Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

‘Aie! Fhtagn!’ he began, Aie! Fhtagn! generally being a good place to start when dealing with abominations such as these. It even impresses shoggoths – and it takes a lot to impress a shoggoth. He spoke the words again in the most impressive tone he could manage. Encouragingly, the creatures stopped their infernal noise and gawped at him, their cherubic faces agog, like a bunch of choirboys discovered raiding the sherry in the vicarage. Choirboys with compound eyes, shiny black carapaces and far too many legs for polite society, it was true, but otherwise the expression fitted.

He glared steely-eyed at them, while internally his mental cogs whizzed fast enough to burn oil. ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,’ he tried next. It wasn’t much – everybody in the Dreamlands surely knew that dead Cthulhu was happily dreaming in his house in R’lyeh: it was probably sewn into innumerable samplers on innumerable parlour walls – but at least it demonstrated that Cabal was willing to call on some big names. ‘Aie! Nyarlothotep! Chaos that crawls . . . messenger, mind and will of the gods . . . the haunted dark . . . devourer of grey lilies . . .’ The creatures twitched in a way that seemed to Cabal to indicate growing unease. They shied back a little. This was going well, he realised. Cthulhu was all very well, but Nyarlothotep was known and active. A few more threatening phrases and their morale might break altogether. ‘Aie! Nyarlothotep! See and smite my enemies! Crumble them to dust, and their kin, and their homes, and their . . .’ He dried for a moment, fumbled for a continuation, and made do with ‘. . . and their pets. Strike them down, your humble servant implores thee! I . . .’ And that was all he had to say.

It would be pleasant to report that Cabal’s ruse worked exactly as he had intended, that the creatures would decide that even if he wasn’t a great sorcerer, he was convincing enough not to trifle with, and scamper off into the woods, never to threaten Cabal and his party ever again. Unhappily, only the very last part of this came true.

The creature that Cabal had levelled his cane at was the first to die. It looked startled, then truly afraid. Its lips drew back in an expression of terror, the eyes grew wide, exposing even more of the vile tiny lenses of which its eyes were made, the skin grew ashen and then the whole beast became ashes – thin grey ashes, as if sieved from an intense fire. A rapidly advancing tide of colourless death swept from its head to the tip of its legs and abdomen, and where it passed, the creature just fell away in silent drifts and plumes.

Corde and Shadrach cried out in wonder and horrified joy – and Bose snored in innocent deep sleep – as the grey death came to every one of the creatures, striking them down where they stood or as they tried to run from that circle of destruction. After no more than a minute, the men stood alone, and they were triumphant.

‘By all that’s wonderful, Cabal!’ said Shadrach, his thin, joyless face temporarily invaded by a smile. ‘I thought the jig was up then but, by heavens, you showed them what for, eh? I knew he was the man for this job! Didn’t I say so, Mr Corde? Did I not say so?’

Corde regarded Cabal with new respect. ‘That was a nice piece of work, Mr Cabal,’ he said, wiping his sword clean on the swathe of dust-covered grass at his feet.

Cabal, however, was not exhibiting any signs of exuberant happiness. To the contrary, he was pale, and beneath his dark glasses, his eyes were as wide as the creatures’ at the moment they had met their doom. ‘Ach, Gott,’ he said, in a hoarse whisper. ‘What have I done?’

‘Done, old man?’ said Corde. ‘You’ve saved our bacon, that’s what you’ve done, and we’re all very grateful, believe me.’ He went to rouse Bose.

‘No. No, you don’t understand,’ said Cabal. He was breathing heavily.

Shadrach was appalled to recognise the symptoms of fear. ‘What is it, Cabal? Did something happen to you when you performed that magic?’

‘Magic?’ Cabal looked at him as if just realising that Shadrach was speaking to him. ‘Magic? I performed no act of magic. It was a ruse . . . a ploy. I intended only to fool those creatures, to scare them into thinking I am the sort of magician who goes around casting spells.’

Shadrach frowned, perturbed and surprised. ‘But they . . . You destroyed them.’

‘No, I did not.’ Cabal was recovering control of himself, but he was only hiding his fear, not dispelling it. ‘I called on other powers. I have done so before in similar circumstances on the basis that at least it buys me some time. The calls are hopeless, you see. They have no effect.’

Shadrach started to say something, but thought better of it. He looked around the trees and the scatterings of fine grey ash that lay about the place. Then he turned back to Cabal, but he did not voice the obvious question. Neither did he need to.

‘I called upon Nyarlothotep, the most vicious, arbitrary and sadistic of them all. Loki, Anansi, Tezcatlipoca, Set . . . All faces that it has worn over the millennia. A trickster god. Do you understand?

‘I called upon Nyarlothotep, and he heard.’

Shadrach tried to think of something comforting to say. As an undertaker, it was his stock in trade to be able to comfort people at difficult times, to mouth platitudes and make them sound worth something, to help people see the light of the next dawn. Now he could not think of a thing. Never, in all the burials and cremations that he had planned and attended, had he ever had to commiserate with somebody who had just gained the attention – the probably baleful attention – of a real and malevolent god. A god that, when prayed to, did not depend on or even expect faith, but simply smote one’s enemies. A price would surely be imposed later, at some future, unspecified Damoclean date. What can one say to somebody in such straits?

Instead he gave Cabal his most professional pat on the shoulder. It was his best pat, the one that said, You have my most sincere albeit non-specific sympathies. It was all he could do.

Cabal’s stoicism was enough to make a Spartan seem prone to the vapours. A casual observer would have seen no obvious signs of the great metaphysical disruption within his mind and spirit, but it was there none the less. For the first time, he truly understood what Nietzsche had meant when he had yammered about looking into abysses. Not only had the abyss looked into him, it had noted his name, address and shoe size. He was disturbed and distracted, and these made him voluble.

‘How bad can it be?’ he asked rhetorically, as the subdued party made their way in what they had judged was probably more or less the direction of Hlanith. ‘I’ve encountered worse. I’m sure I’ve encountered worse. I went to Hell. I met Satan.’ He didn’t notice the shocked expressions on the faces of the others. Whether they were shocked at the admission or perhaps at the possibility that Cabal was losing his mind hardly mattered. Whatever the reason, their faith in him and his abilities was as shaken as he was. ‘Satan was nothing,’ Cabal muttered to himself. ‘I spat in his eye.’ There was a short pause. ‘Figuratively. I figuratively spat in his eye. I couldn’t really spit in his eye.’ Another pause. ‘He was too tall.’

Mercifully for his unwilling audience, any further memoirs of supernatural entities into whose eyes he had expectorated, figuratively or otherwise, were curtailed by the discovery of a path through the wood. It was not