Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute - Jonathan Howard

‘Just so,’ said Cabal, and this time the spectre of a smirk flittered around his mouth. He turned to look down the slope of the valley, and the smirk diminished to nothing. ‘Now, to business.’

He reached down for his bag, and paused. It seemed that he had not managed the transition into the Dreamlands quite as unaltered as he had thought. The bag was open, as it should have been. He had left it open on the floor of the garret, the Silver Key lying within. When he had abandoned his post at the top of the stairs, he had dropped his pistol in before snatching up the bag and throwing himself into the vortex. The Key, he was relieved to see, was still where he had left it. His cane still remained secured to the bag by the leather straps that ran up the sides. Of his gun, however, there was no sign. Instead, lying along the open maw of the bag, like a stick in a toothless dog’s mouth, there was a sword, scabbarded and attached to a belt.

Cabal bit back a snarl. Of course the Dreamlands would not tolerate something so prosaically mechanical as his Webley. Here, progress was held back by a vast romantic inertia as great as that of the mountain on which they stood. One day, it might finally allow flintlocks, perhaps at some future date when the waking world was using death rays and germ bombs.

Cabal took up the sword by the belt and strapped it on. It hung neatly at his left hip, and added a pleasing weight to his stride that he knew a real sword would never match. Demonstrating none of Corde’s bashfulness, he drew the blade in a swift motion and tested its balance. Predictably, it was perfect, although it was no sort of weapon that he had ever held or even seen before. It was a rapier of sorts, but of a combative nature rather than for fencing: flat-bladed with a shallow curve that swept up to a right angle a finger’s length from the sharp tip. Cabal slashed and thrust at the air for a few seconds. An interesting weapon, he concluded. At heart a rapier, but with just enough sabre in its family tree to allow the easy hacking of unfortunates when the mood took one.

He returned it to its scabbard with precision, and looked up to see Corde watching him with interest. ‘You’ve fenced before, Cabal?’

Cabal noticed that familiarity was breeding sufficient contempt for them no longer to address him as ‘Mr Cabal’. ‘I have. Have you?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Corde drew his sword, and it was as different from Cabal’s as a Viking one-and-a-half-hander bastard sword is, unsurprisingly, from a rapier with a bit of sabre on the side. ‘Nothing like this, I grant you.’ He whirled the sword in the air and it seemed for a moment that its path was made of a gleaming arc of solid steel. He swept it back again and then around his head, his eyes filling with undisguised joy. ‘It’s wonderful . . . wonderful!’

Suddenly his sword stopped in mid-air with a sharp cry of steel on steel. Cabal stood with his own once again drawn, halting Corde’s in an exact parry. ‘It is a dream, Corde.’ He lowered and scabbarded it. ‘Time is pressing, and we shall have plenty of time for you to demonstrate your dazzling swordsmanship. I would remind you that we have an entire world to search and we are by no means immortal.’ He took up his bag while Corde reluctantly slid his blade into its scabbard.

Cabal took out his folder of notes on the Dreamlands and found a flattish section of ground on which to unroll a map.

‘You have a map, Cabal?’ said Shadrach. ‘By all that’s wonderful . . . !’

‘Please do not become overly excited by it, gentlemen,’ Cabal warned. ‘It was drawn from the fancies of poets and the ravings of maniacs – which is to say much the same thing – and is therefore only slightly more useful than a blank sheet of paper. Why it is always poets, who are at the laudanum trough or gulping down absinthe, instead of somebody useful like cartographers, I have no idea. In any event, we have an unreliable map. And upon it, we are . . .’ Cabal stabbed his finger down ‘. . . here.’

The others crowded around and looked at the map. After a few moments of angling his head this way and that, Shadrach asked, ‘How can you be so sure?’

Cabal took up the map, rolled it and put it into his bag. ‘In all the Dreamlands, there is one particularly famous mountain, Mount Hatheg-Kla. We are about one mile up it.’ He turned and pointed towards the cloud-wreathed summit. There was something unpleasant about the mountain’s perspective, as if there were simply too much of it and it had somehow furled itself just enough for it to be acceptable to the human psyche. Once inside the mind, however, it popped open like an umbrella with an unreliable catch, jabbing the sensitive fleshy parts with the spiky tips of its ribs and poking about with its contradimensional ferrule. Cabal, from long mental exercise, firmly closed the umbrella again and dropped it into the elephant’s foot of his super-ego. The others, less prepared, were struck dumb by the immensity of the prospect.

Insensitive to his fellows’ state, Cabal continued: ‘Seven miles further up is the highest any human has ever climbed. Barzai the Wise was his name, which just goes to show that names don’t tell you everything, for two miles further up is where the gods themselves sometimes sport. I have no idea what comprises sport for a god – don’t ask. In any event, they took exception to Barzai getting close enough to irk them.’

‘What happened to him?’ asked Corde, the first to discover that the best cure for an umbrella in the psyche was simply not to look.

‘Oh, something ghastly. It usually is with gods. They have no sense of proportion. If you are particularly interested, there is a rock at the eight-mile point that has the full story carved into it as a warning to the curious. Why, Corde? Curious?’

Corde was, but not enough to risk either the climb, or the possibility of getting his very own memorial, courtesy of the gods.

Cabal smiled, technically. He turned his back on the peak and pointed out over the land. ‘That river is the Oukranos. If we follow it down to the sea, we shall find ourselves in the city of Hlanith. Hlanith is a useful sort of place for dreamers, as it is close to the Enchanted Wood.’ He pointed at a great forest visible south of the river a good way off. ‘A twee name, but furiously dangerous. It is where most mortals who enter the Dreamlands through the usual route of sleep first emerge. On the other side of the river is the Dark Wood. A less twee name, but no less dangerous, just in case you were hoping for some sort of inverse relationship between names and peril here. Almost everywhere is dangerous, so you should get used to that idea as soon as possible, if you wish to survive this world.’

Shadrach and Bose had finally managed to tear their eyes away from the peak of Hatheg-Kla with the help of Corde, who had taken firm hold of their chins and steered their gaze in a safe direction by force. ‘How will this . . . Hlanith,’ Shadrach chewed on the unfamiliar word, making it sound like a small mining village in Wales ‘. . . how will it help us, Mr Cabal? We are not dreamers.’

‘Not in any sense,’ said Cabal. ‘But as a result of every Tom, Dick and Harry with a talent for the particular mode of dreaming required to travel here, Hlanith is a gathering place for people whose minds are not altogether mired in the sticky romanticism of this place. In short, gentlemen, there we will find people who will give us straight answers to straight questions.’

Bose shielded his eyes against the sun, an orb whose light seemed a little more golden than that which shone over the Earth they had so recently left. ‘I can’t even see the coast from here. How long will this journey take? How far must we go?’

‘Time and space are not measured in the way we are used to,’ warned Cabal. ‘To give you a time in hours or a distance in leagues would be useless.’

Corde gestured over his shoulder with a jerk of his thumb. ‘Just a minute ago you were telling us that this boulder commemorating Banzai the Wishful –’

‘Barzai the Wise.’

‘– is eight miles up the mountain. Now you’re telling us that units of measurement are meaningless. Well, which is it?’

‘Ah,’ said Cabal, sagely. Before anyone could complain that ‘Ah’ did not really answer anything, he said, ‘We have over a mile of treacherous mountainside to traverse before we reach gentler slopes, gentlemen. Perhaps we should begin.’

‘A mile!’ exclaimed Corde, in an attempt to make his point again, but Cabal was already stepping from the promontory that the Silver Key had dumped them upon, and on to the great steep field of scree and bare rock beneath them.

The most peculiar thing about the descent was how it seemed to take hours, yet when they reached the bottom of the long, ragged escarpment, the sun had barely moved a degree in the sky. Cabal muttered something about subjective objectivity, and there the matter lay. The second most peculiar thing was that, while Shadrach and Bose were neither of the utmost physicality nor especially well dressed for shinning down a mountainside, both arrived at their destination winded but not exhausted, their clothes as pristine as when they had set off.

They walked down towards the bank of the Oukranos in near silence, taking in the wonders around them. At this point they consisted largely of a ruined mansion off to the south, through whose abandoned orchards – in themselves covering the area of a small town – the party made their way. At first glance, the only truly unearthly thing about the environment was the sheer scale of everything: Mount Hatheg-Kla was huge, the ruined mansion was huge, the orchard was huge and contained trees of ancient growth; even the river before them was Amazonian in proportion. To Cabal’s searching eye, however, there were more details that proclaimed the alien nature of the place, and the more he looked, the more subtle they became.

He saw a creature that was neither caterpillar nor butterfly, but rather a caterpillar with broad wings projecting from a chrysalis-like band about its upper third, as if a butterfly’s life cycle had been cut and stitched into a single stage. He saw a rat scurry into a hole, but when it peered out again he thought he must have been mistaken for it had a little flat face like a capuchin monkey’s. He finally realised it had the body of a rat but forelimbs ending in apelike phalanges, and the face of a tiny man with sideburns and a widow’s peak. It glared at him with a mixture of angry hatred and curiosity until it understood they had no interest in it. At which point it grinned like a happy little man, and vanished deeper into its burrow.

The most subtle of the anomalous details, however, was all around them, its very ubiquity making it difficult to notice. The Dreamlands did not, quite, make sense to the eye. The most overt expression of this had been Mount Hatheg-Kla’s ill-mannered refusal to be comfortably comprehensible to the viewer. It was not only big, it was the very epitome of bigness, and it wedged itself into the viewer’s perception like a fat man into a small armchair. All around them now, however, the same perceptual unwillingness was always apparent. It was never quite clear just how far away the ground beneath one’s feet really was. As they passed a tree, the degree by which the trunk’s hidden side was exposed never quite matched up with the degree by which the trunk’s side previously visible was turned away from them. Nothing worked quite as expected. Very nearly – 99 and a good number of percentage places – but never quite perfectly enough to escape a keen eye and an analytical mind. Cabal had these attributes, in addition to something verging on an allergy to whimsy, so he noted these anomalies early, and he noted them often.

This, then, was the stuff of dreams, and it nauseated him. Sloppy, half-baked fancies oozing from a countless multitude of sloppy, half-baked minds. He could hardly wait to conclude his business with the Fear Institute, the quicker to quit that land of the dazed. Those of an artistic bent would doubtless find much to admire in the Dreamlands’ hanging gardens, their crystal fortresses, their gargantuan waterfalls and their towers of brass and steel. To Cabal, however, they were fripperies; momentarily impressive, but ultimately risible. His interest in the place was predictably prosaic.

Many necromancers had travelled to the Dreamlands before him for a variety of reasons – to speak with gods, to seek dark knowledge, or even to grow powerful and gather wealth, respect and a harem of houris who found names like ‘Wesley’ or ‘Cecil’ inexpressibly exotic. Not a few of these predecessors had come with the express intention of never returning, and so they had come as sleepers, engineering the death of their sleeping physical forms by strange rites that guaranted their spirit lived on in the land of dreams. It was an immortality of sorts, as they would never age or die naturally, but Cabal sneered at them as failures. While real knowledge, even experimental knowledge, could be gathered in dream, it was of no consequence if it could not be communicated somehow to the waking world. With the Silver Key in his possession, Cabal planned to make several unannounced visits on such reprobates, and gather their knowledge, by hook or by crook or by the patient application of thumb screws. Cabal didn’t mind: once in the Dreamlands, he had all the time in the world.

There was the small question of the Institute members’ notable naïveté. It was customary for payment to come after the service, yet here he was with the Silver Key in his bag, which he wanted, and the company of three idiots dressed like mechanicals for a production of Henry VIII, which he didn’t. It would be simplicity itself to zig when they zagged, or duck into the shadows while they were otherwise occupied, or, if all else failed, shove them off a convenient cliff. The Dreamlands certainly didn’t seem to be short of dramatic landscapes, so Cabal imagined there must be any number of convenient cliffs to choose from. That he did none of these things, no matter how personally amusing he might have found them, was pragmatic. The Fear Institute Expedition could and probably would run around until it was blue in the face and never discover the Phobic Animus, if it had the decency to exist. He truly did not care. What was important to him was that they would cover ground in doing so, establish protocols of behaviour, perhaps even make reliable contacts. All of these things would be useful to Cabal when he undertook his own projects. So, while the others were under the impression that all were united in the fool’s errand, Cabal knew the true function of the journey was that of a reconnaissance. Plus, as he had realised earlier, there was safety in numbers, particularly when the rest of the party was made up of sacrificial victims to the higher purpose of Cabal’s continued existence. ‘All for one and one for all’ would be their motto, even if only Cabal knew that the former ‘one’ would always be him, and the latter would not.

‘You’re smiling, Mr Cabal,’ said Bose, smiling broadly himself. Cabal’s own slight tightening of a few muscles was not in the same league as Bose’s open and cheerful expression, but it was at least recognisable as a cousin. A fifth cousin of a disgraced forebear. Bose continued, ‘You have faith in our mission, then? You see a happy conclusion ahead?’

Cabal thought of the Silver Key in his bag and pushed his face another few millimetres. The muscles creaked a little, but it had been some time since he had felt something akin to joy. ‘Yes, Bose. I think with a little caution and circumspect prudence, combined with the will to take immediate action when the need arises, this could all go very well.’ He looked on towards the river. ‘Do those look like clifftops over there?’