Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

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 about 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 like 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.

Barrow watched the careful precision of his hands, still in their black kid gloves, and thought Cabal moved like a surgeon. For want of a conversational gambit, he expanded on this. “You don’t strike me as the carnival type, Mr. Cabal.” The cream knife hesitated for a heartbeat and then continued. “I’ve met a fair few different types of people in my life, and I think I’m pretty good at summing them up.”

“I understood that you’d retired from the police force, Mr. Barrow,” said Cabal. He made a curious motion with his wrist as he drew the knife along the side of the pot, and every last vestige of cream was neatly wiped from the blade, as if it had been freshly washed. He drove the tip into the jam, took a blob encasing a strawberry back to the scone, and deposited it neatly in the middle. The result was so precise it looked like the work of a machine. Cabal repeated the action with the knife and laid it, spotless, on his side plate. Cabal raised the scone to his lips. “Old habits die hard, it appears.” He took a careful bite.

Barrow persevered. “You’re a very serious man, Mr. Cabal. You don’t strike me as somebody given to frivolity. If I were playing a game of matching people to their jobs, I wouldn’t have got you down a carny-man in a thousand years. Not ten thousand.”

“Not a game you should play for money, then. As a matter of interest — ”

“A doctor,” cut in Barrow, anticipating the question.

“I’ve impressed you with my flashing bedside manner, then?”

“A pathologist, to be exact.”

Cabal studied him seriously. “You see me working with the dead?”

Barrow poured himself some more tea. “It’s hardly a great leap in imagination, now, is it? Look at you. You go around with a face like a wet Wednesday, dressed all in black, and, frankly, lacking something in charisma. Even funeral directors have to be able to deal with people.” Barrow smiled. Cabal didn’t. “The funny thing is that, in my experience, pathologists are often nice, jolly people. They do an ugly job, but that’s all it is, a job. They leave it behind when they go home of an evening. You, though. I don’t think you’ve ever left work at work.”

“No,” said Cabal. “I always take my work home. I’ve got several clowns under the bed, and a man who can belch the anthems of twelve nations in the wardrobe.”

“Ah, but, as I’ve already said, is that your work?”

“Of course. With the help of my brother, I run a carnival. You can’t have failed to notice it. It’s that big thing down by the railway station.” He finished his tea and put the cup down onto its saucer with a harsh click. “Which is where I should be now. Thank you for the tea, Mr. Barrow. It was very pleasant. You must visit the carnival in reciprocation. Perhaps, for a change, when it’s open.” He produced a card from thin air (“Learn a couple of conjuring tricks,” Horst had told him. “People like that sort of thing”) and gave it to Barrow. “A complimentary ticket, courtesy of the management.”

Barrow accepted the card with a nod. As he read the few words on its face he asked, “May I have another? My daughter, Leonie, loves the fair.”

Cabal produced another two tickets. “Come one, come all,” he said without inflection. “Bring your wife as well.”

Barrow took one ticket from Cabal’s hand and put it away with the first one. “I’m a widower, Mr. Cabal.”

Cabal put the extra ticket in his pocket (it was intended to vanish, but he’d had so little practice at this trick that, to the untrained eye, it simply looked as if he was putting the ticket away in his pocket). “I’m sorry,” he said. He seemed to mean it.

“Thank you,” said Barrow.

Cabal spent a long moment refreshing their cups, his intention to leave apparently forgotten. Once more, he didn’t ask Barrow how he took his. As he plucked slices of lemon from their little plate with the tongs, he asked quietly, “Do you miss her?” He didn’t look at Barrow as he said it.

“Every day,” replied Barrow, accepting his cup back. “Every day. Life can be cruel.”

“It wasn’t life that took her away from you,” said Cabal, looking at him directly. There was an even intensity in his eyes, like the gaze of a man who walks into a room where he knows he is going to see something awful and has braced himself for it.

“Fate, then?”

“Death. Death is your enemy. My enemy. Life can be cruel, that’s true. Death is always cruel.”

“Death can be a release,” said Barrow. Watching Cabal talk now, he had a sensation reminiscent of watching somebody open a Chinese puzzle box. Part of it was wonder at the complexity. Part of it was curiosity as to what lay inside.

“Release?” said Cabal venomously. “Release be damned. That’s just doctors’ talk for failure. ‘At least they’re at peace now,’ ‘They’ve gone to a better place,’ all those lies. You know what’s waiting?”

“I’ll know soon enough,” said Barrow. “I’ll just enjoy life while I can.”

Cabal leaned forward. “I know now,” he said, caution gone. “One place is run by a bored, disappointed sadist. The other … Spiritual transfiguration, do you know what that means? It means having everything that you ever were stripped away, bars of light, too intense to look upon.” He unconsciously fingered the smoked glasses in his breast pocket. “Homogeneity incarnate. Can you imagine that? That’s what the Heavenly Host is, countless thousands of bars of light, souls burning, all the same. Your personality lost forever. Immortal souls, hah! It’s the final death. Sacrificed to a mania for order.” He looked around at the middle distance, his disgust a palpable thing. “Lambs to the slaughter.”

Barrow put his cup down. “Why do you hate death so much?”

Cabal seemed to rein himself in. “I don’t hate death. It’s not a person. There’s no grim skeletal figure with a scythe. I try to avoid hating abstracts, it’s a waste of effort.”

“That’s not what it sounded like a moment ago. You sounded like a man who would kill death if he could.”

Cabal checked his pocket watch. “I despise waste. That’s all.”

“That’s not all,” said Barrow, and instantly knew that he’d overstepped a line.

Cabal got to his feet and straightened his coat. “Good day, Mr. Barrow,” he said with stiff formality. “I’ve enjoyed our little chat, but I have things to attend to back at the carnival. If you will forgive me?” He turned on his heel and went out.

Barrow shook his head. He had the strongest feeling that, whoever Cabal really needed forgiveness from, it wasn’t him. He’d met all sorts in his time, but never anybody quite like Johannes Cabal, and he was beginning to think fate had been kind to him up to now. He dropped some money on the table and followed Cabal.

Outside, he saw Cabal walking determinedly in the direction of the station. He was debating whether to follow when he was arrested by a cry of “Dad!” He turned to see his daughter, Leonie, leaving the hardware shop. He instinctively knew that she had been buying the hinge for the shed that he had complained about yesterday with the words “I’ll have to get around to that one day.” With Leonie, “one day” was “tomorrow,” except on those occasions when it was “today.”

She came over, smiling with the joys, and Barrow, who had the occasional pang of existential angst, was reassured that his life had been worthwhile. Oddly, though, something lay darkly over the familiar happiness that Leonie inspired in him, like a single small but impenetrably dark cloud on the face of the sun. He turned his head slowly in Cabal’s direction.

Cabal was standing stock-still on the far side of the village green, staring at him. The intensity, the unblinking directness of the gaze unnerved Barrow.

He’d once been faced with a rabid dog, an animal that he knew could kill him slowly and agonisingly if it bit him just once. They had stared un-blinkingly at each other, not ten feet apart, as Barrow slowly, and by touch alone, broke, reloaded, and closed his shotgun. It had continued to stare at him as he brought the gun to his shoulder and sighted carefully down the double barrels. The sensation that he had felt, a horrible sensation of the dog’s burnt and chaotic mind communicating its madness to him through its gaze like a basilisk, still woke him in the early hours in a cold sweat. As Cabal stood motionless, staring, glaring, some of that sensation returned to Barrow, and he shuddered involuntarily.

The realisation that Cabal wasn’t looking at him at all released him from his paralysis. The realisation that Cabal was actually looking at Leonie proved unexpectedly confusing. Unable to draw any conclusions, he left his next action to conditioned reflex. Perhaps unfortunately, his inclination was towards politeness.

Taking Leonie’s arm, Barrow walked over to where Cabal was apparently rooted to the ground. “Mr. Cabal,” he said. Cabal’s eyes never deviated from Leonie’s face. “Mr. Cabal, I’d like to introduce you to my daughter, Leonie.”

“You own the carnival!” said Leonie, recognising the name. “Oh, I love fairs!”

“Mr. Cabal has very kindly given us tickets,” said Barrow, patting the pocket that contained them.

“Thank you, Mr. Cabal,” said Leonie. “I really do adore carnivals. We only tend to get the little travelling ones around here, though. Nothing you could call a big professional affair. I am so looking forward to tonight.”

Cabal looked fixedly at her. Smoothly, as if possessed by a will of its own, his hand moved to his breast pocket, withdrew his spectacles, shook them open, and put them on. Seeing the world through smoke-tinted glasses seemed to shake him out of his paralysis of will. “Thank you, Miss Barrow. I’m … we’re very flattered by your interest.” He spoke slowly and with curious emphasis, as if his mind were elsewhere. Barrow watched him closely. Leonie was a good-looking girl — even allowing for a father’s pride, that was plain to see — but surely Cabal wasn’t smitten? The thought of a romantic streak in the sinister Mr. Cabal was disconcerting, even distasteful, especially if his own daughter was the focus of interest.

“How long are you here?” asked Leonie.

“Here,” repeated Cabal tonelessly. “This is the last night.”

“Then where are you going?”

“Then it is the end of the season,” said Cabal. There was a finality in the way he said it that Barrow doubted was deliberate, and that was all the more suggestive for it.

Leonie was talking again. “Well, we mustn’t miss our chance. You can be sure we will be there tonight, Mr. Cabal.”

Barrow smiled, and it didn’t even get within scenting distance of his eyes. He was distracted by the sure knowledge that there was something going on that he didn’t like. He could taste one of his famous hunches, and it held the flavour of a beached whale. He sincerely regretted introducing Leonie to this man. He sincerely regretted accepting the tickets. He sincerely regretted that he would have to disappoint Leonie by making her stay at home tonight.

“But why?” It was later, and they’d gone home after saying goodbye to Cabal and Leonie, once again reassuring him that they’d certainly be there tonight. Barrow had just mentioned casually that he would prefer it if she didn’t go after all, hoping vainly that she might just accept his wish. No such luck. It was shaping up into one of their rare, and all the more unpleasant for it, arguments.

“Nothing ever happens around here,” she said. She seemed hurt, as if he were asking her to stay out of sheer malice.

“There’s something wrong about Cabal. About his whole carnival. Things are happening. Unnatural things.”

“But you know why that is,” said Leonie, as if he were being deliberately stupid. “Rufus Maleficarus the necromancer. He’s trying to ruin the Cabal carnival. We know that.”

“Maleficarus is dead,” pointed out Barrow.

“But he’s a necromancer. That’s the whole point. Life after death after life. They should have burnt him, but they didn’t. Now he’s come back.”

“Do you really believe that?” Life after death after life. Something in the words provoked the glimmer of an idea. In Barrow’s mind, cogs of pure thought started to form from the chaos of unordered data.

“We’ve seen the newspaper. It happened at Murslaugh. The Cabal brothers are heroes there. They’re not making it up.” She shrugged and shook her head at his stubbornness. It was a gesture she’d learned from her mother. She didn’t know it, but it was a knife in his heart every time she did it.

He blinked the pain away and tried to marshal his arguments. They weren’t having it and remained an undisciplined mob. “Look, I’m not arguing about this. You are not going.”

“What?” She couldn’t believe he could be so intransigent. Of course, the crowning point was that she was a grown woman and he really couldn’t stop her if she decided to go. That, however, wasn’t nearly so important to her that minute as understanding why he was even trying. “What happened to hearing both sides of an argument?”

“All right, let’s hear your side.”

“My side? My side is that I want to go to the carnival because I want to go to the carnival. It’s fun. I would like some fun. It’s your side that’s lacking.”

“I’ve told you …”

“You’ve told me that you don’t like Mr. Cabal. Fine. I think you’re being silly, but if you insist, I’ll avoid him. I don’t want to go for his fascinating conversation.” She saw her father fight a smile. Cabal had been all but monosyllabic when she’d spoken to him. “I just want to go on the Ghost Train, throw balls at nailed-down coconuts, and have a bit of fun. What’s wrong with that?”

“There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just…”

“What can possibly happen?” She looked at her father and felt her anger cool a little. When all was said and done, he would die for her, and they both knew it. “What can possibly happen?”

Barrow sighed. Here was the crux of it. “I don’t know,” he admitted, “I really have no idea. Maybe nothing. But, but” — he took her hands in his — “maybe something. Try to understand. When I was still with the police … No! Hear me out!” Leonie had rolled her eyes at the mention of his old job. When he was satisfied that he had her attention, he continued. “When I was with the police, I came across all sorts. The criminals, nine times out of ten, it was obvious. They forget what morality is — real morality, that is. The stuff that lets us get along with each other. They can mimic it like a chameleon can mimic the colour of leaves, but that’s all it is. Mimicry. They’ve forgotten what it is to think like everybody else, and they get things wrong. Little things, but you get so you can scent them out. Little mistakes. Everything that they do, everything they say is riddled and rotting with mistakes.”

Leonie looked at him, worried. He couldn’t tell if she was worried by him or worried about him. “Are you suggesting that Johannes Cabal is a criminal?” she said.

“No, not at all, not in the way that you mean. I actually think he’s a very moral man. I just don’t think that he’s using the same morals as everybody else. I think …” This was it. He’d painted himself into a corner, and a thousand lazy reporters and ever-so-sincere politicians had rendered the only word that he could use comically melodramatic. “I think … Johannes Cabal… is evil.”

Leonie looked at him in disbelief. Evil. The word had lost its power through overuse. Now it just meant incomprehensible to the uncomprehending. Barrow wanted to explain the complexities of it, this language of suffering that he had learned at countless crime scenes and in too many interview rooms. The serial killer and the serial burglar shared far more than either would like to admit: the need that has to be fed until next time, the need that results in the suffering of others, the easy justifications. They shouldn’t have left it unlocked. They shouldn’t have gone down that alley. They shouldn’t have been dressed like that. Barrow had heard it all, and he’d always smelled the sour smell of a failed human. Cabal, though, he was of another order altogether. There was almost a nobility in the corruption of the spirit that Barrow was sure was there, was sure that he had detected. There was something different, though. If he could just put a name to it, he was sure that he would understand Cabal all the better. Evil, in as far as he had experienced it so far, was always selfish. It was always just an extension of the most stupid behaviour of the infant playground: “It’s mine because I say so. It’s mine because I take it.” Belongings, sexuality, life. But not in Cabal’s case. Barrow played with words mentally as he tried to explain to Leonie what he meant. Cabal’s was a (what?) evil. Clinical? Displaced? Remote? Deviant? Altruistic?

Altruistic? How can evil ever be altruistic?

“It’s against its nature,” Barrow said, thinking out loud.

“Evil?” Leonie was still stuck on the word. It wasn’t one her father used often. In fact, she couldn’t remember him ever using it at all. “Are you serious?”

“I’m serious when I say I don’t want you to go to the carnival.” He tightened his grasp of her hands. “I’m scared for you. I’m scared for every person who walks through those gates.”

“You are serious.” She nodded slightly, and her trust in him closed the distance. “I won’t go.”

After she had gone, Barrow reached into his pocket and studied the two tickets. “You,” he said to one of them, “are surplus to requirements.” He threw the piece of pasteboard onto the fire. “You,” he said to the survivor, “are going to get me inside that carnival tonight. Then we shall see.” He went to the window to reread the printing on the ticket.

As he turned his back on the fire, he failed to see the ticket that he had thrown there flutter up the flue. It seemed miraculously unburnt. Indeed, as it made its way up the chimney, even the scorch marks faded away. Three-quarters of the way to the chimney stack, it made a difficult turn and headed for one of the upstairs fireplaces. Leonie sat by the window, looking off across the fields in the direction that she knew the carnival to be. Unseen, the ticket fluttered across the room and landed on her desk. It found itself a good, obvious position and practised looking alluring.