locating a hollow from which it withdrew a brown-paper parcel, packaged as incompetently as only a ghoul or a schoolboy could manage. It reached further into the hollow and pulled out Cabal’s Gladstone bag and cane, both stolen only hours before while Cabal’s attention had been on the latter stages of the elixir synthesis. Stolen by subordinate ghouls, hidden here at their leader’s command.
The ghoul fumbled with the parcel’s string, quickly grew frustrated with trying to untie the knots and tore away the paper instead, with its long powerful fingers, snapping the string as easily as it could a neck. Within lay Cabal’s sloughed skin: the carefully folded and stored bundle of clothes. The ghoul measured its arm against that of the suit jacket and grimaced at how much shorter the sleeve was than the distance from its shoulder to its wrist. Still, there was a solution to that. Holding all the stolen goods in its arms, it moved onwards in a stooped lope, up the sloping path until the rock turned to clay and compacted soil. The tunnel stopped abruptly in a convex wall of cut stone, each block about the size of a loaf. With no hesitation, the ghoul drew the stopper from the little tube of elixir and gulped it down. Now, working quickly, it removed the stones and stacked them carefully on the tunnel floor until there was a gap large enough for it to manoeuvre its scrawny frame through, and take the stolen things with it.
The village was asleep, its occupants deep in sleep, though few sank deep enough to visit the lands from which the ghoul had so recently departed. There was nobody around to see the long-fingered hand, tipped with gore- stained talons, rise from the shadows of the well on the village green, and grasp the edge, or to witness the grey, hideous form that rose up after it. The ghoul looked cautiously around before jumping soundlessly into the moon shadow of the quaint little roof that stood over the well shaft. Behind it, the water bucket swung slightly where its shoulder had touched it. Possessed of a surprisingly tidy mind for a grave-robbing cannibal, the ghoul reached out and stopped it. It had already given orders that the stones in the well wall some thirty feet down the shaft would be replaced before morning, and was in no doubt that it would be obeyed. It was important that no trace was left of this journey.
Across the green, the only light in any building burned in the windows of The Old House at Home. No doubt Parkin had interrupted his evening patrol for a quick half of bitter about two hours ago, and was now on one of its many successors. The ghoul’s long ears flicked back and forth as it listened to the police sergeant, and anyone else in no hurry to go home, quietly talking. Nobody was saying their goodbyes. Excellent: nobody was likely to exit the pub and see a lean dark form dash from the cover of the well, across the green and down the road.
The ghoul could feel the elixir working. The flaring colours of its dark-penetrating sight were becoming attenuated; it no longer loped but was starting to walk more upright; its skin was becoming lighter and more human in texture. Unexpectedly, it was also growing weaker. Humans had not a fraction of the strength of a ghoul, but as its ghoulish strength left it, it seemed to drain deep into the human strength that lay beneath it too. Soon the ghoul’s indefatigable trot became a walk, then a slouch, and finally a stagger. It paused at a rock by the path, having left the road a mile or so before, and sat heavily upon it. It looked at its limbs, at their increased girth, their shortened length, and found them disgusting. At least the clothes would fit now.
Dressed, although not a sartorial triumph in any sense, the ghoul lifted Cabal’s bag and discovered it to be far heavier than it remembered. It ran its hand – it could no longer really be called a ‘paw’ – over its head and was gratified to discover hair growing there, so quickly that it could almost feel it doing so, driving out of his scalp like clay extruded from a nozzle. Belatedly, it realised that the sheer speed of the transformation was also the reason for the overwhelming weakness. It was too fast for his body to bear. If it didn’t stop soon, it might kill him.
He dared not abandon his bag, and half carried it, half dragged it for the next mile until at last he saw the house. It looked cold and forbidding in the moonlight, but it was his salvation, and he must reach it if the long plan he had mapped out was to see fruition. It was another quarter of an hour before he finally reached the garden gate and slumped down by it, mortally tired. He tested his face: the muzzle had gone and his skin felt like human skin, just as it had before his transformation, just as it had before he had been forced to trick himself.
Cause and effect were never certain things in the Dreamlands, and what was objective there was subjective here. Time and place shifted in chaotic patterns between the two realms and it had always astonished him that the ghouls, free travellers that they were, had never taken advantage of it. Now he had come within a hair’s breadth of assuming full ghoulhood, he understood very well. The ghouls simply didn’t care, any more than a rat on a warship or a spider in a clock might care about the greater possibilities of its environment. He, however, had realised how this could save him. He wasn’t sure at what point he
Cabal sat by the wall of his house and remembered how he had realised the truth of it from the depths of despair when the ghoul leader had stolen the elixir from him for no apparent reason. He had known what he must do, and he had done it with precision: the ‘attack’ on the house in Arkham, making contact with the witch of Hlanith, and being there to hint to himself about the sinew-wood construct in the nameless city. He had known where he would descend into the crevasse in Mormo, and had marshalled his ghouls to harvest several thousand dead heads of hair to ensure he had a soft fall when the rope broke, as it always had and it always would.
He had not enjoyed deceiving himself into making the elixir, but it had been necessary and, after all, he had done the same to himself when he was at that point in the loop-the-loop of events. All these things had happened before and were already happening again, albeit in the subjective past. They were foretold and already lived, and it was to Cabal’s advantage that they remained so. Once he had left the loop, however, Fate arose from her figurative armchair, stubbed out her figurative cigarette, put down her figurative newspaper, and started to take an interest in him again. Now he no longer knew the future, as was borne out by the evidence of him sitting by his garden gate, slowly dying.
In the silver light, tiny faces peered under the gate at him. Bound into the limits of the garden by magic Cabal had used to contain them where he could keep an eye on them, the garden folk watched and speculated.
‘It’s Johannes Cabal! Johannes Cabal!’ they cried, in tinkling high voices like the sound of fairy bells.
‘He smells like a dead dog,’ said one.
‘He looks very ill,’ said another. Then, in a slightly calculating tone, ‘And weak.’
There was some excited muttering. Then they chorused, ‘Come into the garden, Johannes Cabal! We will help you to the door! We will help you in! We are your little friends!’
‘And we won’t eat you. Honest,’ said a voice belonging to one of the less human-savvy Fey. There was angry shushing and the sound of a tiny Fey creature being punched.
Cabal had not needed the hint. The garden folk were capricious at the best of times, but at least they respected and feared his powers. Currently, though, he knew he couldn’t intimidate a skittish kitten. He also knew that unless he got to his laboratory and made a simple counteragent to slow the elixir’s effects to a bearable level, he might not live much longer. He had no choice, but to attempt to bluff the garden folk into believing he was not as ill as he was.
