Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute - Jonathan Howard

The small column rode on, and on, and on.

One of Holk’s men turned out once to have been a restaurateur who – while under the influence of an experimental mixture of spices – had been murdered by a jealous sous-chef. The spices had included some unusual powders from the Orient, and as a result the restaurateur was sitting up blinking in the Enchanted Wood while, back in the waking world, the dirty deed was done. Divorced from his body and therefore a now permanent immigrant to the Dreamlands, he had briefly considered setting up a restaurant in Hlanith before realising that all he had ever really wanted to do in life was strap on a sword and do some serious swashbuckling. The swashbuckling had quickly deteriorated into roister-doistering, and thence to lying in gutters outside alehouses. Cirrhosis of the liver being unknown in the Dreamlands, this was a career path he had heartily enjoyed, right up to the moment when he had run out of money and had had to go back to full-time swashbuckling until he had made enough to be a drunk again.

This was all of very little interest to those around him, except for the detail about restaurants because he was a very decent chef. As a result, the evening meals were of surprising complexity, sensually challenging, and the uncontested highlight of every day. His pièce de résistance was the-thing-I-shot-with-my-crossbow-au-vin, which was universally praised on the second evening.

On the third evening, just as it was growing too dark to travel further, they crested a hill and saw, glittering beneath the light of the Dreamlands’ large and disquieting moon, the Lake of Yath stretching out before them. Perhaps four miles away, visible as a hulking mass of shattered rooftops and fallen columns showing pale, like bones in a giants’ graveyard, stood the unnamed city of legend and dread. Certainly Sergeant Holk regarded it with stony-faced stoicism, but his gaze moved constantly, looking for the shadows of nine-legged things scuttling around the archways and byways.

‘We should go back half a league,’ he said finally. ‘We don’t want them knowing we’re here. Getting most of this hill between us and them should hide us from them until dawn.’

Nobody argued. Even Cabal forwent the opportunity to make a snide comment about Holk’s bravery because, having seen what the slightest wound from a wamp could do, he knew that almost any precaution could be regarded as reasonable. So they turned their zebras and cantered back down the hillside to make camp near a stream, their fire masked from the hilltop by a copse of trees. They ate quietly that night, and the guard rota was arranged more carefully than previously.

When morning came, none were dead, or alive and mortally diseased, or alive and rotting, so they regarded their precautions as effective. They rose, performed their morning rituals, ate, organised their equipment with great thoroughness, and then struck camp. Foreboding hung upon them like a cloud as they rode back up the hill and down the far side.

Cabal had gone to great pains to discover everything that could be discovered about the mysterious nameless ruined city while the expedition was being prepared in Baharna, and had raided every library and archive he could find, including several that were not open to the public. The collected intelligence thus uncovered agreed on three main points:

The city was in ruins.

The city’s name was unknown.

The city was a tad mysterious.

As far as could be ascertained, the city had once been a great conurbation, renowned far and wide for the strength of its commerce, the creativity of its artists, the skill of its artisans and the depths of its depravities. In its hubris, however, its collective wisdom had been insufficient to stop it angering something or somebody.

Probably a god.

Probably Nyarlothotep.

Cabal had paused when he saw this, closed his eyes for a long moment, breathed heavily, then returned to his reading.

The somebody or something had sent a monster or, if it really had been Nyarlothotep, assumed the form of one of his larger and more antagonistic avatars. Beneath a red and gibbous moon, doom had crawled from the lake and crept through the city, entering every home and every hostel, every bed and every cradle. By dawn, the city was dead and empty, with not a person or animal left in the place. A merchant caravan that had left the day before and had returned after a night of vile portents was the first to discover the horror.

It was not the first time such a fate had befallen a city in the Dreamlands – Cabal noted that the tale was very similar to the infamous fate of Sarnath – but this event seemed to predate even that. The lesson seemed to be twofold: do not anger the gods, but if you must, at least make sure your city isn’t next to a lake, as that’s just asking for trouble.

The lake looked, if anything, more forbidding than it had the previous evening. The sun was barely above the horizon, so was too low to cast its light directly upon the waves that jagged across the surface to lap at the banks. It left the waters themselves dark and unknowable, doing little for the approaching men’s mood. The Lake of Yath was huge, only the distant hills and mountains giving any indication that it was not a sea, and its depths could only be guessed at.

‘The hermit moved here only about three years ago,’ said Corde, repeating a briefing he had already given before they had left Baharna and again the previous night as they ate. ‘He is believed to reside in a temple on a hilltop in the most regal canton. Presumably some aspect of the temple, its construction or perhaps its significance, keeps creatures like the wamps at bay. That would be useful to discover straight away, as it would give us a secure camp overnight. Failing that, we must be out and clear of the city by dusk.’ He looked at Holk, the image of exposed ribs covered only with scarred pink skin evidently large in his mind. ‘That is imperative, for all our sakes.’

The city walls were still standing in long stretches, but breaches were common and large. They found a tumbled gatehouse with the remains of a tariff-taker’s house outside and hitched their zebras’ reins to a dead tamarind tree that grew by the ruin. Then, heavy with misgivings, they picked their way over the rubble and entered the nameless city.

Cabal had wandered around a few ruined villages and towns in his time, but this was the first city he had entered that still looked anything like a city. Nature reclaims quickly, especially when there is sufficient water to support significant plant growth. Oriab was a temperate island, with no shortage of fresh water, yet the city seemed in remarkably good condition. Scrubby grass grew in patches by the roadsides, ivy tangled the statues, bushes grew at cornices, and some buildings even had trees thrusting up through shattered walls, but it all seemed very mannered and controlled to Cabal’s eye, as if it were the work of an artist portraying an abandoned city rather than the natural actions of time.

‘Sergeant,’ Cabal addressed Holk. He spoke quietly: the city pressed tightly upon the nerves and there was a sense that speaking loudly or even normally might somehow awaken the place. ‘How long ago was this city abandoned?’

Holk did not answer for a moment as he adjusted the buckler strapped to his left forearm. ‘Centuries ago, Master Cabal. Perhaps millennia.’ He drew his sword – his men already had theirs in hand – and scanned the rooftops for movement.

‘Impossible,’ Cabal said. He turned to Shadrach, Bose and Corde. ‘This place would be a forest in less than two hundred years.’

‘On Earth, Cabal,’ said Corde.

‘Yes,’ admitted Cabal. The way this place failed to behave scientifically never ceased to irritate him. ‘On Earth.’

The city clustered up the hillside above the lake. On their approach, they had seen the remains of the docks and the simple housing that huddled near them. It seemed likely that the ‘most regal canton’, in Shadrach’s phrase, would be at the top of the hill, and this area they therefore headed towards as quickly as they dared. They discovered a great city square and followed a broad road that led straight up the hill from there. Holk made a point of keeping the party in the middle of the road: if there had been any risk of coming under arrow or quarrel fire, he would have used cover, but as the primary concern was wamps, some dead ground between them and any potential ambush places could give them vital seconds. At least they had light: there was barely a cloud in the sky, and the sun made the pale volcanic stone of the buildings gleam.

They had been on the road for only a minute or two when Cabal saw the skull. He signalled the sergeant to form a perimeter while he examined it.

‘It’s a city of the dead,’ muttered Corde. ‘A skull is hardly a surprise.’

‘You forget the story, Herr Corde,’ said Cabal, not paying him much attention as he crouched by the skull and examined it cautiously. ‘Whatever happened to the citizens of this place ultimately, the point is that they all vanished from the city beforehand. Besides, this skull is evidently not human.’ He pushed it over with the tip of a stick and examined the jaw. ‘It is similar to a bat skull, but obviously much larger. The orbits are atrophied. This creature had no eyes.’

‘A wamp!’ gasped Bose.

‘Well, of course it’s a wamp. Why do you think I’m not touching it directly? What intrigues me is how it died. The skull is broken.’

‘It’s how they breed,’ said Holk. ‘They can burst out of the skull of anything that’s dead in an abandoned place like this. If the skull’s big enough to house a new wamp – and a human skull works fine – they just grow in there and smash their way out when they’re ripe. They can grow in adult wamp skulls, too. They’re not fussy.’

‘They lay eggs in skulls? I’m confused,’ said Shadrach. ‘How exactly do they reproduce?’

‘They don’t,’ said Cabal. ‘Spontaneous generation. It doesn’t happen on Earth but, as has been made apparent to me on many occasions so far, this is not Earth. An abandoned place of foul repute and a large corpse. That’s all you need for a wamp infestation. However,’ he tapped the broken side of the skull with the stick, ‘this skull has not been burst from the inside. It has been smashed from the outside. Nor is the damage directly over the brainpan. The fact that there is no skeleton or bones around is also significant. This wamp was killed with great violence, and the skull damaged in such a way as to prevent a new wamp forming in it.’ He straightened up and looked around, throwing the potentially contaminated stick into an overgrown garden as he did so. ‘We must consider the possibility that wamps are not the main threat here. There may be something or things here that efficiently hunt wamps and that are, in all likelihood, not going to want to be our friends.’

Three hundred yards further up the hill they found a more complete skeleton, albeit one that somebody had played ‘She loves me, she loves me not’ with. Cabal stood by one of the skeletonised legs while the others located others, around the roadsides. None was closer than three yards to its nearest neighbour. ‘These limbs were torn off and thrown away when they still had flesh upon them,’ said Cabal. ‘See? The bones lie close to one another as they did in life.’ He walked over to the torso and skull in the middle of the avenue. The skull had been crushed in the same way as the previous example. ‘This creature was torn limb from limb while it was alive. So, we can conclude that whatever killed it was very powerful physically, and entirely undaunted by the diseases wamps carry.’

He looked up the hill and then back in the direction they had come. ‘Interesting.’

‘Interesting?’ said Bose. ‘Mr Cabal, I must admit that I have been in a state of trepidation verging on fear ever since the matter of these wamp creatures was first raised. Now you tell us that this city contains something that preys upon them – that preys on monsters – and you characterise it as “interesting”?’

‘You seem pale, Herr Bose. Something you ate, perhaps?’

‘There was nothing wrong with that Hasenpfeffer,’ said their resident cook, from his position on the perimeter.

‘Hasenpfeffer?’ said Cabal. ‘I’m very familiar with that dish, but it’s a rabbit stew. I haven’t seen any rabbits, just those furred creatures like wingless turkeys . . . Oh.’ He considered for a moment. ‘They were delicious.’ He turned his attention back to Bose. ‘My apologies, I interrupted your panicking.’

‘I am not panicking!’ shouted Bose.

Somewhere off to the east, there was the sound of collapsing masonry.

‘No rubble’s fallen since we arrived,’ said Holk, tersely.

‘The stuff must fall over occasionally,’ said Shadrach, the paragon of reason. ‘It is a ruined city, after all.’

‘It may be a coincidence that it happened at the same moment Herr Bose gave away our position,’ said Cabal, picking up his bag and starting to walk up the hill at a quick pace, ‘but it may not be. It would be nothing more than a practical application of the rational caution that you are so quick to espouse if we were to start running. Now.’ He did so, the mercenaries – professionally attuned to danger as they were – joining him in a dogtrot.

Messrs Shadrach and Bose looked at one another in astonishment before looking to Corde, only to find him already well up the road, running also.

Then more rubble fell, to the east, but now it was closer. Shadrach and Bose decided that keeping their dignity came a poor second to keeping their limbs attached to their torsos, and set off after the others as quickly as their robes would allow.

The change from a stealthy progress through the totterdown city into a headlong charge did not reduce the tension that ran through them in the slightest. Headlong charges do not offer many opportunities to look back and, on the snatched glances they did take, they saw nothing but the empty houses and tenements, eyeless yet noble in their slow death. Of the wamps, they saw no living examples, but every alleyway and courtyard seemed to contain their skeletons, all torn, all smashed. The expedition saw them and their sense of growing threat intensified with every snapped bone. There were no longer any unexplained sounds to haunt them – or, at least, none that could be heard over the sound of eight men running – but this did not settle their nerves: if there is one thing more disquieting than an unexplained sound, it is a silence after an unexplained sound.

Around them, the city became steadily grander and more impressive as they passed fallen gateways that marked off the different areas. Each gate had been more massively built and heavily ornamented than the one before as they progressed from being simply markers to show where the scum lived, to actually restricting access to keep the scum out. Cabal ran by a basalt basilisk lying on its side at the end of a line of rubble where a gatepost had fallen, the basilisk’s beak open in challenge, but gagged with a growth of dandelions. On its head was a diadem of gold; one of the mercenaries paused by it, and made to lever it off with the tip of his sword, but Holk swore sharply at him, and the man ran onwards with only one regretful backward glance.