Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

Apparently, so did all nearby creatures. Despite any number of tempting perches for local incontinent birds, the only dirt on it was the coating of curious black rust that came off on his fingers like very coarse soot. Cabal sniffed at it cautiously and was instantly put in mind of energetic evenings down in the cellar, sawing up the evidence and putting it in the furnace before the police arrived. He pushed his tinted spectacles up his nose and blinked thoughtfully behind them. What exactly did this thing run on? He hoped it was wood or coal; it would be much more convenient.

A commotion made him turn. The crow had settled on Denzil’s head and was trying to get a meal out of him. Specifically, out of his eye socket. The hapless dead man had his head down and his arms outstretched and was running a clumsy circle in an effort to dislodge the bird. It wasn’t working; the crow seemed to have stapled itself in place. Dennis wasn’t helping things by trying to hit the bird with a sickly sapling he’d torn up. Blows rained down on Denzil’s back, not even remotely close to the target, and soil from the roots flew everywhere.

“Stop that!” barked Cabal. Both walking dead and bird stopped that. Dennis tried to hide the tree behind his back. “You there. Crow. Come here.” With utmost reluctance, the crow launched itself from Denzil, swooped low until it was almost touching the ground, then swept back up to head height, slalomed nonchalantly through the intervening trees, and landed on Cabal’s shoulder. Cabal turned on his heel and started to walk down past the huge locomotive and towards the train of carriages and cars linked up behind it. “You’ll be fed shortly, bird, so no further trouble, yes?” The crow blinked. “Oh, by the by, if you ever shit on my shoulder, you’ll be in a taxidermist’s window so fast as to beggar belief. Understood?”

“Kronk,” said the crow, which may have meant, “Yes, master.” It could equally well have meant, “You’ll have to catch me first, bugger-lugs.” Either way, it kept its sphincters tight.

Cabal walked slowly along the train. There were a few carriages, several flatcars stacked with once brightly painted boards, and, towards the back, a good number of sealed boxcars. He arrived at the first of them and stopped by the large sliding door that ran for a quarter of its length. He was just considering how to get in when it slid open of its own accord with a hideous shrieking of rusty metal. “Oh,” said Cabal, unimpressed. “It’s you.”

The Little Old Man finished dogging the door open and looked down. “Aye, it’s me, young Cabal. You’ve taken your time.”

Cabal placed a foot on a metal rung, gripped the rail by the door edge, and pulled himself up. The crow flapped off his shoulder and landed on a nearby stanchion. It settled down to practise looking at things beadily.

“You’re lucky I’m here at all. The map was next to useless,” Cabal said as he brushed rust off his hands and shoulder where the doorframe had touched him. He looked at the man. “I was hoping Satan might send something else rather than you, you contrary old bastard.”

The man laughed. Actually, he cackled.

“Oh, we go way back, Johannes. His Worshipfulness thought you might like a familiar face.”

Cabal was looking around the gloomy car. “Only if I thought blowing a hole in it would make any difference,” he replied offhandedly.

The Little Old Man was not, in any real sense, little or a man. He was certainly, however, very old. He was an embodiment of an archetype: the old codger with the flat cap and the grey beard. He cackled, he rolled his own foul-smelling cigarettes, and, when on form, he could be relied on to dribble. He was exactly the sort of person that makes youth fashionable. He was also one of Satan’s numerous avatars: fragments of his personalities and random thoughts that had taken form in the mortal realm. They allowed him to maintain a steady background hum of elemental evil in the world while he concentrated on more important things down in Hell. His cribbage game, for example. Until recent events, the Little Old Man had been Cabal’s only contact with Satan. This was the entity that he’d sold his soul to years before, and the entity that had invalidated more lines of research with his wilful interference than Cabal cared to remember.

The Little Old Man sat on a crate and watched Cabal investigate the dark corners. “Oh, Johannes. I’m hurt,” he said cheerfully. “After all we’ve been through.”

Cabal, his cursory examination of the boxcar completed, walked back to him. “‘All we’ve been through’? All you’ve put me through, surely? If you hadn’t bought my soul and then been such a pervasive nuisance ever since, none of this” — he made a gesture that encompassed the whole train — “would have been necessary.”

The Little Old Man shrugged. “I was only doing my job. You can’t expect altruism from one of Satan’s little helpers.”

Cabal sighed. “Look, I’d really like to be able to say that I’m delighted that you could make it and it’s a real tonic to see you, but I’d be lying.”

“I know.”

“So do you think we might cut along with a little more alacrity, all the quicker to get you out of my sight? I am, after all, on a rather tight schedule.”

“Schedule,” said the Little Old Man, holding up a finger. “I’m glad you reminded me. You’ll be needing this.” He reached into his grubby old coat and produced an hourglass a little over a foot in height. Instead of sand, however, it seemed to be filled with an incredibly fine powder. Tiny motes made their way from the upper chamber into the narrow neck and cascaded downwards. Despite the steady stream, the floor of the bottom chamber barely had a dusting upon it. “This shows you how much time you’ve got left. You know how one works, don’t you?” Cabal gave him a look. “’course you do, clever lad like you. Anyway, when all the grains have fallen from top to bottom, time’s up. Simple. Oh, one thing to remember. This isn’t the actual glass that my better part has down in the hot place. It’s a sort of repeater, relay thing. You can do what you like to this one but it doesn’t affect the time you’ve got left. See?” He turned the glass. The motes fell upwards regardless. The Little Old Man held it at different angles, but nothing made any difference. Time was still passing, and the grains carried on falling in a steady, gravity-boggling stream. “Neat, eh? Goes down a bomb at parties, I can tell you.”

“Really?” said Cabal as he took the glass. “I’ll have to hold a soirée just to impress my friends.”

“You haven’t got any friends.”

“I’m not holding a soirée, either. You have a problem with sarcasm, don’t you? Now, do you have anything else fascinating to impart or can I kick your wrinkly little carcass down the embankment, as I so dearly wish?”

The Little Old Man huffed. “You’re not nice.”

“Your” — Cabal searched for the right word — “founder has given me the task of sending one hundred souls to eternal torment. To be quite frank, I don’t think my name is ever going to become a byword for popularity.”

“You’re right there.” The Little Old Man searched inside his capaciously shapeless coat and finally found a thin file box as broad and wide as foolscap by an inch deep. He undid the thin black tape ribbon sealing it, took off the lid, and showed the contents to Cabal. It was a pack of forms printed on some sort of faintly yellow parchment. Cabal leaned forward and read the top line.

“‘Voluntary Damnation Form. To be filled in by the damnee. EAGH/I.’” He straightened up. “I see the hand of Arthur Trubshaw at work here.”

“You’re not wrong,” replied the Little Old Man as he tied the package up again. “One hundred forms to be handed in fully completed in a little less than a year’s time. Feeling up to it, Johannes?” He passed over the box. Cabal hefted it and looked around.