Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

The main door closed with a final click. Barrow didn’t know whether this was a good thing or not. Layla, on the other hand, seemed to know very well. She rolled onto her back and straightened one leg and ankle, admiring the way the light reflected along her thigh, shin, and foot in a single, unbroken bar. She slowly turned her head until she was looking directly at Barrow.

“Hello, Francis,” she said.

Barrow decided it was a bad thing after all. He stepped back from the curtain and opened the rear door of his covert entry. Barely a few inches wide, the door was abruptly slammed shut from the other side, and he heard the lock turn. He rattled the door and heard a laugh. Then he heard the bodyguard say, “Have a nice time, Mr. Barrow,” and walk away, laughing the whole while.

Barrow was one of those people blessed with a mind that works faster under stress. It was working very rapidly now, looking for some sort of handle on Layla’s likely personality, her possible behaviour. In his uniformed days, he’d been involved in a raid on — delightful old-fashioned phrase — a house of ill-repute. The girls — no matter what their age, they were always “girls” — had shown a certain ennui at the raid and sat around on the stairs smoking and chatting amiably with the young and easily embarrassed coppers. Barrow had been struck by their marked lack of obvious sexuality; despite various stages of undress, leather hip boots, and bullwhips, despite the girls in school uniforms, nurse uniforms, and, confusingly, police uniforms, the house still gave the impression of just being a place of work. They rented out their time and their bodies and their theatrical skills, but that was all. He’d got talking to a tall brunette who wore a long peignoir over some article of clothing that creaked threateningly when she moved. She’d asked him for a light, and while they waited for developments in the raid, which seemed to have stalled for some reason, they talked about this and that. Feeling fired by a faint moral indignation, as he was, after all, a policeman and still believed that his job was to act as society’s conscience, he asked her why she did what she did. She had seemed nonplussed. “Why do I do this generally? For the money, of course. Why do I do this specifically?” At this point, she’d opened the gown, and before he averted his eyes, he caught a glimpse of something Byzantine wrought in leather. “Because I don’t have to touch the gentlemen hardly at all. They do it all themselves, on the other side of the room, while I tell them how bad they’ve been. The hours are good, the money is excellent, and, apart from the sheer tedium of it, it’s the best job I’ve ever had.” At that point the chief constable of the district had turned up in his pyjamas with a raincoat thrown over the top and demanded to know why the raid had been planned without him being told. The operation was stepped down in some haste, and they were all sent home. Interestingly, the tall brunette with the creaking lingerie seemed to know the chief constable by his first name, although she also called him “Patricia” at one point.

Barrow somehow doubted that a filter tip and a friendly chat were going to endear Layla to him. He had to get out of here before she found him. He looked along the narrow corridor formed between the heavy curtains and the walls of the temporary building. Hoping that the front door hadn’t been as securely locked as the rear, he set off at a dogtrot. He couldn’t hear anything from the main body of the building and imagined her stepping directly into his path. What would he do then? He’d never hit a woman — well, just the once, but she’d been bearing down on him with a chainsaw — and, despite his reservations about Layla’s status as a human, didn’t want to start now. He made the end of the corridor and broke cover without hesitation, reaching the door in a few steps. He tugged at the safety bar. On the other side, a padlock and chain rattled mockingly. He felt a shadow on his back and spun around.

He was alone. There was no sign of Layla. He didn’t delude himself; there was no possiblity that she’d gone, she was probably on the other side of the curtains herself, now looking for him. Fine, that gave him a few moments alone in the main part of the room. Overhead, he noticed something in the gloom that might be a painted-out skylight. It wasn’t much, but he was running out of ideas as he stepped over the silk rope and looked a little closer. It was a skylight, but he doubted he could reach it even if he stood on the chaise-longue. Still, he wasn’t doing anything else. He pulled the low couch a couple of feet to one side, until it was directly below the blacked-out skylight, climbed onto it, and reached up. He was nowhere near. He tried jumping, but that didn’t seem to get him any nearer at all. He paused; something had bumped against the curtain. He crouched, concertina-ing himself as small as he could get. He made himself aware of the muscles in his legs, imagined them pulling hard to catapult him up, imagined his hands reaching the catch, knocking it open. Then another jump to get his hands on the ledge, pulling himself up, pushing the skylight open with his shoulders as he climbed. He knew it would have been an impressive feat when he was twenty and wished he could be less rational about the danger he was in. He needed the homicidal strength of a man in mortal fear and fury, the strength of ten he’d seen enough times to know that it existed. He looked up, willed the skylight to be nearer, and jumped.

As his body straightened, the chaise-longue rocked treacherously under the impulse. Barrow forgot all about attaining the skylight and started concentrating on staying upright. The clash in priorities resulted in a low jump that knocked the chaise onto its side. He came down, lost his footing, and fell awkwardly. As he hit the floor parallel to the couch, it added insult to injury by rocking back onto its feet with a solid thump.

Barrow lay winded for a moment before pulling himself into a sitting position and leaning against the chaise. This wasn’t going well. He looked up and realised it wasn’t even going that well.

“Why, Francis, you’ve had a little accident. Let me” — she released the curtain and it fell to behind her as she took a step towards him — “kiss it…” Another step. Perhaps it was the angle, a skewed perspective, but she seemed to cover more ground with each step than was humanly possible. “… Better.” She was standing over him. He looked up at her as she brought the full power of her presence to bear upon him, and strange things started to happen in his brain. Parts of the reptilian brain that encompasses the head of the brain stem began to fire in odd patterns. Barrow almost gagged on a rising tide of thick, cloying lust coloured with the sort of pack behaviour that makes “I was only obeying orders” a favoured defence for war criminals the world over. Unreasoning desire and unquestioning obeisance: a winning combination for the more upper-class predator.

Layla had been born perhaps fifty weeks before and would never see her first birthday. It didn’t matter; she’d seen more in those brief months than most saw in a lifetime. Horst Cabal had found the parts that made her up pre-packaged in a catering-size coffee tin labelled Layla in one of the cars. He had taken the tin to Johannes and shown it to him.

“Have you seen this?” he’d said, emptying the contents onto Cabal’s desktop. Cabal had looked at the mess for some moments before asking, “Well? What is it?”

“Layla the Latex Lady , I would guess from the label and contents. Remember that board I showed you? She must have been one of the very few members of this carnival that they sorted out before the plug was pulled.”