceptable, however. He was sure they could come to some arrangement that didn’t involve any unpleasantness. Any unpleasantness to himself, at any rate.

  Somewhere around midday, Cabal re-entered the caves and made his way with no great enthusiasm to the throne room. There was no self-proclaimed Phobic Animus in residence, and Cabal presumed that he was no longer of interest and Nyarlothotep was off elsewhere, doing incoherent alien things, incomprehensible to anybody who couldn’t think in more than eleven or twelve dimensions. Somewhere between the realities floated a god’s ‘To do’ list with the name Johannes Cabal firmly ticked off. He did not know whether to feel insulted or relieved that he was no longer a person of interest, and settled on relieved, although he would have been still more relieved to have been put somewhere more convenient than Mormo at the end of Nyarlothotep’s pitiless little game.

  Cabal sat upon the throne to think, and presently sprawled upon it for comfort, incidentally and unselfconsciously mimicking Bose’s attitudes of the previous day. In the first instance, he decided, it would be necessary thoroughly to explore Mormo to discover what it contained and then to make plans based on whatever resources were revealed. His options seemed to coalesce into a simple choice between making his home there and hoping for rescue, or building a vessel and taking his chances with the sea. The latter course was by far the more dangerous, but also the least maddening. The very thought of sitting around and feeling his life frittering away was abominable. No, unless his survey of the island turned up something unexpectedly useful, such as a marina on the north shore or even an isthmus to a mainland, then he would put together some sort of boat and bet his life on it neither falling apart nor being swallowed by Moby-Rutland. His mind made up, he went out to see what wonders the beaches and wooded slopes of Mormo might conceal.

  The woods contained trees and the beaches contained sand and, occasionally, large crabs that seemed astonished by their own vicious aggression. It was a disappointing exploration, but Cabal did not begrudge the three days it took to circumnavigate the coast and to examine much of the forest and look up the open upper slopes of the rocky island heart. Food, at least, was not too uncommon. Aside from the vicious but splendidly stupid crabs, there were coconut palms, something like papayas and breadfruit groves, and even a couple of families of wild pigs that avoided him as carefully as he avoided them. It was good to know that they were there, though, should he ever decide the meat part of his diet was becoming tediously crab-orientated. His survey completed, he arrived back at the cave and considered the practicalities of his next move. He had searched the outer part of the island, true, but that still left the inner. The great crack in the throne room’s antechamber might lead somewhere, and required exploration. A stone tossed experimentally into the void went a long while before a distant clatter of impact arrived back at Cabal’s ears. Assuming the laws of physics were more or less the same as in the mundane world, and making an educated guess as to the effect of air resistance, he gauged a drop of somewhere between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty feet. That was a long way to climb in near darkness and there were few handholds, from what he could see close by the upper reaches. He needed a rope and, he realised, he had the necessary elements to make one.

  Coconut rope requires two things above all others: a lot of coconuts and a lot of time. He distantly remembered reading once how such rope was made, and knew that simply making the white coir fibre he needed would take the best part of a year, assuming that he was lucky with the current stage of the coconut’s growth cycle. Cabal considered this, and decided that it would be a last resort if he could not find a more immediate alternative. The obvious one was to use jungle creepers, of which he had noted several varieties on his sortie.

  An expedition specifically to investigate them returned with the results that one was covered with tiny thorns, another had the tensile strength of uncooked bread dough, a third was a fortuitously mild-tempered snake, and a fourth felt like weathered electrical cable. Of this last he harvested as much as he could find and dragged it back to the cave, leaving strange tendrilled tracks in the sand behind him.

  It was slow, tedious work, and Cabal’s mind wandered as he plaited the creepers into lengths of makeshift rope that he would tie or splice together when the time came. He thought of the future Nyarlothotep had shown him, of himself as an old man, and she still as young as when it had all begun. He remembered the pity in her face when he had said his last goodbye to her, the walk back to the house, his ageing knees, ankles and hips complaining. He remembered the taste of the gun in his mouth.

  A strange flicker appeared at the corner of Cabal’s mouth. An uninvolved and disinterested observer might have thought it was a twitch of amusement, a ghost of a smile. To anyone who knew Cabal, however, that was clearly nonsense. Unless Nyarlothotep, for all his vast intelligence, for all his wiles and experience, truly was not ever able fully to understand the shadows and light within the human heart. Unless Nyarlothotep had somehow missed a nuance in his dealings with Cabal that he simply could not comprehend. Unless Cabal had somehow pulled the wool over a god’s eyes.

  But no. That was not the case.

  In truth, Cabal had pulled fully two layers of wool over a god’s eyes.

  The great problem with being a trickster god or, as in Nyarlothotep’s case, the trickster god, was that anyone who deals with one from a position of knowing that one is a trickster is necessarily expecting to be tricked. The true trick that had been played upon Cabal was of such passing subtlety and arcane significance that, apart from the waste of time it constituted, he didn’t mind greatly. His main intentions when agreeing to accompany the Fear Institute expedition had been to gain the Silver Key, and to reconnoitre the Dreamlands, and he had achieved both of these aims. He had never been convinced by the Institute’s claim that such an entity as the Phobic Animus actually existed, and become increasingly cynical as clues and happenstance led them on a path that had been obscure to all others previously. Where others had paranoia, Cabal had a sense of self-preservation that bordered on the supernatural; it
gathered every inconformity, every non-sequitur, every coincidence, and built deductions from them, as others might build models of the Eiffel Tower from discarded matches. Every such theoretical construct was measured against the metric of likelihood, and where it fell short, it was ignored for the time being.

  On entering the Dreamlands Cabal had unconsciously lowered this metric, and it had served him well. Where the others had disregarded their unexpected appearance in the Dark Wood as some sort of Wonderland experience to be accepted without question, Cabal had filed it away under Suspicious Occurrences, and had been adding to the file ever since. Bose’s great revelation had, therefore, been anticipated. This much has already been stated, but Cabal’s guard against deceit was not lowered when Bose’s true colours had been unfurled. So, when Bose – Nyarlothotep – had so obligingly given him the basic principle of perfect resurrection, he was already deeply suspicious. As has famously been noted, ‘There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.’ Thus, he had regarded Nyarlothotep’s great banquet with particular caution.

  When Cabal had first embarked upon the quest for the Phobic Animus – this most boojumish of Snarks – he had naturally considered where he might be most vulnerable to its tenebrous wiles. Physical injury and pain he regarded as unpleasant, but commonplace. Unless one lived one’s life wrapped in kapok and under sedation, then injury and pain were certainties to be expected and dealt with rationally and promptly. He did not look forward to them, but neither did he fear them. He spent no time at all considering the more fanciful phobias: a man who is used to facing down the walking dead and battling ghosts as part of his job description is unlikely to be utterly unmanned by the sight of ducks or the sound of whistling. This left the quieter internal fears. The psychic cancers of doubt.

  Among these Cabal’s greatest was failure, but it was a clear and obvious one and he had long since armoured his heart against it. If ultimately he failed, then there was little he could do about it. Sometimes it still tormented him, but no great endeavour goes without the possibility of its coming to naught, a truism that no longer galled him as much as it might.