Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

The good folk of Penlow on Thurse had been brought up to believe that it was rude to refuse a gift, so they politely filed in under the archway of gleaming painted woodwork and light bulbs. Barrow walked until he stood beneath the arch and looked up. For a second, it seemed to say Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here , but after a moment it definitely proclaimed how the crowned heads of here, there, and everywhere regarded the carnival as ideal entertainment for those of inherited money and limited gene pool, this being regarded as a fine advertisement in some quarters. Barrow decided that he had been mistaken but that his subconscious was trying to tell him something. Forewarned and forearmed, he entered.

Johannes Cabal, necromancer and unwilling carny-huckster, watched the crowd and fretted. This was their penultimate night, and things just weren’t… right. He couldn’t put his finger on it. The crowd seemed to hang together, moving like an extended family from tent to ride to sideshow. Beneath the constant calliope music and the cheerful banter of the barkers lay near silence. People just stopped and looked and moved on. There was a small sensation when somebody bought a toffee apple from a concession stand. “What’s wrong with them? I thought I was supposed to be a hero now. Why are they still so suspicious?”

Horst appeared at his elbow, where he most definitely hadn’t been a second before. “They’re nervous. I may have given them an explanation for the station, but that doesn’t mean that they have to like it. This place reminds them that something weird has happened, something inexplicable and out of the ordinary. Face it, Johannes, I doubt anything out of the ordinary has happened in this place since some passing peasant thought it was a clever place to start a town in year dot. Did you see that fuss over a toffee apple? They couldn’t have been more astounded if we were selling lark tongues in aspic. This place may be a washout.”

“It can’t be a washout. It’s the last port of call. Two souls. I have to get two souls or this whole thing has been a waste of time.”

“And ninety-eight souls.”

“Ninety-nine. My life is forfeit.”

Horst looked at him sharply. “What? You never said anything about that!”

“Strangely, it wasn’t the sort of thing that I like to dwell on. What does it matter? If I don’t get my soul back, then I can’t continue my researches.”

“You just leave a trail of metaphysical disaster behind you, don’t you? You made a mess of your life, my life, however many people you doomed in the eight years and thirty-seven days I was stuck in the cemetery, and now you want to spread the good word to another hundred. And for what?”

“You know damn well.”

Exasperated, Horst shook his head. “No, no, I don’t.” He wagged his finger in his brother’s face. “I used to know. I even sympathised, idiot that I am, and look what it got me. But for what now? I don’t know. I don’t think you do. I think you just carry on this way because if you stopped and asked yourself, ‘Gosh, Johannes, why am I such a total shit to everybody?’ I don’t think you’d be able to give yourself an honest answer.”

Cabal flared. He slapped Horst’s hand to the side. “I don’t care what you think. I am supremely unconcerned by what you think.”

Horst shrugged. “Great. So long as we understand each other.”

“No, no, we don’t understand each other. Or at least you don’t understand me. You never concentrated on anything in your life. You don’t understand what it is to be dedicated. You don’t understand what it means to go to sleep and wake up with the same thought and for that thought to always be there.”

“That’s not dedication.”

“No?”

“No, that’s obsession.”

“And this is your big effort to understand me, is it? A label. I shouldn’t have expected anything but.”

“It’s not a label. Look at yourself. Ye gods, Johannes, you were going to be a doctor! You wanted to help people.”

“Doctors. Frauds and quacks. Just trying to hold back the dark and full of pat excuses when they fail. Too stupid or too scared to bring back the light. Not me. Not me! I’ll be the modern Prometheus no matter what I have to do, no matter how dark I have to make it before I can find the secret.”

“And what if there is no secret to find? What if it’s beyond mortals? What then? What about you?”

“There has to be,” said Cabal, but he seemed very old and very tired as he said it. “There has to be.”

Horst took his younger brother by the shoulders. “Listen to me. We’ve got twenty-four hours — less, allowing for the sunlight — but we’ve got time. We can think of a way out of this.” Cabal just blinked uncomprehendingly. “These contracts always have a hole in them somewhere. I think it must be traditional. We burn the contracts, get you out of this wager, and then find a hole in the contract you signed when you sold your soul.”

“There’s no hole in my contract,” said Cabal. “I signed my soul over in return for the tenets of necromancy.”

“And that’s all?”

“I don’t know. ‘The secret of life after death,’ the usual stuff.”

“That’s what you asked for?”

“Something like that.”

“Then that’s easy! Don’t you understand? You wanted the secret of life after death. All you’ve got is a few formulae that allow you to bring people back as parodies of what they were. And you’re the one who’s had to do most of the work to get that far. They failed to deliver their side of the bargain!”

“That’s just quibbling with definitions.”

“Oh, come on! You think Satan would miss an opportunity like that if the situation were reversed?”

“What would I want with Satan’s soul?”

“Not what I meant. We’ve got him. It’s a philosophical minefield!”

Cabal had a brief mental image of Aristotle walking halfway across an open field before unexpectedly disappearing in a fireball. Descartes and Nietzsche looked on appalled. He pulled himself together. “But I was given the power to invoke the formulae. That was the real boon.”

“It’s got you nowhere. Give it up. Start again.”

“I … I don’t know.” He tried to work out how much research it would require to recoup mundanely the ground that he had lost to the diabolic. It seemed a very great deal.

“Johannes. Do it. It’s redemption.”

To Horst Cabal, his brother, Johannes, looked like he had when he was six and his dog died. The same numb inability to understand what had happened. Johannes Cabal looked at the floor and the night sky and, finally, at his brother. He seemed very lost. “I don’t know,” he whispered.

Horst opened his arms. He hadn’t held his little brother since he was a child. They had never been close, and Cabal’s admission that he’d hated Horst had explained a lot. But even now and even here, blood was still thicker than water.

“Hey! Boss!” Bones came out of nowhere. In the moment that Horst’s gaze flicked from Johannes Cabal to Mr. Bones and back again, his brother had vanished and been replaced by Cabal the necromancer.

“What?” snapped Cabal.

“I think we got a live one,” Bones said, grinning widely. Horst sighed. The moment had gone. Up until now, he’d quite liked Bones, with his easy smile and bonhomie. Up until now, it had been very easy to forget that he was nothing more than a tiny bit of Hell that had been brought to Earth and put in a boater. That smile had changed everything. They were talking about taking somebody’s soul, and it was a cause for delight.

“Where?”

“The penny arcade. She’s just wallowin’ around and lookin’ pretty damn miserable. We gotta have somethin’ she wants.”