Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

‘I’d recommend that you do. There is little time to waste.’ He put the pot back on the marble floor with a hollow klop, and walked to the temple’s main door. ‘Barred from the inside. Of course it is.’ He shook his head and came back, a rare smile on his face. For all that, it was a predatory sort of expression. ‘There’s ingenuity here. Also a terrible oversight on his part, but an understandable one. Regrettable, but understandable.’

‘Cabal,’ said Corde, ‘none of us know what you’re talking about. Speak sense, man.’

‘Speak sense? I always speak sense. Apart from that time with the mild concussion, yes, but apart from that, I always speak sense. Don’t you see it? You’ve seen everything I have. Don’t you know what that monster out there is? There’s just one missing factor.’ As he spoke, he was walking quickly down the aisle between two columns of pews, his light held high, looking this way and that. Suddenly he halted and bent down. When he stood up it was with a skeletal limb in his hand.

‘Right arm. Belonged to a Caucasian male in his fifties.’

‘How can you possibly . . .’ Corde paused. ‘Oh, my God.’

‘Gentlemen,’ said Cabal, holding the arm aloft. ‘Allow me to introduce you to the object of our expedition to this place. I give you, the Hermit of the Nameless City.’ He dropped the arm, the bones rattling on the marble floor in an awful silence. And then a terrible thing happened.

Johannes Cabal giggled.

He felt giddy, ebullient, strange. Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong at the edge of his understanding, and he feared it. It waited for him, and he knew he could not avoid it. Soon, he thought, I shall be dead.

His sojourn in this strange fugue was short, but even so, he was treated to the sight of his seven comrades in adversity all wearing similar expressions of horrified bafflement, the sort of expressions they might have worn if he had vomited millipedes while toy trains shot out of either ear. ‘Look at you all,’ he said, scorn in every syllable. ‘Gawping like simpletons.’

‘You . . .’ Shadrach was momentarily unable to communicate the full enormity of what they had just witnessed. ‘Cabal . . . you . . . giggled.’

‘Which is cause for standing around like moonstruck zebras?’ They had all commented upon the zebras’ vacuous expressions on seeing a full moon during the journey. Cabal permitted himself the indulgence of a luxuriant sneer. ‘You do not know me. Do not presume to imagine that you do.’

It was a magnificent act, for behind the facade he was as astonished as any of them and, more, he was unnerved. He doubted he had giggled since his teenage years; its sudden reappearance, and at such a fraught time, smacked of hysteria. He had never been hysterical – angry, yes, incandescently so, on several occasions – but he had never so utterly lost control as to make that horrible tittering sound.

He faced them down until they looked away rather than meet his eye, his stoic aspect dispelling any fears as to his state of mind. He was very clearly a man in control of himself, and therefore they might permit him control of their destinies, at least in the short term.

Now all business, Cabal looked around, sidling up and down the aisle and occasionally pausing to look under pews.

‘Mr Cabal?’ said Bose hesitantly. ‘What are you looking for?’

‘His skull,’ replied Cabal, without pausing. ‘It may prove useful.’

‘For what?’ asked Corde, but Cabal was not in the mood to enlighten him, and from the looks the others were giving him, Corde decided that it was not the time to press the matter. They scattered and started searching in the same slightly mannered way that one might adopt while helping a stranger hunt for lost keys. After five minutes of quiet diligence, Thirsh – one of the mercenaries – held up his hand and called, ‘Here, Master Cabal!’

Cabal was with him in a few moments, and between them they dragged out the semi-mummified torso and head of a long-dead man. ‘Over here,’ Cabal ordered Thirsh, ‘in the open area.’ They pulled the partial cadaver up the aisle to the clearing beneath the lectern, Cabal by putting his hand inside the empty right arm socket, Thirsh rather more fastidiously by gripping the left clavicle. Still, he was glad to let go when Cabal told him to, and stood off to one side, dusting off his hand on the side of his Romanesque centurion’s skirt for quite a long time afterwards.

Cabal, meanwhile, was studying the body. ‘Evidently he died in the same way as the wamps,’ he said, carelessly gesturing at the empty places where most people liked there to be limbs. ‘The skull is partially crushed, too. Enough to prevent a new wamp spontaneously generating within, but not quite as violently as we’ve seen previously. Sloppy. Very sloppy.’

‘Does it matter, Mr Cabal?’ said Shadrach, snippy with disappointment and frustration. ‘We should be getting out of here with all possible dispatch! Come along! If we are quick, we can gain the outskirts by nightfall.’

‘Yes, we can do that,’ admitted Cabal, as he opened his bag and looked through the contents, ‘but wouldn’t you rather learn the whereabouts of the Phobic Animus?’

Shadrach gave a short, unamused laugh. ‘From whom, Mr Cabal? From whom? From the dreadful monster that apparently seeks to kill everything in this city? Shall we ask it, hmm? Clarify the etiquette in that conversation for me, Mr Cabal. Do we ask it before, after, or while it is tearing our arms and legs from us?’

Cabal sighed. ‘Everybody is such a critic. No, I do not suggest that we interrogate the monster, not least because it is not a monster in the sense that you imagine, nor because it will have little of import to tell us even if we found a way of communicating, and finally – most tellingly – because we have a far more immediate and useful source right before us.’ And here he made a distracted gesture at the corpse while he continued to search through his bag.

There was a silence, during which the mercenaries frowned even as the penny dropped for the Fear Institute members. ‘Ooooh,’ said Bose, the slowest to cotton on. ‘Of course. I keep forgetting. You’re a necromancer.’

This was news to the mercenaries, who all took cautious steps back from Cabal.

Cabal hid his exasperation that, even here in this land of wonders, his profession was held in much the same opprobrium as it was in the waking world. He did not hide it well, however. ‘Yes,’ he said, allowing the s to draw out into a sibilant expression of dangerous resentment. ‘A necromancer. Shaking facts out of dead heads is more traditionalist than most of my experiences, but it’s always nice to do something that harks back to the old school.’ He removed a small padded case from his Gladstone bag and opened