The letter remained inscrutable to close observation under lens and ultraviolet light. Finally, wearing his heaviest rubber gauntlets and an army-surplus gas mask, Cabal opened the envelope with his favourite Swann & Morton No. 22 scalpel, being careful to cut the paper at the opposite end from the flap. Inside he saw nothing more malevolent than a folded sheet of foolscap parchment, which he removed with tweezers, and opened gently for fear of triggering some trap so subtle as to baffle conventional physics and, indeed, common sense. But then, as Cabal knew full well, nobody ever died from being too careful. Well, apart from that man who suffocated in cotton wool, but he was an idiot.
The sheet of parchment was, however, looking much like a sheet of parchment at present. That wasn’t to say it was harmless: there are certain runic patterns that can draw the attention of unwelcome supernatural attention on whoever has the misfortune to look upon them, so Cabal continued to be delicately cautious long after the point when he had disproved the possibility of every form of magical trap known and several more open to conjecture. Finally, even after he had conceded that the letter was merely a letter – though it bore no name and address, and had somehow been posted without the knowledge of his front garden – he still felt misgivings as he opened it fully and studied its contents.
At first he thought he must be mistaken. Surely it was only a similarity in cursive styles. But as he read the short note of a little more than a hundred words that began with no greeting and ended with no signature, he recognised naunces in phrasing and came to the inescapable conclusion that it had been written by himself. He had no memory of ever doing so, however, and the content was of such startling originality that he knew he never had. He tore off the gas mask and gauntlets and read it again, and then again. It was ingenious, it was radical, and he knew in his heart that it was effective. What had Nyarlothotep said as he mooched around on his throne in the form of the inoffensive Herr Bose? How would you like your heart’s desire? The note contained the basic principle for perfect resurrection, the secret of raising the dead just as they had been when they were alive – physically, mentally, spiritually.
Cabal took down his laboratory logbook from the shelf and opened it at a fresh page. All the experiments previously, all those years of work, were now as dross to him. Now he could see the beginning of the true path to his goal. He hung up his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. There was still much to be done, but now he knew what he knew, the fire burned in him again. This time he would succeed. One day, perhaps not so very far away, depending on where his researches led him, she would rise again, and she would see and speak and think, and Cabal would feel happiness for the first time in so long. He paused, angrily wiped at his eye with the heel of his hand. He was shaking. He had no time for this, he told himself. No time. There was so very much to be done.
It was true: there was a very great deal to be done. The note – which Cabal painstakingly transcribed into three different notebooks for fear that it might vanish as mysteriously as it had appeared – was only a beginning, an inspiration to explore some principles that might have been disregarded indefinitely without the note pointing out a subtlety to their applications that opened vast new vistas of fruitful research. But the note was short and of no help beyond putting him on the right path. More researches were necessary, more experiments, which meant more danger. Now, however, he knew the perils were worth it. No more stealing obscure books at great personal risk when he knew they would lead only to dead ends. No more canoodling with demons for scraps of dubious information.
Cabal did wonder, though: if Bose had been telling the truth in his little ‘thought experiment’, and he was also Satan, and Satan was therefore not a fallen angel but just another face of a trickster god, as Tezcatlipoca, Loki and Anansi must also be, what were the demons of Hell in reality? It was an intractable problem. There was only one sure way of knowing and that would involve communicating with Nyarlothotep, who would likely be in neither such a jovial frame of mind nor form should they ever meet again. Cabal’s best guess was that the demons in that case would be constructs or creatures corrupted so thoroughly that they were no longer aware of ever having been anything but demons. It would be the final humiliation, that the eternal suffering of the damned in Hell was simply stage dressing. Ultimately, however, it was irrelevant to his current researches, and he considered those hapless multitudes only for a moment before moving on.
Early experiments were encouraging, and as Cabal’s confidence in this new direction grew, so did his intolerance of distractions. He purchased a new Webley .577 and a replacement for his sword cane. Soon he was using both.
A seventeenth-century painting of the theologian Johannes Valentinus Andreae included a scrap of paper carelessly thrown on his desk that contained a complex diagram showing the relationship between certain esoteric humours. Cabal went to the private house where it hung and cut it from the canvas with the sword cane. When the owner attempted to stop him, Cabal shot him dead with the Webley.
Then there was the time a year later when Cabal was cornered by armed police in the chemical-engineering building of a university. He escaped by converting a fractional distillation column the size of a three-storey house into an impromptu explosive device and hiding behind a heavy concrete wall when it detonated. A dozen bystanders were injured, three fatally, and four university buildings burned down, but Cabal escaped with the materials he had sought, so all that was of no import.
Three years after that, it was necessary to relieve some inbreed – a member of the aristocracy, which is to say much the same thing – of a gem recovered from a meteorite four hundred years previously. It comprised the centrepiece of a tiara that left a vault only for very important occasions, and Cabal waited impatiently for such an occasion to arise. Finally, a benefit dinner for some worthy cause (Cabal thought it might involve orphans, but he was not overly interested) was announced at which some dowager somebody of somewhere would be wearing the tiara. The next morning, the newspapers were agape at the mass murder of everybody at the dinner through the agency of poisonous gas. Some days later, during the investigation, the tiara was recovered from under a side table where it had been carelessly thrown. The central gem was no longer in its setting.
And so it went on, an outrage here, an atrocity there, punctuating the onward and upward progress of Johannes Cabal the necromancer. His path was clear, and if anyone ventured upon it and became an obstruction, they were removed as quickly and economically as swatting a fly. Where Cabal walked, he left gravestones and woe, yet he did not care and he did not pause. Where once he had killed with at least an iota of regret in aiding his ultimate foe, Death, now he murdered easily and without hesitation.
For the first time in his life, he was buying new fifty-round boxes of ammunition annually. He was on his third new sword cane, the first having been lost during an escape, and the second’s blade having snapped in the ribs of a museum guard. Sometimes when he looked in the mirror to shave, Johannes Cabal saw his ultimate foe right there, looking back at him. He shrugged inwardly, and carried on shaving. None of that mattered, he knew. None of those people mattered. He had a plan, and it was more important than anything else in the world.
Nor were his crimes limited to the mundane world. He summoned the demon Lucifuge Rofocale for the second time in his life, and as the demon was halfway through saying, ‘Oh, it’s you again. Have you got your dread rod with you this time?’ Cabal shot him through the head with a bullet made from the metal of Leng, sanctified on a lonely beach by Dagon himself, who had no love for demons. Lucifuge looked surprised, then dead, and Cabal hung him by his feet from a nearby tree for his blood to drain into a bucket. He left the demon dangling upside-down, the last droplets of his black blood tainting the soil. The carrion crows gathered around, but none cared to sample that particular dish.
Satan did not turn up that night, all in a bate because Cabal had killed one of his. Cabal hardly expected him to, because in his mind’s eye he could se
e Satan sitting in his great basalt throne by a burning lake of lava, and – in some lights – he looked just like Mr Gardner Bose.
The wall of Cabal’s laboratory contained a cork-lined noticeboard, and upon this were pinned yellowed newspaper cuttings of opening museum exhibitions and of forthcoming benefit dinners, carefully drawn alchemical charts and formulae of unusual chemical equations. There, in the centre of them all, was a sheet of parchment upon which was written a short paragraph in his own handwriting. It never yellowed or faded.
The path was clear, but it was also long. His experiments were not always successes, but the triumphs became more remarkable and more frequent as he closed in on his ultimate goal. He resurrected animals, first fish, frogs, insects and reptiles, and then mammals. He brought a cat back to life that seemed so delighted to be dead no longer that it positively tapdanced. A dog followed, but turned out to be an ill-tempered and poorly trained animal that had deserved its premature death, so Cabal was forced to repeat the experience for it, this time with no hope of reprieve.
Now there was a final test to make. It seemed advantageous to re-create a certain set of circumstances, so he travelled to the city and made the acquaintance of a woman in her late teens whose time was for sale, and when they were comfortably sequestered in a discreet hotel of a certain sort, he drowned her in the bath. He then conveyed her away in a large trunk he had waiting for precisely this purpose, by train and hired cart, and so to his house and laboratory.
Here, he applied his newly developed procedures and processes, which involved an extraterrestrial crystal, the blood of a demon and a great deal of new research hitherto unguessed at in the esoteric field of necromancy. Three hours and fifty minutes later, the young woman was sitting on the old sofa in Cabal’s front room, shivering with a blanket around her shoulders as she drank a cup of Assam tea Cabal had made her. He spun her some story about her collapsing and how, in a panic, he had brought her away. She couldn’t remember any of the unpleasantness in the bathroom, and barely remembered meeting Cabal in the first place. He insisted that she stay the night, ostensibly because it was already the evening and the railway station was a long way away, but actually to observe her. She behaved much as any startled young woman might, and responded within norms when he lied to her about being a doctor and carried out some tests on mental and physical function. Among these, he sprinkled in a few to make sure that her spirit had not been corrupted or supplanted in the process, dripping holy water and garlic essence on her tongue under the pretence that it was a neural test to check that her senses of taste and smell were still working.
She reported that the water tasted like water, that the garlic essence tasted like garlic, and Cabal observed that at no point did her tongue burst into flames or her head explode, both of which would have constituted negative indicators. She behaved normally throughout, slept normally on the sofa, and at no point during the night was observed to fly around the house with her eyes glowing, or decide at breakfast that what she really wanted to eat was a nice plate of human brains.
He drove her to the second closest railway station by a circuitous route, and pressed a generous sum of money into her hand for her expenses, the inconvenience, and for being an excellent test subject, although he didn’t actually mention this last point. He was breaking his original plan by letting a potential witness go – the rational thing to do would have been to kill her again, saw her up and get rid of the evidence in the house’s furnace – but he was tired of death. He had never enjoyed killing, except in a few well-deserving cases. Now his time as a necromancer was drawing to a close, and he did not regret it.
He did regret, irrationally and momentarily, that he had failed to preserve Miss Smith in any sort of form useful for resurrection now that the secret was in his grasp. Then again, the good turn she had done him had been after her death and dissection, and he truly doubted that he could bring life back to the few bits of her that still existed, bobbing about in formaldehyde. Besides, she seemed happy in her post mortem career as the witch of Hlanith necropolis. Attempting to cram her spirit into a few bits of pickled offal would likely irritate her.
It took him a fortnight to gather the nerve to break the seals on the glass coffin. There it had lain all these years, concealed beneath the floor of his hidden second laboratory in the cellar, a secret within a secret. He spent the two weeks planning and preparing, again and again, assuring himself that this was not procrastination, not fear, but solid, sensible forethought. There reached a point where such rationalisations ceased to convince even himself, however, and so, early one clear Friday morning and after a good breakfast eaten slowly, he went down the cellar steps. He walked reluctantly, as if going to his own execution rather than to the sum of all his ambitions. He knew that there could be only one attempt, and that if he failed, he failed for ever.
His step wavered as he considered going to the city and carrying out his previous experiment again. After all, one can have confidence in one’s results only if they can be consistently repeated. It was a lie to himself, though, and he had always been good at telling when he was lying. He continued the descent.
Once he was committed, he did not hesitate. The seals were broken quickly, for once the first was opened, the conditions within the glass coffin, filled to the brink with a fluid of occult formulation, altered, and its contents were no longer held outside time and from corruption. The coffin was a large structure, almost filling the four-by-eight-foot hole it occupied beneath the laboratory floor. Between the thick glass and the great weight of liquid it contained, there had never been any intention of removing it. Indeed, even shifting the lid required the use of the same winch he had employed to lift the false floor slabs that concealed the coffin in its pit.
It was a struggle to lift her from the coffin and he feared his plan might founder on this slightest of details. He had already lost almost a minute when he reached in and took her arm by the wrist. He had not touched her in so long, and for that minute he was overcome and could hardly breathe for the slow pulse of guilt and sorrow that he had managed to lock away for all those years. Time was wasting, though.
And so he carried out the procedures and the processes, the apex of necromantic science, the final catholicon, a cure for death.
Three hours and fifty minutes it took, just as with the woman from the city, and it succeeded perfectly, just as with the woman from the city.
She was shaking from the reaction, so he coddled her in a warm blanket, and made her tea, and she thanked him for his kindness, and asked where everybody else was, and how far downriver had she been swept before the kind gentleman saved her.
Cabal had been ready for anything, ready for any possibility, or so he thought. He knelt by her, took her hand in his and said her name, and then he said, ‘It is me. Johannes. Your Johannes.’
Then her eyes widened with recognition, and she reached out to touch his hair, which had once been blond but was now grey. ‘How long was I asleep?’ she asked, her voice breaking.
She was stronger than him in so many ways. Everything she had known had faded away in the decades she had lain dead in her fairytale coffin. Only Johannes Cabal was left, but now he was old and, somewhere along the way, he had died too. The man she saw was not the man she loved; she consigned that man away into her lost years. This Johannes Cabal was kind, but just now and then something he said or something he did betrayed an inner desperation she pitied, and sometimes a heartlessness grown habitual that she despised. She was kind to Johannes Cabal, which pained him, and he could feel her pity towards him.
Thus it was no surprise to either of them, not really, when one day he walked her to the railway station, and put a bag containing all the wealth in paper and gold he could gather together in her hand, and sent her to the city. He left her there before she might try to kiss him. It would have been the kiss one gives an elderly relative whom one is moderately fond of, and it would have crushed his heart where he stood. He left her on the platform as th
e train approached, and he did not look back.
In his house, in the attic laboratory, he sat at his workbench and looked at the noticeboard upon which was still pinned that strange piece of parchment. He felt nothing, not any more. In the cellar the furnace burned fiercely as it consumed his notebooks, a lifetime flaming into light and smoke. He had made some adjustments to the boiler valves. Soon there would be a catastrophic explosion that would be heard from the village. He had little doubt there would be celebrations there that evening. Let them have their fun. He wouldn’t even be alive to be taken by the explosion.
On the workbench before him lay his Webley Boxer .577, freshly cleaned and tested. It wouldn’t do for it to fail now. He took it up, enjoying its weight for the last time, placed the muzzle in his mouth and fired.
Chapter 15
IN WHICH LITTLE IS SAID, BUT MUCH IS CONVEYED
Johannes Cabal was not expecting anything very much from death, but the dizziness surprised him. He opened his eyes to find himself in a hemispherical chamber carved into stone. Before him sat a happy man of puppyish demeanour, whom Cabal thought somewhat familiar.
‘Well,’ said Bose, ‘how’d you like those apples, eh?’
Cabal could do little but stare at him for an incontinently long time. Then he looked at his hands. They were the hands of a man in his late twenties, steady and unmarked by liver spots. He looked back up at Bose.
‘Nyarlothotep,’ said Cabal, more calmly than he felt. ‘You little bastard.’
Chapter 16
IN WHICH CABAL PLANS IN THE LONG TERM AND LAUGHTER PROVES TO BE THE WORST MEDICINE
‘How’d you like those apples, eh?’ is a ghastly, uncouth phrase to hear from anybody, and coming from a god did not improve it in the slightest.
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