‘Aie! Fhtagn!’ he began, Aie! Fhtagn! generally being a good place to start when dealing with abominations such as these. It even impresses shoggoths – and it takes a lot to impress a shoggoth. He spoke the words again in the most impressive tone he could manage. Encouragingly, the creatures stopped their infernal noise and gawped at him, their cherubic faces agog, like a bunch of choirboys discovered raiding the sherry in the vicarage. Choirboys with compound eyes, shiny black carapaces and far too many legs for polite society, it was true, but otherwise the expression fitted.
He glared steely-eyed at them, while internally his mental cogs whizzed fast enough to burn oil. ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,’ he tried next. It wasn’t much – everybody in the Dreamlands surely knew that dead Cthulhu was happily dreaming in his house in R’lyeh: it was probably sewn into innumerable samplers on innumerable parlour walls – but at least it demonstrated that Cabal was willing to call on some big names. ‘Aie! Nyarlothotep! Chaos that crawls . . . messenger, mind and will of the gods . . . the haunted dark . . . devourer of grey lilies . . .’ The creatures twitched in a way that seemed to Cabal to indicate growing unease. They shied back a little. This was going well, he realised. Cthulhu was all very well, but Nyarlothotep was known and active. A few more threatening phrases and their morale might break altogether. ‘Aie! Nyarlothotep! See and smite my enemies! Crumble them to dust, and their kin, and their homes, and their . . .’ He dried for a moment, fumbled for a continuation, and made do with ‘. . . and their pets. Strike them down, your humble servant implores thee! I . . .’ And that was all he had to say.
It would be pleasant to report that Cabal’s ruse worked exactly as he had intended, that the creatures would decide that even if he wasn’t a great sorcerer, he was convincing enough not to trifle with, and scamper off into the woods, never to threaten Cabal and his party ever again. Unhappily, only the very last part of this came true.
The creature that Cabal had levelled his cane at was the first to die. It looked startled, then truly afraid. Its lips drew back in an expression of terror, the eyes grew wide, exposing even more of the vile tiny lenses of which its eyes were made, the skin grew ashen and then the whole beast became ashes – thin grey ashes, as if sieved from an intense fire. A rapidly advancing tide of colourless death swept from its head to the tip of its legs and abdomen, and where it passed, the creature just fell away in silent drifts and plumes.
Corde and Shadrach cried out in wonder and horrified joy – and Bose snored in innocent deep sleep – as the grey death came to every one of the creatures, striking them down where they stood or as they tried to run from that circle of destruction. After no more than a minute, the men stood alone, and they were triumphant.
‘By all that’s wonderful, Cabal!’ said Shadrach, his thin, joyless face temporarily invaded by a smile. ‘I thought the jig was up then but, by heavens, you showed them what for, eh? I knew he was the man for this job! Didn’t I say so, Mr Corde? Did I not say so?’
Corde regarded Cabal with new respect. ‘That was a nice piece of work, Mr Cabal,’ he said, wiping his sword clean on the swathe of dust-covered grass at his feet.
Cabal, however, was not exhibiting any signs of exuberant happiness. To the contrary, he was pale, and beneath his dark glasses, his eyes were as wide as the creatures’ at the moment they had met their doom. ‘Ach, Gott,’ he said, in a hoarse whisper. ‘What have I done?’
‘Done, old man?’ said Corde. ‘You’ve saved our bacon, that’s what you’ve done, and we’re all very grateful, believe me.’ He went to rouse Bose.
‘No. No, you don’t understand,’ said Cabal. He was breathing heavily.
Shadrach was appalled to recognise the symptoms of fear. ‘What is it, Cabal? Did something happen to you when you performed that magic?’
‘Magic?’ Cabal looked at him as if just realising that Shadrach was speaking to him. ‘Magic? I performed no act of magic. It was a ruse . . . a ploy. I intended only to fool those creatures, to scare them into thinking I am the sort of magician who goes around casting spells.’
Shadrach frowned, perturbed and surprised. ‘But they . . . You destroyed them.’
‘No, I did not.’ Cabal was recovering control of himself, but he was only hiding his fear, not dispelling it. ‘I called on other powers. I have done so before in similar circumstances on the basis that at least it buys me some time. The calls are hopeless, you see. They have no effect.’
Shadrach started to say something, but thought better of it. He looked around the trees and the scatterings of fine grey ash that lay about the place. Then he turned back to Cabal, but he did not voice the obvious question. Neither did he need to.
‘I called upon Nyarlothotep, the most vicious, arbitrary and sadistic of them all. Loki, Anansi, Tezcatlipoca, Set . . . All faces that it has worn over the millennia. A trickster god. Do you understand?
‘I called upon Nyarlothotep, and he heard.’
Shadrach tried to think of something comforting to say. As an undertaker, it was his stock in trade to be able to comfort people at difficult times, to mouth platitudes and make them sound worth something, to help people see the light of the next dawn. Now he could not think of a thing. Never, in all the burials and cremations that he had planned and attended, had he ever had to commiserate with somebody who had just gained the attention – the probably baleful attention – of a real and malevolent god. A god that, when prayed to, did not depend on or even expect faith, but simply smote one’s enemies. A price would surely be imposed later, at some future, unspecified Damoclean date. What can one say to somebody in such straits?
Instead he gave Cabal his most professional pat on the shoulder. It was his best pat, the one that said, You have my most sincere albeit non-specific sympathies. It was all he could do.
Cabal’s stoicism was enough to make a Spartan seem prone to the vapours. A casual observer would have seen no obvious signs of the great metaphysical disruption within his mind and spirit, but it was there none the less. For the first time, he truly understood what Nietzsche had meant when he had yammered about looking into abysses. Not only had the abyss looked into him, it had noted his name, address and shoe size. He was disturbed and distracted, and these made him voluble.
‘How bad can it be?’ he asked rhetorically, as the subdued party made their way in what they had judged was probably more or less the direction of Hlanith. ‘I’ve encountered worse. I’m sure I’ve encountered worse. I went to Hell. I met Satan.’ He didn’t notice the shocked expressions on the faces of the others. Whether they were shocked at the admission or perhaps at the possibility that Cabal was losing his mind hardly mattered. Whatever the reason, their faith in him and his abilities was as shaken as he was. ‘Satan was nothing,’ Cabal muttered to himself. ‘I spat in his eye.’ There was a short pause. ‘Figuratively. I figuratively spat in his eye. I couldn’t really spit in his eye.’ Another pause. ‘He was too tall.’
Mercifully for his unwilling audience, any further memoirs of supernatural entities into whose eyes he had expectorated, figuratively or otherwise, were curtailed by the discovery of a path through the wood. It was not much of a path, but it was the first time they had seen anything approaching a cleared route and it heartened them, as surely such a thing would only exist close to the wood’s edge.
After a moment’s quiet discussion as to whether they should follow the path this way or that, then a quiet argument, then a quiet flip of one of Shadrach’s golden coins, they went this way, and hoped that Fortune would favour them. Fortune seemed a much better travelling companion than, say, Nyarlothotep.
But even Fortune may behave wilfully on a slow day when she is looking for amusement. They followed the path in as much silence as they could manage, listening for the distant cry of babies. None came. There was only the oppressive quiet, punctuated frequently by their own poor efforts not to punctuate it.
The path turned sharply to one side and suddenly they found
themselves in a clearing, a true clearing in the forest, not just one of the patches of slightly lower tree density that had been all of their previous experience. It was not, however, unoccupied.
With the expenditure of great effort, sections of fallen trees, anything from three to six yards long, had been dragged from elsewhere and placed on their sides. Then the cores of the logs had been patiently removed, apparently by many hours of gnawing. The result was crude but effective dwellings, a whole village of perhaps fifty or so. Each log was swathed with sheets of some organic substance that at first glance appeared to be webbing but that, seen close to, must have been extruded as great flat sheets, addled and crazed with imperfections.
The explorers were just wondering what sort of creature could have made such a place when they noted evidence at their feet which answered that question. The stunted grass and weeds were dusted with thin grey powder of a shade and consistency they had seen all too recently.
‘It’s their village,’ said Corde, his sword never having left his hand since they had discovered the clearing. ‘Those creatures, this is theirs.’
‘They are all dead,’ said Shadrach, strictly unnecessarily, yet it still needed underlining. He peered inside a slightly more complex structure of two tree sections that had been bound together to create a small hall. Inside, football-sized egg sacs hung from the walls. Within every one, there was no movement. They dangled dry and flaccid, half filled with grey dust. ‘Even the unborn,’ he whispered.
As he stepped back, his shoulder brushed the rough lintel. With a loud crack, a great section fell away, dropping to the hard-packed soil and smashing to dust. As if the sound had been all that was required to start the collapse, the roof fell in, breaking into greyness as it tumbled down. The men instinctively clustered together as the destruction spread. Hut after hut came crashing down, the sound of destruction starting harsh, but ending soft. Inexpressibly disturbed, they withdrew to watch the creatures’ village vanish as suddenly as any baker abducted by a snark.
‘They are all dead,’ said Shadrach again, looking at Cabal with fascinated repulsion as if he were a cobra. ‘They, their kin and their homes are destroyed.’
Bose was watching the last of the tree huts become nothing very much with childish amazement. ‘I wonder if you got their pets, too, Mr Cabal? If they had pets.’ He considered for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No, they looked the sort to eat anything vaguely petlike. I don’t suppose they were nearly so keen on companionship as they were on dinner.’
Nobody was listening to Bose’s ruminations. They were all too busy staring at Cabal, except Cabal, who was glaring back.
‘I say again, I am no sorcerer. The rules here, however, are apparently very different from our world in ways that we had not previously considered.’
‘That you had not previously—’ began Corde, but he was cut off by the increasingly testy Cabal.
‘Yes, that I had not previously considered. This world is disturbingly arbitrary, random . . .’ he looked for some term that would effectively communicate how repugnant he found it ‘. . . whimsical. I ask you, who spent so much effort planning for contingencies, did you ever consider anything even approaching our current situation?’ The question was only partially rhetorical, but Cabal was glad of the silence it provoked.
Into that silence crept the ever-perturbable Bose. ‘So . . . what do we do next? Shall we abandon the endeavour?’
Cabal shook his head, angry with himself for the weak leash on which his temper tugged eagerly. ‘That is not a decision for now. We cannot spontaneously leave the Dreamlands whenever we want to. We must either exit via another gate opened by the Silver Key—’
‘Will it be necessary to destroy some other hapless soul, Mr Cabal?’ asked Shadrach, coldly.
‘Usually not,’ said Cabal, blithely unaware of any implied criticism. ‘Gateways of the Silver Key rarely manifest in living creatures. Luckily, on this occasion it chose to do so in a poet and writer, not somebody important or useful. As I was saying, that is one way of re-entering the waking world. The other is to find a rising path, which brings one up and out physically from the Dreamlands. Those are few, and extraordinarily dangerous.’
‘As opposed to the nest of security and comfort in which we find ourselves now, eh, Cabal?’ said Corde.
Cabal looked at him coldly. ‘By comparison, yes, Herr Corde. This is a nest of security and comfort.’ He looked down the path leading away from the clearing that had once held the creatures, their kin, their homes and, presumably, their pets. ‘This must lead somewhere,’ he said, and without waiting for agreement, he set off down it. The others quietly followed.
Chapter 5
IN WHICH CABAL WANDERS FROM THE BUCOLIC TO THE NECROPOLITIC
The path did indeed lead them somewhere – and somewhere practical rather than to a cottage made of gingerbread or full of bears or dwarfs or all three. They emerged from the Dark Wood on a long, rolling meadow that sloped down towards a tree-lined road bounded by small fields of corn. The heavy silence that had travelled with them was lifted by clear air and sunlight, and their mood – but for the impenetrable sullenness of Johannes Cabal – lifted too.
‘That will be the road for Hlanith down there, eh, Cabal?’ said Corde, unaware of or unconcerned at Cabal’s metaphysical torment. ‘Finally, a bit of good luck on this expedition.’
‘Perhaps so.’ Cabal signalled a halt by the simple expedient of stopping and expecting everybody else to follow suit. He took out his telescope and surveyed the terrain. ‘There are a couple of people down there by the road. We shall ask.’
‘Isn’t that risky?’ asked Bose.
‘In this place, even blinking is fraught with peril. Yes, it is risky. They look like a pair of yokels doing whatever it is that yokels do during the day, but they may turn out to be hideous monsters intent on chewing out our spleens.’ He shrugged. ‘It happens, but what is one to do?’ He started walking again.
Bose pattered along in his wake, like an anxious pug. ‘Do you think that is likely?’
‘No. Yes. Perhaps. How should I know? I am a stranger here myself.’ And so, having put Bose’s doubts to rest, or not, he fell back into a ratiocinatory silence from which he would not easily be dislodged.
As they approached the road, Shadrach commented disapprovingly, ‘Look at those sheep. They’re in among the corn. They’ll bloat and die from eating it.’
‘You seem very knowledgeable on the matter, Mr Shadrach,’ said Corde.
‘I come from a farming family,’ said the tall, thin, ascetic and thoroughly unbucolic Shadrach. ‘We kept sheep on the top moor, and Heaven help anyone who let them get into the cornfields down by the river.’
They were now only a few dozen yards from the couple by the road, and conjectures could be made without recourse to a telescope. If they were hideous monsters with a penchant for spleen, they carried it well; Cabal’s guess of ‘yokels’ seemed far closer to the truth. They were young people: he a shepherd in a blue smock and red vest, brown-booted and gaitered, a wooden flagon hanging from his belt, his hair a coarse, wiry brown, his sideburns hedgelike; she equally rustic, though apparently wearing her best red dress and white embroidered blouse. A young lamb lay in her lap, crunching sour apples. Judging from Shadrach’s angry intake of breath, this was also something sheep should avoid. They were sitting by the edge of the road between the trees, chatting and giggling, and altogether unaware of anything else outside their sphere.
‘Excuse me,’ said Cabal, ‘how do we get to Hlanith from here?’ He did not ask if this was the right road for, on closer acquaintance, it clearly wasn’t much of a road at all, just a narrow avenue between two rows of unkempt trees. Perhaps once it had led to a great house or estate, but now it was overgrown and even pitted deeply enough in places to create small shadowed pools, one of which the girl was cooling her bare feet in.
The shepherd boy looked up at them with dull surprise, the natural stupidity in his rubicund face plain
ly enhanced by drink. Behind him, the girl leaned over to look at the newcomers. Her action was coy, but her expression was knowing, and Cabal disliked her for that just as much as he disliked her beau for his bovine inanity.
The boy scrambled to his feet, belatedly alive to his dereliction of duty. ‘Jus’ a moment, yer ’onours, jus’ a moment.’ He ran off to drive the more adventurous sheep from the corn, leaving Cabal’s party in an awkward silence with the girl. She, for her part, did not rise, but remained seated on the green swathe, idly playing with a strand of her russet hair and smiling slightly at them. Corde smiled back, to Shadrach’s disgust, Cabal’s incomprehension and Bose’s blithe ignorance.
‘I wonder, my dear,’ ventured Corde, eliciting a quiet snort from Shadrach, ‘if you could direct us to Hlanith. It can’t be far from here.’
She did not speak, but replied by pointing at the end of the avenue to the south and gesturing vaguely eastwards. Then she went back to toying with her hair and smiling at him.
‘Thank you,’ said Corde, low and slowly, and there was a definite air of twiddling a thin moustache, if he had been wearing one.
‘Thank you, miss,’ said Shadrach, in a tone of subdued outrage. ‘Come along, gentlemen.’ And he led off to the south, followed by Cabal, Bose and, in a desultory fashion, Corde.
As they walked away, the shepherd came back, his hands cupped around some interesting insect he had found. He watched them go with a dull lack of understanding or even remembrance. Then their presence slipped from his mind altogether and he sat down by the girl again to show her this new treasure. Corde watched all this over his shoulder and laughed. ‘As pretty as a picture,’ he said to the others.
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