Baalphorum stalks the small space of the Box spell, roaring with fury. He hammers on the walls and they crack ever so slightly. He could break free with time, but he wants to take what is his now.
A pair of buttons appear in the air before him, along with text:
“Do you wish to escape, my master? YES/NO”
Ahh, the mortal (me) has seen the error of its ways. He will escape and slaughter Earth more quickly now.
An endless, sprawling legal agreement appears, tiny text, miles of it. A checkbox labeled “Check here to continue.” On the surface, it seems simple enough, and each moment he spends outside his prison without the souls, he grows weaker.
Even Elder Ones can’t stand reading the damned things. Baalphorum checks the box and readies himself for a rampage. Instead, he is promptly hurled back into his prison across a thousand astral planes. I hope it hurts like hell.
And that’s lesson number six: software user agreements will fuck you every time.
Jonathan L. Howard is the author of the novels Johannes Cabal the Necromancer and Johannes Cabal the Detective. His short fiction has appeared in Realms of Fantasy and H. P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror. He has also worked in the computer games industry since the early ’90s as a game designer and scriptwriter. He lives in Bristol, England.
If you were a necromancer, how would you feel if you found yourself in the middle of a zombie outbreak? One that threatened the future of the entire world? Well, if you’re Johannes Cabal, you’re not particularly worried—you’re just a little put out.
Cabal has an unusual way of looking at the world, and it’s not just because of his profession, although working with corpses might have colored his outlook. As quick on his feet as James Bond and as selfish as the worst comic book villain, Cabal is an unlikely savior of the world, but when he’s confronted by a magician with more ability than brains, this wizard of the dead is our last and only hope. Unfortunately, all he’s got on his side is one bumbling constable, a bit of rope, and top-notch reconnaissance.
This story fills the gap between the short story “Exeunt Demon King” and the first novel about Cabal, Johannes Cabal the Necromancer. Jonathan Howard says of this story’s inspiration: “I myself halted a zombie apocalypse a couple of years ago, and I remember thinking at the time, ’This would make a good story.’ ”
We think he’s joking.
The Ereshkigal Working
Jonathan L. Howard
This was not the first time a corpse had abruptly sat up on the mortuary slab and turned to face Johannes Cabal with murder in its eyes; it was, however, the first time one had done so without waiting to be formally reanimated. They stared at one another for a moment before the corpse, apparently unaware of the faux pas, made a cry like somebody receiving terrible news, and lunged at Cabal. Cabal, whose faults were mainly moral, grabbed the dead man by the scruff and threw it face first to the floor. While keeping it prone and thrashing with a foot to the back of its neck, he pulled a nearby wheeled trolley to him and reached into the brown leather Gladstone bag that lay open upon it.
The performance was observed in a baleful silence by a dishevelled police constable who sat against the wall, gagged and bound. He watched as Cabal drew a handgun of egregious aspect from the Gladstone, placed the muzzle at the junction between the occipital lobe and the atlas vertebrae, and completed the ad-hoc de-animation procedure with the introduction of a .577 bullet. The sound of the shot was deafening against the morgue’s hard walls and floor, echoing harshly from the cold stone slabs. Cabal kept his foot in place and drew back the revolver’s hammer in anticipation of further trouble. The corpse, however, showed no signs of attempting any further movement other than slumping. Cabal waited for a long moment in case it was a cunning zombie ruse, before gently thumbing the hammer back to rest. He glanced sideways as if sensing the policeman’s accusing glare.
“I don’t know why you’re looking at me like that,” said Cabal, a faint German accent just discernible in his clipped and clearly enunciated speech. “This has nothing to do with me.”
Nor was he lying. Johannes Cabal had taken advantage of the town’s annual carnival weekend to carry out a little specialist shopping. While the crowds gathered on the streets to see the parade go by—this year with the exciting new innovation of enormous hydrogen balloons rendered in the form of newspaper cartoon characters and advertising mascots—Cabal had quietly entered the municipal mortuary through a back window and sequestered himself in the morgue, wherein he had intended to remove some footling bits of offal necessary to his researches. This simple plan had almost foundered once already; an alert police officer had seen Cabal slide down a back alley and had become suspicious. This was not a startling piece of detectively intuition; Cabal was a tall blond man of wan complexion, wearing a black suit and carrying a brown leather Gladstone bag. Though he was only in his late twenties, Cabal’s demeanour was not one of fun and frivolity, even on such an occasion. He had barely looked at the parade as it passed, beyond a glance at the great flying cartoon characters, and even these had only caused his lip to curl. Then he had looked both ways—failing to spot the policeman who had taken station in a doorway—before all but tip-toeing down the alley to the rear of the mortuary. Thus, while not quite wearing a striped shirt, mask, and carrying a bag marked “Swag,” Cabal had not been as surreptitious as he had hoped.
The officer, a Constable Copeland, had investigated the alley and, finding a window jemmied open, had crept inside. Unhappily for him, his creeping was not so very surreptitious either, and he had been laid low by a scientifically applied crowbar. When he had recovered consciousness, it was to discover himself tied and gagged and witness to Cabal’s attempted body part snatching . . . and the unexpected resurrection that thwarted it.
Cabal was most put out. First, the policeman turning up had put him off his stride, and now a dead man coming at him really was beyond the pale. “This is not normal,” he commented. Most people would doubtless have agreed, but most people were not necromancers for whom “normal” is a much broader category.
A whispering groan from beneath a sheet on the furthermost slab drew his attention. He watched the form beneath it stirring into a semblance of life even as the occupant of the next-closest table also begun to wheeze air into lungs unused for a day or two. Cabal considered quickly; he had five rounds remaining in his Webley, and a further six in his pocket, bundled together with an elastic band to prevent them rattling. There were four occupied slabs in the morgue, all of whose occupants were showing uncalled for signs of activity. He could probably stay and fight, but there was something untoward occurring here and he might need the ammunition later. Discretion, as was usually the way, would stand in for valour.
In three long strides he was by the policeman, pulling him to his feet and pushing him through the swinging double doors. He let the bound man sprawl to the floor, taking the moment to draw a switchblade that snapped open with a perfunctory clik. He quickly knelt by the policeman, who was regarding the sharp blade with some trepidation and, fearing the worst, began to struggle. Cabal was having none of it, and slapped Constable Copeland. “Don’t be a fool. If I wanted you dead, you would never have woken up.” The blade went in and sliced, and the policeman suddenly found his hands free. Cabal stood up, the ropes in his left hand, the blade in his right. He snapped the blade shut and dropped it back into his jacket pocket.
Shadows fell across the frosted glass in the upper halves of the morgue doors as Cabal turned back to them. He jammed his foot against the base of the doors as he fed the rope through the handles and quickly knotted them tight. He stepped away as the doors were roughly shoved from the far side. Through the glass, four outlines crowded around the door, pushing.
The policeman had drawn his own penknife and was just finishing sawing through the ropes around his ankles. His gag, his own handkerchief, hung around his neck. “What’s happening?” he demanded hoarsely. “What have you done?”
Cabal didn’t turn, but continued to watch the activity of the shadows. “To answer your second question first, beyond saving your life, I have done nothing. To answer your first, I am not yet sure.”
The shoving had quietened down, and Cabal was just wondering if they had given up when all four shapes rammed the door simultaneously. The rope grew tight under the impact, but held. The shadows became blurs, then sharpened as they rammed the door together again. The rope, tied with a knot that would distress Houdini, held firm. “Ah,” Cabal said. “Now that is interesting.”
“You,” said the policeman, searching for a rock to base his sanity upon and settling upon duty, “are under arrest.”
Cabal sighed, pulled his revolver from his bag and waggled it in a more or less threatening way. “You are being a fool again, officer. I truly am not only the least of your worries at present, but possibly your only chance for salvation. Listen . . . ”
They listened, and beyond the rhythmic thump of undead bouncing off morgue doors could be heard distant screams. Cabal noted the policeman’s expression of dawning realisation with a thin smile. “We are not the only ones having trouble with the walking dead.”
From the topmost storey of the mortuary, they were able to look out across the town square, and the massacre that was occurring there. The carnival crowd had only recently become aware that there was something very horrible occurring within it. It had started when first a scattering of people across the town had collapsed, including many in the crowd. A doctor had struggled through to the nearest victim and done his best, but it was too late. Too late in all manner of ways as it turned out when the dead man’s eyes had flickered open. The happy cries of his family sounded a lot less happy when he grabbed the doctor by the throat and throttled him in a few convulsive twists.
Then the doctor had gotten up too, and the bystanders decided they were not in the safest place. But, hemmed in by the surrounding crowd, there was nowhere to run.
“My God!” cried the policeman.
“Oh? Where?” replied Cabal, looking about with affected surprise.
The policeman glared at him. “I have to help!”
For his part, Cabal now leaned on the chest high windowsill with both arms flat, his chin resting on the uppermost, watching the chaos below with the detachment of an entomologist watching red ants fight black. The policeman waited a long moment for some sort of response before finally giving up and turning angrily on his heel.
“This helping,” said Cabal, just loudly enough to be heard. He did not look away from the window. “This helping to which you refer, I assume you intend to help the living?” Cabal took the pause in footsteps to mean he had the policeman’s attention. “It’s just that your current course of action can only help the walking dead I see out there, by inevitably bolstering their numbers. Come here.”
With some reluctance, the footfalls grew closer until the policeman joined him at the window.
Cabal lifted his head and made a small wave of his hand to take in the moiling mixture of violent dead and unhappy living. “Observe, constable. What do you see?”
“Carnage,” said the policeman hoarsely. His mouth was dry and when he licked his lips, it didn’t help at all. “Terror.”
“Yes, yes,” said Cabal impatiently. “Very picturesque terms but hardly scientific.”
The constable breathed in sharply. “Oh, dear God, there are children out there!”
Cabal favoured him with a disapproving glance. “Of course there were children out there. There was a parade. Why wouldn’t there . . . Oh.” He nodded with realisation. “You mean there are children being murdered. Yes, there are, but that isn’t the interesting thing.”
“What kind of a man are you?”
“The kind who sneaks into mortuaries with the intention of stealing parts of human brains, and isn’t especially put out by the appearance of the unquiet dead—beyond a sort of ‘Oh, what a nuisance’ sort of reaction, anyway.” The two men glared at one another. “Those are all the hints you’re getting,” said Cabal. “I really can’t see you making CID if you can’t reach a conclusion based on them.”
The constable had, in fairness, already reached a conclusion, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. “You’re a necromancer,” he said, quietly repulsed.
“Yes, I am.” Cabal was splendidly unconcerned with the constable’s opinion one way or the other. “And we are a rare breed, which makes all this,” he looked out the window again, “all the more interesting. I come here and the dead spontaneously rise. This really is not normal.”
“Isn’t it?” There was a distinct sneer in the words, and an irony that tottered into sarcasm. It could not have been calculated to irritate Cabal—a man notoriously prone to irritation—with more effectiveness.
“No,” he snapped, rounding on the constable. “No, it isn’t, and I have some actual experience in these areas, rather than that righteous unctuousness in your tone that you fondly believe substitutes for knowledge. Look!” And so saying he took hold of the constable’s collar and pushed him to the window. “There!” Cabal pointed at one group of undead shambling across the road. “There!” He pointed out another group standing aimlessly in the churchyard on the southern side of the town square. “And there!” The mortuary was just off the square, but the town hall was still visible some two hundred yards away. “Do you see?”
The constable angrily shook Cabal’s hand from his collar and glared out of the window. “Monsters,” he said, finally. “Your monsters are everywhere, they . . . ” He paused.
“You see?” asked Cabal, deciding to ignore the “your monsters” calumny.
“They’re behaving differently,” said the constable slowly, his eyes flickering from one group to the next. “Some are working together, others just stand there.” There was a scream outside. The constable blanched. “Unless somebody gets too close. Why aren’t they all doing the same things?”
Cabal didn’t answer. Instead he had opened his Gladstone and was sorting through its contents. A moment later, he straightened up, snapped a small telescope out to length, and peered out across the town square.
The constable saw he wasn’t going to be getting any immediate answers and ventured upon conjecture. “Are they . . . like bees? Workers and . . . drones and . . . ”
“A gestalt hive mind,” offered Cabal, not lowering his telescope.
“Yes!”
“No. Not least because drones sexually serve the queen, and the idea of those roles having analogies in a horde of walking dead is simply too distasteful to contemplate. More pertinently, however, they are not exhibiting different behaviour; only one area of the growing horde is, and that area is not fixed. These are not human bees; these are puppets of flesh. Observe, and you will note that the walkers become more active, more directed, in an area some thirty feet across. This signifies the area of the puppet master’s attention.”
“The puppet master? Somebody’s controlling them? Who?”
“Yes, there is a puppet master. Yes, he is controlling them and . . . ” he handed the constable the telescope and pointed across the square, “ . . . he’s the fat bastard on the roof of the town hall.”
“Fat” was an overstatement, but the man visible on the town hall roof was certainly well-built. The constable could see an ursine form capering back and forth along the parapet edge of the flat-roofed building, gazing out across the chaos he had created now and then with what appeared to be a pair of army surplus field glasses.
“Why has he done this? All this death? All these innocent people? Why?”
Cabal took the telescope back, closed it up with a smart snap, and put it back into his bag. “At the risk of sounding conceited, I believe it’s all about me. It really is too great a coincidence that this fellow decides to embark on such a clottish piece of amateur necromancy at the very same time that I just happen to be skull delving in the local mortuary.”
“He’s trying to impress you?” The idea horrified the constable
. “What sort of . . . ”
“No, no, no,” said Cabal, and made a haha sort of noise that may have been a laugh, or it may have been a nervous tic. “He’s trying to kill me. Not the most efficient way of setting about it, but I can imagine how all this might appeal to a certain type of personality. Not a very clever one, though.”
“Amateur? He managed to raise an army of the dead!”
“Oh, that?” Cabal sniffed dismissively, as if this unknown enemy had raised an army of chinchillas. “Any fool can do that. In fact, only a fool would do that. That is a ritual known as the Ereshkigal Working, and no necromancer with an ounce of wit who isn’t an avowed nihilist would want anything to do with it.”
Constable Copeland was not overly interested in what was à la mode this year in necromancy. He was watching the quick legging it from the dead. “That's the last of the survivors out of the square. If they have any sense, they’ll barricade themselves in their homes until the army gets here. Those things won’t stand a chance then.” He nodded with desperate assuredness at Cabal. “We can just sit this out, can’t we?”
Cabal shook his head, and left the window to perch on the edge of a desk. He gestured for Copeland to sit by him, and this he did with a sense that Cabal had approximately a bathful of ice-cold water to throw on those hopes. As, indeed, he did.
“Constable,” Cabal began, “this is a reasonably-sized town, yes? About two hundred thousand people?” Copeland nodded, and Cabal continued, “In a conurbation of this size, about twelve people die every day. Their bodies remain viable for Ereshkigalian resurrection for about a month. Assume that half are cremated within the first week after death, and that half of the remainder can’t get out of their graves. That’s optimistic, by the way. The dead are very good at exhuming themselves.”
Copeland opened his mouth to ask how Cabal could know such a thing, before realising how foolish that would sound, so he closed it again.
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