The Fall of the House of Cabal

by Jonathan L. Howard

  ‘I think the only time he saw the pan fall unexpectedly was tonight. Previously, he always knew exactly when it would drop.’

  Lament went to stand by the Throne of Death and regarded it curiously. ‘How? He couldn’t trigger it himself. There is absolutely no connection between the throne and the mechanism.’

  ‘There is. And tonight that connection killed him.’ She looked at Rufus Maleficarus. ‘Didn’t you, Rufus?’

  ‘You’re fishing,’ he said evenly. ‘You’re throwing dirt and seeing if anyone reacts.’

  ‘Not at all. I said the inspector was wrong on two details. The first was that you were very close. You were directly beneath the stage, after all. The second was that you left no trace of your involvement.’ Miss Leonie Barrow took the pin from her lapel. ‘But you did.’

  Before the gathering, she walked a few steps to the crossbow mechanism. She held the pin up for them all to see, and then she brought it close to the metal pan of the balance mechanism. With a sharp click whose significance far outweighed its volume, the pin snapped from her hand and stuck to the metal.

  ‘It’s a magnet!’ said Horst.

  ‘It’s magnetised,’ she corrected him. ‘The result of its many, many exposures to an electromagnet. One built by his son and used at every performance to trigger the balance at the exact moment his father signalled him to use it.’

  ‘The struggle.’ La Morte spoke as in a reverie. ‘He’d struggle, slam his feet down just as he freed himself. It was a signal?’

  All eyes were on Rufus Maleficarus. He shrugged. ‘Nice theory. How do you intend proving it?’

  ‘These gentleman,’ Leonie said, nodding at the police officers, ‘and I shall be going through your understage workshop in close detail, looking for a suitable bar and the length of wire you undoubtedly spent the time waiting to be interviewed putting back onto a spool. But you know what wire’s like; it never quite smooths out perfectly. I should think it will be painfully obvious. Of course, we were never supposed to know what it was we were looking for, were we?’

  ‘You can’t prove a thing.’ Rufus seemed bored now.

  In contrast, Miss la Morte was growing more passionately upset by the second. ‘Why didn’t I know about this? I was in the act! Why was I never told?’

  Leonie shrugged. ‘Only Rufus can tell you that now. I would guess it was because Max was trying to impress you. A middle-aged man pulling off an escape eight times a week that would terrify younger men. He probably meant to tell you at some point early on, but it became more difficult with every week that went by. After a while he began to fear that if he told you the one great death-defying moment of the show was as illusionary as all the rest, he would lose your respect. That there was still risk wasn’t enough. He would rather face a crossbow quarrel than disappoint you.’

  ‘Oh, God. Max. You stupid, stupid man.’ She began to weep in exhausted, hopeless little gasps.

  ‘Stupid’s right,’ muttered Rufus. He looked around, jagged little reckonings showing in his eyes. ‘If he’d stuck to his word, none of this would have happened. Well done, Miss Barrow. You deserve your reputation. I thought you were as big a fraud as my father at first, but I have to admit this late rally of yours … I’m impressed. Well, don’t you want to know why I did it?’

  ‘I know why you did it, and you just filled in the last detail. Your father fronted your act and reduced you to a backstage engineer while he got the plaudits. This was only intended to be for a brief while, wasn’t it? A season or two? Then there’d be some grand publicity about the father passing on the mantle, and you were to take over and he would become the engineer or perhaps just retire. But then things became complicated. He fell in love with Miss la Morte and, rather more unexpectedly, she fell in love with him. Now he had a new lease on life. Now a season or two wasn’t enough.’

  ‘I have plans, you know.’ Rufus shook his head. ‘Had plans. Such plans. A new form of magical theatre. More risky, more risqué. My father took them all and made them the same as everything else out there. Bland. Predictable. He took Athena away and turned her into another pouting assistant. Some faint shadows of what I had planned, but becoming safer with every performance. He’d have had you in ostrich feathers and sequins by the end of the season, Athena! Just another showgirl!’ He calmed and looked at Lament. He curled his lip. ‘I was angry. I lost concentration. My finger slipped, and I activated the magnet too early. Just a little too early. It was an accident.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t,’ said Leonie Barrow.

  He turned his surly leer upon her. ‘Prove it.’

  * * *

  ‘The sun.’ Horst watched it rise above the busy skyline of municipalia and industry, the cold rays of a new day throwing golden light into soot-stained streets. He held his hand up to bathe it in the brightness, delighting in how it felt good and how it didn’t feel of violent combustion. ‘Is this a gift? Is this some way this place is saying, “You play a blinding silly ass, Horst. Kudos to you, old man”?’

  There was no immediate reply. He looked over to find Leonie Barrow cross-armed and furrow-browed. ‘For somebody who just solved a pretty tricky crime, you’re looking a bit woeful, glorious leader.’

  She looked at him and did not so much shake off the reverie as crawl disconsolately from it. ‘I failed, though, didn’t I? Rufus is right; nothing can be proved beyond what I demonstrated and what he confessed to. If the police try him for murder, it will all come down to how good the barristers are and just how arrogant he is in front of the jury.’

  ‘Ah, the British jury. Stout yeomen all.’

  ‘Exactly. A bigger bunch of nincompoops it’s hard to imagine. Yet if they let him off with manslaughter instead, who can blame them? There’s nothing to suggest premeditation. If he decided even a minute beforehand to kill his father, it’s murder. If he triggered the thing on the spot in a paroxysm of rage, it’s manslaughter. If he fumbled and did so while distracted, it’s accidental. Only Rufus knows the truth, and his truth will get him off with the lightest charge. The jury will have little choice.’

  ‘That’s the law.’

  ‘It is. Doesn’t feel much like justice, though, does it?’ She watched as the sun melted the hoarfrost from along the ridge of a nearby wall. ‘Perhaps that’s what this was all about? I don’t know. I wonder if we’re supposed to move on now, or if we’re stuck in Sepulchre for a while.’

  Horst shook his head. ‘I have no idea. I just know I’ve missed the sun. Also,’ he said, flexing his hand, ‘I sort of miss being a vampire. I’m feeling very mortal all of a sudden. Weaker. More vulnerable. Not sure I like that.’

  ‘It’s what you once were. You’ll get back into the swing of it, I’m sure.’

  ‘Yes, but … you know Johannes is saying he thinks he might be able to cure the vampirism. I was all ‘Yes! Wonderful!’ about it at the time, but this is making me wonder.’ He looked to Leonie, troubled and sincere. ‘Before, I was nothing. Not really. I was charming, I suppose, and I like to think I was witty, but so were any number of other fellows. But after what happened to me, things changed. I became special. Unique even. Not that I’m the only vampire, but I doubt you’d find another quite like me.’

  Miss Barrow nodded; it seemed a likely truth.

  ‘I helped save the world. That’s something, isn’t it? But old Horst couldn’t have done it. He’d have been dead in the first five minutes. Properly dead.’ He shielded his eyes to look into the dawn. ‘I miss the sun, but perhaps that’s a sacrifice I should make. What do you think?’

  She half laughed. ‘Why are you asking me?’

  ‘Because you’re the Great Detective.’ She started to laugh again, but then saw there wasn’t a glimmer of a smile on his face and the laugh died. ‘Or at least a great detective.’

  ‘You mean that, don’t you?’ She said it with some wonderment and perhaps even a little gratitude.

  ‘I do. Johannes is intelligent, but you’re clever.’

  ‘He’d have f
igured out what was going on with the balance faster.’

  ‘Probably, but that’s because he would have focussed on the balance and barely spoken to anyone else. He’d have found the method, but he would have been very slow finding the motive, if he found it at all.’

  ‘The Great Detective. It’s sweet of you to say that.’ She pecked him on the cheek to his mild astonishment. ‘Is that you being honest or charming?’

  ‘Occasionally I have the opportunity to be both,’ he said.

  They watched the sun rise over Sepulchre.

  The Third Way: ZARENYIA, PRINCESS OF HELL

  The land of the infinite cemetery sloped downward and so they descended the gentle gradient—the necromancer, the witch, and the devil. They spoke little and all proved curiously unobservant as the dank earth gave out to sand beneath their feet, a fine pale powder moderated with larger, dark red grains that glistered like wet blood and made the landscape revealed before them sparkle and shimmer. Johannes Cabal reflexively deployed his spectacles of blue glass, Miss Smith squinted, and Zarenyia hummed ‘By Jingo’ for lack of any other outlet for her customary garrulousness.

  As the soil became sand, the tombs and crypts of the benighted place grew larger and windows made an appearance in their structures, so that by degrees they became houses and then mansions and palaces, and so the grey-blue sky became the dull maroon of a persistent headache.

  Then … a tic of perception, and all three of the travellers realised the subtle changes wrought around them in an instant. They drew to a halt and looked about them in differing degrees of nonchalance.

  Miss Smith uttered an oath to make porters and fishwives blush. Cabal grimaced and made reference to the loss of beloved verisimilitude. Zarenyia crossed her arms across her chest and declared she had been to this place before, but, ‘It’s changed. It shouldn’t look like this. Why are the manses ruined? Why is everything derelict? Where is everyone?’

  ‘Where are we, exactly?’ It was Cabal who spoke, although he was already reasonably sure he knew the answer.

  ‘Why, it’s Hell, dear heart,’ replied Zarenyia, surprised at such apparent naivety. ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

  ‘Why should this be any more Hell than that cemetery was my necropolis?’ said Miss Smith. Cabal raised his eyebrows to Zarenyia as if to say, Why indeed? For her part, Zarenyia had the faintest impression that the humans were ganging up on her, and she did not care for the experience in the slightest.

  She sniffed and pointed at a great building constructed largely of rusted iron and bloodshot tachylyte, the massive blocky structure of the former, the aggressive ornamentation of the latter. The place was not, to coin a phrase, in fine fettle. The fifty-yard-long spears that once formed a close cage around the mansion had fallen away in a tumble of linearities, giving the place the air of a game of spillikins abandoned by Titans.

  ‘That’s Balberith’s palace. Stabby, isn’t it? But look at the state of it! Yes, he may be all about murder and argumentation and suchlike, but he’s frightfully house-proud. What has happened here?’

  Cabal regarded the ruin with equanimity. Over to the right he saw another glorious mansion brought low perhaps by violence or merely time. A once-glorious thing of cherry-red and white marble, it stood skewed as if Gog and Magog had leaned heavily upon its eaves. Statuary of a licentious sort lay scattered about, brokenly wanton. ‘That would be the house of Lilith?’

  ‘Oh, she’ll be livid when she sees her place in that state,’ Zarenyia confirmed, albeit not without a very distinct lamina of schadenfreude. ‘Ah, me. Quel dommage.’

  ‘You’re smirking.’

  ‘I know.’

  Any further badinage was quelled by the sight of dust, a plume like dried blood, growing on the near horizon. ‘Something’s coming,’ said Cabal.

  ‘You say that as if it’s a bad thing,’ replied Zarenyia, never shy of the opportunity to deploy a double entendre, or a single entendre, or occasionally just to chat about penises and orgasms with forensic specificity.

  ‘How to characterise our situation? I am unpopular with Satan, you are exiled from the rings of Hell without good cause, and Miss Smith’—he glanced at her, and she returned it with an expression of expectant curiosity—‘Miss Smith is … I don’t know, but I do not think much of her chances when confronted by a herd of intemperate demons, either, nonetheless.’

  ‘I may be very dangerous, for all you know, Cabal,’ said Miss Smith. ‘They may run screaming from my magic.’

  ‘Might they?’

  ‘They might. Or, they may not.’ She looked back in the direction from which they had come, but the last signs of the great cemetery had faded like a verbal contract. ‘Is it too late to start running?’

  ‘Run? From a hullabaloo? Never!’ Zarenyia turned to face the approaching welcoming party. ‘Unless they’re terrifically dangerous. Run like the wind in that case.’ She noticed Cabal looking at her lower body. ‘Oh, darling, not now! What an awful time for you to take an interest! Hullabaloo!’

  ‘I was just wondering if this would be a good time for you to assume your arachnid form, madam. Helpful for both combat or flight, assuming one or the other proves necessary.’

  ‘Really? That’s the only reason you were looking at my skirt?’ Zarenyia was visibly dismayed. When she spoke again, it was with some disappointment in her voice. ‘I’ll pop out the other limbs at the right moment. Element of surprise and all that. Speaking of which, have you brought your wand with you?’

  ‘Wand?’ Miss Smith was shocked, wands being for mountebanks, hedge wizards, and even necropolis witches, not scientifically minded necromancers.

  ‘I have not,’ said Cabal, a little quickly. ‘I had no reason to do so. There is little stuff of chaos around here upon which a wand might work.’

  ‘Oh, that’s a shame.’ Zarenyia spoke past Cabal to Miss Smith. ‘He cuts such a fine figure with his little stick in his hand, waving it around.’

  Cabal may have blushed. Under the light of that hellish vault it was hard to tell. ‘Ladies! Pray pay attention to—’

  The demons arrived.

  * * *

  Cabal regarded them with freezing disdain. ‘What do you monstrosities want?’

  They were unedifying creatures, true, but at least there were only two of them. One was a herpetologist’s worst nightmare; an otherwise interesting bipedal lizard that had suffered some sort of terrible internal tumour. The cancer had grown and spread until it filled the reptile’s body, misshaping it, wrecking its symmetry, making it grossly rounded, grotesquely distended in its limbs, given it a bubbled, cyst-racked skin, insanely mismatched eyes, a bad haircut, a small moustache, its breath disagreeable, its diction regrettable.

  ‘Oh, he called us “monstronities”, De’eniroth, didja ’ear ’im?’ it said.

  The second demon was taller, thinner, and generally less tumorous. This ended the list of its charms. It took the form of a great, stringy maggot, some ten feet long, that bent in a loose S shape, the lowest straight furnished with an indeterminate number of little legs that propelled it along upon a carpet of fairy steps. The upper body bore a pair of arms that would have given a tyrannosaurus an unaccustomed frisson of superiority in the upper-arms department, white ropes of ganglion and muscle that ended with tiny clutching hands that, for the demon’s sake, one hoped were more practical than they appeared. The demon had no head per se, but only a gullet within which rings of teeth spun slowly and wetly counterwise to their neighbours. If it had eyes, they were not evident. Perched high upon the corpse-pale brow immediately above the gaping maw was a brown trilby of the sort preferred by bookies.

  ‘Hur-hur. “Monstronities”. Hur,’ it said.

  Cabal somehow held his temper. He disliked being toyed with at the best of times, and this particular circumstance was trying his patience badly. He would have suspected the hand (or tentacle, or waving tendril of materialised thought) of Nyarlathotep behind this but for the lack of a characteristic atmosphere of t
rifling sadism. No, this place—like its predecessor—was nothing but a morality tale wrought in broad strokes and bright colours.

  ‘And what are you called?’ he asked the first demon. ‘De’zeel or something similar?’

  The cancerous lizard looked at him with evident astonishment. Then, rallying its limited powers of dissimulation, it said, ‘No.’

  The maggot frowned, which was as unappealing as it sounds. ‘Isn’t it, De’zeel? Why did you tell me it was, then?’

  While the lizard flapped its angular arms at the maggot and the maggot whipped its ropey limbs in defence, Miss Smith said in a voice that betokened both wonderment and disdain, ‘You know these things?’

  Cabal shrugged the shrug of a man of substance discovered by his fashionable friends in the company of the family he’s been trying to disown since his teen years. ‘In a manner of speaking. This is an echo of my past. If the men involved had died and gone to Hell as they so richly deserved, then these are very likely the demons their souls might eventually have become.’

  Miss Smith took a moment to absorb this information. ‘The human versions of them aren’t dead yet? In the real world, I mean. They still live?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said Cabal, snorting a little at such credulity. ‘I killed them myself.’

  It says little for the company of necromancers and, indeed, devils, that neither Miss Smith nor Zarenyia saw anything at all unusual or reprehensible in the statement.

  ‘Then, why couldn’t these actually be the demons created from their damned souls?’

  ‘Because their souls are still bottled up in their bodies. I needed some cheap labour … free labour … and they were handy and disagreeable. I had my pistol and reagents handy, so why not? I think it turned out to everyone’s satisfaction.’ His audience regarded him with suspicion. Cabal elucidated. ‘They got to drive a train. They’d never have done that were they still alive.’

  Both Miss Smith and Zarenyia nodded with agreement; it was all perfectly reasonable, after all.