The Fear Institute

Cabal’s face hardened; he had been trying hard to forget about his inadvertent calling down of Nyarlothotep in the Dark Wood in the irrational but fervent hope that if he forgot about it so would the god. Unfortunately, it seemed likely that Bose was correct. It was stretching coincidence a little far to believe that the sky had just decided to split open and the Moon to explode at that exact moment on a whim. It seemed that Cabal was still being monitored by a supernatural force that, for reasons that remained alien and indistinct, had taken an apparently benevolent interest in his activities. There seemed to be no reason for it – Nyarlothotep was a deity more than usually well disposed to incandescent levels of mindless terror. Why it would see fit to aid an expedition to destroy the well of all irrational fear was a mystery, and perhaps one that transcended the human mind’s ability to comprehend, even if it was explained very, very slowly with diagrams, models and glove puppets. Probably quite frightening glove puppets.

‘The . . . entity to which you are referring, Herr Bose, is notoriously fickle. It did not intervene in the nameless city.’

‘But that wooden monstrosity just fell over, didn’t it? What caused that?’ said Corde.

Cabal looked at him in offended consternation. They had not spoken of that night again, except in the broadest terms, Holk’s death still throwing a pall upon events, but he had not realised that they thought the sinew-wood giant’s fall was due to natural, supernatural or otherwise non-Cabalian causes. ‘It just fell over,’ he said icily, ‘because I was on its shin, waggling a knife around inside its knee joint. I don’t suppose either of you noticed that, due to all the intense skulking you were doing at the time.’ This was slightly hypocritical of Cabal, who had done a great deal of skulking in his life, and was probably regarded as something of a master of the form among the skulking fraternity.

Bose nodded thoughtfully, but Corde was stung. ‘Are you suggesting that we are cowards, Cabal?’

‘Not at all,’ said Cabal. ‘I am stating it. Bose at least has the grace to admit it, by act if not by word. He has never pretended to be anything he is not. Apart from a magistrate,’ he conceded, gesturing at Bose’s judicial robes, ‘but that was rather thrust upon him by the Dreamlands. Reach for that sword, and I shall kill you where you stand.’

For Corde’s hand had strayed to the hilt. It wavered there for a moment, then fell by his side.

Once he was satisfied that Corde would not sully his discourse with any further murderous intentions, Cabal continued, ‘That, Herr Corde, was reasonable caution. Your behaviour in the presence of Ercusides’ great scarecrow was not. Any lucid, rational eye would quickly have discerned the thing’s nature and evolved a strategy for dealing with it, as I did. I required no external agencies to do so.’

Yet as soon as he had said it he doubted it. He had not thought through every detail of that night, but now it occurred to him that there was a speck around which his deductions had been built, a few words of forewarning that had given him a head start on the truth. He thought of a whispering inhuman voice beneath a temple to a forgotten god in a city with no name: ‘Remember Captain Lochery.’

He had focused purely on wondering how the ghoul had even known of the captain and that Cabal was acquainted with him. He had concluded that the ghouls’ unnerving ability to go almost anywhere and anywhen that amused them had been the cause of it, and that the ghoul was merely using the captain as an example of their wide-spanning intelligence, and as a warning to be careful. Now that he paused to consider his memories of the ensuing ratiocinations, however, he realised that the unusual nature of the captain’s leg had flickered through his mind. This, truly, had been the seed from which his deductions pertaining to the true nature of the mysterious wamp-killer had sprung, the moment he had clapped eyes upon the evidence of Ercusides’ exercises in arcane woodwork.

This was a disturbing revelation in itself, and Cabal hushed Corde’s simmering outrage with an impatient flutter of his fingers and a pneumatic pffft of the type used for shooing off cats. Cabal needed to think, and he didn’t need a histrionic solicitor distracting him while he did it.

The truly disturbing element, however, was the nature of the hint. It had been cryptic to the point of abstruseness, and not a reasonable bet for a hint to most people. For Cabal, and Cabal’s thought processes, however, it had been precise and exact. How could some cadaver-chewer have known that? Unless, and he did not enjoy the thought, the ghoul had not been a ghoul at all. Nyarlothotep famously had a thousand avatars, a thousand faces to present, a thousand masks to wear. This was only a figurative figure, however: Nyarlothotep in reality had far, far more. It did not stretch credibility in the slightest to suggest that the ghoul was one of them. If anyone could gauge a clue with such terrifying meticulousness, surely it had to be a god.

Once one accepted in principle that their expedition was being protected by the Crawling Chaos (one of Nyarlothotep’s many names, along with others such as the Black Pharaoh, Ahtu, the Grey Man, Loki, the Child of Eyes, the Bloated Woman, Anansi, the Dweller in Darkness, the Smiling Killer, Tezcatlipoca, and Dave in Accounts), abandoning it became problematical. Nyarlothotep might just shrug and leave them to it, or he might take offence and then revenge. Given that Nyarlothotep’s revenge would likely be biblical in scale, Dadaist in commission, and cruel enough to make de Sade wince, not offending the god seemed very sensible.

Cabal had many faults, several of which were also capital crimes, but he was in no wise indecisive. He shouldered the baldrick to which his Gladstone was attached, and started walking again. ‘Come along,’ he said. ‘I am not abandoning our quest, and therefore will not be finding a reciprocal gateway for the Silver Key. Without it, you are trapped here, Herr Corde, so I suggest you have little option but to accompany us.’

Corde was furious, but still he did not reach for his sword. ‘Don’t I have any say in the matter?’

Cabal stopped to look at him. ‘You have no say, but perhaps you do have a choice. Come or stay.’ He considered. ‘Yes, that covers all the possibilities.’ Cabal made to start walking again.

‘One day, Cabal, you will have your comeuppance.’

‘Is comeuppance some mealy-mouthed way of saying die? One day I shall die, yes, and given my profession, it will likely be sooner than later. But it will also likely be random and stupid and pointless. It is to war against the very irreversibility of such deaths that I do what I do. In all your days as a solicitor, Herr Corde, I doubt you even once pressed the war against death with a minute of your time or an iota of your energy. In real humanitarian terms, your campaign against the Phobic Animus is the most selfless and noble thing you have ever done or will ever do. Do not miss your chance to be useful.’

If the logic convinced him, he did not nod. If the sentiments mollified him, he did not smile but, none the less, Corde followed, and the remaining 75 per cent of the Great Phobic Animus Hunt walked on.

Just over two weeks later, Corde died. It was random and stupid and pointless.

The icy atmosphere within the party had thawed a little, at least on Corde’s part. Cabal was capable of only glacial coldness and incandescent fury; convivial warmness was well beyond him except as an exercise in play-acting. They had made good progress to the Karthian Hills, and the ease of their passage via the kindness of passing caravans, both commercial and military, had given them the easiest leg of their adventures to date. They had bought supplies at cost from the rearguard baggage wagons of a column of húskarlar accompanying a king on royal progress around his lands before saying their goodbyes and climbing into the hills.

The Karthian Hills were painfully bucolic and picturesque, as if planned by John Constable. Every view was striking, every weather condition heart-stopping, the light never anything less than blooming. It was like walking through an art gallery that contained only one piece, but one that surrounded the viewer and altered from one moment to the next, from one masterpiece to the next. As is usually the way in art galleries, they soon settled into a routine of largely ignoring it, but the transcendent beauty of their surroundings could not help but have a mellowing effect on them. Even Cabal found less to be sarcastic about, and so sank into a somewhat resentful quiescence, like a dormant volcano fondly remembering its last pyroclastic flow in which it had buried several hundred people, and now rather looking forward to its next.

There were farms and orchards in the hills, and the people were friendly, refusing as often as not to take payment for the food they gave the travellers. Bose was able to shake off the recent horrors they had witnessed as easily as a young child might, and took to chattering to Corde, or to himself, or to Cabal, which was much the same as chattering to himself. Corde bore the empty conversation well, ignoring much of it, and responding briefly and thoughtfully when the subject touched upon something that interested him. They did not speak of Shadrach. He was gone, and they did not care to consider how that had happened, or the consequences in the waking world when they returned. It would indeed have been easier if only his spirit had entered the Dreamlands, for then his body would have simply died in its sleep and there would have been a coroner’s report of natural causes. Explaining a disappearance would probably turn out to be trickier.

Instead, they liked to consider what the world would be like when the Phobic Animus was finally destroyed. Strangely, despite all their preparations beforehand, they had never truly been examined the actual results of a successful expedition in anything but the vaguest terms of a ‘golden future’. Now that they applied themselves to it, they were pleased and somewhat relieved that they could perceive no deleterious ramifications. Well, almost none.

‘Nobody will care to read ghost stories again,’ said Bose, as they walked. ‘Perhaps just for reasons of literary enjoyment, but certainly not to get the shivers because no one will believe in ghosts any more.’

‘That,’ said Cabal, in one of his rare utterances, ‘would be foolish. One should be cautious of ghosts, for they certainly exist.’ He flexed his shoulder and winced slightly as he said it.

Typically, he would not expand upon the subject having dropped such a boulder into the pool of their conversation, so Corde and Bose had to content themselves with telling one another ghost stories, both ‘true’ and fictional. Cabal sniffed disdainfully during some of these tales, and not during others, by which standard they came to understand which were most likely, given their taciturn companion’s experiences. By this method, they amused themselves to the tops of the Karthian Hills.

The view from up there of the land ahead was less salubrious than that of the land behind. Off in the distance the rolling landscape grew less marked, and the colour drained from it by degrees until the verdant hills gave way to the pale brown sand dunes of the Cuppar-Nombo Desert. Nor was this shade of brown the usual golden brown of Earth’s more scenic deserts, but rather the bland light brown of cold café au lait, a tired, sad colour, too depressing even for hospital walls. All three men looked at it, and all three drew long breaths that they allowed to sigh out of them as if they were deflating. Why the founders of Golthoth had decided to build their city in such a vile environment when the beautiful Karthian Hills were so close was a mystery for the ages. Perhaps the land had been different then; perhaps the Karthian Hills had belonged to some enemy; perhaps the Golthothians really, really liked nondescript brown sand.

Whatever the case, there was a strong sense that their pleasant interlude was drawing to a close, so they settled down to have possibly their last meal without sand in it for a while. They opened their jars and unwrapped their linen parcels, made a picnic of sorts upon the grassy swathe, and chatted about this and that as they ignored the brown expanse and ate their bread, cheese and salted meat.

They had just been discussing the careers that would abruptly wither away once fear was removed (fortune-telling, several branches of insurance sales, and a large part of the Stock Exchange, the latter principally comprised of fiscal pirates on a monetary sea kept profitably choppy by groundless panic and thick-pated optimism; Cabal asked if there was an equivalent form of the Phobic Animus that encouraged such wide-eyed hopefulness, and if so, would they be hunting this cosmic Pollyanna next?), when Corde noticed that the slice of meat he had just that moment arranged upon a cob of bread was no longer there.

After some undignified glaring in all directions, his eye settled upon a young cat, barely more than a kitten, that was padding away as swiftly as it might with a large slice of stolen meat in its mouth. It withdrew to what it believed was a safe distance some twenty feet away, and started tearing morsels from its booty, all the while keeping a watchful eye upon the three men in case they couldn’t resist the desire to recover their food, grass-stained and cat-drool-coated as it was.

‘Well I never!’ said Corde, in righteous anger, but Cabal just made a soft bark of amusement in his throat, and Bose laughed out loud. Corde was suddenly aware that the only beings in that world or any of its immediate neighbours that gave a fig for the fate of his sandwich filling were himself and the cat that had stolen it. He smiled and laughed, a little forcedly, for inside he seethed with resentment at the animal.

‘What sort of cat is that?’ asked Bose, gesturing at it with a meat sandwich that Corde couldn’t help but notice was unsullied by cats. ‘What do they call those? It’s a brindle, isn’t it?’

‘Brindle,’ said Cabal, slowly, as if Bose had said something thoughtlessly hurtful, ‘is a patterning. A brindled cat is a tortoiseshell.’ He sat, watching the cat through narrowed eyes, a faint sense of disquiet growing within him. How far from Ulthar are we? he wondered.

‘Well, whatever type of cat it is,’ said Corde, with faux-joviality, ‘it’s a little rascal.’ So saying, he took up a small stone and shied it in the general direction of the cat. When Cabal saw what he was about, he started to call a warning but it was already too late.

The stone was little more than a largish piece of gravel, and it was thrown without any great force. It should have described a leisurely parabola and bounced upon the grass near the cat, probably startling it. The stone did few of these things. With the horrible inevitability of nightmare it left Corde’s hand like a bullet from a slingshot, spinning rapidly as it went, arced sideways, and hit the cat hard in the head. Even from where they sat, the harsh crack of bone was sickeningly distinct. The cat fell to one side, shaking violently in spasm. Corde leaped to his feet and ran to it, but it was already still and dead by the time he got there.

A man dressed as a great fighting general, he stood over the pathetic little form, put his hand to his mouth and gazed in horror at the blood, the exposed brain and the split eyeball. The cat looked more as if it had been shot than hit by a casually tossed stone.

‘Is it dead?’ he heard Cabal say, in clear, neutral tones behind him.

‘I didn’t mean to . . . How is that possible?’ Corde simply couldn’t take in how bizarre the sequence of events was. ‘I barely even . . . It makes no sense.’

Cabal was not interested. ‘Gather up your things immediately,’ he instructed. ‘We must be on our way before they find out.’

‘What?’ Corde looked uncomprehendingly at Cabal. ‘What are you talking about, man? Before who finds out?’

‘The cats, naturally.’ Cabal was already striding past him, heading westwards in the direction of the desert.

‘Cats, Mr Cabal?’ Bose was having difficulty in raising his voice to be heard through a mouthful of sandwich. ‘The cat’s owners, you mean?’

‘I mean what I say, and I am in deadly earnest. There are plenty of things to be rationally afraid of in the Dreamlands, and not all of them are as overt in their threat as wamps.’

Based on Cabal’s usual sang-froid, if he decided that killing a cat, even accidentally, was cause for a rapid decampment, that was sufficient motivation for Corde and Bose, who decided to hold their questions for later, quickly gathered up their belongings and headed westwards too.

When they caught up with Cabal his first words were, ‘In the shade of the ivy on the wall to the left is a cat. We are discovered already. Our only hope is to reach the desert and hope that their notorious laziness and dislike of discomfort prevents them following.’

Corde risked a sideways glance and saw that there was indeed the tumbledown remains of an old farm wall, upon which grew a generous dangling of ivy. Beneath it, he saw the glint of green eyes, and felt a strangely alien antipathy projected at him that did not make him think of tangled knitting and hairballs. He shuddered, and quickened his pace.

‘What is this?’ he asked Cabal. ‘They’re just cats. How is it that they’re dangerous?’

‘Because they are not just cats,’ said Cabal, now starting to break sweat as he, too, lengthened his step. ‘These are the Dreamlands, and what is here is the stuff of dream. Cats, as any rational person knows, are solitary, opportunistic, ambush predators, much like spiders, but with fewer legs and a better fan club. They are, by and large, stupid animals, the cleverest of the species being about on par with an average dog. I am no great admirer of dogs, either, I should add. My observations, while admittedly casual, are at least, therefore, objective. Cats, however, appeal to the anthropomorphising aspects of the human psyche like no other. They are credited with intelligence, cunning and an indefinable sophistication that, when regarded in light of their actual behavioural mores, will be observed to be pure phantasms. It is a deep belief, however, and that is where our danger lies, for the ridiculously inflated beliefs of generations of delusional cat devotees – and I use the term advisedly – are made concrete in the Dreamlands. Here they truly are intelligent, cunning, sophisticated and capable of the most exquisite malevolence, just as the dreamers who unwittingly weave them would want them to be. You have killed one of their number and, among far too many people, that is a capital offence. And so it is here.’

Soon the cats did not trouble to hide themselves, but sat erect like statuettes by the way, only their eyes moving as the three men hurried past. Then they rose and trotted along in a growing pack behind them, their tails low and twitching with anger.

There was no time to catch their breath and take stock. The horde of idealised kittery in their wake grew in numbers and in threat at every moment. It had long since ceased to be just a bunch of cats – now it was a furred stream that swept after them, an avalanche of claws awaiting the signal.

It was Corde who gave it to them. His evident panic increased with every step, every new recruit to the pursuing army, and his desperation grew with it. He was offered no comfort by his companions. Cabal was silent and focused purely on reaching the desert where the cats might desist. If he knew anything, it was that he loathed the thought of his last moments consisting of being swamped by an overindulged bunch of goldfish-botherers like their persecutors. Bose said nothing, but hurried along in a state of confusion, blinking furiously.

Then panic froze into hopelessness and a desire for some sort of resolution right at that very minute, and Corde stopped, spun on his heel, drew his sword, and bellowed, ‘Come on, then, you damn’d fleabags!’

He was probably expecting a moment of indecision on the part of the cats, a beat before they were faced down, or flew at him, all claws and spitting, but they did neither. They did not stop when he turned, but continued to flow across the ground, and he had barely time to cry his challenge when they were flowing over him too. He was surprised, and did not call out or scream, as he became coated in cat. He struggled, but soon enough he could not see or hear anything. His hands flailed and his sword fell.

Bose said, ‘Oh!’ and went to help him, but Cabal caught his arm and said, ‘If you hurt even a hair on one of their smug little heads, they will kill you too.’

‘But Mr Corde isn’t dead!’ he cried. Cabal just held his arm tightly and watched as Corde fell, and the boiling, purring pool of fur where he had stood smoothed out, and became distinguishable individuals again, then poured off in all directions as if they had appointments elsewhere.

When they had gone, Cabal finally let go of Bose’s arm. ‘Now he is,’ said Cabal.

There was little left, just an abandoned sword, a few scraps of torn cuir-bouilli and some tumbled pieces of equipment. Cabal watched a kitten a few yards away dragging off a finger bone, the joint gripped fiercely in its adorable little blood-smeared mouth.

‘And then there were two, Herr Bose.’

Chapter 13

IN WHICH THE DOMESTIC WONTS OF SORCERERS ARE INVESTIGATED AND CABAL CANNOT BE CONCERNED

Much as a rubber ball deforms on impact only to spring back into its usual shape, so Bose’s crumpled spirits soon rose above such small distractions as having two friends die in relatively rapid succession and in the most horrible ways. After all, life goes on, which in the case of Gardner Bose meant strolling along, whistling a jaunty tune and generally exhibiting a guileless, indeed witless, mien. On a village street, it would be acceptable. In the dun dunes of the alkali Cuppar-Nombo Desert, it was a little wearing.

At least it was not especially hot. The lack of water in the desert was more an accident of geography than extreme temperatures and, while it was a long way from cool, it was not unbearable. Of the environmental hardships, Bose’s whistling was by far the worst. It came slightly muted – although not nearly enough – by the handkerchief he had tied over his mouth and nose in imitation of Johannes Cabal, a measure to avoid breathing in more sand than was necessary. Cabal’s second innovation of wearing his baffled blue-lensed sunglasses Bose could not emulate, so he was reduced to squinting fiercely against the fine dusty clouds that blew up into dust devils given the excuse of any faint breeze.

At least Cabal would not have to endure Bose’s whistling for long, as this leg of their journey would be a short one: according to Cabal’s maps and notes, the abandoned city lay a day’s walk into the sands and was easily visible at range, so an error in navigation was unlikely. When the distant towers of ancient Golthoth appeared, only slightly off their set course, they were only as tired as a day’s walking on sand would warrant and – since the sun didn’t seem greatly interested in the Cuppar-Nombo – barely dehydrated at all.

Golthoth was a very different city from the one they had left by the Lake of Yath. Where that had been strangely vibrant, as if all the citizenry were just hiding out of sight and waiting to leap out in an impracticably large game of peek-a-boo, Golthoth seemed to have been built as a mysterious abandoned city right from the first stroke of an architect’s stylus. As Bose commented when they first walked into its broad precincts, the place seemed very redolent of ancient Egypt, calling to mind the Memphis of the early dynastic period. Was it perhaps possible, he wondered, that the dreams of the first pharaohs had influenced this place? Cabal was quite certain it was the other way around.

The city contained a great deal of formal statuary, made from a dense stone of less scatological shades of brown than the desert. Gods and rulers they may once have been, but a thousand generations of sandstorms had eroded their faces into little more than arrays of suggestive bumps and contours that seemed to indicate that few had begun with human physiognomies. Cabal also noted that the doorways were uniformly a good twenty inches taller than normal Earthly doors, and that the more important buildings often seemed to sport additional doors of a curious squat hexagonal design, some larger examples lacking the upper edge to become pentagonal instead. Cabal kept his counsel, but suspected that these buildings had witnessed visitors for whom the strange doors were ideally suited.

The architectural style, however, was not homogenous. Here and there later additions stood awkwardly surrounded by the eldritch opulence of the original buildings. Some seemed to have been built in an attempt to claim the city for some interloping power, a strategy that had only ever been met by failure, judging from the current state of affairs. Other – rarer – forms were more enigmatic. These were uniquely towers, dotted randomly about the place as if they had been dropped from space, or had grown up through the pavements and squares. There were not many; Cabal counted five easily visible, with two or three more tumbled and broken, the brown sand grown yards deep in drifts against the shattered stone.

‘Wizards,’ he said disparagingly. ‘The pretentious bastards just have to set up shop in towers situated in awkward places. It is a fault endemic among them.’

‘And this wizard Ercusides mentioned . . .’

‘Hep-Seth.’

‘Yes, Hep-Seth. One of these will be his, then, Mr Cabal?’ Bose allowed something like worry to travel across his beamish face. ‘I say, though, it’s all a bit . . . dead here, isn’t it? Do you think he’s still about?’

Cabal considered opening his bag to double check with Ercusides, but decided against it. The hermit-cum-paperweight had become recalcitrant since Dylath-Leen, and every time Cabal tried to speak to him, their conversations became shorter and more cryptic to the point at which he simply did not care to try any more. ‘He should be,’ he said, but did not sound very reassuring even to himself. The city felt dead to him, and he was better equipped than most to sense such a state. He just hoped that it would not be necessary to revivify any more skulls, although the thought of Ercusides and Hep-Seth being stuck in the same Gladstone and resenting it deeply cheered him up a little. ‘It must be one of these towers. We shall work through them until we find the right one.’

Fortunately, the pretentious nature of wizards in general and the sort who raise obtrusive towers in other people’s cities, without so much as a by-your-leave or planning permission in particular, worked in Cabal’s favour. The first tower they approached was all basalt blades jutting into the air around the topmost reaches, with sinuous forms in black marble disporting themselves around the door. It was quite evident why this particular magus had got into the job in the first place. Over the door was carved a sphinx couchant, and when they approached, she turned her face to them and said, ‘Whosoever wishes to meet with Calon of Serpes, the Sage of the Amber Star, must first answer me riddles three.’

‘Calon of Serpes,’ repeated Cabal. ‘Wrong house. Good day, madam.’

‘Wait a moment!’ demanded the sphinx. ‘I’ve been lying here all couchant for three hundred years waiting to ask somebody my riddles.’

‘Then your wait isn’t over. Good day,’ he repeated, a little firmly, and walked away, the sphinx’s enraged shouting fading in the sigh of the desert wind behind them.

Bose looked at him, eyes wide with fright. ‘The door spoke to us!’ he managed eventually.

‘Strictly, the door frame spoke to us, but yes. Now our next port of call.’

The next tower was oddly proportioned, in a way that would appeal to a student of Freud, and Cabal didn’t have to make many guesses as to this magus’s inner motivations either. Fortunately his name was on a sand-scoured brass plate upon an iron door, ancient but readable, and they were able to exclude it from their enquiries and move on.

The third tower belonged to Ukuseraton the Destroyer – at least, according to the animated stone dog that guarded the place, a glistening spire of woven glass and crystal. Then the dog attacked them, but it was only constructed from common sandstone and the desert storms had blasted it thin, so a well-placed kick decapitated it. It charged at Cabal, or where Cabal had been a moment before, and so completed its destruction by running into a wall and reducing itself to aggregate.

The fourth tower was as black as ebon night, and encouragingly bore the inscription ‘HEP-SETH’ over the doorway in Lorphic hieroglyphs that Cabal was able to enunciate with dismissive ease. Less encouragingly, the door stood open, swinging slightly in the low, endless desert wind.

‘Perhaps he has an open-door policy?’ said Bose, with optimism verging on delusion.

‘Yes, of course. That will be it,’ said Cabal, as he eased the door a little further open with his foot. ‘He raised a tower in this distant damned place, wringing the very matter of it from the footnotes between quanta, and then he left the door ajar because he’s so very sociable, really.’ In the low afternoon sun, the ground-floor room of the tower could be seen to be several inches deep in fine sand. ‘And he sacked his cleaner.’

He looked at Bose, but the little man was obviously trying to reconcile all these facts into a whole. Cabal sighed. ‘Sarcasm, Bose. It was sarcasm. I’ll hold a sign up next time,’ he added, but as he wasn’t holding a sign up at the time, Bose believed him, and nodded with a grateful smile.

They tracked cautiously through the entry hall, but if it had ever contained any defences, magical or mechanical, they had long since manifested or sprung. Round the curved wall stood a solid staircase of the same black stone that rose in a clockwise spiral, much like that of a lighthouse. Up this stair Johannes Cabal slowly climbed, followed at a judicious distance by the pallid Bose. The first floor consisted of an antechamber of sorts, the stair to the next floor being behind an elegant but sturdy door of suggestively molten forms, all rendered once more in the smooth glossy black stone. Fortunately it was not locked, and they were able to climb further upwards to what seemed to be an audience chamber or even a throne room. ‘They never lack for egos, do they?’ said Cabal, as they moved up to the third floor. This was the living quarters, informed with the decadent luxuriance so common among top-end wizards. There was a bathing chamber beside the bedroom that contained a great sunken bath, and beyond that a discreet privy, whose drainage plumbing appeared to be a transdimensional interface of some sort. ‘Presumably waste is thereby conducted to some distant place where raining excrement is not regarded as unusual, like Tartarus,’ he guessed. ‘Or Ipswich.’

Cabal had already made some rough guesses as to the dimensions of the rooms, and he could not help but notice that they were growing steadily larger, unlike the external dimensions, which apparently tapered to a small lookout on the highest floor. Apparently, playing merry-hob with dimensions had been Hep-Seth’s major stock-in-trade, and based on this conjecture he had already made a guess as to what the next floor would reveal.

Neither was he incorrect, as they climbed up into Hep-Seth’s laboratory. It was a large room, some hundred feet in diameter, windowless yet illuminated by good, unwavering lights that seemed simply to emanate from the air close to the ceiling. In the centre of the chamber was an iron spiral staircase that seemed likely to re-enter the normal dimensions of the exterior at its peak and open into the small lookout deck. Cabal walked a few yards into the laboratory and looked around, uncertain what he should be searching for. Looking back, however, he spotted Bose’s head from the nose up just peeping out of the stairwell.

‘Is it safe?’ asked Bose, a waver in his voice.

‘That I cannot say. If you specifically mean, Is there an ancient sorcerer up here who is outraged by our intrusion and means us harm? the answer is no. Neither is there a body. The signs are that the tower is abandoned, just like the rest of the city. Hep-Seth either didn’t need this place any more, or died elsewhere and never returned. I cannot say which.’ He grunted irritably. ‘Do come out from there, Bose. I feel like I’m talking to a mole.’

As Bose crept up the remaining steps, like a man entering a maiden aunt’s sick room, Cabal turned his professional eye upon Hep-Seth’s arcane paraphernalia. He was inwardly disturbed by how little of it he could recognise. There were several things whose function he couldn’t even guess at, and his ignorance chafed at him. Nor were they even comfortable to examine visually, their edges, angles and vertices behaving in ways so strange and ill-mannered that Euclid would have been brought to tears.

‘This is the work of a man who was obsessed with reaching the Island of Mormo,’ he said, half to himself, this being the half from which he expected a sensible conversation.

‘Eh?’ said Bose, the half from which Cabal expected nothing, so he ignored him.

‘A genius, judging by his work here. A genius of dimensional engineering. If he wants to go somewhere, he doesn’t call a taxi. He wants to go somewhere none can go, because nobody knows where it is. And he speaks of a . . .’ He had been turning, slowly, as he talked, his eye sweeping around the room, and now he stopped and stared. ‘A seven-sided gate.’

‘Yes, he did,’ agreed Bose, standing by a structure that, to the unjaundiced eye, looked a great deal like an asymmetric seven-sided gateway standing by itself some twenty feet from the nearest wall. It was made from thin, lath-like girders of a brass-like metal that was not brass but a strange alloy that Cabal had encountered once before in unenjoyable circumstances. ‘That’s what your head in the bag said, anyway. But what does it mean?’

Cabal walked over to him, grasped him firmly by the back of his collar, and twisted him to look at the structure. ‘Count,’ he commanded.

‘One!’ squeaked Bose. ‘What’s got into you, Mr Cabal? There’s one frame sort of thing! Should there be more?’

Cabal gave up and let him go while he himself stepped away to weigh up the next move. The gateway was as ambivalent to reality as anything else in the room, seeming to change form within flashes of perception, as if unable to decide whether to be two faces talking or a vase. In this case, however, the choice was between being one asymmetric seven-sided gateway and being any of a vast number of similar but different seven-sided gateways. Looking upon it for even a minute was very uncomfortable, as if the intellect was firmly and methodically unplugging and replugging the cables on the switchboard of the mind into new and ontologically challenging configurations. With difficulty Cabal managed to look away from it, and instead found himself gazing at the cheerfully gormless face of Bose, thereby going from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The work of creating the necessary gate of dubious physicality within the gateway built for it was not going to be a sudden great revelation any time in the next few minutes, so Bose repaired to the sorcerer’s bedchamber to snore gently upon grey-silver samite sheets miraculously untouched by the passage of time, another boon of the tower’s curious reality. Cabal, meanwhile, settled down in the laboratory with what writings of the great man he could find, and started sorting them into piles of graduated usefulness. Even for a man of Cabal’s voracious intellect, this proved difficult. He was a long way from his specialities, and his problems were compounded by the growing realisation that Hep-Seth was not only a leading light in his field but that he was the only light. His notes used forms and nomenclature that were unique to him because he had originated this whole thaumaturgical subset of theory. So, Cabal not only had to evaluate the notes, but he also had to learn a new and novel lexicon in which to do it. Muttering sourly to himself, he began to pore over the papers in the full knowledge that he might be days or weeks about it. Happily, they had discovered a large store of fresh food that was as fresh as the day the fruit had been plucked or the animal slaughtered. It was another of Hep-Seth’s innovations, like the privy, applying the extraordinary to the mundane; neither had he overlooked a seemingly boundless supply of fresh, cool water. They would not starve here, at least.

The next morning – the rooms’ mysterious lighting helpfully waxed and waned to give a sense of the time of day outside – found Cabal surrounded by notes in his own writing and possessed of a grudging admiration for Hep-Seth, albeit one overmatched by a solid dislike for the man based on his inability to write a glossary of terminology and leave it out where some passing necromancer might find it. That he himself wrote notes in a dead language and then enciphered them did not strike him as blinding hypocrisy: he could be executed for necromancy, whereas somebody who could create such magical conveniences as instantaneous travel, perfect food preservation and unblockable toilets had very little to fear, except being mobbed by a loving population.

Bose came in, the very epitome of ebullience and – in rapid succession – wished Cabal a good morning, asked him if he’d cracked the secret of turning the gateway on yet and, even as Cabal was looking for something heavy and spiky to throw at his head, patted it for purposes of illustration, thereby activating it.

Cabal froze, a heavy, spiky thing in his drawn-back throwing arm, and gawped at the shimmering portal that had appeared as easily and without fuss as blowing a soap bubble. The heavy spiky thing fell from his hand to heavily spike the floor.

‘How . . .’ He seemed momentarily incapable of forming the simplest sentence. ‘Gateway . . . How? Created . . . did . . . How?’ He leaped to his feet, the laboratory stool of Hep-Seth clattering over behind him. ‘How in the Nine Circles of Hell did you manage to conjure the gateway, you dim-witted buffoon?’ he roared, forgetting both diplomacy and some much more cutting insults in his passion.

On the other hand, it would have been wasted effort. Bose’s ability to miss, misunderstand and generally remain unscratched by the most jagged verbal barbs transcended the usual simile of ‘water off a duck’s back’. In comparison to his happy indifference to insult, a duck was made of sponge with blotting-paper feathers.

‘I just tapped it, old man,’ said Bose. ‘Hadn’t you tried tapping it yet?’

‘Look at this!’ demanded Cabal, gesturing at the dozens of closely written sheets arranged into neat piles upon the table. ‘Look at all this! This is just basic theory, the very least I would need to understand before going on to intermediate theory, then advanced theory and, finally, the extreme edges of theory where Hep-Seth was working before I could even think of touching that damnable thing! No, “just tapping it” was weeks away.’ He swallowed, and took several deep breaths. ‘Get your things together. We don’t know how long the gateway will remain open.’ Bose opened his mouth to say something, but Cabal interrupted him: ‘If you were about to say that if it closes before we’re ready you can just tap it again, don’t. It would be more than your life is worth at present.’

They had few belongings by this point in any event, the few knick-knacks that Bose had collected being abandoned aboard the Audaine, while Cabal kept all he needed, and several things he might, in his Gladstone. It was the work of a moment to find something similar to a carpet bag in Hep-Seth’s wardrobe (he was, it seemed, especially given to very high collars and wide sleeves judging by its other contents), and to load it with food, water and wineskins. Then they stood before the coruscating light contained within the shifting heptagonal gateway and paused a second. Cabal could not help but be reminded of a similar occasion, weeks before, when they had stood before a similar gateway in an Arkham garret – and just look at how that had turned out. Then, they had been hounded by a ghoulpack and time had been pressing. Now, the only pressure upon them was the possibility of the gateway closing, and that did not seem quite so urgent. Cabal had a sense that if he went through that wavering sheet of distorted reality, things would change, hugely, radically, in ways he could not predict. It was an irrational feeling, and normally he would have crushed it easily, but in that place it circled inside his mind, making his neck tense and uncomfortable, and he knew the Phobic Animus was at work again.

He considered briefly whether he should allow Bose to go first or give him a firm shove into the portal, should he demur. It would be pointless, however: there was no easy way to tell if a disparition was disintegration followed by a distant reintegration, or just disintegration followed by nothing at all. Besides which, the odd ill-formed conviction of change that flittered around his mental battlements, like a translucent sheeted ghost, assured him that the change would not simply be one of being alive to being dead. So, he took a deep breath in through his mouth, let it out through his nose, and stepped into the gateway.

It was a lot less pleasant than travel via a discorporated poet. Cabal had a momentary sense that he had turned to very fine sand, and that the sand was falling away from him. He especially resented it when his eyes flowed away from him like pollen in a breeze, but a moment later the rest of his skull followed and it subsequently became difficult to resent anything very much. He did wonder distantly if this was the nature of the change he had intuited, that he would spend the rest of eternity as a cloud of minutely powdered necromancer, wafting around the cosmos and unable to get very concerned about anything any more. He felt he should be concerned that he couldn’t be concerned, but he couldn’t be concerned enough to care, so he wasn’t. A Jovian perspective, to be sure, but one hard to become enthusiastic about if the job didn’t come with thunderbolts. But then he considered ‘enthusiasm’, and found his own memories of it drained of colour, dimensions and veracity, like a badly written strip cartoon in a cheap newspaper.

Falling apart had been so easy. Mildly disconcerting to begin with, but one got used to one’s molecules going their separate ways, and then the atoms within those molecules trailing off by themselves, and then the electrons and neutrons, and the strangeness and charm, and down ad infinitum in far less time than it takes to say ad infinitum.

Coming back together, on the other hand, hurt like blazes.

There was sun, and there was sand, and there was a screaming, burning man being reforged from the stuff of creation, and he was not enjoying it in the slightest. It would have been a boon if his nervous system had re-formed a little later in the process than it did, but that’s magic for you – even when it’s helpful, it finds a way to be surly with it. Thus his nerves were in place to tell him just how shatteringly painful it is to be glued back together from cosmic clay and fairy dust. The only positives about the experience were that it was educational – being reconstructed is precisely this painful – and it was short.

Johannes Cabal flopped on to the beach, eyes wide with still vibrant memories of recent agony, and rolled on to his back, his hands clenched tightly enough for his fingernails to draw blood from his palms, his face in a humourless rictal grin. He had no idea how long he lay there, the sound of the waves breaking as ignored as the azure sky his eyes saw but did not comprehend. Then he blinked, and sense began to return to him.

‘Gosh,’ said a familiar voice. ‘That stung a bit, didn’t it?’

Cabal sat up. He was on a beach, a beautiful beach of golden sand, beneath a golden sun. It would have been idyllic but for the presence of Bose sitting on a nearby rock, a man with the ability to render the greatest wonders prosaic by his mere presence.

Reaction to the translocation set in a moment later: Cabal leaned over and vomited upon that golden sand, which was not improved by the addition. When he had finished bringing everything up, he felt febrile, weak and oddly ashamed, so he scooped sand over the vomit to hide it. He fumbled in his pocket to find his blue-lensed glasses and put them on to conceal his reddened, watering eyes and save them from the strong sunshine.

‘It stang a bit?’ he managed to say. ‘How are you so composed, Bose? That was the single most unpleasant physical experience I have ever suffered, and I’ve had some bad ones, believe you me.’

Bose shrugged. ‘Yes, it was rather horrid, wasn’t it? But I was here for a full hour before your arrival, Mr Cabal. I’ve had a chance to get over it. Where were you?’

‘Where was I?’ Cabal rose shakily to his feet and dusted himself off. ‘Neither here nor there, it seems.’ He looked around. The beach stretched for about a mile in either direction before vanishing in the curve of the coastline. It gave way to palm trees, then thicker vegetation as it rose up sharply towards a great rocky crag that formed the centre of the island, assuming it was an island and not some promontory on a larger landmass. Directly between them and this feature, however, there was no forest at all, but only a hill of bare rock into which a crude zigzagging path had been carved. At its head, some five hundred yards up the rockface was an equally primitive great stone face cut from the living rock, a demoniacal countenance with a cave entrance for a mouth, befanged, behorned and terrible in its clichés. Cabal had seen a few scary cave entrances in his time, and this one scored low points for originality.

‘This is Mormo, I presume?’ he said, semi-rhetorically, as he expected little insight from Bose. ‘I would hate to have to enter some hideous cave of secrets and face whatever terrors it contains, and then for it to turn out to be the wrong one.’

Bose shook his head. ‘Can’t say, old boy. But unless you plan to make a boat or just settle down here, I don’t suppose we have much choice but to investigate it.’

‘No,’ admitted Cabal. ‘I don’t suppose we do.’

The day was still young, and Cabal felt enervated by the trip and empty by its effects, so they took a little time to eat slowly some of the food they had brought with them, and regarded the cave mouth frequently with guarded suspicion as they did so, just in case the Phobic Animus came galumphing out to share their meal and then, in recompense, kill or unhinge them with a torrent of pure fear. It did not, but the possibility that it might took away most of the small pleasure to be had from eating outside.

It was, however, an eminently suitable time to reflect on how far they had come, and the travails they had undergone to be on that beach. Or just to look at the sea and say how pretty it was, which sufficed for Bose.

Cabal ignored him, a skill it had taken little effort to bring to a high finish. For his own part, the forebodings he had experienced within the tower of Hep-Seth now doubled and redoubled. There was a terrible sense of imminent change, and not a change that he would care for. He was inevitably reminded that the thirteenth card of the tarot deck, Death, signified sudden change that was usually only a figurative death. Usually, but not always. That uncertainty between the metaphorical and the actual had never concerned him quite so much before. Death was waiting for him here; if he had drawn a card at random from a tarot deck right that moment, he would have been more surprised if it had been one of the seventy-seven others.

The sense was not rational, so he could not analyse it rationally. It was subjective to the final degree, so the only metric for it was previous experience. Was the sense imposed, or was its genesis within him? He could not tell. It might just as easily be the influence of the Phobic Animus demonstrating that it had subtleties beyond mortal terror. Cabal drew a long draught from his waterskin, and replaced the stopper with an awareness that this might be among his last acts.

‘Come along, Herr Bose,’ he said, as he stood and beat the sand from his seat. ‘Our destinies, or something along those lines, await.’

The climb up the pathway did not take nearly long enough, and almost before they knew it, they were standing in the mouth of the great stone head. The daylight did not extend very deeply inside, and from what they could see, the interior was not a natural cave but had been cut from the stone of the hill.

Bose squinted into the darkness. ‘I can’t say I fancy going in there, Mr Cabal. It’s awfully gloomy. We shan’t be able to see our hands in front of our faces. I suppose we could try and make flambeaux.’ He looked around and found a bit of dry wood, presumably carried up into the cave during a fierce storm in some bygone year. ‘If we find another stick like this, and wrap something around it that we can set fire to . . . ?’

Cabal said nothing, but took the stick from Bose, and opened his bag. Instantly, cool green-blue flames licked up from inside. Cabal took out the eternally burning head of Ercusides, and stuck it on the end of the stick. ‘There,’ said Cabal. ‘That will do nicely.’

‘Eh?’ said Ercusides. ‘Is somebody there? What is going on?’

‘You’re earning your keep, sir,’ said Cabal. ‘Now, quiet, please. We are working.’

The cave extended back some twenty feet before narrowing into a stone gullet, ridged with shallow steps, that descended at an angle of some thirty degrees to the horizontal. Cabal walked down them without hesitation; if he was correct about the nature of the place, it would not require traps to protect its treasure, as its treasure was quite capable of defending itself. The gullet opened out into a jagged gallery, this time a natural formation that had been tweaked here and there, but was otherwise as natural processes had created it. Along one side a crevice in the floor wound as they walked alongside it, becoming first a crevasse, and then something like an abyss by the time they were close to the far end of the gallery, some two hundred feet long. The light from Ercusides’ skull burned brightly and reflected from the semi-precious stones and quartzes that speckled the walls.

Cabal paused, looking first up a short ramp that led into another narrow carved corridor, much like the gullet from the entry, and then he looked into the abyss. Dank humours were carried up by a low wind that groaned on the very edge of hearing. Bose cautiously joined him.

‘What do you suppose is down there?’ he asked, curiosity and trepidation mingling in his voice.

‘I am guessing at two things. One is a supposition, the other a good likelihood. First, I think whatever is left of the wizard Hep-Seth is down there, if he’s lucky. The gods played a childish game with him, and they usually throw away what they tire of.’

‘Really?’ Bose’s voice was a squeak. He sidled a little closer to the edge and looked into the shadowed deep. ‘And the other?’

The powerful shove he received in his back from Johannes Cabal took him clear off the precipice, and then he screamed shrilly enough to remove any chance of him hearing Cabal say, ‘You, any minute now.’

Cabal listened to the diminuendo screaming for a few seconds, but had heard similar before and was unimpressed by this new rendition. He was making a calculated guess here, and if he was wrong, he was certainly in no more trouble than if he was right. Holding up the grumbling head of Ercusides on his stick, he went down the last corridor and into the chamber of the Phobic Animus.

Surviving fragments of Cyril W. Clome’s manuscript for The Young Person’s Guide to Cthulhu and His Friends: No. 4 Yog-Sothoth, the Lurker at the Threshold

Yog-Sothoth is never late for appointments, best beloved, and for the most wonderful of reasons. Yog-Sothoth is coterminous (coh-TER-min-US) with all time and all space, which means that clever old Outer God exists everywhere ALL the time! It is so terribly, terribly bright that even it doesn’t understand what it’s thinking about half the time, but luckily it’s aware of the other half of the time all the time, so it can crib off itself. I don’t think that counts as cheating.

Yog-Sothoth – who has lots of other names like the Lurker at the Threshold, the Key and the Gate, the Opener of the Way, the All-in-One and the One-in-All and log-Sotôt – looks like a big crowd of silvery bubbles but, unlike a big crowd of silvery bubbles, is stupendous in its malign suggestiveness. That’s just another way of saying, ‘I’m really not sure I trust those silvery bubbles.’

Chapter 14

IN WHICH WE CONTEMPLATE THE LIFE AND DEATH OF JOHANNES CABAL

As Johannes Cabal descended, he could see a flickering glow ahead, and realised he was approaching the final chamber. Once the glow was strong enough, he popped Ercusides off the end of the stick and put him away. Cabal had a strong presentiment that what was coming was going to be complicated and fraught enough without having to worry about a dead head on a stick. He drew his sword on the small chance that it was possible simply to jump on the epitome of Fear and do it to death with some fevered stabbing. It was a very small chance, he knew, but at least it provided a prop to his resolve. He considered turning around and going back out into the daylight. The Silver Key was useless without a gateway, so he could not escape via that route. Perhaps it would be possible to put together some sort of raft, given time, although the chances of negotiating the Cerenarian Sea without knowing where he was, and with all the terrors both meteorological and biological he might encounter en route, were vanishingly small. Or, he supposed, he could just sit around like Robinson Crusoe. No, he concluded, he would go mad with intellectual frustration before many years had gone by and end up more like Ben Gunn. No matter what its nature, its likely brevity, or its outcome, he must ultimately endure this encounter, so he might as well get it out of the way now.

The descending corridor reached its end, and Cabal stepped through into the chamber beyond. It was not hugely impressive but – given its occupant – it did not need to be. The chamber was circular, and some fifty feet in diameter. The walls rose some ten or twelve feet, then formed a hemispherical dome above. In sconces spaced some ten feet apart around the walls torches burned with a strange red fire that flickered black in its heart, yet cast a soft yellow light. Opposite the entrance upon a low dais stood a simple throne of grey and red stone, and upon the throne sat the Phobic Animus in all its preternatural glory.

‘Hello, Herr Bose,’ said Cabal.

‘Hello, old man,’ said Bose, as cheerfully as ever, but with a distinct underpinning of smugness. ‘I gather you caught on to my little joke. Or did you just kill me because you finally got sick of the sight of me?’ His expression shifted to Bose’s habitual sheep-like foolishness. ‘Oh, I say! Yaroo!’ He relaxed again. ‘If that’s the case, you have far more patience than your reputation suggests.’

‘The former is the case, which was the main reason the latter did not occur until this late juncture,’ replied Cabal. ‘It was a small thing, as is usually the way. It occurred to me far too recently that you knew I had cursed even the pets of the spider-ant-baby creatures of the Dark Wood, and yet you were in a dead faint when I had done so. At Dylath-Leen you knew Shadrach’s fate, even though you were in a foetal ball facing the other way at the time. A neat trick for a man. Then, even as you were committing this faux pas, your eyes were dry and it occurred to me, just in passing although the idea grew on me, that you had not been sobbing in fear at all. You were laughing.’

‘Yes, well,’ Bose shrugged, ‘it was funny.’

‘The form that you have taken does you no favours. It is impatient and wilful. I feared I had gained the attention of Nyarlothotep by that ill-considered incantation in the Dark Wood, but my apprehension was a misapprehension. Nyarlothotep had taken notice of me well before then. When I realised that, it calmed me a little.’

‘Did it?’ Bose was frankly surprised. ‘Did it indeed?’

‘It did, because at least it meant I had not drawn down such misfortune upon my head. It was happenstance, the difference between being struck by lightning in a street and on a mountaintop during a storm while capering around with a silver wand.’

‘That’s a pretty allusion,’ said Bose. ‘I like that one.’

‘The slip in time and space that put us into such peril in the first place was both calculated and impatient. At first I thought we were the objects of scrutiny for some wizard or another – the Dreamlands are rotten with wand-wavers – and I stuck by that thesis despite hints to the contrary.’

‘Oh, I know where this is going . . .’

‘Dylath-Leen, however, was blatant. No wizard holds that kind of power, to reduce the lunar cities of the Moon things, to make the Moon burn. That was . . .’

‘Fun?’

‘Heavy-handed.’

Bose wrinkled his nose. ‘That didn’t stop it being fun.’

‘I must admit, I am disappointed. I thought there might be some grand design behind all this, but it seems I was mistaken. As gods go, you’re just a brat.’

Bose’s complacency did not slip, but he was silent for a long moment. Then he said, ‘I am called the Crawling Chaos, the God with a Thousand Faces, but that is just a simple number for simple minds who like things simple. I do not employ Mr Gardner Bose often, and when I do, my sensibilities are filtered through his, just as with all my masks.’

‘I’m reasonably sure that you’re patronising me.’

‘Oh, Mr Cabal, there has never been a human born, nor shall there ever be, to whom I do not have to talk down. You are all infants in a planetary nursery, and your lives are far too short for you ever to grow up. My point is that it doesn’t matter what you think of me, because you don’t matter so very much yourself. You have some small use, and you are already fulfilling it. I shan’t explain it for reasons that must be terribly obvious even for a stunted intellect like yours.’

Cabal said nothing. He was not insulted, for the sting of an insult comes from the resentment the insultee feels towards the insulter’s relatively weak position of superiority that nurtures a sense of ‘How dare they?’ When a god of unimaginable power and intelligence that quite surpasses even the theoretical limits of the human mind calls one a bit dim, however, one has to admit that, relatively speaking, they have a point.

Instead, he said, ‘I have some small understanding of what you have in mind. Satan himself regards me as an agent of evil and chaos in the world.’

‘Satan?’ said Bose. ‘Oh, yes, Satan . . . Let me ask you something about that. How do you suppose that both Satan and I can exist in the same universe, hmm? I mean to say, I don’t regard myself as anything so bland as an agent of evil and chaos. I have a job to do, however, and what you would call evil and chaos are the usual collateral results. Actually going out of one’s way to create them, though . . . a tad immature, wouldn’t you say? Unless . . .’

‘What are you suggesting?’ said Cabal, but he already knew, and so did Bose.

‘Here’s a little thought experiment. What if when you met Satan you actually met me in one of my many forms?’

‘It would be irrelevant,’ replied Cabal. ‘No matter what your form, you’re an unmitigated bastard. I don’t care if you’re Satan in your spare time.’

But Bose was not listening. ‘And what if there was no God, except as a fictional counterweight to my Satan, hmm? Just think of all those people bowing and scraping to a deity that I made up in my lunchtime, hoping their grovelling will get them to some ill-defined Heaven, whereas everybody actually ends up in Hell.’

‘You forget, I have been to Hell. Not all of the dead can be found there.’

‘Well, maybe there is more than one Hell, or perhaps the ones who would have got to Heaven, if it wasn’t fictional, I just allow to blink out at death. That would be quite merciful of me, wouldn’t it? They die an atheist’s death, but that’s better than going to Hell, probably. I wouldn’t know. Whenever I die, I get over it after a while. When I was Tezcatlipoca one time, the locals murdered me. Not sure why – underdeveloped senses of humour would be my guess. Anyway, my corpse stank the place out and everybody else choked on the stench and died, which was pretty witty of me, wouldn’t you say?’

‘You require my validation? Then, no, it wasn’t very witty. Ironic, I grant you, but witty, no.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said Bose, unabashed. ‘The Aztecs thought it very droll. The ones who didn’t die, obviously. Anyway . . . where was I?’

‘You were congratulating yourself on your mordant wit.’

‘So I was. Just think on it, though – every religion in the world, major or minor, worshipping things that don’t exist. And the unbelievers being all smug about it, and saying that religions are products of human fear, ignorance and inadequacy, all unaware that they’re actually products of some minor mystical jiggery-pokery by yours sincerely, so both the believers and the unbelievers are wrong. Now, come on, you must find that just a little bit funny, surely?’

‘What of the ones who worship you?’

‘Worship me? As me? Oh, they’re just a handful, and they tend to end up dead or insane or whatever, and in any case, I don’t care. I don’t need followers. If they want to grovel to me, it might do them some good, it might not, but my needs transcend the awe and adoration of a bunch of filthy apes.’

‘Yet here you are, burning up precious weeks and months of your immortality for some half-witted joke upon me. Perhaps you could explain that in terms a filthy ape might understand, O great and powerful Bose.’

Bose laughed, and swung around in his throne so that his legs hung over one arm. He smiled complacently. ‘You’re terrific, Johannes Cabal. You know that? Just about anybody else would be whimpering in the corner by this point with his sanity in his hands, not least because I would have got bored with them and gone out of my way to blow their wits out of their ears. You, though . . . I am talking to you because I am the Messenger of the Gods, and that makes me the great communicator. I am the only one who has any interest in humanity at all. The others occasionally turn up and blunder around a while, but if they can even perceive humans, they usually regard them as a bit creepy and exterminate them.’

Cabal tried to imagine dread Cthulhu rising from the corpse city of R’lyeh, seeing humans, and squealing like a Hausfrau who discovers mice in the pantry, before pounding them to death with a broom. Then again, perhaps Cthulhu did squeal, but in a form and context unimaginable to the human mind, or imperceptible to human senses. It hardly mattered if it were true; Cthulhu could still eradicate all life on Earth whether he was squealing like an enormous transdimensional schoolgirl or not.

‘But know this, Johannes Cabal, you have a small part in a grand plan, and whatever you decide to do, it is destined. Fall on your sword or live until you are ninety, whatever you do, you do for us. And that is all you need to know. To be honest, it is all you are capable of understanding.’

There was a short, awkward silence. ‘And the Phobic Animus?’

‘That? Oh, there isn’t one, not in the convenient package that the Fear Institute believed. No, irrational fear is always where everybody thought it was – sweating away in the human heart. Once I became aware of their brave little project, though, well, it was so convenient to my plans I just couldn’t resist. I recovered the Silver Key from its last owner – that was Hep-Seth incidentally, and you were right, he is at the bottom of the crevasse – then inveigled it into the hands of the Fear Institute.’

‘And sent them to me,’ finished Cabal. ‘I shan’t bother asking why – you’ll only get all mystical.’

‘Reasons and reasons. But you might understand one.’

Bose looked steadily at him, and Cabal thought he caught the scent of brimstone. ‘This “thought experiment” of yours,’ he said slowly. ‘Just how hypothet—’

‘I told you we weren’t done at the time, Johannes Cabal,’ said Bose, but his voice was not his own.

Cabal swallowed very carefully. ‘So,’ he said tonelessly, ‘what now?’

‘What now?’ Bose’s voice was still of the pit, flaming and dangerous. Suddenly he smiled and sat up. ‘How would you like your heart’s desire?’

As Johannes Cabal gathered himself up from the grass, he wondered just how many times he was likely to be translocated around assorted plains of existence in his lifetime. He looked around as he dusted himself off, peeved but unsurprised that the Phobic Animus, or Nyarlothotep, or Gardner Bose Esq., or whatever else it might be styling itself this week, had not allowed him to keep his bag. The loss of Ercusides he could manfully bear, but the loss of his notebook, phials of reagent, his death’s head cane and, worst of all, the Silver Key were nuisances great and small. He was wondering how likely recovering them might be when a large crow settled on a nearby boulder, eyed him with mercenary glee and croaked loudly, ‘Kronk!’

Cabal almost groaned with rancour and disappointment. He recognised the crow. He recognised the rock on which it was perched. He knew exactly where he was, and he knew that his bag and its contents were lost beyond any reasonable chance of recovery. It was very annoying, but there was nothing to be done about it, so he put them aside in the vast mental jumble room he kept for memories of abject failure, and set his face towards a new day. He was nothing if not a pragmatist.

He allowed the crow to perch upon his shoulder as he walked along. The last time he had been coming this way, it had been to meet Messrs Shadrach, Corde and Nyarlothotep at the pub in the village. How long ago it seemed. Now they were all dead or alive in some metaphysical way that he doubted was expressible to poor creatures like himself. Whom the gods would destroy, the ancients tell us, they first make mad. Cabal often wondered why they would bother destroying anybody whose sanity they had already shattered. It seemed petty, but then, that was gods for you.

The house was just as it always was: bleak, solitary, and with a perilous front garden. He went up the path, ignoring the tiny eyes that watched him from within the shrubs and beneath the ivy, unlocked the door – hardly necessary, but old habits die hard – and let himself in.

And there, in his front hall with the black-and-white tiled floor, he stopped and stared in utter astonishment at what lay before him. For there, just by the mat, was an envelope.

It made not a ha’penny of sense. He collected his post, what little there was of it, poste restante from the post office in the village, both because he didn’t care to have more people than necessary coming to his house, and because the post office did not enjoy having its postmen eaten by the recalcitrant fairies and other little folk of Cabal’s front garden. For a while, he had trained the garden folk to acknowledge a list of people they should let by, which included the postman, but the training required constant refreshing as the gossamerwinged little proponents of chaos tended to forget it at the first hunger pang. Then there had been a moderately ingenious attempt to kill him by a disgruntled relative of somebody or another that he’d dug up for research material: they had dressed as a postman and actually made it into his house before becoming research material themselves. It was all too distracting, so he had made a poste restante arrangement, and everybody was about as happy about it as they were likely to be.

The envelope had not therefore been delivered by a postman, or anybody else who might reasonably be considered edible to tiny mouths full of very sharp tiny teeth. He looked suspiciously at the crisp white envelope for a second longer before reopening the door and calling into the front garden, ‘Who has been to the house?’

‘Nobody,’ came a plaintive chorus of small voices. ‘We are ever so hungry, Johannes Cabal.’ Cabal grunted dismissively, and went back indoors. The garden folk were lousy liars, and on this occasion they seemed to be telling the truth. He crouched by the envelope and tried to see if there was anything obviously dubious about it, such as razors or the faint shimmer of a dried contact poison, but he could see nothing. Finally picking it up gingerly between finger and thumb, protecting his skin with a handkerchief, he took it up into his attic laboratory.

The letter remained inscrutable to close observation under lens and ultraviolet light. Finally, wearing his heaviest rubber gauntlets and an army-surplus gas mask, Cabal opened the envelope with his favourite Swann & Morton No. 22 scalpel, being careful to cut the paper at the opposite end from the flap. Inside he saw nothing more malevolent than a folded sheet of foolscap parchment, which he removed with tweezers, and opened gently for fear of triggering some trap so subtle as to baffle conventional physics and, indeed, common sense. But then, as Cabal knew full well, nobody ever died from being too careful. Well, apart from that man who suffocated in cotton wool, but he was an idiot.

The sheet of parchment was, however, looking much like a sheet of parchment at present. That wasn’t to say it was harmless: there are certain runic patterns that can draw the attention of unwelcome supernatural attention on whoever has the misfortune to look upon them, so Cabal continued to be delicately cautious long after the point when he had disproved the possibility of every form of magical trap known and several more open to conjecture. Finally, even after he had conceded that the letter was merely a letter – though it bore no name and address, and had somehow been posted without the knowledge of his front garden – he still felt misgivings as he opened it fully and studied its contents.

At first he thought he must be mistaken. Surely it was only a similarity in cursive styles. But as he read the short note of a little more than a hundred words that began with no greeting and ended with no signature, he recognised naunces in phrasing and came to the inescapable conclusion that it had been written by himself. He had no memory of ever doing so, however, and the content was of such startling originality that he knew he never had. He tore off the gas mask and gauntlets and read it again, and then again. It was ingenious, it was radical, and he knew in his heart that it was effective. What had Nyarlothotep said as he mooched around on his throne in the form of the inoffensive Herr Bose? How would you like your heart’s desire? The note contained the basic principle for perfect resurrection, the secret of raising the dead just as they had been when they were alive – physically, mentally, spiritually.

Cabal took down his laboratory logbook from the shelf and opened it at a fresh page. All the experiments previously, all those years of work, were now as dross to him. Now he could see the beginning of the true path to his goal. He hung up his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. There was still much to be done, but now he knew what he knew, the fire burned in him again. This time he would succeed. One day, perhaps not so very far away, depending on where his researches led him, she would rise again, and she would see and speak and think, and Cabal would feel happiness for the first time in so long. He paused, angrily wiped at his eye with the heel of his hand. He was shaking. He had no time for this, he told himself. No time. There was so very much to be done.

It was true: there was a very great deal to be done. The note – which Cabal painstakingly transcribed into three different notebooks for fear that it might vanish as mysteriously as it had appeared – was only a beginning, an inspiration to explore some principles that might have been disregarded indefinitely without the note pointing out a subtlety to their applications that opened vast new vistas of fruitful research. But the note was short and of no help beyond putting him on the right path. More researches were necessary, more experiments, which meant more danger. Now, however, he knew the perils were worth it. No more stealing obscure books at great personal risk when he knew they would lead only to dead ends. No more canoodling with demons for scraps of dubious information.

Cabal did wonder, though: if Bose had been telling the truth in his little ‘thought experiment’, and he was also Satan, and Satan was therefore not a fallen angel but just another face of a trickster god, as Tezcatlipoca, Loki and Anansi must also be, what were the demons of Hell in reality? It was an intractable problem. There was only one sure way of knowing and that would involve communicating with Nyarlothotep, who would likely be in neither such a jovial frame of mind nor form should they ever meet again. Cabal’s best guess was that the demons in that case would be constructs or creatures corrupted so thoroughly that they were no longer aware of ever having been anything but demons. It would be the final humiliation, that the eternal suffering of the damned in Hell was simply stage dressing. Ultimately, however, it was irrelevant to his current researches, and he considered those hapless multitudes only for a moment before moving on.

Early experiments were encouraging, and as Cabal’s confidence in this new direction grew, so did his intolerance of distractions. He purchased a new Webley .577 and a replacement for his sword cane. Soon he was using both.

A seventeenth-century painting of the theologian Johannes Valentinus Andreae included a scrap of paper carelessly thrown on his desk that contained a complex diagram showing the relationship between certain esoteric humours. Cabal went to the private house where it hung and cut it from the canvas with the sword cane. When the owner attempted to stop him, Cabal shot him dead with the Webley.

Then there was the time a year later when Cabal was cornered by armed police in the chemical-engineering building of a university. He escaped by converting a fractional distillation column the size of a three-storey house into an impromptu explosive device and hiding behind a heavy concrete wall when it detonated. A dozen bystanders were injured, three fatally, and four university buildings burned down, but Cabal escaped with the materials he had sought, so all that was of no import.

Three years after that, it was necessary to relieve some inbreed – a member of the aristocracy, which is to say much the same thing – of a gem recovered from a meteorite four hundred years previously. It comprised the centrepiece of a tiara that left a vault only for very important occasions, and Cabal waited impatiently for such an occasion to arise. Finally, a benefit dinner for some worthy cause (Cabal thought it might involve orphans, but he was not overly interested) was announced at which some dowager somebody of somewhere would be wearing the tiara. The next morning, the newspapers were agape at the mass murder of everybody at the dinner through the agency of poisonous gas. Some days later, during the investigation, the tiara was recovered from under a side table where it had been carelessly thrown. The central gem was no longer in its setting.

And so it went on, an outrage here, an atrocity there, punctuating the onward and upward progress of Johannes Cabal the necromancer. His path was clear, and if anyone ventured upon it and became an obstruction, they were removed as quickly and economically as swatting a fly. Where Cabal walked, he left gravestones and woe, yet he did not care and he did not pause. Where once he had killed with at least an iota of regret in aiding his ultimate foe, Death, now he murdered easily and without hesitation.

For the first time in his life, he was buying new fifty-round boxes of ammunition annually. He was on his third new sword cane, the first having been lost during an escape, and the second’s blade having snapped in the ribs of a museum guard. Sometimes when he looked in the mirror to shave, Johannes Cabal saw his ultimate foe right there, looking back at him. He shrugged inwardly, and carried on shaving. None of that mattered, he knew. None of those people mattered. He had a plan, and it was more important than anything else in the world.

Nor were his crimes limited to the mundane world. He summoned the demon Lucifuge Rofocale for the second time in his life, and as the demon was halfway through saying, ‘Oh, it’s you again. Have you got your dread rod with you this time?’ Cabal shot him through the head with a bullet made from the metal of Leng, sanctified on a lonely beach by Dagon himself, who had no love for demons. Lucifuge looked surprised, then dead, and Cabal hung him by his feet from a nearby tree for his blood to drain into a bucket. He left the demon dangling upside-down, the last droplets of his black blood tainting the soil. The carrion crows gathered around, but none cared to sample that particular dish.

Satan did not turn up that night, all in a bate because Cabal had killed one of his. Cabal hardly expected him to, because in his mind’s eye he could see Satan sitting in his great basalt throne by a burning lake of lava, and – in some lights – he looked just like Mr Gardner Bose.

The wall of Cabal’s laboratory contained a cork-lined noticeboard, and upon this were pinned yellowed newspaper cuttings of opening museum exhibitions and of forthcoming benefit dinners, carefully drawn alchemical charts and formulae of unusual chemical equations. There, in the centre of them all, was a sheet of parchment upon which was written a short paragraph in his own handwriting. It never yellowed or faded.

The path was clear, but it was also long. His experiments were not always successes, but the triumphs became more remarkable and more frequent as he closed in on his ultimate goal. He resurrected animals, first fish, frogs, insects and reptiles, and then mammals. He brought a cat back to life that seemed so delighted to be dead no longer that it positively tapdanced. A dog followed, but turned out to be an ill-tempered and poorly trained animal that had deserved its premature death, so Cabal was forced to repeat the experience for it, this time with no hope of reprieve.

Now there was a final test to make. It seemed advantageous to re-create a certain set of circumstances, so he travelled to the city and made the acquaintance of a woman in her late teens whose time was for sale, and when they were comfortably sequestered in a discreet hotel of a certain sort, he drowned her in the bath. He then conveyed her away in a large trunk he had waiting for precisely this purpose, by train and hired cart, and so to his house and laboratory.

Here, he applied his newly developed procedures and processes, which involved an extraterrestrial crystal, the blood of a demon and a great deal of new research hitherto unguessed at in the esoteric field of necromancy. Three hours and fifty minutes later, the young woman was sitting on the old sofa in Cabal’s front room, shivering with a blanket around her shoulders as she drank a cup of Assam tea Cabal had made her. He spun her some story about her collapsing and how, in a panic, he had brought her away. She couldn’t remember any of the unpleasantness in the bathroom, and barely remembered meeting Cabal in the first place. He insisted that she stay the night, ostensibly because it was already the evening and the railway station was a long way away, but actually to observe her. She behaved much as any startled young woman might, and responded within norms when he lied to her about being a doctor and carried out some tests on mental and physical function. Among these, he sprinkled in a few to make sure that her spirit had not been corrupted or supplanted in the process, dripping holy water and garlic essence on her tongue under the pretence that it was a neural test to check that her senses of taste and smell were still working.

She reported that the water tasted like water, that the garlic essence tasted like garlic, and Cabal observed that at no point did her tongue burst into flames or her head explode, both of which would have constituted negative indicators. She behaved normally throughout, slept normally on the sofa, and at no point during the night was observed to fly around the house with her eyes glowing, or decide at breakfast that what she really wanted to eat was a nice plate of human brains.

He drove her to the second closest railway station by a circuitous route, and pressed a generous sum of money into her hand for her expenses, the inconvenience, and for being an excellent test subject, although he didn’t actually mention this last point. He was breaking his original plan by letting a potential witness go – the rational thing to do would have been to kill her again, saw her up and get rid of the evidence in the house’s furnace – but he was tired of death. He had never enjoyed killing, except in a few well-deserving cases. Now his time as a necromancer was drawing to a close, and he did not regret it.

He did regret, irrationally and momentarily, that he had failed to preserve Miss Smith in any sort of form useful for resurrection now that the secret was in his grasp. Then again, the good turn she had done him had been after her death and dissection, and he truly doubted that he could bring life back to the few bits of her that still existed, bobbing about in formaldehyde. Besides, she seemed happy in her post mortem career as the witch of Hlanith necropolis. Attempting to cram her spirit into a few bits of pickled offal would likely irritate her.

It took him a fortnight to gather the nerve to break the seals on the glass coffin. There it had lain all these years, concealed beneath the floor of his hidden second laboratory in the cellar, a secret within a secret. He spent the two weeks planning and preparing, again and again, assuring himself that this was not procrastination, not fear, but solid, sensible forethought. There reached a point where such rationalisations ceased to convince even himself, however, and so, early one clear Friday morning and after a good breakfast eaten slowly, he went down the cellar steps. He walked reluctantly, as if going to his own execution rather than to the sum of all his ambitions. He knew that there could be only one attempt, and that if he failed, he failed for ever.

His step wavered as he considered going to the city and carrying out his previous experiment again. After all, one can have confidence in one’s results only if they can be consistently repeated. It was a lie to himself, though, and he had always been good at telling when he was lying. He continued the descent.

Once he was committed, he did not hesitate. The seals were broken quickly, for once the first was opened, the conditions within the glass coffin, filled to the brink with a fluid of occult formulation, altered, and its contents were no longer held outside time and from corruption. The coffin was a large structure, almost filling the four-by-eight-foot hole it occupied beneath the laboratory floor. Between the thick glass and the great weight of liquid it contained, there had never been any intention of removing it. Indeed, even shifting the lid required the use of the same winch he had employed to lift the false floor slabs that concealed the coffin in its pit.

It was a struggle to lift her from the coffin and he feared his plan might founder on this slightest of details. He had already lost almost a minute when he reached in and took her arm by the wrist. He had not touched her in so long, and for that minute he was overcome and could hardly breathe for the slow pulse of guilt and sorrow that he had managed to lock away for all those years. Time was wasting, though.

And so he carried out the procedures and the processes, the apex of necromantic science, the final catholicon, a cure for death.

Three hours and fifty minutes it took, just as with the woman from the city, and it succeeded perfectly, just as with the woman from the city.

She was shaking from the reaction, so he coddled her in a warm blanket, and made her tea, and she thanked him for his kindness, and asked where everybody else was, and how far downriver had she been swept before the kind gentleman saved her.

Cabal had been ready for anything, ready for any possibility, or so he thought. He knelt by her, took her hand in his and said her name, and then he said, ‘It is me. Johannes. Your Johannes.’

Then her eyes widened with recognition, and she reached out to touch his hair, which had once been blond but was now grey. ‘How long was I asleep?’ she asked, her voice breaking.

She was stronger than him in so many ways. Everything she had known had faded away in the decades she had lain dead in her fairytale coffin. Only Johannes Cabal was left, but now he was old and, somewhere along the way, he had died too. The man she saw was not the man she loved; she consigned that man away into her lost years. This Johannes Cabal was kind, but just now and then something he said or something he did betrayed an inner desperation she pitied, and sometimes a heartlessness grown habitual that she despised. She was kind to Johannes Cabal, which pained him, and he could feel her pity towards him.

Thus it was no surprise to either of them, not really, when one day he walked her to the railway station, and put a bag containing all the wealth in paper and gold he could gather together in her hand, and sent her to the city. He left her there before she might try to kiss him. It would have been the kiss one gives an elderly relative whom one is moderately fond of, and it would have crushed his heart where he stood. He left her on the platform as the train approached, and he did not look back.

In his house, in the attic laboratory, he sat at his workbench and looked at the noticeboard upon which was still pinned that strange piece of parchment. He felt nothing, not any more. In the cellar the furnace burned fiercely as it consumed his notebooks, a lifetime flaming into light and smoke. He had made some adjustments to the boiler valves. Soon there would be a catastrophic explosion that would be heard from the village. He had little doubt there would be celebrations there that evening. Let them have their fun. He wouldn’t even be alive to be taken by the explosion.

On the workbench before him lay his Webley Boxer .577, freshly cleaned and tested. It wouldn’t do for it to fail now. He took it up, enjoying its weight for the last time, placed the muzzle in his mouth and fired.

Chapter 15

IN WHICH LITTLE IS SAID, BUT MUCH IS CONVEYED

Johannes Cabal was not expecting anything very much from death, but the dizziness surprised him. He opened his eyes to find himself in a hemispherical chamber carved into stone. Before him sat a happy man of puppyish demeanour, whom Cabal thought somewhat familiar.

‘Well,’ said Bose, ‘how’d you like those apples, eh?’

Cabal could do little but stare at him for an incontinently long time. Then he looked at his hands. They were the hands of a man in his late twenties, steady and unmarked by liver spots. He looked back up at Bose.

‘Nyarlothotep,’ said Cabal, more calmly than he felt. ‘You little bastard.’

Chapter 16

IN WHICH CABAL PLANS IN THE LONG TERM AND LAUGHTER PROVES TO BE THE WORST MEDICINE

‘How’d you like those apples, eh?’ is a ghastly, uncouth phrase to hear from anybody, and coming from a god did not improve it in the slightest.

‘What a ridiculous waste of time,’ said Cabal, trying to think of a verbal barb sufficiently sharp to sting even an immortal, cosmically puissant being. It was an endeavour doomed to failure.

‘Not for me,’ said Bose. ‘Not a second has passed for me. Or for you, if we’re being pedantic, and I know how much you enjoy your pedantry. Subjective time doesn’t matter a jot, does it, old man? Well, I say old man but, of course, not as old a man as you thought.’

Bose’s complacency was such that it took a gargantuan effort of Cabal’s will not to stride over to him and slap him as the impertinent schoolboy he was affecting. That would, however, have provided only momentary satisfaction before Bose – it was so hard to think of him as Nyarlothotep – retaliated in some profoundly horrible though topographically challenging way.

‘When I’m not running billets doux between my employers, Johannes, I deal in terror, and chaos, and madness primarily. Death also, but that’s just a hobby, really. Sometimes you want something with a little piquancy, though, and despair does it for me. You say what I have shown you is a ridiculous waste of time, but I have not wasted a moment. What you should be realising is that your life up to now has been a ridiculous waste of time. Your goal is unachievable. You will die in misery just as you saw.’

‘I will not die in a retirement home,’ said Cabal, ‘surrounded by strangers. Your vision was wrong on that count.’

‘Details, details.’ Bose curled his lower lip and wafted his fingers about. Cabal hoped this was an honest response and not a piece of play-acting to counter his own. He dared not test Bose’s knowledge of what Cabal had experienced beyond this without drawing his attention unduly. It would have to do, and he would base his plans on the presumption that the details of the vision were his and his alone. He did this with a degree of trepidation. Nyarlothotep was the most psychologically human of the Old Ones, but the gap in intellects dwarfed that between, say, a border collie and Leonardo da Vinci. Galling though it might be to him, Cabal’s best hope was that Nyarlothotep could not think down to his level.

Bose’s next comment, however, scuppered at least part of that hope. ‘I know what you’re thinking, though, Mr Cabal,’ he said, with an inscrutable smile. ‘You’re thinking that I’ve actually done you a big favour. I’ve saved you decades in research by letting you live through them in the blink of an eye, and that you can just go home and reproduce the latter stages of your experiments.’

Cabal’s face was inexpressive, but inwardly he winced. That was exactly what he had been hoping. He was also hoping that this reality was the one he thought it was, and Nyarlothotep had not packed him away into a Chinese puzzle box of nested realities interconnected in unexpected ways from which he would never escape. It was a possibility, and the Dreamlands were the ideal environment in which to make it work.

‘The secret you seek is as simple as ABC,’ said Bose, demonstrating godly understatement. ‘It was equally simple to concoct a likely but ultimately fallacious path of research and set you off on it, substituting the happy result that you experienced. It was a happy result, wasn’t it? You must have wept tears of joy.’

‘As practical jokes go . . .’

‘My whoopee cushion is to die for,’ said Bose. He smiled wistfully. ‘Horribly. Oh, I meant to ask, your brother, was he there?’

Cabal felt anger flare and took a moment to damp it down again. ‘My brother is dead.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Bose. ‘Running around, drinking blood dead. I’ve heard of that. I may even have invented it.’

‘No, not undeath. Not any more. I mean dead. Utterly irrevocably dead.’

‘Really?’ Bose rubbed his chin in contemplation. ‘Well, I suppose the line between undeath and death is crossed rather easily, one way or the other. Very well, no brother. Any other family members to haunt your conscience?’

Cabal could feel his anger squirming its way loose of the leash, a development that probably would not go well for him in the present circumstance.

‘I refuse to rise to your childish taunts,’ he said stiffly. ‘You’ve had your fun. I’m going now.’

‘Hmm? Oh, yes. Of course. You must do as you see fit. I suppose I should crack on myself. Lots of little errands to run and chores to do that have been mounting up while I’ve been playing with you and those other two animals. Azathoth will want the newspaper reading to him, and Shub-Niggurath always wants help changing the nappies.’

‘I’m sure the epithet mother of a thousand young is only metaphorical.’ Cabal paused to consider. ‘At least, I think it is only metaphorical.’

‘Oh, don’t I wish,’ said Bose, and sighed. He stirred himself on his throne and sat up. ‘Well, no time for dawdling. You had better see yourself out. I’m bored with being an inoffensive solicitor so I’m going to put on something a little less coherent that will probably shatter your sanity if you look upon it.’

‘How exactly do I get off this island?’ asked Cabal.

Bose’s last few friendly affectations faded away and he looked stonily at Cabal. ‘I wasn’t joking about your sanity,’ he said, in a gravelly voice that no longer sounded much like Bose or, indeed, much like any human. It sounded just like gravel might talk.

There seemed little more to be said. Cabal nodded curtly, turned on his heel and walked out with dignity, while all the time being unable to shake the thought that his exit looked no more decorous to Nyarlothotep than a cockroach attempting a dignified scuttle. As he climbed the corridor towards the crevasse-edge chamber, he could hear something particularly disturbing happening behind him, something that made wet noises, ripping noises and other sounds he could not categorise but which he suspected were generated by happenings neither common nor comprehensible to a mere mortal such as he. Curiosity is one thing, but there comes a point when a wise man sees all the dead cats lying around the place and thinks, I’ll just get along fine without that particular experience. Cabal hastened his step.

The sunlight was harsh after the subdued illumination of the ‘Phobic Animus’ chamber, and Cabal flicked his blue-glass spectacles out of his pocket instinctively and put them on quickly. He walked down the zigzag path, and found a boulder to perch upon at the bottom. He would risk re-entering the cave again the next day, by which time even the most sluggardly of multidimensional creatures should have had ample opportunity to change form and leave. He doubted there was much of use in there, but all it would cost him was time and that, at least, he had plenty of.

He cast his mind back to his early musings on escaping the island and saw little to change his opinion as to the difficulty of the endeavour. He tried to recall if there was anything useful he might gather from a childhood reading of Robinson Crusoe. As far as he could remember, the trick was to avoid being eaten by cannibals, patronise anybody one might save from said cannibals (‘Since today is Friday, I shall call you . . . Man Friday!’; ‘I do have a name, you know. Just because you can’t pronounce it . . .’; ‘Be quiet! I haven’t taught you English yet’), and then cunningly do nothing very useful for years until ftrangely deliver’d by PYRATES. No, that would never do. The local PYRATES were likely to be as bad as cannibals, and that was on the assumption that they weren’t actually cannibals themselves. It was hard to believe, but Cabal had the distinct impression that Daniel Defoe had let him down.

He sat and watched the sun settle slowly towards the western horizon off to his left. Before him was a vast expanse of ocean without a hint of distant land. Once he thought he saw an island, but it grew closer and, before it finally submerged, he realised that it was actually a sea monster, approximately the size of Rutland. It was a memorable sight, but not one he felt improved him or his situation.

As the sun started to dip below the water, crabs began to populate the beach. In common with so much in the Dremlands, they couldn’t simply be just like earthly crabs. These specimens had bodies roughly the size of dinner plates, their chitinous armour coloured a dismal brown-orange, puckered like warmed celluloid. They had four eyes, two mounted on stalks in a decent crably way, but the others were large and human-like, peering out of round openings in the front seam of the carapace between the upper and lower parts. These eyes, occasionally moistened with a meniscus that slid back and forth, looked permanently startled and cautious, but Cabal knew that was just an effect of their setting and nothing to do with their owners’ actual dispositions. As he had no desire to be pincered to pieces by an army of startled-looking crabs in the early hours, he retired to the cave entrance, and blocked off the path with rocks. He hoped the crabs weren’t substantially more intelligent than they looked, and settled down for a miserable night’s sleep in the sandy cave mouth.

Next morning he discovered some useful information about the crabs (that they had probably intended to eat him if they could, but that their rapacious appetites fortunately far outstripped their intelligence), and breakfast (there was a small pile of crabs lying on their backs beneath the cave mouth that had fallen there while trying to negotiate Cabal’s rock blockade. They were still alive and, if anything, looking more startled than usual). He cracked them open with a sharp stone, which startled them still further, and cooked them on a fire lit with one of his precious remaining matches.

He decided that he would keep the fire going as long as he could, and start supplementary fires elsewhere. He had no idea how long it might take to get off the island, or if he ever would, and permanent fires seemed like useful things to have. He might get lucky and find a supply of flint, but he probably wouldn’t, and the whole idea of rubbing sticks together seemed very hit and miss. The smoke from the fire might also attract the attention of passing ships, should there be any, bearing in mind Mormo’s reputation for obscurity. Admittedly, given the Dreamland’s tendency towards the dramatic, should any ship come to the island it would probably be full of cannibalistic pirates, piratical cannibals, Jehovah’s Witnesses or similar. That was acceptable, however. He was sure they could come to some arrangement that didn’t involve any unpleasantness. Any unpleasantness to himself, at any rate.

Somewhere around midday, Cabal re-entered the caves and made his way with no great enthusiasm to the throne room. There was no self-proclaimed Phobic Animus in residence, and Cabal presumed that he was no longer of interest and Nyarlothotep was off elsewhere, doing incoherent alien things, incomprehensible to anybody who couldn’t think in more than eleven or twelve dimensions. Somewhere between the realities floated a god’s ‘To do’ list with the name Johannes Cabal firmly ticked off. He did not know whether to feel insulted or relieved that he was no longer a person of interest, and settled on relieved, although he would have been still more relieved to have been put somewhere more convenient than Mormo at the end of Nyarlothotep’s pitiless little game.

Cabal sat upon the throne to think, and presently sprawled upon it for comfort, incidentally and unselfconsciously mimicking Bose’s attitudes of the previous day. In the first instance, he decided, it would be necessary thoroughly to explore Mormo to discover what it contained and then to make plans based on whatever resources were revealed. His options seemed to coalesce into a simple choice between making his home there and hoping for rescue, or building a vessel and taking his chances with the sea. The latter course was by far the more dangerous, but also the least maddening. The very thought of sitting around and feeling his life frittering away was abominable. No, unless his survey of the island turned up something unexpectedly useful, such as a marina on the north shore or even an isthmus to a mainland, then he would put together some sort of boat and bet his life on it neither falling apart nor being swallowed by Moby-Rutland. His mind made up, he went out to see what wonders the beaches and wooded slopes of Mormo might conceal.

The woods contained trees and the beaches contained sand and, occasionally, large crabs that seemed astonished by their own vicious aggression. It was a disappointing exploration, but Cabal did not begrudge the three days it took to circumnavigate the coast and to examine much of the forest and look up the open upper slopes of the rocky island heart. Food, at least, was not too uncommon. Aside from the vicious but splendidly stupid crabs, there were coconut palms, something like papayas and breadfruit groves, and even a couple of families of wild pigs that avoided him as carefully as he avoided them. It was good to know that they were there, though, should he ever decide the meat part of his diet was becoming tediously crab-orientated. His survey completed, he arrived back at the cave and considered the practicalities of his next move. He had searched the outer part of the island, true, but that still left the inner. The great crack in the throne room’s antechamber might lead somewhere, and required exploration. A stone tossed experimentally into the void went a long while before a distant clatter of impact arrived back at Cabal’s ears. Assuming the laws of physics were more or less the same as in the mundane world, and making an educated guess as to the effect of air resistance, he gauged a drop of somewhere between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and fifty feet. That was a long way to climb in near darkness and there were few handholds, from what he could see close by the upper reaches. He needed a rope and, he realised, he had the necessary elements to make one.

Coconut rope requires two things above all others: a lot of coconuts and a lot of time. He distantly remembered reading once how such rope was made, and knew that simply making the white coir fibre he needed would take the best part of a year, assuming that he was lucky with the current stage of the coconut’s growth cycle. Cabal considered this, and decided that it would be a last resort if he could not find a more immediate alternative. The obvious one was to use jungle creepers, of which he had noted several varieties on his sortie.

An expedition specifically to investigate them returned with the results that one was covered with tiny thorns, another had the tensile strength of uncooked bread dough, a third was a fortuitously mild-tempered snake, and a fourth felt like weathered electrical cable. Of this last he harvested as much as he could find and dragged it back to the cave, leaving strange tendrilled tracks in the sand behind him.

It was slow, tedious work, and Cabal’s mind wandered as he plaited the creepers into lengths of makeshift rope that he would tie or splice together when the time came. He thought of the future Nyarlothotep had shown him, of himself as an old man, and she still as young as when it had all begun. He remembered the pity in her face when he had said his last goodbye to her, the walk back to the house, his ageing knees, ankles and hips complaining. He remembered the taste of the gun in his mouth.

A strange flicker appeared at the corner of Cabal’s mouth. An uninvolved and disinterested observer might have thought it was a twitch of amusement, a ghost of a smile. To anyone who knew Cabal, however, that was clearly nonsense. Unless Nyarlothotep, for all his vast intelligence, for all his wiles and experience, truly was not ever able fully to understand the shadows and light within the human heart. Unless Nyarlothotep had somehow missed a nuance in his dealings with Cabal that he simply could not comprehend. Unless Cabal had somehow pulled the wool over a god’s eyes.

But no. That was not the case.

In truth, Cabal had pulled fully two layers of wool over a god’s eyes.

The great problem with being a trickster god or, as in Nyarlothotep’s case, the trickster god, was that anyone who deals with one from a position of knowing that one is a trickster is necessarily expecting to be tricked. The true trick that had been played upon Cabal was of such passing subtlety and arcane significance that, apart from the waste of time it constituted, he didn’t mind greatly. His main intentions when agreeing to accompany the Fear Institute expedition had been to gain the Silver Key, and to reconnoitre the Dreamlands, and he had achieved both of these aims. He had never been convinced by the Institute’s claim that such an entity as the Phobic Animus actually existed, and become increasingly cynical as clues and happenstance led them on a path that had been obscure to all others previously. Where others had paranoia, Cabal had a sense of self-preservation that bordered on the supernatural; it gathered every inconformity, every non-sequitur, every coincidence, and built deductions from them, as others might build models of the Eiffel Tower from discarded matches. Every such theoretical construct was measured against the metric of likelihood, and where it fell short, it was ignored for the time being.

On entering the Dreamlands Cabal had unconsciously lowered this metric, and it had served him well. Where the others had disregarded their unexpected appearance in the Dark Wood as some sort of Wonderland experience to be accepted without question, Cabal had filed it away under Suspicious Occurrences, and had been adding to the file ever since. Bose’s great revelation had, therefore, been anticipated. This much has already been stated, but Cabal’s guard against deceit was not lowered when Bose’s true colours had been unfurled. So, when Bose – Nyarlothotep – had so obligingly given him the basic principle of perfect resurrection, he was already deeply suspicious. As has famously been noted, ‘There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.’ Thus, he had regarded Nyarlothotep’s great banquet with particular caution.

When Cabal had first embarked upon the quest for the Phobic Animus – this most boojumish of Snarks – he had naturally considered where he might be most vulnerable to its tenebrous wiles. Physical injury and pain he regarded as unpleasant, but commonplace. Unless one lived one’s life wrapped in kapok and under sedation, then injury and pain were certainties to be expected and dealt with rationally and promptly. He did not look forward to them, but neither did he fear them. He spent no time at all considering the more fanciful phobias: a man who is used to facing down the walking dead and battling ghosts as part of his job description is unlikely to be utterly unmanned by the sight of ducks or the sound of whistling. This left the quieter internal fears. The psychic cancers of doubt.

Among these Cabal’s greatest was failure, but it was a clear and obvious one and he had long since armoured his heart against it. If ultimately he failed, then there was little he could do about it. Sometimes it still tormented him, but no great endeavour goes without the possibility of its coming to naught, a truism that no longer galled him as much as it might.

Nyarlothotep, however, was wilier than that. He had settled upon the fear of success. Total, absolute success in all respects save timeliness. This was something Cabal had no defence against except pointedly ignoring it and hoping it would not be so. The phantasmal personation of such a future that had been visited upon him was therefore perfectly pitched, and unimaginably cruel. It was also expected, given Nyarlothotep’s reputation for unimaginable cruelty. Thus, Cabal settled down for several subjective decades of play-acting, carrying out experiments that he knew were useless in the real world. These were the experiments based on the core mechanism that had been provided to him on the parchment, in a forgery of his own hand. There were other experiments, however, apparently arranged as confirmatory or deductive exercises to support the central thesis. These were scattered over the years in an attempt, apparently successful, to hide their true nature as a single coherent line of research. Cabal knew that, for all their power, none of the Great Old Ones was truly omnipotent or omniscient, even if at least Yog-Sothoth managed the party trick of eternal omnipresence. The likelihood was that Nyarlothotep did not actually know what was happening in Cabal’s false future beyond the planned sweep of it, but caution seemed wise all the same. Thus, it was not a complete waste of time at all. In his vanity, the Crawling Chaos had gifted Cabal several very useful years of research in the space of a single second.

This was the first layer of wool. The second was less involved, but far more important to Cabal. If its nature is enragingly opaque to the reader, who is likely to belong to the human race, then it may be understood how entirely incomprehensible it was to a mind as alien as a god’s.

Cabal worked steadily and diligently on the vines to create his rope. He noted that they were drying as they were braided, and he hoped that this would increase rather than decrease their strength. Certainly, it would reduce their weight, which could only help. Even slightly dried out, the rope would have a formidable mass, and the possibility of it snapping under its own weight was a very real one. What might happen when his own weight was added to it was a concern. He would make a few experiments using rocks to simulate him, but he still had the baleful impression that his safety margin would be a narrow one. This wariness resulted in, over the next few weeks, the construction of a large balance scale on to which Cabal placed himself on one side and different quantities of rocks on the other until he had a pile that equalled his own mass, plus a little extra to allow for impulse strain caused by the act of climbing upon it, and a little extra more for safety.

Then his line of experimentation moved to dangling a woven sack of rocks on varying lengths of rope. Sometimes the rope snapped, or separated at the splices, and Cabal would swear volubly for a minute or two, and then get back to the project.

Every day, however, he made a point to give himself a moment or so in the domed room, just to say, ‘You little bastard,’ to the empty throne before getting on with his rope work.

Finally, some time after every possible variant of stupid crab, coconut, breadfruit and papaya had been tried, but shortly before culinary boredom sent him after the pigs, the rope was completed to his reasonable, if not absolute, satisfaction.

Cabal allowed himself a night’s rest before embarking on the descent. He dropped a bundle of torches into the depths, crude items of wood with coconut matting heads moist with crab grease that he knew would burn for a disgustingly stenchfilled half an hour when lit. Ercusides on a stick was certainly more reliable and less odoriferous, but also more voluble and inclined to testiness; Cabal would make do with his crab-fat torches instead. The bundle was wrapped around some food, although he doubted the little tetrahedral cage he had formed from the torches would survive impact. He knew the area he was descending to was reasonably flat, having cast several burning torches down in a survey the previous week, so that was one less thing to worry about. Muttering irritably under his breath, he fed the secured rope down into the darkness and then, muttering stilled, began the climb downwards.

Very aware of the old mountaineers’ maxim that if one is going to fall off a rope, it is usually better to do so near the bottom, he made the best time he could without resorting to abseiling, which might put too much strain on the plaited creepers. Quickly he slid down into a thick, tangible darkness that closed in around him like oil. Above him, the glimmering light from the permanently alight – and very permanently fixed, as he had discovered – flambeaux grew attenuated and then seemed to flicker out altogether. Soon, the only way he had to gauge his progress was the number of times he had moved his hands down the rope, and that was a rough approximation at best. Then, with about forty feet to go, the rope parted.

He fell in silence, but inwardly he was thinking, Typical.

He awoke with no idea of how long he had been unconscious. This was low on his list of priorities at the time, it is true, lagging a long way behind a warranted sense of elation at not being dead and an equally justifiable sense of relief that his skeleton still seemed to be in the correct number of pieces. This miraculous escape was rendered less miraculous by the discovery that he was lying in a deep bed of some fibrous hairlike material that must have cushioned him on impact. While grateful for its serendipitous placement, he was less happy at what it might turn out to be. The image that leaped first to mind was a massive form of mucor, the threadlike mould often found on rotting vegetable matter, but this impression passed quickly when he realised that the threads were dry and not standing vertically but curled and balled. There was the smell, too: dry and musty, with a faint but distinct scent redolent of old crypts.

A suspicion began to form and he rolled slowly from the strange mound, ignoring the discomfort of the bruising he had suffered in his fall. He cast around on the rocky floor, finding only gravel and grit for several long minutes until his hand brushed against a piece of wood, and he realised it was one of his torches. The head of wiry coconut coir was greasy with crab fat and he realised that it must be one of the new torches from his provisions cache. That it was there by itself didn’t raise hopes for the state of the cache, but he would worry about that in a moment.

He took out his silver matchbox and struck a light, allowing the flame to settle and grow in the still air before applying it to the torch. The grease melted and bubbled before the flame took and spread across the matting head, and finally he was able to look around.

The first thing he saw was the provisions bundle. It was not nearly as badly damaged as he had first anticipated. In fact, the only thing different about its state from the moment he had dropped it into the abyss was that one torch had become detached, and that was the torch with which he was now examining it. Serendipity again, it seemed.

The next thing he saw was what he had fallen on to. His second supposition as to its constitution was, he was very sorry to say, the correct one. It was hair – vast, vast quantities of hair, formed into an untidy pile. Moreover, it was human hair. Its length, colouration and, here and there, signs of dyeing and highlights gave no other possible origin. The fact that quite a few bits of desiccated scalp were still attached clinched the identification. Its presence posed two major questions. Where had such a huge multi-hued hairball come from, and why was it here now? Unless some sort of demon trichologist was haunting this dark passageway, Cabal was forced to admit to himself that he had no idea.

Then, when he raised his torch high to look around, the third thing he saw was the great ring of perhaps a hundred or so ghouls that encircled him, down on their haunches, silently watching. Once again Johannes Cabal thought, Typical.

He considered the wisdom of reaching for his sword and found it wanting. Besides, they could have killed him in any second since his undignified arrival into this darkness and had not done so. He had been, and remained, it seemed, an object of fascination among the ghouls. They just seemed to follow him around to see what amusing misadventure he might become embroiled within next. When one’s career consists of haunting graveyards and eating human corpses of varied freshness, Cabal conceded, one has to find one’s entertainment where one can.

‘Well,’ he said, clear and unwavering, ‘how may I help you, ladies and gentlemen?’ They all looked very similar with no obvious sexually dimorphic features, but he knew that every one of them had once been as human as he. Such niceties as showing basic politeness might make the difference between life and lunch.

The ghouls did not reply to him, but meeped and glibbered among themselves, as was their depraved wont. Neither, however, did they come any closer or retreat from the uncertain light of his torch. Cabal wondered just how long they would keep this up. It was like being threatened by wolves dressed as sheep, who had sunk so deep into their method acting that they were now unclear about the whole ‘being dangerous’ thing. Experimentally he took a step forward. The ghouls before him scuttled back a step, while those beside and behind him scuttled sideways and forwards accordingly to maintain the cordon. Marvellous, he thought. I have my very own halo of ghouls. Oh, happy day.

He was just considering, perhaps unwisely, the possible results of leaping forward, arms held high, and bellowing, ‘Boo!’ at them, when there was a disturbance in the circle off to his right. He turned as the line opened a gap and allowed through another ghoul. Physically, there was little to delineate it from its fellows, but there was a spark of recognition, psychic and certain, in Cabal’s mind that this was the same specimen he had spoken to in Arkham and in the nameless city on the bank of the Lake of Yath.

‘We meet again,’ Cabal said, ‘I’m fairly sure. What cryptic truths have you come to bore me with this time?’

The ghoul settled down on the grimy rock, crossing its legs with practised ease despite the way its knees bent back like a dog’s. ‘The last but one, Johannes Cabal.’ It fell silent, watching Cabal with its head cocked to one side.

‘Well?’ said Cabal. ‘If you could buck up and illuminate my ignorance I should be very grateful. Actually, if you want me to be very, very grateful, I would appreciate being led from here to the waking world. This darkness is clearly with your territories, so it shouldn’t be very difficult for . . .’

But the ghoul was slowly shaking its head. It was hard to tell if it was grinning: the line of its muzzle and the flickering light made things uncertain. ‘It is not for me to tell Johannes Cabal what the truth is. Johannes Cabal will see for himself very soon.’

‘What? What do you mean? Am I intended to deduce it? Play Twenty Questions? This is ridiculous.’

And it was ridiculous. The more he thought about it, the more ridiculous it seemed. Here he was, in the depths of an abyss, within the bowels of an uncharted island, in an alien sea, on a different plane of existence, surrounded by monsters, playing guessing games. It was ridiculous, and soon he couldn’t see anything else but how ridiculous it was, and that was when he started laughing. The laughing started with giggling, then full-mouthed guffawing, and it grew louder and more hysterical as the ghouls watched in silence and, perhaps, in sadness.

Within Cabal, he felt panic as the tightly held reins that had steered him from insanity on so many occasions suddenly flapped loose and useless. He felt his mental discipline turn to water as it bore him to the lip of another abyss. This abyss descended into far darker places than he had ever experienced before, and it was one from which even the most accomplished spelunkers would never return.

And then he heard his own laughter, shrill and humourless, gulping breaths beneath it. He heard those half-swallowed sounds and he recognised them, and the fear blossomed within him like flame. The Fear Institute had been right all along, it seemed. Here truly was the Phobic Animus, or his, at least. Where Nyarlothotep had failed, the ghouls had succeeded.

He dropped his torch and fell to his knees, and then to all fours. His hands were before him, and – would he had worn gloves to save him from that sight! – he saw the fingers were perhaps a little too long, the nails a little too pronounced, the skin a shade too grey. He stared at them, making despairing little barking sounds under his breath, and so was unaware when the leader of the ghouls crept close and sat by him.

‘Do not fear, Johannes Cabal,’ it said, though not in any human tongue. ‘We shall look after you. Now you are family.’

Surviving fragments of Cyril W. Clome’s Manuscript for The Young Person’s Guide to Cthulhu and His Friends: No. 5 An ABC

A is for Azathoth, all mindless in space,

B is for Bugg-Shash, a god with no face.

C is for Cthulhu, the Father of Screams,

D is for Deep Ones, who watch while he dreams.

E is for Elder Things that lived long ago,

F is for Fire Vampire, they don’t like the snow.

G is for Ghouls, who look much the same,

H is for Hastur, but don’t say his name.

I is for Ithaqua, you’ll freeze to the bone,

J is for Juk-Shabb, of whom little is known.

K is for Kadath, lost in cold wastes,

L is for Lloigor, of decadent tastes.

M is for Mi-Go, clever if fungal,

N is for Nyarlothotep, not prone to bungle.

O is for Oorn, a mollusc from Hell,

P is for Pluto, called Yuggoth as well.

Q is for Q’yth-az, a strange deity,

R is for Rhogog, who looks like a tree.

S is for Shub-Niggurath, her prey are dismayed,

T is for Tsathoggua, whose needs are depraved.

U is for Ulthar, cat killers be warned,

V is for Vhoorl, where Cthulhu was spawned.

W is for Witch House, down Old Arkham way,

X is for X’chll’at-aa, which is tricky to say.

Y is for Yog-Sothoth, who’s everywhen and where,

Z is for Zoth-Ommog, Great Cthulhu’s third heir.

Read this right through, and then you may see, That

(The MS halts abruptly at this point. The author remains largely missing, but for his finger- and toenails, and his eyes.)

Chapter 17

IN WHICH CABAL EXPERIENCES OMOPHAGIA, ANNOYS THE VATICAN, AND ENDURES MUCH

The physical transformation was rapid, the mental one slow. More than once, Johannes Cabal wished that the reverse had been true. He sat in the darkness, chewing on the haunch of a newspaper proprietor who had just been buried a day or two before. The meat was rich with avarice and mendacity, rendered salty by the crocodile tears of his heirs. Cabal had balked at eating human flesh at first, despite the rising appetite for it within him. The leader of the ghouls had come to him then and pointed out the obvious truth that most people were little more than dumb animals and that, in any case, this could be regarded as a form of recycling and therefore was terribly sensible as well as delicious. Cabal had still been reluctant, but then they had brought him best joint of archbishop and, after that, he had no problems at all.

If the dietary changes were eventually acceptable, the physical ones were less so, and the inevitable mental degradation concerned him most of all. The ghouls were not stupid – they were about as intelligent as an average human – but their intelligence rarely wavered much higher or lower than that, and the thought of being reduced to merely average human intelligence appalled Cabal. Indeed, if he were to be honest with himself, it terrified him.

Less dismaying than the cannibalism (though, as he rationalised it, he was no longer truly human and therefore no cannibal), but almost as troubling as the imminent collapse of his mental faculties was the nudity. Ghouls had little use for clothes, a mode that Cabal was sure he would not adopt. As time passed – and in the eternal darkness beneath the worlds, he had no idea how much time that meant – his garments grew constrictive and he felt intolerably swaddled and contained within them. He shed them in an isolated tunnel, and left them there, neatly folded, the last memorial to Johannes Cabal.

It should hardly have surprised him, this change. It was not even unknown in the history of his profession. The basic precepts of necromancy involved hanging around graveyards, tinkering with corpses and inevitably having dealings – friendly or otherwise – with ghouls. Given that the triggering events for a ghoulish transformation are psychic rather than material and include an interest in human cadavers, an empathy if not necessarily a sympathy with ghouls, and the ingestion of human remains, Cabal could only conclude that he should have washed his hands more thoroughly between dissections and lunch. Somewhere along the way, he must have inadvertently enjoyed a morsel of meat that had not come from the butcher. It served him right for eating in his laboratory. Still, it could have been worse. He’d only changed species instead of, say, picking up hepatitis.

So, he sat with the others in a lightless cavern, chewing a media tycoon’s thigh and wondering what would become of him. He had failed. It had always been a possibility, but he had imagined the path would be abruptly halted by his death. It had never occurred to him that he might be turned aside from it, watching helplessly as potential success paled into certain failure. He looked at the others scattered around, industriously rationing out parcels of stolen meat among themselves. He didn’t even need visible light to see them. Everything was limned in a strange and beautiful incandescence that showed details in the most mundane things that he had never dreamed might be there. This was a gift of his new physiology and, it was true, this he did not mind so much.

‘But,’ meeped a voice, ‘you are not happy.’

Cabal turned to see the leader squatting nearby, watching him with calm interest. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I am not happy. I did not complete my work, and soon I will not even be able to remember why it was important to me.’

‘You will,’ laughed the leader, a sound like a choking terrier. ‘You will remember.’

‘But I won’t want to.’

‘You are so sorry for yourself. All your power and knowledge and books, and you are sorry for yourself. We have heard so much about Johannes Cabal. A clever man. A clever man. But sorry for yourself.’

Unused to being chastised, least of all by a creature that used crypts and tombs as All You Can Eat buffets, Cabal snapped, ‘The process is irreversible. Everybody knows that.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said the leader, nodding understandingly. ‘Everybody.’

‘Yes. Everybody. Well, except for Culpins, but his theory of countermorphic residual transfiguration pertained only to lycanthropes, where the process is essentially reversible in any event, not this sort of transformation where, once the new morphic form is achieved, it is retained.’

‘Achieved,’ said the leader, nodding. It looked off into the cavern, apparently already bored with the conversation. ‘Retained.’

‘Exactly so,’ said Cabal. It was nice to use his intellect. It was like looking over the old mansion he had grown up in before being permanently evicted and spending the rest of his life in a small studio flat. ‘Once the full morphotypical state has been . . .’ He paused. ‘The destination is final, but the journey . . .’ He leaped to his feet, and wobbled slightly. His knees were midway through the transformation of bending backwards to bending forwards, and currently bent both ways, which was good for yoga and bad for almost everything else.

‘But the journey may be aborted! Quickly! Tell me! How much longer before I am entirely a ghoul? Days? Weeks? Months?’

The leader looked sideways at him. ‘You do not like being a ghoul?’

‘No. I don’t. No insult intended, but I have plans, and eating people for eternity isn’t among them.’

The leader looked at him fully. Then it grinned the maddog grin that ghouls do so well, exposing every fang it had. ‘That is fine, and we are not insulted. You are Johannes Cabal.’ It gestured at the others. ‘We have enough numbers. There are lots of ghouls, but only one Johannes Cabal. You have at least six weeks, Johannes Cabal. At most, eight.’

Cabal’s initial enthusiasm abated a little in the face of what he needed to do, and the time in which he had to do it. ‘A stabiliser elixir won’t be easy to synthesise. I’ll need a laboratory, chemical reagents, books.’

The leader made a dismissive gesture with a paw. ‘We steal bodies. My people, we have stolen three dead popes. The Vatican was very cross. Glass things, chemicals, books, they will be no trouble. Much easier than dead popes.’

‘Why on Earth did you steal three dead popes?’ asked Cabal.

‘First, to make the Vatican very cross. That was funny. Second reason, delicious.’

Considering the ghouls’ bad reputation, Cabal had found them astonishingly affable creatures: when the leader gathered them together to tell them that Cabal was going to attempt to stop his own transformation, they were not insulted, and when it called upon them to help in any way possible, they were happy to do so. If his life had been a little different, Cabal concluded, being a ghoul really wasn’t so bad. While they were intellectually stunted, at least by his standards, their aesthetic senses went unblunted. He had discovered one ghoul painting a study of a London Tube station, in which ghouls watched the inattentive commuters on the platform from the shadows of the tunnel. The execution was exquisite, even if the subject matter was not. As a race they were mutually supportive and sanguine in their outlook. Previously Cabal had always reckoned them to be rivals in his graveyard harvests, nuisances at best, dangers at worst. Now, however, he saw them for what they were, stoic opportunists, and he respected them for it. Should his efforts over the next few weeks prove successful, he would be far more tolerant of their activities, and never shoot one again. Unless really irked.

First, it was necessary to possess a copy of the thesis, published to universal dismay by Erast Culpins, renowned lycanthropologist, son of a Russian émigré and a Kentish haberdasher, and now a permanent patient of Brichester Asylum. This the ghouls stole, in an excess of mischief, from the Vatican’s very own Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Apparently, the theft made the Vatican ‘cross’. Cabal didn’t care if it made it livid, just so long as he had a copy.

Flicking as quickly as his increasingly long and distressingly rubbery fingers could manage it, Cabal disregarded the other artefacts of Culpins’s peculiar genius – consisting of crude pictures of women bathing amid unnecessarily Byzantine plumbing – and concentrated on the fragmentary references to the metamorphic process. Culpins’s terminology was imprecise and as mutable as his subject, but over the period of fifteen precious days, Cabal succeeded at shaking out the seed of the idea. On the sixteenth day, Cabal drew up a shopping list, and the ghouls were dispatched to gather the items therein requested. They went joyfully, apparently enjoying some petty larceny in their lives to make a change from the drudgery of workaday grave robbing.

There was a rash of thefts not only across the Earth, but across its history, and across the histories of other Earths and counter-Earths, and Earths that never should have been, and Earths that never shall be, as the ghouls happily voyaged through strange dimensions to play in Cabal’s scavenger hunt. They came back, eventually, with many of the things he had requested, some things similar to those requested, and quite a lot of things they had just taken a shine to in passing.

‘Another dead pope,’ said Cabal, to one such returnee. He peered into the sack again and sighed. ‘Though this one shows signs that he wasn’t dead before he was folded up and put in here. I imagine the Vatican was quite cross about this, was it?’ To which the ghoul nodded happily.

As Cabal worked at putting together a laboratory down in the ghoulish caverns, he would sometimes turn to find the ghoul leader there, hunkered down in the shadows, watching his progress in silence. Cabal had noted that the leader was also changing in strange ways, his speech becoming simpler and more like that of the others in the pack. This, he gathered, was because he had once been a man of great intellect himself, but that the steady erosion of his humanity had reached even this last bastion as inexorably as an incoming tide. The ghoul didn’t seem to be so very concerned about it, so Cabal never broached the subject.

‘It’s coming along,’ Cabal told him. ‘I should be able to start experimentation soon.’ He paused in unpacking a condenser tube from its box, stolen from the chemistry lab of a small boys’ public school in Hampshire, and turned to the leader. ‘I am appreciative of all your help in this enterprise, sir, but I must know: why exactly are you doing so?’

The ghoul lifted its long index finger, a finger graced with too many joints to be seemly, and counted, ‘One thing. Johannes Cabal is necromancer. Necromancers get respect from gravefolk. From ghouls. Johannes Cabal needs help, Johannes Cabal gets help. Two things. If Johannes Cabal is unhappy as gravefolk, he should not be gravefolk. Three things. Stealing is fun.’

Cabal nodded, satisfied. He had certainly heard less worthwhile reasons given to commit the most appalling crimes in the past. A willingness to help and a raison d’être for a bit of racial kleptomania were better than most.

The apparatus was constructed rapidly, though some of the more unconventional reagents intended for its retorts took longer to procure. One in particular required special care, and Cabal led a party of ghouls to help him acquire it. He returned sombre and quiet, bearing the skeletal tip of a left-hand little finger. ‘That grave remains sacrosanct,’ he told the leader. ‘Spread the word among the gravefolk: if any break into it – man or ghoul – they will regret it.’ He held up the small bone and regarded it with melancholy. ‘Apart from me, obviously.’

The leader did not need to enquire why, for it had already been informed that the gravestone above the coffin they had so respectfully robbed bore the words,

Gottfried Cabal. Survived by his wife Liese, and son Johannes, gone to join his elder sonHorst in God’s Grace.REQUISCAT IN PACE.

Instead it watched Cabal painstakingly clean the bone and then carefully powder exactly as much as he needed before placing the remainder in a fresh test-tube, sealing it and stowing it in his Gladstone bag.

Cabal’s motivation was high: every day he found it a little harder to remember things or to carry out mental calculations. He was heading towards average human intelligence, and he found the experience stifling and claustrophobic. On the one hand it appalled him that people were content to live with such small intellects, although on the other it went a long way to explaining so many things about society that otherwise defied belief. At least the ghouls seemed as highly motivated as he: he had only to suggest that an item might be useful for a gang to run off and return anywhere from hours to a couple of days later with it in paw. That at least was one less thing to worry about, but the narrow window of opportunity the elixir presented and the impossibility of securing further supplies of some of the reagents needed meant that he had little latitude for supporting experimentation. The few tests he was able to conduct were highly encouraging – it seemed that Culpins’s obsessions with werewolves, plumbing and naked ladies had actually borne fruit – but there could only be a single acid test, and as much as he wanted to hold it off until he could be sure he was doing the right thing, its time was growing inexorably closer.

At last, Johannes Cabal ran out of excuses for himself. Time was short, the principles of his work were already beginning to escape him, and he knew he must act now or for ever be trapped in the Stygian places beneath the Earth and its close neighbours in dream and out of it. He carried out the last reactions, filtered away an unnecessary precipitate, added another reagent drop-wise until the contents of his test-tube went from sepia to colourless and clear. He added the powdered bone, marking the elixir with a trace of his own former humanity, and shook it vigorously for ten minutes until the bone had entirely dissolved. Then he neutralised the remaining solution, and distilled it. He was left with perhaps a fluid ounce of clear, slightly oily liquid, which he gathered in a small test-tube. He allowed it to cool, and then stoppered it. It was so small, little more than an ampoule, yet everything rested upon it. He gathered his faculties, arose from his laboratory stool – obligingly stolen from a Brazilian university by the ghouls – and went out into the main cavern.

He stood before them, straining to stand upright as a man stood, instead of the slight crouch that the ghoul form encouraged, and held up the elixir. ‘Friends,’ he meeped, and it was true that he had rarely felt so friendly towards anybody or anything. ‘Friends, I come before you today to thank you for your aid in my work.’ The ghouls were already scampering over on all fours to be close and catch his every word. ‘This transformation clearly suits many of you, and is, I think, a more honourable and honest career than, say, the judiciary. It is not, however, a career suited to everyone.’ Cabal could see the ghoul leader standing nearby, nodding slightly in silent appreciation of these sentiments. ‘I have found my stay with you highly educational, and a wide expansion of my horizons, and as I have come to know the gravefolk, I have also come to understand you, and to respect and appreciate you. When I return to the world above, I will never forget you. Indeed, I believe that we may combine our forces in many mutually advantageous ways.’ Cabal had learned to see expression and emotion in the muzzled grey rubbery faces, and he could see sadness there now. They were sad to see him go, he knew, and probably sad that all the justified thieving had to stop. Despite himself, he felt quite fond of them.

‘Now?’ asked one to his right.

‘Well, let me get home first, and then . . .’ began Cabal, but the ghoul was not speaking to him.

‘Now,’ said the leader, quietly but firmly.

Suddenly Cabal was being held down, his arms and legs pinioned. ‘What?’ he shouted. ‘What are you doing?’ He thrashed in their grip, but there were too many of them, and they were far too strong. Then he felt his paw being gently but inexorably forced open. He could only swear and damn them as the elixir was taken from him. ‘No! Get off me, you verdammt animals! It’s no use to you! It’s too late for you!’

He fought until he was exhausted and weeping with anger and fear of his certain future. The ghouls continued to keep him still as their leader stood before him. He held up the small glass tube that held all Cabal’s hopes and said, ‘I am sorry, Johannes Cabal. I am sorry as you will be sorry, too. But not yet.’

‘It’s useless to you,’ rasped Cabal, through a larynx grown unused to human speech. ‘You cannot use it. You are fully transformed.’

‘Yes. Full transformation. Sorry again. I lied.’

Cabal looked up suddenly at him. ‘You did what?’

‘Body change, yes, six . . . eight weeks. Mind change, much longer.’ Still looking thoughtfully at the elixir in its right paw, it batted self-referentially at itself with its left. ‘Mind finally going but not gone yet. Not too late for me.’ He looked at Cabal. ‘Long as you fight it, not too late for you either.’

‘If you take that away from me,’ said Cabal looking at the test-tube, ‘then it is too late for me.’

‘No,’ said the leader. ‘You do not understand yet. You will understand.’ It started to turn away and paused, looking back guiltily at Cabal. ‘I am sorry, Johannes Cabal. Wish there was other way.’ And suddenly it was off at a bound, running into one of the tunnels and, from there, to anywhere and anytime.

‘No!’ Cabal called weakly after it. ‘It won’t work for you. You don’t understand. It wasn’t formulated for you, it isn’t keyed to you. Please. Come back.’

The leader did not, and the other ghouls held Cabal prisoner until pursuit became hopeless. Then they released him, and slunk away, ashamed.

Cabal sat alone, unable to take in the enormity of what had just happened to him. No, that isn’t quite correct. Cabal was a man who had bandied words with gods and devils, and had yet to experience anything of sufficient enormity to prevent him functioning. It wasn’t the scale of the disaster that distressed him so, vast though it was. It was the irrationality of it. The ghouls might be childlike sometimes, but they were no fools, their leader least of all. Cabal had made no secret of the elixir’s specificity, so what did the ghoul leader hope to gain? To crush Cabal’s spirit? Possibly, but everybody – everything – had seemed almost as upset about it as he did. He tried to visualise the ghoul leader stopping in some lightless tunnel to open the phial and gulp down the contents, waiting for several minutes while nothing at all happened, then looking faintly put out. Cabal could not understand it. It made no sense at all.

Until the slowing mechanisms of his mind stumbled upon an idea, and he considered it and found it was not wanting in any respect, and realised that it was therefore likely enough to be the truth. He sat frozen by the idea as its ramifications rippled out and illuminated his ignorance like a flare down a pit. It was at first breathtaking, and his breath was duly taken. Then he started to laugh. It was an open, full-throated laugh, with an air of relief so strong in it that it occasionally tended a little to hysteria, but was reined back whenever it did so. It was an honest laugh, and it was the laughter of a man, not that of a ghoul.

When finally he was able to bring it under control and it quietened to sobbed chuckles, he said, loudly enough that anyone nearby would hear it, ‘Oh, I won’t forget. I won’t forget what I am. I will never forget who I am.’ Then he stood and bellowed into the empty darkness. ‘I am Johannes Cabal! Necromancer! Mildly infamous in some quarters! Rise up, ghouls, and come to me! There is work to be done! There are preparations to be made!’

From every corner, every tunnel they crept and slunk and crawled and scampered to form a great mass of a corpse-eating audience before him. They were no longer filled with guilt and regret at what they had done, because they knew he now understood. They grinned their mad-dog grins, happy again.

The ghoul leader bounded through blackness, the curving rocky tunnel flaming in smudged colours to his eyes. It wasn’t perfect sight – light was required for that – but it was substantially better than running into walls and off precipices. He had wondered how it worked for some time, but had known that that was beyond his ability to deduce. Still, that would be changing shortly, just as soon as he drank the stolen elixir. He felt no guilt at its theft. Why should he? He knew that Cabal would soon understand his reasons, then come to regard his new ghoulish existence not as a malign curse but as the great opportunity it truly was.

It turned a corner, scurried across a nexus in the great deep darkness frequented by the fearsome gugs, and darted into a new narrow tunnel that had been melted through the rock by a juvenile cthonian twenty millennia before. The ghoul knew the giant worm-like cthonian in question, at least by repute; it was now a young adult of truculent demeanour and a burden to all seven of its parents. But the ghoul had more important matters to concentrate on today than the soap opera lives of the selfish and invertebrate.

It paused, sensing the eddies in time that surged in those strange places as gentle as breezes. The hackles of its neck arose and it knew it was close, sniffing the air for a scent of a particular time and space. The creatures in those tenebrous extents wandered up and down the years, like cows in a field, unaware and uncaring, but the ghouls understood instinctively the opportunities and dangers since they were among the few who ever ventured into the worlds that abutted the Dreamlands, and among the even fewer who cared.

Soon the scent of fresh air would have been apparent even to a sense of smell less perceptive than a ghoul’s. The ghoul leader stopped, and looked back as if half expecting pursuit, but the tunnel was empty except for himself and an explosion of roots that entered the space from above. The ghoul searched roughly within them, quickly locating a hollow from which it withdrew a brown-paper parcel, packaged as incompetently as only a ghoul or a schoolboy could manage. It reached further into the hollow and pulled out Cabal’s Gladstone bag and cane, both stolen only hours before while Cabal’s attention had been on the latter stages of the elixir synthesis. Stolen by subordinate ghouls, hidden here at their leader’s command.

The ghoul fumbled with the parcel’s string, quickly grew frustrated with trying to untie the knots and tore away the paper instead, with its long powerful fingers, snapping the string as easily as it could a neck. Within lay Cabal’s sloughed skin: the carefully folded and stored bundle of clothes. The ghoul measured its arm against that of the suit jacket and grimaced at how much shorter the sleeve was than the distance from its shoulder to its wrist. Still, there was a solution to that. Holding all the stolen goods in its arms, it moved onwards in a stooped lope, up the sloping path until the rock turned to clay and compacted soil. The tunnel stopped abruptly in a convex wall of cut stone, each block about the size of a loaf. With no hesitation, the ghoul drew the stopper from the little tube of elixir and gulped it down. Now, working quickly, it removed the stones and stacked them carefully on the tunnel floor until there was a gap large enough for it to manoeuvre its scrawny frame through, and take the stolen things with it.

The village was asleep, its occupants deep in sleep, though few sank deep enough to visit the lands from which the ghoul had so recently departed. There was nobody around to see the long-fingered hand, tipped with gore-stained talons, rise from the shadows of the well on the village green, and grasp the edge, or to witness the grey, hideous form that rose up after it. The ghoul looked cautiously around before jumping soundlessly into the moon shadow of the quaint little roof that stood over the well shaft. Behind it, the water bucket swung slightly where its shoulder had touched it. Possessed of a surprisingly tidy mind for a grave-robbing cannibal, the ghoul reached out and stopped it. It had already given orders that the stones in the well wall some thirty feet down the shaft would be replaced before morning, and was in no doubt that it would be obeyed. It was important that no trace was left of this journey.

Across the green, the only light in any building burned in the windows of The Old House at Home. No doubt Parkin had interrupted his evening patrol for a quick half of bitter about two hours ago, and was now on one of its many successors. The ghoul’s long ears flicked back and forth as it listened to the police sergeant, and anyone else in no hurry to go home, quietly talking. Nobody was saying their goodbyes. Excellent: nobody was likely to exit the pub and see a lean dark form dash from the cover of the well, across the green and down the road.

The ghoul could feel the elixir working. The flaring colours of its dark-penetrating sight were becoming attenuated; it no longer loped but was starting to walk more upright; its skin was becoming lighter and more human in texture. Unexpectedly, it was also growing weaker. Humans had not a fraction of the strength of a ghoul, but as its ghoulish strength left it, it seemed to drain deep into the human strength that lay beneath it too. Soon the ghoul’s indefatigable trot became a walk, then a slouch, and finally a stagger. It paused at a rock by the path, having left the road a mile or so before, and sat heavily upon it. It looked at its limbs, at their increased girth, their shortened length, and found them disgusting. At least the clothes would fit now.

Dressed, although not a sartorial triumph in any sense, the ghoul lifted Cabal’s bag and discovered it to be far heavier than it remembered. It ran its hand – it could no longer really be called a ‘paw’ – over its head and was gratified to discover hair growing there, so quickly that it could almost feel it doing so, driving out of his scalp like clay extruded from a nozzle. Belatedly, it realised that the sheer speed of the transformation was also the reason for the overwhelming weakness. It was too fast for his body to bear. If it didn’t stop soon, it might kill him.

He dared not abandon his bag, and half carried it, half dragged it for the next mile until at last he saw the house. It looked cold and forbidding in the moonlight, but it was his salvation, and he must reach it if the long plan he had mapped out was to see fruition. It was another quarter of an hour before he finally reached the garden gate and slumped down by it, mortally tired. He tested his face: the muzzle had gone and his skin felt like human skin, just as it had before his transformation, just as it had before he had been forced to trick himself.

Cause and effect were never certain things in the Dreamlands, and what was objective there was subjective here. Time and place shifted in chaotic patterns between the two realms and it had always astonished him that the ghouls, free travellers that they were, had never taken advantage of it. Now he had come within a hair’s breadth of assuming full ghoulhood, he understood very well. The ghouls simply didn’t care, any more than a rat on a warship or a spider in a clock might care about the greater possibilities of its environment. He, however, had realised how this could save him. He wasn’t sure at what point he had realised this or when he had acted upon it. Paradox had stolen the exact sequence of events from his mind and he doubted it would do his sanity much good to try to re-evaluate it, but what was sure was that he had acted upon it, and now the ghoul warrens housed among its many unpleasant material artefacts this one gloriously elegant temporal one. He knew Cabal would settle into the role of ghoul leader easily. After all, he always had.

Cabal sat by the wall of his house and remembered how he had realised the truth of it from the depths of despair when the ghoul leader had stolen the elixir from him for no apparent reason. He had known what he must do, and he had done it with precision: the ‘attack’ on the house in Arkham, making contact with the witch of Hlanith, and being there to hint to himself about the sinew-wood construct in the nameless city. He had known where he would descend into the crevasse in Mormo, and had marshalled his ghouls to harvest several thousand dead heads of hair to ensure he had a soft fall when the rope broke, as it always had and it always would.

He had not enjoyed deceiving himself into making the elixir, but it had been necessary and, after all, he had done the same to himself when he was at that point in the loop-the-loop of events. All these things had happened before and were already happening again, albeit in the subjective past. They were foretold and already lived, and it was to Cabal’s advantage that they remained so. Once he had left the loop, however, Fate arose from her figurative armchair, stubbed out her figurative cigarette, put down her figurative newspaper, and started to take an interest in him again. Now he no longer knew the future, as was borne out by the evidence of him sitting by his garden gate, slowly dying.

In the silver light, tiny faces peered under the gate at him. Bound into the limits of the garden by magic Cabal had used to contain them where he could keep an eye on them, the garden folk watched and speculated.

‘It’s Johannes Cabal! Johannes Cabal!’ they cried, in tinkling high voices like the sound of fairy bells.

‘He smells like a dead dog,’ said one.

‘He looks very ill,’ said another. Then, in a slightly calculating tone, ‘And weak.’

There was some excited muttering. Then they chorused, ‘Come into the garden, Johannes Cabal! We will help you to the door! We will help you in! We are your little friends!’

‘And we won’t eat you. Honest,’ said a voice belonging to one of the less human-savvy Fey. There was angry shushing and the sound of a tiny Fey creature being punched.

Cabal had not needed the hint. The garden folk were capricious at the best of times, but at least they respected and feared his powers. Currently, though, he knew he couldn’t intimidate a skittish kitten. He also knew that unless he got to his laboratory and made a simple counteragent to slow the elixir’s effects to a bearable level, he might not live much longer. He had no choice, but to attempt to bluff the garden folk into believing he was not as ill as he was.

His master plan of deception and obscuration failed at the first step. He couldn’t stand up. ‘Damn,’ he said out loud. ‘Damn, damn, damn.’ It had been such a good plan too. He had fooled himself, after all. How difficult could it be to fool a bunch of criminally insane pixies? ‘Damn,’ he said once more, and lapsed into unconsciousness.

He sat propped against the low garden wall, quietly dying. As he faded, he dreamed of how he had raised her from the dead, and how he had felt to see her live and breathe again. How he had not cared about the years, but only about the result and the truth that there were some people in this benighted world who were worthy of sacrificing oneself for. This was the second thing that he had denied Nyarlothotep, Crawling Chaos and bastard, and he might have laughed in his sleep as he dreamed of it.

Slowly he slumped over, and sank too deeply towards death to dream any more.

For five more minutes he faded.

A figure detached itself from the shadows beside the house and walked to him. Cabal was unaware as his eyelid was drawn back and the pulse at his throat checked. He didn’t feel it when he was unceremoniously picked up and slung easily over the figure’s shoulder, his bag gathered. The garden gate was opened and he was carried down the path to the front door of his house. The garden folk scattered in panic. They knew danger when they saw it, and the figure reeked of threat.

The front door was locked. Cabal doubtless had the key about his person or in his bag, but the figure had neither the time nor the inclination to search. Instead it put down Cabal’s Gladstone, punched the door with its now free hand, smashing the bolt through the frame, picked up the bag again and carried it, with Cabal, into the hallway, past the door that still shuddered from the impact. The figure, a tall man in a long coat, didn’t bother to secure the door. The house was warded against intrusions by the garden folk but, even if it hadn’t been, none of them would have dared to enter while he was there.

Stirred from deep sleep, Cabal was muttering in delirium, and the man listened intently without even having to put his ear to Cabal’s feverishly quivering lips. Cabal was running through the last things he had been thinking about before passing out. The scheme to get into the house was now moot, but the cause and cure for his quickly evaporating life was not. The man listened gravely to the burbled imperatives. Time was short, it was true, but he proved remarkably rapid. He opened Cabal’s bag, was only momentarily surprised to find a flaming skull in there, removed the notebook that Cabal had fastidiously kept even during his descent into ghoulhood and flicked through it quickly. At least the relevant sections weren’t encrypted – Cabal’s failing intellect had preventing him doing that. The man read quickly, stopping once to look at Cabal with disgust. He went to the bookshelves and took down a slim volume entitled A Treatise on the Induced Retrocessation of the Physiological Transformation in cases of Lycanthropy, Including Notes on the Metamorphic Processes Catalysed by Ghoulish Anthropophagy by Erast Culpin. Then, in long strides, he was out of the room and up the stairs to the attic laboratory.

Cabal did not die that night, the next, or the next, but neither did he awaken fully. He was nursed through the illness by the man, fed slowly and patiently like a baby, washed and looked after. Sometimes, during the day, Cabal would almost manage to awaken, and would look around his room before lapsing back into sleep, but the man was never there.

The man looked after the house, too, repairing the front door, cleaning the rooms, and laying in provisions. One evening, he opened Cabal’s Gladstone bag and removed the skull of Ercusides. ‘Who’s there?’ Ercusides demanded. ‘There is something going on, isn’t there? Isn’t there? Is there?’

The man did not answer, but instead carefully placed the skull with its cool blue-green flames in a varnished wooden box that had once contained a reflecting mirror galvanometer until Johannes Cabal had inadvertently destroyed it in an unhelpful if exciting experiment. The empty box had been left in a corner of the attic laboratory for years, which was where the man had discovered it. Ercusides’ skull fitted neatly, and the heatless flames did not start a fire in the wood shavings the man had provided as packing. The lid was closed and clipped shut, and the box placed on the high shelf by the fireplace in the front room, beside another wooden box of similar dimensions.

Ercusides wasn’t sure what was being done with him, but he was reasonably sure it was outrageous. ‘What is this? Is that you, Cabal? Speak to me, you vile man!’

The stranger who had placed him there was already gone, but the other box, Ercusides’ new neighbour, answered in a fashion. It whistled, a slow, haunting, melancholy air that spoke of optimism through adversity. Ercusides’ shouts grew quieter, and died away altogether as he found himself listening. Finally he said, ‘You . . . whoever you are. That tune, what is it?’

The other box replied, its voice rich and mature. ‘“Blimey, I’m a Limey”,’ it said.

‘What’s a limey?’ asked Ercusides. ‘Who’s “Blimey”?’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ said the box, and began whistling again.

Soon, when he had heard the tune all the way through, Ercusides joined in.

Four days after he had collapsed at his own front gate, Johannes Cabal finally awoke fully. It was late evening, almost eleven, according to the clock on the mantel, and for a moment he felt content. Then he realised he had no idea how he had got there, and his contentment quickly turned to concern. He was wearing pyjamas, which he never wore because he had long since fallen out of the habit of wearing pyjamas to bed, the closest thing he had to a decadent characteristic. They had been sitting in a drawer in his dresser for years. Why was he wearing them all of a sudden? Why was there a carafe of fresh water by his bed? There had been next to no coal when he had left on the Fear Institute expedition, and he had not bothered to order any, so why was there a full scuttle by a healthy fire in the grate? With some difficulty he sat up, and – some ghoul instinct still in place – sniffed the air. There was an ineffable sense of intrusion in the air. Somebody else was in his house. In his house. He looked at the desk and wondered if the interloper had searched it. If not, then the Italian revolver he had in the upper-right-hand drawer should still be there.

The door opened and he had no chance either to reach the desk or pretend he was still asleep.

The anger on his face at the intrusion into his home melted like wax beneath a blowtorch. Entirely forgetting himself, he gawped, and continued to gawp as the man sat on the edge of his bed, and looked at him without saying a word.

It was Johannes Cabal who spoke first, when his wits began to return having been temporarily expelled by mountainous astonishment.

‘You,’ he said at last, his voice thin and weak from illness and disuse. ‘It’s you.

‘But . . . you’re dead . . .’

Author’s Note

It would be remiss of me if I were not to emphasise that the titular society does not exist, and one would be ill-advised to search for it, not least for reasons that must be apparent from the text. There is, however, a real Fear Institute. The organisation in this novel was briefly called the Phobos Society, until I gave in to the temptation that descended upon me every time I walked along the high street in Keynsham, Somerset, England, the town in which this book was written. There stands the J. N. Fear Institute, a building bequeathed to the people of Keynsham by John Nelson Fear in 1917. I feel obliged to underline that while the Institute is home to bridge and chess clubs, that one may learn to dance within its Fear Hall (I ask again – how could I resist?), and that it holds frequent country markets, it has never at any time instigated, funded or pursued the goal of eliminating irrational fear from the world by natural or supernatural means, least of all through the offices of a sarcastic necromancer. Or, if it has, it hasn’t mentioned anything about it on its noticeboard.

With respect to the map, H. P. Lovecraft did not, as far as I know, create a map himself. From clues given in his stories, however, assorted examples have been drawn up over the years. I used a combination of elements from maps by Carolyn Schultz and Jack Gaughan as a starting place (although my lovely crinkly bits around the coastlines are somewhat different), but then naughtily shifted the entire Eastern Continent a bit further north to give me space to pop in the island of Oriab where I thought it looked nicer. I then – does my hubris know no bounds? – shoved the Lake of Yath into a different position and moved the ruins of the unnamed city to stand by its northern shore. Why did I do these wilful things?

Well, because that’s the way I dreamt it.

Acknowledgements

It is usual to thank those who have helped out in the creation of a book, but in this particular case, it is a larger community than the norm. Ever since H.P. Lovecraft created the Dreamlands it has been a playground for generations of writers and artists, and to all of them – especially those whose additions I have made use of in this novel and likely altered horribly – I offer my appreciation and thanks.

As always, there is a great unsung army behind the business and production side of every book. Mentioned in dispatches are my agent Sam Copeland, my editor Claire Baldwin, and the thoroughly perspicacious Hazel Orme, who copy edited The Fear Institute.

Thanks once again to Linda ‘Snugbat’ Smith for her splendid chapter head art. There never seems enough time between the finalised chapter list and art deadline to get them done, yet she always manages it.

I’d also just like to say a few words about George H. Scithers, who died last year (2010). I never met him in person, but we corresponded after he bought the very first Johannes Cabal short story – ‘Johannes Cabal and the Blustery Day’ – for publication. He was a clever man, experienced in the ways of the world of science fiction and fantasy (he had four Hugos to his name), and wise too. He offered me good advice and strong encouragement, and I was grateful to have him in my corner. He’s missed.

¹ It is illustrative of the workings of Cabal’s mind that he readily associated religion and moral dissolution.

² And in the end the burgesses passed that remarkable law which is told of by traders in Hatheg and discussed by travellers in Nir; namely, that in Ulthar no man may kill a cat. The Cats of Ulthar, H. P. Lovecraft, 1920