Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute - Jonathan Howard

The whole region seemed indefinably tainted. Bad things happened. Brutality, drunkenness and petty crime stained the reputations of the towns, but there were whispers of worse things still. Witchcraft was afoot in Arkham, incest in Dunwich, murder and cannibalism in Innsmouth went the gossip. The towns seemed mired in degeneration and sin against which the burghers had no recourse. But then the witch hunters came from nearby Salem, and cleansed by fire and rope. Though they killed only the hapless innocent in Salem, nobody ever made such claims for Arkham or her near neighbours. Here, the self-styled inquisitors saw things that assured them of their righteous cause, even while it shook their faith in a benevolent God.

And so, Arkham and Innsmouth and the others were saved from the atavistic blight, all was light and joy, and evil ne’er again haunted these places. Certainly, that was the impression the towns were keen to convey, if only to save themselves all that bother again, and – in common with the best self-fulfilling prophecies – that was how things seemed. Some carried this feat with more assuredness than others: Arkham became home to the popular and renowned Miskatonic University, which in turn attracted learned and artistic communities to the town; Kingsport grew lean and ascetic, as though time had lost interest in it, thereby holding the twin illnesses of decay and progress from its door. Innsmouth, however, kept its secrets and grew cunning in that keeping, while Dunwich just rotted amid its fields like an unharvested pumpkin.

But it is Arkham that claims our interest, amid its quaint old-world houses and its famous university, which, if not quite Ivy League, still brings to mind things that climb and creep.

The vast majority of Arkhamites are pleased with their town in many respects. It is architecturally interesting, it has a good university, it is pleasantly placed, and if it has some small historical opprobria attached to its name, then these have mellowed through time to lend nothing more than a delicious notoriety to the town. In this last matter, the vast majority of Arkhamites are deluded.

Arkham lies in a region of reality where the weft and warp have worn dangerously thin. Here, people may think things they ought not, see things they ought not, and be seen by things that ought not be. There are those within the town who know of these facts, and who willingly research into them, either for purposes of knowledge, protection or, most frequently, personal power. It is a perilous path, and few survive it intact, either spiritually or physically, those who reach the end finding that the prize is rarely worth the cost. As they suffer and die and suffer some more, beyond the thin veil there are dark shapes that gibber and pipe, and one voice laughs and never stops.

Yet there are always more who come to try to draw the veil aside. Which suits the dark shapes, for they know a secret that was ancient long before even amoebae floated in the primordial oceans of Earth. An ancient truth that sings throughout this universe and the others that crowd around it, a secret that may be expressed in words as ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’

One such sucker was Eldon Harwell, a young man recently dropped out of – before he could be sent down from – Miskatonic University. Eldon’s path into moral disintegration had begun when he had attended a showing at the Pickman Gallery on the corner of Pickman and West. It had been a poorly attended affair, and Harwell had been quite full of nibbles and cheap white wine when the proprietor had taken a shine to him, and invited him to see the ‘private’ collection after the public showing was concluded. Drunk and bored, Harwell had readily agreed, hopeful that the collection would be sufficiently debauched to please the jaded senses of a citizen of Eldersburg, Maryland, such as himself.

Harwell, as a former undergraduate, was confident of his worldliness, but what he saw behind the threadbare velvet curtain kicked open several doors in his psyche that would better have remained locked. He was, for example, familiar with the theory if not the practice of bestiality, but the beautiful – and in pure aesthetic terms, in ratio and technique, in application and style, it was beautiful – painting of women sporting with hounds unsettled him more than he had expected. First in the recognition that the hounds were not exactly hounds and, later when he thought back, the realisation that the women were not exactly women.

He slept badly that night, and when exasperation finally drove him from his bed, he looked out from his garret room across the junction of Lich Street and Peabody Avenue. There lay Arkham Cemetery, shadowed and silvered by the light of a gibbous moon that seemed to leer down upon the silent, empty scene.

But, no! What was that? In the corner of the burial ground, through the ivy-twined railings, he caught a glimpse of movement between the gravestones. It paused, as if aware of him, then stepped out into the cold moonlight, and he saw that it was a dog, only a dog.

And then it looked up at him, and rose on to its hind legs, and it walked like a man.

He awoke the next morning on the floor, a bump at the back of his head where it had struck the floor when he fell, fainting. This was a small blessing, as it allowed him to reorder the disordered events of the night in a form that caused him less distress. He had risen, and tripped in the darkness, banging his head in the fall. This had caused a horrible nightmare triggered by the paintings he had seen. There had been no dog in the graveyard. There had been no dog.

He was lying to himself and, in his heart, he knew it. What he did not know was he could never be the same man again. The doors had been opened, and they allowed transit in both directions. He began to have ideas, interesting ideas in the same way that the ideas of the Marquis de Sade or Samuel Taylor Coleridge were interesting. Perverse, out-of-the-usual-run-of-things ideas that buffeted around his head like especially muscular butterflies, seeking expression. This was of the greatest torment to Harwell for, though he was as debauched and worldly as a man of his age and means could reasonably expect, though he was now illuminated by the truth of everything and was mere baby steps from comprehension, he was entirely talentless.

Musically, his attempts at ‘Chopsticks’ sounded like Stravinsky in a temper, his art was inferior to a manatee’s attempts at finger painting, and what his prose lacked in style, it also lacked in adverbs. The overall effect was that Eldon Harwell was a blocked spigot; a kettle filled with meaning and a cork down his spout.

Such a situation has driven greater men into the arms of madness, and opiates, and barmaids. Being a lesser man, Harwell succumbed to all three, before settling into a state of melancholia, from which his few remaining friends could not stir him.

In that dismal garret, he sat with his head in his hands, unable to articulate the vistas that moiled and slithered across his mind. At hand were a pen, ink and a half ream of cheap paper, for Harwell could at least spell and therefore clutched miserably at writing as an outlet. One day, he hoped and prayed, the boiling light he could perceive but not describe would resolve into coherence, and he would be its conduit. A great poem would pour from him, and leave him empty and peaceful. He also knew his next act would be to burn the manuscript before it could infect anyone else or, worse, reinfect him. As yet he had remained frustrated in this. Every attempt to shake loose the cosmic truth within him had resulted in a garbled mess or, on one occasion, a limerick about vicious but stupid crabs.

The curtains remained drawn at all hours. He feared seeing something else in the cemetery, so when the knock came at his door late one night, it surprised him terribly and he cried, suddenly fearful, ‘Who is there? Who raps upon my chamber door at this late hour?’

Beyond the portal, there came the muffled sound of a whispered conversation. Finally, a sepulchral voice intoned, ‘I . . .’ There was another pause, amid fierce muttering. ‘Which is to say, we . . .’

Then Harwell heard a new voice murmur something that sounded exasperated and possibly defamatory in German before saying, ‘Oh, just open the door, Herr Harwell. We have business to discuss with you.’

Reassured by the matter-of-fact tone, Harwell unlocked his door and slowly opened it to reveal four men whose identities must surely be apparent to all but the most inattentive reader. Johannes Cabal was the first in, impatient energy written into his every movement. He looked critically but silently around the room as Shadrach, Corde and Bose filed in behind him and stood uncomfortably with their hats in their hands as Cabal wandered about the place with long strides. At the window, he twitched the curtain back a crack and looked out over the crossroad for perhaps half a minute, before allowing the curtain to fall back into place. He stood in silent thought for a moment before saying, ‘We do not have a great deal of time, gentlemen. We are not the only party with an interest in Herr Harwell. We arrived barely in time.’

‘An – an interest?’ stammered Harwell. ‘Who has an interest in me? Who are you?’

‘Elucidation would be redundant,’ said Cabal. He snapped his fingers peremptorily at Shadrach. ‘The Key, sir! Quickly now.’

‘The key . . .’ It took a moment for Shadrach to take Cabal’s meaning. ‘The Silver Key?’

‘Of course the Silver Key,’ said Cabal, his patience burning away as quickly as a powder trail. ‘You do have it, do you not? If we have come all this way, and it is sitting on the dressing-table at home . . .’

‘Yes, of course I have the Silver Key, but it is useless without a gateway. Isn’t that true?’

Harwell glanced around the group, now at least partially convinced that he was hallucinating this indecipherable gang of men cluttering up his room. He hadn’t realised it was possible to suffer absinthe flashbacks, but it seemed the most likely explanation.

‘Yes, it is true, and there is a gateway here. The Key, if you please?’

‘A gateway,’ said Harwell. ‘In my room?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Bose, as genial as Pickwick. ‘Your garret is home to a gateway to another world! Isn’t that wonderful? The land of dreams, no less.’ Shadrach shushed him, to no obvious effect.

Harwell’s expression showed dawning comprehension. ‘The land of dreams . . . the land of . . . Of course! It explains so much! My dreams, my visions! I understand now!’ He looked frantically around, turning on the spot. ‘Where is it? Where is this gateway? It must be near – I can feel it.’

Cabal meanwhile had accepted the Key from a reluctant Shadrach and was in the process of sliding it from the long chamois envelope in which it was kept. He let it lie in his hand for a long moment, feeling its weight wax and wane, watching the bittings ebb and flow, like crystals melting and re-forming. It was silver, certainly, but only in colour. What it was made of was an entirely different question.

He tucked the envelope into his coat pocket while taking a firm grip of the Key. ‘Yes, Herr Harwell. The Gate of the Silver Key is very close indeed.’

Harwell turned to him, his next question already forming on his lips, but he never had the chance to voice it. For Cabal raised the Silver Key to head height and, without hesitation, drove it between Eldon Harwell’s eyes.

There was no crunching of bone, no spraying blood or cerebral fluid as the Key slid through skin, subcutaneous fat, flesh, skull and brain. There was no sound at all, but for the collective horrified gasp of shock from the onlookers. It is not true to say that the Key’s passage between Harwell’s frontal lobes left no mark: the flesh and bone crumbled and melted into thin white smoke and what was left was nothing more or less than a neatly defined keyhole. None of them thought this strange at the time, but only afterwards in reflection; at that moment it seemed that the keyhole had always been there, obvious and apparent to them as soon as they had seen Harwell, yet somehow they had forgotten about it. It was a curious, half-formed memory, their first experience of the nature of the Dreamlands while waking, as its influence escaped through the opening gate into the mortal world like jasmine-scented air escaping a garden.

Only Cabal and Harwell made no sound, until Cabal turned the Silver Key in its lock and Harwell made a soft sigh as of realisation or perhaps recognition. Certainly, his eyes widened as though he could see things that had lain hidden from him his whole life. ‘It’s . . . beautiful,’ he whispered, and a solitary tear rolled down his cheek as the confused miasma of half-glimpsed possibilities that had haunted him since that night at the Pickman Gallery finally grew sharper in focus. ‘It’s all so . . .’

Then his face grew tense, the skin pulled back against the bone. ‘There’s something else, something else . . .’

Cabal finished turning the key and gently withdrew it from Harwell’s head. The keyhole remained, and from it lines of liquid light rolled up vertically across the centre of the brow and down along the ridge of the nose.

‘The Gateway . . .’ said Corde. ‘The Gateway of the Silver Key.’ The silver line of light was extending over Harwell’s head and down his chest, the glow becoming fiercer as it travelled. ‘I’d naturally assumed—’

‘Walls do not dream,’ interrupted Cabal, and Corde fell silent.

The line had almost bisected Harwell and with every inch the line travelled, his expression of disbelief warped slowly into horror. ‘No . . . no! I can see it! I can see it! I cannot . . . must not . . . God help me!’

‘What can you see?’ demanded Cabal, standing close to Harwell. He noted that the stricken man’s eyes seemed to be growing further apart. The gateway was opening.

‘I see . . . it all!’ Harwell’s eyes were focused on something far beyond Cabal, beyond the grubby little room, beyond this world and the realms of space that it sits within. ‘Oh, mercy! Is there no mercy?’

And, with that, the tips of the line of light joined, the Gateway of the Silver Key opened wide, and that was the end of Eldon Harwell. He became something, but what it was, living or dead, was without definition. He shattered into crumbs that sublimed into gas that smeared into liquid that sublimed into something else again until all that was left was the gateway, burning in the air with the light of a bright afternoon into a dirty garret at midnight.

‘You . . .’ Bose was, for once, lost for words. ‘You killed him.’

Cabal shrugged, as if Bose had accused him of using the wrong spoon at dinner. ‘He was already dead. He’d allowed certain conceptual theomorphs to take residence in his mind. He would have killed himself or been killed within a few months in any case. At least this way he served a purpose.’ He noticed some pieces of paper lying on Harwell’s writing-table and studied them for a moment. ‘He was a poet. No loss, then.’

‘You are a cold man, Mr Cabal,’ said Corde, not entirely disapprovingly.

Cabal did not answer. He was looking at the portal, stepping around it to gauge its width. ‘This will not be a quick passage. I estimate it will take approximately a minute for each of us to complete the transition from here to there. We must start immediately.’