Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute - Jonathan Howard

‘Did it?’ Bose was frankly surprised. ‘Did it indeed?’

‘It did, because at least it meant I had not drawn down such misfortune upon my head. It was happenstance, the difference between being struck by lightning in a street and on a mountaintop during a storm while capering around with a silver wand.’

‘That’s a pretty allusion,’ said Bose. ‘I like that one.’

‘The slip in time and space that put us into such peril in the first place was both calculated and impatient. At first I thought we were the objects of scrutiny for some wizard or another – the Dreamlands are rotten with wand-wavers – and I stuck by that thesis despite hints to the contrary.’

‘Oh, I know where this is going . . .’

‘Dylath-Leen, however, was blatant. No wizard holds that kind of power, to reduce the lunar cities of the Moon things, to make the Moon burn. That was . . .’

‘Fun?’

‘Heavy-handed.’

Bose wrinkled his nose. ‘That didn’t stop it being fun.’

‘I must admit, I am disappointed. I thought there might be some grand design behind all this, but it seems I was mistaken. As gods go, you’re just a brat.’

Bose’s complacency did not slip, but he was silent for a long moment. Then he said, ‘I am called the Crawling Chaos, the God with a Thousand Faces, but that is just a simple number for simple minds who like things simple. I do not employ Mr Gardner Bose often, and when I do, my sensibilities are filtered through his, just as with all my masks.’

‘I’m reasonably sure that you’re patronising me.’

‘Oh, Mr Cabal, there has never been a human born, nor shall there ever be, to whom I do not have to talk down. You are all infants in a planetary nursery, and your lives are far too short for you ever to grow up. My point is that it doesn’t matter what you think of me, because you don’t matter so very much yourself. You have some small use, and you are already fulfilling it. I shan’t explain it for reasons that must be terribly obvious even for a stunted intellect like yours.’

Cabal said nothing. He was not insulted, for the sting of an insult comes from the resentment the insultee feels towards the insulter’s relatively weak position of superiority that nurtures a sense of ‘How dare they?’ When a god of unimaginable power and intelligence that quite surpasses even the theoretical limits of the human mind calls one a bit dim, however, one has to admit that, relatively speaking, they have a point.

Instead, he said, ‘I have some small understanding of what you have in mind. Satan himself regards me as an agent of evil and chaos in the world.’

‘Satan?’ said Bose. ‘Oh, yes, Satan . . . Let me ask you something about that. How do you suppose that both Satan and I can exist in the same universe, hmm? I mean to say, I don’t regard myself as anything so bland as an agent of evil and chaos. I have a job to do, however, and what you would call evil and chaos are the usual collateral results. Actually going out of one’s way to create them, though . . . a tad immature, wouldn’t you say? Unless . . .’

‘What are you suggesting?’ said Cabal, but he already knew, and so did Bose.

‘Here’s a little thought experiment. What if when you met Satan you actually met me in one of my many forms?’

‘It would be irrelevant,’ replied Cabal. ‘No matter what your form, you’re an unmitigated bastard. I don’t care if you’re Satan in your spare time.’

But Bose was not listening. ‘And what if there was no God, except as a fictional counterweight to my Satan, hmm? Just think of all those people bowing and scraping to a deity that I made up in my lunchtime, hoping their grovelling will get them to some ill-defined Heaven, whereas everybody actually ends up in Hell.’

‘You forget, I have been to Hell. Not all of the dead can be found there.’

‘Well, maybe there is more than one Hell, or perhaps the ones who would have got to Heaven, if it wasn’t fictional, I just allow to blink out at death. That would be quite merciful of me, wouldn’t it? They die an atheist’s death, but that’s better than going to Hell, probably. I wouldn’t know. Whenever I die, I get over it after a while. When I was Tezcatlipoca one time, the locals murdered me. Not sure why – underdeveloped senses of humour would be my guess. Anyway, my corpse stank the place out and everybody else choked on the stench and died, which was pretty witty of me, wouldn’t you say?’

‘You require my validation? Then, no, it wasn’t very witty. Ironic, I grant you, but witty, no.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said Bose, unabashed. ‘The Aztecs thought it very droll. The ones who didn’t die, obviously. Anyway . . . where was I?’

‘You were congratulating yourself on your mordant wit.’

‘So I was. Just think on it, though – every religion in the world, major or minor, worshipping things that don’t exist. And the unbelievers being all smug about it, and saying that religions are products of human fear, ignorance and inadequacy, all unaware that they’re actually products of some minor mystical jiggery-pokery by yours sincerely, so both the believers and the unbelievers are wrong. Now, come on, you must find that just a little bit funny, surely?’

‘What of the ones who worship you?’

‘Worship me? As me? Oh, they’re just a handful, and they tend to end up dead or insane or whatever, and in any case, I don’t care. I don’t need followers. If they want to grovel to me, it might do them some good, it might not, but my needs transcend the awe and adoration of a bunch of filthy apes.’

‘Yet here you are, burning up precious weeks and months of your immortality for some half-witted joke upon me. Perhaps you could explain that in terms a filthy ape might understand, O great and powerful Bose.’

Bose laughed, and swung around in his throne so that his legs hung over one arm. He smiled complacently. ‘You’re terrific, Johannes Cabal. You know that? Just about anybody else would be whimpering in the corner by this point with his sanity in his hands, not least because I would have got bored with them and gone out of my way to blow their wits out of their ears. You, though . . . I am talking to you because I am the Messenger of the Gods, and that makes me the great communicator. I am the only one who has any interest in humanity at all. The others occasionally turn up and blunder around a while, but if they can even perceive humans, they usually regard them as a bit creepy and exterminate them.’

Cabal tried to imagine dread Cthulhu rising from the corpse city of R’lyeh, seeing humans, and squealing like a Hausfrau who discovers mice in the pantry, before pounding them to death with a broom. Then again, perhaps Cthulhu did squeal, but in a form and context unimaginable to the human mind, or imperceptible to human senses. It hardly mattered if it were true; Cthulhu could still eradicate all life on Earth whether he was squealing like an enormous transdimensional schoolgirl or not.

‘But know this, Johannes Cabal, you have a small part in a grand plan, and whatever you decide to do, it is destined. Fall on your sword or live until you are ninety, whatever you do, you do for us. And that is all you need to know. To be honest, it is all you are capable of understanding.’

There was a short, awkward silence. ‘And the Phobic Animus?’

‘That? Oh, there isn’t one, not in the convenient package that the Fear Institute believed. No, irrational fear is always where everybody thought it was – sweating away in the human heart. Once I became aware of their brave little project, though, well, it was so convenient to my plans I just couldn’t resist. I recovered the Silver Key from its last owner – that was Hep-Seth incidentally, and you were right, he is at the bottom of the crevasse – then inveigled it into the hands of the Fear Institute.’

‘And sent them to me,’ finished Cabal. ‘I shan’t bother asking why – you’ll only get all mystical.’

‘Reasons and reasons. But you might understand one.’

Bose looked steadily at him, and Cabal thought he caught the scent of brimstone. ‘This “thought experiment” of yours,’ he said slowly. ‘Just how hypothet—’

‘I told you we weren’t done at the time, Johannes Cabal,’ said Bose, but his voice was not his own.

Cabal swallowed very carefully. ‘So,’ he said tonelessly, ‘what now?’

‘What now?’ Bose’s voice was still of the pit, flaming and dangerous. Suddenly he smiled and sat up. ‘How would you like your heart’s desire?’

As Johannes Cabal gathered himself up from the grass, he wondered just how many times he was likely to be translocated around assorted plains of existence in his lifetime. He looked around as he dusted himself off, peeved but unsurprised that the Phobic Animus, or Nyarlothotep, or Gardner Bose Esq., or whatever else it might be styling itself this week, had not allowed him to keep his bag. The loss of Ercusides he could manfully bear, but the loss of his notebook, phials of reagent, his death’s head cane and, worst of all, the Silver Key were nuisances great and small. He was wondering how likely recovering them might be when a large crow settled on a nearby boulder, eyed him with mercenary glee and croaked loudly, ‘Kronk!’

Cabal almost groaned with rancour and disappointment. He recognised the crow. He recognised the rock on which it was perched. He knew exactly where he was, and he knew that his bag and its contents were lost beyond any reasonable chance of recovery. It was very annoying, but there was nothing to be done about it, so he put them aside in the vast mental jumble room he kept for memories of abject failure, and set his face towards a new day. He was nothing if not a pragmatist.

He allowed the crow to perch upon his shoulder as he walked along. The last time he had been coming this way, it had been to meet Messrs Shadrach, Corde and Nyarlothotep at the pub in the village. How long ago it seemed. Now they were all dead or alive in some metaphysical way that he doubted was expressible to poor creatures like himself. Whom the gods would destroy, the ancients tell us, they first make mad. Cabal often wondered why they would bother destroying anybody whose sanity they had already shattered. It seemed petty, but then, that was gods for you.

The house was just as it always was: bleak, solitary, and with a perilous front garden. He went up the path, ignoring the tiny eyes that watched him from within the shrubs and beneath the ivy, unlocked the door – hardly necessary, but old habits die hard – and let himself in.

And there, in his front hall with the black-and-white tiled floor, he stopped and stared in utter astonishment at what lay before him. For there, just by the mat, was an envelope.

It made not a ha’penny of sense. He collected his post, what little there was of it, poste restante from the post office in the village, both because he didn’t care to have more people than necessary coming to his house, and because the post office did not enjoy having its postmen eaten by the recalcitrant fairies and other little folk of Cabal’s front garden. For a while, he had trained the garden folk to acknowledge a list of people they should let by, which included the postman, but the training required constant refreshing as the gossamerwinged little proponents of chaos tended to forget it at the first hunger pang. Then there had been a moderately ingenious attempt to kill him by a disgruntled relative of somebody or another that he’d dug up for research material: they had dressed as a postman and actually made it into his house before becoming research material themselves. It was all too distracting, so he had made a poste restante arrangement, and everybody was about as happy about it as they were likely to be.

The envelope had not therefore been delivered by a postman, or anybody else who might reasonably be considered edible to tiny mouths full of very sharp tiny teeth. He looked suspiciously at the crisp white envelope for a second longer before reopening the door and calling into the front garden, ‘Who has been to the house?’

‘Nobody,’ came a plaintive chorus of small voices. ‘We are ever so hungry, Johannes Cabal.’ Cabal grunted dismissively, and went back indoors. The garden folk were lousy liars, and on this occasion they seemed to be telling the truth. He crouched by the envelope and tried to see if there was anything obviously dubious about it, such as razors or the faint shimmer of a dried contact poison, but he could see nothing. Finally picking it up gingerly between finger and thumb, protecting his skin with a handkerchief, he took it up into his attic laboratory.

The letter remained inscrutable to close observation under lens and ultraviolet light. Finally, wearing his heaviest rubber gauntlets and an army-surplus gas mask, Cabal opened the envelope with his favourite Swann & Morton No. 22 scalpel, being careful to cut the paper at the opposite end from the flap. Inside he saw nothing more malevolent than a folded sheet of foolscap parchment, which he removed with tweezers, and opened gently for fear of triggering some trap so subtle as to baffle conventional physics and, indeed, common sense. But then, as Cabal knew full well, nobody ever died from being too careful. Well, apart from that man who suffocated in cotton wool, but he was an idiot.

The sheet of parchment was, however, looking much like a sheet of parchment at present. That wasn’t to say it was harmless: there are certain runic patterns that can draw the attention of unwelcome supernatural attention on whoever has the misfortune to look upon them, so Cabal continued to be delicately cautious long after the point when he had disproved the possibility of every form of magical trap known and several more open to conjecture. Finally, even after he had conceded that the letter was merely a letter – though it bore no name and address, and had somehow been posted without the knowledge of his front garden – he still felt misgivings as he opened it fully and studied its contents.

At first he thought he must be mistaken. Surely it was only a similarity in cursive styles. But as he read the short note of a little more than a hundred words that began with no greeting and ended with no signature, he recognised naunces in phrasing and came to the inescapable conclusion that it had been written by himself. He had no memory of ever doing so, however, and the content was of such startling originality that he knew he never had. He tore off the gas mask and gauntlets and read it again, and then again. It was ingenious, it was radical, and he knew in his heart that it was effective. What had Nyarlothotep said as he mooched around on his throne in the form of the inoffensive Herr Bose? How would you like your heart’s desire? The note contained the basic principle for perfect resurrection, the secret of raising the dead just as they had been when they were alive – physically, mentally, spiritually.

Cabal took down his laboratory logbook from the shelf and opened it at a fresh page. All the experiments previously, all those years of work, were now as dross to him. Now he could see the beginning of the true path to his goal. He hung up his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. There was still much to be done, but now he knew what he knew, the fire burned in him again. This time he would succeed. One day, perhaps not so very far away, depending on where his researches led him, she would rise again, and she would see and speak and think, and Cabal would feel happiness for the first time in so long. He paused, angrily wiped at his eye with the heel of his hand. He was shaking. He had no time for this, he told himself. No time. There was so very much to be done.