Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

CHAPTER 9 in wich I go to the carnyval and see stuff

Wat I did at the weakend

by Timothy Chambers esq. VC and bar, bane of the treens.

“Well, ain’t you the enthusiastic one, huh, junior?” said Mr. Bones, looking down on the young boy jumping up and down in front of him. “Where’s your mom?”

The boy looked abashed. “Over there,” he said eventually, and pointed at half the county.

“Oh,” said Bones. “Right. Well, so long’s she know where you are, young fella, that’s fine. You want to go on the Ghost Train, hmm?”

The boy nodded hard and fast enough to pull muscles in an older man.

“Okay, but you got to understand, this is one spooky mother of a ride, y’hear? We get kids — oh, heck — twice your age goin’ in here, comin’ out like ooooooold men.” He illustrated “ooooooold” by going bowlegged and waggling his hands. “Why, I went in there with a fine head of hair. Now look!” He whipped off his brown derby to show a perfectly smooth skull. The boy laughed delightedly. “Oh, you can laugh now, but look what this ride gone and done to me. I’m only fifteen!”

“No cash, huh?” said Bones. “Weeeell…” He looked around with great drama and then ducked close to whisper, “I s’pose I could push the rules and let you in, yeah? But it’s our secret, right? No tellin’ your friends, ’cos I’ll have to say no to ’em. Okay?”

The boy nodded, excited by the conspiracy.

“H’okay, then,” said Bones. He stepped into the ticket booth and slapped out a piece of pasteboard. “Here y’go. One complimentary ticket, courtesy of the management.” The boy took it reverentially. Bones stepped sideways out of the booth and said sternly, “You got a ticket? I see you have.” He plucked it from the boy’s fingers, tore it neatly in two, and returned the stub. Then, brightening, he said, “All aboard the Ghost Train!” and waved him onto the first car.

The train accelerated hard and shot into the tunnel like a ferret down a hole, smashing open the doors that kept the interior in gloom. Timothy had a momentary impression of the hideous grinning face painted across the doors changing its expression to one of worried anticipation just before impact, and could have sworn that he heard the doors say “Ouch” in concert amidst the loud buffet as they bounced off their end stops.

“Ha-ha,” said the driver laconically to himself. The train swept around a corner and down a small hill that must surely take them lower than ground level, slowed to take a hard jink to the left, and then started to pick up speed. Timothy hadn’t been on many ghost trains in his short life, but this one was surely different. Even the way the train ran — heading off into doors to the right of the façade and therefore offering a widdershins ride as distinct from the common clockwise path — seemed calculated to unsettle. For several long seconds, nothing occurred. Then he became aware of a small grey area that, for a curious moment, he felt sure was a window. No, it was too irregular. Suddenly he realised that it was a large toy rabbit, perhaps four feet tall. It had definitely seen better days: one ear was lopsided halfway up its length, the fur was balding down to a hessian quality in places, and one of its button eyes dangled on its cheek by a loose thread.

Jan the Horror Bunny took delicate hold of the thread running from beside the site of his dangling eye and pulled gently, drawing the eye back into its correct place. “That’s better,” he said to Timothy. “It plays absolute hell with your stereoscopic vision having one eye wandering around like that. So, Master …?”

“Timothy,” said Timothy in a small voice, although not as small as one might expect under the circumstances.

“Master Timothy, are you enjoying the fair so far?”

“It’s a bit… funny.”

“Oh, yes,” said Jan, leaning forward in his seat to peer into the darkness, “it’s a funny fair all right.”

Suddenly thin figures, apparently made from outsize black pipe cleaners with broken spoons for heads, leapt out of nowhere and danced around, making gobbling noises. Timothy jumped a little. “Garn!” shouted Jan. “Get it out of it, you beatniks!” The figures capered out of sight, still gobbling. Jan turned to Timothy. “I mean, what are they meant to be? They’re just a mess. We’ve been on the go for months now, and we’ve never met anybody who had a morbid fear of surrealism. Dislike?” He seesawed a paw. “Maybe. Fear? Nah.”

They trundled on in silence for a few more moments. Something indescribably phobic shuffled out and sat by the track, smoking a woodbine. “I am the thing that lives under your bed. Goorah, goorah.” This last delivered as the sort of noise a monster might make if it could get up a bit of enthusiasm.

“Oh,” said the something. “Bollocks.” It shuffled back into the shadows until only the glowing tip of its cigarette was visible.

“You’re a tough nut to crack, Master Timothy,” said Jan. A wardrobe loomed up, and the door began to open, slowly, menacingly. Jan leaned out of the train and kicked it shut. “Don’t waste your time,” he called at the wardrobe as it was lost in the gloom behind them. Muffled swearing seemed to be coming from it. “He’s only a kid.” Jan turned to Timothy and studied him with an appraising eye. A tug of the thread allowed him to study Timothy with two appraising eyes. “We should have a few vampires and zombies and that sort of thing in, shouldn’t we? All this psychological stuff is entirely wasted on you.”

With another battering of bat-wing doors, they were back out into the open air. “Hey, kid,” said Jan as the train drew to a halt and the driver returned to studying the racing papers, “want to see some stuff?”

Timothy and Jan wandered the carnival, drawing surprisingly little comment except a few disparaging ones about the condition of that little man’s costume. “Where are we going?” asked Timothy.

“Dunno yet,” said Jan. He paused and looked slowly around, as if his ears were radar antennae. “Let’s try the Hall of Mirrors.”

“Ah, pooh!” said Timothy with gusto. “Halls of Mirrors are boring. All there is, is a lot of mirrors, an’ one makes you look fat an’ another makes you look thin an’ one makes you look wiggly. That’s boring.”

“You’re too young to be worldly-wise, Master Timothy,” said Jan. “C’mon, get educated.” They went around the back of the sideshow and slipped in through a service door.

“We won’t get in trouble, will we?” asked Timothy a little tremulously, for he was basically a responsible lad and respected the privacy of individuals and institutions. Besides which, he hated getting shouted at.

Jan paused to think about it, erecting his floppy ear and flopping his erected one while he did so. “Trouble? Nah, I shouldn’t think so. The Hall of Mirrors is much more fun from this side.”

They were in a darkened room, the only illumination coming from tall, thin oblongs of subdued light. The oblongs seemed at first to be pictures of a dull room, until Timothy belatedly realised that they were on the other side of the mirrors, looking into the hall itself. From this side, the images were completely undistorted, as if the mirrors were plain glass, and no sooner had he made that realisation than people started coming in. He watched as people trooped past, pausing, laughing, doing knee bends, sticking out tongues, dragging their friends in front of the panes, moving on, all in total silence. “What’s so good about this?” asked Timothy.

“Come over here,” said Jan, beckoning. Timothy joined him by a mirror that was in a little cul-de-sac off the main room. The light was bad, but there was a woman standing on the other side looking at herself in the looking glass. She wasn’t smiling. Timothy squinted; she looked familiar somehow, but this mirror, unlike all the others, didn’t give a clear image. It was like looking through a film of oil, or at a body at the bottom of a shallow pond. “Know what she’s seeing?” asked Jan in an unnecessary whisper. “She’s seeing herself as she wishes she was. Probably a bit younger, probably a bit more shapely, probably not looking quite so much like somebody travelling steerage in the ship of life. Sad, ain’t it?”

“Why’s she want to be younger? I can’t wait to grow up.”

“You don’t have to wish to grow up, it happens all the same. You can’t stop it. Not without the proper assistance, anyway.”

“She looks all right to me,” said Timothy, to whom all adults were much of a muchness.

“Yeah, but you ain’t seeing what she’s seeing. If you were looking in that mirror, know what you’d see? You’d see yourself in a few years’ time.”

“As a space pilot?”

“If that’s what you want to be. I don’t suppose she wants to be Daniella Dare, though. Whoa, she’s gonna be off in a minute if the boss doesn’t shake a leg.” The woman shook her head unhappily and turned to go. As if on cue, a tall blond man in slightly archaic clothes stepped up beside her. They started talking. The man gestured towards the mirror, and the woman, despite herself, couldn’t help but look. “That’s the boss,” said Jan, “Johannes Cabal himself.” Cabal stood beside the woman, talking quietly, as she looked at her reflection that wasn’t really her reflection.

“Jus’ a minute,” said Timothy, frowning profoundly. “He won’t be seeing what she’s seeing, will he? He’ll be seeing what he wants to be. What’s that, then?” Unless Cabal wanted to be a space pilot, too, Timothy couldn’t conceive of anything he’d rather be than the owner of a carnival. You could go on the rides as much as you liked and eat candy floss for dinner. If he’d looked a little closer, perhaps he might have seen that Cabal wasn’t looking in the mirror at all, only at the woman. In fact, he seemed to be making some effort to avoid the sight of his reflection.

“Dunno,” said Jan, shrugging. “Oh, here we go.”

Cabal was leading the woman away. She kept stealing glances over her shoulder. She looked hopeful. “Sign on the dotted line, get your heart’s desire and all at the footling cost of…”

Jan looked sideways at Timothy. “Are you sure you want to be a space pilot?”

“Oh, yes!”

“More than anything else?”

“Yes!”

Rocket Ship Erebus swept low over the Sea of Tranquillity. Transmissions from Moonbase Omega had ceased twelve standard space hours earlier, and Space Control had dispatched the nearest rocket ship to investigate. “It’s probably the Selenites,” gruff Colonel Crommarty had warned them. “They’ve been quiet just recently. Too quiet. Be careful, m’boy.”

Now, at the responsive controls of his trusty ship, Captain Timothy Chambers, space VC and bar, coolly appraised the approaching base. “No signs of life, old man. I don’t like the look of this. Not one little bit.”

His co-pilot, Space Rabbit First Class Jan, nodded thoughtfully. “The Selenites have never forgiven you for the last time you gave them a bloody nose, guv. It’s no secret this is your patrol area. We’d best be on the lookout. It could just be a trap.”

The Erebus performed a perfect landing by the base’s ground-vehicle bays. “What’s the scheme, guv?” asked Jan. “We’re nowhere near the main airlocks.”

Captain Chambers finished checking his Toblotron Maxi-Multiblaster ray pistol and holstered it on his space suit. “We’re going in through the vehicle doors. They won’t be expecting us to come from that direction.”

“Oh, crumbs,” said Jan unhappily. “A moonwalk. They always give me the collywobbles.”

Minutes later, the two doughty space heroes were on the concrete apron and heading for the airlock leading into the vehicle bays, Chambers moving in a smooth, rhythmic stride, Jan in cautious hops that carried him twenty feet. Halfway there and caught in no cover, they heard a familiar voice filtering into their helmets, a harsh voice with an underlying counterpoint of clickings and whirrings. “Ah, Captain Chambers. If there is one thing predictable about you, it is your pathetic attempts at unpredictability.”

“T’shardikara,” said Chambers, halting, crouching, and signalling Jan to do the same. “The last I saw of you, you were being pursued through the Venusian swamps by the local fauna. It would seem that even a predosaurus rex has its standards.”

“Make your little jokes, human. I’m not the one trapped out in the open with the guns of twenty Selenite warriors trained upon me.”

“Well, there’s no accounting for taste,” said Chambers evenly, but he was worried. T’shardikara, the atavistic freak with unusually high intelligence that had turned the formerly peaceful Selenites against the benign patronship of Earth, was not to be dismissed lightly. Even now, in his moment of victory, if he said that there were twenty warriors, then there were sure to be at least twice that number. “Jan, old man, I’ve heard say that Pogo Sticks are fashionable again.” He drew his gun and released the “recoilless” toggle.

Jan understood immediately. “Oh, lumme, they’re not, are they?” he said with dismay. He hated this.

T’shardikara had many negative traits, but inattention wasn’t one of them. “They’re up to something,” he clicked and whirred at his troops in their native tongue. “Kill them!”

Three dozen Mutron space carbines opened fire simultaneously, but it was already too late. Chambers, space hero to a generation, had fired at the ground beneath him at full power! The pistol, with its inertial compensators deactivated, produced a monstrous kick. In the Moon’s weak gravity — one-sixth of Earth’s — he was thrown high above the surface. Tumbling head over heels, he reactivated the compensators and started snap-shooting with deadly effect on the snipers. Jan’s enormously powerful hind legs had propelled him into the dark lunar sky without the need for assistance, and he fired in valiant and enthusiastic support. Selenite warriors shattered and exploded under the lethal rain, their return fire confused and ineffective. In seconds, one had thrown down its carbine and was running for the safety of the nearby tunnel — certainly the method by which they had taken the base by surprise. Like a trickle forming into a deluge, the others quickly decided that they couldn’t face up to Captain Tim Chambers, and they, too, ran, a rout rather than a retreat.

“Re-form, you fools! Regroup and attack!” raged T’shardikara. Suddenly he realised he was alone. Discretion being the better part of valour, he ran, too. “The next time, Captain, you will be sorry for this. Oh, yes!” he grated before throwing himself headlong into the tunnel. Chambers’s and Jan’s combined fire brought it crashing down on his heels.

Ten minutes later, they were inside Moonbase Omega untying the prisoners. “Great guns, sir!” cried the base commandant, slapping Chambers on the shoulder. “I thought the jig was up there for a little while. Then, when that Selenite who was leading them — ”

“T’shardikara.”

“They’ve got names? Fancy that. Anyway, when the leader said it was all a trap to take you in, I thought right then, didn’t I think right then, Valerie?”

Valerie, the commandant’s beautiful daughter, looked at Chambers with unabashed adoration. “Oh, yes!” she said. Something about her attention made Chambers feel a bit funny and awkward.

“Think you could do this for a living? Being a hero and everything?”

Timothy was still looking around the room with wide eyes. Light bulbs flickered random patterns in plywood consoles, a painted moonscape was visible through a plastic window, Layla and some giant stuffed toys stood around in tatty uniforms of silver lamé. Layla had an expression of unabashed adoration that wasn’t altering by a twitch. “This is great,” he breathed.

“Well,” continued Jan, “all you have to do is fill in a form and all this can be yours.”

“A form?” said Timothy dubiously. “Forms” were the only things about growing up that filled him with fear. They looked complicated, and he knew his parents hated them.

“Oh, don’t say it like that. It’s your entry to the Space Corps. Your name’s all that’s needed. Right here.” He produced a form from his stuffing.

Timothy looked at it for the best part of three seconds before saying, “Okay.”

“That’s great,” said Jan, flicking pieces of kapok off the parchment. “You won’t regret this.” In an undertone he added, “At least, not immediately.” He passed Timothy a pen.

Miss Raine, Timothy’s teacher, finished reading the report and tapped her lower incisors with the butt of her pen. This made worrying reading; very worrying reading. Something really ought to be done. She took the exercise book, walked out of the marking room through the staffroom, and down the corridor to the headmaster’s study. She knocked and entered at his invitation.

“Good afternoon, Miss Raine,” he said as he finished pencilling in some numbers on the budget figures he was compiling. Miss Raine was notorious for making a big hoo-hah over nothing. He had no doubt that this was going to be more of the same. “And how can I help you?”

“It’s Timothy Chambers, Mr. Tanner. I’m a little concerned about his state of mind.”

“Tim Chambers? Really? He’s always struck me as perhaps a little overimaginative, but nothing that a few years of secondary school won’t knock out of him. What exactly is the problem?”

“He handed in a report today about what he did at the weekend.” She threw it on the desk. “It’s bordering on the psychotic.”

As Tanner leaned forward to pick up the report, he noticed that Miss Raine’s skirt stopped just shy of her knees. This was a new development. He frowned inwardly; there is such a thing as mutton dressing as lamb. On the other hand, they were unexpectedly appealing knees. Very appealing indeed. He flicked through the report but wasn’t really paying much attention. How was it that he’d never noticed what a handsome woman Miss Raine was? Very handsome, most attractive. Perhaps she had changed her hair? She was saying something about calling in the district school psychiatrist, and he nodded absently. A possible threat to the other children? Why, that would be most unpleasant. They must do everything in their power, in his power, to make sure that didn’t come to pass.

In the space of ten minutes, Timothy Chambers stopped being a nice, decent sort of lad, if a little prone to fancies, and had become a potential serial killer, arsonist, and cannibal. Psychiatric reports were a probability, observational internment a possibility, and removal from the school a certainty.

Tanner watched a pleased Miss Raine leave his study, and he wasn’t looking at her back. She turned at the door and added, “After all, I should know. I was at the carnival myself last night. I had a wonderful time.”