“There has to be,” said Cabal, but he seemed very old and very tired as he said it. “There has to be.”
Horst took his younger brother by the shoulders. “Listen to me. We’ve got twenty-four hours — less, allowing for the sunlight — but we’ve got time. We can think of a way out of this.” Cabal just blinked uncomprehendingly. “These contracts always have a hole in them somewhere. I think it must be traditional. We burn the contracts, get you out of this wager, and then find a hole in the contract you signed when you sold your soul.”
“There’s no hole in my contract,” said Cabal. “I signed my soul over in return for the tenets of necromancy.”
“And that’s all?”
“I don’t know. ‘The secret of life after death,’ the usual stuff.”
“That’s what you asked for?”
“Something like that.”
“Then that’s easy! Don’t you understand? You wanted the secret of life after death. All you’ve got is a few formulae that allow you to bring people back as parodies of what they were.
“That’s just quibbling with definitions.”
“Oh, come on! You think Satan would miss an opportunity like that if the situation were reversed?”
“What would I want with Satan’s soul?”
“Not what I meant. We’ve got him. It’s a philosophical minefield!”
Cabal had a brief mental image of Aristotle walking halfway across an open field before unexpectedly disappearing in a fireball. Descartes and Nietzsche looked on appalled. He pulled himself together. “But I was given the power to invoke the formulae. That was the real boon.”
“It’s got you nowhere. Give it up. Start again.”
“I … I don’t know.” He tried to work out how much research it would require to recoup mundanely the ground that he had lost to the diabolic. It seemed a very great deal.
“Johannes. Do it. It’s redemption.”
To Horst Cabal, his brother, Johannes, looked like he had when he was six and his dog died. The same numb inability to understand what had happened. Johannes Cabal looked at the floor and the night sky and, finally, at his brother. He seemed very lost. “I don’t know,” he whispered.
Horst opened his arms. He hadn’t held his little brother since he was a child. They had never been close, and Cabal’s admission that he’d hated Horst had explained a lot. But even now and even here, blood was still thicker than water.
“Hey! Boss!” Bones came out of nowhere. In the moment that Horst’s gaze flicked from Johannes Cabal to Mr. Bones and back again, his brother had vanished and been replaced by Cabal the necromancer.
“What?” snapped Cabal.
“I think we got a live one,” Bones said, grinning widely. Horst sighed. The moment had gone. Up until now, he’d quite liked Bones, with his easy smile and bonhomie. Up until now, it had been very easy to forget that he was nothing more than a tiny bit of Hell that had been brought to Earth and put in a boater. That smile had changed everything. They were talking about taking somebody’s soul, and it was a cause for delight.
“Where?”
“The penny arcade. She’s just wallowin’ around and lookin’ pretty damn miserable. We gotta have somethin’ she wants.”
“The arcade? About time that place earned its keep.” Cabal strode off with Bones at his heel.
Horst blurred and was there before them.
The penny arcade had consistently proved a good attraction to people wanting to get rid of spare change but had performed badly in the soul-reaping stakes. Now, as always, it was packed with children and teenagers playing the bagatelle boards and one-armed bandits, testing their strength against a brass arm, and watching the macabre events of the penny tableaux. Horst looked around frantically. They would arrive soon, and he would have lost his chance to get the prospective victim out of here. Impeded by bodies, he was unable to move at high speed and was forced to push politely through the throng. He couldn’t see anybody who fitted the bill until, finally, a mob of pubescents gave up trying to win fluffy toys from the crane machine and moved away. She was young, probably not even twenty, and Horst had rarely seen such an expression of ingrained misery. Here she was surrounded but untouched by people, her unhappiness a tangible thing that must have seemed to her almost deliberately ignored by others. Horst moved firmly through the mass.
“Excuse me, madam.” He was at her elbow. She looked up. Too many nights without sleep. Too many nights crying. He looked towards the entrance. He could see his brother and Bones approaching. He didn’t have enough time for subtlety or even just to mesmerise and steer her out of there. “You seem unhappy. May I be of assistance?” She just smiled wanly, uncertain. “I am Horst Cabal, one of the proprietors. It pains me to see one of…” Cabal and Bones were almost at the entrance. “Look, what’s wrong? Can it be fixed with money? We’ve got more money than we know what to do with. I can give you as much as you need.” Her smile faded, and she just looked confused. He had no more time. He leaned forward and whispered in her ear. “Whatever you do, do
Cabal looked around the arcade. There were any number of women who might have been either miserable or just fashionably inexpressive. Any knack for spotting misery that he may have once possessed had long since atrophied through lack of use. “Who?” he asked Bones.
Cabal studied her. She looked a little baffled to him, frankly. “So what does she want?”
Bones shrugged ineloquently.
Cabal sighed with exasperation and tried to remember how the arcade worked. The sideshows were so much easier. There you could just ask. He looked around for somebody to ask here, and his eye fell upon the mechanical fortune-teller. Inside her glass case, Madame Destiny promised to tell the gullible punters their fortune, printed on a small piece of card, and all for a single penny of the realm. She’d proved useful in the past, he recalled. Perhaps again?
Cabal walked over to it and surreptitiously struck the case with the base of his fist by the coin slot. Nothing happened. “Stump up, Destiny, or it’s a rendezvous with a hacksaw for you,” he whispered harshly.
The mannequin in the case immediately whirred into life, obligingly looked into her crystal ball, and stopped. A moment later, a card fell into the tray. Cabal took it and read:
MADAME DESTINY KNOWS ALL AND SEES ALL.
YOU WILL MEET A WOMAN WHO HAS WHAT SHE DOES NOT WANT.
GIVE HER A SOLUTION AND SHE WILL BE GENEROUS.
MADAME DESTINY’S ADVICE:
MANNERS MAKETH THE MAN.
Cabal read it through twice before crumpling it up. He leaned close to the front of the cabinet, as if putting a coin in. “That is precisely no help to me,” he whispered. “What does she have that she doesn’t want? A disease? Lice? A distinctive and irritating laugh? Give me specifics and save the meaningless generalities for the rubes.” To the imaginative, the mannequin might have seemed to purse its lips. Certainly it ran through its little fortune-telling dumb show at an undignified gallop. The card spat into the tray with so much venom that Cabal had to stop it before it fell to the ground. This one read:
OKAY, OKAY.
MADAME DESTINY ETC.
THAT WOMAN HAS A BABY WHO’S DRIVING HER CRAZY.
WON’T STOP HOWLING. NO HUSBAND.
HER MOTHER’S LOOKING AFTER IT TONIGHT.
GIVE HER AN OUT AND SHE’lL GIVE YOU HER SOUL. EASY.
MADAME DESTINY’S ADVICE:
TRY SAYING “PLEASE” IN FUTURE, YOU ARSEHOLE.
