Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

She shook her head slowly. ‘No. Don’t thank me. I’m sending you into the worst trial of your life, and the only consolation is that the alternative is infinitely worse. I’m sorry. I wish it wasn’t like this. You’ve attracted attention of the wrong sort now, and there’s no going back.’

Cabal nodded grimly. ‘Nyarlothotep.’

‘Don’t say that name here,’ she snapped. ‘I may have power, but I’m a long way short of bullet-proof and I don’t need that sort of trouble.’ Then she laughed, surprising Cabal. ‘You know, I never have got into the hang of thee and thou and prithee and all that sort of stuff. “Bullet-proof.” I guess I’m just too modern for this place.’ She sobered a little and regarded Cabal through shadowed eyes. ‘But you’re right. You’ve caught on about him already, eh? You always were a clever one. The best rival a girl could hope for. I was so pleased with myself for nicking the Opusculus V before you. I knew you had the other four. You must have been so pissed off with me.’

‘Mildly,’ said Cabal, with extravagant understatement.

‘I’m sure. Look, you remember that town? On the high street, there’s a branch of Winwicks Bank with a safety deposit facility. You want box number 313. I can’t give you the key, but I doubt that will slow you down. A gift from me, Johannes. I hope you live to enjoy it.’

On the way out, Cabal happened upon two men doing a poor job of hiding bags of tools behind their backs. They looked at him, then back along the way he had come with some consternation. ‘’Scuse us,’ said one, ‘but have you just come from the old cemetery?’

‘Yes,’ said Cabal, casually resting his hand on his sword hilt in a not especially casual way.

The two men looked at where his hand lay, and the option of an impromptu mugging was almost palpably crossed off their inner ‘To do’ lists. ‘An’ you didn’t see no ghouls about?’

Cabal was interested if not surprised to see that, even here, the vast majority of criminals were stunningly stupid. ‘No,’ he said, with a pleasant sense of duplicitous honesty. ‘There were certainly no ghouls around just now. I was just admiring a magnificent jade pagoda there, and I felt entirely safe.’

The two men grinned at one another, thanked Cabal hastily and trotted off in the direction of the old cemetery. He watched them go with no ambivalent feelings. ‘A gift from me, Miss Smith.’ Then he continued on his way.

Surviving fragments of Cyril W. Clome’s manuscript for The Young Person’s Guide to Cthulhu and His Friends: No. 2 Nyarlothotep, the Crawling Chaos

Oh, Nyarlothotep is such a naughty god! Full of wheezes and wizard pranks – which often involve wizards – he is more fun than the human mind can comprehend. So all we poor mortals can understand of his jolly clever jokes is the agony and the suffering and the blood and the madness. Yes, humans just don’t have much of a sense of humour, I’m afraid.

Now Nyarlothotep is one of the Outer Gods, who are terrifically powerful and see we humans as less than germs, which is only right. Nyarlothotep is super-special, though, because he has lots of different faces and lots of different personalities. It must be so much fun to wake up in the morning and decide not only who you will be today, but even what species you will be. If you were Nyarlothotep, what form would you like to have today? I think I’d like to be a dense, oily mist that could creep into people’s homes as they slept and give them acute radiation burns. That would be a splendid jape, wouldn’t it?

He has lots of names, too, to go with every mask he wears, but really he is always good old Nyarlothotep. He isn’t just a very funny clown, though. He is also the soul of the Outer Gods and their messenger, so he is terribly, terribly busy. But don’t worry. Nyarlothotep always finds time to play his tricks. What fun!

Chapter 6

IN WHICH THE EXPEDITION CROSSES THE SEA AND CABAL TAKES AN INTEREST IN THE LEG OF A SAILOR

They met as arranged the next day, and immediately retired to an alehouse where they could drink wine or beer or a local tea, as they so desired, and eat seed cakes as they told of what they had discovered. All but Cabal, who said that he had researched the strange glitch in time they had experienced, but had discovered nothing of use. This was true, in a largely false way: he had asked a stablehand, who had said he’d never heard of the like. Then again, the stablehand had likely never heard of Damascus, apoplexy or soap, but as no one queried Cabal on the size or demographics of his sample, he did not feel the need to burden them with such details.

Cabal’s disappointing luck aside, everyone had something exciting to report.

Bose was the first. ‘I spoke with the archive keeper and asked him if he had ever heard tell of something called the Phobic Animus –’

‘Hardly likely,’ said Corde, ‘since we coined the term.’

‘– or anything similar,’ continued Bose, a little testily. ‘He had heard of something known as the “Frozen Heart”, which is described as being the epitome of all fears.’

‘The “Frozen Heart”,’ said Cabal. He was looking out of the window, drinking his tea slowly. His seed cake sat untouched. ‘How poetic.’

‘Yes, that was what I thought,’ said Bose, happily, entirely missing Cabal’s tone. ‘This whole world is built on poetic principles. That is what led me to believe in the veracity of this line of research. I asked if these reports had a specific locale or locales associated with them. And they do!’

He produced a rolled-up piece of parchment from his sleeve and unfurled it on the tabletop. At its head, he had written in careful block capitals, ‘LIKELY LIST OF PLACES (SHUNNED)’. Beneath it was a list of perhaps twenty locations.

‘Well, it’s a start,’ said Shadrach, uncertainly. ‘But those places must be hundreds of miles apart. Checking every one of them will take months, if not years, subjectively speaking at least.’

‘This one’s handy,’ said Corde. ‘It’s the old cemetery right here in Hlanith. We can go there now.’

‘You can cross that one off,’ said Cabal, with a bored languor he did not feel. ‘I went there myself last night.’ They all looked at him in astonishment. He shrugged. ‘I’m a necromancer. Cemeteries and the like are my meat and drink.’