Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute - Jonathan Howard

Coconut rope requires two things above all others: a lot of coconuts and a lot of time. He distantly remembered reading once how such rope was made, and knew that simply making the white coir fibre he needed would take the best part of a year, assuming that he was lucky with the current stage of the coconut’s growth cycle. Cabal considered this, and decided that it would be a last resort if he could not find a more immediate alternative. The obvious one was to use jungle creepers, of which he had noted several varieties on his sortie.

An expedition specifically to investigate them returned with the results that one was covered with tiny thorns, another had the tensile strength of uncooked bread dough, a third was a fortuitously mild-tempered snake, and a fourth felt like weathered electrical cable. Of this last he harvested as much as he could find and dragged it back to the cave, leaving strange tendrilled tracks in the sand behind him.

It was slow, tedious work, and Cabal’s mind wandered as he plaited the creepers into lengths of makeshift rope that he would tie or splice together when the time came. He thought of the future Nyarlothotep had shown him, of himself as an old man, and she still as young as when it had all begun. He remembered the pity in her face when he had said his last goodbye to her, the walk back to the house, his ageing knees, ankles and hips complaining. He remembered the taste of the gun in his mouth.

A strange flicker appeared at the corner of Cabal’s mouth. An uninvolved and disinterested observer might have thought it was a twitch of amusement, a ghost of a smile. To anyone who knew Cabal, however, that was clearly nonsense. Unless Nyarlothotep, for all his vast intelligence, for all his wiles and experience, truly was not ever able fully to understand the shadows and light within the human heart. Unless Nyarlothotep had somehow missed a nuance in his dealings with Cabal that he simply could not comprehend. Unless Cabal had somehow pulled the wool over a god’s eyes.

But no. That was not the case.

In truth, Cabal had pulled fully two layers of wool over a god’s eyes.

The great problem with being a trickster god or, as in Nyarlothotep’s case, the trickster god, was that anyone who deals with one from a position of knowing that one is a trickster is necessarily expecting to be tricked. The true trick that had been played upon Cabal was of such passing subtlety and arcane significance that, apart from the waste of time it constituted, he didn’t mind greatly. His main intentions when agreeing to accompany the Fear Institute expedition had been to gain the Silver Key, and to reconnoitre the Dreamlands, and he had achieved both of these aims. He had never been convinced by the Institute’s claim that such an entity as the Phobic Animus actually existed, and become increasingly cynical as clues and happenstance led them on a path that had been obscure to all others previously. Where others had paranoia, Cabal had a sense of self-preservation that bordered on the supernatural; it gathered every inconformity, every non-sequitur, every coincidence, and built deductions from them, as others might build models of the Eiffel Tower from discarded matches. Every such theoretical construct was measured against the metric of likelihood, and where it fell short, it was ignored for the time being.

On entering the Dreamlands Cabal had unconsciously lowered this metric, and it had served him well. Where the others had disregarded their unexpected appearance in the Dark Wood as some sort of Wonderland experience to be accepted without question, Cabal had filed it away under Suspicious Occurrences, and had been adding to the file ever since. Bose’s great revelation had, therefore, been anticipated. This much has already been stated, but Cabal’s guard against deceit was not lowered when Bose’s true colours had been unfurled. So, when Bose – Nyarlothotep – had so obligingly given him the basic principle of perfect resurrection, he was already deeply suspicious. As has famously been noted, ‘There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.’ Thus, he had regarded Nyarlothotep’s great banquet with particular caution.

When Cabal had first embarked upon the quest for the Phobic Animus – this most boojumish of Snarks – he had naturally considered where he might be most vulnerable to its tenebrous wiles. Physical injury and pain he regarded as unpleasant, but commonplace. Unless one lived one’s life wrapped in kapok and under sedation, then injury and pain were certainties to be expected and dealt with rationally and promptly. He did not look forward to them, but neither did he fear them. He spent no time at all considering the more fanciful phobias: a man who is used to facing down the walking dead and battling ghosts as part of his job description is unlikely to be utterly unmanned by the sight of ducks or the sound of whistling. This left the quieter internal fears. The psychic cancers of doubt.

Among these Cabal’s greatest was failure, but it was a clear and obvious one and he had long since armoured his heart against it. If ultimately he failed, then there was little he could do about it. Sometimes it still tormented him, but no great endeavour goes without the possibility of its coming to naught, a truism that no longer galled him as much as it might.

Nyarlothotep, however, was wilier than that. He had settled upon the fear of success. Total, absolute success in all respects save timeliness. This was something Cabal had no defence against except pointedly ignoring it and hoping it would not be so. The phantasmal personation of such a future that had been visited upon him was therefore perfectly pitched, and unimaginably cruel. It was also expected, given Nyarlothotep’s reputation for unimaginable cruelty. Thus, Cabal settled down for several subjective decades of play-acting, carrying out experiments that he knew were useless in the real world. These were the experiments based on the core mechanism that had been provided to him on the parchment, in a forgery of his own hand. There were other experiments, however, apparently arranged as confirmatory or deductive exercises to support the central thesis. These were scattered over the years in an attempt, apparently successful, to hide their true nature as a single coherent line of research. Cabal knew that, for all their power, none of the Great Old Ones was truly omnipotent or omniscient, even if at least Yog-Sothoth managed the party trick of eternal omnipresence. The likelihood was that Nyarlothotep did not actually know what was happening in Cabal’s false future beyond the planned sweep of it, but caution seemed wise all the same. Thus, it was not a complete waste of time at all. In his vanity, the Crawling Chaos had gifted Cabal several very useful years of research in the space of a single second.

This was the first layer of wool. The second was less involved, but far more important to Cabal. If its nature is enragingly opaque to the reader, who is likely to belong to the human race, then it may be understood how entirely incomprehensible it was to a mind as alien as a god’s.

Cabal worked steadily and diligently on the vines to create his rope. He noted that they were drying as they were braided, and he hoped that this would increase rather than decrease their strength. Certainly, it would reduce their weight, which could only help. Even slightly dried out, the rope would have a formidable mass, and the possibility of it snapping under its own weight was a very real one. What might happen when his own weight was added to it was a concern. He would make a few experiments using rocks to simulate him, but he still had the baleful impression that his safety margin would be a narrow one. This wariness resulted in, over the next few weeks, the construction of a large balance scale on to which Cabal placed himself on one side and different quantities of rocks on the other until he had a pile that equalled his own mass, plus a little extra to allow for impulse strain caused by the act of climbing upon it, and a little extra more for safety.

Then his line of experimentation moved to dangling a woven sack of rocks on varying lengths of rope. Sometimes the rope snapped, or separated at the splices, and Cabal would swear volubly for a minute or two, and then get back to the project.

Every day, however, he made a point to give himself a moment or so in the domed room, just to say, ‘You little bastard,’ to the empty throne before getting on with his rope work.

Finally, some time after every possible variant of stupid crab, coconut, breadfruit and papaya had been tried, but shortly before culinary boredom sent him after the pigs, the rope was completed to his reasonable, if not absolute, satisfaction.

Cabal allowed himself a night’s rest before embarking on the descent. He dropped a bundle of torches into the depths, crude items of wood with coconut matting heads moist with crab grease that he knew would burn for a disgustingly stenchfilled half an hour when lit. Ercusides on a stick was certainly more reliable and less odoriferous, but also more voluble and inclined to testiness; Cabal would make do with his crab-fat torches instead. The bundle was wrapped around some food, although he doubted the little tetrahedral cage he had formed from the torches would survive impact. He knew the area he was descending to was reasonably flat, having cast several burning torches down in a survey the previous week, so that was one less thing to worry about. Muttering irritably under his breath, he fed the secured rope down into the darkness and then, muttering stilled, began the climb downwards.

Very aware of the old mountaineers’ maxim that if one is going to fall off a rope, it is usually better to do so near the bottom, he made the best time he could without resorting to abseiling, which might put too much strain on the plaited creepers. Quickly he slid down into a thick, tangible darkness that closed in around him like oil. Above him, the glimmering light from the permanently alight – and very permanently fixed, as he had discovered – flambeaux grew attenuated and then seemed to flicker out altogether. Soon, the only way he had to gauge his progress was the number of times he had moved his hands down the rope, and that was a rough approximation at best. Then, with about forty feet to go, the rope parted.

He fell in silence, but inwardly he was thinking, Typical.

He awoke with no idea of how long he had been unconscious. This was low on his list of priorities at the time, it is true, lagging a long way behind a warranted sense of elation at not being dead and an equally justifiable sense of relief that his skeleton still seemed to be in the correct number of pieces. This miraculous escape was rendered less miraculous by the discovery that he was lying in a deep bed of some fibrous hairlike material that must have cushioned him on impact. While grateful for its serendipitous placement, he was less happy at what it might turn out to be. The image that leaped first to mind was a massive form of mucor, the threadlike mould often found on rotting vegetable matter, but this impression passed quickly when he realised that the threads were dry and not standing vertically but curled and balled. There was the smell, too: dry and musty, with a faint but distinct scent redolent of old crypts.

A suspicion began to form and he rolled slowly from the strange mound, ignoring the discomfort of the bruising he had suffered in his fall. He cast around on the rocky floor, finding only gravel and grit for several long minutes until his hand brushed against a piece of wood, and he realised it was one of his torches. The head of wiry coconut coir was greasy with crab fat and he realised that it must be one of the new torches from his provisions cache. That it was there by itself didn’t raise hopes for the state of the cache, but he would worry about that in a moment.

He took out his silver matchbox and struck a light, allowing the flame to settle and grow in the still air before applying it to the torch. The grease melted and bubbled before the flame took and spread across the matting head, and finally he was able to look around.

The first thing he saw was the provisions bundle. It was not nearly as badly damaged as he had first anticipated. In fact, the only thing different about its state from the moment he had dropped it into the abyss was that one torch had become detached, and that was the torch with which he was now examining it. Serendipity again, it seemed.

The next thing he saw was what he had fallen on to. His second supposition as to its constitution was, he was very sorry to say, the correct one. It was hair – vast, vast quantities of hair, formed into an untidy pile. Moreover, it was human hair. Its length, colouration and, here and there, signs of dyeing and highlights gave no other possible origin. The fact that quite a few bits of desiccated scalp were still attached clinched the identification. Its presence posed two major questions. Where had such a huge multi-hued hairball come from, and why was it here now? Unless some sort of demon trichologist was haunting this dark passageway, Cabal was forced to admit to himself that he had no idea.

Then, when he raised his torch high to look around, the third thing he saw was the great ring of perhaps a hundred or so ghouls that encircled him, down on their haunches, silently watching. Once again Johannes Cabal thought, Typical.

He considered the wisdom of reaching for his sword and found it wanting. Besides, they could have killed him in any second since his undignified arrival into this darkness and had not done so. He had been, and remained, it seemed, an object of fascination among the ghouls. They just seemed to follow him around to see what amusing misadventure he might become embroiled within next. When one’s career consists of haunting graveyards and eating human corpses of varied freshness, Cabal conceded, one has to find one’s entertainment where one can.

‘Well,’ he said, clear and unwavering, ‘how may I help you, ladies and gentlemen?’ They all looked very similar with no obvious sexually dimorphic features, but he knew that every one of them had once been as human as he. Such niceties as showing basic politeness might make the difference between life and lunch.

The ghouls did not reply to him, but meeped and glibbered among themselves, as was their depraved wont. Neither, however, did they come any closer or retreat from the uncertain light of his torch. Cabal wondered just how long they would keep this up. It was like being threatened by wolves dressed as sheep, who had sunk so deep into their method acting that they were now unclear about the whole ‘being dangerous’ thing. Experimentally he took a step forward. The ghouls before him scuttled back a step, while those beside and behind him scuttled sideways and forwards accordingly to maintain the cordon. Marvellous, he thought. I have my very own halo of ghouls. Oh, happy day.

He was just considering, perhaps unwisely, the possible results of leaping forward, arms held high, and bellowing, ‘Boo!’ at them, when there was a disturbance in the circle off to his right. He turned as the line opened a gap and allowed through another ghoul. Physically, there was little to delineate it from its fellows, but there was a spark of recognition, psychic and certain, in Cabal’s mind that this was the same specimen he had spoken to in Arkham and in the nameless city on the bank of the Lake of Yath.