Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

“I had business to attend to,” said Cabal, while he thought, Why am I explaining myself?

“Offering the girl help with legal expenses. Yes, I know. That was very kind of you.” Cabal blanched. Barrow continued, “I’ve just come away from the police station. I went there after I heard the news from Dr. Greenacre.”

“The good news.”

“Yes.”

Cabal looked expectantly at him, but no elaboration was forthcoming. “Well?”

“I’m sorry,” said Barrow, shaking his head and smiling his accursed smile. “I had the oddest feeling that you would already know.”

“Know what?” asked Cabal, but he did already know.

“The baby. It’s recovered.”

“It recovered from death? Remarkable. Children are so resilient.”

“The doctor thinks it wasn’t dead to start with, that the poison was really a drug that caused some sort of catatonic coma. Isn’t that remarkable?”

“Isn’t it? And the girl?”

“I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t really know. Perhaps she might have been prosecuted for attempted murder.”

“Might have?”

“Yes, there was quite a kerfuffle at the police station when I arrived. They’ve lost her statement.”

“Really?” Cabal shifted his weight carefully from one foot to the other. He didn’t want to make the contract rustle against the other piece of paper he’d brought away from there. “This would be the statement in which she admitted her guilt?”

“It would. Odd, that. No statement, no conviction, because she’s denying it all now. Still, this little adventure might bring her around. She’s not a bad girl, just a little out of her depth. She’d kept how miserable she was to herself. Folk’ll rally ’round now they know. Penlow is a very close community like that,” he finished significantly.

Close, thought Cabal. It’s positively suffocating.

He noticed that Barrow was looking past him and followed his gaze. “I like animals as a rule,” said Barrow. “But there’s something about carrion crows that gives me the willies.”

The crow had obviously got bored of hanging around the carnival and come to investigate the town. It sat on a nearby wall that somehow looked a lot less scenic for the addition. It looked at them; first with one eye, then with the other. Then, to show it was a polymath among crows, it went back to the first eye.

“Come here, crow,” said Cabal.

With a delighted cry of “Kronk!” the bird flung itself from the wall, and, flapping its wings with more noise than an ornithopter made out of a telescoping umbrella, it landed on his shoulder. It looked around smugly.

Barrow seemed impressed. “I would never have guessed you were good with animals, Mr. Cabal,” he said.

“I’m not.” He nodded sideways at the crow, which seemed momentarily to consider pecking his ear and then thought much better of it. “There are two ways to get animals to obey you. One way is through kindness, and then there’s …” He looked sharply at the crow. The near-irresistible desire it had been feeling to take off with his nice, shiny spectacles suddenly evaporated. Instead, it tried to grin in a charming, inoffensive, non-spectacles-thieving fashion. It wasn’t a pretty sight. “The other way,” finished Cabal, darkly.

“Cruelty?” said Barrow with disapproval.

Cabal was honestly surprised. “No,” he said. “Threats.”

“I thought threats were for blowhards and cowards?”

“When you’re dealing with people, yes. Animals seem to take them in the spirit that they are meant, though.” Barrow was looking at him strangely. “Or so I’ve found,” finished Cabal a little weakly.

“Yes. Well.” Barrow looked around for something to change the subject. “Do you like the town, Mr. Cabal?”

“Like.” Cabal considered. “I’m not sure I’d use the word ‘like.’ I’ve been through many little towns and villages with the carnival, and I can honestly say this is a unique place in my experience. It’s so nice.” He said it as an imprecation.

“It is nice, isn’t it?” replied Barrow, choosing to ignore Cabal’s tone. The clock of Saint Olave’s struck the hour, startling the crow into the air. “Ten o’clock already?”

“What?” Cabal couldn’t believe it was so late so early.

“Time flies when you’re having fun, eh?”

Cabal was too taken aback to deliver a hard look. “It can’t be. I only just got here.”

“It’s a while before the pub opens, but we can get a pot of tea and some buns at the teashop,” said Barrow. Cabal hadn’t been in a teashop in almost longer than he could remember, nor did he have any great desire to break his fast of olde-worlde tweeness. Yet, for reasons he was incapable of remembering later, he allowed himself to be steered into the Church Tea-Rooms by his elbow and never said a peep.

It was left to Barrow to make small talk with the waitress, to order the tea and buns and some other fancies, and, he suspected, to pay. Not that he thought Cabal was tight-fisted by nature. No, you have to know what money means before it has significance one way or the other. Barrow doubted Cabal cared about it in the slightest.

They remained in an unstrained but neutral silence until the waitress came back, deposited the tea things, and bustled back off to the kitchen to tell her mum that Mr. Barrow was talking to one of the funny folk from the carnival.

Cabal took off his blue smoked-glass spectacles, folded them carefully, and placed them in his breast pocket. He looked very tired.

“So — what’s life like?” asked Barrow.

“Life?” said Cabal quietly. “It’s like a wisp of smoke in a tempest.” There was a lengthy pause during which Barrow looked at Cabal and Cabal looked at the little pot of clotted cream as if he expected it to do something.

“I meant,” said Barrow, “what’s life like running a carnival?”

Cabal started to say something that might have become “How should I know?” but turned into “How shall I begin? Challenging. Very challenging. Fate” — he said the word pointedly, as if he were on poor terms with it — “always has some little surprise or other in store for me. One tries to be prepared.” He looked at Barrow, and Barrow was surprised that, just for once, his gaze held no malice at all.

“Expect the unexpected, eh?”

Cabal almost smiled. “A trite saying, and one without even the advantage of being practical. I keep an open mind and try to stay flexible. But the future remains a mystery right to the moment it becomes the present.”

“I saw a fortune-telling machine in that arcade of yours. No help?”

“Not much. Recalcitrant, too.” He looked up at a print of an eighteenth-century hunting scene and fell silent. Barrow wasn’t sure if the comment had been intended as a joke. Somehow he doubted it. Cabal abruptly said, “I disapprove of hunting.” Then, without a word, he dropped a slice of lemon into his cup and filled it with Assam. Then, slightly to Barrow’s surprise, he did the same for his cup, too. The possibility that this wasn’t how Barrow took his tea didn’t seem to occur to him. Barrow was struck by the paradox: Cabal was prepared to serve him his tea but not to check whether he liked milk or lemon. As it happened, he didn’t mind much either way. Cabal took a sip.

“How do you like your tea?” asked Barrow.

“Very nice, thank you.” Cabal watched the few tiny leaf fragments that had got by the strainer settle at the bottom of his cup. “I used to like Lapsang Souchong in my adolescence.” He looked Barrow straight in the eye, and Barrow almost expected him to add, “And now you know my secret, you must die.” Instead, he finished, “I can’t imagine why. Its perfume is too much for me now.” He put his cup down and proceeded to smother a scone with cream.

Barrow watched the careful precision of his hands, still in their black kid gloves, and thought Cabal moved like a surgeon. For want of a conversational gambit, he expanded on this. “You don’t strike me as the carnival type, Mr. Cabal.” The cream knife hesitated for a heartbeat and then continued. “I’ve met a fair few different types of people in my life, and I think I’m pretty good at summing them up.”

“I understood that you’d retired from the police force, Mr. Barrow,” said Cabal. He made a curious motion