George Martin - The Way of the Wizard

“I don’t know why you’re looking at me like that,” said Cabal, a faint German accent just discernible in his clipped and clearly enunciated speech. “This has nothing to do with me.”

Nor was he lying. Johannes Cabal had taken advantage of the town’s annual carnival weekend to carry out a little specialist shopping. While the crowds gathered on the streets to see the parade go by — this year with the exciting new innovation of enormous hydrogen balloons rendered in the form of newspaper cartoon characters and advertising mascots — Cabal had quietly entered the municipal mortuary through a back window and sequestered himself in the morgue, wherein he had intended to remove some footling bits of offal necessary to his researches. This simple plan had almost foundered once already; an alert police officer had seen Cabal slide down a back alley and had become suspicious. This was not a startling piece of detectively intuition; Cabal was a tall blond man of wan complexion, wearing a black suit and carrying a brown leather Gladstone bag. Though he was only in his late twenties, Cabal’s demeanour was not one of fun and frivolity, even on such an occasion. He had barely looked at the parade as it passed, beyond a glance at the great flying cartoon characters, and even these had only caused his lip to curl. Then he had looked both ways — failing to spot the policeman who had taken station in a doorway — before all but tip-toeing down the alley to the rear of the mortuary. Thus, while not quite wearing a striped shirt, mask, and carrying a bag marked “Swag,” Cabal had not been as surreptitious as he had hoped.

The officer, a Constable Copeland, had investigated the alley and, finding a window jemmied open, had crept inside. Unhappily for him, his creeping was not so very surreptitious either, and he had been laid low by a scientifically applied crowbar. When he had recovered consciousness, it was to discover himself tied and gagged and witness to Cabal’s attempted body part snatching… and the unexpected resurrection that thwarted it.

Cabal was most put out. First, the policeman turning up had put him off his stride, and now a dead man coming at him really was beyond the pale. “This is not normal,” he commented. Most people would doubtless have agreed, but most people were not necromancers for whom “normal” is a much broader category.

A whispering groan from beneath a sheet on the furthermost slab drew his attention. He watched the form beneath it stirring into a semblance of life even as the occupant of the next-closest table also begun to wheeze air into lungs unused for a day or two. Cabal considered quickly; he had five rounds remaining in his Webley, and a further six in his pocket, bundled together with an elastic band to prevent them rattling. There were four occupied slabs in the morgue, all of whose occupants were showing uncalled for signs of activity. He could probably stay and fight, but there was something untoward occurring here and he might need the ammunition later. Discretion, as was usually the way, would stand in for valour.

In three long strides he was by the policeman, pulling him to his feet and pushing him through the swinging double doors. He let the bound man sprawl to the floor, taking the moment to draw a switchblade that snapped open with a perfunctory clik . He quickly knelt by the policeman, who was regarding the sharp blade with some trepidation and, fearing the worst, began to struggle. Cabal was having none of it, and slapped Constable Copeland. “Don’t be a fool. If I wanted you dead, you would never have woken up.” The blade went in and sliced, and the policeman suddenly found his hands free. Cabal stood up, the ropes in his left hand, the blade in his right. He snapped the blade shut and dropped it back into his jacket pocket.

Shadows fell across the frosted glass in the upper halves of the morgue doors as Cabal turned back to them. He jammed his foot against the base of the doors as he fed the rope through the handles and quickly knotted them tight. He stepped away as the doors were roughly shoved from the far side. Through the glass, four outlines crowded around the door, pushing.

The policeman had drawn his own penknife and was just finishing sawing through the ropes around his ankles. His gag, his own handkerchief, hung around his neck. “What’s happening?” he demanded hoarsely. “What have you done?”

Cabal didn’t turn, but continued to watch the activity of the shadows. “To answer your second question first, beyond saving your life, I have done nothing. To answer your first, I am not yet sure.”

The shoving had quietened down, and Cabal was just wondering if they had given up when all four shapes rammed the door simultaneously. The rope grew tight under the impact, but held. The shadows became blurs, then sharpened as they rammed the door together again. The rope, tied with a knot that would distress Houdini, held firm. “Ah,” Cabal said. “Now that is interesting.”

“You,” said the policeman, searching for a rock to base his sanity upon and settling upon duty, “are under arrest.”

Cabal sighed, pulled his revolver from his bag and waggled it in a more or less threatening way. “You are being a fool again, officer. I truly am not only the least of your worries at present, but possibly your only chance for salvation. Listen… ”

They listened, and beyond the rhythmic thump of undead bouncing off morgue doors could be heard distant screams. Cabal noted the policeman’s expression of dawning realisation with a thin smile. “We are not the only ones having trouble with the walking dead.”

From the topmost storey of the mortuary, they were able to look out across the town square, and the massacre that was occurring there. The carnival crowd had only recently become aware that there was something very horrible occurring within it. It had started when first a scattering of people across the town had collapsed, including many in the crowd. A doctor had struggled through to the nearest victim and done his best, but it was too late. Too late in all manner of ways as it turned out when the dead man’s eyes had flickered open. The happy cries of his family sounded a lot less happy when he grabbed the doctor by the throat and throttled him in a few convulsive twists.

Then the doctor had gotten up too, and the bystanders decided they were not in the safest place. But, hemmed in by the surrounding crowd, there was nowhere to run.

“My God!” cried the policeman.

“Oh? Where?” replied Cabal, looking about with affected surprise.

The policeman glared at him. “I have to help!”

For his part, Cabal now leaned on the chest high windowsill with both arms flat, his chin resting on the uppermost, watching the chaos below with the detachment of an entomologist watching red ants fight black. The policeman waited a long moment for some sort of response before finally giving up and turning angrily on his heel.

“This helping ,” said Cabal, just loudly enough to be heard. He did not look away from the window. “This helping to which you refer, I assume you intend to help the living?” Cabal took the pause in footsteps to mean he had the policeman’s attention. “It’s just that your current course of action can only help the walking dead I see out there, by inevitably bolstering their numbers. Come here.”

With some reluctance, the footfalls grew closer until the policeman joined him at the window.

Cabal lifted his head and made a small wave of his hand to take in the moiling mixture of violent dead and unhappy living. “Observe, constable. What do you see?”

“Carnage,” said the policeman hoarsely. His mouth was dry and when he licked his lips, it didn’t help at all. “Terror.”

“Yes, yes,” said Cabal impatiently. “Very picturesque terms but hardly scientific.”