Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute - Jonathan Howard

It was a lot less pleasant than travel via a discorporated poet. Cabal had a momentary sense that he had turned to very fine sand, and that the sand was falling away from him. He especially resented it when his eyes flowed away from him like pollen in a breeze, but a moment later the rest of his skull followed and it subsequently became difficult to resent anything very much. He did wonder distantly if this was the nature of the change he had intuited, that he would spend the rest of eternity as a cloud of minutely powdered necromancer, wafting around the cosmos and unable to get very concerned about anything any more. He felt he should be concerned that he couldn’t be concerned, but he couldn’t be concerned enough to care, so he wasn’t. A Jovian perspective, to be sure, but one hard to become enthusiastic about if the job didn’t come with thunderbolts. But then he considered ‘enthusiasm’, and found his own memories of it drained of colour, dimensions and veracity, like a badly written strip cartoon in a cheap newspaper.

Falling apart had been so easy. Mildly disconcerting to begin with, but one got used to one’s molecules going their separate ways, and then the atoms within those molecules trailing off by themselves, and then the electrons and neutrons, and the strangeness and charm, and down ad infinitum in far less time than it takes to say ad infinitum.

Coming back together, on the other hand, hurt like blazes.

There was sun, and there was sand, and there was a screaming, burning man being reforged from the stuff of creation, and he was not enjoying it in the slightest. It would have been a boon if his nervous system had re-formed a little later in the process than it did, but that’s magic for you – even when it’s helpful, it finds a way to be surly with it. Thus his nerves were in place to tell him just how shatteringly painful it is to be glued back together from cosmic clay and fairy dust. The only positives about the experience were that it was educational – being reconstructed is precisely this painful – and it was short.

Johannes Cabal flopped on to the beach, eyes wide with still vibrant memories of recent agony, and rolled on to his back, his hands clenched tightly enough for his fingernails to draw blood from his palms, his face in a humourless rictal grin. He had no idea how long he lay there, the sound of the waves breaking as ignored as the azure sky his eyes saw but did not comprehend. Then he blinked, and sense began to return to him.

‘Gosh,’ said a familiar voice. ‘That stung a bit, didn’t it?’

Cabal sat up. He was on a beach, a beautiful beach of golden sand, beneath a golden sun. It would have been idyllic but for the presence of Bose sitting on a nearby rock, a man with the ability to render the greatest wonders prosaic by his mere presence.

Reaction to the translocation set in a moment later: Cabal leaned over and vomited upon that golden sand, which was not improved by the addition. When he had finished bringing everything up, he felt febrile, weak and oddly ashamed, so he scooped sand over the vomit to hide it. He fumbled in his pocket to find his blue-lensed glasses and put them on to conceal his reddened, watering eyes and save them from the strong sunshine.

‘It stang a bit?’ he managed to say. ‘How are you so composed, Bose? That was the single most unpleasant physical experience I have ever suffered, and I’ve had some bad ones, believe you me.’

Bose shrugged. ‘Yes, it was rather horrid, wasn’t it? But I was here for a full hour before your arrival, Mr Cabal. I’ve had a chance to get over it. Where were you?’

‘Where was I?’ Cabal rose shakily to his feet and dusted himself off. ‘Neither here nor there, it seems.’ He looked around. The beach stretched for about a mile in either direction before vanishing in the curve of the coastline. It gave way to palm trees, then thicker vegetation as it rose up sharply towards a great rocky crag that formed the centre of the island, assuming it was an island and not some promontory on a larger landmass. Directly between them and this feature, however, there was no forest at all, but only a hill of bare rock into which a crude zigzagging path had been carved. At its head, some five hundred yards up the rockface was an equally primitive great stone face cut from the living rock, a demoniacal countenance with a cave entrance for a mouth, befanged, behorned and terrible in its clichés. Cabal had seen a few scary cave entrances in his time, and this one scored low points for originality.

‘This is Mormo, I presume?’ he said, semi-rhetorically, as he expected little insight from Bose. ‘I would hate to have to enter some hideous cave of secrets and face whatever terrors it contains, and then for it to turn out to be the wrong one.’

Bose shook his head. ‘Can’t say, old boy. But unless you plan to make a boat or just settle down here, I don’t suppose we have much choice but to investigate it.’

‘No,’ admitted Cabal. ‘I don’t suppose we do.’

The day was still young, and Cabal felt enervated by the trip and empty by its effects, so they took a little time to eat slowly some of the food they had brought with them, and regarded the cave mouth frequently with guarded suspicion as they did so, just in case the Phobic Animus came galumphing out to share their meal and then, in recompense, kill or unhinge them with a torrent of pure fear. It did not, but the possibility that it might took away most of the small pleasure to be had from eating outside.

It was, however, an eminently suitable time to reflect on how far they had come, and the travails they had undergone to be on that beach. Or just to look at the sea and say how pretty it was, which sufficed for Bose.

Cabal ignored him, a skill it had taken little effort to bring to a high finish. For his own part, the forebodings he had experienced within the tower of Hep-Seth now doubled and redoubled. There was a terrible sense of imminent change, and not a change that he would care for. He was inevitably reminded that the thirteenth card of the tarot deck, Death, signified sudden change that was usually only a figurative death. Usually, but not always. That uncertainty between the metaphorical and the actual had never concerned him quite so much before. Death was waiting for him here; if he had drawn a card at random from a tarot deck right that moment, he would have been more surprised if it had been one of the seventy-seven others.

The sense was not rational, so he could not analyse it rationally. It was subjective to the final degree, so the only metric for it was previous experience. Was the sense imposed, or was its genesis within him? He could not tell. It might just as easily be the influence of the Phobic Animus demonstrating that it had subtleties beyond mortal terror. Cabal drew a long draught from his waterskin, and replaced the stopper with an awareness that this might be among his last acts.

‘Come along, Herr Bose,’ he said, as he stood and beat the sand from his seat. ‘Our destinies, or something along those lines, await.’

The climb up the pathway did not take nearly long enough, and almost before they knew it, they were standing in the mouth of the great stone head. The daylight did not extend very deeply inside, and from what they could see, the interior was not a natural cave but had been cut from the stone of the hill.

Bose squinted into the darkness. ‘I can’t say I fancy going in there, Mr Cabal. It’s awfully gloomy. We shan’t be able to see our hands in front of our faces. I suppose we could try and make flambeaux.’ He looked around and found a bit of dry wood, presumably carried up into the cave during a fierce storm in some bygone year. ‘If we find another stick like this, and wrap something around it that we can set fire to . . . ?’

Cabal said nothing, but took the stick from Bose, and opened his bag. Instantly, cool green-blue flames licked up from inside. Cabal took out the eternally burning head of Ercusides, and stuck it on the end of the stick. ‘There,’ said Cabal. ‘That will do nicely.’

‘Eh?’ said Ercusides. ‘Is somebody there? What is going on?’

‘You’re earning your keep, sir,’ said Cabal. ‘Now, quiet, please. We are working.’

The cave extended back some twenty feet before narrowing into a stone gullet, ridged with shallow steps, that descended at an angle of some thirty degrees to the horizontal. Cabal walked down them without hesitation; if he was correct about the nature of the place, it would not require traps to protect its treasure, as its treasure was quite capable of defending itself. The gullet opened out into a jagged gallery, this time a natural formation that had been tweaked here and there, but was otherwise as natural processes had created it. Along one side a crevice in the floor wound as they walked alongside it, becoming first a crevasse, and then something like an abyss by the time they were close to the far end of the gallery, some two hundred feet long. The light from Ercusides’ skull burned brightly and reflected from the semi-precious stones and quartzes that speckled the walls.

Cabal paused, looking first up a short ramp that led into another narrow carved corridor, much like the gullet from the entry, and then he looked into the abyss. Dank humours were carried up by a low wind that groaned on the very edge of hearing. Bose cautiously joined him.

‘What do you suppose is down there?’ he asked, curiosity and trepidation mingling in his voice.

‘I am guessing at two things. One is a supposition, the other a good likelihood. First, I think whatever is left of the wizard Hep-Seth is down there, if he’s lucky. The gods played a childish game with him, and they usually throw away what they tire of.’

‘Really?’ Bose’s voice was a squeak. He sidled a little closer to the edge and looked into the shadowed deep. ‘And the other?’

The powerful shove he received in his back from Johannes Cabal took him clear off the precipice, and then he screamed shrilly enough to remove any chance of him hearing Cabal say, ‘You, any minute now.’

Cabal listened to the diminuendo screaming for a few seconds, but had heard similar before and was unimpressed by this new rendition. He was making a calculated guess here, and if he was wrong, he was certainly in no more trouble than if he was right. Holding up the grumbling head of Ercusides on his stick, he went down the last corridor and into the chamber of the Phobic Animus.

Surviving fragments of Cyril W. Clome’s manuscript for The Young Person’s Guide to Cthulhu and His Friends: No. 4 Yog-Sothoth, the Lurker at the Threshold

Yog-Sothoth is never late for appointments, best beloved, and for the most wonderful of reasons. Yog-Sothoth is coterminous (coh-TER-min-US) with all time and all space, which means that clever old Outer God exists everywhere ALL the time! It is so terribly, terribly bright that even it doesn’t understand what it’s thinking about half the time, but luckily it’s aware of the other half of the time all the time, so it can crib off itself. I don’t think that counts as cheating.

Yog-Sothoth – who has lots of other names like the Lurker at the Threshold, the Key and the Gate, the Opener of the Way, the All-in-One and the One-in-All and log-Sotôt – looks like a big crowd of silvery bubbles but, unlike a big crowd of silvery bubbles, is stupendous in its malign suggestiveness. That’s just another way of saying, ‘I’m really not sure I trust those silvery bubbles.’

Chapter 14

IN WHICH WE CONTEMPLATE THE LIFE AND DEATH OF JOHANNES CABAL

As Johannes Cabal descended, he could see a flickering glow ahead, and realised he was approaching the final chamber. Once the glow was strong enough, he popped Ercusides off the end of the stick and put him away. Cabal had a strong presentiment that what was coming was going to be complicated and fraught enough without having to worry about a dead head on a stick. He drew his sword on the small chance that it was possible simply to jump on the epitome of Fear and do it to death with some fevered stabbing. It was a very small chance, he knew, but at least it provided a prop to his resolve. He considered turning around and going back out into the daylight. The Silver Key was useless without a gateway, so he could not escape via that route. Perhaps it would be possible to put together some sort of raft, given time, although the chances of negotiating the Cerenarian Sea without knowing where he was, and with all the terrors both meteorological and biological he might encounter en route, were vanishingly small. Or, he supposed, he could just sit around like Robinson Crusoe. No, he concluded, he would go mad with intellectual frustration before many years had gone by and end up more like Ben Gunn. No matter what its nature, its likely brevity, or its outcome, he must ultimately endure this encounter, so he might as well get it out of the way now.

The descending corridor reached its end, and Cabal stepped through into the chamber beyond. It was not hugely impressive but – given its occupant – it did not need to be. The chamber was circular, and some fifty feet in diameter. The walls rose some ten or twelve feet, then formed a hemispherical dome above. In sconces spaced some ten feet apart around the walls torches burned with a strange red fire that flickered black in its heart, yet cast a soft yellow light. Opposite the entrance upon a low dais stood a simple throne of grey and red stone, and upon the throne sat the Phobic Animus in all its preternatural glory.

‘Hello, Herr Bose,’ said Cabal.

‘Hello, old man,’ said Bose, as cheerfully as ever, but with a distinct underpinning of smugness. ‘I gather you caught on to my little joke. Or did you just kill me because you finally got sick of the sight of me?’ His expression shifted to Bose’s habitual sheep-like foolishness. ‘Oh, I say! Yaroo!’ He relaxed again. ‘If that’s the case, you have far more patience than your reputation suggests.’

‘The former is the case, which was the main reason the latter did not occur until this late juncture,’ replied Cabal. ‘It was a small thing, as is usually the way. It occurred to me far too recently that you knew I had cursed even the pets of the spider-ant-baby creatures of the Dark Wood, and yet you were in a dead faint when I had done so. At Dylath-Leen you knew Shadrach’s fate, even though you were in a foetal ball facing the other way at the time. A neat trick for a man. Then, even as you were committing this faux pas, your eyes were dry and it occurred to me, just in passing although the idea grew on me, that you had not been sobbing in fear at all. You were laughing.’

‘Yes, well,’ Bose shrugged, ‘it was funny.’

‘The form that you have taken does you no favours. It is impatient and wilful. I feared I had gained the attention of Nyarlothotep by that ill-considered incantation in the Dark Wood, but my apprehension was a misapprehension. Nyarlothotep had taken notice of me well before then. When I realised that, it calmed me a little.’