The Fall of the House of Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘Darling.’ Something in Zarenyia’s tone made Miss Smith look over. Zarenyia was facing the direction where the stolen entomopter was setting down, but that wasn’t where her gaze led. The sky was vanishing. The city was vanishing. Belatedly, Miss Smith realised that the Mirkarvians weren’t running from her at all.

  The Cabal brothers climbed from the entomopter and ran towards them, Horst leaping the sandbags and Cabal rolling over them in his haste to join the women. He almost fell on the covered body. He stepped back, startled, and demanded, ‘Is this Miss Barrow?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Cabal.’ Miss Smith abandoned the gun and went to him. ‘There was nothing we could do. She was already gone when we reached her. I’m sorry.’

  Cabal looked at her with genuine perplexity. ‘Why are you sorry? You didn’t shoot her, I trust?’

  ‘Of course not. But I know what she meant to you.’

  Cabal shook his head irritably as if dissuading a determined fly. ‘What she means to me? She’s a colleague. A reliable ally.’ He started checking his pockets for no discernible reason.

  Miss Smith glanced at Horst, who shrugged, and Zarenyia, who pulled a face and offered, ‘Are all humans so bloody abstruse?’

  Cabal produced a cigarette case or similar. Miss Smith held out a hand. ‘If you’re going to spend the last few minutes before the world ends puffing on a gasper, I want one, too.’

  But instead of a cigarillo, Cabal removed a tiny crystal phial, sealed with white wax. He snapped the case shut, dropped it back into his pocket, and whipped away the blanket. Feigning ignorance of the ragged bullet wound in her side or its larger exit wound, ignoring the great deal of blood she must have lost as she haemorrhaged to death with no one to save her, he lifted her head, opened the sealed cap of the phial with his thumb, and poured the contents into her open mouth.

  ‘What is that?’ asked Miss Smith, fascinated.

  ‘A miracle. I hope.’ Cabal regarded Leonie Barrow’s face closely, but there was no flicker of muscle action, no change in the dull, corpse pallor. ‘Come on,’ he whispered. ‘Come along, Miss Barrow. I went to a great deal of trouble to get this. Kindly oblige me by not being dead any more. Come on…’ He slapped the corpse across the face. ‘Come on!’

  ‘Johannes!’ Horst snapped. ‘What do you—’

  Cabal’s hand was already back ready for another blow when the body’s hand reached up and grabbed his wrist. Leonie Barrow’s eyes flew open. ‘If you slap me again, Cabal, I will break your bloody nose.’

  ‘Well,’ said Zarenyia, ‘there’s something you don’t see every day. Or, indeed, at all.’

  Leonie was glaring at Cabal, sparing some ire for all these people gathered around her. ‘I was just knocked out. I was climbing up the ramp and I slipped, that’s all. I am perfectly well, thank you. Never felt better.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Miss Smith in the confidential tone of a friend who is going to broach the subject of an unexpected personal hygiene problem, ‘no. You were stone dead.’

  Leonie looked at her sharply. ‘I was not.’

  ‘Take it from a professional, Leonie—yes, you were.’

  Leonie Barrow’s anger fell away. She glanced at Cabal. ‘Was I?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘You were shot and bled to death.’

  ‘I thought … I thought you couldn’t resurrect the dead perfectly, Cabal. I thought…’ Her eyes widened. ‘Oh, God. I’m not a zombie, am I?’

  ‘If you are, you’re chattier and more introspective than any I’ve met before.’ Seeing her expression, Cabal added, ‘No. I am confident that you are completely restored to us. Ladies, Horst, we have won. The prize of the Five Ways is ours. Your share, Miss Barrow, is why you are no longer dead.’

  ‘Johannes.’ Horst pointed to the darkness. It was no longer a linear wave, but seemed to have broken around the area at the end of the Mall, sweeping around as a wave does upon a rock. The horizon turned dark all about them. ‘I don’t wish to spoil the party, but what are we going to do about the imminent end of the world?’

  ‘Nothing. It is not necessary; when this reality fails, we shall be spat out into our own. We are the victors here. To destroy us now would spoil our benefactor’s joke.’

  ‘Benefactor?’

  ‘You truly don’t want to know. In any event, we are safe’—he turned to Miss Smith—‘but for you.’

  Her face grew taut. ‘What do you mean, Cabal?’

  ‘You were never intended to be part of the trial. You were dragged along as scenery. There are no guarantees for you. You don’t even have a body to return to. If this world ends and you cannot reach the Dreamlands—and I shall be frank, I see no mechanism by which you might—you will be destroyed in the dissolution.’

  Miss Smith sat heavily by the sandbag wall and slumped back against it. Her eyes flickered about distractedly as she sought solutions and failed. ‘It hardly seems fair to die twice when it wasn’t my fault either time.’ She looked at Cabal. ‘Well, fuck.’

  Cabal crouched before her, opened his cigarillo case and produced another phial. ‘Orfilia Ninuka shall not be needing hers. I cannot be sure it will help you, but given the alternative…’

  Miss Smith leaned forwards and snatched it from his hand with a speed and precision that would have made vipers applaud, if only they had hands and a sense of graciousness. She tore off the stopper and swallowed the contents in a second. Only after she had ingested the fluid did she find pause to look abashed. ‘I’m fed up of dying,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I hope it goes well by you, Miss Smith. If it…’ Cabal frowned. ‘Madam, you are becoming less substantial.’

  ‘What?’ She held up her hand to study it. There was indeed something of the translucent about it. ‘Is this right? Is this supposed to happen? Am I dissolving or becoming invisible? Invisibility will not help me right this moment, Cabal! Not with that coming!’ She waved a decreasingly apparent finger at the oncoming void. As she spoke, despite her excitement raising her voice, there was an ineffable yet definite sense that it was simultaneously draining away, as if she was being upset at a distance.

  ‘I cannot say,’ admitted Cabal. ‘Every phial may have a different effect, depending on the recipient. Oh, Miss Smith!’

  But there was nobody to talk to. In mid-harangue at an implacably bloody-minded destiny that seemed set on dissolving her by one means or another, her voice dwindled to nothing, and her presence with it. Her clothes collapsed by the sandbag wall and the empty phial clattered to the ground.

  ‘Did … she just die? Again?’ asked Horst.

  ‘No.’ Cabal was certain. ‘I strongly doubt she did. But bear in mind that she was never truly with us, but merely a dreamer’s body gathered from the Dreamlands. And these’—he prodded the very solid seeming dress—‘are Dreamland clothes, yet they remained here. I think Miss Smith may well have returned to the corporeal world. Whole and well, I hope.’

  ‘And naked!’ said Zarenyia cheerfully.

  ‘All the best people are resurrected from certain doom naked,’ said Horst, also cheerfully. ‘Well, I was, and that turned out all right.’

  A sudden sense of presence at his elbow made him look down. At his right elbow stood the ghost of a frightened little girl.

  ‘Oh, Minty…’ In all the excitement, he had quite forgotten about her, and the inattention stung him with guilt.

  ‘Wha’s ’appening?’ she said. ‘Where’s London goin’?’ Her eyes were wide, her speech hurried and panicked.

  Horst knelt to look her in the eye. How could he tell her that she was nothing more than a shadow of a shadow, a facsimile of a phantom, a stage prop in a murderous theatre?

  ‘We’ve undone what happened here,’ he told her. ‘The Red Queen is dead. It will be as if none of this ever happened.’

  She blinked at him. ‘Will I be alive again?’

  Horst nodded. He could see that motes of pale light were starting to stream away from her towards the darkness as London died.


  ‘But … bein’ alive ’urt,’ she said. ‘Bein’ like this’—she held up her hands—‘nothin’ ’urts. Nothin’.’

  The motes had become a stream. She was diminishing, emptying away before his eyes. Miss Smith’s vanishing had been a far less cruel thing than this.

  ‘Minty, I’ve been alive, and I’ve been dead. Being alive is better, believe me. When you return to life, you won’t remember any of this, but perhaps you’ll remember this much. To have a good life. It’s brief. It’s often troublesome, but it’s a great deal better than the alternative. We’re all a long time in the grave, we poor creatures. Make what you can of those years when the spark is in you.’

  She turned then, and saw her essence being drawn away. She looked back at him. ‘Take me wiv you, Horst! Please!’

  And she was gone.

  The void was almost upon them. ‘Here,’ said Cabal with urgency. ‘It would be as well if you all had your share of the prize when the void reaches us.’ He quickly handed a phial to Zarenyia and one to Horst. Horst took it from him silently, still looking into the darkness where a small light faded.

  Cabal returned the case containing the last to his pocket. ‘You are already your own proof, Miss Barrow.’

  ‘Should we hold hands or something?’ she asked, the gun redoubt rapidly becoming the only point of reality left in an infinity of nothing.

  ‘Oh, let’s!’ Zarenyia grasped Leonie’s hand and Cabal’s. ‘Everyone hold hands! We can sing a song!’

  ‘I’d rather we didn’t…’

  ‘Ging gang goolie goolie goolie goolie watcha…’

  At which moment, the last world of the Trial of the Five Ways was snuffed out, and that was probably just as well.

  THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF CABAL

  Vlatez and Muk had enjoyed their camping holiday. Of course, as Katamenian bandits they had lived the larger part of their adult lives bivouacking in forest clearings or in handy caves. Relatively few of their nights were spent under the rooves of houses and these they regarded as novelties, sure enough, but never likely to catch on. Thus, as previously noted, any camping vacation was in the manner of a busman’s holiday for them, but at least it had been conducted in a country not their own, or just over the borders of a neighbouring state.

  They had been given a good sum of money, return tickets to England, and very explicit instructions. For a period that might be as short as a few days or as lengthy as a couple of months they were to monitor any activity around the house of Johannes Cabal and to keep a watch on the railway station that served the village an hour’s walk away. In case of certain situations arising, they were instructed to do this, that, or the other. In the meantime, they were given basic rules of conduct and strongly worded warnings as to what would surely result if they failed in even the smallest aspects. Given that the orders had been personally given by Her Majesty herself, and the superstitious—and sensible—awe in which her Katamenian mercenaries held her, there was never any question that Vlatez and Muk would do their very, very best. Their honour demanded it, and their senses of self-preservation were very much in favour, too.

  Their cover was simply that they had always wanted to visit the English countryside and that they were happy to simply wander the byways, admiring the flora and fauna. They were to remain at least reasonably sober at all times, they were to indulge in no criminal activities no matter how many soft targets crossed their paths, they were to maintain friendly contact with the locals as and when it was unavoidable, but should otherwise shun any company but their own.

  Thus, once or twice a week, one of the bandits would wander into the village in the ludicrous ‘rambling’ outfits that had been pressed upon them after a brief read of some old magazines and a battered Boy Scout’s manual, and there they would purchase rations. The locals became familiar with the sight of either the cadaverous Muk or the apelike Vlatez appearing in the grocers dressed in baggy brown shorts or green corduroy trousers, short-sleeved shirt or tank top, and a broad-brimmed canvas hat, and buying assorted staple food items in broken English, occasionally pausing to smile brightly and comment on the weather.

  The villagers rapidly came to the conclusion that the visitors could only possibly be interested in the only unusual thing to be found in the area: Johannes Cabal. Given the heavy-handed attempts at portraying themselves as nothing more than innocent hikers, they were presumably up to something clandestine and almost certainly injurious to Cabal and his interests. This was fine with the villagers; anything awful that befell him was something wonderful by their lights, he having failed to ingratiate himself with the locals. This is an understatement; on more than one occasion the locals had tried to get rid of him themselves, but failed for a variety of reasons, often by being talked down from the peak of righteous fury by the words of the local policeman, Sergeant Parkin.

  Parkin, it should be pointed out, did his duty in this way for dual reasons: it was his job to keep the peace, and lynch mobs were distinctly not peaceful; and he was very happy to have his salary bolstered by regular bribes from Cabal precisely so he never forgot that duty.

  Parkin was not only sharper than the Katamenians believed, but even than the locals knew. He had understood that the ‘hikers’ were a threat to Cabal the moment he clapped eyes upon them, and set about identifying them. The men were cagey about saying from exactly where in Eastern Europe they hailed, but Parkin noted both men possessed unusual tattoos of the sort associated with prison yards and memorised one in particular that both men bore. It was an ugly thing, and badly done, but the design was distinct: a skull, its crown removed, sitting in a campfire. Either the campfire was very small, or the skull very large, for the flames barely licked up past the level of the upper teeth. Propped in the skull’s open brainpan could be seen the handle of a spoon or a ladle. It seemed an impractical way to serve broth, but Parkin guessed it referred to some local legend or popular tale.

  Whatever its provenance, it was distinctive. Parkin took down his copy of The Big Police Book of Criminal Organisations Around the World and spent a hair-raising morning examining the indicia of sundry gangs, mobs, and syndicates of many lands. Working his way through those of Eastern Europe in particular, he finally located a drawing very similar to the tattoos he had seen both foreigners sporting on their forearms.

  EUROPE: EASTERN: KATAMENIA: KATAMENIAN BANDITS

  ‘Oh, dear,’ said Sergeant Parkin. He made himself a fresh cup of tea and settled down to examine the text. During the reading, he had cause to say, ‘Oh, dear’ several times more; bandits as an occupational grouping tend away from the wholesome, but the Katamenian variety seemed to go out of their way to dabble in the ghastly.

  Presently, when he had finished reading, Parkin closed the book. He took a long draught of hot tea and blew a sigh of steamy breath through his walrus moustache. ‘Sorry, Cabal, old son,’ he said to the empty room. ‘You’re on your own this time.’

  * * *

  It was in an early morning in the fifth week of their vigil that Muk was to be seen speeding away from the railway station upon a bicycle (the bicycle was hired as per their instructions, despite them so very much wanting to steal one instead). A study in angles, Muk arrived in an area from which they had previously been kept by their orders: the environs of Cabal’s house itself. Casting the bicycle aside, he waved like a human semaphore up at the hill that faced the house. He remembered the hour, drew a pistol from his pack, and fired it skywards, then took a red flare, ignited the fuse against the striker cap, and capered excitedly around. Some five minutes and another couple of skyward shots later, he was rewarded by the sight of Vlatez making his way at a steady jog through the gloom towards him.

  The burly man arrived with a question on his lips, but it died when he saw Muk’s grim expression. Still, he had to be sure.

  ‘The queen … she has not arrived?’

  Muk shook his head. Through their long surveillance, it had primarily been the thought of pleasing Her Majesty that had kept them
keen. The conditions for ending their mission had been threefold and explicit. If nobody comes to the house in the space of three months, they were to return to Mirkarvia by the next available packet. If Queen Ninuka or one of her recognised senior ministers or advisors arrived, they were to be conducted to Cabal’s house with all possible speed, for the necromancer was dead or captured, and his house and its contents were declared bounty to the new Mirkarvian Empire. If, however, Cabal or one of his colleagues were seen to return …

  They both knew this boded poorly for their beloved monarch, whom they loved more than life. With a dark hatred growing in their hearts for the probable assassin of Queen Orfilia Ninuka, they opened their packs and removed the pieces of equipment they had hoped never to need.

  * * *

  It was a tired necromancer and his subdued vampire brother who left the milk train at the station and, finding no cart to be hired, nor even any bicycles to be had, they settled down to walk the few miles to the house. ‘He was luckier than us,’ said Horst, nodding at the angular man in ill-chosen shorts haring off down the road on a bicycle. He looked to the sky and checked his watch against the station clock. ‘Oh, well. Should be back with a few minutes to spare before dawn, in any case.’

  * * *

  Cabal and Madam Zarenyia had popped back into existence in Abyssinia, Horst and Miss Barrow in Constantinople. As previously arranged by Cabal in a tortuous but ultimately sensible plan of meeting places and poste restante addresses, they rendezvoused in Venice. The plan was for them to travel on together back to England, but Leonie Barrow had said she needed a holiday to recuperate from the adventure in general and being dead in particular, so she would remain on the Continent for a few weeks more. Zarenyia had said that sounded delightful and, as she herself was probably diaboli non grata in Hell for the next few millennia, she would be honoured if Miss Barrow would allow her to be her travelling companion and bodyguard. ‘We can broaden one another’s minds, darling. You can teach me to be a little bit good … and I can teach you to be a little bit wicked.’ Madame Zarenyia said this, and smiled lazily. After securing Zarenyia’s oath not to kill people willy-nilly, extracted with a great deal of dibbing, the Cabal brothers waved goodbye from the Orient Express to the ladies on the platform as the train pulled away safely after dusk with a coffin stowed in the baggage car.