The Brothers Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Then she saw Horst, besmirched in gore, magically appear beside a couple of the attackers and divest one of its head and a quantity of spinal cord, which he then used to belabour its partner into a ruin of pulped flesh and pulverised bone in a few furious blows. Assured neither were likely to be getting up again, he flickered from sight once more.

  ‘I’m very glad he’s on our side,’ said the professor, pausing by her side. ‘You did a good job persuading him to come over to the side of virtue.’

  ‘Persuade him?’ She laughed. ‘I shot him a couple of times, and he forgave me. He never needed any persuasion. Ouch.’ This last as she observed a zombie thrown into the trunk of a proud old elm hard enough to leave an imprint in the bark.

  Horst stopped to rest, leaning against a toolshed at the side of a wheat field. It wasn’t much of a rest; he didn’t need a pause nearly so much as he needed to drink. He couldn’t understand why the Ministerium hadn’t sent any of their shapechangers. Their blood was entirely acceptable, and their ethics so abominable that he only experienced the smallest regret when feeding on them. Perhaps that was why they hadn’t sent any; to deny him of sustenance. So Lady Misericorde had dispatched her army (and he was aware of the awful possibility that this was not the entirety of it), and it seemed they had their precious ‘Lord of Powers’ with his unusual cloud formations.* This one hadn’t performed its party trick yet, whatever that happened to be, assuming that it was ever intended to do anything but fly against the wind and glower. He considered the possibility that it was simply a way of corralling the zombies around; where the cloud went, they followed. That would certainly make sense given the available evidence. Perhaps, he hoped, that was the limit of the cloud’s threat.

  He was just about to re-embark on his zombie-splashing exploits when something fell from the cloud. It thudded to Earth some fifty feet from him at the edge of the wheat, throwing soil in a halo around it.

  Horst wasn’t sure what it was meant to be. At first glance, it was as if a lover of classical art had struck a blow by pushing a modern sculpture over the railing from a passing aeroship. It stood comfortably over two yards high on three supports, and seemed to be made of metal, and as a result was really quite heavy. He looked at the sculpture, all organic curves and enigmatic holes where it stood at the edge of the field, an impromptu installation by a guerrilla sculptor. Apparently the Ministerium Tenebrae had decided to conquer the region using the unusual twin-pronged attack of zombies and avant-garde artwork. Then the piece of sculpture lifted itself up on its three supports and shook itself in a remarkably doglike action, scattering off the clods of damp earth thrown up on impact that had stuck to its skin. Horst realised with both wonder and horror that the sculpture was nothing of the sort. It was a machine, yet it was living. Some sort of evolved device from some alternate plane or strange dimension where people had been altogether too indulgent of their toasters, and the consumer durables had inherited their Earth.

  As if it knew it was being watched, the machine stumped around on—he could no longer think of them as supports—its three legs and regarded him somehow, for there were no obvious eyes. There was an intelligence in that regard that Horst did not care for, and he was aware of a great hatred, as if he had just said something derogatory about Henry Moore while standing by one of his works, and it had taken umbrage. For his part, Horst did not like the look of the thing, either. Not so much on an aesthetic level (he was actually quite fond of the modern art), but with respect to the resilience necessary to survive a drop from a couple of hundred feet, the hardness of skin to disregard the impact, the mass to make three small craters where the supports—the legs—had come down, and the likelihood that, should the creature (for creature it surely was, of some sort) have anything analogous to veins and arteries beneath that skin, it would likely be at best machine oil, and at worst mercury. Neither represented a decent meal for Horst, should he manage to vanquish it.

  The thing moved a little closer with the careful step of a bird-eating spider. Horst slid down the side of the shed away from it, never taking his eyes from it as he moved. The thing took another step, a step that was cautious only in the way a predator not wishing to alarm its prey is. Horst backed away still further; it was like being stalked by an obelisk and he did not care for the sensation at all.

  A part of him—not the cynical, monstrous part; that seemed to have gone, or perhaps was only waiting for an opportunity to return when his defences were down, or alternatively was off in a corner of his psyche somewhere, sulking after being harshly spoken to—wondered just how a man like him ends up in a situation like this. He had always imagined himself becoming something that doesn’t involve too much work, like a poet or a speculator, being endlessly fascinating to an endless stream of delightful girls. Eventually, he would have become a ‘silver fox’ sort of gentleman roué, and so ended his days chasing nurses. It wasn’t the most evolved or ambitious of careers, but it had the undoubted advantage of a great deal of female company. Yet here he was, a vampire, a long way from home, being menaced in a field by statuary. How could such a thing come to pass? How could he have missed his mark in life so very, very thoroughly?

  Then he remembered his brother, and all became immediately clear. He didn’t think of his brother’s miraculous ability to turn everything on its head with rancour; that would be like railing against the wind for blowing or water for being so very wet. He simply accepted it with an inner nod, and a philosophical ‘Oh. That’s why.’

  He also realised what he had known at some psychic level for the past few days of restless sleep; that somehow his brother was still alive, although possibly in some hue of peril. This surprised him only rationally; emotionally he had found it easy to accept. Johannes should have been suffering eternal torment in Hell by this point (even if he had dodged the particular damnation Horst had anticipated at the close of the Cabal Bros. Carnival, according to Lady Misericorde), yet it seemed he wasn’t if Horst’s curious deathly dreams were to be believed. And he did believe them; there were some things he’d come to accept about being a creature from a nightmare, and one of them was that when he experienced odd things like this, he should pay them credence. He still had humanly hunches, just as he ever had, but he knew those might lead him astray, just as they ever had. These more supernatural senses, however, he had come to trust.

  All very interesting, he told himself, and something to ponder on sometime after he had managed to escape the attentions of a large metallic thing, which might be alive in some sense. A couple of hundred yards away, something else large, dense, and distinctly not of the Earth fell in the middle of the wheat field with a resounding thud that Horst felt through his feet before the sound reached him. Further local seismic activity told him that shortly he would be surrounded by enough of the things to fill a notably dangerous gallery of very challenging artwork.

  The statue-thing, perhaps startled into activity by the arrival of its colleagues, leapt at Horst, a manoeuvre that in terms of being unexpected was on par with being pounced upon by a smallish stately home. A human would probably have ended as puree beneath the massive form, but Horst was not as human as he used to be, and while the thing’s legs shoved several inches into the ground as the impetus grew to launch it, he was already reacting. By the time it landed, it was to find that Horst was no longer there. One of its legs tore a long splintered scar through the wall of the shed and, as being slightly in the way was apparently regarded as an unforgivable crime in whichever dimension the creature had been summoned from, it spent the next half a minute smashing the rest of the shed into matchwood using a strange dance of destruction that positively reeked of petulance.

  Horst, meanwhile, was making himself a scarce resource in that part of the field. He ran slower than was his wont, because he didn’t wish his last memories to be of cutting a new furrow with his mouth after a high-speed fall, immediately followed by something that looked like it had been spawned by Stonehenge jumping on his back. It was one thi
ng to be humiliated, another to die horribly, but he was damned if he’d do both simultaneously.

  He tore to a halt in a shower of earth and wheat ears somewhere in the middle of the field. Before him lay something like a solid wheel, but as if taken from a huge toy automobile. It was black, sleek, and shiny, fat and rounded, a regular transverse ridge pattern making him think of a tyre’s tread. It was also large; wider than a man was tall, and chest high to him. His first thought was that perhaps it was an abandoned wheel from some farm vehicle of the sort that he’d heard of before he became a vampire. That was years ago, now; perhaps they were common these days, and much bigger than he’d anticipated. That these poor farmers were able to afford such a machine seemed unlikely, however, which troubled him, as did the shininess of it, betokening newness. When the tyre started to uncurl itself, he realised that the ‘tread’ was actually the ridges between body segments, and that he was watching an unreasonably large woodlouse in action. It found the soil with its multitude of legs, arranged itself for movement, and swung its front end around to face Horst as if scenting him. Its face was far less insectlike than he was expecting; two very mammalian eyes mounted in a skull-like head but for the complex mouthparts that juddered spastically vertically, horizontally, and on the diagonals regarded him with an expression of concentrated malevolence. That didn’t mean it actually was malevolent, he reminded himself. It wasn’t the creature’s fault that it looked like that, after all. Perhaps it was actually just being friendly. Then he noticed it was starting to drool, and—with the best will in the world—decided that he was being optimistic.

  The giant woodlouse reared up on a multitude of legs, waving another multitude in the air and champing its mouthparts together like a topographically challenged horse. By the time it struck, Horst was already moving out of the way. Not nearly as quickly as he would have liked, however; his reserves were finally dry.

  His attempt to run away and not stop until he had passed through at least three international borders finished less than ten feet away with him wallowing weakly in a furrow. The great woodlouse reared again, spitting soil from its mouth with far less concern and far greater ability than Horst could manage, re-acquired him as a target, and prepared to strike again. Horst floundered his way behind a row of wheat, in the desperate hope that the stalks might interfere with its vision. It was a thin sort of hope, but he was suddenly so enervated, he wasn’t even sure he could stand unaided. The weakness was terrifying in itself, but the timing of it didn’t help affairs. He remembered suffering from flu back when such things bothered him, and being left so weak that he had to crawl across the room. This was worse. There was none of the sense of his muscles trying to do the job they usually did so easily yet failing. Instead, there was nothing to call upon at all. His arms felt boneless, afterthoughts stapled on at the shoulders by a slipshod creator. His legs flopped behind him, scrabbling slowly across the soil.

  The great louse was looking dead at him, those narrow, moist eyes clear and focussed upon him, unperturbed by the intervening line of wheat. This, Horst concluded, was going to be a stupid and inglorious death. Hardly an uncommon state of affairs to humanity, but one he’d been hoping to avoid. If he had to go, something more noble than this. He’d done a decent job of dying the last time, but it seemed his encore would be perfunctory and nasty.

  Above, the strange cloud rolled and shuddered as it dispatched more unearthly monstrosities to destroy the town and, incidentally, those it had been sent to kill. To his eye, it seemed to Horst that the cloud was no longer as large or as dense as it had been previously. He remembered how the much-smaller cloud they had first encountered had vanished altogether after disgorging six monsters; perhaps the same was happening here but with a proportionately greater number. At some point the cloud would be too thin to exert its curious ability to shield him from the usual effects of daytime and light upon him, which is to say, coma and combustion. Not that he’d be alive (in the vampiric sense) long enough to experience that. The great louse loomed, and Horst braced himself for the lightning-fast strike that would take him.

  And it came. Not, however, from the louse. Unseen and unsuspected, the giant woodlouse had been stalked by the prowling sculpture. Now, in a flail of great rounded shapes with aesthetically placed holes here and there, it pounced upon its prey. The great louse went down in a jumble of art and arthropod.

  Horst crawled from the fight, trying to find his way back to the edge of the field. Somewhere off to the other side of him there was an odd sound like a very large pair of scissors closing. Seconds later half a zombie—bisected from crotch to crown—landed in a wet wave in front of him in much the same way a slice of bacon might be laid in the pan. It seemed to Horst that whatever the Lord of Powers had summoned were many and varied, and poorly briefed as to what they were supposed to be attacking. If any further proof were needed, another zombie walked by Horst a few seconds later, head down and furious of expression, death failing to mediate its displeasure at being covered in a pulsating slime, transparent and animate, that was visibly dissolving the flesh of the walking corpse.

  Horst dragged himself through the field, the sound of argumentative monsters filling the air as the attack on the town devolved rapidly into a free-for-all among the summoned and the raised. Staying low actually seemed to be the wisest thing to do, as well as the necessary thing to do thanks to his legs feeling like overcooked noodles. Thus, he crawled slowly and painfully through a battlefield of the dreadful, the fights between summoned, and the attacks of the summoned upon the zombies. For the zombies never seemed to retaliate, this being outside their orders. Instead they confined themselves to trying to struggle on despite eviscerations, amputations, and other nuisances. They did, however, look very cross by dead people standards while doing it, as if regarding the actions of their extra-dimensional tormentors as highly unprofessional.

  In this, Horst had to concede that they might have had a point. Whatever control the summoned creatures were under seemed either loose, or perhaps their orders had been careless.

  Abruptly the wheat thinned away and he was at the edge of the field. He had managed to navigate in the right direction—before him lay a country lane, the town off to his left, and dead ahead was the showground. Beyond it lay the train and sanctuary. Using the fence as a support, he pulled himself to his feet and awkwardly between the bars. Now all he had to do was travel a quarter of a mile across open country with legs that weren’t as reliable as he was used to.

  Then he saw the steam and smoke rising from the locomotive start to puff rhythmically and he knew it was moving. His unrequited need for blood was dimming his sight, his senses dulling as they starved, but even through the growing attenuation of his hearing, he could hear the chuff of the engine as it headed for the main line.

  Despairing, he took a step and immediately fell. He tried to shout, but his voice was nothing but a croaking gasp in his throat. Behind him, he could hear things—what things they were he had no idea—moving closer. He started to crawl, but knew he couldn’t outrun a hogtied terrapin in his current state. He was abandoned, he was helpless, and he was doomed.

  An Interlude

  It should be pointed out that Horst’s recollection of events necessarily skipped over some facts that he did not know or was unaware of—as mentioned at the beginning of this narrative—but also things that he decided not to mention both for reasons of brevity, or because he simply did not wish to talk about them. Into this latter category fell the inner conflict he had felt with his inhuman side. Johannes Cabal, however, was very at home to his own inhuman side; indeed, he was less welcoming to his human side. This gave him a certain understanding of the sensibilities of the unconventionally moralled, and he had scented his brother’s evasions throughout the telling.

  ‘Tell me, Horst,’ he said with studied nonchalance, ‘how is the vampire business going for you these days?’

  Horst was uncharacteristically dumbstruck. Eventually he managed, ‘By which yo
u mean…?’

  ‘By which I mean that vampires, even those that were good men or women in their previous existences, are not pleasant company. There is a corruption of the spirit there, at least in the vast majority of cases. Have you felt within yourself any hints of such?’

  Horst said nothing, but simply seemed uncomfortable and avoided eye contact.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ said Cabal, ‘we’re talking about vampirism, not genital warts. I shall assume that you have been experiencing a desire to treat humanity as low and expendable.’

  Horst swallowed. ‘Yes,’ he said in a shamed whisper. ‘It’s horrible.’

  ‘Is it?’ Cabal was honestly surprised. ‘I was about to say I sympathise entirely. That has long been my relationship with my fellow humans. I can see it would be an unpleasant experience to you, though. There is, however, a simple enough solution, although one that requires mental effort and discipline on your part.’ He indicated his eyes with a gesture of his index and middle fingers. ‘Look at me.’

  Horst did so, somewhat suspiciously. ‘You’re not going to try to hypnotise me, are you?’

  ‘That’s rather more your forte than mine,’ said Cabal a little pointedly, as Horst realised that his mild manipulations of his brother’s memories during the early stages of his convalescence had not gone as unnoticed as Horst had hoped. ‘No, I simply want your full attention. Do I have it? Yes? Good. Then mark what I say and see in my face that there is no dissimulation or pettifogging.