Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

kicking and biting among the zebra’s Earthly brethren, but the zebras of the Dreamlands are a breed apart, intellectual and dignified by their own lights, so it communicated its disdain with a basilisk stare accompanied by a monstrous and lengthy micturition, during which it did not even blink.

Holk’s three handpicked men – Cabal had watched him pick them out of the gutter outside an alehouse, and Holk had definitely used his hand to do it – were looking more presentable now that they’d had a chance to sober up and were wearing a uniform of sorts. Holk had found a reliable manufacturer of good cuir-bouilli armour and bought four suits in a striking shade of crimson. Corde, who had gone along on the shopping expedition, had bought himself one in grim sable, set with acid-blacked studs. He developed an inordinate attachment to it, and wore it with great frequency even while they were within the safety of the city. ‘I’m just wearing it in,’ he would say, but no one believed him. For his part, Cabal purchased a leather strap that he used to make a baldric for his Gladstone, allowing him to carry it slung across his body, and so leaving his hands free.

And so, on the morning of the fourth day, the expedition embarked upon its journey to the ruins by the Lake of Yath, with Holk and one of the mercenaries riding in the vanguard, the other two in the rearguard, and the four explorers in file in the middle, Corde to the front. Oriab Island was no small rock in the sea, and they knew it would take four or five days to reach the lake, even assuming easy going and no unwelcome adventures en route.

For his part Cabal bore it all with the same grim detachment that he had brought to the ocean journey. He was intrigued by so much in this world that he had little time for the small-talk of the others. He was interested in the way that distant places were not merely distorted by the haze of the air but – to his eye – seemed actually unfinished. There was nothing he could definitely give a name to, but there was a distinct sense that details clustered on these far vistas as they were approached, like coral accruing around a simple rock. He was surprised to find Bose, of all people, thinking along the same lines.

‘Well, they are the Dreamlands, I suppose,’ said Bose, swaying gently from side to side in time with his zebra’s gait. ‘And what we can’t see close to has no need of . . . I have no idea what to call it . . . this stuff of dreams, until it’s right there in front of you.’

‘I’m not sure that is how it works,’ said Cabal. He did not need to refer to his notes: he had reread them so many times by now that they were thoroughly ingrained in his always rapacious memory. ‘We are not dreaming the Dreamlands. Others dreamed them before us, and the superimposition of their dreams has given it permanency. One may dream of the Dreamlands, but the Dreamlands are not a dream.’

‘Yes,’ Bose conceded, ‘yes, that is very true. We, for example, are awake.’

We hope, thought Cabal, giving inner voice to the most recurrent of his concerns.

‘Well, whatever the metaphysics of it,’ said Bose, rising in his stirrups to look ahead, ‘it is beautiful here. Great men must have dreamed some very wonderful dreams to have wrought such a world.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Cabal, for this had raised another concern: a suspicion verging on a certainty that the majority of the creation here was not of human origin. He had not spoken again of what had happened in the Dark Wood, but it rarely left him. Nothing else of the same sort had happened since the dislocation in time and space, and the destruction of the spider-ant-baby things, and the others seemed to have forgotten about it. Cabal had not, any more than a man kneeling in prayer would forget if the clouds parted, God Almighty poked his head out, and demanded, ‘Yes? What is it?’

He had gained the attention of a god, and could not be sure that he had lost it, or would ever lose it. On a purely pragmatic level, if he had not called for the intervention of Nyarlothotep, they would doubtless all have died in the wood. He still wondered, however, if being prey to a spider-ant-baby thing was potentially preferable to whatever the infamously capricious god might visit upon him in return for the favour.

The small column rode on, and on, and on.

One of Holk’s men turned out once to have been a restaurateur who – while under the influence of an experimental mixture of spices – had been murdered by a jealous sous-chef. The spices had included some unusual powders from the Orient, and as a result the restaurateur was sitting up blinking in the Enchanted Wood while, back in the waking world, the dirty deed was done. Divorced from his body and therefore a now permanent immigrant to the Dreamlands, he had briefly considered setting up a restaurant in Hlanith before realising that all he had ever really wanted to do in life was strap on a sword and do some serious swashbuckling. The swashbuckling had quickly deteriorated into roister-doistering, and thence to lying in gutters outside alehouses. Cirrhosis of the liver being unknown in the Dreamlands, this was a career path he had heartily enjoyed, right up to the moment when he had run out of money and had had to go back to full-time swashbuckling until he had made enough to be a drunk again.

This was all of very little interest to those around him, except for the detail about restaurants because he was a very decent chef. As a result, the evening meals were of surprising complexity, sensually challenging, and the uncontested highlight of every day. His piece de resistance was the-thing-I- shot-with-my-crossbow-au-vin, which was universally praised on the second evening.

On the third evening, just as it was growing too dark to travel further, they crested a hill and saw, glittering beneath the light of the Dreamlands’ large and disquieting moon, the Lake of Yath stretching out before them. Perhaps four miles away, visible as a hulking mass of shattered rooftops and fallen columns showing pale, like bones in a giants’ graveyard, stood the unnamed city of legend and dread. Certainly Sergeant Holk regarded it with stony-faced stoicism, but his gaze moved constantly, looking for the shadows of nine-legged things scuttling around the archways and byways.

‘We should go back half a league,’ he said finally. ‘We don’t want them knowing we’re here. Getting most of this hill between us and them should hide us from them until dawn.’

Nobody argued. Even Cabal forwent the opportunity to make a snide comment about Holk’s bravery because, having seen what the slightest wound from a wamp could do, he knew that almost any precaution could be regarded as reasonable. So they turned their zebras and cantered back down the hillside to make camp near a stream, their fire masked from the hilltop by a copse of trees. They ate quietly that night, and the guard rota was arranged more carefully than previously.

When morning came, none were dead, or alive and mortally diseased, or alive and rotting, so they regarded their precautions as effective. They rose, performed their morning rituals, ate, organised their equipment with great thoroughness, and then struck camp. Foreboding hung upon them like a cloud as they rode back up the hill and down the far side.

Cabal had gone to great pains to discover everything that could be discovered about the mysterious nameless ruined city while the expedition was being prepared in Baharna, and had raided every library and archive he could find, including several that were not open to the public. The collected intelligence thus uncovered agreed on three main points: