The Fall of the House of Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘I wasn’t planning on marketing it…’

  ‘I appreciate that. No matter what, it’s not my concern. It has never been my concern.’

  ‘Ah.’ Cabal picked up his glass as if considering finishing the drop of wine at the bottom, but put it down again undrained. ‘I’m sorry to hear it, Fräulein Barrow. I am sorry I’ve wasted your time. Mine, too, but I regarded it as necessary.’ He rose awkwardly. ‘I shall see myself out.’

  Leonie watched him complacently. ‘You’re adorable when you do that, you know? Your injured-pride face would melt a puppy.’

  Cabal’s expression was uncertain; he had seen a molten puppy once, and it hadn’t been that adorable.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘We’re not done yet.’

  ‘With respect, Fräulein Barrow, I understood that we were. You do not wish to help me. I shall have to look for aid elsewhere.’

  ‘I said nothing of the sort. You forget, Cabal, I’m a scientist myself.’

  ‘Criminology, I believe?’

  ‘You remembered.’ She smiled a sweet smile like icing on a razor. ‘I have my own interests. For one thing, bringing back the dead would make my job a lot easier. Or, I admit, obsolete.’ She adopted a poor workable Cockney accent. “Orright, Bert, ’oo did you in?” “It were ’im, guv’nor! Stabbed me to death good and proper an’ dropped me in the river. I’ll swear to it in court.”’

  She observed conflicting expressions on the faces of Cabal and her father, the former somewhat taken aback by the amateur dramatics, the latter suddenly remembering a few old cold cases from his career that might finally be brought to book by this development.

  ‘But that’s not what I’m talking about in this case. These fragments of myth of yours, Cabal. They exist?’

  ‘I believe so, yes. I believe so very strongly. I have seen variants of the same mechanism; these “fragments” are hybrids of the two. The only reason that they are not generally known is because they are not easily discovered or entered.’

  ‘Now they fascinate me.’ She shrugged. ‘Who wouldn’t be by the thought that our world contains such things, like reading a novel and finding pages of another book mixed in?’

  ‘It’s dangerous,’ both men chorused and looked at one another.

  ‘Life is brief, opportunities to see the extraordinary are rare. It’s not as if I’ll be by myself, Dad. Cabal here is a rare survivor. If I have his word that he will not abandon me, that’s good enough for me.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Cabal slowly. ‘That’s not quite the plan.’ He looked out of the window. Beyond the net curtains, dusk deepened.

  ‘It isn’t?’ said Leonie.

  ‘Not quite. Pardon me a moment.’

  Cabal rose and left the room. They heard him go to the door and open it. Frank and Leonie Barrow heard Cabal speak in lowered tones. A voice, male, answered him. The Barrows looked at one another with cautious surprise. A moment later Cabal re-entered the room.

  ‘I should like to introduce you to my brother, Horst,’ he said.

  A tall man in his early twenties, handsome, pale, and with curls of light brown hair curling out from beneath his hat stepped into the room. He was dressed well in a suit of black with flashes of imperial purple at the breast pocket and lapels, the left of which bore a clove-red carnation as a boutonnière. He doffed his hat, and bowed to the Barrows.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Horst. ‘More of a reintroduction, I think? We’ve met before.’ He smiled, and his eye teeth seemed somewhat pronounced, yet it was no less charming a smile for all that. ‘Hullo.’

  * * *

  It took a week to settle matters. Frank Barrow spent two full days of this trying to talk Leonie out of what he sincerely believed to be a disastrous decision. To his every argument, she would smile consolingly and answer with a counterargument that always, reduced to its most fundamental terms, ran thus: ‘Science.’

  To this, he had no response.

  When it became apparent that no appeal to intellect, sympathy, or sentiment (he was too good a man to resort to emotional blackmail, no matter how profoundly he feared her loss) would dissuade her, he instead turned his attention to improving the odds of her safe return. The first step of this was when, on the morning of the third day, he came to her bearing, not argumentation, but a well-crafted but undecorated box of pale, varnished wood.

  They sat together at the breakfast table, and he opened it. Inside lay a .38 revolver in a shaped covert lined with green felt. Around it, also snuggled into slots and alcoves, were the accoutrements of maintenance, and six live rounds.

  Leonie looked at it for a long moment, expressionless. Then she took it up to examine it. ‘Webley Mk.1,’ she said. ‘Cabal would approve. He usually carries a Webley .577.’

  ‘I’m not giving it to you for his bloody approval.’ It disconcerted him to see a firearm in his daughter’s hands, frightened him, and he sat down to forestall the desire to take it from her. She was a grown woman, after all. She had an M.Phil and was working on a Ph.D. She wasn’t his baby any more. Would never be his baby again.

  ‘I thought you didn’t like guns, Dad.’

  ‘I don’t. Bought that after … after the last time.’

  He didn’t clarify this, but he didn’t need to. The last time Cabal came into our lives.

  She weighed the weapon in her hand a moment longer, and returned it to its case. ‘It’s a kind thought, Dad, but I’m not taking this.’

  ‘You need to be able to protect yourself. God only knows what sort of mess that maniac wants to drag you into. A vampire!’ He looked around helplessly, as if something in the kitchen would appreciate his discontent. ‘A bloody vampire he’s got you running off with!’

  ‘Horst seems nice enough,’ said Leonie carelessly. ‘He never wanted to become one.’

  ‘Oh? So how did that happen? Caught vampirism off a toilet seat or something?’

  ‘No. I think it was his brother’s fault. Some experiment or something that went wrong.’

  ‘Cabal made his own brother into a blood-sucking monster? Well, that makes me so much more confident about the whole thing now. If only he’d said, I’d have offered to go along myself.’ He paused. ‘I should go with you.’

  ‘Dad, we’ve been through this. You’re in your sixties, now, and—be honest—you’ve not kept yourself in the best condition.’ Barrow looked down at his gut glumly; even his own adipose was betraying him. ‘Cabal’s a planner. He doesn’t take risks he doesn’t have to. And, when all’s said and done, Horst is a blood-sucking monster, yes, but he’s our blood-sucking monster. I’ll be safe.’

  ‘I’d be happier if you had a gun.’

  ‘Dad.’ She sat opposite him and took his hands in hers. ‘I’ve got a gun.’

  Barrow’s mouth dropped open. ‘You’ve what?’

  ‘Senzan 8mm automatic. The man sold me a box of dumdums under the counter.’

  ‘Dumdums? Bloody hell! How long have you had that?’

  Leonie shrugged. ‘Bought it after … after the last time.’

  She didn’t clarify this, but she didn’t need to. The last time Cabal came into my life.

  * * *

  The brothers Cabal were staying in the next town, as they were not remembered entirely fondly in Penlow on Thurse where the Barrows lived. There had been the business with the exploding carnival, the giant ape, the demons, and so forth. It had even made the front page of the Penlow Reporter; FUSS CAUSED, screamed the headline on the story. THREE NOISE COMPLAINTS RECEIVED. Admittedly it had been a sidebar to a more pressing story about a small fire in a hayrick that had been put out quite quickly. They took their hayricks seriously in Penlow on Thurse.

  So, Johannes Cabal had taken a room in a bed-and-breakfast establishment while Horst found a fairly comfortable and long disused tomb in the local cemetery, and the two brothers waited, one more patiently than the other. Finally, a telegram of acquiescence arrived, and Cabal met Leonie at the Penlow railway station, a station the railway company had been
astonished to discover was not as decommissioned and demolished as their records showed and so quietly returned it to the schedules. Somebody had clearly blundered and, on the off chance it was somebody important, it was better to just let things be.

  Cabal was pleased—perhaps even very pleased—to see Leonie, less so to see her father.

  ‘Mr Barrow,’ he said. He didn’t trouble himself to fabricate even one of his least convincing smiles for the greeting. The two men understood one another completely.

  Frank Barrow placed the end of one fingertip a quivering sixteenth of an inch from the tip of Cabal’s nose.

  ‘One hair. So much as one bloody hair on my daughter’s head is harmed, and I will hunt you down to world’s end. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Of course.’ Cabal took a half step back to remove his nose from the finger’s proximity. ‘And you should understand that no part of my plans involve anyone getting hurt.’

  ‘You just look after her.’

  ‘I shall not. My brother shall. He is to be her bodyguard and to sport his not inconsiderable abilities as and when they are required.’

  Barrow’s eyes narrowed. Horst struck him as possibly a bit of a lady’s man, vampire or not. ‘What sort of abilities?’

  ‘Strength, alacrity, mesmerism, acute senses. He’s rather impressive; I don’t say that lightly.’

  ‘I’ll be okay, Dad,’ said Leonie, returning from the kiosk with a magazine to read. ‘Where is Horst, anyway?’

  Cabal nodded towards the rear of the train. ‘In the baggage car. The sun is up, and it and he are not especially compatible.’ He picked up Leonie’s valises and frowned. ‘I suggested that you pack lightly, Miss Barrow. Money is not a concern, and the intention is that we buy supplies as and when they are required. What do you have in these bags, anyway?’

  ‘Well,’ she said brightly, placing a fingertip to her chin, ‘the brown one has all my dresses and frillies and girly things in it. And the cream one, why, that holds my ammunition.’ She smiled sweetly. ‘All aboard!’ She climbed up into the carriage, leaving an astonished Cabal in her wake.

  Barrow smiled at him, not kindly. ‘She’s not even joking, Mr Cabal. Do not upset my little girl.’

  Cabal hefted the bags onto the carriage and turned on the step to address Barrow. ‘You will not believe it, I am sure, sir, but I hold your daughter in the highest regard. If any harm befalls her and it was in my power to protect her, you need not hunt me at all, for I shall already have died in her unsuccessful defence.’

  As the train pulled away, Leonie waved at her father, and he waved back, albeit with a somewhat dumbfounded expression. She watched him vanish from view as the train left Penlow on Thurse Station and then Penlow on Thurse proper before turning to Cabal and regarding him with suspicion.

  ‘Just what did you say to my father?’

  ‘Oh, merely a bitter exchange of insults. The usual.’ Cabal shrugged. ‘It’s what your father and I do.’

  * * *

  The train journey lasted several hours and was in all respects unremarkable, with the exception of the moment Leonie noted a milk churn had fallen from a waggon by a level crossing.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, observing this tragedy. ‘That’s a shame.’

  This high point apart, they continued untroubled, at least externally.

  ‘Where exactly are we going?’ asked Leonie quite early on.

  ‘Creslent,’ replied Cabal, as if that answered everything.

  ‘I’m not familiar with … What was it? Creslent? Where is that?’

  ‘It isn’t a town, if that’s what you’re thinking.’ Cabal favoured her with a glimpse over the top of his spectacles. ‘Nor yet a village.’

  ‘A hamlet?’

  ‘No.’

  They continued in silence for a minute longer, Cabal reading a treatise for light entertainment and Leonie glaring steadily at him the whole time.

  ‘Is it a house?’ she asked at last. ‘It sounds like it could be a stately home.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thank you. So where is this house?’

  Cabal looked up from his treatise and furnished her with a light frown. ‘What makes you think it’s a house?’

  ‘You just said it was.’

  ‘No, I agreed that it sounded like it could be the name of a stately home. I certainly did not intend you to think that was what it actually was.’

  ‘Cabal,’ said Leonie slowly. ‘When I said my cream valise was full of ammunition, I was not entirely joking. Do not provoke me.’

  ‘Provoke you? I merely—’

  ‘Creslent. Tell me what and where it is. Do not let a single morsel of other data leave your lips, or this quest of yours may finish in a messy railway murder. I hope I make myself understood.’

  Cabal’s frown deepened, indicating that, no, she had not, or at least not entirely. ‘Messy in what sense?’

  ‘Dumdum rounds. Soft-nosed with an asterisk cut into each and every one of them.’

  ‘I was under the impression legislation had been passed against such munitions? Something about “contrary to the laws of humanity”, I believe,’ said Cabal. They regarded each other a moment longer. ‘I feel sure that you are preparing a barb about me knowing all about being contrary to the laws of humanity.’

  ‘Creslent, Cabal. What is it?’

  ‘Very well, if it will calm your vexatious curiosity. It is an entrance into Hell.’

  ‘Thank you!’ said Leonie, not very graciously. ‘You could simply have told me that when I first asked.’

  Cabal said nothing, but returned to his book with the air of a long-suffering parent.

  Presently his reading was once again interrupted by Miss Leonie Barrow pulling down the book in an impertinent manner and forcefully enquiring, an expression of soul-felt shock upon her face, ‘An entrance to where‽’

  * * *

  Creslent turned out to be a service entrance at the rear of a factory that made dinnerware. Cabal, Leonie, and—it being now comfortably after sundown—Horst stood in the lugubrious setting of a narrow English alleyway, cobbled and peopled by dustbins, backed by a low stone wall topped by rusting stanchions threaded by decaying barbed wire. In the field beyond, a solitary goat observed them.

  ‘An entrance to Hell? Really?’ Miss Barrow was still not entirely over her surprise.

  Cabal did not answer. He was watching the goat as it watched them, and wondering if it were perhaps some sort of sentry.

  Horst regarded the building with scarcely greater confidence than Leonie. ‘That reminds me, Johannes. You need more soup bowls. The ones you have are terribly chipped. That’s probably not sanitary. Do you think while we’re in here, we might pick up some replacements? Leave some money for them, obviously. I mean, we’re not thieves, are we? Well, I’m not, at any rate. I’m sure Miss Barrow isn’t, either.’

  He did not extend this innocence of thievery to his brother, for he knew him too well.

  ‘There are no soup bowls to be had beyond that door,’ said Cabal, turning his attention to the steel door upon which local children had scratched doggerel and nicknames.

  ‘Pretty poor crockery factory that doesn’t make soup bowls.’ Horst had decided he was an authority on dinnerware logistics.

  ‘There isn’t a dinnerware factory behind that door, except in a gross physical sense.’ Cabal was examining the lock and handle under the light of an electric torch. ‘I do keep telling you.’

  ‘Your brother isn’t being unreasonable, Cabal,’ said Leonie. He paused in the examination to give her a somewhat crusty look. He had noted that she referred to his brother as ‘Mr’ or sometimes ‘Herr Cabal.’ He, however, was invariably just ‘Cabal.’ He wasn’t sure whether this was a hooded insult or perhaps a mark of familiarity. In either case, he didn’t like it.

  ‘You really are children in the world of the occult, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m a vampire,’ said Horst, as if that conferred honorary membership in the World of the Occult,
as if it were a friendly society, or perhaps a book club. He said it in such a tone of immoderate enthusiasm—it might have been described as ‘perkily’—that any such organisation would likely have blackballed him on principle.

  Both Cabal and Leonie opted to ignore the interruption. ‘You’ve never struck me as the practical joking type—’

  ‘I should think not…’

  ‘—so I must assume that you are serious in your description of this shabby little door to a plate factory as in fact leading to Hell. What I can’t see is why you’re so adamant…’

  And here she paused. Leonie Barrow was no fool, nor was her father, and nor were the professors who had steered her through her university career. She was a criminologist to the bone, and that instinct and training now triumphed where her natural disbelief had not.

  ‘The graffiti…’

  ‘Yes?’ said Cabal slowly, already knowing what she would say.

  ‘The children around here must be very well educated.’

  ‘That’s one possibility.’

  She borrowed Cabal’s electric torch without seeking permission to do so and studied the scratches in the metal. Crudely done they might have been, and childish in form, but what was written there was another thing entirely.

  ‘That’s Latin. Omnes relinquite spes o vos intrantes.’ She handed the torch back and stepped away from the door. ‘Abandon all hope, O ye who enter here.’

  ‘Latin … hmmm…’ Horst rubbed his chin. ‘The “abandon hope” thingy. I’ve heard that somewhere before.’

  Leonie looked at him oddly. ‘You’re a very handsome man, Mr Cabal,’ she said after a moment.

  ‘Oh!’ Horst could scarce hide his delight. ‘Why, thank you!’

  ‘I don’t suppose you bothered trying very hard at school, did you?’

  ‘Well, no, I mean I…’ The penny dropped with the psychic ting of a coin falling into a very empty vessel. ‘Hold on, are you calling me stupid?’