Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute - Jonathan Howard

Hlanith, however, was no disappointment on first sight. The land around it was low and marshy, but approached from many directions by causeways both natural and artificial. These converged on a great sloping plateau no more than a few dozen yards higher than the surrounding marshland, a plateau that sloped gently down towards its seaward side. The granite walls that ran around the town proper were almost unnecessary to the defences – the approaches could be made very difficult to any enemy – but it seemed that the town architects had felt that walls were necessary, so there they were.

Their wagon clattered up an artificial causeway whose length was broken here and there by bridges to let the highest tides wash in and out of the marshes unimpeded. The illusion of reality was remarkable, Cabal admitted to himself. The sea breeze blew in and brought the smell of brine with it. Gulls, identical to the birds of Earth, as far as he could see, wheeled and cried over the hummocks of harsh sea grass growing across what seemed to be the estuary of a great river that had disappeared. He watched as a gull flipped a fish out of a shallow pool where it had been stranded, immediately starting a fierce squabble among the rest of the opportunistic flock.

The wagon paused briefly at a guard post close to the end of the causeway. The guards’ questions and search were so cursory and disinterested that it seemed Hlanith had little need of any defences at the moment, natural or artificial. The wagon was directed onwards across the drawbridge and under the portcullis of a small keep that was built across the full width of the causeway – an artefact from a less settled time and a precaution against a dangerous future – and ten minutes or so later, they were clambering down and thanking the wagon driver outside a gate in the town wall. He, for his part, surprised them by refusing to take payment, and wished them a pleasant stay in the city before parting from them.

The guards on the gate were only fractionally more interested in Cabal’s party than the ones on the causeway had been, but only as far as discovering that they were new to the Dreamlands. They asked if they had come via the Enchanted Wood, and Cabal lied, and said that they had. He suspected that if the guards heard that their route had taken them through the far more dangerous Dark Wood, then there would be more questions, starting with ‘So, why aren’t you all dead?’

Once the guards’ initial prejudices that they were dealing with a bunch of tourists was confirmed, the expedition was allowed into the city proper. None of them were quite sure what they had expected Hlanith to look like, and this was as well for every expectation would have been beggared. The town was medieval in flavour, yet peculiar in execution. There was something very Scandinavian about the tall, peaked roofs, yet the crossbeams and plaster seemed more Tudor, and the mixture of thatching on some buildings, while their immediate and otherwise identical neighbours were tiled in the Mediterranean style, just seemed wilfully contrary. Bose looked around with hands on his hips, every inch the gormless tourist. ‘Well I never,’ he kept saying, which was both true and redundant.

‘Well, Herr Cabal,’ said Shadrach. ‘How do we proceed from here?’

‘We search, and we research. Herr Corde, you strike me as a man who would be at home gathering intelligence in a tavern. I would suggest you find somewhere busy and not too disreputable and start there. Herr Bose, there must be some form of library or university here. In your persona as a magistrate, you may be able to gain access to an archive that we cannot. Learn what you can, or at least gather lines of investigation that may prove fruitful. Herr Shadrach, Hlanith is primarily a trading centre and the mercantile guilds will surely be strong. Merchant ships criss-cross the world from here and may have brought back some useful data for us. I would suggest you make the acquaintance of the local merchant princes and discover what you can. We should all make our own arrangements for somewhere to sleep, then meet on the morrow.’

This seemed like a sensible use of their time, and none had any problems with it, beyond an understandable lack of confidence as to how well they might get on with the locals. This was quashed by a heavy implication from Cabal that they were subject to the influence of the Phobic Animus and so were behaving like – and this is not the exact phrase he used, but certainly gives a sense of it – a ‘big bunch of jessies’.

‘And what will you be doing all this while, Cabal?’ asked Shadrach, as he doled out coins to the others, mostly to Corde, who reckoned he might have to get in a few rounds of drinks, a duty he seemed very happy to be taking on.

Cabal did not answer immediately, but looked down the long avenue at whose head they stood to the defensive wall that would seal off the docks in case of seaward invasion, and beyond to the oaken wharves and ships, and still further to the great blue-grey Cerenarian Sea. ‘There are other questions to be asked, and other sources to be questioned,’ he said distractedly. Then, drawing himself back to the present, he added, ‘We will meet here at midday tomorrow to exchange what we have discovered and to decide what to do next. Are we agreed?’

And so they parted.

Cabal did not make enquiries: experience had given him instinct. He simply followed his whims until they brought him, as they always did, to the graveyard. In this particular case ‘graveyard’ was a poor sort of term for a true necropolis, a labyrinth of lanes and alleyways bordered by tombs like stone huts, opening out into fields of grave markers, and squares where the municipal buildings were great mausolea and temples to the departed souls. It might seem strange that there was death within sleep, but the truth of it was that the Dreamlands were as real as anywhere else, at least while you were within them. Judging from this town of the dead that nestled within a city of the living, many would never leave.

Cabal had entered the necropolis at its western gate, and walked until he found himself at its heart, a great circus – in the ‘metropolitan’ rather than ‘three-ring’ sense – of white gravel encompassed by great curving kerbs of stone tall enough to sit upon, which Cabal did. The kerbs were periodically broken by the beginnings of avenues that radiated outwards to every corner of the enormous area. Cabal watched a funeral enter the circus and depart down one of the avenues, a long column of figures in all encompassing black veils fore and aft, with a much smaller group of soberly dressed men and women following an open hearse drawn by six black horses. These latter people were dignified rather than mournful, unlike the veiled figures that sobbed and wailed and struck postures of extravagant spiritual distress. Cabal waited until the funeral had largely processed on to the avenue before getting to his feet and walking after it.

He caught up with the rearguard professional mourner and coughed until he gained its attention. ‘Excuse me, madam,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if you could perhaps help me?’

‘You can start by calling me “sir”,’ said a bass voice from within the veil.

‘Yes, quite. My mistake,’ said Cabal, after the shortest of pauses. ‘I was thinking that in your profession you must have a good knowledge of the layout of this necropolis and—’

‘Look, squire, I’m working,’ interrupted the mourner, continuing to strike attitudes of mortal grief. ‘The punters have forked out for forty mourners, not thirty-nine. If you want to talk, keep up and look mournful, savvy?’

‘I don’t have to be extravagant about it, do I?’ Cabal was watching the others, who looked like nothing so much as a dance troupe extemporising on the theme of electrocution.

‘You couldn’t if you wanted to. Takes years of practice and three guild examinations to get to this standard. No, just look as if you gave a bugger about the departed and follow along.’

Cabal doubted he was a good enough actor to manage that, but he had spent his whole life polishing sombreness to a dignified mahogany glow that looked much the same to the unpractised eye. Thus, he followed at a steady funereal pace, and that did very nicely.

‘So, what did you want to know, mate?’ said the mourner, when he was satisfied that Cabal’s presence was an asset to the procession.

‘I was wondering if you could direct me to the oldest part of the necropolis.’

The mourner almost stumbled in mid-mimed declamation. ‘You want to go where? What for?’ he said, in open astonishment. ‘That’s the bad place.’

‘It is also the interesting place and, for me, the necessary place.’

‘No, seriously, chum, you don’t want to go there. There’s ghouls up there. The gardeners only go once a month and even then under armed guard. You’re looking to get chewed if you go up there.’

‘I’m not afraid of ghouls,’ said Cabal. ‘In fact, I might even learn something of interest from them. They are not my current concern, however. Does anyone live there? Any soothsayers? Oracles? Anybody like that?’ He had the impression that the mourner was looking oddly at him.

‘How’d you know?’

‘It is a principle of the Dreamlands that themes of folklore are followed, even if they are altered or corrupted. Oracles and soothsayers are associated with shunned places. Therefore it seemed rational to seek out such a place. Given the predilection of ghouls to populate old graveyards and cemeteries in both worlds, I guessed their quarter would represent such a shunned place.’ The impression of being oddly looked at had not diminished, although its timbre had changed. ‘Well, you did ask,’ said Cabal, perhaps a little tetchily.

The mourner looked at him a moment longer, then started striking attitudes once more, albeit at an accelerated pace to catch up with the procession. When they were back in place, he said, ‘There’s supposed to be a witch.’

‘A witch,’ Cabal repeated. He shrugged. ‘Good enough. When you say witch, do you mean the sort with a cauldron and potions, or just a mad old lady who feeds stray cats?’

‘How should I know? Never been up there. But there is supposed to be a witch.’

A witch, then, would have to do. Cabal took leave of his short career as an amateur mourner with directions to the purportedly doom-haunted old cemetery in the north-eastern quadrant of the necropolis, and set off at a swift stride. Finding the right place had taken longer than he had anticipated and the sun was already low in the sky. While he truly did not fear the ghouls, he equally truly had a rational concern about being near one of their warrens after sunset. Between threats and a large Webley, he could keep a horde of them back for hours, but threats and a less immediate engine of extermination such as his sword offered no such certainty.

A decision to forgo the directions in an attempt to cut corners turned out to be unwise, and he wasted still more time while he backtracked first to where he had made the rash decision, and then to the circus. The shadows were long indeed by the time Cabal finally arrived at the old cemetery, where ghouls reputedly cavorted and a witch made her home.

The city of Hlanith had stood in the Dreamlands for as long as men have dreamed, and they have been dreaming for a very, very long time. It was a different place then, of course; crude and barbaric as those who dreamed it were crude and barbaric, but even from the first, it had known death. The necropolis was just a plot of land, then, in which the dead were interred with a few grave goods, their resting places marked with sticks and rocks and bones. Over time, the sticks and bones were discarded as too ephemeral in the former case, and too attractive to the local scavenging dogs in the latter. This left the stones, which grew larger, eventually sporting inscriptions of differing measures of accuracy, sincerity and spelling. These levels of increasing sophistication had travelled out, like ripples, from this original site until the differences became aesthetic and modish rather than fundamental. Seen from on high, however, the original burial ground still stood out like a black wart on a grey face. It had been shunned when it was first marked out, and it was shunned ground now, ancient, primal, dangerous.

There had been sundry ill-omened attempts to rehabilitate the area down the centuries. Every few generations, somebody would take it into their head that the ideal place for their inhumation or that of a respected family member, friend or client would be the oldest part of the necropolis. The builders would enter cautiously at dawn, and stampede out at dusk, spending the meantime erecting whatever tomb or crypt or mausoleum had seemed like such a good idea in the architect’s office. After the things were built, and occupied, they were rarely visited again when it had become plain that, rather than civilising the atavistic nature of the place, the new structures might as well have been built in a war zone. So, abandoned if still remembered, these tombs, crypts and mausolea stood around like gentry who had inadvertently wandered into a rough pub, and there they grew grubbier as the years passed.

Johannes Cabal stood at the edge of the old cemetery and paused to take in the ambience of the place. The last shunned burial ground he had been in had been more than two years before, an unusually long period between shunned burial grounds in his working life. That one had been beautiful in its way, misty and artful in its slow, entropic descent into ruin. It had also borne an air of waiting for death, of hungering for new inmates, of taking the role of a great pointing skeletal hand in a misty, artful memento mori. It had not been a pleasant place to dawdle for reasons beyond its aesthetics, but it had never felt especially malign.

This old cemetery, on the other hand, reeked of malevolence. There were no true paths through it; nor had there ever been. Just jumble and tumble, weeds and briars, markers and ancient bones, some belonging to local scavenger dogs who had allowed their hunger to override their sense that the nature of this land was changing. The newer structures stood sloped and grimy, overwhelmed and embarrassed by their incongruity in this place of primordial death. Some had already collapsed, and from where he stood Cabal could see a smashed marble sarcophagus on its side amid the ruin of the tomb once built to hold it. The sarcophagus was empty, which did not surprise him. In this place, it had probably been emptied within a day of the funeral ceremony. To the ghouls, these structures were not hallowed resting places: they were larders.

Cabal loosened his sword in its scabbard and walked slowly forward. He wished he had a canteen of water with him: he was probably going to be speaking ghoulish soon and it always played havoc with his larynx. Some water to moisten his vocal cords would have been very helpful. He took up station upon a mound, under which lay the mouldering bones of a tribal shaman, and waited as the shadows flowed like ghost blood and the darkness grew deep.

He was not sure when he first became aware of the eyes that watched him. They did not blink, nor did they move, but they watched him with unwavering intent as their faint phosphorescent glow, an unhealthy greenish yellow, slowly made them stand out from the growing gloom. While there was still light in the sky, he knew they would be too cautious to attack, so he decided that now would be a good time to start his entreaty to them.