Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute - Jonathan Howard

‘Well, Captain Mart, he was a good man, he said to me, “You’re a sailor through and through and no leg-thieving seagaunts are going to take that away from you.” At least, that’s what he said later, ’cause I’d flaked out at the time from loss of blood. Anyway, he had a favour owed to him by a sorcerer in the city, and he took me to him – big tower at the northern end of the Spice Quarter, some dodgy evoker’s got it now, last I heard – and he comes up with this little beauty. See, dreff live in trees from the Sinew Wood, south-east of the Lake of Yath. The trees can move, but they got no brains. The dreff have brains – pretty good ones, considerin’ how little they are – but they can’t look after themselves. So, the dreff and the sinew trees are sort of . . .’ He looked for the word.

‘Symbiotes,’ supplied Cabal, intrigued by the insight into an alien ecology.

‘Pals,’ continued Lochery. ‘Now, this sorcerer says dreff are clever and they know a good thing when they see it, which is a roundabout way of saying that they train up easy. Keep ’em fed and happy, and they’ll be your pals for life. This little fella in here, Checky, he knows that when I throw my hip forward, it’s walking time, and he makes the leg – finest sinew wood, this is – shift at knee and ankle. Fact is, that he just seems to know now, we been together so long.’

He fed the dreff the last of the sour bread before gently nudging its head back in and bunging the whole with a stopper perforated with air holes. ‘They live about ten years. Takes about six months for you to understand each other, and they go a bit mad a few weeks before they die, sleeping a lot, making the leg bend all ways, so you know it’s time to get to the Sinew Wood with a box trap and some sour bread. They love the stuff.’

He looked off into the middle distance, lost in the past. ‘But you know the worst part of all of this? Not my leg, no, there’s people suffer worse. No, I still think of Jecks, the poor sod. You know what?’

The rhetorical question was interrupted by Cabal rising. ‘He was never seen again. Goodnight, gentlemen. An early start tomorrow.’

Chapter 7

IN WHICH THE EXPEDITION EXPLORES A NAMELESS CITY OF EVIL REPUTE

‘Wamps,’ said the sergeant, as he checked the ties on his scabbard.

‘Wamps!’ replied Bose, hand held up.

‘Wamps,’ said Cabal, ‘are a species. Not a greeting.’

‘Oh,’ said Bose, unabashed. ‘They sound rather harmless, though, don’t they?’ He tested the name several times with different intonations, each implying wamps were cuddly, warm, docile and fun to have around the house.

Sergeant Holk, a man with his experience measured in scars and a hard, weather-beaten face, looked at Bose as a father might look at a child who wants a wolverine for Christmas, ideally one with rabies. ‘They’re bigger than a man. They have nine legs and heads like great bats with no eyes at all. They’re disease-ridden killers . . . Just a scratch from one can kill you, even if it takes a year of miserable, agonising sickness to do it.’

‘Do be quiet,’ said Corde. The sergeant’s predilection for gruesome hyperbole was proving counterproductive. It was Corde who had found him at one of the ill-regarded dives he was becoming quite adept at locating. The sergeant had agreed to tell them what was known of the empty and partially ruined city to the east in exact, non-folklorish terms for he had been there.

So far his advice had been very much of the ‘Don’t go there’ variety, of which the presence of wamps was the newest variant. Warming to his theme, the sergeant said, ‘Six years ago, I went in there with a platoon to raid the old library. Special commission, you see. We got the scrolls we went in for, but it was dusk by the time we were ready to move out. The wamps ambushed us. They’ve got a few brains, and they don’t fight like animals. They’re cunning, see? They can creep up walls and drop on you from above. That’s what happened to us. Thirty of us went in, only four of us got out.’

‘Without a scratch, I presume?’ said Cabal, drily.

The sergeant just laughed and pulled up the left side of his jerkin. Beneath, the flesh was not simply scarred but missing down to the ribs, which showed as slats beneath a thin covering of skin. His audience watched, fascinated, as the slats rose and fell with his breathing. ‘No, sir. Not without a scratch. Within half a day, that scratch was a mass of worms. The chirurgeon had no choice but to cut out all the tainted flesh before it spread. I cursed him. Gods, in my delirium, I cursed the eyeballs from his head. But he saved my life.’

Shadrach was caught in the flux between repulsion and fascination. ‘Worms? You mean maggots, surely?’

‘I mean worms. Filthy, fat things that swallowed strings of my flesh at one end and shat out pus at the other.’

‘But where did they come from?’

‘From the same place a worm that causes a toothache comes, Shadrach,’ said Cabal.

Shadrach looked sourly at Cabal. ‘Don’t talk nonsense, man. Worms don’t cause toothache. That’s an old wives’ tale.’

Cabal made a noise often heard from the parents of ungifted children just before explaining for the tenth time why it’s bad for Timmy to put Timmy’s arm in the big fire. ‘Herr Shadrach . . . this is a world in which old wives are authorities. How many times must I reiterate this, gentlemen? This is the Dreamlands, where theories of micro-organic infection carry far less weight than the realities of myth. In the waking world, one may profitably avoid plaque and gingivitis. Here, dental hygiene consists of avoiding the attention of tooth worms.’

The sergeant listened to this, nodding with approval. ‘Flossing helps,’ he added. ‘They hate that.’

‘It all sounds a bit dangerous,’ said Bose, quietly.

‘It all sounds remarkably dangerous,’ corrected Cabal. ‘We don’t even know if this marvellous hermit is still alive, or can help us if he is. Perhaps we should look elsewhere for data.’

Shadrach took a firm grip on the edges of his simarre and jutted out his jaw. ‘Mr Cabal. We have crossed a sea to find this man. If you had any caveats with this plan, the time to say so has long since passed. We are committed, sir! We are committed!’

‘Are we? Are we indeed?’ Cabal could feel an old and pleasant feeling stirring in his breast. He had shown great patience with these fools to date. He had not failed them or abandoned them. Neither had he murdered even a single one of them. Yet for all these kindnesses he had received no thanks, only whining and, now, undiluted stupidity. The delightful sensation he could feel was his temper slipping the leash.

‘Your argument is as specious as it is fallacious. I do not give a damn that we have crossed a sea to be here. By your logic, if one was to circumnavigate the globe before being given the option of jumping off a cliff or not jumping off a cliff, you would fling yourself off immediately because – oh, my goodness – you’ve gone all that way and it would be a shame not to do something memorably stupid at the end. Not memorable to you, of course: you’d be dead. But everyone for miles around will always remember the day the idiot from afar threw himself to his death because, well, it would have been a shame not to.’

‘Mr Cabal!’ Shadrach was scandalised.

Bose, meanwhile, had become very wide-eyed and was muttering, ‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen!’ under his breath, while Corde and the sergeant were smiling.

Shadrach was appalled that Cabal – a hireling, for heaven’s sake – should be so . . . ‘The impertinence, sir!’

‘Are you going to challenge me to a duel, Shadrach?’ Cabal drew back the edge of his jacket to show the hilt of his rapier. ‘I very much hope you are.’

Corde stirred himself enough to step between them. ‘That’s enough, gentlemen. I think Mr Cabal is simply giving vent to some inner issues.’

Cabal’s face tightened. ‘I am angry, Herr Corde,’ he said, in a severely calm tone. ‘Not flatulent.’

Corde ignored him. ‘But he makes a valid point. Rational caution, eh? Remember that? These ruins out by the lake are not safe, not even close to safe. I think we must still go there – pace, Herr Cabal – but we must take every precaution and learn all that we may. For example, Sergeant, you said the wamps only attacked you on the way out. Was that because darkness had fallen?’

The sergeant nodded. ‘Like I said, they don’t have eyes. They don’t see like we do. They can see in the dark, and they know we can’t. I can’t say if they hate the light, but I’m sure they love the dark.’

‘There, then.’ Corde held his hands wide in a supplicatory gesture. ‘We have the beginnings of a plan. Nobody has to go jumping off any cliffs.’ He considered momentarily asking Shadrach and Cabal to shake hands and make nice, but one look at their faces, Cabal’s particularly, dissuaded him immediately.

Cabal released the edge of his jacket to cover his sword’s hilt once more, and as it was apparent that this – a tacit agreement not to run Shadrach through right this minute – was the closest he would be offering in the way of an olive branch, it was duly accepted by all present, again tacitly.

‘So,’ he said, his narrowed eyes never leaving Shadrach, ‘of what does the rest of this plan consist?’

As it transpired, it was not nearly so much a plan as a list of things to be careful about. They would be careful about the wamps. They would be careful to get in and out during daylight. They would be careful never to split the party. They would be careful not to tickle any dragons, antagonise any ogres, irritate any trolls. They would also – and this was Cabal’s contribution to the plan – be careful to let somebody else go first.

Sergeant Holk was apparently used to the role of professional Judas goat and was easily able to lay hands upon a likely trio of bullyboys to traipse into danger in return for a decent reward. Shadrach was irked that he had to use more of his gold than he felt comfortable about to change what had first been envisaged as a relaxing stroll into a scenic set of ivyentwined ruins to seek the counsel of a wise old man, and had now taken the character of an armed assault upon a Hellmouth.

Certainly the logistics of the matter had stretched out over three interminable days while equipment and mounts were secured. That the mounts were zebras did nobody’s humour much good.

‘They look ridiculous,’ said Cabal, on the morning the expedition left Baharna from the Lava Gate in the eastern wall. He was standing by his zebra looking at it at least as caustically as it was looking at him. The irony that he himself was dressed entirely in black and white passed him by, his self-awareness not being of a high enough pitch to detect this resonance. The zebra, on the other hand, felt a nebulous sense of indignation that it would be ridden by another zebra, albeit an odd bipedal one with not much of a mane. This indignation would have manifested as kicking and biting among the zebra’s Earthly brethren, but the zebras of the Dreamlands are a breed apart, intellectual and dignified by their own lights, so it communicated its disdain with a basilisk stare accompanied by a monstrous and lengthy micturition, during which it did not even blink.

Holk’s three handpicked men – Cabal had watched him pick them out of the gutter outside an alehouse, and Holk had definitely used his hand to do it – were looking more presentable now that they’d had a chance to sober up and were wearing a uniform of sorts. Holk had found a reliable manufacturer of good cuir-bouilli armour and bought four suits in a striking shade of crimson. Corde, who had gone along on the shopping expedition, had bought himself one in grim sable, set with acid-blacked studs. He developed an inordinate attachment to it, and wore it with great frequency even while they were within the safety of the city. ‘I’m just wearing it in,’ he would say, but no one believed him. For his part, Cabal purchased a leather strap that he used to make a baldric for his Gladstone, allowing him to carry it slung across his body, and so leaving his hands free.

And so, on the morning of the fourth day, the expedition embarked upon its journey to the ruins by the Lake of Yath, with Holk and one of the mercenaries riding in the vanguard, the other two in the rearguard, and the four explorers in file in the middle, Corde to the front. Oriab Island was no small rock in the sea, and they knew it would take four or five days to reach the lake, even assuming easy going and no unwelcome adventures en route.

For his part Cabal bore it all with the same grim detachment that he had brought to the ocean journey. He was intrigued by so much in this world that he had little time for the small-talk of the others. He was interested in the way that distant places were not merely distorted by the haze of the air but – to his eye – seemed actually unfinished. There was nothing he could definitely give a name to, but there was a distinct sense that details clustered on these far vistas as they were approached, like coral accruing around a simple rock. He was surprised to find Bose, of all people, thinking along the same lines.

‘Well, they are the Dreamlands, I suppose,’ said Bose, swaying gently from side to side in time with his zebra’s gait. ‘And what we can’t see close to has no need of . . . I have no idea what to call it . . . this stuff of dreams, until it’s right there in front of you.’

‘I’m not sure that is how it works,’ said Cabal. He did not need to refer to his notes: he had reread them so many times by now that they were thoroughly ingrained in his always rapacious memory. ‘We are not dreaming the Dreamlands. Others dreamed them before us, and the superimposition of their dreams has given it permanency. One may dream of the Dreamlands, but the Dreamlands are not a dream.’

‘Yes,’ Bose conceded, ‘yes, that is very true. We, for example, are awake.’

We hope, thought Cabal, giving inner voice to the most recurrent of his concerns.

‘Well, whatever the metaphysics of it,’ said Bose, rising in his stirrups to look ahead, ‘it is beautiful here. Great men must have dreamed some very wonderful dreams to have wrought such a world.’

‘Perhaps,’ said Cabal, for this had raised another concern: a suspicion verging on a certainty that the majority of the creation here was not of human origin. He had not spoken again of what had happened in the Dark Wood, but it rarely left him. Nothing else of the same sort had happened since the dislocation in time and space, and the destruction of the spider-ant-baby things, and the others seemed to have forgotten about it. Cabal had not, any more than a man kneeling in prayer would forget if the clouds parted, God Almighty poked his head out, and demanded, ‘Yes? What is it?’

He had gained the attention of a god, and could not be sure that he had lost it, or would ever lose it. On a purely pragmatic level, if he had not called for the intervention of Nyarlothotep, they would doubtless all have died in the wood. He still wondered, however, if being prey to a spider-ant-baby thing was potentially preferable to whatever the infamously capricious god might visit upon him in return for the favour.