“Just do what you’re going to do and leave the contract here.” Cabal frowned. “But then it doesn’t count against the hundred.” Horst rested his chin in his hand and looked at his brother. He’d never dreamt that his brother could be so obtuse. “That’s the point,” he explained.
Cabal looked at Horst as if he were mad. “Then there is no point.” He clapped his hat on and left, slamming the door behind him.
Horst looked at the door for a very long moment, then glanced over at the hourglass. The time was all but gone: a few grains of inestimably fine sand remained in the top bulb. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly to himself. “I’m more sorry than you will ever know.”
* * *
Cabal arrived at the police station and made enquiries. He was sorely distressed that some poor woman — he managed to avoid saying “soul” at the last moment — had done such a terrible, terrible thing while the balance of her mind was disturbed. It seemed that the visit to the carnival had somehow provided, all unwittingly, the impetus for her psychosis, and — while he naturally couldn’t accept any liability — he really wanted to help any way that he could. He had to be quite insistent before he was allowed to see her. He was quite sure that Horst could just have walked straight in and they’d have fallen over themselves to make him a cup of tea. Finally, with heavy hints that he would be paying her legal expenses, he was allowed in alone.
“Well, then,” he said finally, sitting down across a plain, square table from her. “This is a sticky mess you’ve got yourself into.” She looked at him miserably, her eyes red from crying.
“I’m afraid the authorities are going to treat you very harshly for this. You probably already realise that.” She nodded and looked in her lap, where she pulled and worried a handkerchief endlessly.
“They’ll have told you that there is no machine like the one you thought you saw at my carnival, hmmm?” She gave no response. “‘The Mother’s Escape,’ I think it was.”
She stopped fidgeting. She looked sharply at him.
“It was there all right. I got rid of it the moment you walked out of the arcade. I’m sorry to say it was the most ruthless piece of entrapment I have ever been forced to commit. Yes, forced. You see, I really would be very appreciative if you would sign something for me. If you do so, you have my word that I’ll reverse what has happened. If you don’t, well, you’re obviously going to Hell anyway. If you don’t sign, the torment will start before death with a life sentence. I understand child-killers have rather a miserable time of it.”
While he’d been talking, he’d allowed his gaze to wander around the room: the barred window, the institutional green paint on the walls, some schedule of regulations framed and hung by the door. Then he looked at her and realised that if looks could kill he would assuredly have been dead for some moments. She glared at him, teeth slightly bared, an expression of hot, animal loathing on her face. She spoke so quietly, he almost didn’t catch it.
“Necromancer,” she said, as if it was the worst word she knew. At that moment, it was.
“An inference is no proof of an implication,” he replied, and produced the contract. “Do you want your life back, such as it is? Or shall I leave? I’m a busy man. A rapid decision would be nice.”
She looked at the folded paper as if its blank exterior would tell her all that she needed to know. Cabal laid it out flat, turned it so that it faced her, and slid it across to her. She looked at it, obviously not reading. Cabal had an uncomfortable feeling that she was going to start crying again. He drew his pen and offered it to her.
“Sign. Now.”
She took the pen and, her hand trembling slightly, she signed.
* * *
Cabal walked out into the new day. The last day of the carnival. He needed one last soul and had every chance of succeeding. Why, then, he wondered, did he feel so wretched?
CHAPTER 12
In which Cabal discovers some places are nice to live in but you really wouldn’t want to visit
Cabal patted the pocket containing the contract to reassure himself that it hadn’t vanished due to some capricious event at the quantum level. No, it hadn’t. He drew a deep breath; some part of him had been rather hoping it might. He was tired, more tired than he could ever remember being, and for a man who regarded sleep as a necessary evil, this was very tired indeed. Despite it, he had no desire to rest his head. No doubt he was well past the point where sleep came easily. Besides, he might dream.
He adjusted his dark-blue spectacles and looked around. It was the first time he’d actually entered Penlow on Thurse, and what he saw depressed him. It looked absolutely idyllic, exactly the sort of place that folk dream of retiring to before they examine their pension fund and end up in a terrace next door to a psychotic with a dog, a baseball bat, and a sousaphone. It raised the question “Where do the citizens of Penlow go to retire?” Cabal didn’t care. The place bothered him inexplicably.
A postman shot by on his bicycle, smiling and saying hello as he swept down the road to a junction. Despite there not being another vehicle on the road for as far as the eye could see, the postman slowed, checked both ways, and signalled before joining the main road. A place where bicyclists — postmen to boot — obeyed the laws of the road. Cabal had seen many strange things in his life, of which the walking dead were the least. He’d run for his life from the guardians of Solomon’s Key, avoided the attentions of the gargoyle Bok, and studied, although been careful not to blow, a bronze whistle upon which the words “QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT” were deeply inscribed. None of these, however, had filled him with such a sense of hidden threat and foreboding as this polite and cheerful postman.
“All I need now is a friendly vicar and I’ll know I’m in trouble.” He turned and walked into a priest, a man of gentle and genial demeanour in his mid-sixties.
“I do beg your pardon, my son. I was just ruminating on my sermon and …” He paused and looked at Cabal over the top of his half-moon spectacles. “But you must be one of the people from the travelling carnival, I declare! How do you do! I’m delighted to make your acquaintance. I’m the vicar at Saint Olave’s, just over there.” He gestured towards a small parish church of heartbreaking architectural excellence in picture-postcard grounds. “Will you still be here on Sunday? Perhaps you would like to attend the service. We’ve always got space for visitors.”
“No, I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”
“You’re moving on, no doubt. In my youth, such a peripatetic life held great appeal. Now, however …” He spread his hands and smiled so sweetly Cabal was caught by opposing urges to strike him and adopt him.
“We won’t be here,” replied Cabal. “That’s true, but I wouldn’t attend anyway.” He smiled. “I’m a Satanist.”
The vicar smiled back. Cabal felt a need to check his own smile in a mirror to make sure it was still the thing of fear that he’d carefully cultivated for years.
“Ah, me,” said the vicar, infuriatingly unshocked. Cabal might as well have admitted to preferring spring to summer or a fondness for chocolate digestives. “And are you happy?”
Cabal’s large quiver of cutting replies proved unexpectedly empty. He had been ready for almost any response but sympathy. “No,” he managed to say finally. “No, I’m not. It’s not something I chose to be. It’s more like work experience. I intend to give it up as soon as possible.”
“I shan’t argue with your decision. Dear me, no. I cannot argue with your decision. It seems very wise to me. Well, I must be getting on. I’ll bid you a good day, sir.” Cabal found himself shaking the man’s hand, thanking him for his concern, and wishing him a pleasant morning.
Cabal watched the vicar wander off in the direction of his perfect church and bet himself that the sermon would be perspicacious, amusing, and interesting. People would enjoy going to church. He found himself envying them. He stopped and inspected the sensation. What was wrong with him? He sat down on a well-sited and unvandalised bench and set abou
t sorting himself out. He was almost glad when the little girl sat down at the far end of the bench. He loathed children and was glad that here, at least, was a situation he could trust his reactions in.
“Hello,” said the little girl, and smiled a gap-toothed smile brightly at him. Cabal suddenly felt broody. An insane urge to find a good woman, settle down, and have a couple of kids — one of each — lit upon him like a thing out of a nightmare.
Staggering to his feet, he managed a disjointed warning against talking to strangers before walking quickly away. He needed somewhere quiet to pull himself together. A short expedition into the churchyard resulted in a hasty retreat, as his feet started to smoke. He’d forgotten about the danger of consecrated ground in his soulless state. That was another inconvenience he’d be rid of once he found somebody. Just one more person. It worried him that he’d forgotten about the danger: combusting footwear was an experience that tended to stay with a person. Yet that was exactly what he’d done — blithely forgotten all about it, seduced by the tranquillity of the place. His sense of foreboding was deepening by the minute.
“Hello, Mr. Cabal,” said Barrow, happening upon him at the end of a short parade of shops. “You don’t look well, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Yes. Yes, I do,” said Cabal, drawing on some inner reservoir of animosity. “I’m always pale. I’m” — inspiration danced lithely out of grasp — “a pale person.”
“I had noticed,” replied Barrow without reproach. “I didn’t mean your colour, though. I was talking about your air. You seem lost.”
Cabal looked sharply at him. “And what if I am? What is it to you?”
Barrow smiled. Cabal was getting sick of people smiling at him. He was getting even sicker of the impulse to respond in kind. “It’s my town,” said Barrow. “We feel responsible for strangers here.”
“Do you? Do you indeed?” Cabal thought he was beginning to sound like an old man. Vaguely peevish but without real rancour. His fire seemed to be going out. A desire to escape back to the carnival, where he could be foul-tempered at a moment’s notice, was certainly within him, but it was being balanced, no, overbalanced, by an inertia to stay in Penlow.
“I’ve got some good news,” continued Barrow. “I was going to go over to the carnival because I thought you might like to hear it, but here you are, so you’ve saved me a trip.”
“I had business to attend to,” said Cabal, while he thought, Why am I explaining myself?
“Offering the girl help with legal expenses. Yes, I know. That was very kind of you.” Cabal blanched. Barrow continued, “I’ve just come away from the police station. I went there after I heard the news from Dr. Greenacre.”
“The good news.”
“Yes.”
Cabal looked expectantly at him, but no elaboration was forthcoming. “Well?”
“I’m sorry,” said Barrow, shaking his head and smiling his accursed smile. “I had the oddest feeling that you would already know.”
“Know what?” asked Cabal, but he did already know.
“The baby. It’s recovered.”
“It recovered from death? Remarkable. Children are so resilient.”
“The doctor thinks it wasn’t dead to start with, that the poison was really a drug that caused some sort of catatonic coma. Isn’t that remarkable?”
“Isn’t it? And the girl?”
“I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t really know. Perhaps she might have been prosecuted for attempted murder.”
“Might have?”
“Yes, there was quite a kerfuffle at the police station when I arrived. They’ve lost her statement.”
“Really?” Cabal shifted his weight carefully from one foot to the other. He didn’t want to make the contract rustle against the other piece of paper he’d brought away from there. “This would be the statement in which she admitted her guilt?”
“It would. Odd, that. No statement, no conviction, because she’s denying it all now. Still, this little adventure might bring her around. She’s not a bad girl, just a little out of her depth. She’d kept how miserable she was to herself. Folk’ll rally ’round now they know. Penlow is a very close community like that,” he finished significantly.
Close, thought Cabal. It’s positively suffocating.
He noticed that Barrow was looking past him and followed his gaze. “I like animals as a rule,” said Barrow. “But there’s something about carrion crows that gives me the willies.”
The crow had obviously got bored of hanging around the carnival and come to investigate the town. It sat on a nearby wall that somehow looked a lot less scenic for the addition. It looked at them; first with one eye, then with the other. Then, to show it was a polymath among crows, it went back to the first eye.
“Come here, crow,” said Cabal.
With a delighted cry of “Kronk!” the bird flung itself from the wall, and, flapping its wings with more noise than an ornithopter made out of a telescoping umbrella, it landed on his shoulder. It looked around smugly.
Barrow seemed impressed. “I would never have guessed you were good with animals, Mr. Cabal,” he said.
“I’m not.” He nodded sideways at the crow, which seemed momentarily to consider pecking his ear and then thought much better of it. “There are two ways to get animals to obey you. One way is through kindness, and then there’s …” He looked sharply at the crow. The near-irresistible desire it had been feeling to take off with his nice, shiny spectacles suddenly evaporated. Instead, it tried to grin in a charming, inoffensive, non-spectacles-thieving fashion. It wasn’t a pretty sight. “The other way,” finished Cabal, darkly.
“Cruelty?” said Barrow with disapproval.
Cabal was honestly surprised. “No,” he said. “Threats.”
“I thought threats were for blowhards and cowards?”
“When you’re dealing with people, yes. Animals seem to take them in the spirit that they are meant, though.” Barrow was looking at him strangely. “Or so I’ve found,” finished Cabal a little weakly.
“Yes. Well.” Barrow looked around for something to change the subject. “Do you like the town, Mr. Cabal?”
“Like.” Cabal considered. “I’m not sure I’d use the word ‘like.’ I’ve been through many little towns and villages with the carnival, and I can honestly say this is a unique place in my experience. It’s so nice.” He said it as an imprecation.
“It is nice, isn’t it?” replied Barrow, choosing to ignore Cabal’s tone. The clock of Saint Olave’s struck the hour, startling the crow into the air. “Ten o’clock already?”
“What?” Cabal couldn’t believe it was so late so early.
“Time flies when you’re having fun, eh?”
Cabal was too taken aback to deliver a hard look. “It can’t be. I only just got here.”
“It’s a while before the pub opens, but we can get a pot of tea and some buns at the teashop,” said Barrow. Cabal hadn’t been in a teashop in almost longer than he could remember, nor did he have any great desire to break his fast of olde-worlde tweeness. Yet, for reasons he was incapable of remembering later, he allowed himself to be steered into the Church Tea-Rooms by his elbow and never said a peep.
It was left to Barrow to make small talk with the waitress, to order the tea and buns and some other fancies, and, he suspected, to pay. Not that he thought Cabal was tight-fisted by nature. No, you have to know what money means before it has significance one way or the other. Barrow doubted Cabal cared about it in the slightest.
They remained in an unstrained but neutral silence until the waitress came back, deposited the tea things, and bustled back off to the kitchen to tell her mum that Mr. Barrow was talking to one of the funny folk from the carnival.
Cabal took off his blue smoked-glass spectacles, folded them carefully, and placed them in his breast pocket. He looked very tired.
“So — what’s life like?” asked Barrow.
“Life?” said Cabal quietly. “It’s l
ike a wisp of smoke in a tempest.” There was a lengthy pause during which Barrow looked at Cabal and Cabal looked at the little pot of clotted cream as if he expected it to do something.
“I meant,” said Barrow, “what’s life like running a carnival?”
Cabal started to say something that might have become “How should I know?” but turned into “How shall I begin? Challenging. Very challenging. Fate” — he said the word pointedly, as if he were on poor terms with it — “always has some little surprise or other in store for me. One tries to be prepared.” He looked at Barrow, and Barrow was surprised that, just for once, his gaze held no malice at all.
“Expect the unexpected, eh?”
Cabal almost smiled. “A trite saying, and one without even the advantage of being practical. I keep an open mind and try to stay flexible. But the future remains a mystery right to the moment it becomes the present.”
“I saw a fortune-telling machine in that arcade of yours. No help?”
“Not much. Recalcitrant, too.” He looked up at a print of an eighteenth-century hunting scene and fell silent. Barrow wasn’t sure if the comment had been intended as a joke. Somehow he doubted it. Cabal abruptly said, “I disapprove of hunting.” Then, without a word, he dropped a slice of lemon into his cup and filled it with Assam. Then, slightly to Barrow’s surprise, he did the same for his cup, too. The possibility that this wasn’t how Barrow took his tea didn’t seem to occur to him. Barrow was struck by the paradox: Cabal was prepared to serve him his tea but not to check whether he liked milk or lemon. As it happened, he didn’t mind much either way. Cabal took a sip.
“How do you like your tea?” asked Barrow.
“Very nice, thank you.” Cabal watched the few tiny leaf fragments that had got by the strainer settle at the bottom of his cup. “I used to like Lapsang Souchong in my adolescence.” He looked Barrow straight in the eye, and Barrow almost expected him to add, “And now you know my secret, you must die.” Instead, he finished, “I can’t imagine why. Its perfume is too much for me now.” He put his cup down and proceeded to smother a scone with cream.
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