Jonathan Howard - Johannes Cabal - The Fear Institute

The descending corridor reached its end, and Cabal stepped through into the chamber beyond. It was not hugely impressive but – given its occupant – it did not need to be. The chamber was circular, and some fifty feet in diameter. The walls rose some ten or twelve feet, then formed a hemispherical dome above. In sconces spaced some ten feet apart around the walls torches burned with a strange red fire that flickered black in its heart, yet cast a soft yellow light. Opposite the entrance upon a low dais stood a simple throne of grey and red stone, and upon the throne sat the Phobic Animus in all its preternatural glory.

‘Hello, Herr Bose,’ said Cabal.

‘Hello, old man,’ said Bose, as cheerfully as ever, but with a distinct underpinning of smugness. ‘I gather you caught on to my little joke. Or did you just kill me because you finally got sick of the sight of me?’ His expression shifted to Bose’s habitual sheep-like foolishness. ‘Oh, I say! Yaroo!’ He relaxed again. ‘If that’s the case, you have far more patience than your reputation suggests.’

‘The former is the case, which was the main reason the latter did not occur until this late juncture,’ replied Cabal. ‘It was a small thing, as is usually the way. It occurred to me far too recently that you knew I had cursed even the pets of the spider-ant-baby creatures of the Dark Wood, and yet you were in a dead faint when I had done so. At Dylath-Leen you knew Shadrach’s fate, even though you were in a foetal ball facing the other way at the time. A neat trick for a man. Then, even as you were committing this faux pas , your eyes were dry and it occurred to me, just in passing although the idea grew on me, that you had not been sobbing in fear at all. You were laughing.’

‘Yes, well,’ Bose shrugged, ‘it was funny.’

‘The form that you have taken does you no favours. It is impatient and wilful. I feared I had gained the attention of Nyarlothotep by that ill-considered incantation in the Dark Wood, but my apprehension was a misapprehension. Nyarlothotep had taken notice of me well before then. When I realised that, it calmed me a little.’

‘Did it?’ Bose was frankly surprised. ‘Did it indeed?’

‘It did, because at least it meant I had not drawn down such misfortune upon my head. It was happenstance, the difference between being struck by lightning in a street and on a mountaintop during a storm while capering around with a silver wand.’

‘That’s a pretty allusion,’ said Bose. ‘I like that one.’

‘The slip in time and space that put us into such peril in the first place was both calculated and impatient. At first I thought we were the objects of scrutiny for some wizard or another – the Dreamlands are rotten with wand-wavers – and I stuck by that thesis despite hints to the contrary.’

‘Oh, I know where this is going . . .’

‘Dylath-Leen, however, was blatant. No wizard holds that kind of power, to reduce the lunar cities of the Moon things, to make the Moon burn. That was . . .’

‘Fun?’

‘Heavy-handed.’

Bose wrinkled his nose. ‘That didn’t stop it being fun.’

‘I must admit, I am disappointed. I thought there might be some grand design behind all this, but it seems I was mistaken. As gods go, you’re just a brat.’

Bose’s complacency did not slip, but he was silent for a long moment. Then he said, ‘I am called the Crawling Chaos, the God with a Thousand Faces, but that is just a simple number for simple minds who like things simple. I do not employ Mr Gardner Bose often, and when I do, my sensibilities are filtered through his, just as with all my masks.’

‘I’m reasonably sure that you’re patronising me.’

‘Oh, Mr Cabal, there has never been a human born, nor shall there ever be, to whom I do not have to talk down. You are all infants in a planetary nursery, and your lives are far too short for you ever to grow up. My point is that it doesn’t matter what you think of me, because you don’t matter so very much yourself. You have some small use, and you are already fulfilling it. I shan’t explain it for reasons that must be terribly obvious even for a stunted intellect like yours.’

Cabal said nothing. He was not insulted, for the sting of an insult comes from the resentment the insultee feels towards the insulter’s relatively weak position of superiority that nurtures a sense of ‘How dare they?’ When a god of unimaginable power and intelligence that quite surpasses even the theoretical limits of the human mind calls one a bit dim, however, one has to admit that, relatively speaking, they have a point.

Instead, he said, ‘I have some small understanding of what you have in mind. Satan himself regards me as an agent of evil and chaos in the world.’

‘Satan?’ said Bose. ‘Oh, yes, Satan . . . Let me ask you something about that. How do you suppose that both Satan and I can exist in the same universe, hmm? I mean to say, I don’t regard myself as anything so bland as an agent of evil and chaos. I have a job to do, however, and what you would call evil and chaos are the usual collateral results. Actually going out of one’s way to create them, though . . . a tad immature, wouldn’t you say? Unless . . .’

‘What are you suggesting?’ said Cabal, but he already knew, and so did Bose.

‘Here’s a little thought experiment. What if when you met Satan you actually met me in one of my many forms?’

‘It would be irrelevant,’ replied Cabal. ‘No matter what your form, you’re an unmitigated bastard. I don’t care if you’re Satan in your spare time.’

But Bose was not listening. ‘And what if there was no God, except as a fictional counterweight to my Satan, hmm? Just think of all those people bowing and scraping to a deity that I made up in my lunchtime, hoping their grovelling will get them to some ill-defined Heaven, whereas everybody actually ends up in Hell.’

‘You forget, I have been to Hell. Not all of the dead can be found there.’

‘Well, maybe there is more than one Hell, or perhaps the ones who would have got to Heaven, if it wasn’t fictional, I just allow to blink out at death. That would be quite merciful of me, wouldn’t it? They die an atheist’s death, but that’s better than going to Hell, probably. I wouldn’t know. Whenever I die, I get over it after a while. When I was Tezcatlipoca one time, the locals murdered me. Not sure why – underdeveloped senses of humour would be my guess. Anyway, my corpse stank the place out and everybody else choked on the stench and died, which was pretty witty of me, wouldn’t you say?’

‘You require my validation? Then, no, it wasn’t very witty. Ironic, I grant you, but witty, no.’

‘Suit yourself,’ said Bose, unabashed. ‘The Aztecs thought it very droll. The ones who didn’t die, obviously. Anyway . . . where was I?’

‘You were congratulating yourself on your mordant wit.’

‘So I was. Just think on it, though – every religion in the world, major or minor, worshipping things that don’t exist. And the unbelievers being all smug about it, and saying that religions are products of human fear, ignorance and inadequacy, all unaware that they’re actually products of some minor mystical jiggery-pokery by yours sincerely, so both the believers and the unbelievers are wrong. Now, come on, you must find that just a little bit funny, surely?’

‘What of the ones who worship you?’

‘Worship me? As me? Oh, they’re just a handful, and they tend to end up dead or insane or whatever, and in any case, I don’t care. I don’t need followers. If they want to grovel to me, it might do them some good, it might not, but my needs transcend the awe and adoration of a bunch of filthy apes.’