The Fall of the House of Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  * * *

  Thus, they found themselves back in England, walking home. They walked largely in silence (Horst being in an uncharacteristic melancholy mood), but for Cabal once saying apropos of nothing that he hoped the dose of the prize that had gone to Miss Smith had done her good.

  ‘What do you call “good”?’ asked Horst.

  ‘Returned her to life, of course. A life worth living, that is. Her last fragments of physical existence in this world are bobbing around in formaldehyde in my laboratory. If that’s what her spirit has been forced into, I would not regard that as “good”, for example.’

  ‘You’ve got bits of Miss Smith in bottles?’

  Cabal nodded. ‘It was a courtesy of sorts. I don’t expect you to understand.’

  Horst didn’t, and so that line of conversation dried up.

  They were within a mile of the house, although it was hidden from view by the curve of the small valley in which it resided. Horst paused. ‘Something is wrong,’ he said with a certain gravity that impressed his brother.

  ‘Wrong? How so?’ He peered off into the darkness. The day was coming, and the ridges of the hills were rimed with pre-dawn light. The birds were stirring in the trees, and there was dew upon the grass. It seemed commonplace enough, but Cabal felt his hackles rise.

  Horst closed his eyes and stood with his head cocked as if listening. Then he drew in a deep breath through his nose.

  ‘Smoke. I smell smoke.’ His eyes opened wide and he stared at Cabal with horror. ‘Fire.’

  ‘Run! Run!’ Cabal had no time for niceties. ‘I will catch up. Run, for heaven’s sake!’

  * * *

  Horst burnt a lot of his blood reserves to go as fast as he possibly could, and that was very quickly indeed. He tore through the intervening mile in a time more easily measured in seconds and parts of seconds than minutes, and turned the edge of the hill upon whose lower slopes Johannes Cabal had somehow shifted the house some years before. It was alight, the window of the sitting room on the ground floor and that of Johannes’s bedroom on the first both shattered, smoke and flames showing through the frames.

  He ran to the house, noting an abandoned bicycle lying by the path through the valley some twenty yards from the wall. Instantly put in mind of the figure cycling away from them with such urgency at the station, he started to get a vague understanding of what might be afoot.

  He hurdled the front wall into the house’s small rose garden and found the little folk of the garden engaged in a cleanup job. Assorted body parts were being dragged under the rosebushes. Horst noted a rapidly vanishing leg, extant only from the knee down, wore a bicycle clip. ‘What happened here?’

  ‘Is not our fault,’ chorused the tiny, cute, ineffably dangerous denizens of the garden. ‘They weren’t postmen. Johannes only said not to eat the postmen! We have been good!’

  ‘I said’—Horst allowed his own ineffable dangerousness to wash into his voice—‘what happened here?’

  Taking the hint, the garden folk said, ‘They climbed over the wall! They had metal rocks and threw them. Poom! The metal rocks went poom! And things went on fire! We said, “Hey, you! Stop throwing around metal rocks that go poom!” And they went, “Whaaaaaat?” And then we ate them because they weren’t postmen. That is what happened here.’

  Johannes Cabal arrived, panting heavily and his jacket discarded somewhere on the way. ‘What,’ he wheezed out, ‘has happened here?’

  Horst reached down and lifted up the leg despite the squeaks of protest from the garden fey and tapped the bicycle clip significantly.

  Cabal glanced at the fire and grimaced with open anger. ‘Ninuka! Such a poor loser.’ Now he weighed up the fire more carefully and how good its grip on the fabric of the building might be.

  ‘The house is doomed,’ he said almost immediately. ‘But we can still save much. Avoid opening doors when you can, keep the rooms short of oxygen.’ He nodded at the house. ‘The sitting room and my room will be lost first. Mine contains little of import, but from the front you must get all the books from the second and third shelves, and save the three boxes on the deep shelf by the fireplace.’

  ‘Really? You want me to save your head collection?’

  ‘My reasons are sound, hardly sentimental. Meanwhile, I shall fetch Dennis and Denzil. They may for once turn out to be useful.’

  ‘Johannes, wait!’ Horst pointed at the eastern sky. ‘The sun’s almost up. I can’t help you. I have to find cover.’

  Cabal did not hesitate. ‘Drink your phial. It will make you human again, I think.’

  Horst shook his head. ‘You think. And what about Alisha Bartos? No, the phial is for her. I failed her, I will save her.’

  ‘Miss Bartos shall have mine. You take yours now. Consider it the fulfilment of the promise I made when I first released you from the Druin crypt. You deserve life, Horst. A real life.’

  Horst gawped at him. ‘Yours? But … what about—’

  ‘If we don’t act now, all is lost. You say you failed her. No, she understood the danger and risked it, anyway. But you, I failed you at that crypt. You had no idea into what peril I was taking us. This time, when I say, ‘Trust me,’ I mean it with every thread of my being. Use your phial. Time is against us.’

  Without waiting for a reply, Cabal ran down the side of the house to the shed where he kept sundry tools, a quantity of firewood and coal, and two blissfully happy zombies called Dennis and Denzil, who found post-mortem existence very much to their liking.

  Horst reached into his waistcoat pocket and fished out the small crystal phial. He regarded it with unreadable expression for a moment, his awareness of the imminent sun rounding the earth to blast him to ashes growing by every tick of his pocket watch. Then in precipitate action, he tore away the stopper and threw the contents into his mouth.

  He had long since forgotten what it had felt like to become contaminated by the taint of vampirism, or so he told himself. It was not true; he had felt the corruption flood every cell, felt his humanity come under a spiritual assault unlike anything he could ever have imagined, felt his very body change as it prepared him for an existence that made him both the most alpha of predators, and the most wretched of parasites. He had felt all these things, and then he had spent the subsequent years of imprisonment assiduously wiping every conscious memory of it away. All he had was that he was Horst Cabal, who was so very human, and people liked him. This was the stanchion to which he clung while the world turned upside down, and it had worked. When he finally emerged, he was not the thing of whispered horror he might have been. He was still Horst Cabal—good old Horst—and if it was only an act, it was good enough to fool even him.

  That pretence was stripped away now, as the shadow was lifted from him, the corruption burning from his cells, and as it did so, he plaintively realised that, to an extent, he had enjoyed being a vampire. The strength, the blurring into motion so rapid as to be almost invisible, the mesmerism, the psychical invisibility, it had all been useful one time or another and, he had to confess, often a great deal of fun. He would miss all of that. Now he would just be himself again, he would age, and he would die. That was fine, he supposed, but he would really miss being something extraordinary.

  He was shocked by how much he had become habilitated to the taint, however; his mortality returned to him like a golden flood of true, actual life. It was ecstasy without a hint of the accursedness that had troubled his feeding as a vampire. He fell to his knees and shuddered under the impact of life.

  Cabal returned a minute later with Dennis and Denzil pottering along good-naturedly hideous and dead in his wake, each clutching a bucket. ‘Go to the stream, fill your bucket, bring it back, throw it’—Cabal realised he was just setting them up for Saturday morning matinee antics unless he was painfully specific in his orders—‘throw the water from the bucket onto the fire, and then return to the stream to do the whole thing again. Keep doing it until I tell you differently. Go on! Off you go!’ He watched
the wretchedly preserved pair totter off in the direction of the stream. ‘And don’t fall in!’ he shouted after them, more in hope than expectation.

  Glancing at the state of the house—the fire had become noticeably more entrenched even in the minute or so he was away—Cabal helped his brother back to his feet. ‘Well?’ He looked to the east. The sun was almost cresting the hills. There would just be time to get Horst to the shed and away from the sun’s rays if the contents of the phial proved to have failed. ‘Did it work?’

  His brother looked at him. Cabal realised something he never had until that moment; just how much of the colour had left Horst since his unfortunate change in lifestyle. When he had first seen him as a vampire, Horst had been trapped underground for over eight years, and Cabal had unconsciously rationalised his changed complexion as something akin to prison pallor. Then he had grown used to it, not least because the practicalities of vampiric life meant that he had only seen him by artificial light, by candle or fire, and occasionally by the light of the moon subsequently.

  Now there was colour in his face, pinkness in his cheeks, and the gleam of his eye was less unnatural, less feral and feverish.

  ‘I think it did, Johannes.’ Horst said it slowly, as if waking from a dream. ‘I think it worked. I feel different.’

  ‘Human?’

  Horst shrugged. ‘I don’t know. My memory’s not that good.’

  The acid test was upon them a moment later. The sun finally spilled its light over the horizon and bathed the pair of them in its brilliance. Cabal squinted against it and regretted having dumped his jacket in the run to the house; it might have done to shield Horst and give him an extra few seconds if necessary. But Horst was standing there, looking at his hands in the full onslaught of the new day and, wonderfully, there was no smoke leaking from them. He turned to face the sun, and the only shield he needed was his hand to his brow.

  ‘Mein Gott,’ said Cabal. ‘It worked, Horst. It actually worked!’

  Horst turned back to him, looking perplexed. ‘There is one thing, though.’

  ‘Which is?’

  Horst opened his mouth to show his teeth. Nothing seemed unusual. Then, presumably as the result of a small act of effort on Horst’s part, his fangs extended. ‘Wha’s all this abou’, eh?’ he asked, as of one having a conversation with the dentist.

  Cabal looked at him, little short of aghast. He looked at the sun, which was definitely up, definitely real, and definitely sprinkling its purifying rays all over his brother. He looked again at Horst, who was definitely alive, definitely befanged, and definitely not bursting into flames. It was a conundrum.

  ‘Horst,’ he said, theorising frantically yet failing to settle on any specific conclusion, ‘I’m not entirely sure, but I think we may have inadvertently disturbed the natural order of things.’

  Horst closed his mouth and made a sour face. ‘What? Again?’

  ‘In any event, we have no time to discuss your newest and most baffling change in taxonomy. The house is afire and’—they watched as Dennis, soaked to the skin, padded past, threw a half-filled bucket of water into the flames, stood admiring his work for a few seconds, turned, and padded happily back off to the stream—‘and I have no great hopes of bringing it under control. Come on!’

  And so saying, he ran to the front door, tested the handle to see if it was hot, and entered, Horst close on his heels.

  They cleared the burning sitting room first. Horst gathered up armfuls of the indicated books and journals while Cabal stood on a chair to recover the three head-sized wooden boxes from the deep shelf by the fireplace.

  The work progressed quickly, punctuated by the occasional sprinkle of water as Dennis or Denzil flung the remaining contents of their buckets through the smashed window. Cabal also noticed, but did not comment upon, just how many books Horst could carry at a time, ferry them out, and return for more, all without even breaking a sweat. The prize of the Five Ways truly was staggeringly powerful. Returning Leonie Barrow to life exactly as she had been before she was shot had demonstrated its extraordinary capabilities, but if Horst truly had been turned into a creature with the advantages of a vampire but with all the marked disadvantages removed, that was perhaps an even greater miracle. Had such a creature ever existed before?

  The upper stories of the house were in the greatest danger, so they headed upstairs for their next job. Cabal had next to nothing he couldn’t live without in his room or anywhere on the first floor, and he was in and out the former to grab his backup travelling bag, a hidden bag of cash garnered from the year of the Carnival of Discord’s operations (he had a feeling he would be needing a lot of money in the near future), and—somewhat to Horst’s surprise and pleasure—a framed picture of their mother and father. That was it for the first floor.

  The topmost floor consisted of Cabal’s main attic laboratory. Here Cabal flung a shelf full of notebooks and journals into an old Gladstone bag, and then moved along the shelves rapidly and without vacillation choosing those things that would be very hard to replace. These were dropped on top of the notebooks, those things that he did not require being left to burn.

  There was one point where he paused before a row of jars half filled with a clear liquid, almost colourless but for a hint of yellow. That he stood staring at them for more than a few seconds was enough to draw Horst’s attention, busily loading a tea chest with pieces of equipment his brother had asked him to save.

  ‘What’s in those jars? Something important?’

  ‘It’s what’s not in those jars that astonishes me, and gives me hope.’

  ‘Hope?’

  Cabal turned his head, and Horst saw he was smiling slightly. ‘Miss Smith.’

  Horst looked to the jars as understanding dawned. ‘Ohhh … Well, fingers crossed for a happy outcome there.’

  ‘Indeed so.’ Cabal returned to selecting those things to be saved with a new vigour. ‘Indeed so.’

  The attic laboratory scoured of all that was useful required three journeys. Cabal was sweating and dishevelled at the end of it, but Horst was still disgracefully unruffled. Cabal began entertaining thoughts that the phial had magically imbued his brother with the power to be more irritatingly perfect than even he had previously believed possible. On the last sortie, the stairwell had been difficult to negotiate, both in terms of the smoke noticeably thickening since the last one, and the choking effects it had as it gathered at the head of the well. Cabal glanced up at the skylight that illuminated the stairwell; as and when the fire broke it, then it would become beyond any hope of control. Between the broken windows and an open window at the top of the house, a convection flow would surely develop, feeding the flames with fresh oxygen and turning the building into an impromptu furnace.

  ‘We don’t have long left,’ he told Horst as they put down the last load of salvage from the attic by the garden gate.

  ‘Put out the fire! Burney fire! Ouchey fire!’ chanted the garden folk as Denzil and Dennis ambled past, bearing buckets. They lined up in front of the sitting room window and attempted to fling water through the broken glass. Denzil underdid his swing of the bucket, and watered the base of the wall. Dennis overdid his, and ended his swing with the bucket on his head. Denzil regarded him for a moment, put down his own bucket, and tried to dry Dennis off with his hands, a hopeless venture given both of them had already fallen in the stream a half dozen times each. Finding his fingers wet, Denzil tried flicking water droplets from them at the fire.

  The Cabals watched them, paragons of firefighting. Johannes Cabal shook his head. ‘There’s no point in trying to sort them out. It would take hours. The fire will spread very soon and threaten the fabric of the house. The cellar; nothing is more vital now.’

  Cabal wetted his handkerchief on a passing zombie and tied it over his nose and mouth. Horst demurred to do the same; he apparently felt few ill effects from the heat and smoke. Then they entered the house in which they had grown up together for the last time.

&nbs
p; They made their way with the surety of long familiarity through the smoke in the hallway, across the black-and-white tiles of the corridor, across the parquet from the base of the stairwell, and so to the kitchen. There Cabal opened the door to the cellar and flicked the light switch. Electric lights glowed slowly into life, draining the last few minutes from the emergency storage batteries even as the automatic generator was coaxed into life by the demand for power. By the time they were halfway down the stairs, the generator had coughed a few times and was now chugging along quite contentedly. The light strengthened, and they looked around the first cellar, neatly arrayed with shelved assorted household oddments, storage boxes, fuel cans, and boxes of tinned food. They ignored them all, but for a large barrel. Here, they hesitated.

  ‘It’s bigger than I remember,’ said Horst.

  ‘We got it down here easily enough. We just reverse the process. You are more than strong enough to—’

  ‘I was strong enough. That was before I swallowed the contents of the phial.’

  Cabal stared at him. ‘But … you still have your fangs. You’ve been carrying around great piles of books and equipment without obvious effort. I thought—’

  ‘No. I’ve changed. Something’s changed. I can feel it. I’m not as strong as I was.’ He looked around, found a large sack of potatoes, gripped it by the neck with one hand, and hefted it up.

  Cabal pointed. ‘That is no small feat.’

  ‘Any decent circus strongman could do this.’ Horst gasped with exertion. ‘This would have been nothing to me an hour ago. Now I’m really labouring to manage it.’ He dropped the sack. ‘I’m not even half as strong as I was. That barrel, plus all the liquid in it, plus poor Alisha, how much is that going to weigh? I can’t do it, Johannes.’ He nodded towards where the hidden laboratory lay behind its secret door, his evident despair deepening. ‘And this thing is a feather’s weight compared to the glass coffin.’ He looked helplessly at his brother. ‘What are we going to do?’