Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

able to see our hands in front of our faces. I suppose we could try and make flambeaux.’ He looked around and found a bit of dry wood, presumably carried up into the cave during a fierce storm in some bygone year. ‘If we find another stick like this, and wrap something around it that we can set fire to . . . ?’

Cabal said nothing, but took the stick from Bose, and opened his bag. Instantly, cool green-blue flames licked up from inside. Cabal took out the eternally burning head of Ercusides, and stuck it on the end of the stick. ‘There,’ said Cabal. ‘That will do nicely.’

‘Eh?’ said Ercusides. ‘Is somebody there? What is going on?’

‘You’re earning your keep, sir,’ said Cabal. ‘Now, quiet, please. We are working.’

The cave extended back some twenty feet before narrowing into a stone gullet, ridged with shallow steps, that descended at an angle of some thirty degrees to the horizontal. Cabal walked down them without hesitation; if he was correct about the nature of the place, it would not require traps to protect its treasure, as its treasure was quite capable of defending itself. The gullet opened out into a jagged gallery, this time a natural formation that had been tweaked here and there, but was otherwise as natural processes had created it. Along one side a crevice in the floor wound as they walked alongside it, becoming first a crevasse, and then something like an abyss by the time they were close to the far end of the gallery, some two hundred feet long. The light from Ercusides’ skull burned brightly and reflected from the semi-precious stones and quartzes that speckled the walls.

Cabal paused, looking first up a short ramp that led into another narrow carved corridor, much like the gullet from the entry, and then he looked into the abyss. Dank humours were carried up by a low wind that groaned on the very edge of hearing. Bose cautiously joined him.

‘What do you suppose is down there?’ he asked, curiosity and trepidation mingling in his voice.

‘I am guessing at two things. One is a supposition, the other a good likelihood. First, I think whatever is left of the wizard Hep-Seth is down there, if he’s lucky. The gods played a childish game with him, and they usually throw away what they tire of.’

‘Really?’ Bose’s voice was a squeak. He sidled a little closer to the edge and looked into the shadowed deep. ‘And the other?’

The powerful shove he received in his back from Johannes Cabal took him clear off the precipice, and then he screamed shrilly enough to remove any chance of him hearing Cabal say, ‘You, any minute now.’

Cabal listened to the diminuendo screaming for a few seconds, but had heard similar before and was unimpressed by this new rendition. He was making a calculated guess here, and if he was wrong, he was certainly in no more trouble than if he was right. Holding up the grumbling head of Ercusides on his stick, he went down the last corridor and into the chamber of the Phobic Animus.

Surviving fragments of Cyril W. Clome’s manuscript for The Young Person’s Guide to Cthulhu and His Friends: No. 4 Yog-Sothoth, the Lurker at the Threshold

Yog-Sothoth is never late for appointments, best beloved, and for the most wonderful of reasons. Yog-Sothoth is coterminous (coh-TER-min-US) with all time and all space, which means that clever old Outer God exists everywhere ALL the time! It is so terribly, terribly bright that even it doesn’t understand what it’s thinking about half the time, but luckily it’s aware of the other half of the time all the time, so it can crib off itself. I don’t think that counts as cheating.

Yog-Sothoth – who has lots of other names like the Lurker at the Threshold, the Key and the Gate, the Opener of the Way, the All-in-One and the One-in-All and log-Sotot – looks like a big crowd of silvery bubbles but, unlike a big crowd of silvery bubbles, is stupendous in its malign suggestiveness. That’s just another way of saying, ‘I’m really not sure I trust those silvery bubbles.’

Chapter 14

IN WHICH WE CONTEMPLATE THE LIFE AND DEATH OF JOHANNES CABAL

As Johannes Cabal descended, he could see a flickering glow ahead, and realised he was approaching the final chamber. Once the glow was strong enough, he popped Ercusides off the end of the stick and put him away. Cabal had a strong presentiment that what was coming was going to be complicated and fraught enough without having to worry about a dead head on a stick. He drew his sword on the small chance that it was possible simply to jump on the epitome of Fear and do it to death with some fevered stabbing. It was a very small chance, he knew, but at least it provided a prop to his resolve. He considered turning around and going back out into the daylight. The Silver Key was useless without a gateway, so he could not escape via that route. Perhaps it would be possible to put together some sort of raft, given time, although the chances of negotiating the Cerenarian Sea without knowing where he was, and with all the terrors both meteorological and biological he might encounter en route, were vanishingly small. Or, he supposed, he could just sit around like Robinson Crusoe. No, he concluded, he would go mad with intellectual frustration before many years had gone by and end up more like Ben Gunn. No matter what its nature, its likely brevity, or its outcome, he must ultimately endure this encounter, so he might as well get it out of the way now.

The descending corridor reached its end, and Cabal stepped through into the chamber beyond. It was not hugely impressive but – given its occupant – it did not need to be. The chamber was circular, and some fifty feet in diameter. The walls rose some ten or twelve feet, then formed a hemispherical dome above. In sconces spaced some ten feet apart around the walls torches burned with a strange red fire that flickered black in its heart, yet cast a soft yellow light. Opposite the entrance upon a low dais stood a simple throne of grey and red stone, and upon the throne sat the Phobic Animus in all its preternatural glory.

‘Hello, Herr Bose,’ said Cabal.

‘Hello, old man,’ said Bose, as cheerfully as ever, but with a distinct underpinning of smugness. ‘I gather you caught on to my little joke. Or did you just kill me because you finally got sick of the sight of me?’ His expression shifted to Bose’s habitual sheep-like foolishness. ‘Oh, I say! Yaroo!’ He relaxed again. ‘If that’s the case, you have far more patience than your reputation suggests.’

‘The former is the case, which was the main reason the latter did not occur until this late juncture,’ replied Cabal. ‘It was a small thing, as is usually the way. It occurred to me far too recently that you knew I had cursed even the pets of the spider-ant-baby creatures of the Dark Wood, and yet you were in a dead faint when I had done so. At Dylath-Leen you knew Shadrach’s fate, even though you were in a foetal ball facing the other way at the time. A neat trick for a man. Then, even as you were committing this faux pas, your eyes were dry and it occurred to me, just in passing although the idea grew on me, that you had not been sobbing in fear at all. You were laughing.’

‘Yes, well,’ Bose shrugged, ‘it was funny.’