Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute - Jonathan Howard

Having placed an abeyant death sentence on Corde’s head, he turned his attention to Bose, who, for his part, looked vapid and without a shred of malice or machinatory instinct about him, a soft toy in the great department store of life. In short, just the same as he always did. He seemed to bimble around the Dreamlands like somebody at a museum exhibit of how frightful foreigners are. He would look, and gasp, and be appalled, then go home, have a boiled egg for tea and be utterly untouched by what he had seen in any lasting sense.

Inevitably, Cabal wondered if he, too, was changing in appearance. If the mechanism was one of altered perceptions, then it was unlikely; he was as sure as he could reasonably be that he was of the same mind and worldview as he had been the day that the Fear Institute had first come to call. It’s difficult to be objective about the subjective, but Cabal maintained assorted mental checks and balances to confirm that he was reasonably sure his mentality remained recognisable, and that he had not gone inconveniently mad. As Descartes would have been quick to tell him, his perceptions could not necessarily be trusted, but – then again – if he was so mad that he didn’t realise he was utterly mad, it was academic anyway. He would have failed in his life, and that was that. He could just get on with learning to enjoy institutional food and the sure knowledge that electricity makes your eyes go black.

Still, things were progressing, at least. They had a faint idea where to go next, to speak with someone else who was probably dead, who might not be able to help them whether he breathed or not, and who might be able to direct them to somewhere that might or might not hold the Phobic Animus, but which was ludicrously dangerous in either case. Cabal had a sense that the whole expedition had long since taken on the character of certain doom, but was dooming them all so very, very slowly that it was difficult to get upset about it. It was like travelling by glacier to be hanged.

True, they had also lost two men, but neither had been him, so that was of limited concern.

Surviving fragments of Cyril W. Clome’s manuscript for The Young Person’s Guide to Cthulhu and His Friends: No. 3 Azathoth, the Demon Sultan

Azathoth is as huge as anything (except Yog-Sothoth, who is as huge as everything), but do you know, O best beloved, he’s as mindless as . . . Well, there’s the thing. Nothing is as mindless as Azathoth (who is sometimes called the ‘Demon Sultan’, although never to his face, but then he doesn’t have a face). Think of the most stupid thing you can. A flatworm? No, that’s cleverer than Azathoth. A rock? No, that’s still brighter than he. A Member of Parliament? Shocking as it may seem, O best beloved, far more obtuse even than that. Azathoth is so cosmically stupid that he saps the intelligence from those who see him, big old chaos beyond angled space that he is. Why, if you were to take the biggest fool in the world to see him, the fool’s wits would still steam out of his ears. And if you took the thousand cleverest people in the world, their minds would spill into the void, like water from overturned goblets, but all their cleverness would not even dampen the burning void of Azathoth’s mindlessness. Still, it’s fun to try.

Chapter 11

IN WHICH IT TRANSPIRES THAT DYLATH-LEEN IS NOT VERY NICE

Captain Lochery was at sea, it transpired, and they therefore had to make alternative arrangements to go westwards from Baharna. This was how they came to be sharing a table with two merchants swathed in heavy black robes that left only their faces exposed, an unfortunate oversight in Cabal’s opinion. The merchants smiled and chuckled and smirked and giggled and rubbed their heavily bejewelled gloved hands and tittered and were so transparently evil that he spent much of the time watching his colleagues for the moment when the penny must surely drop. After almost an hour of oleaginous dickering, Shadrach and the others were all set to buy passage aboard the merchants’ black galley. Wearily Cabal realised that he would have to save the day again. Luckily, he could do it by being monumentally rude.

‘So, gentlemen,’ he said to the merchants, ‘you undertake to transport we four to Dylath-Leen in safety and comfort. That is the deal, yes?’

‘Yes, O most perspicacious one,’ said one of the merchants – it barely mattered which – smiling and nodding and smiling some more.

‘Really, Mr Cabal,’ said Shadrach sharply, ‘you haven’t said a word in an age, and now you wish to be involved in the negotiation. I have the matter well in hand, I assure you.’

‘Oh,’ said Cabal, chastened. ‘My apologies, Herr Shadrach. Forgive my interruption. Please, carry on . . .’ he leaned back in his chair and then added, quietly but clearly ‘. . . selling us into slavery.’

‘What?’ said Corde. He looked at Cabal in surprise, then swung his gaze to the merchants, his expression hardening. He did not much care for Cabal’s company, but he knew his instincts to be good.

‘These creatures before you, and I say “creatures” advisedly, mean to capture us all and use us as slaves. At the conclusion of your discussion they will call for wine to celebrate the agreement. The wine will, of course, contain enough soporifics to stun a shoggoth. The intention is that, when we wake, we shall find ourselves aboard the fetid black galley, which – incidentally – is safe and comfortable only for these . . . people. Finally, we shall be dumped upon the Moon. Yes!’ (He said it quickly to overrule Shadrach’s dismissive ‘Oh!’) ‘The Moon is a viable environment in the Dreamlands, and it is inhabited by these . . . people’s employers, who are white and toad-like and hideous. They get through slaves quite rapidly, by a dual process of attrition and peckishness, hence a steady demand for replacements. It says little for the acuity of the Dreamlands’ citizens that the merchants of the black galleys have been plying this trade for millennia, using precisely the feeble technique we see this evening, and people still fall for it.’

‘Is all lies,’ said one merchant, cheerfully.

‘We has deck quoits,’ said the other, happily.

‘No doubt you do,’ said Cabal, climbing to his feet, ‘and that is another excellent reason not to travel with you. Good night, gentlemen,’ he said to Shadrach, Bose and Corde. ‘I shall see you in the morning, when we shall look for a real captain who has a real chance of getting us to Dylath-Leen. If I do not see you, I shall assume you have decided to ignore my advice, have accepted the offer of these . . .’ he couldn’t bring himself to flatter them with people, given he knew full well that, beneath their robes, they were not even faintly human ‘. . . these things, and that you are bound for an interesting, if short and miserable, lunar experience.’ With that, he left.

On one side of the table Shadrach, Bose and Corde turned to regard the two merchants with manifest suspicion.

‘We has deck quoits,’ repeated the second merchant, blissfully, a sweetener that had always sealed the deal in the past.

‘We’ll try the docks tomorrow,’ said Corde to Shadrach, and left the table. Bose followed quickly, and a moment later, with some reluctance, Shadrach.

The two merchants sat smiling but nonplussed, looking around the room as if for an explanation as to why their infallible ruse had failed. After a few moments, two adventurers walked up to them, fine, swashbuckling types with chiselled jaws and declamatory voices.

‘Ho there, sirrah!’ cried one, putting a knee-booted foot upon one of the recently vacated stools and resting his forearm on the raised knee. ‘Rumour has it that if a couple of bullyboys like meself and me companion here –’

‘Ho-ho!’ boomed his barrel-chested companion, fists on hips.

‘– should seek passage to Dylath-Leen at the turn of the next tide, then you’re the swarthy coves we should be talking to!’ He grinned, and his teeth gleamed as brightly as the golden ring in his ear.

The merchants were only swarthy by dint of a layer of preservative upon the stolen faces they wore, faces that had once graced the skulls of two previous passengers. The chemical layer contracted over time, giving the faces a manic rictus that people simply interpreted as the open smile of an honest visage.

‘We has deck quoits,’ said the second merchant, gleefully, the only phrase in human speech it knew.

‘Done then!’ roared the first adventurer, confident that good voice projection and a waxed chest would see him through every predicament. He shook the hand of each merchant in turn, failing to notice that their arms each had two elbow joints. ‘Done, and double done! We sail with the morrow’s tide!’

‘Ho-ho!’ boomed his barrel-chested companion, all unaware that in a week he would be giant Moon toad food.

Next morning discovered Cabal and the others – they in a variety of moods from indifferent to disgruntled, he supremely unconcerned – negotiating passage aboard a weathered but serviceable caravel to Dylath-Leen. There was a clear advantage in travelling aboard the lean and rakish ship in that she would make significantly better time than a fat cog hybrid like Lochery’s Edge of Dusk, a coastal vessel pressed into sea-crossing journeys with a few alterations to hull and sheets that ranged from canny to optimistic. The captain of the Audaine, Wush Oleander, was short and fiery, and came with an unusual prosthetic, apparently an entry requirement for the job. In his case, it was a scrimshaw left hand, beautifully carved to show a tiny vignette of a screaming Captain Oleander dangling by the stump of his wrist from the jaws of a great sea serpent. Bose was particularly taken with it, and plied him with questions about the event, and whether Oleander was filled with an obsessive desire to pursue the sea serpent to the four corners of the Dreamlands, seeking vengeance, but Oleander just looked at him askance, and said, no, these things happened and you just had to accept them. Bose nodded sagely, digesting this shimmering truth, then asked about meals.

After passage to Dylath-Leen had been agreed, and their few belongings secured, Cabal and Corde stood by the rail as the ship made ready to depart on the running tide. They had little to say to one another, and instead watched the docks and the other ships departing the Oriab Island. One was a large black galley that slid by, its ranks of oars working strongly, silently, and with inhuman synchronisation. On deck, two merchants, swathed in black, played quoits. As a breeze blew toward the Audaine, it seemed to carry a scrap of sound with it, a voice raised in righteous indignation, apparently somewhere below.

Corde frowned as he listened intently, then said to Cabal, ‘Did somebody just shout, “Release us at once, you varlets!”?’

Cabal watched the black galley glide by and out past the harbour mole, a great breakwater of natural and worked stone. ‘No,’ he said, and went below.

The journey back across the sea was largely uneventful. They happened upon the sunken city again and, as before, the crew became anxious and hastened to clear it as quickly as they could. This time, however, they crossed it at dusk, and during the night the ship was paced by something that never came closer than a hundred yards off the starboard beam, churning the sea into a phosphorescent glow as it went. Captain Oleander stood by the wheelsman for five long hours, quietly warning him to hold his heading and to change course neither closer nor further away from their submarine shadow. Eventually, whatever it was dived deep, leaving the surface to the waves and the white horses, and the Audaine as she sped away from those unhallowed waters. Oleander stayed watching until the sky started to lighten in the east, and only then did he go to his bunk.

Cabal had little interest in such things: he was entirely of Captain Lochery’s liver here. If a sea monster attacked the ship, there would be some screaming, men falling off rigging and the other usual accoutrements of such an attack, and then they would all die and that would be that. As he would have no say in the outcome, he failed to see any reason why he should spend time fussing about it. Besides, he had a much more immediate and more intriguing happenstance upon which to apply his intellect.

He had been waiting for Ercusides to die again, but Ercusides hadn’t, and Cabal found this perplexing in the extreme. The agent he had used to bring some sort of life back to the slightly crumpled skull had been a long shot, and he had been pleasantly surprised when it had not only worked but worked magnificently. From past experience, the best he had been hoping for was a few sepulchral sentences from Beyond the Veil, yet instead Ercusides had been loquacious to the point of actually being rather exasperating. His personality seemed to be much as it had been in life, which was unfortunate but there it was. Cabal had not even had to mutter the mandatory incantation to complete the ritual, indicating that perhaps in the Dreamlands ‘mandatory’ was not so terrifically mandatory.

Every day or so, he would open his Gladstone bag and be unsurprised, if increasingly perturbed, that cold ghost fire was still rolling off the skull and that the spirit of Ercusides was still there, still aggravatingly chatty.

‘Is that you, Cabal?’ the skull demanded, as Cabal took it out of his bag and placed it on the small table in the cramped cabin the four men shared. The others were up on deck at the moment, taking the air, and – by the bye – watching out for more sea monsters, although they would never admit that.

‘How did you know I had opened the bag?’ asked Cabal. ‘I was very quiet.’

‘I could feel the light on me,’ said Ercusides. ‘Do you think I might be getting my sight back?’

Cabal looked at the mummified eyelids over the empty sockets. ‘No,’ he said. He leaned back in his chair and regarded the flaming skull thoughtfully. ‘Whatever shall I do with you, Ercusides? Once upon a time I would have dropped you over the side and been done with you. That would have been the convenient thing to do, for me at least. These days I am minded that you are only talking now because of me, and that I am, in some tiresomely moral way, responsible for you. So,’ he leaned forward and rested his chin on his hands on the tabletop, regarding the skull, nose to gap-where-the-nose-used-to-be, ‘what am I to do with you?’

Ercusides was silent for a time, and then said, soberly and without resentment, as one learned man speaking to another, ‘Shall I ever know rest again?’

‘I do not know. You should have returned already, but the Dreamlands seemingly amplify my powers, and do so unsystematically. I could destroy your skull, but I strongly doubt it would do any good. The bone is only an anchor for the fire, and the fire is you. You would still be here, but in nowhere near as convenient a form. But tell me, you were an aesthete and a hermit in life. Is this new existence really so execrable to you?’