Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

towards anybody or anything. ‘Friends, I come before you today to thank you for your aid in my work.’ The ghouls were already scampering over on all fours to be close and catch his every word. ‘This transformation clearly suits many of you, and is, I think, a more honourable and honest career than, say, the judiciary. It is not, however, a career suited to everyone.’ Cabal could see the ghoul leader standing nearby, nodding slightly in silent appreciation of these sentiments. ‘I have found my stay with you highly educational, and a wide expansion of my horizons, and as I have come to know the gravefolk, I have also come to understand you, and to respect and appreciate you. When I return to the world above, I will never forget you. Indeed, I believe that we may combine our forces in many mutually advantageous ways.’ Cabal had learned to see expression and emotion in the muzzled grey rubbery faces, and he could see sadness there now. They were sad to see him go, he knew, and probably sad that all the justified thieving had to stop. Despite himself, he felt quite fond of them.

‘Now?’ asked one to his right.

‘Well, let me get home first, and then . . .’ began Cabal, but the ghoul was not speaking to him.

‘Now,’ said the leader, quietly but firmly.

Suddenly Cabal was being held down, his arms and legs pinioned. ‘What?’ he shouted. ‘What are you doing?’ He thrashed in their grip, but there were too many of them, and they were far too strong. Then he felt his paw being gently but inexorably forced open. He could only swear and damn them as the elixir was taken from him. ‘No! Get off me, you verdammt animals! It’s no use to you! It’s too late for you!’

He fought until he was exhausted and weeping with anger and fear of his certain future. The ghouls continued to keep him still as their leader stood before him. He held up the small glass tube that held all Cabal’s hopes and said, ‘I am sorry, Johannes Cabal. I am sorry as you will be sorry, too. But not yet.’

‘It’s useless to you,’ rasped Cabal, through a larynx grown unused to human speech. ‘You cannot use it. You are fully transformed.’

‘Yes. Full transformation. Sorry again. I lied.’

Cabal looked up suddenly at him. ‘You did what?’

‘Body change, yes, six . . . eight weeks. Mind change, much longer.’ Still looking thoughtfully at the elixir in its right paw, it batted self-referentially at itself with its left. ‘Mind finally going but not gone yet. Not too late for me.’ He looked at Cabal. ‘Long as you fight it, not too late for you either.’

‘If you take that away from me,’ said Cabal looking at the test-tube, ‘then it is too late for me.’

‘No,’ said the leader. ‘You do not understand yet. You will understand.’ It started to turn away and paused, looking back guiltily at Cabal. ‘I am sorry, Johannes Cabal. Wish there was other way.’ And suddenly it was off at a bound, running into one of the tunnels and, from there, to anywhere and anytime.

‘No!’ Cabal called weakly after it. ‘It won’t work for you. You don’t understand. It wasn’t formulated for you, it isn’t keyed to you. Please. Come back.’

The leader did not, and the other ghouls held Cabal prisoner until pursuit became hopeless. Then they released him, and slunk away, ashamed.

Cabal sat alone, unable to take in the enormity of what had just happened to him. No, that isn’t quite correct. Cabal was a man who had bandied words with gods and devils, and had yet to experience anything of sufficient enormity to prevent him functioning. It wasn’t the scale of the disaster that distressed him so, vast though it was. It was the irrationality of it. The ghouls might be childlike sometimes, but they were no fools, their leader least of all. Cabal had made no secret of the elixir’s specificity, so what did the ghoul leader hope to gain? To crush Cabal’s spirit? Possibly, but everybody – everything – had seemed almost as upset about it as he did. He tried to visualise the ghoul leader stopping in some lightless tunnel to open the phial and gulp down the contents, waiting for several minutes while nothing at all happened, then looking faintly put out. Cabal could not understand it. It made no sense at all.

Until the slowing mechanisms of his mind stumbled upon an idea, and he considered it and found it was not wanting in any respect, and realised that it was therefore likely enough to be the truth. He sat frozen by the idea as its ramifications rippled out and illuminated his ignorance like a flare down a pit. It was at first breathtaking, and his breath was duly taken. Then he started to laugh. It was an open, full-throated laugh, with an air of relief so strong in it that it occasionally tended a little to hysteria, but was reined back whenever it did so. It was an honest laugh, and it was the laughter of a man, not that of a ghoul.

When finally he was able to bring it under control and it quietened to sobbed chuckles, he said, loudly enough that anyone nearby would hear it, ‘Oh, I won’t forget. I won’t forget what I am. I will never forget who I am.’ Then he stood and bellowed into the empty darkness. ‘I am Johannes Cabal! Necromancer! Mildly infamous in some quarters! Rise up, ghouls, and come to me! There is work to be done! There are preparations to be made!’

From every corner, every tunnel they crept and slunk and crawled and scampered to form a great mass of a corpse-eating audience before him. They were no longer filled with guilt and regret at what they had done, because they knew he now understood. They grinned their mad-dog grins, happy again.

The ghoul leader bounded through blackness, the curving rocky tunnel flaming in smudged colours to his eyes. It wasn’t perfect sight – light was required for that – but it was substantially better than running into walls and off precipices. He had wondered how it worked for some time, but had known that that was beyond his ability to deduce. Still, that would be changing shortly, just as soon as he drank the stolen elixir. He felt no guilt at its theft. Why should he? He knew that Cabal would soon understand his reasons, then come to regard his new ghoulish existence not as a malign curse but as the great opportunity it truly was.

It turned a corner, scurried across a nexus in the great deep darkness frequented by the fearsome gugs, and darted into a new narrow tunnel that had been melted through the rock by a juvenile cthonian twenty millennia before. The ghoul knew the giant worm-like cthonian in question, at least by repute; it was now a young adult of truculent demeanour and a burden to all seven of its parents. But the ghoul had more important matters to concentrate on today than the soap opera lives of the selfish and invertebrate.

It paused, sensing the eddies in time that surged in those strange places as gentle as breezes. The hackles of its neck arose and it knew it was close, sniffing the air for a scent of a particular time and space. The creatures in those tenebrous extents wandered up and down the years, like cows in a field, unaware and uncaring, but the ghouls understood instinctively the opportunities and dangers since they were among the few who ever ventured into the worlds that abutted the Dreamlands, and among the even fewer who cared.

Soon the scent of fresh air would have been apparent even to a sense of smell less perceptive than a ghoul’s. The ghoul leader stopped, and looked back as if half expecting pursuit, but the tunnel was empty except for himself and an explosion of roots that entered the space from above. The ghoul searched roughly within them, quickly