As Cabal straightened up, Horst asked, ‘The Skirtingboard People? What are they?’
‘Extinct,’ said Cabal meaningfully and more for the benefit of the listening garden than for Horst.
* * *
Johannes and Horst Cabal sat on the wall at the end of the garden and waited. They waited mainly in silence, but for the small sound of Johannes Cabal occasionally drawing up his sleeve to read his wristwatch. Finally, he looked sideways at Horst and said, ‘You seem remarkably calm about the approaching dawn.’
‘I know when it’s about to crest the horizon. If they’re not here by dawn, I shall just have to retire to the snug little resting place I made myself in the cellar and we shall go at sundown instead.’
‘The cellar…’ said his brother.
‘Of course the cellar. Where else could I be assured somewhere to rest where no ray of sunlight would fall on me?’
‘Of course.’ Cabal grew quiet, but his eyes betrayed his preoccupation.
Horst, who had no need of vampiric super-senses in most dealings with his brother, stroked his chin and added as an innocent afterthought, ‘Funny. I remembered the cellar as being much larger than that.’
Cabal jumped to his feet and started walking back and forth distractedly, checking his watch yet again. ‘Where is that entomopter?’
Horst smiled to himself, started to say something, but then the smile faded and he looked up at the starry night. ‘They’re coming.’
‘They?’
‘Miss Montgomery said she’d bring one of the others with her in case we needed to carry very much gear. Just as well; the cargo space in her Copperhead was pretty crowded with just me in there on the outward journey. The other ’mopter can take your case and bag. That cane will be awkward if you were planning to take it into the cockpit, too. I’d put it in there if I were you.’
‘Extra cargo space…’ Cabal was thinking rapidly. ‘Just a moment.’
He hurdled the wall into the front garden, much to the dismay of the wee folk who scattered almost invisibly but with plenty of tiny screams and several foul curses delivered in tones like chiming fairy bells. Cabal had no time for their finer feelings; he was already at the front door, temporarily annulling its occult defences, unlocking it, and ducking inside. Horst was conflicted by his interest in this new development and keeping an eye out for the approaching aircraft. Both the entomopters appeared in the eastern horizon, outrunning the sun, at the same moment Cabal reappeared in the open doorway. He had slung across his back a long canvas bag, and over his shoulder a fishing bag. Horst ached with curiosity to know how fly-fishing was going to help matters, but contented himself with instead lighting the flares he had been supplied with to delineate a clear landing area; two greens to mark the entry side, two red to mark the far edge. As the Spirit of ’76 and the Buzzbomb decelerated and came in to land on 45-degree descents, his brother joined him to watch.
‘Fascinating machines,’ said Cabal.
‘I thought your scientific interests were more biological?’
‘Professionally, yes, but one cannot help but be impressed by the mechanical ingenuity of an entomopter.’
‘So enthusiastic. You should take lessons.’
‘I did. I can fly.’
Leaving his brother openmouthed in his wake for the second time in one night, Cabal approached the aircraft respectfully from the front, well clear of the blur of wings as they slowed to a halt.
When the wings were travelling at a visible speed and therefore unlikely to do more than break a limb if one were foolish enough to stand by them, the cockpits of both aircraft opened, the Copperhead’s rear half canopy sliding back, and the Giaguaro’s along hinges on its trailing edge. Cabal watched as two women climbed down, both exhibiting the unconscious awareness of where exactly the wings were that one would expect from highly experienced pilots so as not to inadvertently walk within their sweep and receive anything from a bone-shattering slap up to an impromptu amputation.
The woman from the Giaguaro was the first to reach Cabal. They eyed each other with a degree of suspicion in the flickering red and green light of the flares. To Dea Boom’s eye, Johannes Cabal looked like a walking dead man, gaunt with illness, his paleness picking up the strange illumination making him look like a ghost in a cheap theatrical production. He stood resolute, yet the long bag on his back was clearly weighing on him, and for all his willpower he could not help wavering slightly beneath it. She did not know whether to respect him for that pride or despise him. For his part, he first noted the shoulder holster she wore, was aware of the weight of the Webley automatic snugged away in his own, and briefly felt a sense of comradeship in the Great International League of Shoulder Holster Wearers. She took off her flying helmet and ruffled her fingers through the short blond hair therein, and he decided—instinctively and with a terrible irrationality that would have made him snort in derision only a year or two before—that she was all right and that they would probably get along nicely. After all, she had short blond hair, a pistol in a shoulder holster, and she flew an entomopter. That was three commonalities right there.
‘You’re the necromancer, right?’ she said, and even over the sound of the engines winding down, he could make out the distinctive intonations of a Dutch accent. While many Germans find the Dutch accent inherently hilarious, Cabal’s humours were balanced differently: strong in the choleric, and barely less so in the melancholic, a good showing for the phlegmatic, but the sanguine potters over the finishing line last and alone. Thus, as a practical linguist, he found nothing remarkable there, still less amusing. Then again, this was a man who had remained straight-faced while a medium—claiming to speak an obscure dialect of Enochian—had lowed at him like a cow in calf for ten minutes.
‘I am Johannes Cabal,’ said Cabal. ‘I am not defined by my profession.’
She pursed her lips. ‘And this profession that doesn’t define you, that would be necromancy?’
Cabal belatedly realised that his rhetorical skills, never his strongest suit, had been blunted still further by his illness. ‘Yes,’ he replied, wisely cutting his losses.
‘Right.’
By this point, the woman from the Copperhead had joined them. Cabal noted that she, too, wore a pistol in a shoulder holster. Her flying helmet, however, concealed shoulder-long auburn hair that had not enjoyed being forced under the leather of the helmet. She dropped her gloves into the helmet she held in one hand while she ran her fingers absently through her hair in an effort to separate the locks and make them flow, rather than sit unbecomingly in a mound on the crown of her head. Where the Dutch woman was, he gauged, somewhere in her mid-twenties, the Copperhead pilot looked to be in her early thirties and comported herself with the confidence of a leader. Even if Cabal had not already identified her from her aircraft, her manner would have done the job just as well.
‘That Horst’s brother?’ she asked of Dea.
‘The necromancer,’ confirmed Dea, never looking away from Cabal. ‘Right.’
They both looked at him without further comment for a period that started to grow uncomfortable.
Are they judging me? thought Cabal, with a growing sense of umbrage.
‘Ginny! Dea!’ said Horst, joining them. He smiled, and they smiled back at him, dropping Cabal from their attention like an overripe haddock.
Thus was it ever, thought Cabal.
‘This is my little brother, Johannes,’ he said, and unwisely made to ruffle Cabal’s hair before remembering why it would be unwise in much the same way that making to tickle a feral polecat under the chin may be considered unwise. ‘He’s the brains of my family.’
‘While Horst laid claim to several other organs,’ said Cabal. ‘I’m delighted to make your acquaintances, Miss Montgomery, Mevrouw Boom.’ He looked as delighted as a rabbi inheriting a pig farm.
They, however, had been warned of his icy demeanour, and took no offence, which he found unsettling. Causing offence at first acquaintance was his forte, and he cons
idered himself more than commonly good at it.
‘You must be shattered after all that flying,’ said Horst. ‘Do you need to rest?’
‘We’re okay,’ said Virginia. ‘We set down to refuel at a French aerofield just over the Channel. Grabbed some shut-eye while we had the chance. We’re good for a few hours now.’
‘I made you some coffee and sandwiches.’ Horst produced a calico shopping bag adorned with a floral pattern so unmercifully twee that Cabal was sure only the poor light saved him from blindness, specifically by clawing out his own eyes. From the depths of this radioactively pretty receptacle, emitting fast particles in the quaint spectrum, Horst took two packets of greaseproof paper and two metal cylinders.
‘Those are dewar vessels,’ said Cabal jealously, ‘from my laboratory.’
‘Are they? I thought they were thermos flasks. Well, never mind, I’m sure they’ll do just as well.’ Horst passed them to the pilots, who accepted them gratefully.
‘You wouldn’t be so keen on that coffee if you knew what had been in those vessels previously,’ muttered Cabal, at pains to make it loud enough to be heard.
‘Ignore him. I got them straight from their boxes in the store cupboard.’
‘Is nothing sacrosanct?’ muttered Cabal at the same muttering volume as previously.
‘And I ran them through the autoclave just to be safe. Believe me, they’re surgically clean.’
‘You used my autoclave,’ said Cabal, so outraged that he forgot to mutter, ‘for washing dishes?’
‘Yes,’ replied Horst. He smiled, unabashed.
‘Your brother’s a lot of fun,’ said Dea, addressing Horst but looking at Johannes.
‘True,’ replied Horst, the spirit of ingenuousness. ‘Although some days he’s in a bad mood.’
‘I can see my brother has already inculcated you into his comedy troupe,’ said Cabal. ‘So, unless anyone has any other morsels of rollicking humour with which they wish to bless this gathering, perhaps we can get along, the sooner to kill Maleficarus.’
‘Your brother doesn’t beat around the bush none, does he, Horst?’ said Virginia, showing a small sign of warming slightly to Cabal through the agency of a half smile. ‘Calls a shovel a shovel.’
‘Actually, I call it a “spade”,’ Cabal said.
She looked at him, and an eyebrow raised. The smile, however, remained infuriatingly only-sort-of there and only-sort-of not.
Cabal frowned suspiciously. ‘Are you flirting with me?’ he demanded.
Horst clapped his hands, startling them all. ‘Right!’ he said with forced bonhomie. ‘Let’s get our gear packed, I can take up residence in my luxurious stateroom, and we can get back to the saving of the good old world. Can’t we?’ He smiled a slightly desperate smile at them all. ‘Get back to the good old train? In our good old entomopters?’
‘Oh!’ said Dea. ‘I forgot to tell you, Ginny. There’s a problem with the train.’
Virginia and Horst exchanged worried glances whose main function, it seemed to Cabal, was to make him feel still more supernumerary. ‘Mechanical?’ Virginia asked.
‘Mechanic. Becky’s exhausted. The footplate men from the freight train who helped her get the train away from the town left.’ She shrugged. ‘You can’t blame them. They have families to go to. But it means Becky’s doing everything—keeping the train and the ’mopters going and driving the train. She’s running on coffee and willpower. She’s going to start making mistakes, Ginny.’
Virginia did not argue the point, but nor was she happy. ‘We can’t just put an ad in the classifieds, “Train crew required for monster-battling expedition. No money, limited life expectancy”.’
‘Maybe Becky can stay driving the train and we find a good ’mopter mechanic somewhere?’ suggested Dea.
‘No! Hell, no. Would you trust somebody to fool with your ’mopter just like that? No. Becky’s the best grease monkey I’ve ever seen. We can’t just replace her, and it would break her heart if we even tried. Horst, you helped her drive once. Could you take over at the footplate?’
‘Well, I suppose I could.’ He did not sound at all certain. ‘But … won’t I be needed for the fighting? All the stuff with the strength and the fangs and suchlike? And my working hours are a bit limited anyway, remember?’
‘It isn’t a problem,’ said Cabal. They all looked at him. ‘Yes, I am still here.’ He unslung his bags and handed them to Horst. ‘Load those aboard, would you, Horst? I shall be back shortly.’
Horst hefted the longer of the two bags. ‘This is really heavy for a fishing rod,’ he said, a little ironically.
‘It’s an elephant gun,’ replied Cabal blandly. ‘And ammunition. You mentioned Maleficarus’s pets tend to be on the big side.’ He turned to go back to the house, paused for long enough to add, ‘I suspect he’s overcompensating for something,’ and walked off.
They had just finished putting away Johannes Cabal’s gear in the Buzzbomb’s cargo space and were discussing Horst’s travelling arrangements, when Dea shouted ‘Zombies!’ and went to draw her pistol. Horst and Virginia whirled to see Cabal walking towards them, a coil of rope in one hand and apparently unaware of the two corpses that walked behind him.
‘Zombies?’ he said. ‘Really? Where?’ He turned and saw the two monsters barely a yard away from him. ‘Oh, I see. Not technically zombies, but an easy mistake for the layman to make. Laywoman. Layperson.’
For the third time in one night, Horst was astonished. ‘You’re kidding, Johannes? You’ve still got them?’
‘Waste not, want not.’ He walked to them and stopped, and the dead men following him stopped, too. Close to, Virginia and Dea could see that these were not at all like the undead who had attacked the train and, later, the town. Where those things had been relatively fresh, fleshly, albeit discoloured, malodorous, and slightly drippy, these examples of the necromancer’s art were dry, clearly not at all new, creaked slightly as they walked, and their flesh seemed to be coated with varnish over clown make-up. One stood tall and thin, and the other shorter and not so much stout as sagging where once it might have been fat. They wore filthy coveralls, and perched upon their heads were Casey Jones engineer hats, grimy and cobwebbed. With a horrible crunching noise as of a thousand ants eating a popadam next to a microphone, they smiled at the women. The women did not smile back.
‘What,’ said Virginia in a terrible whisper, ‘the living hell are those?’
‘Dennis and Denzil,’ said Cabal, as if introducing old school friends. ‘Despite appearances, they have their uses. Specifically, they can drive a train.’ He looked at them and frowned. ‘Possibly Denzil and Dennis. I forget which is which. It doesn’t really matter.’
Dennis and Denzil nodded in agreement. They had long since come to understand that it mattered only to them and, even then, not always. They were currently just glorying in the sensation of not being in the shed at the bottom of Cabal’s back garden where they had been sitting patiently waiting for him to remember them for a little over two years. In this time they had kept themselves amused with any number of little plans and shenanigans, some of which had taken them from the confines of the shed. This Cabal did not know, which was just as well. Still, they had always come back to sit and wait, while spiders made webs around them and millipedes processed across their boots.
This, however, was clearly a special occasion, as Johannes Cabal had remembered them and they were out of the shed and under an open sky at his prompting and with his blessing. There were also two women present, who, the dusty archives of their memories assured them, were attractive, although any reason why that should be relevant eluded them. They had just been introduced, so obviously they would be going out on a blind date with them. Things were certainly looking up for Dennis and Denzil.
* * *
Dawn found the Spirit of ’76 and Buzzbomb airborne and heading towards the Continent. Through the blue skies, barely marked by a few half-hearted nimbi rolling in from the southwest, they
whirred in a mist of multiple wings and exhaust fumes. Their pilots squinted through sunglasses as the morning sun struck them, driving Horst Cabal into a deep sleep where he lay curled in the Copperhead’s stowage. He no longer dreamt as he slept, but at least he knew why he had for a while, and why the dreams had all featured Johannes wandering around in a strange world of wonder and terror.
For his part, Johannes Cabal now only troubled the Dreamlands in his dreams, which was his current activity. Hat pulled down over his eyes, he sat slumbering in the front seat of the Spirit of ’76, markedly unimpressed by the whole business of aerotravel. As he had climbed into the seat, he had said he much preferred entomopter travel to aeroship, a statement that to the average man on the street was as ridiculous as saying a pogo stick was a finer way to travel than cruise liner. It had won the kind regards of the pilots present, however, and all the more so because the sentiment was so plainly sincere; Johannes Cabal was evidently not a man given to dissimulation.
The Buzzbomb was bearing an unexpected cargo, but one well within its capabilities. On either side of the fuselage below the level of the cockpit and forward of the leading edges of the moving wings were two further short, stub-ended wings. Once, their main function had been to carry external armaments. Now, instead of bombs, rockets, or fuel pods, each wing bore a living dead man, tied firmly around their midriffs with lengths of rope. The slipstream battered them, but they did not care; this was the most fun they had ever had, living or dead. With their engineer hats firmly joined to their heads with rusty staples, they looked to the dawn and greeted it with joyful hoots and groans.
Chapter 14
IN WHICH JOHANNES CABAL MEETS ALL SORTS OF PEOPLE WHO WOULD LOVE TO KILL HIM
The journey was uneventful, though tedious. The only great complication was that the flight required two halts for refuelling, both of which raised the question of what to do with two happy dead men, neither of whom were likely to be popular nor welcome at even the most cosmopolitan of aerofields. They devised a simple plan wherein Johannes Cabal, Dennis, and Denzil would be deposited in an out-of-the-way sort of place as near the aerofield as possible, and then the aircraft would refuel and pick them up again.
The Brothers Cabal Page 24