Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘Eh?’ said Ercusides. ‘Is somebody there? What is going on?’

  ‘You’re earning your keep, sir,’ said Cabal. ‘Now, quiet, please. We are working.’

  The cave extended back some twenty feet before narrowing into a stone gullet, ridged with shallow steps, that descended at an angle of some thirty degrees to the horizontal. Cabal walked down them without hesitation; if he was correct about the nature of the place, it would not require traps to protect its treasure, as its treasure was quite capable of defending itself. The gullet opened out into a jagged gallery, this time a natural formation that had been tweaked here and there, but was otherwise as natural processes had created it. Along one side a crevice in the floor wound as they walked alongside it, becoming first a crevasse, and then something like an abyss by the time they were close to the far end of the gallery, some two hundred feet long. The light from Ercusides’ skull burned brightly and reflected from the semi-precious stones and quartzes that speckled the walls.

  Cabal paused, looking first up a short ramp that led into another narrow carved corridor, much like the gullet from the entry, and then he looked into the abyss. Dank humours were carried up by a low wind that groaned on the very edge of hearing. Bose cautiously joined him.

  ‘What do you suppose is down there?’ he asked, curiosity and trepidation mingling in his voice.

  ‘I am guessing at two things. One is a supposition, the other a good likelihood. First, I think whatever is left of the wizard Hep-Seth is down there, if he’s lucky. The gods played a childish game with him, and they usually throw away what they tire of.’

  ‘Really?’ Bose’s voice was a squeak. He sidled a little closer to the edge and looked into the shadowed deep. ‘And the other?’

  The powerful shove he received in his back from Johannes Cabal took him clear off the precipice, and then he screamed shrilly enough to remove any chance of him hearing Cabal say, ‘You, any minute now.’

  Cabal listened to the diminuendo screaming for a few seconds, but had heard similar before and was unimpressed by this new rendition. He was making a calculated guess here, and if he was wrong, he was certainly in no more trouble than if he was right. Holding up the grumbling head of Ercusides on his stick, he went down the last corridor and into the chamber of the Phobic Animus.

  Surviving fragments of Cyril W. Clome’s manuscript for The Young Person’s Guide to Cthulhu and His Friends: No. 4 Yog-Sothoth, the Lurker at the Threshold

  Yog-Sothoth is never late for appointments, best beloved, and for the most wonderful of reasons. Yog-Sothoth is coterminous (coh-TER-min-US) with all time and all space, which means that clever old Outer God exists everywhere ALL the time! It is so terribly, terribly bright that even it doesn’t understand what it’s thinking about half the time, but luckily it’s aware of the other half of the time all the time, so it can crib off itself. I don’t think that counts as cheating.

  Yog-Sothoth – who has lots of other names like the Lurker at the Threshold, the Key and the Gate, the Opener of the Way, the All-in-One and the One-in-All and log-Sotôt – looks like a big crowd of silvery bubbles but, unlike a big crowd of silvery bubbles, is stupendous in its malign suggestiveness. That’s just another way of saying, ‘I’m really not sure I trust those silvery bubbles.’

  Chapter 14

  IN WHICH WE CONTEMPLATE THE LIFE AND DEATH OF JOHANNES CABAL

  As Johannes Cabal descended, he could see a flickering glow ahead, and realised he was approaching the final chamber. Once the glow was strong enough, he popped Ercusides off the end of the stick and put him away. Cabal had a strong presentiment that what was coming was going to be complicated and fraught enough without having to worry about a dead head on a stick. He drew his sword on the small chance that it was possible simply to jump on the epitome of Fear and do it to death with some fevered stabbing. It was a very small chance, he knew, but at least it provided a prop to his resolve. He considered turning around and going back out into the daylight. The Silver Key was useless without a gateway, so he could not escape via that route. Perhaps it would be possible to put together some sort of raft, given time, although the chances of negotiating the Cerenarian Sea without knowing where he was, and with all the terrors both meteorological and biological he might encounter en route, were vanishingly small. Or, he supposed, he could just sit around like Robinson Crusoe. No, he concluded, he would go mad with intellectual frustration before many years had gone by and end up more like Ben Gunn. No matter what its nature, its likely brevity, or its outcome, he must ultimately endure this encounter, so he might as well get it out of the way now.

  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 nu
mber 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.’

  ‘Yet here you are, burning up precious weeks and months of your immortality for some half-witted joke upon me. Perhaps you could explain that in terms a filthy ape might understand, O great and powerful Bose.’

  Bose laughed, and swung around in his throne so that his legs hung over one arm. He smiled complacently. ‘You’re terrific, Johannes Cabal. You know that? Just about anybody else would be whimpering in the corner by this point with his sanity in his hands, not least because I would have got bored with them and gone out of my way to blow their wits out of their ears. You, though . . . I am talking to you because I am the Messenger of the Gods, and that makes me the great communicator. I am the only one who has any interest in humanity at all. The others occasionally turn up and blunder around a while, but if they can even perceive humans, they usually regard them as a bit creepy and exterminate them.’

  Cabal tried to imagine dread Cthulhu rising from the corpse city of R’lyeh, seeing humans, and squealing like a Hausfrau who discovers mice in the pantry, before pounding them to death with a broom. Then again, perhaps Cthulhu did squeal, but in a form and context unimaginable to the human mind, or imperceptible to human senses. It hardly mattered if it were true; Cthulhu could still eradicate all life on Earth whether he was squealing like an enormous transdimensional schoolgirl or not.

  ‘But know this, Johannes Cabal, you have a small part in a grand plan, and whatever you decide to do, it is destined. Fall on your sword or live until you are ninety, whatever you do, you do for us. And that is all you need to know. To be honest, it is all you are capable of understanding.’

  There was a short, awkward silence. ‘And the Phobic Animus?’

  ‘That? Oh, there isn’t one, not in the convenient package that the Fear Institute believed. No, irrational fear is always where everybody thought it was – sweating away in the human heart. Once I became aware of their brave little project, though, well, it was so convenient to my plans I just couldn’t resist. I recovered the Silver Key from its last owner – that was Hep-Seth incidentally, and you were right, he is at the bottom of the crevasse – then inveigled it into the hands of the Fear Institute.’

  ‘And sent them to me,’ finished Cabal. ‘I shan’t bother asking why – you’ll only get all mystical.’

  ‘Reasons and reasons. But you might understand one.’

  Bose looked steadily at him, and Cabal thought he caught the scent of brimstone. ‘This “thought experiment” of yours,’ he said slowly. ‘Just how hypothet—’

  ‘I told you we weren’t done at the time, Johannes Cabal,’ said Bose, but his voice was not his own.

  Cabal swallowed very carefully. ‘So,’ he said tonelessly, ‘what now?’

  ‘What now?’ Bose’s voice was still of the pit, flaming and dangerous. Suddenly he smiled and sat up. ‘How would you like your heart’s desire?’

  As Johannes Cabal gathered himself up from the grass, he wondered just how many times he was likely to be translocated around assorted plains of existence in his lifetime. He looked around as he dusted himself off, peeved but unsurprised that the Phobic Animus, or Nyarlothotep, or Gardner Bose Esq., or whatever else it might be styling itself this week, had not allowed him to keep his bag. The loss of Ercusides he could manfully bear, but the loss of his notebook, phials of reagent, his death’s head cane and, worst of all, the Silver Key were nuisances great and small. He was wondering how likely recovering them might be when a large crow settled on a nearby boulder, eyed him with mercenary glee and croaked loudly, ‘Kronk!’

  Cabal almost groaned with rancour and disappointment. He recognised the crow. He recognised the rock on which it was perched. He knew exactly where he was, and he knew that his bag and its contents were lost beyond any reasonable chance of recovery. It was very annoying, but there was nothing to be done about it, so he put them aside in the vast mental jumble room he kept for memories of
abject failure, and set his face towards a new day. He was nothing if not a pragmatist.

  He allowed the crow to perch upon his shoulder as he walked along. The last time he had been coming this way, it had been to meet Messrs Shadrach, Corde and Nyarlothotep at the pub in the village. How long ago it seemed. Now they were all dead or alive in some metaphysical way that he doubted was expressible to poor creatures like himself. Whom the gods would destroy, the ancients tell us, they first make mad. Cabal often wondered why they would bother destroying anybody whose sanity they had already shattered. It seemed petty, but then, that was gods for you.

  The house was just as it always was: bleak, solitary, and with a perilous front garden. He went up the path, ignoring the tiny eyes that watched him from within the shrubs and beneath the ivy, unlocked the door – hardly necessary, but old habits die hard – and let himself in.

  And there, in his front hall with the black-and-white tiled floor, he stopped and stared in utter astonishment at what lay before him. For there, just by the mat, was an envelope.

  It made not a ha’penny of sense. He collected his post, what little there was of it, poste restante from the post office in the village, both because he didn’t care to have more people than necessary coming to his house, and because the post office did not enjoy having its postmen eaten by the recalcitrant fairies and other little folk of Cabal’s front garden. For a while, he had trained the garden folk to acknowledge a list of people they should let by, which included the postman, but the training required constant refreshing as the gossamerwinged little proponents of chaos tended to forget it at the first hunger pang. Then there had been a moderately ingenious attempt to kill him by a disgruntled relative of somebody or another that he’d dug up for research material: they had dressed as a postman and actually made it into his house before becoming research material themselves. It was all too distracting, so he had made a poste restante arrangement, and everybody was about as happy about it as they were likely to be.