Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

Almost a minute passed.

Johannes Cabal rolled onto his back and slowly drew the knife from his clothes. He’d been very, very lucky. The blade had scraped obtusely across his side, the waistcoat and shirt having tangled and deflected it. He threw the bloodied knife on the grass in disgust, his gloves quickly joining it. He probed at the wound with his fingertips and winced. Very lucky. He stanched the cut with his handkerchief and applied pressure while he tried to reorder his thoughts. He looked at the blood on his free hand. What had come over him? Violence was loathsome but occasionally necessary; he had no problems with that. But this? He’d been standing there talking like an idiot, Barrow had rather unwisely given away too much (How had he learned the truth of the carnival? No matter, there were more important things to attend to), and, the next thing he knew, he’d had his knife in his hand and was bearing down on Barrow like a member of one of these childish street gangs he’d heard tell of. It was so unlike him. Of course, Barrow would have to go, but it could have been done with a little more forethought. Now he was off and running and spreading fear and apprehension, and it was almost as if Cabal was working against himself.

“Oh,” he said sharply. “I see.”

A few minutes later, Cabal appeared at the popcorn stand and helped himself to the salt tub with bloodied fingers. Outstanding orders for cartons promptly all changed from salted to sweet. “I abjure thee,” he snapped furiously, and threw the salt over his left shoulder. The fascinated onlookers could have sworn they heard a yelp from thin air. Cabal straightened up slightly as if a weight had been lifted from him. The pervasive taste of aniseed left his palate. “Right, where’s Bones?” he demanded of the popcorn lady before winding his way off through the crowd.

Down in Hell, Ratuth Slabuth watched with polite interest as Mimble Scummyskirts, an imp of notorious and incandescent fury, washed her smarting eyes with warm saline. “That is sterile, isn’t it?”

“’Ow the fenk should I know, eh?” replied Mimble with the easy lack of delicacy that would result in rapid promotion up the noncommissioned ranks. “Wot a sod. Jus’ doin’ me pisking job, and — bof! — I gets a face full of kelching salt. Exorcised, sweet as kiss-me-skenk! The parbo!” [5] The worrying thing was that every one of Mimble’s oaths and curses actually meant something, and every one was far, far worse than anything cleared for release into the world of men. “There are limits, you know,” Satan had said.

“Don’t give yourself airs,” said Ratuth Slabuth. “You’re not actually capable of possession, so it wasn’t really an exorcism. You could only colour his actions, not control them.” And a fine mess you made of that, he thought. “It was more of an eviction.”

Mimble left General Slabuth in no doubt that the difference between eviction and exorcism was a petty one, of concern only to armchair generals who never got off their big fat —

At which point Ratuth Slabuth, who was nowhere near as refined as he pretended, squashed Mimble Scummyskirts into an aniseed-flavoured smear with his thumb and went to report to Satan, leaving the smear to think really bad thoughts for the six hundred and sixty-six years it would take to re-form.

Behind the carnival, the freaks gathered. Cabal had returned to the train for a chance to apply a hasty dressing to his wound and a quick change of clothes. He lifted the lid of the blanket box with the toe of his shoe, but Horst wasn’t at home. Typical, never around when he was needed. He dropped the lid with a bang and returned his attention to getting his thin black cravat just so. By the time he’d finished, they were waiting for him outside.

Cabal stood on the topmost step and addressed the search parties. “Good evening. We have two serious problems. Firstly, the carnival will cease to exist in a little over an hour’s time, and we are still one soul short of the target. Secondly, we have a man on the loose who knows far more about our business than is good for us and, therefore, him. This man will cause trouble if he isn’t located and dealt with as soon as possible. Mr. Bones?”

“Yo?” The thin man waved from the back of the group.

“Has Barrow managed to get out of the grounds?”

“No way, sah. We had a couple of peeks of him, but, soon as he sees us comin’, he’s out of there like a bat out of Hell.” He frowned. “Never did understand that expression. They don’t have bats in Hell.”

“Mr. Bones,” said Cabal, “a little focus, please?”

Bones focussed. “I got Joey on the main gate. Barrow ain’t going anywhere.”

“Good. Have you organised search teams?”

“Sure have, two of ’em. Dolby, Holby, and Colby from the Ferris wheel, because they know what he looks like — ”

“Hold on. Who’s running the wheel in that case?”

“Oh, a couple of Maleficarus’ old crew are handlin’ that.”

Cabal paused. He didn’t like leaving any of the former inmates of Brichester Asylum to their own convoluted devices unless absolutely necessary.

At the Ferris wheel, the two men watched it spin endlessly.

“You see?” said one. “It never ends. Wheels within wheels. Infinite angles.”

“Yes! Yes! Ouroboros incarnate! Swallowing his own tail!”

“Swallowtail?” said the first. “Where? Where?”

“Excuse me,” called a woman from the wheel. “Could you possibly let us off now? We’ve been going around for about half an hour and it’s getting a bit boring.”

The lunatics ignored her. “The circle is complete!”

“Card ten, the wheel of fortune!”

“Ten! Very, very significant!”

“Yes! No! Isn’t that twenty-three?”

Cabal shrugged inwardly. They’d be all right. “And the other team?”

“Some of the Things from the Ghost Train — we got Dennis and Denzil fillin’ in while they gone,” Bones added quickly, anticipating Cabal’s question.

“What we have here,” said the skeleton driver of the hastily retitled Parapsychological Perplex Experience, “is some sort of demarcation problem. Now, I wouldn’t dream of turning up on the footplate of your locomotive. You’re supposed to be behaving ghostily, in there.”

He pointed into the shadowed entrance of the ride. Dennis and Denzil, firmly wedged into the tiny train at the head of the ride, followed the gesture, their necks creaking like new shoes. They turned back to the Ghost Train’s driver and shook their heads, squik, squik, squik . There was the faintest sound of something rolling around inside of Denzil’s skull.

“All right,” said the driver, “you don’t want to do this in a civilised way, we’ll do it yours.” Denzil and Dennis looked at each other and nodded triumphantly. Squik, squik, squik.

“Konga?” called the driver at the top of the structure. The enormous gorilla automaton who sat on top of the ride and threatened passers-by with a papier-mâché boulder — at least, the passers-by hoped it was papier-mâché — leaned over the parapet and looked inquisitively at the driver. Upside down, it looked a lot more threatening for some reason. “I’m having a little trouble with these two,” finished the driver, waving a thumb at Dennis and Denzil. The giant gorilla slid a contemptuous glare at them, bared its impressive fangs, and made a basso profundo growl that shook their teeth in their dry sockets. What was left of Dennis’s and Denzil’s eyes widened with much cracking of varnish.