Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

‘This is the work of a man who was obsessed with reaching the Island of Mormo,’ he said, half to himself, this being the half from which he expected a sensible conversation.

‘Eh?’ said Bose, the half from which Cabal expected nothing, so he ignored him.

‘A genius, judging by his work here. A genius of dimensional engineering. If he wants to go somewhere, he doesn’t call a taxi. He wants to go somewhere none can go, because nobody knows where it is. And he speaks of a . . .’ He had been turning, slowly, as he talked, his eye sweeping around the room, and now he stopped and stared. ‘A seven-sided gate.’

‘Yes, he did,’ agreed Bose, standing by a structure that, to the unjaundiced eye, looked a great deal like an asymmetric seven-sided gateway standing by itself some twenty feet from the nearest wall. It was made from thin, lath-like girders of a brass-like metal that was not brass but a strange alloy that Cabal had encountered once before in unenjoyable circumstances. ‘That’s what your head in the bag said, anyway. But what does it mean?’

Cabal walked over to him, grasped him firmly by the back of his collar, and twisted him to look at the structure. ‘Count,’ he commanded.

‘One!’ squeaked Bose. ‘What’s got into you, Mr Cabal? There’s one frame sort of thing! Should there be more?’

Cabal gave up and let him go while he himself stepped away to weigh up the next move. The gateway was as ambivalent to reality as anything else in the room, seeming to change form within flashes of perception, as if unable to decide whether to be two faces talking or a vase. In this case, however, the choice was between being one asymmetric seven-sided gateway and being any of a vast number of similar but different seven-sided gateways. Looking upon it for even a minute was very uncomfortable, as if the intellect was firmly and methodically unplugging and replugging the cables on the switchboard of the mind into new and ontologically challenging configurations. With difficulty Cabal managed to look away from it, and instead found himself gazing at the cheerfully gormless face of Bose, thereby going from the sublime to the ridiculous.

The work of creating the necessary gate of dubious physicality within the gateway built for it was not going to be a sudden great revelation any time in the next few minutes, so Bose repaired to the sorcerer’s bedchamber to snore gently upon grey-silver samite sheets miraculously untouched by the passage of time, another boon of the tower’s curious reality. Cabal, meanwhile, settled down in the laboratory with what writings of the great man he could find, and started sorting them into piles of graduated usefulness. Even for a man of Cabal’s voracious intellect, this proved difficult. He was a long way from his specialities, and his problems were compounded by the growing realisation that Hep-Seth was not only a leading light in his field but that he was the only light. His notes used forms and nomenclature that were unique to him because he had originated this whole thaumaturgical subset of theory. So, Cabal not only had to evaluate the notes, but he also had to learn a new and novel lexicon in which to do it. Muttering sourly to himself, he began to pore over the papers in the full knowledge that he might be days or weeks about it. Happily, they had discovered a large store of fresh food that was as fresh as the day the fruit had been plucked or the animal slaughtered. It was another of Hep-Seth’s innovations, like the privy, applying the extraordinary to the mundane; neither had he overlooked a seemingly boundless supply of fresh, cool water. They would not starve here, at least.

The next morning – the rooms’ mysterious lighting helpfully waxed and waned to give a sense of the time of day outside – found Cabal surrounded by notes in his own writing and possessed of a grudging admiration for Hep- Seth, albeit one overmatched by a solid dislike for the man based on his inability to write a glossary of terminology and leave it out where some passing necromancer might find it. That he himself wrote notes in a dead language and then enciphered them did not strike him as blinding hypocrisy: he could be executed for necromancy, whereas somebody who could create such magical conveniences as instantaneous travel, perfect food preservation and unblockable toilets had very little to fear, except being mobbed by a loving population.

Bose came in, the very epitome of ebullience and – in rapid succession – wished Cabal a good morning, asked him if he’d cracked the secret of turning the gateway on yet and, even as Cabal was looking for something heavy and spiky to throw at his head, patted it for purposes of illustration, thereby activating it.

Cabal froze, a heavy, spiky thing in his drawn-back throwing arm, and gawped at the shimmering portal that had appeared as easily and without fuss as blowing a soap bubble. The heavy spiky thing fell from his hand to heavily spike the floor.

‘How . . .’ He seemed momentarily incapable of forming the simplest sentence. ‘Gateway . . . How? Created . . . did . . . How?’ He leaped to his feet, the laboratory stool of Hep-Seth clattering over behind him. ‘How in the Nine Circles of Hell did you manage to conjure the gateway, you dim-witted buffoon?’ he roared, forgetting both diplomacy and some much more cutting insults in his passion.

On the other hand, it would have been wasted effort. Bose’s ability to miss, misunderstand and generally remain unscratched by the most jagged verbal barbs transcended the usual simile of ‘water off a duck’s back’. In comparison to his happy indifference to insult, a duck was made of sponge with blotting-paper feathers.

‘I just tapped it, old man,’ said Bose. ‘Hadn’t you tried tapping it yet?’

‘Look at this!’ demanded Cabal, gesturing at the dozens of closely written sheets arranged into neat piles upon the table. ‘Look at all this! This is just basic theory, the very least I would need to understand before going on to intermediate theory, then advanced theory and, finally, the extreme edges of theory where Hep-Seth was working before I could even think of touching that damnable thing! No, “just tapping it” was weeks away.’ He swallowed, and took several deep breaths. ‘Get your things together. We don’t know how long the gateway will remain open.’ Bose opened his mouth to say something, but Cabal interrupted him: ‘If you were about to say that if it closes before we’re ready you can just tap it again, don’t. It would be more than your life is worth at present.’

They had few belongings by this point in any event, the few knick-knacks that Bose had collected being abandoned aboard the Audaine, while Cabal kept all he needed, and several things he might, in his Gladstone. It was the work of a moment to find something similar to a carpet bag in Hep-Seth’s wardrobe (he was, it seemed, especially given to very high collars and wide sleeves judging by its other contents), and to load it with food, water and wineskins. Then they stood before the coruscating light contained within the shifting heptagonal gateway and paused a second. Cabal could not help but be reminded of a similar occasion, weeks before, when they had stood before a similar gateway in an Arkham garret – and just look at how that had turned out. Then, they had been hounded by a ghoulpack and time had been pressing. Now, the only pressure upon them was the possibility of the gateway closing, and that did not seem quite so urgent. Cabal had a sense that if he went through that wavering sheet of distorted reality, things would change, hugely, radically, in ways he could not predict. It was an irrational feeling, and normally he would have crushed it easily, but in that place it circled inside his mind, making his neck tense and uncomfortable, and he knew the Phobic Animus was at work again.

He considered briefly whether he should allow Bose to go first or give him a firm shove into the portal, should he demur. It would be pointless, however: there was no easy way to tell if a disparition was disintegration followed by a distant reintegration, or just disintegration followed by nothing at all. Besides which, the odd ill-formed conviction of change that flittered around his mental battlements, like a translucent sheeted ghost, assured him that the change would not simply be one of being alive to being dead. So, he took a deep breath in through his