“Specifically, a mixture of indigo blue and starch. I need those chemicals.”
“Pah!” said the chemist. “You’re mad!” He started to close his window.
“I will pay double the price for a little alacrity, gentlemen,” Cabal said, loudly enough to be heard through the rapidly closing shutters. The shutters paused, and then reopened.
“Double?” said the chemist. “Eh?”
Miss Barrow was sitting on the stairs in the house when Cabal returned. She had found and lit the gaslight in the hall and, judging by the muted glows, those towards the back of the house and upstairs. Cabal said nothing as he placed the paper bag containing his purchases on the dresser, and hung up his jacket and hat. Miss Barrow finally said, “I’ve looked over the whole house. It’s strange. Everything you could want to be comfortable is here — bedding, books, the larder is full of tinned and dried food. A lot of preserves in jars, too. But there isn’t a single personal touch about the place. I can’t see the personality of the owner. I don’t understand why Cacon had a key to it. I would say it was rented, but I’ve never heard of food being supplied like that.”
Cabal kept his counsel. He had a theory about the house, but would wait to hear what Cacon had to say on the subject. Provided, of course, that the ad-hoc resurrection worked. He took up the paper bag and went into the room where Cacon lay, pausing at the doorway to ask Miss Barrow, “Do you want to see this?” She looked at him, her eyes tired and haunted. Cabal tried again. “You might find it … educational.” She didn’t respond, just stared at him through the bannisters.
Cabal went into the room alone. Miss Barrow sat silent and motionless on the stair. She heard the crackle of the paper bag being opened, and its contents removed and checked. Shortly thereafter, she heard the fizz of powders being tipped onto flames and smelled pungent chemical fumes drifting through the crack of the ajar door. Cabal started chanting under his breath — a strange singsong in a language she didn’t recognise, and doubted more than a handful of people in the world would recognise. Then, defying a reluctance that would joyfully have driven her from that house, that town, that very country, she climbed to her feet and walked slowly down the couple of steps to the boards of the hallway and into the front room. Cabal’s chanting paused, and then continued.
Twelve minutes later, Alexei Cacon returned from the dead.
The room stank like a laboratory fire, and the thick chemical fug made Miss Barrow’s eyes sting. Cabal ignored it all, his own eyes screwed shut as he chanted and chanted a seemingly endless litany of inhuman words from an inhuman religion. They were awful words, incomprehensible to her, but jagged, ugly things that he spat out like stones and razors. That he knew them by heart did not escape her, and she feared him for that, for it showed depths in him that opened into the abyss. Nor did he hesitate when Cacon’s heels began to rattle on the floor, his legs spasming like the galvanised corpse of a frog on a school science bench. It was death, but in reverse, and the most obscene abrogation of the laws of nature she could ever imagine. Life did not return easily to the carcass but was bullied and coerced, and what little dignity there is in death was torn and tattered by this sordid reversal. Cacon seemed to swell with something that was just close enough to life to serve, but, equally, she sensed in her every fibre that it was a poor sort of stopgap and would leak away again soon enough. When Cacon started to shake and suck in ragged, dry breaths, she shuddered with revulsion, but she could not stop watching.
Cabal did not notice her reaction. He checked the second hand on his pocket watch and started a new, more urgent chant. The ritual as a whole would give him only a few seconds in which to interrogate Cacon, provided this last stage succeeded in nailing his soul back into his body, a relationship that would perforce prove to be a delicate one.
Cacon’s eyes fluttered open. “Oooh! Right in me guts, that was! Ruined me vest and that was fresh on this morning. Still, mustn’t grumble.” His eyes managed to stop on Cabal’s face and went most of the way towards focussing. “Hullo, Herr Meissner! You found me, then? Very good, very good. I thought, Cacon, me old fruit bat, I would say you’re just about stuffed. You’ve been left for dead, and that’s what you’ll be, oh, any minute now, I’d say, yes. Not dead, though, am I? Result! Alexei Cacon, one! Grim Reaper, nil!”
“Cacon, you’re dying,” said Cabal bluntly, painfully aware of the vital seconds already wasted.
“Cabal!” said Miss Barrow, snapped from profound horror to mannered indignity at such rudeness. She already had her hand to her mouth when he shot her a furious look.
“What? How’s that?” Cacon tried to look around, but his reanimation was barely enough to get him talking again, and his head was too heavy for his enervated neck to move. “Who’s there?” What Cabal had just said filtered through at about that moment, and Cacon looked back at him with an expression of offended rectitude. “Dying? What d’you mean,
“Of course you will,” said Cabal tersely, in what he believed was an acceptable bedside manner. He was mistaken in this. “Now quickly, Cacon, tell me. This is urgent. Who stabbed you?”
“Stabbed me? Pshaw! A mere flesh wound. I’ve had worse shaving.”
“I doubt it — ”
“It just bled a bit.” He considered, while Cabal — impatience rising — checked his watch again. “It bled quite a bit, true. It — ” The complacent expression turned to one of realisation, and then fear. It seemed Cacon had sped from denial to understanding with a rapidity that might have dismayed his circumlocutory mores had he been generally less gutted and exsanguinated. “Oh, bloody hell! I remember now! I’m dying!”
“Quite so. Your time is short, Herr Cacon. Make these seconds count for something, I beg you. So, again … who stabbed you?”
Cacon’s face bore a rictus of terror. “Help me!”
“Then help me!
Cacon’s eyes swept from side to side, and their light was beginning to fade. Cacon’s brief curtain call to the world’s stage was already coming to an end.
Cabal took him by the lapels and shook him furiously. “Cacon, you
Cacon said something, but the words were lost as his head rolled back. “What?” barked Cabal. “What was that you said?” He held Cacon still and listened closely, his ear an inch from Cacon’s mouth.
In the sudden stillness, Cacon’s next words were perfectly audible even to Miss Barrow where she sat some feet away.
“I saw her … I saw her following you, Meissner.”
Cabal’s astonishment could have been greater only if Cacon had told him he’d been stalked by an allosaurus in twin set and pearls. “Her? A woman?”
Cacon rallied enough to say, “Yes, a woman. Flamin’ Nora, Meissner! It’s a bad time to need lessons on the blinkin’ objective form of the singular feminine nominative, isn’t it?”
Cabal had been insulted by enough dead men not to concern himself. “This woman, who was she?”
“Following you. I thought, Oho, what’s this, Rovetta? Young love? Not with that viperess! So I cut up the alley, went round. Get b’hind, see?”
Cacon had started slurring. Cabal knew his synapses were firing their last, but there was so much he needed to know.
“Rovetta?” said Miss Barrow. “Who’s Rovetta?” Cabal shot her a furious look, but Cacon answered all the same.
“Rovetta’s me. ’S my name. Arturo Rovetta. ’Smee.” He frowned. “Your voice has gone all high, Meissner, mate.”
Cabal could see that Cacon — or Rovetta, so it seemed — had reached the stage where his brain was no longer capable of doing the complex work necessary to lie.
“Went roun’ an’ roun’ an’ roun’ till I los’ ’er. Thought, Ah, sod it. Wen’ to safe ’ouse and there she wasss … ‘Ullo!’ says I. ‘Bam!’ she goes. Stiletto righ’ in me gizzards. Don’ hurt so much now. Don’ hurt a’ all. Goin’ all dark. Goin’ allllll dark …” His eyes lost focus, and Cabal knew it was too late to ask him any more questions. There was a silence broken only by the rasp of Cacon’s shallow breaths. “Eh, Meissner, me ol’ … me ol’ … thingy. Guess wha’. You’ll never … guess wha’ …”
“What is it, Rovetta?” The bark had completely gone from Cabal’s voice. Miss Barrow watched him, surprised and a little perturbed by how gentle he had become, how quietly he spoke.
“I ’ave … the oddest feelin’ I’ve done this before … Deja vu, isn’t it, ol’ son? Deja vu …”
