Exeunt Demon King

Exeunt Demon King

by

Jonathan
L. Howard

Copyright

Exeunt Demon King

by

Jonathan
L. Howard

All
rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in
any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of
the copyright holder.

First
publication: “H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror” #3,
2006

Revised
2013

Copyright
© 2006-2013 Jonathan L. Howard

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http://www.jonathanlhoward.com/

Cover
Illustration by Linda “Snugbat” Smith

www.snugbat.co.uk

Christmas comes around but once a year. To Johannes Cabal,
this showed shocking over-familiarity and ill-breeding.

Winter
as a whole was a trial to him, forcing his attention from his work
and to the necessities of running a house as the mercury dropped
and the pipes threatened to burst at the first frost. Even when his
house – a three storey building apparently stolen from the middle
of a row of late Victorian townhouses and dropped on a remote
hillside intact down to its small front and back gardens, woodshed
and ingrained soot – even when his house was in good repair and
proof against the December cold, there was little he could do
professionally but bring his notes up to date and plan new
experiments for the thaw. It was, after all, terribly difficult to
rob a grave when the soil was frozen. Johannes Cabal’s profession
was analytical necromancy.

It
wasn’t a calling that attracted adoration or even tolerance. It
seemed ironic to him, while escaping one torch-bearing mob or
another, that doctors were regarded so highly for their stumbling
and short-termed treatments when all he wanted to do was surpass
their greatest efforts. The man who attempts to cure the common
cold is a popular hero. The man who tries to defeat death is
hounded from pillar to post. He appreciated that the practicalities
of necromancy might be unpalatable to some but, really, what was a
robbed grave here, a summoned demon there, compared to the possible
gains? Oh, but no. The public could never see past the occasional
and unavoidable mistakes, bleating on about how the science of
necromancy was somehow intrinsically evil just because some of the
higher profile failures had ended up wandering the countryside with
a hunger for human brains. Sanctimonious fools, the lot of
them.

Still, Christmas Eve
, Cabal thought
as he looked at the calendar on the parlour mantelpiece.
A family time
. Usually,
his solitary lifestyle was not only necessary to his researches,
but very much his preference. Sometimes, though, just sometimes… He
sighed heavily. He wasn’t entirely alone, strictly speaking. There
were the things in the garden, and the things he kept in the
woodshed, but he would rather open a vein than have them tracking
grave mould and pixie dust onto the carpets. He’d been forced to
take action against the things in the skirtingboards some time
before so that only really left the thing in the box. He looked up
at the wooden box that sat on the deep shelf above the
fire.

“
Merry Christmas,” he said.

After a moment, the box started to whistle
Good King Wencelas
in a melancholy
but not unpleasant key. Cabal lowered his head and listened for a
few bars. Something like a smile of happy remembrance flickered
across his lips, or perhaps it was just the flickering firelight
illuminating his face as the daylight died outside.

Abruptly, a sharp knocking at the door made his head snap up,
the ghostly smile instantly replaced by his habitual expression of
tight-lipped distaste. Cabal wasn’t in the habit of receiving
visitors at all, not least because not many actually made it as far
as the front door. The garden folk – pixies, sprites and fairies
whose activities would have made Enid Blyton very sad – didn’t
usually permit it.

On the
doorstep, Parkin waited patiently. It had been snowing earlier and
he was wrapped up warmly. It hadn’t surprised him at all to see
that his where the only tracks that went anywhere near Cabal’s
house; quite the contrary. He rocked gently on the balls of his
feet and blew out a cloud of hoary breath. In one of the flowerbeds
near his foot, something small, fey and unutterably malign
moved.

“
Hullo, sonny,” said Parkin, apparently sensing the movement by
sonar and not even deigning to look down. “Before you get up to any
nonsense with fairy–shot or the like, I think you really ought to
know my boots are nailed with cold iron hobs.” He looked down, his
expression hard. “And I’m more than minded to grind buggers like
you to dust with them if you get any bright ideas. Now,” his
expression softened to an entirely insincere smile, “how can I help
you?”

After a
nervous pause, the snowy hedges and borders chorused a shaky,
“Merry Christmas, Police Sergeant Parkin.”

“
And a Happy Saturnalia to you too. Now piss off out of it
before I do you.”

The door
opened and Johannes Cabal stood framed there. He was a tall, lean
man in his late twenties, blond hair cut sensibly short, blue eyes
that had seemed nothing other than cold for a long time. He wore a
white shirt but otherwise almost all black; trousers, socks, a
black cardigan. Red tartan slippers and an enormous revolver
completed his wardrobe.

“
Herßliche Weihnacten
, Parkin. Forgive
the gun, I’d quite forgotten to expect you.”

“
Not at all, Cabal. Just chatting with your charming garden
gnomes.”

“
Not gnomes!” cried the garden folk in horror at the slur, but
Parkin had already gone in.

While Parkin made himself comfortable in the parlour, Cabal
went off to fetch his annual bribe. He returned to find Parkin
singing
Once in Royal David’s City
with the box.

“
Good voice, yon box,” said Parkin, unabashed when he saw Cabal
watching him from the doorway. “What’s in it anyway?”

“
Nothing you’d want to know, much less see.” Cabal held out an
envelope stuffed with banknotes. “Your, ah… Remind me, how do we
dignify this?”

“
Your very kind contribution to the police benevolent fund,”
Parkin said as he tucked the envelope away in his coat. “It might
amuse you to know, that’s actually where eighty percent of it does
go. I keep the rest as a Christmas bonus, buy something nice for
the kids.”

“
I find your brand of honest dishonesty endlessly fascinating,
Parkin.”

“
Aye, well. It’s all in the degree, isn’t it? There’s plenty
back in the village get their knickers in a twist every time this
place is mentioned. Me and my tiny force of plods, though, we don’t
care because you keep your nose clean in this parish. The fact that
you don’t elsewhere is what this,” he tapped the safely ensconced
envelope, “is for smoothing over. Truth is, I don’t see what it is
that you get up to that’s so much worse than what some of those
doctors in the city do. It’s all in the degree. Well,” he started
to draw his gloves back on, “I’d best be on me way.”

Something stirred in Cabal. Perhaps it was the season and the
memories, perhaps it was Parkin’s non-judgemental view on Cabal’s
work and unexpected attack on the smug ranks of the loathsome
medical establishment, but Cabal suddenly felt the need for some
companionship, somebody just to chat to for a little while as the
night drew in.

“
Could…” Cabal floundered in the unfamiliar waters of social
interaction for a moment. “Could I interest you in a drink before
you go? It’s a long walk back to the village, after
all.”

Parkin
stopped. He weighed Cabal up for a few seconds, then sighed and
said, “You’re not going to poison me, are you? That would be a
bloody silly thing to do.”

“
Poison?” Cabal was taken aback. “Ach, nein! I would not… I
only kill in self-defence.” He laughed. Parkin had never heard
Cabal laugh before, had hardly thought him capable of it, and its
unforced nature did a great deal to reassure him. “My laboratory
is, that phrase…
in mothballs
for the winter precisely because it is such a
difficult time to gather specimens.” He shook his head. “You have
nothing to fear, Sergeant Parkin. I do not kill casually. I
abominate death.”

So,
abominating death, Cabal instead turned to the water of life for
his guest. Specifically, a single malt that was very much to the
sergeant’s taste. Cabal was going to make some tea for himself but
Parkin insisted that he would not drink alone and so Cabal
acquiesced but insisted on adulterating it with a little water to
the mock horror of Parkin although after a couple Cabal decided to
forego the water and so they went on and a little while later it
was much later and a little while after that it was later
still.

It was
in the natural silence after Parkin had finished a strange little
anecdote about a mad bull, a frightened constable and a weapon
usually intended to stop getaway cars by shattering the engine
block. They sat listening to the sonorous ticking of the
grandfather clock in the hall for a full two minutes. The whisky
had given out by this point and they were now enjoying a good
cognac. Cabal hadn’t even known he’d had the stuff but Parkin’s
honed detective instincts had sniffed it out, along with the
snifters to enjoy it in.

“
So,” he asked finally, “what’s it like being a necromancer
then?”

The
alcohol had pleasantly warmed Cabal, but he was still some way
short of drunk and that wasn’t a question he cared to answer.
Instead, he replied, “You’ve been kind enough to tell me some of
your old war stories. Would you like to hear one of
mine?”

Parkin
was policeman enough to know when a question was being evaded, but
he really hadn’t been that interested in the answer anyway. This
sounded far more engaging and he said as much.

“
Very well.” Cabal took a moment to recharge their glasses
while he marshalled the distant events into a narrative order.
“When I first decided to pursue this profession…”

“
Why exactly did you do that?” interrupted Parkin. “Why did you
decide you wanted to become a necromancer instead of, oh, I dunno,
a train driver?”

“
My reasons are personal,” growled Cabal, the unfamiliar sense
of bonhomie slipping slightly.

Parkin
wasn’t listening anyway. “I wanted to be a cricketer,” he said
wistfully as cigarette card dreams danced before his
eyes.

Cabal
decided to forge on regardless. “When I first decided on this
course, I had no plan. There are no career plans for necromancers.
One just has to guess. Extemporise. I decided to attack the problem
from one aspect. Not that of the morbidity of the body, but of the
longevity of the soul. I decided to become a ghost
hunter.”

Parkin
looked at him askance. “Is this a ghost story you’re winding up
for, Cabal?”

Cabal
shrugged slightly. “Why not? Christmas is a time for ghost stories,
and mine has the distinction of being true.

"Where
to begin? Perhaps with an observation. A word is a word is a word.
But words have power and in my own profession I have long since
learned to regard them with a cautious respect. Part of that power
is that of remembrance. A single word can draw one back to another
time and another place, as the scent of a flower can resurrect a
lost summer from the sepia depths of the past. Other words, though,
can chill the heart and take one straight back to an ugly time, a
fearful place. My story starts with such a word." He said it
slowly, a small effort of will apparent, each syllable forced over
his lips as if he was using his tongue to evict cockroaches.
"Pant-o-mime."