Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal - The Fear Institute

When they finally found an entrance, it was not quite of the nature they had been expecting. Something discreet and bijou like a castle’s postern gate, perhaps, or a theatre’s stage door, by which, in days of yore, theological groupies might have clustered in the hope of a glimpse of some superstar preacher. Instead they discovered a great yawning cavern of destruction, a ragged hole in the temple’s rear wall sufficient to provide disabled access for a wheelchair-bound diplodocus. Blocks of stone, Brobdingnagian in scale, lay tumbled about like a child’s toys amid drifts of rubble. The four men had slowed to walking pace when the first pieces of debris had become visible, and now were all but walking on tiptoe. There was no chance that this was a natural collapse: the top of the hole remained firm and the blocks had not simply fallen but had been thrown some distance.

Cabal moved up first, to peer cautiously around the edge of the breach. Beyond, he could see a trail of demolished internal walls going deep into the building, until all was lost in gloom.

‘It got in,’ said Corde, defeat heavy in his voice. ‘It got in and killed him. The whole journey out here has been pointless.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Cabal admonished him. ‘Observe – the rubble from the walls, right from the inside to out. This damage was not caused by something monstrous going in: it was caused by something monstrous coming out.’

‘Well . . .’ Corde thought for a moment. ‘Mightn’t whatever did this have gained entrance elsewhere and just created destruction on the way out? For all we know, Shadrach’s party are standing by an equally massive hole, but one in which much of the debris lies inside the line of the wall.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Cabal, impatiently. ‘Look, man! If there is another breach, would we not be able to see light somewhere within?’

Corde opened his mouth, failed to think of anything more intelligent to refute this argument than an arch, but in this case unsupported, ‘Not necessarily,’ and therefore shut his mouth without saying anything at all.

‘There is, of course, a chance that this mysterious colossus has returned here and is lurking deep inside, presumably with one hand over its mouth to stifle its giggles, as it waits for us to stroll in and consequently suffer blunt trauma and detached limbs.’ The others looked at him uncertainly. Cabal shrugged. ‘But it’s unlikely. Well, this represents an entrance, I suppose. Sergeant Holk, we should alert the other group to our discovery.’

Apparently Holk was still having trouble getting past the image of a snickering colossus waiting to do him harm. ‘Eh? Oh, yes. At once, Master Cabal.’ He turned to the other mercenary and sent him off to continue clockwise around the building at a run until he met the rest coming the other way. He was to make a mental note of any other entrances he passed en route , but the important thing was to reunite everyone as quickly as possible. With a hasty salute, the soldier ran off, his hand on his sword hilt to keep his sword angled up and away from his heels as he went.

‘Right,’ said Corde. ‘Very well. Good plan, Sergeant.’ He plainly felt keenly the way he was not being consulted, but was endeavouring not to show it. ‘When the others get here, we shall decide how to proceed.’

‘Yes, you do that.’ There was a faint hollow quality to Cabal’s voice that made Corde turn, and then gasp audibly, for Cabal had already climbed over the sill formed by the shattered stone and was advancing into the temple. ‘I shall just have a little wander around while you wait.’

‘But!’ Corde realised he’d shouted, and lowered his tone to sotto voce . ‘But, Cabal! What if the – the thing really is still in there?’

Cabal had just vanished behind the first broken internal wall but he leaned out and put his finger to his lips. ‘Hush, Herr Corde,’ he said. ‘I need to be able to hear a snickering giant if I am to survive this.’ With which he vanished into the shadowed interior, leaving only a faint tang of sarcasm upon the air.

Once he was out of sight and – longed-for and glorious – by himself, Cabal’s artfully angled flippancy fell away to be replaced by a cool wariness, honed by a hundred unauthorised sorties into other people’s laboratories, other people’s libraries and other people’s graves. He could see that the damage caused by the mysterious Goliath was in no way wanton: it had simply decided that it wished to leave, had had its own reasons for not going by the main door – it was very hard to believe that a creature capable of such destruction would have had any problems with the great gates – and had made a dash for the outside, swatting away several hundred tons’ worth of pesky intervening walls in the process. Cabal could not know why the gates hadn’t appealed to it, but he was inclined to think that it was simply because it had not understood the concept of doors. He was also inclined to think, and here he was very sorry that he did not know, that since it had been so very keen to leave the confines of the great temple, then it would not be in any great hurry to return. This was supposition, however, and supposition could often cause one to die at an inconvenient time and with one’s work left unfinished. Therefore, he backed it with a generous portion of caution.

He paid little attention to the chambers he climbed through, beyond checking for possible threats: he found none. The light was becoming dim as he clambered through ruined offices, storerooms, subsidiary chapels and libraries, all raised in the honour of a god who seemed to care little enough now, perhaps even the god who had visited the city’s doom upon it. Gods had so much power here, and so little wisdom: like a child with a howitzer, they rained death on those who displeased them, and as for those who did please them, the gods did nothing. It was a poor sort of deal, to be left alone in return for tribute, a bullying sort of worship, but one common in the Dreamlands, and implied often enough on Earth.

He was just negotiating a route through some sort of chapel of rest, which must have been used on an industrial scale in its heyday, judging by the number of empty funereal biers, when he met with mishap. He stood upon a tumbled pew, and its end seesawed down alarmingly. Too far down: the floor was broken deeply through not just the sombre black tiling but into the very fabric of the Romanesque cement that lay beneath. The floor beneath the pew tipped steeply, pivoted on a structural beam beneath, and Cabal – unable to keep his feet – fell heavily and slid into the dark depths. Without his weight upon it, the floor swung back to equilibrium. Of the gap in the floor where Cabal had vanished, there was no sign but a crack.

It was not the first time Johannes Cabal had been dumped into darkness, and the experience had lost its dubious allure on his very first outing. He was thus already in a vile mood as he crumpled on to an unseen floor, his right knee driving up hard enough on impact to strike him in the face and to draw blood from where his canine ripped the inner lip. He spat out blood, saliva and invective as he sought to reorientate himself in this new and troublesome environment.

First, he took in what he could through his available senses. Wherever he was, the floor was even and worked so at least he hadn’t fallen into a cave system or a cavity formed by natural subsidence. This was good: there must therefore be a way out. He could taste dust that had been thrown up by his undignified entrance and, from his extensive experience of long-abandoned places, could tell that it was largely inorganic in nature, indicating that at least he was unlikely to be sharing the space with anything else at that exact moment, a small comfort. The air was cool and musty and, even after standing, he could wave his hand over his head without touching the ceiling, which accorded with the second and a half it had taken him to reach the floor. The light in the room from which he had fallen had been attenuated at best and none of it could make it past the obliquely spalled crack. He listened for a full two minutes before sharply stamping, and listening for the echoes. They confirmed what he had gathered in the moment of poor light as he fell, that he was in a room with hard walls, more likely stone than brick, and that it was no more than forty feet across in any dimension.