‘First, to make the Vatican very cross. That was funny. Second reason, delicious.’
Considering the ghouls’ bad reputation, Cabal had found them astonishingly affable creatures: when the leader gathered them together to tell them that Cabal was going to attempt to stop his own transformation, they were not insulted, and when it called upon them to help in any way possible, they were happy to do so. If his life had been a little different, Cabal concluded, being a ghoul really wasn’t so bad. While they were intellectually stunted, at least by his standards, their aesthetic senses went unblunted. He had discovered one ghoul painting a study of a London Tube station, in which ghouls watched the inattentive commuters on the platform from the shadows of the tunnel. The execution was exquisite, even if the subject matter was not. As a race they were mutually supportive and sanguine in their outlook. Previously Cabal had always reckoned them to be rivals in his graveyard harvests, nuisances at best, dangers at worst. Now, however, he saw them for what they were, stoic opportunists, and he respected them for it. Should his efforts over the next few weeks prove successful, he would be far more tolerant of their activities, and never shoot one again. Unless
First, it was necessary to possess a copy of the thesis, published to universal dismay by Erast Culpins, renowned lycanthropologist, son of a Russian
Flicking as quickly as his increasingly long and distressingly rubbery fingers could manage it, Cabal disregarded the other artefacts of Culpins’s peculiar genius – consisting of crude pictures of women bathing amid unnecessarily Byzantine plumbing – and concentrated on the fragmentary references to the metamorphic process. Culpins’s terminology was imprecise and as mutable as his subject, but over the period of fifteen precious days, Cabal succeeded at shaking out the seed of the idea. On the sixteenth day, Cabal drew up a shopping list, and the ghouls were dispatched to gather the items therein requested. They went joyfully, apparently enjoying some petty larceny in their lives to make a change from the drudgery of workaday grave robbing.
There was a rash of thefts not only across the Earth, but across its history, and across the histories of other Earths and counter-Earths, and Earths that never should have been, and Earths that never shall be, as the ghouls happily voyaged through strange dimensions to play in Cabal’s scavenger hunt. They came back, eventually, with many of the things he had requested, some things similar to those requested, and quite a lot of things they had just taken a shine to in passing.
‘Another dead pope,’ said Cabal, to one such returnee. He peered into the sack again and sighed. ‘Though this one shows signs that he wasn’t dead before he was folded up and put in here. I imagine the Vatican was quite cross about this, was it?’ To which the ghoul nodded happily.
As Cabal worked at putting together a laboratory down in the ghoulish caverns, he would sometimes turn to find the ghoul leader there, hunkered down in the shadows, watching his progress in silence. Cabal had noted that the leader was also changing in strange ways, his speech becoming simpler and more like that of the others in the pack. This, he gathered, was because he had once been a man of great intellect himself, but that the steady erosion of his humanity had reached even this last bastion as inexorably as an incoming tide. The ghoul didn’t seem to be so very concerned about it, so Cabal never broached the subject.
‘It’s coming along,’ Cabal told him. ‘I should be able to start experimentation soon.’ He paused in unpacking a condenser tube from its box, stolen from the chemistry lab of a small boys’ public school in Hampshire, and turned to the leader. ‘I am appreciative of all your help in this enterprise, sir, but I must know: why exactly are you doing so?’
The ghoul lifted its long index finger, a finger graced with too many joints to be seemly, and counted, ‘One thing. Johannes Cabal is necromancer. Necromancers get respect from gravefolk. From ghouls. Johannes Cabal needs help, Johannes Cabal gets help. Two things. If Johannes Cabal is unhappy as gravefolk, he should not be gravefolk. Three things. Stealing is fun.’
Cabal nodded, satisfied. He had certainly heard less worthwhile reasons given to commit the most appalling crimes in the past. A willingness to help and a
The apparatus was constructed rapidly, though some of the more unconventional reagents intended for its retorts took longer to procure. One in particular required special care, and Cabal led a party of ghouls to help him acquire it. He returned sombre and quiet, bearing the skeletal tip of a left-hand little finger. ‘That grave remains sacrosanct,’ he told the leader. ‘Spread the word among the gravefolk: if any break into it – man or ghoul – they will regret it.’ He held up the small bone and regarded it with melancholy. ‘Apart from me, obviously.’
The leader did not need to enquire why, for it had already been informed that the gravestone above the coffin they had so respectfully robbed bore the words,
Gottfried Cabal. Survived by his wife Liese, and son Johannes, gone to join his elder sonHorst in God’s Grace.
Instead it watched Cabal painstakingly clean the bone and then carefully powder exactly as much as he needed before placing the remainder in a fresh test-tube, sealing it and stowing it in his Gladstone bag.
Cabal’s motivation was high: every day he found it a little harder to remember things or to carry out mental calculations. He was heading towards average human intelligence, and he found the experience stifling and claustrophobic. On the one hand it appalled him that people were content to live with such small intellects, although on the other it went a long way to explaining so many things about society that otherwise defied belief. At least the ghouls seemed as highly motivated as he: he had only to suggest that an item might be useful for a gang to run off and return anywhere from hours to a couple of days later with it in paw. That at least was one less thing to worry about, but the narrow window of opportunity the elixir presented and the impossibility of securing further supplies of some of the reagents needed meant that he had little latitude for supporting experimentation. The few tests he was able to conduct were highly encouraging – it seemed that Culpins’s obsessions with werewolves, plumbing and naked ladies had actually borne fruit – but there could only be a single acid test, and as much as he wanted to hold it off until he could be sure he was doing the right thing, its time was growing inexorably closer.
At last, Johannes Cabal ran out of excuses for himself. Time was short, the principles of his work were already beginning to escape him, and he knew he must act now or for ever be trapped in the Stygian places beneath the Earth and its close neighbours in dream and out of it. He carried out the last reactions, filtered away an unnecessary precipitate, added another reagent drop-wise until the contents of his test-tube went from sepia to colourless and clear. He added the powdered bone, marking the elixir with a trace of his own former humanity, and shook it vigorously for ten minutes until the bone had entirely dissolved. Then he neutralised the remaining solution, and distilled it. He was left with perhaps a fluid ounce of clear, slightly oily liquid, which he gathered in a small test-tube. He allowed it to cool, and then stoppered it. It was so small, little more than an ampoule, yet everything rested upon it. He gathered his faculties, arose from his laboratory stool – obligingly stolen from a Brazilian university by the ghouls – and went out into the main cavern.
He stood before them, straining to stand upright as a man stood, instead of the slight crouch that the ghoul form encouraged, and held up the elixir. ‘Friends,’ he meeped, and it was true that he had rarely felt so friendly
