That must be it, he concluded. It was an old map, and the spur line had been built. The earthwork was a raised railway bed. Simple. Pleased with his deduction, he turned to pick up his bag and found that he was no longer alone.
The two men whom he’d caught in a pantomime of stealth were of a disreputable appearance. There was a sense that if you opened an illustrated dictionary and looked up “disreputable” there would be a picture of one or the other of them. Possibly both. After all, if there was some minor detail of reprehensible untrustworthiness that couldn’t be found in one of them, it was certain to be present in his partner. One was short and greasy. The other was taller, and looked like his mother had been scared — scared quite badly — by a scabby vulture. They grinned, and Cabal almost sighed with the pathetic predictability of it all. Oh well. Best to get it over with.
“Can I help you gentlemen?” he said with no hint of irony.
“Oh, he called us ‘gennlemen,’ Dennis, didja ’ear ’im?” said the short one.
“Hur-hur. ‘Gennlemen.’ Hur,” answered the tall one, Dennis, who seemed to be the straight man.
“Tha’s very perlite, innit? Very perlite indeed. Ho, yus. Spoke jus’ like a gennleman.”
“‘Gennleman,’ hur-hur. Yus, Denzil. Verr perlite.” Dennis nodded and showed the poor state of his dentition.
Cabal was getting irritated. He was on a tight schedule and just wished they’d hurry up and mug him.
“Werl,” said Denzil, the brains of the operation, “we wus wondering if you’d paid the toll, see?”
“Of course,” said Cabal, who spoke Bare-Faced Liar like a native when the situation called for it. “I paid at the toll gate.”
Dennis and Denzil looked nonplussed. They’d spent weeks practising this criminal act; diagrams on blackboards, little dioramas with figures representing them and their potential victim — a tin Sioux Indian, a small bear with a pair of cymbals, and a llama respectively. Somehow this particular eventuality had never been covered.
“There b’aint be no toll gate,” muttered Denzil.
“No? Then there can’t be any toll,” said Cabal with an easy irrationality that ran against the grain of his brutally rational mind. He knew he’d regret it in the morning, but he just wanted to get this whole situation over and done with as quickly as possible.
Dennis was shaking his head slowly as he ran through the contingency plans. They’d never made any, so it didn’t take very long. They had considered making some, but, then, they’d also considered getting drunk at the same time. If they had ever actually come up with a contingency plan — and there is no evidence that they did — they had forgotten it again somewhere around the tenth pint. It had been no great loss: they had never needed a Plan B before. Indeed, they had never needed a Plan A before, dependent as it was upon actually finding somebody to rob amongst the dreary and seldom-travelled lanes of the Flatlands. With the unexpected discovery of an actual viable victim, the gaping holes in the scheme were quickly becoming apparent.
Dennis shook his head again, but when his cognitive process halfheartedly kicked in, the sensation of thinking was like worms in a jam jar, and he wished it would stop. Meanwhile, the incisive wit of Denzil had come to the rescue.
“I don’t care if there b’aint be no toll. We’re robbin’ you anyway.” He drew a short, rusty blade and elbowed Dennis until he drew his. Now they were on solid ground. They’d killed before and, by some miracle, had got away with it. If this thin streak of piss didn’t stump up the cash right this minute, they’d be taking their chances with the gallows again, and the devil could take the consequences. Cabal shrugged.
“I don’t have any money,” he said truthfully.
Denzil pointed at the bag. “What’s in there, then?”
There comes a time when the thin skein of possibilities that suspends us above the unknown stretches and tears in places. For Dennis and Denzil, that moment was now. The skein grew thinner and more transparent as Cabal reached down and picked up his bag.
“Nothing that you could want. I’m a scientist. This contains my equipment.”
“A scientiss?” moaned Dennis. He put his hand on Denzil’s shoulder. “He woan have no money. C’mon, Denzil. Less go.”
The skein thickened and started to knit itself back. Denzil, however, had decided that he really didn’t like Cabal. Even if Cabal had nothing that they wanted, Denzil was damn sure that he was going to take it anyway. He angrily shook Dennis’s hand from his shoulder.
“No, I want whatever you’ve got, you milk-faced bugger. Open the bloody bag before I cut ya.” The skein grew thin as a bubble, tight as a drumskin. Cabal pursed his lips and opened the bag. The skein tore from side to side. Although Dennis and Denzil hadn’t been fully acquainted with the facts yet, they were doomed men.
Cabal reached in and drew out a human skull. Denzil and Dennis took a step back. Cabal wondered for a moment how he was going to explain concisely why he was carrying a bank clerk’s skull and decided not to.
“This is a memento mori,” he said instead. He could see they were going to say it — no, it was a skull — so he quickly added, “A reminder of mortality. That we are all clay. That we all die.” This last was said pointedly, but the pair of thieves was too busy gawping at the skull to be paying much attention to the nuances. He replaced the skull and took out a small leather folder. He flipped it open to reveal gleaming scalpels and probes. “These are my surgical instruments.”
“Yer a doctor, then?” asked Denzil, trying to guess how much the instruments might be worth. Cabal put them away again.
“Not really. These,” he continued as he produced a box about the size of a binocular case, padded inside and out, “are phials containing Test Batch 247.” He worked the catch with his thumb and opened it to show the heads of several test tubes, each sealed with wax into which the imaginative might have thought they saw a curious symbol worked.
Denzil could see that they weren’t going to be retiring after this job. “Wassat worth, then?”
Cabal closed the case and put it away. “If you don’t know how to use them, nothing at all. And finally,” he said, rummaging deep in the glad-stone. “This is a Webley.577.” Cabal drew the biggest handgun either Denzil or Dennis had ever seen in his life. Dennis cheered up.
“Werl, that’s gotta be worth something, eh? Eh, Denzil?” He turned around to see Denzil running as fast as his fat little legs could carry him. Somewhere deep in the reptilian part of his brain, Dennis got the feeling that he might be in trouble. The bullet that smashed through his back did nothing to diminish this. Even as Dennis was falling, his minimal amounts of brain activity flickering down to nothing, Cabal was carefully levelling the revolver at Denzil’s diminishing form. The first shot threw up stone fragments close by his heels. Cabal raised his aim a little and tried again. Denzil went down like he’d been poleaxed.
* * *
It took some time to find a spot where he could climb through the straggling and unhealthy hedgerow that grew alongside the earthwork, and another few minutes of climbing through brambles to reach the top. As he’d surmised, this was indeed the “proposed spur line” mentioned on the map. The dilapidated state of the line made him wonder how old the map was: the rails were heavy with undisturbed rust, the sleepers were rotting under moulds and mushrooms, weeds and young trees grew waist-high along the full length of the track as far as he could see. He consulted the map again. From his vantage point he could finally make out a few of what might, locally at least, be called landmarks: ponds, marshes, and forks in the roads. He turned the map through a few angles until he could work out where he was, reorientated himself facing north, and then looked directly along the line where the map carried an enigmatic “X.” The vegetation seemed far more mature there, a dense copse of trees that straddled the line and spread down each embankment. That, he hoped, must be it.
He set off towards the trees with determination, but after a few steps he was halted by the sound
of something falling heavily on the track behind him. He turned and snapped, “Do keep up! We don’t have all day.” Denzil blinked slowly at him and then down at Dennis, who was trying to get up, but his foot had caught under a rotten sleeper. It took a moment for Denzil to realise that he might help by kicking Dennis’s heel repeatedly until it came loose. He took slow, careful aim, swung his leg with great force, missed, and ended up on his back. He blinked uncomprehendingly at the grey sky. It seemed much more difficult to get things done now that he was dead.
Cabal pulled a little black book from his pocket, drew a pencil from its spine, and made a note. Batch 247 seemed to act quickly, but it certainly didn’t help co-ordination in any practical sense. With hindsight, perhaps he should have made some effort to take their souls on a more formal basis as the first donors of the hundred. That he hadn’t was partially down to not being quite sure how one actually sets about taking souls on a more formal basis, but mainly because they had peeved him. “I’ll be over there.” He pointed towards the trees and put his notebook away. “Catch up when you’re able.” That, he thought ruefully, might be some time.
As Cabal got closer to the trees, he began to see how long the copse was — perhaps a quarter of a mile. Given the stunted state of everything else in sight, that was suspicious in itself. Nothing else seemed likely to produce much more than toothpicks, while these trees were great twisted brutes that stood on the landscape as if painted in black ink. Leafless branches clutched at the sky, and the convulsed bark of the trunks looked, to a fanciful mind, like human faces twisted in torment. “This,” he said quietly, “must be the place. It’s so melodramatic.”
In a nearby tree that might have been an elm before being regularly watered with LSD, a carrion crow sat and regarded Cabal keenly. It tilted its head and cawed mockingly at Cabal. Then it saw Dennis and Denzil stumbling along the track a hundred yards behind him and, full of hope and appetite, flew to investigate them.
Cabal passed the tortured elm, stepped over the roots of a lunatic’s vision of a witch hazel, and came face to face with the Monster.
Cabal exhaled sharply, and his always pale complexion turned an ugly grey for a second, until he brought himself under control. He didn’t move, tried not to breathe, tried not to let the great black Monster know he was alive. Then he took a deep, shuddering breath, stepped forward, and placed his hand upon its face.
He had to step on the cowcatcher to reach, though.
It was the most astounding piece of engineering he thought he’d ever seen, and he’d seen a few. A massive locomotive that even here, dead and neglected, its firebox long cold, demanded and received unthinking respect. It bore some affectations of the Old West — the cowcatcher, the fluted smokestack — but the body seemed more Old World, aggressively squared and not afraid to shunt every carriage ever built from here to Hell. Perhaps it was capable of that. Cabal nodded approvingly: he might not be an engineer by trade, but he knew solid workmanship when he saw it.
Apparently, so did all nearby creatures. Despite any number of tempting perches for local incontinent birds, the only dirt on it was the coating of curious black rust that came off on his fingers like very coarse soot. Cabal sniffed at it cautiously and was instantly put in mind of energetic evenings down in the cellar, sawing up the evidence and putting it in the furnace before the police arrived. He pushed his tinted spectacles up his nose and blinked thoughtfully behind them. What exactly did this thing run on? He hoped it was wood or coal; it would be much more convenient.
A commotion made him turn. The crow had settled on Denzil’s head and was trying to get a meal out of him. Specifically, out of his eye socket. The hapless dead man had his head down and his arms outstretched and was running a clumsy circle in an effort to dislodge the bird. It wasn’t working; the crow seemed to have stapled itself in place. Dennis wasn’t helping things by trying to hit the bird with a sickly sapling he’d torn up. Blows rained down on Denzil’s back, not even remotely close to the target, and soil from the roots flew everywhere.
“Stop that!” barked Cabal. Both walking dead and bird stopped that. Dennis tried to hide the tree behind his back. “You there. Crow. Come here.” With utmost reluctance, the crow launched itself from Denzil, swooped low until it was almost touching the ground, then swept back up to head height, slalomed nonchalantly through the intervening trees, and landed on Cabal’s shoulder. Cabal turned on his heel and started to walk down past the huge locomotive and towards the train of carriages and cars linked up behind it. “You’ll be fed shortly, bird, so no further trouble, yes?” The crow blinked. “Oh, by the by, if you ever shit on my shoulder, you’ll be in a taxidermist’s window so fast as to beggar belief. Understood?”
“Kronk,” said the crow, which may have meant, “Yes, master.” It could equally well have meant, “You’ll have to catch me first, bugger-lugs.” Either way, it kept its sphincters tight.
Cabal walked slowly along the train. There were a few carriages, several flatcars stacked with once brightly painted boards, and, towards the back, a good number of sealed boxcars. He arrived at the first of them and stopped by the large sliding door that ran for a quarter of its length. He was just considering how to get in when it slid open of its own accord with a hideous shrieking of rusty metal. “Oh,” said Cabal, unimpressed. “It’s you.”
The Little Old Man finished dogging the door open and looked down. “Aye, it’s me, young Cabal. You’ve taken your time.”
Cabal placed a foot on a metal rung, gripped the rail by the door edge, and pulled himself up. The crow flapped off his shoulder and landed on a nearby stanchion. It settled down to practise looking at things beadily.
“You’re lucky I’m here at all. The map was next to useless,” Cabal said as he brushed rust off his hands and shoulder where the doorframe had touched him. He looked at the man. “I was hoping Satan might send something else rather than you, you contrary old bastard.”
The man laughed. Actually, he cackled.
“Oh, we go way back, Johannes. His Worshipfulness thought you might like a familiar face.”
Cabal was looking around the gloomy car. “Only if I thought blowing a hole in it would make any difference,” he replied offhandedly.
The Little Old Man was not, in any real sense, little or a man. He was certainly, however, very old. He was an embodiment of an archetype: the old codger with the flat cap and the grey beard. He cackled, he rolled his own foul-smelling cigarettes, and, when on form, he could be relied on to dribble. He was exactly the sort of person that makes youth fashionable. He was also one of Satan’s numerous avatars: fragments of his personalities and random thoughts that had taken form in the mortal realm. They allowed him to maintain a steady background hum of elemental evil in the world while he concentrated on more important things down in Hell. His cribbage game, for example. Until recent events, the Little Old Man had been Cabal’s only contact with Satan. This was the entity that he’d sold his soul to years before, and the entity that had invalidated more lines of research with his wilful interference than Cabal cared to remember.
The Little Old Man sat on a crate and watched Cabal investigate the dark corners. “Oh, Johannes. I’m hurt,” he said cheerfully. “After all we’ve been through.”
Cabal, his cursory examination of the boxcar completed, walked back to him. “‘All we’ve been through’? All you’ve put me through, surely? If you hadn’t bought my soul and then been such a pervasive nuisance ever since, none of this” — he made a gesture that encompassed the whole train — “would have been necessary.”
The Little Old Man shrugged. “I was only doing my job. You can’t expect altruism from one of Satan’s little helpers.”
Cabal sighed. “Look, I’d really like to be able to say that I’m delighted that you could make it and it’s a real tonic to see you, but I’d be lying.”
“I know.”
“So do you think we might cut along with a little more alacrity, all the quicker to get you out of my
sight? I am, after all, on a rather tight schedule.”
“Schedule,” said the Little Old Man, holding up a finger. “I’m glad you reminded me. You’ll be needing this.” He reached into his grubby old coat and produced an hourglass a little over a foot in height. Instead of sand, however, it seemed to be filled with an incredibly fine powder. Tiny motes made their way from the upper chamber into the narrow neck and cascaded downwards. Despite the steady stream, the floor of the bottom chamber barely had a dusting upon it. “This shows you how much time you’ve got left. You know how one works, don’t you?” Cabal gave him a look. “’course you do, clever lad like you. Anyway, when all the grains have fallen from top to bottom, time’s up. Simple. Oh, one thing to remember. This isn’t the actual glass that my better part has down in the hot place. It’s a sort of repeater, relay thing. You can do what you like to this one but it doesn’t affect the time you’ve got left. See?” He turned the glass. The motes fell upwards regardless. The Little Old Man held it at different angles, but nothing made any difference. Time was still passing, and the grains carried on falling in a steady, gravity-boggling stream. “Neat, eh? Goes down a bomb at parties, I can tell you.”
“Really?” said Cabal as he took the glass. “I’ll have to hold a soirée just to impress my friends.”
“You haven’t got any friends.”
“I’m not holding a soirée, either. You have a problem with sarcasm, don’t you? Now, do you have anything else fascinating to impart or can I kick your wrinkly little carcass down the embankment, as I so dearly wish?”
The Little Old Man huffed. “You’re not nice.”
“Your” — Cabal searched for the right word — “founder has given me the task of sending one hundred souls to eternal torment. To be quite frank, I don’t think my name is ever going to become a byword for popularity.”
“You’re right there.” The Little Old Man searched inside his capaciously shapeless coat and finally found a thin file box as broad and wide as foolscap by an inch deep. He undid the thin black tape ribbon sealing it, took off the lid, and showed the contents to Cabal. It was a pack of forms printed on some sort of faintly yellow parchment. Cabal leaned forward and read the top line.
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