Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

by the gate, watching those going home with a close attention. Barrow didn’t believe that he could hope to go up against the stone-headed man armed with anything less than an anti-tank rifle. A cursory examination of the fencing that surrounded the Cabal Bros. Carnival indicated that he wouldn’t be getting out that way, either: twelve feet high and topped with razor wire. He’d assumed that the inward bend at the top was a mistake, that they’d put up the fence the wrong way around. After all, putting it up that way would be far better at keeping people in than out. Now he wasn’t so sure it was a mistake at all. He was trapped, then. In that case, he had no choice but to stay hidden until daybreak. From what he’d seen on his previous early visit, most of the carnival’s denizens weren’t very keen on daylight. He’d watched a group of flickering dark things pass across the roofs and hoardings a few minutes earlier. Only the fact that he was out of the bright lights himself had made them visible; the townsfolk below had remained entirely unaware of the lightly tripping mob of nightmare that had passed only a few feet above their heads, shielded by the brilliant bulbs, neons, and fluorescents that made the darkness beyond so much deeper.

Barrow looked back on the unpleasant feeling of foreboding that had been with him much of the day, the feeling that he had glorified with the word “fear,” and smiled. No, that had just been the collywobbles. Now he was afraid. They were throwing everything into the search, and that meant things that had only ever been catalogued in chained books in cathedrals. Things that were a long way away from the human monsters he’d spent his working life hunting and bringing to justice. Thinking of that helped him; perhaps he could find some strength there by remembering the predators he’d pulled out of the crowd and thrown into gaol? He tried it.

Smith, the insurance man who collected on a few too many policies for comfort. Yes, he could still remember the look on Smith’s face when the verdict came in, like a spoilt child who’d been found out. Jones, the doctor who started to play God with his patients’ lives and disposed of the ones he disapproved of. That had been difficult — Jones had been “assisting” the enquiry as an expert witness, and it was the alteration of a piece of evidence that had made Barrow look more closely at his involvement. Ye gods, the trouble he’d had convincing his superiors to probe Jones’s background more thoroughly. Brown, the hatter with the very private collection of busts he used to model his wares. If there had ever been a man to revel in his own insanity, it had been Brown. He’d actually become a hatter purely because of the association with madness. When he’d been sentenced, he’d asked to see his captor in private. There, as the Black Maria waited to take him away, he’d leaned close to Barrow and, laughing quietly to himself, whispered, “I’m not really mad. Only pretending, only pretending!” He was led away making shushing noises at Barrow — it was to be their private little joke.

And Simpkins, the man who killed because he could. They’d arrested him on fifteen charges, and he’d quietly suggested in the interview room that there were thirty-two missing persons that they might like to add to the tally. Barrow could still remember Simpkins in the dock while the charges were read, never showing a flicker of emotion but seeming polite, if a little bored. “Do you plead guilty or not guilty?”

Simpkins had pushed his glasses back up his nose, smiled slightly to show that he just wanted to help, and said, “Oh, guilty. Obviously.”

In his interviews, he would only talk to Barrow, and ignored questions from anybody else even if Barrow was present. “Why is it so important that you speak only to me?” Barrow had asked finally. “It’s very inconvenient.”

“Because you can see me, Detective Inspector Barrow. Other people start to lose interest after a while. You, delightfully, always see me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’ve gone through life as a piece of marginalia, faintly written in soft pencil. Passed by, overlooked, ignored. It has been of great personal distress to me, I cannot begin to tell you how painful. Since childhood, I was always the last to be chosen — if, indeed, they remembered to choose me at all. Always considered the wallflower, though I stood full-front and cried, ‘Me! Me! Me!’ Never loved, never despised, never anything to stir the emotions at all. Alfred Simpkins, the invisible man. After a while, it quite began to aggravate me. That’s when I started making people take some notice of me.”

“You started killing them.”

“Yes, I did. Even that was a disappointment. I’d hoped for some sort of great emotion from those whose lives I took. After all, being murdered for no other reason than because a pallid little man — I am under no illusions as to how you perceive me — wants to prove a point, you would think it would make people angry at the very least. It would seem unfair, would it not? But all I ever got was faint expressions of surprise. You know, I don’t believe they noticed I had murdered them. I really don’t. They just seemed faintly put out, as if it were a bit of bad luck, an act of God. ‘Oh, my carotid artery has been severed with an open razor. I knew I should have cut down on greasy foods.’ ‘Botheration, I’m being belaboured with a fourteenth-century battleaxe. What are the odds, eh?’ I was standing there in front of them with a sub-machine gun or backing over them with a rotary cultivator or whatever and shouting, ‘I am Alfred Simpkins! I am killing you! Will you please take a little bit of bloody notice, please?’ But they never did. So I kept going. Hope springs eternal, after all.”

“You knew you’d be caught, surely?”

“Well, one would think so, wouldn’t one? Do you know, I’ve sat in my living room covered head to toe in blood, cradling the murder weapon in my hands — already labelled ‘Exhibit 1’ — and been interviewed by your colleagues. Had I seen my next-door neighbour recently? Indeed, I had. A little under three hours previously, when I’d bludgeoned her to death with this very knobkerrie, officer. Well, sir, we have other enquiries to make. Good day. They hadn’t noticed. Nobody notices me. Except you, Detective Inspector Barrow. You notice me. The first time you saw me, you knew I’d done it. Do you want to know what I would like to do more than anything, Detective Inspector Barrow?”

“No.”

“I’d like to kill you.” Barrow had looked at Simpkins hard. “No animosity. Simply because you would notice yourself being murdered. That would be my little bit of affirmation of my existence. Then I would never have to kill again.”

Barrow had denied Simpkins’s request and not been diplomatic about it. Simpkins was sent down to Laidstone for so many life terms that, even with good behaviour, he was unlikely to be out before the next ice age. Simpkins’s attitude towards him had changed then; it had become personal.

Barrow paused, curious, and wondered why he was thinking about Simpkins just now, of all times. Perhaps it had been that little man he’d seen walk by in the crowd. He’d been the absolute living spit; the resemblance had just started all these thoughts rolling around his head. All of which was very nostalgic in a forensic sort of way, but it wasn’t getting him any closer to finding somewhere safe and stopping Cabal. “Stopping Cabal” seemed very simple when it was only two words. The implications were horrifying in their complexity, however. Stop him how? Stop him from doing what? Stop him when? First things first, he thought, and broke cover.

Walking like a man who has every right to be going into the back of a sideshow, he went into the back of a sideshow. I just need a dark corner, he thought, somewhere I can … He paused, inhaled through his nose. What was that smell? An odd, synthetic sour odour. He had a rapacious memory, in that once a sensation had been experienced it was held for good, and so he knew he’d smelled something similar before. Unfortunately, his rapacious memory hung on to the details, too, refusing to pass them on to the cognitive centres, and so he couldn’t quite recall where. He twitched a curtain gently to one side and peered through the gap. What he saw rooted him to the spot. He was on the wrong side of the velvet rope that separated the visitors from an exhibit, if that was the right word. Actually, on this occasion, it was definitely the right word. Most definitely. Exhibitionism was the whole point here.

On the far side of the rope, Barrow could make out the shadowy forms of the paying customers. They clung to the area of low light — dim, flickering electrical faux candles showing only form but no detail — loath to be seen and identified. This was a place that many wanted to visit but nobody wanted to be caught in. The reason for the guilty interest lay languorous and lithe upon a chaise-longue, regarding the gawking and sweating mass with an insouciance that slid easily beyond human limits. Since his conversations with the brothers Cabal this evening, it was as if the scales had fallen from Barrow’s eyes. For example, he knew without hesitation — as surely as Horst had known about Cleopatra earlier the same evening — that, whatever else Layla the Latex Lady was, she wasn’t a lady. She wasn’t even human.

There was something in the way that she moved, slowly and deliberately and without apparent recourse to such human fripperies as joints, that was reptilian yet still warmly mammalian enough to provoke a low hum of sighs and wetting of lips from her admiring audience — the white noise of desire. Her skin was dark, dark grey,