Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute jc-3-1

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘I mean, Herr Cabal,’ and here Mr Corde took an unconsciously dramatic step closer to Cabal, ‘fear!’ Satisfied that he had made his point with sufficient emphasis, he stepped back again. ‘Every waking moment of our lives we spend as hostages to the terrible “perhaps”. We dread the unnameable that lurks beyond our doors. We collapse into ridiculous phobias with the most fleeting provocation. Clowns! Birds! The number thirteen! Each one a nail driven into the fabric of our lives, limiting our movement, hemming us in, draining our futures of possibilities. How many better tomorrows have been lost because of natural human timidity? How many wonders have never seen the light because those who dared dream them could never dare build them?’

  Cabal laughed: a humourless sound. ‘You wish courage, gentlemen? I believe it may be found in any public house, by the pint. Good day.’ He rose to escort the men out, but then Mr Shadrach spoke, and Cabal listened.

  ‘We have considered long and carefully before coming to you, Herr Cabal. You are quite right. A sufficient measure of liquor will drive out fear from any man, but it will take all rationality with it too. My companions have not perhaps made our aim quite as clear as they might. We understand the role of fear as a safeguard, but we dispute its effect on a higher creature such as the human being. A rational man should be able to look upon a situation and weigh its dangers – physical, moral or financial – as coldly as if weighing tea on a scale. That is denied us because fear is essentially irrational. We seek nothing more or less than to remove it. Our dream is that one day the human race will walk this good Earth, free from the invisible tethers of fear, subject only to the kindly effects of rational caution.’

  Cabal sighed and sat down again. ‘You mentioned a society. What sort of society? Do you hold annual general meetings, raise funds by selling cakes, and all go on a charabanc holiday together with funds raised by subscription?’

  ‘We do not,’ replied Shadrach, a little icily.

  ‘Ah,’ said Cabal. ‘Yours is the other sort of society, then. The type with impractical handshakes.’

  Shadrach also regarded their society’s secret handshake as unnecessary, infantile and not even very secret, as it looked like the first shakee was attempting to put the second into a half-nelson. Thus, he did not dispute Cabal’s description, but said, ‘Our numbers are relatively few, but contain men and a few women of influence and insight. Scientists, logicians, entrepreneurs. Our resources, both intellectual and monetary, run as deep as our ambitions.’

  ‘No churchmen, I notice. Of course not. What use have they for a world without irrational fear? And how did an undertaker, an art dealer and a solicitor happen to join such a society?’

  ‘Irrelevant,’ said Corde, a little snappily.

  Shadrach, however, was happy to elucidate. ‘My own interest was founded in the lack of fear of the dead that I feel, a lack created by my long familiarity with the practicalities of dealing with the recently departed. One cannot do such business without wondering at the fear the public hold for a population that can offer them no harm.’

  Cabal, whose experience with that population indicated that they were perfectly capable of offering harm in the right circumstances, held his silence.

  ‘Mr Corde, if I may speak on your behalf?’ Corde jerked his head in an impatient affirmation, so Shadrach continued: ‘Mr Corde deals with people every day who make bad decisions based upon fear and not logic, whether to create a fund here, or a trust there, even fear of writing a will in case it should tempt Fate in some ill-imagined way. In both our cases, you see, we watch people blunt their lives with silly fears, fears that offer them nothing, not even safety. And Mr Bose . . .’ here, Shadrach did not ask permission ‘. . . is fascinated by the deeper mysteries, of life, of death.’

  ‘I meet all sorts in my job,’ smiled Bose, as if discussing the vagaries of collecting matchbox labels. ‘One of my clients told me about the society, and I said, “Oh, that sounds like fun!” So here I am.’

  Shadrach looked at Bose for a long moment, unsure how to proceed. Cabal filled the silence a little impatiently by saying, ‘Yes, it’s all very laudable I’m sure, but I am still at a loss to understand my part in all this. How do you intend to achieve your goal? Brain surgery?’

  Bose grimaced. ‘Tried that. It didn’t work,’ he said, before being shushed by Corde.

  ‘We have conducted much research, Herr Cabal,’ said Shadrach, ‘both experimental,’ here he shot a sideways glance at Bose, who looked suitably abashed, ‘and theoretical. It is the latter that has led us to a possible – indeed probable – solution. What we intend is nothing less than to isolate the very spirit of fear and, thence, to focus our energies on finding its anathema. The antibody to fear, if you will.’

  Cabal smiled or, at least, his face creased in a manner only suitably described as a smile, but there was little warmth there. ‘You wish to isolate fear. Ah, well, if only I’d realised your ambitions were so simple. Perhaps we can work up to it by capturing faith, bottling hope, and presenting love to the world as a commodity, available by the pound, wrapped in greaseproof paper and topped with a bow.’ He sighed. ‘How can you possibly hope to isolate the incorporeal? If it were a true spirit, you could amuse yourself with salt and pentagrams, but fear, sirs? You waste your time and mine.’

  Surprisingly, the three men did not seem at all put out or taken aback by Cabal’s response and he realised that they’d anticipated it. Indeed, they seemed to relish it. ‘Sir, our researches are conclusive. We are certain, absolutely certain, that fear may manifest and be captured. But not, sir, in this world.’

  ‘There is another place, Herr Cabal,’ said Bose, ‘another world where things are not as they are here. Where the most fanciful concepts may prove sterling truth, and the incorporeal take form.’

  Cabal straightened a little in his chair, interested despite himself. ‘You speak of the Dreamlands.’

  The name notwithstanding, the Dreamlands are neither a retailer of mattresses, a retirement home nor a particularly nasty permanent funfair in a rundown coastal resort. Neither are they where our minds go when they sleep. Those are merely dreams, and the Dreamlands are too strange and, in their own curious way, too noble to trouble themselves with endless variations on wandering the corridors of one’s old school on the first day, alone, lost, naked, and having just discovered that an exam nobody told one about had started ten minutes ago. No, the Dreamlands were formed by dreams, but are not a dream themselves. They are a world of curious and exotic sights, a collision of myths, of lands as ancient as thought and oceans as deep as imagination. They are home to those who have abandoned their waking bodies, or been abandoned by them. But, as the Dreamlands are true and material even though they hide behind the veil of sleep, there have been other immigrants from other realities, and here lay Cabal’s interest. One of those immigrants was a fierce and protean magic that might, just might, carry a spark of itself back into the waking world, should it be brought by somebody strongly willed enough to shade it from the mundanities of the everyday. Somebody like a well-motivated necromancer.

  ‘Yes, I researched them exhaustively myself years ago. But they are beyond reach.’

  ‘They are not, sir.’

  ‘To trained or talented dreamers, no. To the users of certain highly dangerous and unreliable drugs, no. To the holder of the Silver Key, no. I am none of these things, meine Herren, and neither are you. The Dreamlands, while an interesting destination, are beyond the reach of any of us.’

  Alarmingly, the three men still seemed splendidly unconcerned and, indeed, rather smug. Cabal ran the alternatives through his head rapidly and settled on the most likely, though staggeringly unlikely it was. ‘You . . . have the Silver Key?’

  It was Shadrach who spoke. ‘We do, sir. We have the Silver Key of the Dreamlands. We may enter and leave as we will.’

  Cabal tried to keep the quiver out of his voice. ‘You . . . How . . . did you come by it?’

  ‘As a bequest. An explorer of
that world learned of our endeavours and, I’m delighted to say, passed it on to us.’

  ‘As a bequest,’ Cabal echoed. ‘How did he die?’

  ‘Oh, he may not be dead. He was simply declared deceased by the coroner’s court. He’d been missing for some time and, well, I’m sure you know how these things work.’

  Cabal, who was very familiar with the workings of all the institutions that dealt with death, grunted. ‘It does not worry you that this gentleman probably died in the Dreamlands?’

  ‘Worry,’ said Corde, evenly, ‘is a product of fear. We will not submit to it. Instead, we will add this datum to the rational caution that such an enterprise must engender.’

  Ah, thought Cabal, now we come to it.

  ‘There are many possibilities, many things that may go awry in the Dreamlands,’ said Shadrach. ‘This may be the only opportunity that we of the Institute will ever have to venture there. We must maximise our chance of success in every way that we can.’

  ‘And this, I would guess, is why you have come to me,’ said Cabal. Although he showed no sign of it, he was impressed by their methodology. If irrational fear had something approaching a physical form, then it could surely survive only in a world formed from dreams where the rules of existence were intuitive rather than scientifically rigorous. From there it could leak its influence back into the sleeping minds of the mundane world to soak into their waking lives and colour every decision with delicate shades of uncertain terror. It all sounded very interesting, Cabal was sure. There was, however, a problem. ‘I’m afraid that I must disappoint you. I have no experience of the Dreamlands. I have never been there.’

  ‘We know,’ said Corde. ‘You’re alive and sane. It seemed very unlikely that you’d ever visited.’

  ‘So, why . . . ?’

  ‘Because we have little use for a dead or insane guide. You may not have immediate experience of the Dreamlands, Herr Cabal, but you do have plentiful experience of the, ah, occult,’ he said apologetically, ‘and the unusual. You also have a reputation for formidable sang-froid, which will come in useful given the stressful environment.’

  Cabal smiled, a little less humourlessly this time. It always amused him that, when you wished to flatter somebody, you would describe them as possessing sang-froid, whereas if you wished to sting or insult them, they were simply cold-blooded.

  ‘Our proposal is that you should lead an expedition into the Dreamlands, Herr Cabal,’ said Shadrach, ‘to seek out, capture and bring back into this world the archetype of fear, its principle, the very phobic animus itself.’

  ‘And if it refuses to come quietly?’

  ‘Then it will be put down.’

  There was a heavy silence after that for some seconds. Then Cabal said, ‘You are asking me to risk my life and sanity. What am I to gain from this?’

  Bose coughed. ‘The Silver Key, Herr Cabal. Once we have the animus, we shall have no further need of the Key. Indeed, rational caution dictates that it is never used without good cause, and our cause would already be fulfilled. We think that you, however, would have cause to use it again, in future, in the continuance of your own field of research.’

  Cabal considered. Then he spoke: ‘Gentlemen, your proposition is not without interest. I should like to think upon it. You will make your way back to the village and, if you have not already done so, take rooms there. I would suggest that you don’t tell them you have any dealings with me or the standard of service will suffer. I shall send word of my decision to you some time tomorrow. Good day.’ And so saying, he shooed his visitors from his house, ensuring first that they successfully negotiated the path without being ambushed from the tea roses.

  Later that evening, Cabal was to be found at the table, the contents of a box file labelled ‘Dreamlands’ spread out before him. He had been accruing data on the place for years, although never as a definite piece of research. After all, while the usefulness of the Dreamlands in his work was beyond dispute, accessing it in a safe and reliable way had always been little more than . . . well, a dream.

  Others had attempted it, and some had even done so successfully. As a group, however, they were a bunch of arty sorts – Orientalists and sensualists, who could be depended upon to be undependable, sitting around in silken robes with a book of poetry in one hand and a hookah pipe in the other. They disgusted Cabal for their practical rather than moral shortcomings; if Cabal was to go exploring, he would be inclined to do so with a sola topi on his head and an elephant gun loaded for tyrannosaur in his hands.

  Practicality, however, was the enemy of the Dreamlands explorer. He would be standing around in the mundane world until his sola topi bleached and his elephant gun rusted, while in the meantime the disgusting woolly-minded artistic types were off writing bad sonnets by the lake at Sarnath, having wandered into the Dreamlands by the very virtue of being woolly-minded artistic types. It was as intolerable as, for example, the British Library suddenly enforcing a ‘Monkeys Only’ rule, leaving serious scholars fuming outside while, within the sacred walls, macaques made merry with the Magna Carta, and capuchins defecated on the Gutenberg. It galled Cabal beyond belief that those of analytic mind who could make most use of the strange resources of the Dreamlands were, by their very nature, denied entrance.

  There was one way through, however: the Silver Key – always capital S, capital K because it truly was that important and that unique. There may be only one Holy Grail, but it is part of an entire junk shop’s worth of similar relics – fragments of the One True Cross, the Spear of Destiny, the Burial Shroud in Turin, and more miraculous bits of dead saints than bear thinking about. The Silver Key, however, was truly unique – the only artefact that allowed physical rather than psychic entry into the Dreamlands, and the only artefact that could be used by absolutely anyone with the will to do so, regardless of opium consumption.

  Finding it, however, was the natural prerequisite to using it, and finding it had proved impossible. It seemed to have an irrational fondness for ending up in the hands of the very wastrels who could just as easily have reached the Dreamlands by the narcotic route, and as drug-addled wastrels make poor documenters, the trail of hands through which the Key had passed was as ephemeral as footprints by the low-tide mark.

  And now, having been dismissed as, at best, unfindable and, at worst, non-existent, the Silver Key of myth and legend was almost in his hands, certainly within his reach. Cabal considered walking to the village in the night, murdering the men in their beds and stealing the Key, but discarded the notion. After all, they might not have it with them. Besides which, the idea of leading a funded expedition into the Dreamlands appealed to him. He could use the hunt for this ‘Phobic Animus’ of theirs as an opportunity to scout out the land, and gather intelligence for his own subsequent explorations. He did not even mind having three unctuous men following him around: he agreed with their aims and if, wonder of wonders, they succeeded, the mortal world would be that much more rational, and therefore personally bearable to Cabal. Also, he was confident that he could outrun any of them, and if the party ended up being pursued by one or other of the Dreamlands’ many horrors, it was good to know that there were three alternative meals that he could leave in his wake.

  The village – it had a name, but Cabal rarely used it – lay some four miles away from where his house stood in its sheltered little valley, a location calculated to prevent the slightest tone of a church bell reaching it even with a tailwind. Four miles is also, incidentally, an awkward distance for a torch-bearing mob to cover: torches gutter, pitchforks grow heavy, and the length of the walk robs a lynching of its necessary spontaneity. Not that the villagers did very much of that, not after the last time.

  Cabal kept his visits there to the bare minimum, and for their part, the villagers tolerated him with a forced civility that said as much for their Englishness as for any fear of him. The grocer would take his order in polite silence, only speaking to make the mandatory opening conversational gambit of greeting
and comment upon the weather, then to clarify any ambiguities as he transcribed Cabal’s list of requirements, and finally to bid him a sincere and relieved goodbye. People on the street ignored him. Even the most wilful teenager knew the stories and avoided eye contact.

  The only individual who sought Cabal out when he visited was Sergeant Parkin, the senior officer of the village’s police force, consisting of Parkin, two unambitious constables, and an ageing Alsatian called ‘Bootsy’. People liked Sergeant Parkin and were grateful for the calm way in which he dealt with the Cabal problem. ‘He knows better than to throw his weight around here,’ Parkin would say, while drinking on duty in the saloon bar of The Old House at Home. ‘We treat him polite, like, and he’s here and gone, and good riddance.’ The villagers might have been less pleased to know that Parkin’s public-relations efforts were entirely focused upon them, as Parkin himself was in Cabal’s employ. In return for a suitable emolument in a brown envelope every Christmas, Parkin kept the village in a state of delicate uncertainty, as a Swiss village might be beneath a mountainside deep in snow: providing they remained calm and quiet, no avalanche would descend upon them. Parkin saw no clash between his role and his actions. After all, his primary concern was to keep the peace, and this he did.

  Parkin was talking football in the pub when Mr Jeffries, whose home overlooked the dusty and rarely travelled road that ran by Cabal’s house, entered, approached the sergeant directly, spoke quietly and calmly in his ear, and left again.

  Parkin frowned and looked at the calendar hung behind the bar. Beneath a gaudy McGill painting of an exasperated judge and a smirking divorce case co-respondent (‘You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not sleep with this woman?’ ‘Not a wink, my lord!’), the date caused him some mild consternation.

  He buttoned up his uniform tunic, put on his helmet, said, ‘Duty calls,’ to the landlord, slung the last inch of his pint down his throat, and went out to face the dreadful Herr Cabal.