Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

It was only when they had walked for some hours that Corde broke the silence. ‘The expedition is a disaster,’ he said. ‘We have lost one of our number, and who knows what else we may have lost?’ He looked to the sky, but the rent in the atmosphere had healed with only a dispersed, jagged pink line to show it had ever been there, and even this was slowly dissipating.

Cabal stopped walking and leaned against a dry-stone wall bordering a farmer’s field. ‘You mean Shadrach’s money?’

‘No! No, I do not!’ Corde was speechless with rage for a moment, then blurted, ‘I mean our minds, our very souls. Why did we ever come here?’

‘The Phobic Animus,’ said Bose, quietly, settling himself on a boulder by the road.

‘Yes, I . . . I know that, Bose. I don’t mean . . .’ Corde shook his head, tired and defeated. ‘We must go back.’

‘I agree,’ said Cabal.

‘You would,’ said Bose. Both Cabal and Corde looked at him with some surprise. Finding himself suddenly under observation, Bose couldn’t meet their eyes, so he addressed the turf at his feet instead. ‘You have made it very plain from the earliest stages of this venture that you thought us foolish and our quest pointless. I have no doubt that you’ve only stuck with us so far because of your own curiosity about the Dreamlands. We were foolish to leave the Silver Key in your hands, but I think . . . we all thought . . . that by your own lights you were honourable. Well, I release you from any remaining responsibilities. Take Mr Corde, and get back to the waking world. There is no use you both dying for a cause you do not believe in.’ He straightened his legs and slid off the boulder to land on his feet. He took a deep breath, and started walking again.

‘Wait, Bose. Wait!’ called Corde, to the little man’s back. ‘Where are you going?’

Bose did not turn, but kept walking. ‘To the Island of Mormo, in the Cerenarian Sea. I shall find it, and the Phobic Animus, and then I shall try . . .’ He stopped walking. ‘I shall try very, very hard . . . to destroy it.’ He began walking again.

They watched Bose walk on without them in silence for a long minute. ‘Hmm,’ said Cabal.

‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake,’ said Corde. Then he started running after Bose. ‘Bose! Mr Bose! Gardner! Wait!’

‘Hmm,’ said Cabal again, and walked after the pair of them.

A hundred yards later he caught up with Corde and Bose, who were having a heated discussion. Bose was saying, ‘Shadrach died for this. I cannot just give up immediately afterwards, as if that counts for nothing. I do not weigh my life as worth more than his. I must go on, don’t you see?’

‘Damn you, Bose!’ It was hard to be sure if Corde was angrier with Bose or himself. ‘Damn you! We’ll all die in this misbegotten world if we don’t leave, can’t you see that?’

‘No. No, I don’t. Although I would be happier if Mr Cabal were to stay with us, or me, if you insist on returning.’

‘Me?’ said Cabal, intrigued. ‘Why me?’

‘You saved us all against the spider-ant-baby things, and against the black galleys. And without you we would never have known that our goal lies on Mormo.’

‘Hold hard,’ said Cabal, raising an admonishing finger. ‘I had nothing to do with what happened back there.’

‘Didn’t you? I’m not so sure, Mr Cabal. I saw the hand of Divine Providence in what happened. Perhaps not the divinity that we usually look to, but any port in a storm, eh?’

Cabal’s face hardened; he had been trying hard to forget about his inadvertent calling down of Nyarlothotep in the Dark Wood in the irrational but fervent hope that if he forgot about it so would the god. Unfortunately, it seemed likely that Bose was correct. It was stretching coincidence a little far to believe that the sky had just decided to split open and the Moon to explode at that exact moment on a whim. It seemed that Cabal was still being monitored by a supernatural force that, for reasons that remained alien and indistinct, had taken an apparently benevolent interest in his activities. There seemed to be no reason for it – Nyarlothotep was a deity more than usually well disposed to incandescent levels of mindless terror. Why it would see fit to aid an expedition to destroy the well of all irrational fear was a mystery, and perhaps one that transcended the human mind’s ability to comprehend, even if it was explained very, very slowly with diagrams, models and glove puppets. Probably quite frightening glove puppets.

‘The . . . entity to which you are referring, Herr Bose, is notoriously fickle. It did not intervene in the nameless city.’

‘But that wooden monstrosity just fell over, didn’t it? What caused that?’ said Corde.

Cabal looked at him in offended consternation. They had not spoken of that night again, except in the broadest terms, Holk’s death still throwing a pall upon events, but he had not realised that they thought the sinew-wood giant’s fall was due to natural, supernatural or otherwise non-Cabalian causes. ‘It just fell over,’ he said icily, ‘because I was on its shin, waggling a knife around inside its knee joint. I don’t suppose either of you noticed that, due to all the intense skulking you were doing at the time.’ This was slightly hypocritical of Cabal, who had done a great deal of skulking in his life, and was probably regarded as something of a master of the form among the skulking fraternity.

Bose nodded thoughtfully, but Corde was stung. ‘Are you suggesting that we are cowards, Cabal?’

‘Not at all,’ said Cabal. ‘I am stating it. Bose at least has the grace to admit it, by act if not by word. He has never pretended to be anything he is not. Apart from a magistrate,’ he conceded, gesturing at Bose’s judicial robes, ‘but that was rather thrust upon him by the Dreamlands. Reach for that sword, and I shall kill you where you stand.’

For Corde’s hand had strayed to the hilt. It wavered there for a moment, then fell by his side.

Once he was satisfied that Corde would not sully his discourse with any further murderous intentions, Cabal continued, ‘That, Herr Corde, was reasonable caution. Your behaviour in the presence of Ercusides’ great scarecrow was not. Any lucid, rational eye would quickly have discerned the thing’s nature and evolved a strategy for dealing with it, as I did. I required no external agencies to do so.’

Yet as soon as he had said it he doubted it. He had not thought through every detail of that night, but now it