Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute (13 page)

‘How’d you know?’

‘It is a principle of the Dreamlands that themes of folklore are followed, even if they are altered or corrupted. Oracles and soothsayers are associated with shunned places. Therefore it seemed rational to seek out such a place. Given the predilection of ghouls to populate old graveyards and cemeteries in both worlds, I guessed their quarter would represent such a shunned place.’ The impression of being oddly looked at had not diminished, although its timbre had changed. ‘Well, you did ask,’ said Cabal, perhaps a little tetchily.

The mourner looked at him a moment longer, then started striking attitudes once more, albeit at an accelerated pace to catch up with the procession. When they were back in place, he said, ‘There’s supposed to be a witch.’

‘A witch,’ Cabal repeated. He shrugged. ‘Good enough.
When you say
witch
, do you mean the sort with a cauldron and potions, or just a mad old lady who feeds stray cats?’

‘How should I know? Never been up there. But there
is
supposed to be a witch.’

A witch, then, would have to do. Cabal took leave of his short career as an amateur mourner with directions to the purportedly doom-haunted old cemetery in the north-eastern quadrant of the necropolis, and set off at a swift stride. Finding the right place had taken longer than he had anticipated and the sun was already low in the sky. While he truly did not fear the ghouls, he equally truly had a rational concern about being near one of their warrens after sunset. Between threats and a large Webley, he could keep a horde of them back for hours, but threats and a less immediate engine of extermination such as his sword offered no such certainty.

A decision to forgo the directions in an attempt to cut corners turned out to be unwise, and he wasted still more time while he backtracked first to where he had made the rash decision, and then to the circus. The shadows were long indeed by the time Cabal finally arrived at the old cemetery, where ghouls reputedly cavorted and a witch made her home.

The city of Hlanith had stood in the Dreamlands for as long as men have dreamed, and they have been dreaming for a very, very long time. It was a different place then, of course; crude and barbaric as those who dreamed it were crude and barbaric, but even from the first, it had known death. The necropolis was just a plot of land, then, in which the dead were interred with a few grave goods, their resting places marked with sticks and rocks and bones. Over time, the sticks and bones were discarded as too ephemeral in the former case, and too
attractive to the local scavenging dogs in the latter. This left the stones, which grew larger, eventually sporting inscriptions of differing measures of accuracy, sincerity and spelling. These levels of increasing sophistication had travelled out, like ripples, from this original site until the differences became aesthetic and modish rather than fundamental. Seen from on high, however, the original burial ground still stood out like a black wart on a grey face. It had been shunned when it was first marked out, and it was shunned ground now, ancient, primal, dangerous.

There had been sundry ill-omened attempts to rehabilitate the area down the centuries. Every few generations, somebody would take it into their head that the ideal place for their inhumation or that of a respected family member, friend or client would be the oldest part of the necropolis. The builders would enter cautiously at dawn, and stampede out at dusk, spending the meantime erecting whatever tomb or crypt or mausoleum had seemed like such a good idea in the architect’s office. After the things were built, and occupied, they were rarely visited again when it had become plain that, rather than civilising the atavistic nature of the place, the new structures might as well have been built in a war zone. So, abandoned if still remembered, these tombs, crypts and mausolea stood around like gentry who had inadvertently wandered into a rough pub, and there they grew grubbier as the years passed.

Johannes Cabal stood at the edge of the old cemetery and paused to take in the ambience of the place. The last shunned burial ground he had been in had been more than two years before, an unusually long period between shunned burial grounds in his working life. That one had been beautiful in its way, misty and artful in its slow, entropic descent into ruin. It
had also borne an air of waiting for death, of hungering for new inmates, of taking the role of a great pointing skeletal hand in a misty, artful
memento mori
. It had not been a pleasant place to dawdle for reasons beyond its aesthetics, but it had never felt especially malign.

This old cemetery, on the other hand, reeked of malevolence. There were no true paths through it; nor had there ever been. Just jumble and tumble, weeds and briars, markers and ancient bones, some belonging to local scavenger dogs who had allowed their hunger to override their sense that the nature of this land was changing. The newer structures stood sloped and grimy, overwhelmed and embarrassed by their incongruity in this place of primordial death. Some had already collapsed, and from where he stood Cabal could see a smashed marble sarcophagus on its side amid the ruin of the tomb once built to hold it. The sarcophagus was empty, which did not surprise him. In this place, it had probably been emptied within a day of the funeral ceremony. To the ghouls, these structures were not hallowed resting places: they were larders.

Cabal loosened his sword in its scabbard and walked slowly forward. He wished he had a canteen of water with him: he was probably going to be speaking ghoulish soon and it always played havoc with his larynx. Some water to moisten his vocal cords would have been very helpful. He took up station upon a mound, under which lay the mouldering bones of a tribal shaman, and waited as the shadows flowed like ghost blood and the darkness grew deep.

He was not sure when he first became aware of the eyes that watched him. They did not blink, nor did they move, but they watched him with unwavering intent as their faint
phosphorescent glow, an unhealthy greenish yellow, slowly made them stand out from the growing gloom. While there was still light in the sky, he knew they would be too cautious to attack, so he decided that now would be a good time to start his entreaty to them.

He cleared his throat, and began with a creditable attempt at meeping: ‘I bear you no ill-will. I only seek counsel with one who lives in this place. My name is—’

‘I have told you once before,’ said a ghoulish voice from the shadows, and it spoke in English. ‘I know who you are, Johannes Cabal.’

‘Ah,’ said Cabal, his concern at the reappearance of the ghoul who had spoken to him in Arkham at least slightly offset by his relief that he could speak a more civilised tongue. ‘
Guten Abend
. We meet again, it seems. You still have me at a disadvantage, though.’

‘Only one, Herr Cabal? You are surrounded by sixty of my brethren. Your disadvantages multiply.’

‘I have made provision for that,’ lied Cabal. ‘No, I am more interested in who you are.’

‘Who I am is what I am, and I am a ghoul. That is all there is to me, and I am content in that.’

‘Obviously I am delighted that you have found satisfaction in your current employment, but you hide in semantics. As you wish, then. Who
were
you?’

A pause. Then, ‘Does it matter?’

‘It might.’

Another pause. ‘I forget. It all seems a long time ago when I walked in the light, and ate burned meat . . .’ There was a liquid throaty growl from the other ghouls, a sound Cabal knew to denote disgust. From a race that routinely ate gamey
human cadavers, it wasn’t a sound that received much use. ‘. . . and vegetables.’ The liquid throaty growl sounded again, louder this time. Cabal noted that the Ghoulish language certainly maintained a higher level of incipient threat than human languages. It was hard to imagine sixty people managing to be so menacing while chorusing, ‘Eew . . .’

Cabal did not believe for an instant that the ghoul had truly forgotten its human identity, but they were inclined towards a wanton abstruseness. When one is a burrow-dwelling anthropophagist, one must seek entertainment wherever one can, so the ghouls had raised the sport of being mysterious to a level worthy of admittance to the Olympic Games. Not that they would ever actually turn up: they would just send some cryptic clues to the opening ceremony hinting that they might. Thus, this ghoul was almost certainly hiding its identity for some reason. That was comforting, as it implied that since the ghoul had a long-term plan for Cabal, it would not spoil it by eating him. At least, not by eating him prematurely. It was a toxic sort of guarantee but, for a man in Cabal’s profession, it was much better than he was used to.

As the ghoul did not wish to discuss its personal history at this juncture, Cabal decided that it was permissible to skip the pleasantries and get on to the real reason for his visit. ‘There is one who lives here . . . who I believe lives here.’

‘You speak of the witch,’ said the ghoul, barely before Cabal had finished. ‘Yes, she is here.’

Cabal was too shrewd to be elated by this statement: the ghoul had specifically not said that she lived there, only that she was there. It might mean nothing, or it might mean everything. ‘She lives here?’ he said, with some emphasis.

‘She lives,’ said the ghoul, and Cabal thought he had heard
a note of amusement.
Ah
, he thought.
So teasing people as to whether somebody’s alive or dead is what passes for humour in ghoul circles
. Then the ghoul said, ‘You must speak with her. It is your destiny.’

Cabal’s hackles rose slightly. In his experience, people who talked in terms of destiny were those without sufficient reason to be doing what they were doing. Not so very long ago he had suffered the misfortune of being in conversation with a military man intent on starting a war with his country’s neighbours. He had spoken in terms of destiny, too, because, if that had been forbidden him, he would have had to admit that his motives were little better than rape, pillage and seizing the land of others. Calling it ‘destiny’ made it seem so much more noble. So it has always been, and so it will always be.

As if understanding his reserve, the ghoul said, ‘If you prefer, it would be
wise
to speak with her.’

‘Just to be clear,’ said Cabal, ‘do you mean
wise
purely as in pertaining to wisdom, or was it just an implied threat, with a flavour of
or else
about it?’

There was another pause. Cabal thought he heard the ghoul sigh. ‘Which will induce you to speak to the witch, Johannes Cabal?’

Cabal thought about it for a moment. ‘Under the circumstances, either.’

‘Then it hardly matters, does it?’ The ghoul was beginning to sound angry now. ‘You are just as contrary as your reputation suggests.’

‘What reputation?’ asked Cabal, slightly taken aback. It counts for something when ghouls consider one
infra dig
.

‘Go beyond the jade pagoda and look for the firelight. You will go unmolested by my people, but go quickly.’

The glowing eyes vanished quickly in scatterings of pairs. In moments the sense of being observed lifted from Cabal and he knew the ghouls were gone.

Breathing a sigh that might have been of exasperation or might have been of relief, Cabal looked around until he found a pagoda a few yards into the clutter of tombs. It stood some six yards tall, and was decorated with great slabs of jade. One lay by the pagoda’s base, along with the tools that a foolish thief had used to remove it. It seemed that they had found to their cost that this particular part of the necropolis had no need for night-watchmen. Cabal walked slowly around it – pausing
en route
for a moment when something that he suspected was part of the thief crunched under his foot – and finally reached the rear of the structure.

The firelight was easily visible from there, flickering by a Grecian temple that had been built by students of Socrates, according to logical paradoxes rendered in architectural form. Given this provenance, it was no surprise that it had long since fallen over. Amid the tumbled columns, a figure sat upon a large bust of Socrates at his most disgruntled. She wore a black cloak that made her outline difficult to discern against the encroaching shadows, made deeper around her by the inconstant light from the fire. As Cabal approached, he saw she was wearing her cloak’s hood over her brow and eyes. He could see the pale skin and red lips of a young woman but little else.

‘Pardon me, madam,’ he said, in the uncertain tones of a store detective running in a dowager duchess, ‘are you, and I hesitate to use the term, a witch?’

She smiled, and while it was a pleasing smile in purely aesthetic terms, there was something knowing about it that he
did not like. It reminded him of the peasant girl with the lamb’s smile, not in appearance so much as in import. ‘What were you expecting, Johannes Cabal?’ she said. ‘Somebody uglier? Wartier?’ That smile again. ‘Sluttier?’

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘Do I know you?’

She shook her head slowly. ‘No. We have never met, although . . . although you may know me by reputation.’

Cabal grimaced. ‘It’s all reputations around here.’

‘Not around here. Back there,’ and he knew she was speaking of the waking world. ‘You need a clue. Very well. Do you recall the last little book of Darius?’

‘The
Opusculus V
? What of it?’ Realisation was sudden. ‘You? I . . .’ He somehow rallied his dignity in the face of astonishment. ‘Madam, I was very much under the impression that you were dead.’