The sheet of parchment was, however, looking much like a sheet of parchment at present. That wasn’t to say it was harmless: there are certain runic patterns that can draw the attention of unwelcome supernatural attention on whoever has the misfortune to look upon them, so Cabal continued to be delicately cautious long after the point when he had disproved the possibility of every form of magical trap known and several more open to conjecture. Finally, even after he had conceded that the letter was merely a letter – though it bore no name and address, and had somehow been posted without the knowledge of his front garden – he still felt misgivings as he opened it fully and studied its contents.
At first he thought he must be mistaken. Surely it was only a similarity in cursive styles. But as he read the short note of a little more than a hundred words that began with no greeting and ended with no signature, he recognised naunces in phrasing and came to the inescapable conclusion that it had been written by himself. He had no memory of ever doing so, however, and the content was of such startling originality that he knew he never had. He tore off the gas mask and gauntlets and read it again, and then again. It was ingenious, it was radical, and he knew in his heart that it was effective. What had Nyarlothotep said as he mooched around on his throne in the form of the inoffensive Herr Bose?
Cabal took down his laboratory logbook from the shelf and opened it at a fresh page. All the experiments previously, all those years of work, were now as dross to him. Now he could see the beginning of the true path to his goal. He hung up his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. There was still much to be done, but now he knew what he knew, the fire burned in him again. This time he would succeed. One day, perhaps not so very far away, depending on where his researches led him, she would rise again, and she would see and speak and think, and Cabal would feel happiness for the first time in so long. He paused, angrily wiped at his eye with the heel of his hand. He was shaking. He had no time for this, he told himself. No time. There was so very much to be done.
It was true: there was a very great deal to be done. The note – which Cabal painstakingly transcribed into three different notebooks for fear that it might vanish as mysteriously as it had appeared – was only a beginning, an inspiration to explore some principles that might have been disregarded indefinitely without the note pointing out a subtlety to their applications that opened vast new vistas of fruitful research. But the note was short and of no help beyond putting him on the right path. More researches were necessary, more experiments, which meant more danger. Now, however, he knew the perils were worth it. No more stealing obscure books at great personal risk when he knew they would lead only to dead ends. No more canoodling with demons for scraps of dubious information.
Cabal did wonder, though: if Bose had been telling the truth in his little ‘thought experiment’, and he was also Satan, and Satan was therefore not a fallen angel but just another face of a trickster god, as Tezcatlipoca, Loki and Anansi must also be, what were the demons of Hell in reality? It was an intractable problem. There was only one sure way of knowing and that would involve communicating with Nyarlothotep, who would likely be in neither such a jovial frame of mind nor form should they ever meet again. Cabal’s best guess was that the demons in that case would be constructs or creatures corrupted so thoroughly that they were no longer aware of ever having been anything but demons. It would be the final humiliation, that the eternal suffering of the damned in Hell was simply stage dressing. Ultimately, however, it was irrelevant to his current researches, and he considered those hapless multitudes only for a moment before moving on.
Early experiments were encouraging, and as Cabal’s confidence in this new direction grew, so did his intolerance of distractions. He purchased a new Webley .577 and a replacement for his sword cane. Soon he was using both.
A seventeenth-century painting of the theologian Johannes Valentinus Andreae included a scrap of paper carelessly thrown on his desk that contained a complex diagram showing the relationship between certain esoteric humours. Cabal went to the private house where it hung and cut it from the canvas with the sword cane. When the owner attempted to stop him, Cabal shot him dead with the Webley.
Then there was the time a year later when Cabal was cornered by armed police in the chemical-engineering building of a university. He escaped by converting a fractional distillation column the size of a three-storey house into an impromptu explosive device and hiding behind a heavy concrete wall when it detonated. A dozen bystanders were injured, three fatally, and four university buildings burned down, but Cabal escaped with the materials he had sought, so all that was of no import.
Three years after that, it was necessary to relieve some inbreed – a member of the aristocracy, which is to say much the same thing – of a gem recovered from a meteorite four hundred years previously. It comprised the centrepiece of a tiara that left a vault only for very important occasions, and Cabal waited impatiently for such an occasion to arise. Finally, a benefit dinner for some worthy cause (Cabal thought it might involve orphans, but he was not overly interested) was announced at which some dowager somebody of somewhere would be wearing the tiara. The next morning, the newspapers were agape at the mass murder of everybody at the dinner through the agency of poisonous gas. Some days later, during the investigation, the tiara was recovered from under a side table where it had been carelessly thrown. The central gem was no longer in its setting.
And so it went on, an outrage here, an atrocity there, punctuating the onward and upward progress of Johannes Cabal the necromancer. His path was clear, and if anyone ventured upon it and became an obstruction, they were removed as quickly and economically as swatting a fly. Where Cabal walked, he left gravestones and woe, yet he did not care and he did not pause. Where once he had killed with at least an iota of regret in aiding his ultimate foe, Death, now he murdered easily and without hesitation.
For the first time in his life, he was buying new fifty-round boxes of ammunition annually. He was on his third new sword cane, the first having been lost during an escape, and the second’s blade having snapped in the ribs of a museum guard. Sometimes when he looked in the mirror to shave, Johannes Cabal saw his ultimate foe right there, looking back at him. He shrugged inwardly, and carried on shaving. None of that mattered, he knew. None of those people mattered. He had a plan, and it was more important than anything else in the world.
Nor were his crimes limited to the mundane world. He summoned the demon Lucifuge Rofocale for the second time in his life, and as the demon was halfway through saying, ‘Oh, it’s you again. Have you got your dread rod with you this time?’ Cabal shot him through the head with a bullet made from the metal of Leng, sanctified on a lonely beach by Dagon himself, who had no love for demons. Lucifuge looked surprised, then dead, and Cabal hung him by his feet from a nearby tree for his blood to drain into a bucket. He left the demon dangling upside-down, the last droplets of his black blood tainting the soil. The carrion crows gathered around, but none cared to sample that particular dish.
Satan did not turn up that night, all in a bate because Cabal had killed one of his. Cabal hardly expected him to, because in his mind’s eye he could see Satan sitting in his great basalt throne by a burning lake of lava, and – in some lights – he looked just like Mr Gardner Bose.
The wall of Cabal’s laboratory contained a cork-lined noticeboard, and upon this were pinned yellowed newspaper cuttings of opening museum exhibitions and of forthcoming benefit dinners, carefully drawn alchemical charts and formulae of unusual chemical equations. There, in the centre of them all, was a sheet of parchment upon which was written a short paragraph in his own handwriting. It never yellowed or faded.
