Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal - The Fear Institute

And then, as is also the way of dreams, they were suddenly there, so abruptly that there was not even the sense of having covered the last hundred yards. They ran up the steps, all ninety-nine – Cabal counted – and arrived in front of the great entrance into the building.

‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ gasped Corde, as he tried to recover his breath. ‘Have you ever seen such enormous doors?’ Behind him, Shadrach and then Bose staggeringly reached the top of the steps and promptly fell down, wheezing pathetically.

‘Yes,’ said Cabal, as indeed he had. ‘But they had the decency to have a porter’s door set into them. How is anyone supposed to open these things for worship? Did they have mammoths for ushers?’ He turned and looked out across the square, which, typically, now didn’t seem anywhere near as enormous. The glare from the morning sun on the pale stone made his eyes water, and he instinctively felt for his glasses in his jacket pocket.

As he did so, something twisted uncomfortably in his mind. Something like déjà vu , except instead of having the sense that he had done all this before, he had an unaccountable sense that he had never, not even once, in all the time that they had been in the Dreamlands, checked his pockets for their contents. It didn’t make sense, and almost immediately small fragments of memory, like ants, clustered around and he thought, perhaps, that he had after all. Yet the scent of an unreliable recollection, a false memory hung around it, and it was with considerable effort that he pulled himself back to the present. He found he had his blue-glass spectacles out, and was staring at them as if he had just noticed that he had eight fingers on that hand. How many fingers did that hand have? Eight. No, five. That was right. Five. Five phalanges; four fingers and an opposable thumb. That was what he had. He counted twice to be sure.

Shadrach had managed to regain his feet by leaning on one of the massive columns that supported the portico over the temple gates. He was looking at Cabal oddly. ‘Mr Cabal? Mr Cabal, are you well, sir?’

Cabal put on the glasses quickly, but his hand shook as he did so. ‘I am perfectly well, Mr Shadrach,’ he said, taking care that there was no tremor in his voice. ‘Simply exhausted after the run. I’m sure you can sympathise with that.’ Without waiting for a reply, he turned his attention to the square. It was empty of all but wamp bones and scrub grass forcing its way between the slabs. Of their pursuer, if there was a pursuer, there was no sign. ‘It isn’t showing its face – assuming it has a face – yet,’ he said to Corde. Corde ignored him: he and the mercenaries were at the crack between the great wooden doors, trying to get enough purchase to open them. Normally Cabal would have been happy to watch them scrabble away for a good long while, but as his own survival was also at stake, he decided he should make a few constructive comments.

‘Don’t be such verdammt fools,’ he snapped. They turned to him with differing degrees of curiosity and resentment. ‘If this is the correct temple, and I hope for all our sakes that it is, then a lone hermit lives here. I hardly think he manhandles those doors open and shut every time he wishes to dash out for some milk. There must be some other way in. I had hoped it would be at the top of the stairs by the main gates and that we could not see it as we approached because of the curvature of the frontage or the occlusion of the colonnades. A forlorn hope, it appears. The fact remains that a frontal assault on these doors is doomed to failure, and that time may be limited before whatever destroyed the wamps locates and does the same to us.’

‘The man’s right,’ said Holk, brushing grime off his hands. ‘We would need a platoon and ropes stapled to the door edge to stand any chance of getting this thing open. If there’s another way in, we have to find it, and soon.’ Without waiting for orders from either moneyman Shadrach or ‘Captain’ Corde, he turned to his men. ‘Right, you two go around widdershins and take Masters Bose and Shadrach with you. The rest of us will go the other way. If anybody finds a door, send a runner immediately to tell the other party. Understood? Then jump to it!’

Going down ninety-nine steep stone steps in a hurry was less tiring than going up ninety-nine steep stone steps in a hurry, but comfortably made up for it in terms of perceived danger. Hand rails and other such nods to safety had apparently been regarded as somehow heretical, and it was better that some of the faithful should finish as broken lumps of flesh at the bottom with bones sticking out at odd angles than there be any backsliding into being blasphemously careful. After the first few steps taken at a rapid pace, it became obvious that stopping was no longer an option so all eight men found themselves having to apply their full concentration to a descent that was quickly developing an aspect of ‘headlong’. All it took was for one little mincing step inadvertently to be a long, manly one, and the owner of the recalcitrant leg would shortly find himself at sixes and sevens, and possibly eights and nines, depending on how many sharp-edged corners he encountered on the way down.

They reached the square at a gallop, the more adventurous jumping the last few steps, the less adventurous losing any remaining dignity as they had to keep running while bending their legs to absorb the downward momentum, overall giving the effect of a drunken uncle at a party doing the hilarious going-down-to-the-cellar visual gag, and doing it badly.

They split off into the teams Holk had suggested and began their circumnavigations of the great round bulk of the temple. ‘You realise that we shall be travelling far faster than the other party, Sergeant?’ said Corde. ‘Shadrach and Bose are exhausted. They’ll have to keep stopping.’

‘He knows,’ interrupted Cabal. ‘That’s exactly why he did it. If he’d split Shadrach and Bose between parties, both would be impeded. This way at least one is making decent time.’

They were indeed making decent time. Cabal had realised some time ago that much in the Dreamlands depended on one’s state of mind. If one expected to be exhausted, one would likely be so that much sooner than somebody with more faith in their own endurance. Similar aspects were equally affected by expectation and, it seemed, aesthetics. Cabal and the Fear Institute expedition had been in the Dreamlands weeks already, yet none of them had had any need to change their clothes. Well, there was Corde and his studded black leather, but that had been by choice, not necessity. If their situation changed to one in which the popular imagination decreed bad smells – if they were taken as galley slaves, for example – then bad smells there would be. But for doughty adventurers, there would be nothing more than the smell of fresh sweat and, when the need arose, blood. Such was Cabal’s observation, his conviction and his expectation.

All of them now and then looked back at the top of the avenue by which they had reached the square. Cabal found himself half expecting the appearance of some monster rendered in painted latex upon a wire armature, lent life by stop-frame animation and scale by back projection, like a film he had seen when he was young and had time for such nonsense. The harsh light and hard shadows gave the whole vista an artificial air that chimed with the thought, and Cabal made a conscious effort to suppress it: this world seemed to take far too much notice of one’s inner musings. Or day-dreaming , he reminded himself, which seemed to explain a great deal. As they continued to dogtrot clockwise, the top of the avenue slowly became hidden from view, and not one of them was sure that they preferred it that way.