Suddenly the carnival fell totally silent; the calliope stopped in mid-phrase, the barkers stopped barking. Cabal blinked, raised the gun to a ready position, and checked his watch. “What’s this, Bones?” he demanded. “There’s still a minute left.”
Bones stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat. “That’s right, boss. Still a minute for you to get that there contract signed, but as for this here carnival, we’re packin’ up.”
“What?” Cabal rose to his feet. “How dare you? This is my carnival, and I say — ”
“You say way, way too much with all them big words of yours. And it ain’t your carnival, and it’s never been your carnival. You just borrowed it for a while, and the loan term’s up, boss. This last minute, it’s ours. And it starts” — he struck a dramatic listening pose by the window; the calliope churned back into life, and Cabal recognised the tune within the first few notes as a deranged, discordant version of “The Minute Waltz” — “now!” Bones danced around like a ferret and clapped his hands. “Time for some real fun round here.” He stopped by Cabal. “Hey, did I ever mention what a pig’s-ass job you did of makin’ me in the first place?”
“Frequently.”
“I means to say, look at this.” Bones’s face sloughed off the front of his skull, revealing bare bone and muscle. It hit the floor with a noise like an accident with a rice pudding. Cabal just glared at him. Barrow had attended enough autopsies to have seen worse. Leonie looked away. She had the feeling that the next minute was going to be the worst of her life, one way or another. “That’s just shoddy, now, ain’t it?” He laughed a high shrieking laugh, rolled the door open, and leapt down to the ground.
The open door let in a tide of sound, including a lot of screams and shouts. “What the Hell is going on?” Cabal said, and stepped forward to the doorway.
Hell was exactly what was going on.
The carnival was falling apart and re-forming into new, horrible shapes before his eyes. He was forcibly reminded of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. It didn’t seem like a place to bring the family. The Things from the Ghost Train were flying low and fast between the blossoming flowers of destruction that used to be sideshows, harassing panicking townsfolk into headlong stampedes. The giant gorilla had left the Ghost Train, ascended the Helter-Skelter — now a looming tower of spikes and blades — and stood triumphantly atop it, swatting at what used to be the four jockeys from the Day at the Races concession but who now looked like personifications of Death, War, Pestilence, and Hunger, although they still wore their bright racing silks. The gorilla was holding in its spare hand some hapless individual that was fighting feebly to get away. At the base of the tower, Denzil waved up at Dennis, who paused in his struggles to wave back. He didn’t feel cut out to play Fay Wray at all.
“Stop that!” bellowed Cabal. Nobody stopped at all. “Joey? Joey! Pull your verdammt trousers up this instant! You’re frightening people!”
“That’s rather the plan, actually, old bean. Sorry and all that,” called back Joey, the most well-mannered and polite expression of diabolical will one is ever likely to meet.
Cabal looked around. “Bones, stop them! I’m still in control here!”
“For the next thirty seconds,” shouted Bones from a hundred yards away. He became sober. “I’ll see what I can do, boss.” He turned to the pulsing boil of chaos that used to be a carnival. “Stop that,” he said in an effete voice, wagging his finger. He exploded laughing, staggering around with delight at his own wit. Then his head just exploded.
Cabal drew back the hammer on his smoking gun. “I will not be mocked,” he said to nobody in particular. He turned back to face Barrow. “Sit down,” he said to Barrow, who had started to rise. Cabal looked around the office. The panelling was starting to rot, the polish vanishing from the desktop, a smell of damp and abandonment returning to this place, just as he’d found it. He walked back to the Barrows and placed the gun barrel against the side of Leonie’s head. “Fifteen seconds. Sign now.”
“No,” said Barrow, inevitably.
“Then it’s all over,” Cabal said tonelessly, and aimed at Frank Barrow’s head.
Without drama but in swift, certain movements, Leonie snatched the contract and pen from where they lay and signed. She thrust the paper at Cabal. “Leave my father alone,” she said simply.
“No!” cried both men, making Leonie jump.
Cabal glared at Barrow. “Now look what you’ve done with your idiotic intransigence!”
Barrow wasn’t so aghast at Leonie’s act that he couldn’t be taken aback still further. “What I’ve done?”
Distantly, the clock of Saint Olave’s struck twelve.
The flow of dust in the hourglass abruptly ran out, settled in the lower bulb, and lay still.
“Time’s up!” said Bones’s body, appearing at the door carrying a boater full of skull fragments. The voice came directly from the wet stump of his neck and sounded a little muffled. “All aboard the Damnation Express!” He swung out of sight again, and through the open door Cabal could see that the carnival field was empty but for a few people running aimlessly about.
Cabal turned to Barrow and his daughter to speak, but then paused. Barrow was crying freely, Leonie holding him and telling him it was all right. Cabal looked at the contract in his hand and opened his mouth, but suddenly the train heaved forward and he was thrown onto his back. Leonie looked around fearfully. It was odd; the train seemed to be pulling away, but they — she and her father — seemed to be staying still. The walls of the car were becoming translucent, as if they belonged somewhere else or were made of mist. Even Cabal, rolling heels over head in slowed motion, didn’t seem very solid anymore.
The train slid away from beneath the Barrows, and they were dumped gently onto the tracks. Except there were no tracks, no sleepers, and no sign that there had been for years. The train, a phantom monster in glowing greens and blues, howled past the station and left it a ruin from an old, old fire, the stationmaster saluting sadly as he was whisked back out of the land of the living and dumped into the place reserved for and deserved by suicides. At least, that was the thinking when the rules were drawn up.
Screaming and ranting, the engine shot away into the night and towards a black horizon. Leonie even had the impression, just before it vanished from sight, that it had lifted from the ground altogether and was travelling into the midnight sky like a great luminous eel from the ocean depths.
“Why did you do it?” asked her father, deep in misery.
“He was going to kill you, Dad. I had to take a risk.” She looked at the empty sky. “A calculated risk.”
* * *
Cabal felt a faint tickling on his lip. He moved his hand to swat it away but had trouble co-ordinating his hand. He tried once, twice, and was just at the point where he decided that it wasn’t that unpleasant a sensation, and it was too much bother to deal with it anyway, when somebody else swatted it away for him. Actually, somebody else slapped him hard.
“Uuurgh!” said Johannes Cabal, rolling away from the blow. He climbed onto all fours, his head hurting abominably, feeling disorientated and nauseous.
Horst watched without comment as his brother vomited miserably on the office floor. When he was sure Cabal was just about empty, he reached down, grasped him by the lapels, and threw him across the room. Before he had time to recover, Horst had picked him up again and pinned him against the wall.
“You didn’t listen to a word I said, did you?”
Cabal tried to pull himself together. Beside his brother’s coldly furious face, he could make out that they were still in the office. It must have carried on rotting while he’d been unconscious — mild concussion, that would explain why he felt so dreadful — for it was now no more than the car full of rubbish it had been when he first found it. The only change was a poster on the wall, decaying and curling already: “The Cabal Bros. Present Their World Famous Carnival of Wonders!” A woodlouse unsuccessfully tried to negotiate it a
nd fell to the floor — Cabal realised what the tickling on his lip had been. Through the windows he could see gnarled trees and a suspicion of low, rolling land. They were back in the Flatlands. The carnival was back in mothballs.
“You took another innocent soul, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t take anything — ”
“Don’t lie to me! I was right there in that bloody box, listening to you!”
“Then you know that I didn’t take anything!” barked Cabal, wrestling himself free. He glared at Horst as he tried to straighten his jacket. “She gave it to me.”
“Gave it to you,” said Horst contemptuously.
“Gave it to me! Don’t come the moral guardian with me! If you were right there, why didn’t you do something?”
“I was ready, believe me. If I’d heard that distinct click your finger makes when squeezing a trigger, it wouldn’t have got as far as making the second click it makes when it’s finished.”
“You didn’t stop me shooting Bones.”
“You were leaning out of the door and obviously pointing in the wrong direction.” He smiled grimly. “You shot Bones, did you? Can’t say I’m sorry. I never trusted him. I never trusted any of them. They finally betrayed you, then?”
“Like you were expecting it.”
“Damn right I was. Just like you were. You’re not stupid, Johannes. Inhuman and morally bankrupt perhaps, but not stupid. Chose their moment, didn’t they?”
“Oh, yes, they did that right enough.” Cabal brushed some of the debris from the desk corner and sat there. His favoured leather chair seemed to be home to a nest of mice. “Look, I’m not proud of what I’ve done, but it’s done. I’ve been manipulated from pillar to post, committed acts I’d prefer to forget about, but that’s all done with. I’m not pretending that the ends justify the means, but the fact remains, I’ve won the wager. I get my soul back, and I can get on with my research.”
“Whoopee,” said Horst.
Cabal stifled his annoyance. Horst had put up with a lot. “Now, I’m sorry about last night, the things I said. In my defence, I can honestly say I wasn’t quite myself. I’m not insensitive to all the work and effort you put into the carnival, and, well, it would have been a failure without you.”
“Rub my nose in it, why don’t you?”
“The point is,” said Cabal, talking through him, “the point is, you kept your side of our deal, so I’ll keep my side. I’ve had a few ideas about how your condition can be treated. If you’ll come back to the house with me, I promise you that I won’t rest until I’ve found a cure.” There was a long pause. “I’ve said my piece,” finished Cabal.
Horst looked at him for a long moment. “No. No, it won’t do. I’m afraid I’ll have to turn down your kind offer for several reasons. Firstly …” He started to walk to the window but kicked something. He picked up the crowbar, touched the tip, sniffed it. “That’s blood. Is this what you hit Frank Barrow with?”
“It is,” said Cabal, irritated by the distraction. “He used it to try to get into the locked drawer, to get the contracts. I was expecting something more artistic from him.” He stopped, thought. “Just a moment.” He walked to the desk and inspected the drawer. There was a scratch on the lockplate, which had previously confirmed to his satisfaction that Barrow had tried to force it. He cursed himself for addled thinking.
“Firstly,” carried on Horst, regardless, “I really have no interest in being stuck in the same house as you for the years your experiments would inevitably take. Secondly, we both know that your interest would slide back to your main researches and probably leave me high and dry. Thirdly, you’re a despicable human being who should have died at birth.”
“Sticks and stones,” said Cabal, otherwise paying no attention. “The crowbar was on the chair over there. How, then, did Barrow even manage to attempt to jemmy this drawer when the tool was nowhere near to hand?”
“Fourthly, I am never going to be able to live with myself for helping you, not if I live to be a thousand, which, given my condition, is a real possibility.”
Cabal was still ignoring him. “And, further, why attack the lock when surely a crowbar would be used against the catch?” He examined the scratch. “This is too fine to have been caused by that bar. This lock’s been picked.”
“Fifthly, lastly, and I think most tellingly, I’m not going to accept your offer because you’ve lost your bet.”
Cabal looked up at him with dawning horror as Horst reached into his waistcoat pocket and produced a couple of shining lockpicks. He held them up for inspection as, with the other hand, he took a familiar-looking piece of parchment from an inside pocket. He shook it open and turned its face towards Cabal.
It was one of the contracts. It was unsigned.
Cabal felt his legs starting to go and sat heavily on the floor. “Oh, Horst,” he said. “Oh, what have you done?”
“I’ve killed you, brother. Just like you killed me. I would like to think there’s some small degree of nobility in my actions, though.”
Cabal couldn’t tear his eyes from the paper. “When did you do it?”
“I picked your desk drawer and stole this about ten months ago.”
“Ten months? You’ve had that for ten months?”
“It took me until then to notice that you never counted the contracts, only ticked them off in that silly book of yours, and a tick is easy enough to forge. You had faith the contracts themselves would stay where you put them. Reasonable faith, as it turned out when I tried to get at them: that lock was incredibly difficult to pick. It took perhaps ten attempts.”
“It pays to invest in quality,” said Cabal faintly. “Why? Why did you take it?”
“When this all started out, all the people who you got to sign were obviously going to the Bad Place no matter what. I had no problem with that. But sometimes you’d be almost at the point of pulling the cap off your pen for some poor schmo whose only sin was being a bit stupid or gullible. Yes, I know those are cardinal sins as far as you’re concerned. Not for me, though. I’d have to jump in and distract you with some more suitable prospect. That’s when I decided I needed a bargaining counter.”
“So you stole the contract.”
“So I stole the contract.”
“But how was that supposed to modify my behaviour if I didn’t know you had it? What use is a threat if you don’t make it?”
“There we have the difference between us. It was never intended as a threat. If we’d arrived here and I’d been convinced that you were doing this the right way, I’d have got this thing signed for you myself. Even somewhere like Penlow, there were still some likely prospects. When you took the soul of that woman in the arcade — ”
“Nea Winshaw,” said Cabal quietly.
“At least you remember her name. Yes, Nea Winshaw; that was it. I gave up hope. I knew you were beyond redemption.”
“Well, I am now,” said Cabal with no rancour. “I’m going to have this mortal coil violently stripped from me on Satan’s own orders and spend the rest of eternity in boiling sulphur or being impaled by tridents or something equally tedious. Thank you, Horst, ever so.”
“I’m sorry, Johannes.”
“You should be.”
“No, I’m not sorry for what I did. I’m sorry for everything that brought us to here and now, everything that meant I had no choice. I am truly, deeply sorry. If it’s any comfort, I still believed you could be saved almost up to the last moment.”
“Saved? From what? The only thing I really needed saving from turns out to be my own brother. Redemption? You keep saying that as if it’s something I needed. Shouldn’t you produce a tambourine from somewhere and start dancing around when you talk like that?”
He rested his crossed arms on his drawn-up knees and rested his forehead on the forearms. His whole life was a waste. His researches hadn’t added a pennyweight’s value to human knowledge. He was no closer to reaching his goal. Soon he would be dead, and everything that
he had done would be forgotten or a cheap joke. If he had applied himself to something useless, like money, he would be a rich man now. Ironically, he was a rich man: running a lucrative business that doesn’t pay wages can do that. Unfortunately, he was going to be dead long before he’d even get a chance to do something worthwhile with the wealth. “I should never have gone back to the Druin crypt. I should just have put an advertisement in the entertainment press. ‘Required: deputy manager for travelling carnival. Talent and greed essential. Moralists need not apply.’”
Horst looked down on Cabal, started to open his mouth to speak, but changed his mind. He had the air of somebody who finally realises that he’s been wasting his time. Instead, he walked to the window and looked out at the eastern horizon, tearing up the useless contract as he stood. “The sky’s getting light. It’s almost dawn. I haven’t seen the sun in nine years.” He opened the door and climbed down.
Johannes Cabal sat alone with his self-pity and self-loathing for a long minute. Finally, he looked up with an expression of awful realisation. “Dawn?” he said in a horrible whisper. He threw himself to his feet, staggered slightly as the circulation returned to his legs, recovered, and ran to the open door.
Outside, Horst had walked some fifty feet and was taking off his jacket, neatly folding it and putting it on the ground. Cabal paused on the step and shouted desperately, “For pity’s sake, Horst! Come in! Come in! Don’t do this!”
Across the Flatlands, light from the new dawn swept rapidly towards them. Horst watched it approach with unconcerned equanimity and a gentle smile. Cabal didn’t. He jumped down, landing heavily, and started to run towards his brother, pulling his own coat off as he ran, swinging it around to act as a shield against the brightness. “Please, Horst! I’m begging you, don’t! You can get back to cover if you run!”
Johannes Cabal the Necromancer jc-1 Page 29