eyes.)
Chapter 17
IN WHICH CABAL EXPERIENCES OMOPHAGIA, ANNOYS THE VATICAN, AND ENDURES MUCH
The physical transformation was rapid, the mental one slow. More than once, Johannes Cabal wished that the reverse had been true. He sat in the darkness, chewing on the haunch of a newspaper proprietor who had just been buried a day or two before. The meat was rich with avarice and mendacity, rendered salty by the crocodile tears of his heirs. Cabal had balked at eating human flesh at first, despite the rising appetite for it within him. The leader of the ghouls had come to him then and pointed out the obvious truth that most people were little more than dumb animals and that, in any case, this could be regarded as a form of recycling and therefore was terribly sensible as well as delicious. Cabal had still been reluctant, but then they had brought him best joint of archbishop and, after that, he had no problems at all.
If the dietary changes were eventually acceptable, the physical ones were less so, and the inevitable mental degradation concerned him most of all. The ghouls were not stupid – they were about as intelligent as an average human – but their intelligence rarely wavered much higher or lower than that, and the thought of being reduced to merely average human intelligence appalled Cabal. Indeed, if he were to be honest with himself, it terrified him.
Less dismaying than the cannibalism (though, as he rationalised it, he was no longer truly human and therefore no cannibal), but almost as troubling as the imminent collapse of his mental faculties was the nudity. Ghouls had little use for clothes, a mode that Cabal was sure he would not adopt. As time passed – and in the eternal darkness beneath the worlds, he had no idea how much time that meant – his garments grew constrictive and he felt intolerably swaddled and contained within them. He shed them in an isolated tunnel, and left them there, neatly folded, the last memorial to Johannes Cabal.
It should hardly have surprised him, this change. It was not even unknown in the history of his profession. The basic precepts of necromancy involved hanging around graveyards, tinkering with corpses and inevitably having dealings – friendly or otherwise – with ghouls. Given that the triggering events for a ghoulish transformation are psychic rather than material and include an interest in human cadavers, an empathy if not necessarily a sympathy with ghouls, and the ingestion of human remains, Cabal could only conclude that he should have washed his hands more thoroughly between dissections and lunch. Somewhere along the way, he must have inadvertently enjoyed a morsel of meat that had not come from the butcher. It served him right for eating in his laboratory. Still, it could have been worse. He’d only changed species instead of, say, picking up hepatitis.
So, he sat with the others in a lightless cavern, chewing a media tycoon’s thigh and wondering what would become of him. He had failed. It had always been a possibility, but he had imagined the path would be abruptly halted by his death. It had never occurred to him that he might be turned aside from it, watching helplessly as potential success paled into certain failure. He looked at the others scattered around, industriously rationing out parcels of stolen meat among themselves. He didn’t even need visible light to see them. Everything was limned in a strange and beautiful incandescence that showed details in the most mundane things that he had never dreamed might be there. This was a gift of his new physiology and, it was true, this he did not mind so much.
‘But,’ meeped a voice, ‘you are not happy.’
Cabal turned to see the leader squatting nearby, watching him with calm interest. ‘No,’ he replied. ‘I am not happy. I did not complete my work, and soon I will not even be able to remember why it was important to me.’
‘You will,’ laughed the leader, a sound like a choking terrier. ‘You will remember.’
‘But I won’t want to.’
‘You are so sorry for yourself. All your power and knowledge and books, and you are sorry for yourself. We have heard so much about Johannes Cabal. A clever man. A clever man. But sorry for yourself.’
Unused to being chastised, least of all by a creature that used crypts and tombs as All You Can Eat buffets, Cabal snapped, ‘The process is irreversible. Everybody knows that.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said the leader, nodding understandingly. ‘Everybody.’
‘Yes. Everybody. Well, except for Culpins, but his theory of countermorphic residual transfiguration pertained only to lycanthropes, where the process is essentially reversible in any event, not this sort of transformation where, once the new morphic form is achieved, it is retained.’
‘Achieved,’ said the leader, nodding. It looked off into the cavern, apparently already bored with the conversation. ‘Retained.’
‘Exactly so,’ said Cabal. It was nice to use his intellect. It was like looking over the old mansion he had grown up in before being permanently evicted and spending the rest of his life in a small studio flat. ‘Once the full morphotypical state has been . . .’ He paused. ‘The destination is final, but the journey . . .’ He leaped to his feet, and wobbled slightly. His knees were midway through the transformation of bending backwards to bending forwards, and currently bent both ways, which was good for yoga and bad for almost everything else.
‘But the journey may be aborted! Quickly! Tell me! How much longer before I am entirely a ghoul? Days? Weeks? Months?’
The leader looked sideways at him. ‘You do not like being a ghoul?’
‘No. I don’t. No insult intended, but I have plans, and eating people for eternity isn’t among them.’
The leader looked at him fully. Then it grinned the maddog grin that ghouls do so well, exposing every fang it had. ‘That is fine, and we are not insulted. You are Johannes Cabal.’ It gestured at the others. ‘We have enough numbers. There are lots of ghouls, but only one Johannes Cabal. You have at least six weeks, Johannes Cabal. At most, eight.’
Cabal’s initial enthusiasm abated a little in the face of what he needed to do, and the time in which he had to do it. ‘A stabiliser elixir won’t be easy to synthesise. I’ll need a laboratory, chemical reagents, books.’
The leader made a dismissive gesture with a paw. ‘We steal bodies. My people, we have stolen three dead popes. The Vatican was very cross. Glass things, chemicals, books, they will be no trouble. Much easier than dead popes.’
‘Why on Earth did you steal three dead popes?’ asked Cabal.
