Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

‘They lay eggs in skulls? I’m confused,’ said Shadrach. ‘How exactly do they reproduce?’

‘They don’t,’ said Cabal. ‘Spontaneous generation. It doesn’t happen on Earth but, as has been made apparent to me on many occasions so far, this is not Earth. An abandoned place of foul repute and a large corpse. That’s all you need for a wamp infestation. However,’ he tapped the broken side of the skull with the stick, ‘this skull has not been burst from the inside. It has been smashed from the outside. Nor is the damage directly over the brainpan. The fact that there is no skeleton or bones around is also significant. This wamp was killed with great violence, and the skull damaged in such a way as to prevent a new wamp forming in it.’ He straightened up and looked around, throwing the potentially contaminated stick into an overgrown garden as he did so. ‘We must consider the possibility that wamps are not the main threat here. There may be something or things here that efficiently hunt wamps and that are, in all likelihood, not going to want to be our friends.’

Three hundred yards further up the hill they found a more complete skeleton, albeit one that somebody had played ‘She loves me, she loves me not’ with. Cabal stood by one of the skeletonised legs while the others located others, around the roadsides. None was closer than three yards to its nearest neighbour. ‘These limbs were torn off and thrown away when they still had flesh upon them,’ said Cabal. ‘See? The bones lie close to one another as they did in life.’ He walked over to the torso and skull in the middle of the avenue. The skull had been crushed in the same way as the previous example. ‘This creature was torn limb from limb while it was alive. So, we can conclude that whatever killed it was very powerful physically, and entirely undaunted by the diseases wamps carry.’

He looked up the hill and then back in the direction they had come. ‘Interesting.’

‘Interesting?’ said Bose. ‘Mr Cabal, I must admit that I have been in a state of trepidation verging on fear ever since the matter of these wamp creatures was first raised. Now you tell us that this city contains something that preys upon them – that preys on monsters – and you characterise it as “interesting”?’

‘You seem pale, Herr Bose. Something you ate, perhaps?’

‘There was nothing wrong with that Hasenpfeffer,’ said their resident cook, from his position on the perimeter.

‘Hasenpfeffer?’ said Cabal. ‘I’m very familiar with that dish, but it’s a rabbit stew. I haven’t seen any rabbits, just those furred creatures like wingless turkeys . . . Oh.’ He considered for a moment. ‘They were delicious.’ He turned his attention back to Bose. ‘My apologies, I interrupted your panicking.’

‘I am not panicking!’ shouted Bose.

Somewhere off to the east, there was the sound of collapsing masonry.

‘No rubble’s fallen since we arrived,’ said Holk, tersely.

‘The stuff must fall over occasionally,’ said Shadrach, the paragon of reason. ‘It is a ruined city, after all.’

‘It may be a coincidence that it happened at the same moment Herr Bose gave away our position,’ said Cabal, picking up his bag and starting to walk up the hill at a quick pace, ‘but it may not be. It would be nothing more than a practical application of the rational caution that you are so quick to espouse if we were to start running. Now.’ He did so, the mercenaries – professionally attuned to danger as they were – joining him in a dogtrot.

Messrs Shadrach and Bose looked at one another in astonishment before looking to Corde, only to find him already well up the road, running also.

Then more rubble fell, to the east, but now it was closer. Shadrach and Bose decided that keeping their dignity came a poor second to keeping their limbs attached to their torsos, and set off after the others as quickly as their robes would allow.

The change from a stealthy progress through the totterdown city into a headlong charge did not reduce the tension that ran through them in the slightest. Headlong charges do not offer many opportunities to look back and, on the snatched glances they did take, they saw nothing but the empty houses and tenements, eyeless yet noble in their slow death. Of the wamps, they saw no living examples, but every alleyway and courtyard seemed to contain their skeletons, all torn, all smashed. The expedition saw them and their sense of growing threat intensified with every snapped bone. There were no longer any unexplained sounds to haunt them – or, at least, none that could be heard over the sound of eight men running – but this did not settle their nerves: if there is one thing more disquieting than an unexplained sound, it is a silence after an unexplained sound.

Around them, the city became steadily grander and more impressive as they passed fallen gateways that marked off the different areas. Each gate had been more massively built and heavily ornamented than the one before as they progressed from being simply markers to show where the scum lived, to actually restricting access to keep the scum out. Cabal ran by a basalt basilisk lying on its side at the end of a line of rubble where a gatepost had fallen, the basilisk’s beak open in challenge, but gagged with a growth of dandelions. On its head was a diadem of gold; one of the mercenaries paused by it, and made to lever it off with the tip of his sword, but Holk swore sharply at him, and the man ran onwards with only one regretful backward glance.

They arrived at the corner of a plaza close to the top of the hill, and as they turned it, the ones at the front came to an abrupt halt, the others piling into them with cries of mixed anger and dismay.

‘The greatest temple of the most regal canton, wasn’t it, Shadrach?’ said Cabal. ‘Does this qualify?’

The great cathedrals of Europe are massive affairs, and would frequently have been larger yet, but for the soil beneath their foundations being unable to bear their prodigious weight. Aachen, Paris, York, all have mighty houses of worship that are known throughout the world. Yet if the Kaiserdom of Aachen, the Cathedral of St Peter in York, and Notre Dame in Paris were placed side by side, there would still have been room for a horse track and a shopping precinct within the temple to an unknown god before them.

‘That’s . . .’ started Corde, but words failed him.

‘Cyclopean?’ suggested Shadrach, who read a lot.

The temple was a vast circular building, as far as could be made out, with a large flight of steps, as wide as a football field is long, leading up to a colonnaded terrace upon whose rear wall was the temple’s main entrance: massive twin doors of wood and brass. The colossal edifice was topped with a shallow dome that glowed with the reflected light of the Dreamlands’ sun upon copper that had never and would never suffer the touch of verdigris.

Behind them, some five or six hundred yards away, and perhaps a hundred yards from the road, whose head they had reached, stood a thin, delicate tower that must once have been the domain of an ancient sorcerer or mystic. It rose above its neighbours unbowed and unmarked by the passage of the ages, a fine stalk broadening to