They washed between stalls, he fraught with suspicion, she with shifting apprehensions, unaware that they were objects of attention for a curious bystander.
Horst Cabal, invisible to all but the most perspicacious of cats or suspicious of dogs, watched them go by. Rendering himself imperceptible by men and animals was one of the little tricks that came with being less alive than most, along with his speed, strength, and — when need be — mesmerism. His perceptive eye and sympathetic heart, however, were all his own. He watched and he listened to their stilted conversation — his all statements, hers all prevarication — and he drew his conclusions.
He waited until they were out of sight before allowing himself to seep back into visibility, and stood quietly, an expression of speculative contemplation on his face. Then he blurred and the place was empty again.
* * *
Johannes Cabal was just finishing his first session as a sideshow barker when Horst found him. Horst sprang into being in full sight of several customers, who all performed simultaneous shocked jumps and squeals.
“My brother,” Cabal explained to them. He smiled with all the warmth of a dollhouse oven. “Rather a gifted magician.” He waited for the subdued and not entirely convinced crowd to dissipate before turning angrily to Horst. “What are you trying to do? It doesn’t take much to scare these sheep off.”
Horst passed him a bottle he had picked up in his rapid trip from there to here. Remarkably, its contents had survived the transit. “Drink this,” he said, unmoved by Cabal’s anger. “You need to save your voice for your next session.”
Cabal took the bottle testily and swigged from it. There was a moment’s pause, just long enough for Cabal’s expression to change from testy to horrified revulsion. He spat the liquid violently onto the grass like a man who has got absent-minded with the concentrated nitric acid and a mouth pipette. He glared at Horst as he took off his spectacles and wiped his suddenly weeping eyes. “Disinfectant? You give me disinfectant to drink?”
Horst’s surprise was replaced with mild amusement. “It’s root beer, Johannes. Have you never had root beer?”
Cabal looked suspiciously at him, then at the bottle. “People drink this?”
“Yes.”
“For non-medicinal reasons?”
“That’s right.”
Cabal shook his head in open disbelief. “They must be insane.” He carefully put the bottle down, but continued to watch it from the corner of his eye, as if fearing it might force itself upon him. “So — what have you been doing?”
“Watching.”
He said no more, waited for the silence to have its effect and for his brother to start almost visibly fuming, and then continued. “I think you may be in luck tonight.”
Cabal’s face showed a sudden light of hope that troubled Horst, but it was quickly replaced by suspicion. “I thought you didn’t approve.”
“I don’t. I didn’t say I was going to do anything to move things on. Just that you may be in luck tonight.”
Cabal considered. “And …”
Abruptly, he was alone. He let his breath out in a deep sigh. It hardly seemed worth becoming irritated, especially as he knew that was exactly why Horst had left in such a fashion. Johannes Cabal regarded the bottle of root beer and decided he would rather be somewhere else, too. If there was a chance that the carnival would claim its first real victim tonight, he was anxious to see it happen. If necessary, he would make it happen, and, given the agency by which he had come into temporary management of the carnival, this seemed a likely necessity. First, however, he would need somebody to take over the barking for the House of Medical Monstrosity.
“You.” He snapped his fingers and pointed peremptorily.
A passing ten-year-old boy with a Dr. Terwilliker beanie cap, a red-and-white-striped T-shirt, and a paper bag full of freshly roasted peanuts gawped at Cabal. Uncertain, he tapped his chest. “Me, sir?”
“Yes, you. Here. Come here. Up here, behind this podium. No, perhaps not — nobody will see you there. To the side. Take that ridiculous hat off. Now put this ridiculous hat on. There. Now publicise this sideshow until I get back.”
Cabal left the boy panic-stricken in an overlarge straw boater. “How do I do that?” the boy called after him, but he received no answer.
In truth, however, Cabal was equally unsure of his next actions. Despite a careful search, the carnival had failed to produce anything as basic as a user’s manual.
Cabal wandered among the chattering common folk — who were both very chatty and very common — and sought inspiration. It shouldn’t be difficult, he reasoned. The whole carnival was an excrescence of Hell, an outpost, a departure lounge for the pre-damned. The whole place should hunger for the souls of the unwary. Therefore, he theorised, it should only require a light prodding to do what came naturally. He paused, a dark rock in a flow of humanity. He wasn’t quite sure as to how one should set about lightly prodding a carnival. Perhaps he was, abominable as the thought was, over-intellectualising the problem. Perhaps he should trust his instinct. This would be difficult, he knew — his first instinct was always to use rational thought — but perhaps, just this once, he should listen to his intuition.
He tried to clear his mind, tried to silence the thousand buzzing thoughts that made up his consciousness, tried to ignore the sound of the crowd. He concentrated and focussed until there was nothing.
Nothing at all.
Certainly nothing helpful. He made an exasperated noise and let his mind, resentful of even those few moments of inactivity, whirr back up to speed.
Prickly at the failed experiment, Johannes Cabal looked straight ahead and saw the carnival’s penny arcade. He’d expressed surprise when Horst had insisted on it being added to the complement of attractions, but — as always — his brother had known what people liked. While it was unlikely that it would ever play much of a role in gathering souls, it did seem to be doing an excellent job in gathering spare change from those who could afford it and redistributing it to those who were running short. The idea was that the sideshows were where the real chances lay; in the dark corners and shadowed booths, these were where the deals of dubious theological probity would be debated and decided. In contrast, the penny arcade was largely intended as a wealth-redistribution centre, it being notoriously difficult to lead folk into temptation if they can’t get past the ticket barrier. Mr. Bones had explained all this to Cabal while the arcade was being built by two of Horst’s more fanciful constructs, Messrs Lintel and Scree. They loped around like stilt walkers on overly long, overly thin legs, their equally long thin arms waving around. They wore black suits and dark glasses and had hair of an uncomfortable shade of yellow, and the thickness of darning wool. As he watched them totter back and forth barking at each other in an incomprehensible language of their own, Cabal had been confident that they were intended as gross parodies of himself, but refused to rise to the insult by saying as much. Still, they certainly knew their business, throwing together wood and metal, glass, paint, and varnish in a whirl of apparent chaos that spat out penny cascades, mechanical horse races, and bagatelles of precision engineering and pristine form. Cabal liked things to be precise and pristine, and so had warmed to Lintel and Scree, although, again, he wouldn’t say as much. This kind feeling came to him now as he looked at the penny arcade, the result of their labours. He would try his luck here.
The arcade was busy. At the one-armed bandits, a man was consistently losing while his less well-off neighbour was on a lucky streak, both unaware of the arcade’s Marxist tendencies. Elsewhere, tin monkeys shinned up tin palm trees, ghosts appeared at the windows of a haunted house only to be met by a fusillade of shots on a shooting gallery,[1] and a mechanical Gypsy told fortunes from the security of a glass-fronted case.
The Gypsy was — according to the legend painted across a board at the top of the case in swirling orange, yellow, and black — one Madame Destiny, and she took the form of a young woman with a headsc
arf, loop earrings, and a vertiginous cleavage. She sat, hands raised motionless about her crystal ball, silently waiting for the gang of teenaged boys gathered in front of her case to stop trying to peer down her top, making ribald and obvious comments as they did so. Finally, one of them, spurred on by the others, fumbled a coin into the slot. Madame Destiny immediately whirred into life and obligingly looked into her crystal ball. Deep within it, strange colours flickered and swirled. The boys grew quieter, and an air of discomfort developed around them as they watched the mechanical Gypsy’s hands move in a very realistic manner for wood or plaster, her fingers bending where no hinges were evident.
Abruptly she juddered to a halt, the light died within the crystal ball, and the boys recovered their bravado a little. Then, with a percussive twang of spring-loaded machinery that sang through the machine’s case for long seconds, a piece of card dropped into a tray set into the base beneath the glass. Grinning at the comments of his friends, the boy took the card and read it.
It seemed to take a long time to read those few lines, but after the first words his eyes widened a little, and the smile slowly faded from his face as if massaged away by invisible fingers. He went back and began to read the words again, then onwards to the end. Then, ashen-faced, he turned and staggered out of the arcade, his suddenly concerned friends asking him what was wrong.
Cabal watched them go grimly. He walked over to Madame Destiny, made a show of finding a coin in his pocket, and leaned down to put it in the slot. As his face grew close to Destiny’s on the other side of the glass, he whispered, “Very amusing for you, no doubt, but hardly in line with what we’re trying to do here. The intention is to tempt them in, not scare them off like rabbits.” Unseen by any but Cabal, Madame Destiny raised a finely painted eyebrow. With another reverberant twang, a new card dropped into the tray, despite no coin being inserted. He read it where it lay.
MADAME DESTINY KNOWS ALL AND SEES ALL.
VERY AMUSING INDEED. I HAVE TO HAVE A LITTLE FUN.
MADAME DESTINY’S ADVICE:
THERE ARE RICHER PICKINGS TO BE HAD.
Despite the insubordinate tone, there was good news here, and Cabal was cheered a little by the knowledge that Madame Destiny seemed to know of at least one alternative prospect. “Richer pickings … Where precisely?”
Madame Destiny’s eyes rolled in their sockets until she was looking directly at him. She held his gaze for a second, then looked back down into the crystal. The strange light bloomed within, and with a whirr of gears she gently fluttered her fingers across the surface of the ball, never once touching it. A click, a twang, and a new card fell into the tray, covering the one already there. Cabal took them both, dropped the older in his pocket, and examined the new one. It read:
MADAME DESTINY KNOWS ALL AND SEES ALL.
MADAME DESTINY’S ADVICE:
BEHIND YOU.
Cabal turned. He was now facing the arcade’s entrance. Beyond it was a surging torrent of humanity, washing from here to there and back again. No single face stood out, no one figure drew his attention. Cabal scowled. “This is no use,” he said in an undertone that he knew Destiny could still hear. “I need some better indication of whom I am looking for than …” His eyes darted down to reread the card, and he stopped. For now the card read:
MADAME DESTINY KNOWS ALL AND SEES ALL.
MADAME DESTINY’S ADVICE:
AHEAD OF YOU.
Experimentally, he tried turning the card through ninety degrees. Madame Destiny’s advice underwent a metamorphopsychotic[2] transition and now read, “TO YOUR LEFT.”
Cabal nodded slightly, impressed. Considering she was essentially half a mannequin, a small cabinet, and just enough cogs and gears to make a tolerably accurate mantel clock, she certainly had her uses. Cradling the fortune like a cardboard lodestone, Cabal set off in search of his prey.
He walked headlong into the crowd and, inured by nature and habit against the complaints of those upon whose feet he trod and whose peanuts he spilt, he proceeded to close upon his mark. First, he used a rough triangulation to give him a very approximate range and bearing. Then he put his head down and ploughed a path through the mass, leaving a wake of disgruntlement. AHEAD OF YOU, said the card. AHEAD OF YOU.
Abruptly Cabal’s headlong pursuit foundered upon an immoveable rock, all wrapped in a Sunday suit. He looked up, and a brow beneath a bad haircut beetled down upon him. Cabal quickly checked the card again. MADAME DESTINY’S ADVICE now read, THAT’S HIM. APOLOGISE. QUICK.
Cabal tucked the fortune teller’s card away into his breast pocket and touched the brim of his hat. “Good evening, sir,” he said to the large man, “I’m terribly sorry I ran into you like that. My most humble apologies.” The man glared at him, his hands rapidly curled into fists, and he went pale. Cabal knew more than enough about the intricacies of the endocrine system to appreciate that a man who goes pale with anger is a great deal more likely to strike out than one who goes red. Unbidden, Cabal’s free hand moved across to his cane, took the silver skull at its head firmly in his grip, and twisted it slowly until the catch disengaged. He knew Horst would probably regard running a rube through with a sword cane as poor public relations, but in Cabal’s book, “The customer is always right” became academic the instant the customer drew back his fist.
“Please, no, Ted!” A woman appeared around the windward side of the mountainous man. She was as pale as the man — Ted — but for different reasons. Her dark make-up showed livid against the white skin. “Please! He’s not worth it!”
Cabal — who at one time or another had been pursued by village mobs, town mobs, the police, the army, two Inquisitions, and sundry other concerned citizens — was entirely positive that he was worth it. The phrase on her lips, however, had the air of a formula worn by use into a ready invocation, a cantrip against the extremities of Ted. Under such circumstances, Cabal was prepared to forgive her presumption. For Ted, on the other hand, he had conceived a strong dislike, and those for whom Cabal developed a strong dislike rarely prospered.
“Please, allow me to introduce myself,” said Cabal, releasing the head of the cane and using that hand to tap his chest as he spoke. The gesture also confirmed the presence of one of Trubshaw’s contracts, folded and ready in the inside pocket of Cabal’s coat. “I am Johannes Cabal, joint proprietor of this carnival.”
Ted seemed to calm down with remarkable rapidity, Cabal noted. Obviously cowed by authority. His dislike for Ted deepened.
“Allow me to apologise once again for my earlier clumsiness. Please, I’d like to make it up to you in some way. Is there some attraction or sideshow for which I can offer you a complimentary ticket? An exhibit?” Ted’s eyes scanned back and forth, apparently considering his choices. His expression gave no assurances that he would come to a conclusion soon. “A stall, perhaps?”
“You like to shoot,” suggested the woman in a small, cautious voice.
Ted thought about this, then nodded.
“He likes to shoot things,” the woman said to Cabal.
“I shot her dog,” added Ted.
It took an effort, but Cabal didn’t show even the flicker of a reaction.
“If you’d come this way, please, sir,” he said in neutral tones, indicating the way to the shooting gallery.
The shooting gallery was, in common with all the carnival’s stalls, a carefully judged amalgam of every fairground shooting gallery that had ever been or ever would be, an archetype, a functional mean. It offered the opportunity to shoot at tin silhouettes of little men standing to attention, tin silhouettes of caricature ducks, and tin silhouettes of clay pipes, which processed and spun across a pellet-peppered backdrop. The weapons it offered were break-barrel.22 air-rifles — Cabal had been mildly amused to discover that they were ageing Webleys, of the same manufacture as the.577 Boxer revolver currently lying in his desk drawer — their sights all artistically crocked so as to be worse than useless. In return for the feat of striking down moving targets
with ill-maintained rifles, the stall offered the chance to take home desperately ill goldfish, disconcerting Kewpie dolls, decorative knick-knacks of dubious quality and taste, and ill-proportioned baboons stuffed with kapok.
Cabal arrived with Ted, the latter carving a channel through the crowd much like a surly ice-breaker. In their wake, Ted’s girlfriend, Rachel, walked quickly, head down, giving apologies to anybody who looked like they were owed one. Cabal quietly explained to the stallholder that Ted was to be allowed five free games, and to be awarded any prize that he might win just as if he had paid. Bowing a little too stiffly to be truly unctuous, Cabal withdrew to a safe distance and observed.
Ted turned out to be an effective marksman, inaccurate sights or not. He cracked open the rifle as if it had insulted him, thumbed in a slug, snapped it shut, raised it to his shoulder, and fired with barely a pause until all five slugs were gone and two unhappy little tin ducks, two tin men, and a tin pipe had been laid low. The stallholder showed him the utter tat that was his for the asking, but Ted waved such very minor temptations aside. He intended to accrue five tokens from his five gratis games and go home with an altogether classier piece of tat from the top shelf of prizes.
Cabal watched, discomfited. He had been banking on the nefarious true purpose of the carnival making itself known in certain stealthy, subtle ways only evident to the watchful and educated observer, if for no other reason than that that was its nature. Instead, he was looking at an oaf doing quite well for himself in an egotistical show of physical superiority. He might as well have been watching professional sports. In short, unless the carnival was being so stealthy and subtle about its soul-stealing that even Cabal couldn’t see it happening, then he could only conclude that he would have to move matters along himself.
Everything at the carnival was ultimately dedicated to taking the souls of the unwary. That was a given. Therefore, unlikely as it seemed, even the shooting gallery must be capable of this. Cabal didn’t know how, but surely the stallholder did? As proprietor, it was merely Cabal’s role to make the decision, to give the signal, and then stand back and watch the carnival draw the snare tight around the prey. Well, he had made the decision, so it would seem that he should give the signal. Cabal caught the stallholder’s eye while Ted was mowing down more hapless tin casualties, and gestured in a way he hoped would imply that the stallholder should get on with securing Ted’s soul.
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