“Hey, watch it!” barked Al Capone, wrestling with the spelling of “venereal,” as Cabal stepped over him. “Why don’t you just…” The protest died on his lips. “Hey … Hey! That guy’s dressed! He’s got clothes!”
That guy did, indeed, have clothes. A short black frock coat, slouch-brimmed black hat, black trousers, black shoes, a white shirt, and a tidy black cravat. He wore dark-blue tinted glasses with side-baffles, and he carried a black gladstone bag. Unexciting clothes, but clothes nonetheless.
It was the first sensation that the desert had ever experienced. The damned parted before Cabal, who, in his turn, seemed to accept this as his due. Some excitedly speculated that he must be a messenger from the Other Place, that the end times had finally arrived. Others pointed out that nothing in Revelation referred to a man in a black hat and sensible shoes.
Cabal walked directly to the porter’s door and slammed his hand on the closed window. While he waited for a reply, he looked about him, and the damned withered beneath his soulless and impassive gaze.
The window snapped open.
“What do ye want?” demanded a weasely man wearing a teller’s shade from the other side, a man named Arthur Trubshaw.
Sartre said that Hell was other people. It transpires that one of the other people was Trubshaw. He had lived a life of bureaucratic exactitude as a clerk out in a dusty bank in a dusty town in the dusty Old West. He crossed all the “t”s and dotted all the “i”s. Then he made double entries of his double entries, filed the crossed “t”s, cross- referenced the dotted “i”s in tabulated form against the dotted “j”s, barred any zeroes for reasons of disambiguation, and shaded in the relative frequencies on a pie chart he was maintaining.
Arthur Trubshaw’s life of licentious proceduralism was brought to an abrupt end when he was shot to death during a robbery at the bank. He did not die heroically: not unless one considers demanding a receipt from bandits as being in some sense praiseworthy.
Even in Hell, Trubshaw had continued to demonstrate an unswerving devotion to the penny ante, the nit- picking, the terribly trivial, the very things that had poisoned his soul and condemned him in the first place. Given such a mania for order, a den of chaos like Hell should have been an ideal punishment. Trubshaw, however, just regarded it as a challenge.
At first the demons assigned to torment him laughed diabolically at his aspirations and looked forward greedily to the sweet juices that drip from crushed hopes. Then they discovered that, while they had been laughing, Trubshaw had rationalised their tormenting schedules for maximum tormenting efficiency, organised a time-and- motion study for the imps, and, in passing, tidied the underwear drawers of the demon princes and princesses. Lilith, in particular, was mortified.
Never one to squander such a remarkably irritating talent, Satan put Trubshaw in charge of admissions. Hell had grown a new, unofficial ring.
“I want to see Satan. Now.” Cabal’s accent was clipped and faintly Teutonic. “I don’t have an appointment.”
By now Trubshaw had noticed the clothes and was considering possible explanations. “And who might ye be? The Archangel Gabriel?” He started the sentence as a joke but modified his tone halfway through. After all, perhaps it
“My name is Johannes Cabal. Satan
“So ye’re nobody special, then?”
Cabal gave him a hard look. “It is hardly my place to say. Now, open this door.”
Clothes or no clothes, Trubshaw decided he was on pretty familiar ground after all. He produced a copy of AAAA/342 and pushed it towards Cabal.
“Ye’ll need to fill this in, mister!” he said, and indulged himself in a chuckle, a horrible noise, like a clockwork crow running down. Cabal gave the form a cursory glance and handed it back.
“You misunderstand. I’m not staying. I have business to discuss. Then I’m leaving.” There was a muted gasp from the interested onlookers.
Trubshaw narrowed his eyes. “Leaving, ye reckon? Well, I reckon ye’re wrong. This is Hell, sonny. Ye just can’t come gallivanting in and out like a lady’s excuse-me. Ye’re dead and ye’re staying. That’s the way it’s always been and that’s the way it is now, y’hear?”
Cabal looked at him for a long, long moment. Then he smiled, a cold, horrid rictus that travelled up his face like rising damp. The crowd went very quiet. Cabal leaned close to Trubshaw.
“Listen, you pathetic little man … you pathetic little
Everybody shifted their attention to Trubshaw This was going to be good.
“No, Mr. Fancy-Pants-Living-Fella, I ain’t gonna open the door, and I ain’t gonna regret it, neither. Know why? Because, as ye spotted so neatly despite them damn foolish spectacles, I’m dead, and, better yet, I’m on the payroll in these parts. My job’s to make sure people fill in the paperwork.
For his answer, Cabal raised his bag until it was level with the window. Then he carefully opened it and, with a flourish like a stage magician, produced a skull.
Trubshaw shied away momentarily, but curiosity overcame him. “What ye got there, ye freak?”
Cabal’s horrible smile deepened.
“It’s your skull, Trubshaw.” Trubshaw blanched and his eyes widened as he gazed at it. “I … ‘liberated’ it from your old town’s cemetery. They still talk about your death there, you know. You’ve quite passed into local folklore.”
“I always did my duty,” said Trubshaw, unable to tear his eyes away from the skull.
“Oh, yes. Your name lives on to this day.”
“Yeah?”
“Indeed.” Cabal waited exactly long enough for pride to start swelling agreeably in Trubshaw’s withered excuse for a heart before adding, “It has become a byword for stupidity.”
Trubshaw blinked, the spell broken.
“Oh, yes. Well, what do you expect if you get yourself murdered for the sake of a receipt? Children say, ‘You’re as dumb as Trubshaw,’ to their little playmates. When their parents refer to somebody remarkably stupid, they’ll say, ‘Well, there goes a proper Trubshaw and no mistake.’ You can get souvenirs and everything. It’s quite the cottage industry.”
He smiled, and something like benevolence slipped into his expression for the first time. It was almost certainly a trick of the light.
Trubshaw incandesced with fury.
“How the heck do you reckon you’re gonna get by me now, you goddamned Kraut? You really got my goat now, y’know. By jiminy, it’ll be a cold day around here afore I let ye through!”
Cabal affected a yawn. “Your reputation is well deserved, Arthur Trubshaw. You think I stole this skull as a keepsake? Do you know who I am?”
“I don’t care who ye are, mister! You can take yer bag a’ bones and shove it right up ye — ”
“I am Johannes Cabal. Necromancer.”
It went very quiet indeed on both sides of the door. Word gets about in the shadowed places. Corpses exchange scuttlebutt and gossip, and they know all about the necromancers, the sorcerers who use the dead. They are the Bogeyman’s Bogeymen.
“Now, Arthur, your choice is clear. You can open the door and let me in. Or I can go back to the land of the living in a truly abominable mood, raise you up from this place, put your cankerous soul into something that will do as a body, and then make you wish you were dead all over again. Repeatedly.”
Cabal pulled down his smoked-glass spectacles far enough to show his hard, humourless eyes — grey flecked with blue that suggested tempered steel and difficult times ahead for any foe — and Trubshaw knew he meant every word. “Which is it to be?”
The Arch Demon Ratuth Slabuth had been informed that Hell had been invaded and, being a general of the
