Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

The open door let in a tide of sound, including a lot of screams and shouts. “What the Hell is going on?” Cabal said, and stepped forward to the doorway.

Hell was exactly what was going on.

The carnival was falling apart and re-forming into new, horrible shapes before his eyes. He was forcibly reminded of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights . It didn’t seem like a place to bring the family. The Things from the Ghost Train were flying low and fast between the blossoming flowers of destruction that used to be sideshows, harassing panicking townsfolk into headlong stampedes. The giant gorilla had left the Ghost Train, ascended the Helter-Skelter — now a looming tower of spikes and blades — and stood triumphantly atop it, swatting at what used to be the four jockeys from the Day at the Races concession but who now looked like personifications of Death, War, Pestilence, and Hunger, although they still wore their bright racing silks. The gorilla was holding in its spare hand some hapless individual that was fighting feebly to get away. At the base of the tower, Denzil waved up at Dennis, who paused in his struggles to wave back. He didn’t feel cut out to play Fay Wray at all.

“Stop that!” bellowed Cabal. Nobody stopped at all. “Joey? Joey! Pull your verdammt trousers up this instant! You’re frightening people!”

“That’s rather the plan, actually, old bean. Sorry and all that,” called back Joey, the most well-mannered and polite expression of diabolical will one is ever likely to meet.

Cabal looked around. “Bones, stop them! I’m still in control here!”

“For the next thirty seconds,” shouted Bones from a hundred yards away. He became sober. “I’ll see what I can do, boss.” He turned to the pulsing boil of chaos that used to be a carnival. “Stop that,” he said in an effete voice, wagging his finger. He exploded laughing, staggering around with delight at his own wit. Then his head just exploded.

Cabal drew back the hammer on his smoking gun. “I will not be mocked,” he said to nobody in particular. He turned back to face Barrow. “Sit down,” he said to Barrow, who had started to rise. Cabal looked around the office. The panelling was starting to rot, the polish vanishing from the desktop, a smell of damp and abandonment returning to this place, just as he’d found it. He walked back to the Barrows and placed the gun barrel against the side of Leonie’s head. “Fifteen seconds. Sign now.”

“No,” said Barrow, inevitably.

“Then it’s all over,” Cabal said tonelessly, and aimed at Frank Barrow’s head.

Without drama but in swift, certain movements, Leonie snatched the contract and pen from where they lay and signed. She thrust the paper at Cabal. “Leave my father alone,” she said simply.

“No!” cried both men, making Leonie jump.

Cabal glared at Barrow. “Now look what you’ve done with your idiotic intransigence!”

Barrow wasn’t so aghast at Leonie’s act that he couldn’t be taken aback still further. “What I’ve done?”

Distantly, the clock of Saint Olave’s struck twelve.

The flow of dust in the hourglass abruptly ran out, settled in the lower bulb, and lay still.

“Time’s up!” said Bones’s body, appearing at the door carrying a boater full of skull fragments. The voice came directly from the wet stump of his neck and sounded a little muffled. “All aboard the Damnation Express!” He swung out of sight again, and through the open door Cabal could see that the carnival field was empty but for a few people running aimlessly about.

Cabal turned to Barrow and his daughter to speak, but then paused. Barrow was crying freely, Leonie holding him and telling him it was all right. Cabal looked at the contract in his hand and opened his mouth, but suddenly the train heaved forward and he was thrown onto his back. Leonie looked around fearfully. It was odd; the train seemed to be pulling away, but they — she and her father — seemed to be staying still. The walls of the car were becoming translucent, as if they belonged somewhere else or were made of mist. Even Cabal, rolling heels over head in slowed motion, didn’t seem very solid anymore.

The train slid away from beneath the Barrows, and they were dumped gently onto the tracks. Except there were no tracks, no sleepers, and no sign that there had been for years. The train, a phantom monster in glowing greens and blues, howled past the station and left it a ruin from an old, old fire, the stationmaster saluting sadly as he was whisked back out of the land of the living and dumped into the place reserved for and deserved by suicides. At least, that was the thinking when the rules were drawn up.

Screaming and ranting, the engine shot away into the night and towards a black horizon. Leonie even had the impression, just before it vanished from sight, that it had lifted from the ground altogether and was travelling into the midnight sky like a great luminous eel from the ocean depths.

“Why did you do it?” asked her father, deep in misery.

“He was going to kill you, Dad. I had to take a risk.” She looked at the empty sky. “A calculated risk.”

Cabal felt a faint tickling on his lip. He moved his hand to swat it away but had trouble co-ordinating his hand. He tried once, twice, and was just at the point where he decided that it wasn’t that unpleasant a sensation, and it was too much bother to deal with it anyway, when somebody else swatted it away for him. Actually, somebody else slapped him hard.

“Uuurgh!” said Johannes Cabal, rolling away from the blow. He climbed onto all fours, his head hurting abominably, feeling disorientated and nauseous.

Horst watched without comment as his brother vomited miserably on the office floor. When he was sure Cabal was just about empty, he reached down, grasped him by the lapels, and threw him across the room. Before he had time to recover, Horst had picked him up again and pinned him against the wall.

“You didn’t listen to a word I said, did you?”

Cabal tried to pull himself together. Beside his brother’s coldly furious face, he could make out that they were still in the office. It must have carried on rotting while he’d been unconscious — mild concussion, that would explain why he felt so dreadful — for it was now no more than the car full of rubbish it had been when he first found it. The only change was a poster on the wall, decaying and curling already: “The Cabal Bros. Present Their World Famous Carnival of Wonders!” A woodlouse unsuccessfully tried to negotiate it and fell to the floor — Cabal realised what the tickling on his lip had been. Through the windows he could see gnarled trees and a suspicion of low, rolling land. They were back in the Flatlands. The carnival was back in mothballs.

“You took another innocent soul, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t take anything — ”

“Don’t lie to me! I was right there in that bloody box, listening to you!”

“Then you know that I didn’t take anything!” barked Cabal, wrestling himself free. He glared at Horst as he tried to straighten his jacket. “She gave it to me.”

“Gave it to you,” said Horst contemptuously.

“Gave it to me! Don’t come the moral guardian with me! If you were right there, why didn’t you do something?”

“I was ready, believe me. If I’d heard that distinct click your finger makes when squeezing a trigger, it wouldn’t have got as far as making the second click it makes when it’s finished.”

“You didn’t stop me shooting Bones.”

“You were leaning out of the door and obviously pointing in the wrong direction.” He smiled grimly. “You shot Bones, did you? Can’t say I’m sorry. I never trusted him. I never trusted any of them. They finally betrayed you, then?”