‘But I won’t want to.’
‘You are so sorry for yourself. All your power and knowledge and books, and you are sorry for yourself. We have heard so much about Johannes Cabal. A clever man. A clever man. But sorry for yourself.’
Unused to being chastised, least of all by a creature that used crypts and tombs as All You Can Eat buffets, Cabal snapped, ‘The process is irreversible. Everybody knows that.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said the leader, nodding understandingly. ‘Everybody.’
‘Yes. Everybody. Well, except for Culpins, but his theory of countermorphic residual transfiguration pertained only to lycanthropes, where the process is essentially reversible in any event, not this sort of transformation where, once the new morphic form is achieved, it is retained.’
‘Achieved,’ said the leader, nodding. It looked off into the cavern, apparently already bored with the conversation. ‘Retained.’
‘Exactly so,’ said Cabal. It was nice to use his intellect. It was like looking over the old mansion he had grown up in before being permanently evicted and spending the rest of his life in a small studio flat. ‘Once the full morphotypical state has been . . .’ He paused. ‘The destination is final, but the journey . . .’ He leaped to his feet, and wobbled slightly. His knees were midway through the transformation of bending backwards to bending forwards, and currently bent both ways, which was good for yoga and bad for almost everything else.
‘But the journey may be aborted! Quickly! Tell me! How much longer before I am entirely a ghoul? Days? Weeks? Months?’
The leader looked sideways at him. ‘You do not like being a ghoul?’
‘No. I don’t. No insult intended, but I have plans, and eating people for eternity isn’t among them.’
The leader looked at him fully. Then it grinned the maddog grin that ghouls do so well, exposing every fang it had. ‘That is fine, and we are not insulted. You are Johannes Cabal.’ It gestured at the others. ‘We have enough numbers. There are lots of ghouls, but only one Johannes Cabal. You have at least six weeks, Johannes Cabal. At most, eight.’
Cabal’s initial enthusiasm abated a little in the face of what he needed to do, and the time in which he had to do it. ‘A stabiliser elixir won’t be easy to synthesise. I’ll need a laboratory, chemical reagents, books.’
The leader made a dismissive gesture with a paw. ‘We steal bodies. My people, we have stolen three dead popes. The Vatican was very cross. Glass things, chemicals, books, they will be no trouble. Much easier than dead popes.’
‘Why on Earth did you steal three dead popes?’ asked Cabal.
‘First, to make the Vatican very cross. That was funny. Second reason, delicious.’
Considering the ghouls’ bad reputation, Cabal had found them astonishingly affable creatures: when the leader gathered them together to tell them that Cabal was going to attempt to stop his own transformation, they were not insulted, and when it called upon them to help in any way possible, they were happy to do so. If his life had been a little different, Cabal concluded, being a ghoul really wasn’t so bad. While they were intellectually stunted, at least by his standards, their aesthetic senses went unblunted. He had discovered one ghoul painting a study of a London Tube station, in which ghouls watched the inattentive commuters on the platform from the shadows of the tunnel. The execution was exquisite, even if the subject matter was not. As a race they were mutually supportive and sanguine in their outlook. Previously Cabal had always reckoned them to be rivals in his graveyard harvests, nuisances at best, dangers at worst. Now, however, he saw them for what they were, stoic opportunists, and he respected them for it. Should his efforts over the next few weeks prove successful, he would be far more tolerant of their activities, and never shoot one again. Unless really irked.
First, it was necessary to possess a copy of the thesis, published to universal dismay by Erast Culpins, renowned lycanthropologist, son of a Russian émigré and a Kentish haberdasher, and now a permanent patient of Brichester Asylum. This the ghouls stole, in an excess of mischief, from the Vatican’s very own Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Apparently, the theft made the Vatican ‘cross’. Cabal didn’t care if it made it livid, just so long as he had a copy.
Flicking as quickly as his increasingly long and distressingly rubbery fingers could manage it, Cabal disregarded the other artefacts of Culpins’s peculiar genius – consisting of crude pictures of women bathing amid unnecessarily Byzantine plumbing – and concentrated on the fragmentary references to the metamorphic process. Culpins’s terminology was imprecise and as mutable as his subject, but over the period of fifteen precious days, Cabal succeeded at shaking out the seed of the idea. On the sixteenth day, Cabal drew up a shopping list, and the ghouls were dispatched to gather the items therein requested. They went joyfully, apparently enjoying some petty larceny in their lives to make a change from the drudgery of workaday grave robbing.
There was a rash of thefts not only across the Earth, but across its history, and across the histories of other Earths and counter-Earths, and Earths that never should have been, and Earths that never shall be, as the ghouls happily voyaged through strange dimensions to play in Cabal’s scavenger hunt. They came back, eventually, with many of the things he had requested, some things similar to those requested, and quite a lot of things they had just taken a shine to in passing.
‘Another dead pope,’ said Cabal, to one such returnee. He peered into the sack again and sighed. ‘Though this one shows signs that he wasn’t dead before he was folded up and put in here. I imagine the Vatican was quite cross about this, was it?’ To which the ghoul nodded happily.
As Cabal worked at putting together a laboratory down in the ghoulish caverns, he would sometimes turn to find the ghoul leader there, hunkered down in the shadows, watching his progress in silence. Cabal had noted that the leader was also changing in strange ways, his speech becoming simpler and more like that of the others in the pack. This, he gathered, was because he had once been a man of great intellect himself, but that the steady erosion of his humanity had reached even this last bastion as inexorably as an incoming tide. The ghoul didn’t seem to be so very concerned about it, so Cabal never broached the subject.
‘It’s coming along,’ Cabal told him. ‘I should be able to start experimentation soon.’ He paused in unpacking a condenser tube from its box, stolen from the chemistry lab of a small boys’ public school in Hampshire, and turned to the leader. ‘I am appreciative of all your help in this enterprise, sir, but I must know: why exactly are you doing so?’
The ghoul lifted its long index finger, a finger graced with too many joints to be seemly, and counted, ‘One thing. Johannes Cabal is necromancer. Necromancers get respect from gravefolk. From ghouls. Johannes Cabal needs help, Johannes Cabal gets help. Two things. If Johannes Cabal is unhappy as gravefolk, he should not be gravefolk. Three things. Stealing is fun.’
Cabal nodded, satisfied. He had certainly heard less worthwhile reasons given to commit the most appalling crimes in the past. A willingness to help and a raison d’être for a bit of racial kleptomania were better than most.
The apparatus was constructed rapidly, though some of the more unconventional reagents intended for its retorts took longer to procure. One in particular required special care, and Cabal led a party of ghouls to help him acquire it. He returned sombre and quiet, bearing the skeletal tip of a left-hand little finger. ‘That grave remains sacrosanct,’ he told the leader. ‘Spread the word among the gravefolk: if any break into it – man or ghoul – they will regret it.’ He held up the small bone and regarded it with melancholy. ‘Apart from me, obviously.’
The leader did not need to enquire why, for it had already been informed that the gravestone above the coffin they had so respectfully robbed bore the words,
Gottfried Cabal. Survived by his wife Liese, and son Johannes, gone to join his elder sonHorst in God’s Grace.REQUISCAT IN PACE.
Instead it watched Cabal painstakingly clean the bone
and then carefully powder exactly as much as he needed before placing the remainder in a fresh test-tube, sealing it and stowing it in his Gladstone bag.
Cabal’s motivation was high: every day he found it a little harder to remember things or to carry out mental calculations. He was heading towards average human intelligence, and he found the experience stifling and claustrophobic. On the one hand it appalled him that people were content to live with such small intellects, although on the other it went a long way to explaining so many things about society that otherwise defied belief. At least the ghouls seemed as highly motivated as he: he had only to suggest that an item might be useful for a gang to run off and return anywhere from hours to a couple of days later with it in paw. That at least was one less thing to worry about, but the narrow window of opportunity the elixir presented and the impossibility of securing further supplies of some of the reagents needed meant that he had little latitude for supporting experimentation. The few tests he was able to conduct were highly encouraging – it seemed that Culpins’s obsessions with werewolves, plumbing and naked ladies had actually borne fruit – but there could only be a single acid test, and as much as he wanted to hold it off until he could be sure he was doing the right thing, its time was growing inexorably closer.
At last, Johannes Cabal ran out of excuses for himself. Time was short, the principles of his work were already beginning to escape him, and he knew he must act now or for ever be trapped in the Stygian places beneath the Earth and its close neighbours in dream and out of it. He carried out the last reactions, filtered away an unnecessary precipitate, added another reagent drop-wise until the contents of his test-tube went from sepia to colourless and clear. He added the powdered bone, marking the elixir with a trace of his own former humanity, and shook it vigorously for ten minutes until the bone had entirely dissolved. Then he neutralised the remaining solution, and distilled it. He was left with perhaps a fluid ounce of clear, slightly oily liquid, which he gathered in a small test-tube. He allowed it to cool, and then stoppered it. It was so small, little more than an ampoule, yet everything rested upon it. He gathered his faculties, arose from his laboratory stool – obligingly stolen from a Brazilian university by the ghouls – and went out into the main cavern.
He stood before them, straining to stand upright as a man stood, instead of the slight crouch that the ghoul form encouraged, and held up the elixir. ‘Friends,’ he meeped, and it was true that he had rarely felt so friendly towards anybody or anything. ‘Friends, I come before you today to thank you for your aid in my work.’ The ghouls were already scampering over on all fours to be close and catch his every word. ‘This transformation clearly suits many of you, and is, I think, a more honourable and honest career than, say, the judiciary. It is not, however, a career suited to everyone.’ Cabal could see the ghoul leader standing nearby, nodding slightly in silent appreciation of these sentiments. ‘I have found my stay with you highly educational, and a wide expansion of my horizons, and as I have come to know the gravefolk, I have also come to understand you, and to respect and appreciate you. When I return to the world above, I will never forget you. Indeed, I believe that we may combine our forces in many mutually advantageous ways.’ Cabal had learned to see expression and emotion in the muzzled grey rubbery faces, and he could see sadness there now. They were sad to see him go, he knew, and probably sad that all the justified thieving had to stop. Despite himself, he felt quite fond of them.
‘Now?’ asked one to his right.
‘Well, let me get home first, and then . . .’ began Cabal, but the ghoul was not speaking to him.
‘Now,’ said the leader, quietly but firmly.
Suddenly Cabal was being held down, his arms and legs pinioned. ‘What?’ he shouted. ‘What are you doing?’ He thrashed in their grip, but there were too many of them, and they were far too strong. Then he felt his paw being gently but inexorably forced open. He could only swear and damn them as the elixir was taken from him. ‘No! Get off me, you verdammt animals! It’s no use to you! It’s too late for you!’
He fought until he was exhausted and weeping with anger and fear of his certain future. The ghouls continued to keep him still as their leader stood before him. He held up the small glass tube that held all Cabal’s hopes and said, ‘I am sorry, Johannes Cabal. I am sorry as you will be sorry, too. But not yet.’
‘It’s useless to you,’ rasped Cabal, through a larynx grown unused to human speech. ‘You cannot use it. You are fully transformed.’
‘Yes. Full transformation. Sorry again. I lied.’
Cabal looked up suddenly at him. ‘You did what?’
‘Body change, yes, six . . . eight weeks. Mind change, much longer.’ Still looking thoughtfully at the elixir in its right paw, it batted self-referentially at itself with its left. ‘Mind finally going but not gone yet. Not too late for me.’ He looked at Cabal. ‘Long as you fight it, not too late for you either.’
‘If you take that away from me,’ said Cabal looking at the test-tube, ‘then it is too late for me.’
‘No,’ said the leader. ‘You do not understand yet. You will understand.’ It started to turn away and paused, looking back guiltily at Cabal. ‘I am sorry, Johannes Cabal. Wish there was other way.’ And suddenly it was off at a bound, running into one of the tunnels and, from there, to anywhere and anytime.
‘No!’ Cabal called weakly after it. ‘It won’t work for you. You don’t understand. It wasn’t formulated for you, it isn’t keyed to you. Please. Come back.’
The leader did not, and the other ghouls held Cabal prisoner until pursuit became hopeless. Then they released him, and slunk away, ashamed.
Cabal sat alone, unable to take in the enormity of what had just happened to him. No, that isn’t quite correct. Cabal was a man who had bandied words with gods and devils, and had yet to experience anything of sufficient enormity to prevent him functioning. It wasn’t the scale of the disaster that distressed him so, vast though it was. It was the irrationality of it. The ghouls might be childlike sometimes, but they were no fools, their leader least of all. Cabal had made no secret of the elixir’s specificity, so what did the ghoul leader hope to gain? To crush Cabal’s spirit? Possibly, but everybody – everything – had seemed almost as upset about it as he did. He tried to visualise the ghoul leader stopping in some lightless tunnel to open the phial and gulp down the contents, waiting for several minutes while nothing at all happened, then looking faintly put out. Cabal could not understand it. It made no sense at all.
Until the slowing mechanisms of his mind stumbled upon an idea, and he considered it and found it was not wanting in any respect, and realised that it was therefore likely enough to be the truth. He sat frozen by the idea as its ramifications rippled out and illuminated his ignorance like a flare down a pit. It was at first breathtaking, and his breath was duly taken. Then he started to laugh. It was an open, full-throated laugh, with an air of relief so strong in it that it occasionally tended a little to hysteria, but was reined back whenever it did so. It was an honest laugh, and it was the laughter of a man, not that of a ghoul.
When finally he was able to bring it under control and it quietened to sobbed chuckles, he said, loudly enough that anyone nearby would hear it, ‘Oh, I won’t forget. I won’t forget what I am. I will never forget who I am.’ Then he stood and bellowed into the empty darkness. ‘I am Johannes Cabal! Necromancer! Mildly infamous in some quarters! Rise up, ghouls, and come to me! There is work to be done! There are preparations to be made!’
From every corner, every tunnel they crept and slunk and crawled and scampered to form a great mass of a corpse-eating audience before him. They were no longer filled with guilt and regret at what they had done, because they knew he now understood. They grinned their mad-dog grins, happy again.
The ghoul leader bounded through blackness, the curving rocky tunnel flaming in smudged colours to his eyes. It wasn’t perfect sight – light was required for that – but it was substantially better
than running into walls and off precipices. He had wondered how it worked for some time, but had known that that was beyond his ability to deduce. Still, that would be changing shortly, just as soon as he drank the stolen elixir. He felt no guilt at its theft. Why should he? He knew that Cabal would soon understand his reasons, then come to regard his new ghoulish existence not as a malign curse but as the great opportunity it truly was.
It turned a corner, scurried across a nexus in the great deep darkness frequented by the fearsome gugs, and darted into a new narrow tunnel that had been melted through the rock by a juvenile cthonian twenty millennia before. The ghoul knew the giant worm-like cthonian in question, at least by repute; it was now a young adult of truculent demeanour and a burden to all seven of its parents. But the ghoul had more important matters to concentrate on today than the soap opera lives of the selfish and invertebrate.
It paused, sensing the eddies in time that surged in those strange places as gentle as breezes. The hackles of its neck arose and it knew it was close, sniffing the air for a scent of a particular time and space. The creatures in those tenebrous extents wandered up and down the years, like cows in a field, unaware and uncaring, but the ghouls understood instinctively the opportunities and dangers since they were among the few who ever ventured into the worlds that abutted the Dreamlands, and among the even fewer who cared.
Soon the scent of fresh air would have been apparent even to a sense of smell less perceptive than a ghoul’s. The ghoul leader stopped, and looked back as if half expecting pursuit, but the tunnel was empty except for himself and an explosion of roots that entered the space from above. The ghoul searched roughly within them, quickly locating a hollow from which it withdrew a brown-paper parcel, packaged as incompetently as only a ghoul or a schoolboy could manage. It reached further into the hollow and pulled out Cabal’s Gladstone bag and cane, both stolen only hours before while Cabal’s attention had been on the latter stages of the elixir synthesis. Stolen by subordinate ghouls, hidden here at their leader’s command.
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