Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

“I understood that you’d retired from the police force, Mr. Barrow,” said Cabal. He made a curious motion with his wrist as he drew the knife along the side of the pot, and every last vestige of cream was neatly wiped from the blade, as if it had been freshly washed. He drove the tip into the jam, took a blob encasing a strawberry back to the scone, and deposited it neatly in the middle. The result was so precise it looked like the work of a machine. Cabal repeated the action with the knife and laid it, spotless, on his side plate. Cabal raised the scone to his lips. “Old habits die hard, it appears.” He took a careful bite.

Barrow persevered. “You’re a very serious man, Mr. Cabal. You don’t strike me as somebody given to frivolity. If I were playing a game of matching people to their jobs, I wouldn’t have got you down a carny-man in a thousand years. Not ten thousand.”

“Not a game you should play for money, then. As a matter of interest — ”

“A doctor,” cut in Barrow, anticipating the question.

“I’ve impressed you with my flashing bedside manner, then?”

“A pathologist, to be exact.”

Cabal studied him seriously. “You see me working with the dead?”

Barrow poured himself some more tea. “It’s hardly a great leap in imagination, now, is it? Look at you. You go around with a face like a wet Wednesday, dressed all in black, and, frankly, lacking something in charisma. Even funeral directors have to be able to deal with people.” Barrow smiled. Cabal didn’t. “The funny thing is that, in my experience, pathologists are often nice, jolly people. They do an ugly job, but that’s all it is, a job. They leave it behind when they go home of an evening. You, though. I don’t think you’ve ever left work at work.”

“No,” said Cabal. “I always take my work home. I’ve got several clowns under the bed, and a man who can belch the anthems of twelve nations in the wardrobe.”

“Ah, but, as I’ve already said, is that your work?”

“Of course. With the help of my brother, I run a carnival. You can’t have failed to notice it. It’s that big thing down by the railway station.” He finished his tea and put the cup down onto its saucer with a harsh click . “Which is where I should be now. Thank you for the tea, Mr. Barrow. It was very pleasant. You must visit the carnival in reciprocation. Perhaps, for a change, when it’s open.” He produced a card from thin air (“Learn a couple of conjuring tricks,” Horst had told him. “People like that sort of thing”) and gave it to Barrow. “A complimentary ticket, courtesy of the management.”

Barrow accepted the card with a nod. As he read the few words on its face he asked, “May I have another? My daughter, Leonie, loves the fair.”

Cabal produced another two tickets. “Come one, come all,” he said without inflection. “Bring your wife as well.”

Barrow took one ticket from Cabal’s hand and put it away with the first one. “I’m a widower, Mr. Cabal.”

Cabal put the extra ticket in his pocket (it was intended to vanish, but he’d had so little practice at this trick that, to the untrained eye, it simply looked as if he was putting the ticket away in his pocket). “I’m sorry,” he said. He seemed to mean it.

“Thank you,” said Barrow.

Cabal spent a long moment refreshing their cups, his intention to leave apparently forgotten. Once more, he didn’t ask Barrow how he took his. As he plucked slices of lemon from their little plate with the tongs, he asked quietly, “Do you miss her?” He didn’t look at Barrow as he said it.

“Every day,” replied Barrow, accepting his cup back. “Every day. Life can be cruel.”

“It wasn’t life that took her away from you,” said Cabal, looking at him directly. There was an even intensity in his eyes, like the gaze of a man who walks into a room where he knows he is going to see something awful and has braced himself for it.

“Fate, then?”

“Death. Death is your enemy. My enemy. Life can be cruel, that’s true. Death is always cruel.”

“Death can be a release,” said Barrow. Watching Cabal talk now, he had a sensation reminiscent of watching somebody open a Chinese puzzle box. Part of it was wonder at the complexity. Part of it was curiosity as to what lay inside.

“Release?” said Cabal venomously. “Release be damned. That’s just doctors’ talk for failure. ‘At least they’re at peace now,’ ‘They’ve gone to a better place,’ all those lies. You know what’s waiting?”

“I’ll know soon enough,” said Barrow. “I’ll just enjoy life while I can.”

Cabal leaned forward. “I know now,” he said, caution gone. “One place is run by a bored, disappointed sadist. The other … Spiritual transfiguration, do you know what that means? It means having everything that you ever were stripped away, bars of light, too intense to look upon.” He unconsciously fingered the smoked glasses in his breast pocket. “Homogeneity incarnate. Can you imagine that? That’s what the Heavenly Host is, countless thousands of bars of light, souls burning, all the same. Your personality lost forever. Immortal souls, hah! It’s the final death. Sacrificed to a mania for order.” He looked around at the middle distance, his disgust a palpable thing. “Lambs to the slaughter.”

Barrow put his cup down. “Why do you hate death so much?”

Cabal seemed to rein himself in. “I don’t hate death. It’s not a person. There’s no grim skeletal figure with a scythe. I try to avoid hating abstracts, it’s a waste of effort.”

“That’s not what it sounded like a moment ago. You sounded like a man who would kill death if he could.”

Cabal checked his pocket watch. “I despise waste. That’s all.”

“That’s not all,” said Barrow, and instantly knew that he’d overstepped a line.

Cabal got to his feet and straightened his coat. “Good day, Mr. Barrow,” he said with stiff formality. “I’ve enjoyed our little chat, but I have things to attend to back at the carnival. If you will forgive me?” He turned on his heel and went out.

Barrow shook his head. He had the strongest feeling that, whoever Cabal really needed forgiveness from, it wasn’t him. He’d met all sorts in his time, but never anybody quite like Johannes Cabal, and he was beginning to think fate had been kind to him up to now. He dropped some money on the table and followed Cabal.

Outside, he saw Cabal walking determinedly in the direction of the station. He was debating whether to follow when he was arrested by a cry of “Dad!” He turned to see his daughter, Leonie, leaving the hardware shop. He instinctively knew that she had been buying the hinge for the shed that he had complained about yesterday with the words “I’ll have to get around to that one day.” With Leonie, “one day” was “tomorrow,” except on those occasions when it was “today.”

She came over, smiling with the joys, and Barrow, who had the occasional pang of existential angst, was reassured that his life had been worthwhile. Oddly, though, something lay darkly over the familiar happiness that Leonie inspired in him, like a single small but impenetrably dark cloud on the face of the sun. He turned his head slowly in Cabal’s direction.

Cabal was standing stock-still on the far side of the village green, staring at him. The intensity, the unblinking directness of the gaze unnerved Barrow.

He’d once been faced with a rabid dog, an animal that he knew could kill him slowly and agonisingly if it bit him just once. They had stared un-blinkingly at each other, not ten feet apart, as Barrow slowly, and by touch alone, broke, reloaded, and closed his shotgun. It had continued to stare at him as he brought the gun to his shoulder and sighted carefully down the double barrels. The sensation that he had felt, a horrible sensation of the dog’s burnt and chaotic mind communicating its madness to him through its gaze like a basilisk, still woke him in the early hours in a cold sweat. As Cabal stood motionless, staring, glaring, some of that sensation returned to Barrow, and he shuddered involuntarily.