Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal - The Fear Institute

Now it was time to cast a little light on his situation. He had two option: to use a match from the silver matchbox in his pocket – a technological innovation that the Dreamlands were apparently prepared to countenance – or to try out a device he had spotted in an artificer’s shop in Baharna while trying to explain the concepts of percussion caps, powder corning and the special joy of putting a lead ball into any person who presents a nuisance.

The device consisted of a beautifully filigreed brass cylinder topped with a sphere of solid glass. Into the space beneath the sphere one placed a small capsule in which there was a beetle of a particular species, kept alive but sluggish through the agency of a small quantity of drugged food. The beetles were the Dreamlands’ equivalent of glow-worms or fireflies but, unlike their mundane cousins, they did not generate their light as it was required through a chemical reaction but, rather, stored sunlight during their pupal stage and released it at will through adulthood. Cabal had, at this stage of the artificer’s explanation, pointed out several scientific implausibilities in this explanation, stated a distinct lack of faith in the artificer’s truthfulness, and offered to nail the artificer’s fingers to the counter in full knowledge of the detrimental effect this would have on the artificer’s subsequent livelihood. At this point, the artificer decided that this would be an ideal point to offer a small lagniappe of sorts, in return for good will, future business and not having his fingers nailed to the counter.

Cabal had studied the device only briefly at the time, and had not loaded one of the capsules into the cylinder beforehand. Now he sat cross-legged and, in total darkness, carefully unscrewing the glass from the end of the cylinder. Once it was off, he dropped it into his right pocket for easy recovery later, and opened the parchment tube containing four capsules of fine wound wire. The parchment bent in his hand, and he was rewarded with the sound of the four capsules falling to the floor and rolling off in all directions. He bit back another testy comment, and started patting the floor around him carefully, with his open palm, in an attempt to find one.

‘Try by the tip of your left shoe,’ said a voice in the dark. It said it in Ghoulish.

Cabal started, his head held up, his ears keening. ‘Who are you?’ he meeped slowly.

‘Oh, do not attempt my language,’ said the voice. ‘Your accent is terrible. Speak in German, or English, or Latin, or whatever tongue you prefer, without that awful parody of a pharyngeal stop. I will understand you perfectly, and not be offended by your butchery of my elegant and poetic tongue.’

‘Ghoul speech sounds like somebody vomiting up halibut heads in syrup,’ said Cabal, stung by the attack on his pronunciation. He had worked hard on that pharyngeal stop. As he spoke, he reached out cautiously with his hand and discovered that, indeed, there was one of the lost capsules by the tip of his left shoe.

‘For somebody whose native language is German, you should be very careful about casting aspersions on the artistry of any other tongue.’

‘It is the language of Goethe,’ said Cabal, dropping the capsule into the open end of the cylinder. He recovered the glass sphere from his pocket and began screwing it home.

‘An accident of birth, not an informed choice. Forgive me if I am underwhelmed.’ There was a pause, then the voice said, ‘You are forgetting that it’s a left-hand thread. You will never put the thing together like that.’

Cabal had indeed forgotten that it was a left-hand thread, such had been his concentration on the voice and wherever it was coming from. ‘You don’t mind me using this, then?’ he said, as he finally finished screwing the sphere back into place.

‘Not at all. I know you cannot enjoy being in the dark, unable to see me, when my eyes can see you so very easily. Go ahead, Johannes. Cast a little light on proceedings.’

‘As you wish,’ said Cabal, and gave the lower end of the cylinder a vicious twist. Inside, a piston drove upwards, crushing the tiny cage and its soporific occupant. As the beetle was smashed flat and partially sieved through the mesh of the capsule, captured sunlight was released, refracted through the glass ball, and emitted all around in a yellow glow with an unhealthy green tinge. Cabal held the cold torch aloft and took stock of his surroundings.

The room was perhaps forty feet along its long axis, and thirty feet broad, built from rough brick. Around the walls were marble slabs, and Cabal realised that the room had once served as a mortuary for those of insufficient standing to take a place in the chapels above. At one end of the room there was a ramp broad enough for a coffin to be borne along, upon the shoulders of bearers. By the ramp on either side were deep alcoves at waist height, and in one of these sat a ghoul. Cabal risked a glance over his shoulder and saw that the brickwork had been broken through in the far corner. Beyond it doubtless lay a ghoul warren. Something caught his eye, and he walked over slowly to the pile of bricks as the ghoul watched him with mild interest.

Unlike house bricks in the waking world, they were square prisms so had no specific upper or lower sides. ‘Some of these bricks have mortar on four sides,’ said Cabal. ‘They’ve been reused. Why is that? Why has this wall been broken down once, rebuilt – less expertly by the look of the mortar – and then been broken down again? By you, I would guess.’

‘Well, let’s see,’ said the ghoul. It unwound its long betaloned fingers and began counting off points as if it were a professor in a lecture theatre. ‘First, this room used to have food in it.’

‘You mean corpses.’

‘Of course I mean corpses. I’m a ghoul. What did you think I meant? Sausage rolls and fairy cakes? Yes, human corpses. Not only delicious, but good for you too. You should try one some time.’

Cabal watched the ghoul with carefully concealed worry. Ghouls were not necessarily ruthless killers all the time, just most of it. They were strong, resilient and unpleasantly flexible, armed with vicious teeth in their canine jaws and sharp claws upon their powerful fingers. Once they had been human, though, and vestiges of that humanity still showed in many of them. Most had been nothing more than vile cannibals in life, and joined the tomb legions of the ghouls as their appetites overwhelmed their physiologies, altering them in these loathsome ways. They were beasts long before they ever became ghouls, and their chaotic, insane minds had long since fragmented completely. Others, however, had come to this transfiguration voluntarily via decadence and intellectual preference, and held on to much more of their previous life. He had never heard of a ghoul being quite so jocular before, though.

‘They don’t taste like chicken,’ mused the ghoul. ‘I don’t know why people think that. They should try some before spouting such rubbish. Much more like pork.’ The ghoul sighed. ‘But I digress. I was explaining the state of that wall. First, this room had food, corpses if you prefer, in it. So we broke open the wall, took a few bodies and replaced the bricks after we went.’

‘And nobody noticed?’

‘Administration is poor in the Dreamlands,’ said the ghoul. ‘They come down here, think, Wasn’t there a body on that slab? then think perhaps they imagined it, and wander off to write a haiku . We got away with it for years, sneaking in and out as necessary.’

‘Hold hard,’ said Cabal. ‘This city has not been populated in millennia. How could you have been here when it was occupied?’

‘That? Two reasons. Ghouls are effectively immortal, barring accidents and foul play. Thing is, being a ghoul invites accidents and foul play. It all evens out. Second, the ghoul warrens, the great underworld beyond that wall, obey the confines neither of time nor space. I can enter here, and exit in Massachusetts sixty years ago, or on the Moon sixty years hence. Time and place mean a lot less to me than they do to you.’