Johannes Cabal the Necromancer jc-1

by Jonathan L. Howard

  Barrow watched the careful precision of his hands, still in their black kid gloves, and thought Cabal moved like a surgeon. For want of a conversational gambit, he expanded on this. “You don’t strike me as the carnival type, Mr. Cabal.” The cream knife hesitated for a heartbeat and then continued. “I’ve met a fair few different types of people in my life, and I think I’m pretty good at summing them up.”

  “I understood that you’d retired from the police force, Mr. Barrow,” said Cabal. He made a curious motion with his wrist as he drew the knife along the side of the pot, and every last vestige of cream was neatly wiped from the blade, as if it had been freshly washed. He drove the tip into the jam, took a blob encasing a strawberry back to the scone, and deposited it neatly in the middle. The result was so precise it looked like the work of a machine. Cabal repeated the action with the knife and laid it, spotless, on his side plate. Cabal raised the scone to his lips. “Old habits die hard, it appears.” He took a careful bite.

  Barrow persevered. “You’re a very serious man, Mr. Cabal. You don’t strike me as somebody given to frivolity. If I were playing a game of matching people to their jobs, I wouldn’t have got you down a carny-man in a thousand years. Not ten thousand.”

  “Not a game you should play for money, then. As a matter of interest — ”

  “A doctor,” cut in Barrow, anticipating the question.

  “I’ve impressed you with my flashing bedside manner, then?”

  “A pathologist, to be exact.”

  Cabal studied him seriously. “You see me working with the dead?”

  Barrow poured himself some more tea. “It’s hardly a great leap in imagination, now, is it? Look at you. You go around with a face like a wet Wednesday, dressed all in black, and, frankly, lacking something in charisma. Even funeral directors have to be able to deal with people.” Barrow smiled. Cabal didn’t. “The funny thing is that, in my experience, pathologists are often nice, jolly people. They do an ugly job, but that’s all it is, a job. They leave it behind when they go home of an evening. You, though. I don’t think you’ve ever left work at work.”

  “No,” said Cabal. “I always take my work home. I’ve got several clowns under the bed, and a man who can belch the anthems of twelve nations in the wardrobe.”

  “Ah, but, as I’ve already said, is that your work?”

  “Of course. With the help of my brother, I run a carnival. You can’t have failed to notice it. It’s that big thing down by the railway station.” He finished his tea and put the cup down onto its saucer with a harsh click. “Which is where I should be now. Thank you for the tea, Mr. Barrow. It was very pleasant. You must visit the carnival in reciprocation. Perhaps, for a change, when it’s open.” He produced a card from thin air (“Learn a couple of conjuring tricks,” Horst had told him. “People like that sort of thing”) and gave it to Barrow. “A complimentary ticket, courtesy of the management.”

  Barrow accepted the card with a nod. As he read the few words on its face he asked, “May I have another? My daughter, Leonie, loves the fair.”

  Cabal produced another two tickets. “Come one, come all,” he said without inflection. “Bring your wife as well.”

  Barrow took one ticket from Cabal’s hand and put it away with the first one. “I’m a widower, Mr. Cabal.”

  Cabal put the extra ticket in his pocket (it was intended to vanish, but he’d had so little practice at this trick that, to the untrained eye, it simply looked as if he was putting the ticket away in his pocket). “I’m sorry,” he said. He seemed to mean it.

  “Thank you,” said Barrow.

  Cabal spent a long moment refreshing their cups, his intention to leave apparently forgotten. Once more, he didn’t ask Barrow how he took his. As he plucked slices of lemon from their little plate with the tongs, he asked quietly, “Do you miss her?” He didn’t look at Barrow as he said it.

  “Every day,” replied Barrow, accepting his cup back. “Every day. Life can be cruel.”

  “It wasn’t life that took her away from you,” said Cabal, looking at him directly. There was an even intensity in his eyes, like the gaze of a man who walks into a room where he knows he is going to see something awful and has braced himself for it.

  “Fate, then?”

  “Death. Death is your enemy. My enemy. Life can be cruel, that’s true. Death is always cruel.”

  “Death can be a release,” said Barrow. Watching Cabal talk now, he had a sensation reminiscent of watching somebody open a Chinese puzzle box. Part of it was wonder at the complexity. Part of it was curiosity as to what lay inside.

  “Release?” said Cabal venomously. “Release be damned. That’s just doctors’ talk for failure. ‘At least they’re at peace now,’ ‘They’ve gone to a better place,’ all those lies. You know what’s waiting?”

  “I’ll know soon enough,” said Barrow. “I’ll just enjoy life while I can.”

  Cabal leaned forward. “I know now,” he said, caution gone. “One place is run by a bored, disappointed sadist. The other … Spiritual transfiguration, do you know what that means? It means having everything that you ever were stripped away, bars of light, too intense to look upon.” He unconsciously fingered the smoked glasses in his breast pocket. “Homogeneity incarnate. Can you imagine that? That’s what the Heavenly Host is, countless thousands of bars of light, souls burning, all the same. Your personality lost forever. Immortal souls, hah! It’s the final death. Sacrificed to a mania for order.” He looked around at the middle distance, his disgust a palpable thing. “Lambs to the slaughter.”

  Barrow put his cup down. “Why do you hate death so much?”

  Cabal seemed to rein himself in. “I don’t hate death. It’s not a person. There’s no grim skeletal figure with a scythe. I try to avoid hating abstracts, it’s a waste of effort.”

  “That’s not what it sounded like a moment ago. You sounded like a man who would kill death if he could.”

  Cabal checked his pocket watch. “I despise waste. That’s all.”

  “That’s not all,” said Barrow, and instantly knew that he’d overstepped a line.

  Cabal got to his feet and straightened his coat. “Good day, Mr. Barrow,” he said with stiff formality. “I’ve enjoyed our little chat, but I have things to attend to back at the carnival. If you will forgive me?” He turned on his heel and went out.

  Barrow shook his head. He had the strongest feeling that, whoever Cabal really needed forgiveness from, it wasn’t him. He’d met all sorts in his time, but never anybody quite like Johannes Cabal, and he was beginning to think fate had been kind to him up to now. He dropped some money on the table and followed Cabal.

  Outside, he saw Cabal walking determinedly in the direction of the station. He was debating whether to follow when he was arrested by a cry of “Dad!” He turned to see his daughter, Leonie, leaving the hardware shop. He instinctively knew that she had been buying the hinge for the shed that he had complained about yesterday with the words “I’ll have to get around to that one day.” With Leonie, “one day” was “tomorrow,” except on those occasions when it was “today.”

  She came over, smiling with the joys, and Barrow, who had the occasional pang of existential angst, was reassured that his life had been worthwhile. Oddly, though, something lay darkly over the familiar happiness that Leonie inspired in him, like a single small but impenetrably dark cloud on the face of the sun. He turned his head slowly in Cabal’s direction.

  Cabal was standing stock-still on the far side of the village green, staring at him. The intensity, the unblinking directness of the gaze unnerved Barrow.

  He’d once been faced with a rabid dog, an animal that he knew could kill him slowly and agonisingly if it bit him just once. They had stared un-blinkingly at each other, not ten feet apart, as Barrow slowly, and by touch alone, broke, reloaded, and closed his shotgun. It had continued to stare at him as he brought the gun to his shoulder and sighted carefully down the double barrels. The sensation that he h
ad felt, a horrible sensation of the dog’s burnt and chaotic mind communicating its madness to him through its gaze like a basilisk, still woke him in the early hours in a cold sweat. As Cabal stood motionless, staring, glaring, some of that sensation returned to Barrow, and he shuddered involuntarily.

  The realisation that Cabal wasn’t looking at him at all released him from his paralysis. The realisation that Cabal was actually looking at Leonie proved unexpectedly confusing. Unable to draw any conclusions, he left his next action to conditioned reflex. Perhaps unfortunately, his inclination was towards politeness.

  Taking Leonie’s arm, Barrow walked over to where Cabal was apparently rooted to the ground. “Mr. Cabal,” he said. Cabal’s eyes never deviated from Leonie’s face. “Mr. Cabal, I’d like to introduce you to my daughter, Leonie.”

  “You own the carnival!” said Leonie, recognising the name. “Oh, I love fairs!”

  “Mr. Cabal has very kindly given us tickets,” said Barrow, patting the pocket that contained them.

  “Thank you, Mr. Cabal,” said Leonie. “I really do adore carnivals. We only tend to get the little travelling ones around here, though. Nothing you could call a big professional affair. I am so looking forward to tonight.”

  Cabal looked fixedly at her. Smoothly, as if possessed by a will of its own, his hand moved to his breast pocket, withdrew his spectacles, shook them open, and put them on. Seeing the world through smoke-tinted glasses seemed to shake him out of his paralysis of will. “Thank you, Miss Barrow. I’m … we’re very flattered by your interest.” He spoke slowly and with curious emphasis, as if his mind were elsewhere. Barrow watched him closely. Leonie was a good-looking girl — even allowing for a father’s pride, that was plain to see — but surely Cabal wasn’t smitten? The thought of a romantic streak in the sinister Mr. Cabal was disconcerting, even distasteful, especially if his own daughter was the focus of interest.

  “How long are you here?” asked Leonie.

  “Here,” repeated Cabal tonelessly. “This is the last night.”

  “Then where are you going?”

  “Then it is the end of the season,” said Cabal. There was a finality in the way he said it that Barrow doubted was deliberate, and that was all the more suggestive for it.

  Leonie was talking again. “Well, we mustn’t miss our chance. You can be sure we will be there tonight, Mr. Cabal.”

  Barrow smiled, and it didn’t even get within scenting distance of his eyes. He was distracted by the sure knowledge that there was something going on that he didn’t like. He could taste one of his famous hunches, and it held the flavour of a beached whale. He sincerely regretted introducing Leonie to this man. He sincerely regretted accepting the tickets. He sincerely regretted that he would have to disappoint Leonie by making her stay at home tonight.

  * * *

  “But why?” It was later, and they’d gone home after saying goodbye to Cabal and Leonie, once again reassuring him that they’d certainly be there tonight. Barrow had just mentioned casually that he would prefer it if she didn’t go after all, hoping vainly that she might just accept his wish. No such luck. It was shaping up into one of their rare, and all the more unpleasant for it, arguments.

  “Nothing ever happens around here,” she said. She seemed hurt, as if he were asking her to stay out of sheer malice.

  “There’s something wrong about Cabal. About his whole carnival. Things are happening. Unnatural things.”

  “But you know why that is,” said Leonie, as if he were being deliberately stupid. “Rufus Maleficarus the necromancer. He’s trying to ruin the Cabal carnival. We know that.”

  “Maleficarus is dead,” pointed out Barrow.

  “But he’s a necromancer. That’s the whole point. Life after death after life. They should have burnt him, but they didn’t. Now he’s come back.”

  “Do you really believe that?” Life after death after life. Something in the words provoked the glimmer of an idea. In Barrow’s mind, cogs of pure thought started to form from the chaos of unordered data.

  “We’ve seen the newspaper. It happened at Murslaugh. The Cabal brothers are heroes there. They’re not making it up.” She shrugged and shook her head at his stubbornness. It was a gesture she’d learned from her mother. She didn’t know it, but it was a knife in his heart every time she did it.

  He blinked the pain away and tried to marshal his arguments. They weren’t having it and remained an undisciplined mob. “Look, I’m not arguing about this. You are not going.”

  “What?” She couldn’t believe he could be so intransigent. Of course, the crowning point was that she was a grown woman and he really couldn’t stop her if she decided to go. That, however, wasn’t nearly so important to her that minute as understanding why he was even trying. “What happened to hearing both sides of an argument?”

  “All right, let’s hear your side.”

  “My side? My side is that I want to go to the carnival because I want to go to the carnival. It’s fun. I would like some fun. It’s your side that’s lacking.”

  “I’ve told you …”

  “You’ve told me that you don’t like Mr. Cabal. Fine. I think you’re being silly, but if you insist, I’ll avoid him. I don’t want to go for his fascinating conversation.” She saw her father fight a smile. Cabal had been all but monosyllabic when she’d spoken to him. “I just want to go on the Ghost Train, throw balls at nailed-down coconuts, and have a bit of fun. What’s wrong with that?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s just…”

  “What can possibly happen?” She looked at her father and felt her anger cool a little. When all was said and done, he would die for her, and they both knew it. “What can possibly happen?”

  Barrow sighed. Here was the crux of it. “I don’t know,” he admitted, “I really have no idea. Maybe nothing. But, but” — he took her hands in his — “maybe something. Try to understand. When I was still with the police … No! Hear me out!” Leonie had rolled her eyes at the mention of his old job. When he was satisfied that he had her attention, he continued. “When I was with the police, I came across all sorts. The criminals, nine times out of ten, it was obvious. They forget what morality is — real morality, that is. The stuff that lets us get along with each other. They can mimic it like a chameleon can mimic the colour of leaves, but that’s all it is. Mimicry. They’ve forgotten what it is to think like everybody else, and they get things wrong. Little things, but you get so you can scent them out. Little mistakes. Everything that they do, everything they say is riddled and rotting with mistakes.”

  Leonie looked at him, worried. He couldn’t tell if she was worried by him or worried about him. “Are you suggesting that Johannes Cabal is a criminal?” she said.

  “No, not at all, not in the way that you mean. I actually think he’s a very moral man. I just don’t think that he’s using the same morals as everybody else. I think …” This was it. He’d painted himself into a corner, and a thousand lazy reporters and ever-so-sincere politicians had rendered the only word that he could use comically melodramatic. “I think … Johannes Cabal… is evil.”

  Leonie looked at him in disbelief. Evil. The word had lost its power through overuse. Now it just meant incomprehensible to the uncomprehending. Barrow wanted to explain the complexities of it, this language of suffering that he had learned at countless crime scenes and in too many interview rooms. The serial killer and the serial burglar shared far more than either would like to admit: the need that has to be fed until next time, the need that results in the suffering of others, the easy justifications. They shouldn’t have left it unlocked. They shouldn’t have gone down that alley. They shouldn’t have been dressed like that. Barrow had heard it all, and he’d always smelled the sour smell of a failed human. Cabal, though, he was of another order altogether. There was almost a nobility in the corruption of the spirit that Barrow was sure was there, was sure that he had detected. There was something different, though. If he could just put
a name to it, he was sure that he would understand Cabal all the better. Evil, in as far as he had experienced it so far, was always selfish. It was always just an extension of the most stupid behaviour of the infant playground: “It’s mine because I say so. It’s mine because I take it.” Belongings, sexuality, life. But not in Cabal’s case. Barrow played with words mentally as he tried to explain to Leonie what he meant. Cabal’s was a (what?) evil. Clinical? Displaced? Remote? Deviant? Altruistic?

  Altruistic? How can evil ever be altruistic?

  “It’s against its nature,” Barrow said, thinking out loud.

  “Evil?” Leonie was still stuck on the word. It wasn’t one her father used often. In fact, she couldn’t remember him ever using it at all. “Are you serious?”

  “I’m serious when I say I don’t want you to go to the carnival.” He tightened his grasp of her hands. “I’m scared for you. I’m scared for every person who walks through those gates.”

  “You are serious.” She nodded slightly, and her trust in him closed the distance. “I won’t go.”

  After she had gone, Barrow reached into his pocket and studied the two tickets. “You,” he said to one of them, “are surplus to requirements.” He threw the piece of pasteboard onto the fire. “You,” he said to the survivor, “are going to get me inside that carnival tonight. Then we shall see.” He went to the window to reread the printing on the ticket.

  As he turned his back on the fire, he failed to see the ticket that he had thrown there flutter up the flue. It seemed miraculously unburnt. Indeed, as it made its way up the chimney, even the scorch marks faded away. Three-quarters of the way to the chimney stack, it made a difficult turn and headed for one of the upstairs fireplaces. Leonie sat by the window, looking off across the fields in the direction that she knew the carnival to be. Unseen, the ticket fluttered across the room and landed on her desk. It found itself a good, obvious position and practised looking alluring.