Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

Cabal turned, the whistle dying on his lips. “What do you mean?”

“You, whistling ‘Happy Days Are Here Again.’ You have a perverse sense of humour.” Horst pulled on his coat and top hat. “If you’ll forgive me, I don’t like the atmosphere in here very much.” The door opened and shut, and Johannes Cabal was alone once more, in all senses of the word.

Cabal looked at the staves with disbelief. He leaned forward over the notebook and rested his fingertip on the first note. “Hap-py days are here a-gain,” he sang quietly as his finger tapped from note to note. Yes, Horst was quite right. In abrupt disgust, he tore the pages out and threw them in the wastepaper basket. “Very funny. Most amusing.” He pulled on his coat and hat and went to find Horst. Somewhere, somebody laughed.

Horst was walking in long-legged strides between the stands, stalls, and sideshows, pointedly ignoring the riggers that approached him asking for clarifications of his half-written plans. Johannes Cabal had no trouble finding him; he just followed the trail of disgruntled men with wilting bits of paper in their hands. He caught up with Horst by the Mysteries of Egypt, where Cleopatra had managed to buttonhole him. As Cabal approached, he could hear her haranguing Horst.

“Woss all this, then? Eh?” she squalled, waving a sheet of paper under Horst’s nose.

“It’s your revised script,” said Horst with uncharacteristic irritation. “Learn it. Now.”

“Woss wrong wiv me ol’ script, eh?” She changed gear and her voice became mellifluous, sensuous. “I” — she breathed the word — “am Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, mistress” — this with a significant look — “of the Nile. Come with me and discover the pleasures … and the terrors of the ancient world.” She went from smoky seductress to Billingsgate fishwife in much less than a second. “There! W’a were wrong wiv that, eh? I mean, that were the dog’s bollocks, that were. Now you’ve given me this crap!” She waved the sheet in his face. “Woss all this shite ’baht dynasties an’ stuff? People dun wonna know ’baht that! They wanna ’ear ’baht shaggin’ an’ murder an’ people ’avin’ their brains fished aht their noses an’ stuff!”

Horst was never impolite to ladies. Unfortunately for Cleopatra, she wasn’t only definitely not a lady, she wasn’t even technically human.

“Shut up,” said Horst in a cold hiss. He sounded a lot like his brother. “Just shut up. Come midnight, you’re dust and ashes, just like everybody else in this travelling nightmare, so I really don’t care what you think. You learn the script I’ve given you and you deliver it properly. If I come around this show later and find you delivering the old one, or deliberately making a bad job of the new one, you’re not even going to make it to midnight. Do you understand me?”

Cleopatra blinked. “All right,” she said in a very small voice.

“Horst,” called Cabal as he approached, “Horst, what has got into you?” Cleopatra looked fearfully at the pair of them. “You are dismissed,” said Cabal, and she ran off into the sideshow like a frightened kohl-smirched bunny.

“What has got into me?” Horst looked at the dark sky. When he looked back down, his expression was one of purest animosity. “Where do I begin?”

Cabal’s mind worked quickly to isolate an event that might have caused such a rapid deterioration in relations. “This is about that woman last night, isn’t it? The one with the child?”

“Yes, this is about the woman last night. The one with the child. What did you do to her? What dirty little stunt did you pull?”

“I granted her wish. That’s all.”

“And she signed over her soul for it.”

“No. She didn’t. She signed over her soul so that I’d take the wish away again. She wanted the child dead, Horst. She’s no angel.”

Horst waved his finger in Cabal’s face. “No, she didn’t want her baby dead. For crying out loud, Johannes, she just wanted a little help. Couldn’t you see that? Couldn’t you see that she just wanted a little help? She needed a babysitter, not a plan for murder.”

“I. Don’t. Care. What. She. Needed,” said Cabal, feeling his temper stirring. “She was prepared to sign for what she got. That’s all that matters.”

“‘That’s all that matters’? That is not all that matters, by a very long chalk. She’s a person, a human being, a living woman. Not just another name on one of your forms. You’ve ruined her life, you know that? She knows what’s waiting for her now, hanging over her.”

“I didn’t hear you make this kind of fuss over any — ”

“Pay attention, Johannes! The difference is that she hadn’t done anything wrong until you railroaded her into it. You! You’ve finally become what you were always meant to be.”

Cabal’s sixth sense belatedly started tingling. He had the faint impression that somebody was making a fool of him, had been making a fool of him for the last year, somebody who smelled quite strongly of brimstone. “What do you mean?” he asked cautiously.

“You are such a fool,” said Horst. “That’s what this whole exercise has really been about. I thought you’d have worked it out a long, long time ago. Old Hob down below isn’t interested in a pile of souls that he would have got anyway. He wanted to push you into taking one. Corrupting one. That business with Billy Butler was to make you desperate, make you forget that somewhere inside” — Horst’s voice cracked slightly — “there’s a good man. My little brother, Johannes. That’s all gone now. You’re not trying to beat the devil anymore. You’re doing his work for him. You’re not my brother anymore. I can’t… I won’t help you anymore.” Horst turned and started to walk away.

“Horst?” Cabal’s voice was small, disbelieving. Horst braced himself against sentiment, kept walking. “Horst, I need you. I can’t do this alone. I’m so close. Horst!” His brother’s stride never faltered. Johannes Cabal’s temper was a volatile quantity at the best of times, and he could feel it riding in his gullet now. This time, however, it was different.

There was something else there, a blossoming flower of easy violence that flooded up through his chest and found expression on his tongue, a faint taste of aniseed. “You will help me, Horst,” he said, his voice stronger, “or you’ll stay the way you are now, forever.”

Horst stopped. He stood still a long moment and then turned. “What,” he said quietly, “did you just say?”

You have power over him , thought Cabal, although part of him wondered if somebody else was doing his thinking for him. He can’t talk to you like that . “I said, you’ll do what you’re told or you can stay a parasite for the rest of time.”

Horst took a moment to consider his words. He walked right up to his brother until they were nose to nose and said, “Go fuck yourself, Johannes.” There was a sudden breeze as air rushed into the space that used to be full of Horst. Cabal looked around, blinking. He was quite alone.

Who needs him? said a small voice in his heart. You’re the man with the plan. Get to it. One last soul needed. Horst was just holding you back with all his stupid little scruples. Now you don’t have to pussyfoot around looking for somebody who wants to give their soul away. Now you can find a likely candidate and takeit.

Frank Barrow moved with surprising stealth through the shadows behind the sideshows. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he was damn sure that it wasn’t in plain sight. He’d turned up at the turnstiles, handed over his complimentary ticket, noticed that almost everybody else in the queue had one, too, and had then entered the carnival ground with the sullen expression of somebody who expected to be entertained. He’d stood by a ginnel formed between the Parapsychological Perplex Experience (the Ghost Train) and the Sociopathic Mind (a Chamber of Horrors stuffed to the rafters with waxworks of infamous murderers) [4] Several of the waxworks, studied closely, could be seen to breathe, blink, and appear rather nervous. This was because they were the real things. A strawberry-picking expedition for the serial-killer wing of Laidstone Prison had proved a sad disappointment for the progressive governor. The carnival just happened to be nearby at the time, and in return for a place to hide, the escaped convicts had naturally been required to fill in a few forms. Fair’s fair, after all. Cabal had somehow neglected to mention that their bolthole was going to vanish within the year. Ah well. and made a great show of winding his watch. The instant he wasn’t observed, he’d faded into the background. Now he shook the rust off his old shadowing skills and saw what he might see. He’d stumbled upon the Cabal brothers having some sort of argument but hadn’t been able to get close enough to find out what it had been about. An odd thing, though: there had been a point when he’d been sure that Horst was about to punch Johannes, Barrow had blinked, and Johannes had suddenly been alone. He wasn’t quite sure where Horst had got to, and, judging by the way he’d been casting about, neither had Johannes. Then Johannes Cabal had paused, and a very unpleasant smile had crept across his face, like a melanoma in time-lapse. It was another odd thing in and of itself, because Cabal had looked very different for some reason, almost like a different person. Then, full of a sense of purpose that Barrow found alarming in its suddenness, Cabal had strode off into the carnival’s main thoroughfare.