The Fall of the House of Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Perhaps once, a very long time ago, there had been some small fight here. Not even necessarily a fatal one. Perhaps Og of the stone tribe had grunted something needlessly deprecatory about Ug of the fur tribe’s mother, and Ug—who loved his mother dearly although not in the manner alluded to by Og—had struck him smartly in the face, putting him on his arse with a split lip.

  In the retelling, the blow had become a fight, the fight a skirmish, the skirmish a battle, a pebble of truth gathering the moss of invention as it rolled down the years. And people were so stupid, they couldn’t tell one period from another. Cabal had once seen an early medieval Bible lovingly illustrated with men and women dressed in clothes contemporaneous with the age in which it was created. Jericho was shown being besieged with siege engines a thousand years out of their time. In uncountable minds’ eyes down the centuries, the Battle of Perkis Moor was fought in whatever best pleased the daydreamer. Knights in gleaming armour to please the heart of Malory, soldiers of the War of the Roses, swords and spears, crossbows and muskets, rocks and rockets.

  It hardly mattered; all that was important was that the device worked. He wasn’t even convinced that the drug had been necessary and would try the operation again the following evening, this time without. In the meantime, the drug hadn’t so purged him of reason that he couldn’t be judgemental of the sideshow for fools playing out before him. This was the least of examples, he was sure. One clumsily glued together by generations of unimpressive intellects. He was after greater fare. Out there were five particular sites, and his suspicion was that they had been created deliberately by methods that escaped him. Not that he needed to know, of course. He had no great interest in replicating such things, only in exploiting them. Exploiting five. It was no small undertaking. They would be cathedrals of the intellect as compared to Perkis Moor’s small mud hut.

  In a single movement Cabal took up the tripod and slid home its legs against a stone, closed it, flicked some small fragments of soil adhering to the spikes clear with a gloved finger, and put the device back into his bag. As he did so, the battle suddenly attenuated, its combatants thinning out like magic lantern projections when the curtain is drawn back and the daylight re-enters the room. Now they looked like ghosts, and now they looked like suggestive shapes in the evening mist rising from the damp land, and now they were gone altogether.

  Cabal cared not a jot. His main concern was how on earth he was supposed to entertain himself for a full day in a place as devoid of interest as Perkis Moor. After all, it was only haunted, and the ghosts were boring.

  * * *

  A week later, two mourners stood by an open grave in a concrete field, and looked down upon a glass coffin that held a beautiful corpse.

  ‘My God,’ said one, dead himself. ‘She’s perfect. Just as she was.’

  ‘I made no mistake,’ said the other, dead himself once, half-dead on enough occasions to be worth several more extinctions. Yet now he was living and vital, because some people are just jammy like that. ‘I have never made a mistake where she was concerned. At least,’ and here he paused and frowned at painful memory, ‘no mistake in method or theory. There are other mistakes possible, however. The metaphysics of my endeavours are far from clear or simple.’

  The first man, a monster by some authorities, a good chap by all the rest, smiled a sympathetic smile. ‘You speak of the morality of it?’

  ‘I do.’ The second man was only considered a monster by the law and most churches, and who were they to judge him, anyway? ‘It used to be simple. She is dead, therefore I move heaven and earth to save her.’

  ‘Simple…’ echoed the other.

  ‘And yet, despite the clear practical problems involved in my practises, it transpires there are philosophical matters to consider, too. Once I discounted philosophy as a pastime for earnest young men with unconvincing beards and the be-sweatered young women who hang upon their every word, for old men in barrels or on top of pillars. I have made war upon angels and demons and, worst of them all, humans to arrive at this juncture, and yet it was only recently that I realised there is a pressing question that I had never once addressed nor even considered.

  ‘Would she actually wish to be brought back to the land of the living?’

  ‘Those are heavy matters indeed,’ said the first, who was a vampire. A nice one.

  ‘Indeed,’ said the second, who was a necromancer.

  They pondered in silence.

  Finally, the vampire said to the necromancer, his brother, ‘Is “be-sweatered” actually a word?’

  * * *

  They replaced the great stone cover upon the concrete grave—and went to leave the hidden laboratory adjoining the cellar of the house of Johannes Cabal, the necromancer. As they left the laboratory and made their way through the cellar, the vampire, Horst, paused by a large barrel, a butt of the type popular for the drowning of dukes. This example, however, did not contain an awkward rival for the throne of Richard III pickled in Malmsey wine.

  Horst laid his hand on the wood of the barrel’s head a little guiltily. ‘This seems very undignified in comparison.’

  Cabal knew his brother well enough to detect the forced lightness in his tone; he did not comment on it. Instead he said, ‘Practicality was the concern. The barrel was handy, and undoubtedly made its … her transport across the Continent a great deal easier. It’s just as good a container as a glass coffin. Better, perhaps. It’s certainly a great deal less fragile.’

  ‘You’re not going to—’ Horst made vague gestures with his hands, as if pouring out a bucket—‘decant her, then?’

  ‘I am not,’ said Cabal. ‘Doing so would be a risky operation and for little gain beyond, I admit, the aesthetic. In any case, from what I know of Fräulein Bartos’s personality, I think she would prefer the barrel. Glass coffins are for fairy-tale princesses. Not someone as pragmatic as she.’

  Horst nodded, reassured. It wasn’t necessary for his brother to explicitly state that Alisha Bartos had been a trained killer, practised agent, and decent conversationalist. Had been, and would be again if Johannes Cabal could keep his promise.

  * * *

  In an ideal world, the reader would have the common courtesy to have read all the previous novels in this series and retained sufficient of the plot that a pithy summation would be unnecessary.

  As has been noted by observers more perspicacious than the author, however, it is far from an ideal world, and a distinct proportion of those reading these words will have had more pressing matters than to avail themselves of the four novels preceding this one. To these people, the author says, ‘Yes, four. You jumped in at Book Five. What are you like?’

  Thus, it falls upon the author (as diligent and kind as he is handsome and effortlessly virile) to offer a brief summation of previous events to aid these readers—Who starts reading at Book Five, I ask you?—as well as those who have read the preceding novels and would simply like their memories refreshed.

  Johannes Cabal was once very nearly a solicitor, but a kindly fate saved him from this terrible future by killing his best beloved. She drowned, should you be curious, or just morbid.

  Grief stricken, Cabal refused to accept the generally accepted absoluteness of death, and instead turned to certain esoteric, occult, and highly illegal paths of possibility. One such path took him to a remote, shunned graveyard where he was forced to abandon his brother, Horst, in a crypt wherein dwelt a vampire. Horst destroyed the monster, but not before he was contaminated.

  Thus, Horst vanished from the purview of man. Missing, believed dead (which was both true and not true), his loss splintered die Familie Cabal: his father sank into a dreadful melancholy that ended with his premature death; his mother denounced the younger and less favoured son, Johannes, before leaving England and returning to her birthplace in Hesse, Germany.

  All of this troubled Johannes Cabal less than perhaps it ought. Rather than doing anything to rectify matters, he instead relocated the family house by curi
ous means from the middle of a terrace in a provincial English town to a lonely hillside in open country, by which he gained the solitude necessary to continue his studies.

  He gained the knowledge to perform such research and, indeed, commit wanton acts of urban redevelopment by the simple expedient of selling his soul. Presently it transpired that this was a mistake, and that his soul was actually of use to him. Using a potent mix of ruthlessness, immorality, deception, diablerie, and candyfloss, he was able to reclaim his soul. In so doing, he upset Satan. If only that were the only time he had upset a major otherworldly entity.

  At least Cabal had recovered his brother, Horst, from the ancient crypt in which he had been abandoned, albeit for selfish ends. Unhappily, there were words and hurt feelings, and Horst died, utterly and finally.

  Until he got better. This was as great a surprise to him as to anyone else. Resurrected by a shadowy conspiracy (as distinct, presumably, from one of those highly publicised conspiracies), Horst was put in the difficult position of asking his brother to help save the world from the machinations of the conspiracy in general and of its prime mover in particular, a woman of means, intellect, and profound wickedness known as the ‘Red Queen’.

  To his surprise, Johannes seemed older (this was because he was older), wiser, and altogether more human than Horst remembered, his experiences having mellowed him at least a little. He readily agreed to help Horst and his allies, and the world was saved. Saved again, strictly speaking, as it turned out Johannes Cabal had done it a couple of times before, usually by accident.

  The victory was not without sacrifices, however. One such was Alisha Bartos, currently perfectly preserved by a strange chemical in a large barrel. Horst had developed a fondness for her—she had once shot him, then apologised nicely—but more pressingly felt responsible for her death.

  Nor, however, was the victory without spoils. Johannes Cabal had recovered a book so rare that he had believed every copy had long since been lost or destroyed: The One True Account of Presbyter Johannes by His Own Hand.

  This, you may rest assured, is a very important book. Why that should be has not been revealed to date, but probably shall be sooner rather than later. After all, Johannes Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy, has rested much stock upon it and enthused in uncharacteristically vigorous terms how it changes everything without actually being overly specific about why that should be.

  And so, we are up to date. If you have read the previous novels, I hope that has successfully refreshed your memory. If you have not, and have just lurched in here like a drunk into a cinema half an hour after the programme began, sit down and shut up. You are disturbing the patrons.

  We may now continue.

  * * *

  The grandfather clock chimed midnight as they emerged from the cellar door and made their way to the front parlour. Cabal was nocturnal by habit (it was when the cemeteries and graveyards were most fruitful for his visits) and Horst by nature (sunlight caused him to burn rather than tan; burn in a brief moment of incandescence leaving naught but dust and regrets).

  Horst was taking things as restfully as possible, delaying the inevitable moment when needs be he would seek blood. Even when that happened, he would take it carefully, a jigger here, a mouthful there, so as not to inconvenience anyone. His brother’s material needs were less troublesome, and he went to the kitchen to assuage them with a pot of Assam tea and a plate of cold meat and pickles.

  Horst sank into his favourite armchair and awaited Cabal’s return. While he waited, he regarded the deep alcove by the fireplace and the high shelf there. Upon it was a row of three wooden boxes, each large enough to contain a human head. This is not a fanciful metric; two did contain human heads and the third something head-like that may well have been a head. Johannes Cabal was cagey on the subject of its contents. Whatever it was, it had a good singing voice. To the right of it was the living skull of the hermit and sage Ercusides, whose voice was a little reedy, but he tried all the same, bless him. The third box contained the living head of Rufus Maleficarus, although his was not the spirit that animated it. That was an entity of awful malevolence that had sought on several previous occasions to bring the apocalypse to earth, that loathed Johannes Cabal with a savage intensity, and that couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. Now it was forced to occupy the head of a former rival of Cabal’s, and spent its days sulking, voicing threats and imprecations, and utterly failing to hit even middle C with any reliability. The thing in the first box’s hopes for, with the addition of a hypothetical future fourth box, a barbershop quartet had foundered on the head of Rufus Maleficarus massacring ‘Carolina Moon’.

  For the moment, however, the boxes were quiet but for a quiet burring snore from the second and subdued spasmodic expletives from the third.

  Cabal returned with his supper. As he arranged his plate and saucer to his satisfaction upon the table, he noted Horst’s languid gaze up at the shelf. ‘The erstwhile Herr Maleficarus turns out to be as poor a loser in the afterlife as he ever was when he had a body beneath his neck,’ Cabal commented. ‘His father was no better.’

  ‘You decapitated him, too?’ Horst’s tone was no more astonished than if his brother had suggested he had taken up golf. Far less so, in fact.

  ‘I did not. I don’t make a habit of that, you know.’

  Horst regarded the row of boxes. ‘Of course you don’t.’

  ‘There is a certain degree of coincidence with regard to living heads in my line of work, I’ll grant you. Still, they are hardly unknown in occult circles. Bacon’s head of brass leaps to mind, for example.’

  ‘Hmmmm.’ Horst was not agreeing, as he had no idea as to whom Cabal referred. He was, however, remembering that he had once liked bacon and grieved privately that it could no longer be part of his diet.

  ‘So,’ he said, stirring himself from memories of bacon sandwiches past, ‘has that book turned out to be as useful as you thought it would be? Are the secrets of the universe there unveiled?’

  ‘No,’ said Johannes Cabal.

  ‘Too easy, eh?’

  ‘Too easy. I’m sure I have impressed upon you in the past what the word “occult” actually means?’

  ‘You have. It means “hidden”.’ He saw Cabal’s raised eyebrow. ‘You see? I do listen. Now and then.’

  ‘Much of that “hidden” quality is not on the part of nature, or the supernatural. Wizards, sorcerers, witches, and oracles have seen things for which the common herd are neither prepared nor tolerant. For their own safety, such people are inclined towards secrecy. I can only sympathise; many of my more potentially … contentious—’

  ‘Incriminating…’

  ‘—notes are enciphered for exactly those reasons.’

  ‘So Presbyterian Jack’s big book of magic is in code, is that what you are saying?’

  ‘Presbyter Johannes, often called Prester John.’

  ‘Let’s call him Prester John to avoid confusion.’

  ‘Quite, yes. That would be sensible.’ Cabal stirred his tea and took a sip. ‘It isn’t exactly enciphered, but it is in code. It uses allegory and allusion to hide its truths, mostly very esoteric imagery. Highly arcane. I have been working to squeeze sense from it.’

  Horst could see this was no more than the truth. Cabal’s sunken face and darkly rimmed eyes betokened near exhaustion. Horst was dead to the world during the hours of light and could not know what his brother did in that time, but it seemed to contain little enough sleep.

  ‘You should rest, Johannes.’ He said it gently. ‘You are no use to anyone if you burn the candle at both ends.’

  ‘I have no time for rest.’

  ‘Make some.’ The gentle tone slipped a little, leaving something steelier in its place. ‘Don’t make me compel you.’

  Cabal looked up sharply at him. ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘I’m still the elder of us, even if you’re the one who looks older now. I won’t watch you work yourself to death, especially havi
ng brought you back from the brink once recently already. I have better things to do than nurse you through another convalescence.’

  ‘Don’t even joke about exerting any of your … talents upon me, brother. I do not take well to coercion.’

  There was an awkward silence. In truth, Horst had indeed used his vampiric powers to force his brother into deep recuperative sleep when he had been seriously ill some weeks before. This, he would never tell Johannes. For his part, Johannes had strong suspicions that Horst had done exactly that. This, he would never tell Horst. He was damned sure he would never permit it while in good or, at least, moderate health, however.

  Cabal coughed. ‘In any case, it would be an unnecessary measure. I have wrung what truth I can from the book. I am reasonably confident that I have all of it. I shall attend to my health and well-being at this point. You are, quite accidentally, right for once. The trials I foresee shall require my constitution to be at a peak.’

  Horst, who had been slouching back with his hands behind his head, sat up. ‘Trials? What do you mean? I thought that book was meant to be the be-all and end-all. The Philosopher’s Stone, you called it. The Fountain of Youth.’

  ‘So I believed. I was wrong, but in some ways right. I have told you of my time in the Dreamlands?’

  Horst nodded. ‘Zebras.’

  ‘Of all the aspects of that long and perilous journey, your first thought is of the zebras. Yes, then. The place with the zebras. The nature of the Dreamlands is that they are formed from the will of sleepers, not all benevolent, not all human. It is concrete enough, but mutable, and that mutability is a function of belief. The Dreamlands gain much of their permanence from being what they are anticipated to be.’