skull to be paying much attention to the nuances. He replaced the skull and took out a small leather folder. He flipped it open to reveal gleaming scalpels and probes. “These are my surgical instruments.”
“Yer a doctor, then?” asked Denzil, trying to guess how much the instruments might be worth. Cabal put them away again.
“Not really. These,” he continued as he produced a box about the size of a binocular case, padded inside and out, “are phials containing Test Batch 247.” He worked the catch with his thumb and opened it to show the heads of several test tubes, each sealed with wax into which the imaginative might have thought they saw a curious symbol worked.
Denzil could see that they weren’t going to be retiring after this job. “Wassat worth, then?”
Cabal closed the case and put it away. “If you don’t know how to use them, nothing at all. And finally,” he said, rummaging deep in the glad-stone. “This is a Webley.577.” Cabal drew the biggest handgun either Denzil or Dennis had ever seen in his life. Dennis cheered up.
“Werl, that’s gotta be worth something, eh? Eh, Denzil?” He turned around to see Denzil running as fast as his fat little legs could carry him. Somewhere deep in the reptilian part of his brain, Dennis got the feeling that he might be in trouble. The bullet that smashed through his back did nothing to diminish this. Even as Dennis was falling, his minimal amounts of brain activity flickering down to nothing, Cabal was carefully levelling the revolver at Denzil’s diminishing form. The first shot threw up stone fragments close by his heels. Cabal raised his aim a little and tried again. Denzil went down like he’d been poleaxed.
It took some time to find a spot where he could climb through the straggling and unhealthy hedgerow that grew alongside the earthwork, and another few minutes of climbing through brambles to reach the top. As he’d surmised, this was indeed the “proposed spur line” mentioned on the map. The dilapidated state of the line made him wonder how old the map was: the rails were heavy with undisturbed rust, the sleepers were rotting under moulds and mushrooms, weeds and young trees grew waist-high along the full length of the track as far as he could see. He consulted the map again. From his vantage point he could finally make out a few of what might, locally at least, be called landmarks: ponds, marshes, and forks in the roads. He turned the map through a few angles until he could work out where he was, reorientated himself facing north, and then looked directly along the line where the map carried an enigmatic “X.” The vegetation seemed far more mature there, a dense copse of trees that straddled the line and spread down each embankment. That, he hoped, must be it.
He set off towards the trees with determination, but after a few steps he was halted by the sound of something falling heavily on the track behind him. He turned and snapped, “Do keep up! We don’t have all day.” Denzil blinked slowly at him and then down at Dennis, who was trying to get up, but his foot had caught under a rotten sleeper. It took a moment for Denzil to realise that he might help by kicking Dennis’s heel repeatedly until it came loose. He took slow, careful aim, swung his leg with great force, missed, and ended up on his back. He blinked uncomprehendingly at the grey sky. It seemed much more difficult to get things done now that he was dead.
Cabal pulled a little black book from his pocket, drew a pencil from its spine, and made a note. Batch 247 seemed to act quickly, but it certainly didn’t help co-ordination in any practical sense. With hindsight, perhaps he should have made some effort to take their souls on a more formal basis as the first donors of the hundred. That he hadn’t was partially down to not being quite sure how one actually sets about taking souls on a more formal basis, but mainly because they had peeved him. “I’ll be over there.” He pointed towards the trees and put his notebook away. “Catch up when you’re able.” That, he thought ruefully, might be some time.
As Cabal got closer to the trees, he began to see how long the copse was — perhaps a quarter of a mile. Given the stunted state of everything else in sight, that was suspicious in itself. Nothing else seemed likely to produce much more than toothpicks, while these trees were great twisted brutes that stood on the landscape as if painted in black ink. Leafless branches clutched at the sky, and the convulsed bark of the trunks looked, to a fanciful mind, like human faces twisted in torment. “This,” he said quietly, “must be the place. It’s
In a nearby tree that might have been an elm before being regularly watered with LSD, a carrion crow sat and regarded Cabal keenly. It tilted its head and cawed mockingly at Cabal. Then it saw Dennis and Denzil stumbling along the track a hundred yards behind him and, full of hope and appetite, flew to investigate them.
Cabal passed the tortured elm, stepped over the roots of a lunatic’s vision of a witch hazel, and came face to face with the Monster.
Cabal exhaled sharply, and his always pale complexion turned an ugly grey for a second, until he brought himself under control. He didn’t move, tried not to breathe, tried not to let the great black Monster know he was alive. Then he took a deep, shuddering breath, stepped forward, and placed his hand upon its face.
He had to step on the cowcatcher to reach, though.
It was the most astounding piece of engineering he thought he’d ever seen, and he’d seen a few. A massive locomotive that even here, dead and neglected, its firebox long cold, demanded and received unthinking respect. It bore some affectations of the Old West — the cowcatcher, the fluted smokestack — but the body seemed more Old World, aggressively squared and not afraid to shunt every carriage ever built from here to Hell. Perhaps it was capable of that. Cabal nodded approvingly: he might not be an engineer by trade, but he knew solid workmanship when he saw it.
Apparently, so did all nearby creatures. Despite any number of tempting perches for local incontinent birds, the only dirt on it was the coating of curious black rust that came off on his fingers like very coarse soot. Cabal sniffed at it cautiously and was instantly put in mind of energetic evenings down in the cellar, sawing up the evidence and putting it in the furnace before the police arrived. He pushed his tinted spectacles up his nose and blinked thoughtfully behind them. What exactly did this thing run on? He hoped it was wood or coal; it would be much more convenient.
A commotion made him turn. The crow had settled on Denzil’s head and was trying to get a meal out of him. Specifically, out of his eye socket. The hapless dead man had his head down and his arms outstretched and was running a clumsy circle in an effort to dislodge the bird. It wasn’t working; the crow seemed to have stapled itself in place. Dennis wasn’t helping things by trying to hit the bird with a sickly sapling he’d torn up. Blows rained down on Denzil’s back, not even remotely close to the target, and soil from the roots flew everywhere.
“Stop that!” barked Cabal. Both walking dead and bird stopped that. Dennis tried to hide the tree behind his back. “You there. Crow. Come here.” With utmost reluctance, the crow launched itself from Denzil, swooped low until it was almost touching the ground, then swept back up to head height, slalomed nonchalantly through the intervening trees, and landed on Cabal’s shoulder. Cabal turned on his heel and started to walk down past the huge locomotive and towards the train of carriages and cars linked up behind it. “You’ll be fed shortly, bird, so no further trouble, yes?” The crow blinked. “Oh, by the by, if you ever shit on my shoulder, you’ll be in a taxidermist’s window so fast as to beggar belief. Understood?”
“Kronk,” said the crow, which may have meant, “Yes, master.” It could equally well have meant, “You’ll have to catch me first, bugger-lugs.” Either way, it kept its sphincters tight.
Cabal walked slowly along the train. There were a few carriages, several flatcars stacked with once brightly painted boards, and, towards the back, a good number of sealed boxcars. He arrived at the first of them and stopped by the large sliding door that ran for a quarter of its length. He was just considering how to get in when it slid open of its own accord with a hideous shrieking of rusty metal. “Oh,” said Cabal, unimpressed. “It’s you.”
The Little Old Man finished dogging the door open and looked down. “Aye, it’s me, young Cabal. You’ve taken your time.”
Cabal placed a foot on a metal rung, gripped the rail by the door edge, and pulled himself up. The crow flapped off his shoulder and landed on a nearby stanchion. It settled down to practise looking at things beadily.
“You’re lucky I’m here at all. The map was next to useless,” Cabal said as he brushed rust off his hands and shoulder where the doorframe had touched him. He looked at the man. “I was hoping Satan might send something else rather than you, you contrary old bastard.”
The man laughed. Actually, he cackled.
“Oh, we go way back, Johannes. His Worshipfulness thought you might like a familiar face.”
Cabal was looking around the gloomy car. “Only if I thought blowing a hole in it would make any difference,” he replied offhandedly.
The Little Old Man was not, in any real sense, little or a man. He was certainly, however, very old. He was an
