Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

evil on Earth, he made unwholesome sacrifices to his dark gods and demanded great power in return.”

Horst touched his forehead and feigned dizziness. “Ooh, deja vu.” Cabal ignored him.

“His dark gods obviously have their standards; they gave him a few party tricks and cut him loose.”

“Dark gods?” said the official, dismayed by such wickedness.

“Extra-cosmic entities with names that sound like they were typed up by a drunken Egyptologist. Anyway, being able to pull a squid out of a top hat didn’t keep him ahead of the authorities. The last I heard, they’d banged him up in a spherical cell at Brichester Asylum. So he’s loose again? How nice.” The thinness of his lips implied that it was anything but.

“What are you going to do, Johannes?”

“I’m going to deal with it. I’ve encountered Mr. Maleficarus once before. Not what you’d call a meeting of minds. I’ll have a word with him, tell him to take his army of the touched elsewhere.”

“He’ll listen to you, then?”

“I doubt it, but I ought to give him the option before killing him. In the meantime, we need to do something to stop our potential customers leaving town.”

“That’s my department,” said Horst, and, almost too quickly for the eye to see, he ascended a stack of trunks.

“Ladies and gentlemen, might I have your attention?” he said in a loud, clear voice. There wasn’t a shred of interest from the churning crowd. It seemed that the ladies and gentlemen had grown resistant to calls for calm. People continued to fight for room on the train.

The incredibly loud report of a gun followed by the tinkle of glass from the platform roof focussed their attention wonderfully. Even the train seemed to be stunned. Cabal blew the smoke from the barrel of his Webley revolver and replaced it in his gladstone bag.

“My brother has something to say,” he said simply in the profound silence.

“Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I am Horst Cabal of the Cabal Brothers Carnival. The man with the gun and the will to use it is my brother, Johannes. It is our intention to deliver you from the approaching menace of the Maleficarian Army and provide you with the best in travelling entertainment. All that we ask is your patience while the former is dealt with and your attendance when the latter is prepared. Thank you again, and bless you all.” He jumped down.

“Bless you all?” hissed Cabal.

“They’re going to need it,” replied Horst.

* * *

The sun was half an hour up by the time Cabal encountered Rufus Maleficarus and his army of the mad. Directed by many grateful citizens, he had made his way through the town lauded on all sides as some sort of hero, which was something of a turnabout, given the way he was usually treated by mobs. Flowers and kisses were a novel change from burning torches and lynch ropes. Not that he liked them much, either.

Then up he walked, out of the town, and onto the broad moor that lowered there like a huge expanse of earth, covered with grass, sheep, and drystone walling. Rufus and his cohort were just marching towards the town when Cabal arrived and stopped and watched and waited. As they got closer, he realised that they were singing. From the tune, their choice of song seemed inappropriate until they got close enough for him to make out the lyric.

Big Squidhead lies a-sleeping at the bottom of the sea,
And one day, when the stars are right, he’ll wake up presently,
And then may wipe us all out, which sounds worrying to me,
While the Tcho-Tcho sing this song…

The Maleficarian Army sang with the vigour of scouts fresh out of camp. They could probably keep this drivel up for hours on end. “All together now!” boomed the leader. Even at this range, Cabal could recognise Rufus by his hideously deformed dress sense.

Aie! Ftagn! Ftagn! Cthulhu!
Cosmic horror coming to you,
The Old Ones are back now with a view to
Sucking out your brains.

Big Squidhead lies a-sleeping, although, in a way, he’s dead.
There are dreams that change reality a-running round his head.
He lies in dread R’lyeh, which is on the ocean bed.
But pops up and down for fun.

“And the Tcho-Tcho sing …?” demanded Rufus in the tone whose subtext ran, “Anybody not having fun will be smashed in the face with a skillet.”

Aie! Ftagn! Ftagn! Yog-Sothoth!
The streets will be chockablock with shoggoth,
How sweetly their cries “Tekeli-li!” doth
Improve the slimy hour.

Cabal dimly recalled that the musical genius who’d decided to put on Necronomicon: The Musical had got everything he deserved: money, fame, and torn to pieces by an invisible monster.

Rufus had finally spotted him and, throwing up his hand in a gesture suitable for halting a column of war- elephants, advanced alone. He stopped some ten yards from Cabal and eyed him contemptuously. Cabal put down his bag and held his cane in the crook of his arm while he wiped his nose. Behind Rufus, the insane, the deranged, and the eccentric but poor formed up into a herd thirty or forty strong. Rufus was a big man with a fine beard and a romantic mane of hair that got him halfway to being a poet without so much as having to dip a nib. Both beard and mane were, inevitably, red. He wore an Inverness cape, plus fours, and stout shoes. Inexplicably, he also wore a tea cosy on his head, into which the symbol of an eye in a pyramid had been stitched. “Well, well, well,” he roared. This was his only volume. “If it isn’t Johannes Cabal” — the army jeered and hissed — “the necromancer.” The army went very quiet and tried to hide behind Rufus.

Cabal put away his handkerchief. “Hello, Rufus,” said Cabal flatly. “Turn around and go away. Thank you.” He picked up his bag and started to go.

“Go away?” roared Rufus (vide supra). “GO AWAY? Do you know who I am?”

Cabal turned. Even behind his blue-tinted spectacles, you just knew that his eyes had narrowed. “I called you ‘Rufus,’ Rufus. Perhaps I made a hash of the pronunciation? Let’s see, that’s ‘Rufus,’ pronounced ‘egotistical, megalomaniac, half-arsed, half-witted, half-baked, swivel-eyed, bubble-brained, slack-jawed, slope-browed, prattling, porcine, dimwit Schei?kopf.’ There, was that better?”

“You shouldn’t have said that,” whispered Rufus in a knuckle-whitening fury. If one imagines a tyrannosaurus appearing in light opera and delivering a line sotto voce, that was the effect. “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”

“I don’t like you anyway, so it makes few odds. I don’t like you happy, sad, beamish, or maudlin. The only way that I will like you is if you take yourself and your friends there away to where you