The Fall of the House of Cabal (47 page)

Bose/Nyarlathotep rocked his/its head from side to side. ‘It's happened, now and then. Go on, try me.'

‘Is the Trial of the Five Ways your creation?'

‘Straight question. Straight answer … yes. I devised it a long, long time ago for some pre-human race or another, and just left it running. It simply is the most terrific fun.'

‘For you.'

‘Obviously.' He laughed. ‘You're wondering if the prize is genuine, aren't you? Of course you are, I can see the thoughts swirling around inside your comically tiny ape brain. “Oooh, Nyarlathotep big fibber. Maybe Five Ways big fib, too. Oooh.” Well, no. For reasons that must be painfully plain to even the meanest intellect'—here Bose pointed at Cabal with both index fingers and mouthed,
Like yours
—‘it makes more sense for the prize to be real. Word of mouth, you see? So important. But, it's a poisoned chalice. Of course it is. Get your dearest wish? No, no, no. It's got “monkey's paw” written all over it.'

‘I do not recognise the allusion.'

Bose seemed slightly startled by the admission. ‘Really? Perhaps I haven't released it into the world yet. I really must get a diary. In any case, take it from me, it's a stinker. Dearest wishes and utter curses have a lot in common.'

Cabal glared at him; it was the most he dared. ‘Nevertheless, I shall have that prize.'

‘You see?' Bose clapped his hands in delight. ‘I've told you it's heartbreak and damnation, yet still you're going for it. I do love humans. They are
so
stupid. I shall tell you something else, old bean, I'm rooting for you—yes, you!—to win. Ninuka is an open book to me, I've seen thousands like her. She'll use the power to destroy her enemies (which means you, right at the top of her list), bring her daddy back (who will get in the way and mess up her plans because they will both want to be in control), and consolidate her corporeal power (and fail to notice when the rot sets in to whatever governmental structures she sets up and the whole farrago falls down).'

He feigned a yawn. ‘Tedious, isn't it? I really could not care less. You … I don't know. I think you have a secret project that even I haven't been able to spy. Probably somebody close to you who's dead? Your father, too? Hmmm, no. That isn't it, I think. In any case, secret project aside, you have brought along the most interesting people. Ninuka's original plan was to do it all herself, but she couldn't crack
The One True Account of Presbyter Johannes by His Own Hand
. So she tinkered with it a bit, forged a new copy that removed any of the hints that five was an important number in connection with the rite, laid a simple enchantment of geas, as the Irish say, upon the thing so you would decide you needed four little helpmates along when you attempted it, and then left the book in a place she trusted you to be clever enough to find.' Bose nodded appreciatively. ‘I have to say, I quite admire her as humans go. You certainly fell for it.'

‘It was hardly an obvious trap.'

‘You wouldn't have fallen for an obvious trap. Well, apart from that one that got Miss Barrow killed—'

‘Shut up.'

Bose cocked his head and regarded Cabal with a speculative smile. ‘Yes. I thought so. You poor chap. Must pain you to lose her. She reminds you so very strongly—'

‘Shut
up
!'

Bose leaned back on his throne. ‘Perhaps you're right. Perhaps it's time to conclude our business once more. I doubt we shall meet again, but I've been wrong before. To err is human, eh? Good luck, Johannes. I truly hope you win.'

The lights in the crude clay oil lamps and fluttering from the torches grew dim as all the flames in the room slowly died away. In the moment after the room was plunged into total darkness, Cabal thought he saw Bose's eyes glowing in a colour that had no satisfactory name in any human tongue. Then the darkness was absolute.

Cabal waited, but he seemed alone once more. He took a match from the little metal matchbox in his pocket and struck it, but the light seemed hardly to travel at all. He watched in bafflement as the flame shrank quickly, and then he gasped in horror as his strength left him at the same rate. He tried to keep the match burning as long as he might, but it was hopeless. Soon it was gone, and he fell to his knees. He started to fall forwards, but there was something stone or perhaps concrete right before him, and he leaned gratefully against it. Above him, the cave grew brighter, and he looked up, only to see he was no longer in a cave at all, but beneath a starry night.

*   *   *

Ill unto death, he had returned to his strange little isolated house to recuperate, yet could not enter since his front garden was conspiring to kill and eat him. He saw then that his was to be an ignominious death, to slowly shuffle off the mortal coil while propped against the gatepost of his home, mere yards from salvation. It did not surprise him—it is the lot of a necromancer to die, in all likelihood, an ignominious death, and he could only sigh a small sigh of relief that it didn't involve zombies, because that would have been tiresome. So, necromancer that he was, he settled down to rattle out his last breath in as much comfort as he could.

There he expired.

Too late did a potential rescuer arrive, a taciturn figure that stood over the body of Johannes Cabal, and sighed his name with true grief. The figure leaned upon the gatepost in silence for some minutes, then effortlessly lifted Cabal and walked up the garden path with the dead necromancer carelessly slung over one shoulder. At this new presence, the starving unseelie of the garden scattered in fear, because that which is supernatural and nasty knows supernatural and nastier when it sees it.

The front door was a hefty artefact of English oak and triple locked with a London bar device to resist kicking and battering attacks. The figure, a man, kicked it clean out of its frame without even troubling to put down the body, and entered. He stood for some seconds upon the black-and-white chessboard tiling of the hallway, taking in the ambience of the house. It was not the curious glance of an intruder he turned upon the mundane details of the visible house, but the slow, absorbing regard of nostalgia and memory; this had once been his home. Then, with the resolve of one on familiar ground, he made his way through the hall to the kitchen at the rear of the house, and thence down to the cellar.

Here he placed Cabal's corpse carefully upon the workbench in the corner and went to the far wall where, after a little searching around the nitrous stonework, he found and released a hidden catch. An apparently effortless shove swung a heavy secret door open, revealing a hidden laboratory larger than the mundane cellar that concealed it. The man pushed the operating table that dominated the centre of the room to one side and briefly examined the floor beneath it before finding a recessed ring in the centre of a large slab of stone flooring. He glanced up at the lifting gear suspended from the ceiling usually employed to lift the slab, but decided against it. Instead, he hooked a couple of fingers through the ring and, taking a moment to get good purchase on the floor, heaved with quite literally superhuman strength. The slab lifted sideways with a splintering grating of the edge of the slab snapping off shards as it became a pivot against the surrounding floor. It ruined it as a place of concealment, but that was all right; it would never be used again. The man allowed the slab to fall past the tipping point and it crashed to the floor, but did not break further. He noted in passing that only the top surface of the slab was made of the same stone as the rest of the floor, while the underside was pumice, presumably to reduce its weight. Perhaps so, but lifting it by brute strength had still been a prodigious feat.

Beneath the slab lay the glass coffin. The man stood silently looking at the woman within for several minutes. He had known her in life, and it was horrible and wonderful to see her again. Horrible that here she was, preserved like an exhibit in a museum of natural history, yet wonderful that the preservation was so perfect that she looked like she might open her eyes any moment, and it would be a moment of joyous surprise, not of horror. But that would never happen. Not now.

The glass coffin was sealed carefully all around its upper edges to safeguard the preservative qualities of the strange colourless yet glistening liquid in which she lay suspended. To break the seal was to immediately restart the process of decay that had been halted all those years before. The man did so without further hesitation, tearing away the waxen substance that was not wax around the coffin lid and then levering it up just as he had done with the stone slab concealing it. Unlike the slab, the lid broke when he let it topple, into three large pieces. The man did not care. He was far past caring about such trivia now.

He went back out into the cellar and returned a moment later with Cabal's body, which he laid alongside the open coffin on the fragments of glass. He stood back to look at the scene. It wasn't enough. He knelt by Cabal and gently slid his legs off the glass into the liquid, and then his midriff. The upper body followed naturally in, and the man gently moved Cabal alongside the woman. There wasn't enough room for both bodies to face upwards, but they finished floating face-to-face, and that was good. The man stood and looked at them. They would never be reunited in life; reuniting them in death was the best that he could do. He said their names. He said goodbye.

From the cellar shelves, the man fetched down a storm lantern, its reservoir kept filled and its wick trimmed in case the house's electrical generator should fail. The man took it and the box of vesta matches lying by it upstairs. It didn't take long to scatter most of the lamp's contents around the front room of the house. With no further lingering, he walked out of the house, lit the lamp, and flung it through the front window. For some seconds he wondered if the throw had extinguished the light, but no, there, a flickering illumination appeared, making the bookshelves glow. A curl of smoke, a sudden crescendo of light as the oil caught fire. The left-hand curtain started to flutter as the heat in the room began to draw air through the broken window. The man had made a point of leaving the doors open; the fire would spread easily. A suitable funeral pyre for Johannes Cabal.

The man turned and walked away, and a ghost watched him.

*   *   *

‘No,' said Cabal. He raised his aim, a wire snapped, and all outcomes were reshuffled.

Lady Ninuka stared at him as if just realising she had no idea what he truly was. She lowered her arms. ‘Why?'

‘Because I may be your enemy, but you are not mine. You may be my nemesis, but I am not yours. I grow tired of these games, Orfilia Ninuka; yours and everybody else's. I am just a scientist, and I am conducting an experiment.'

He turned to face the urn containing the ashes of Count Marechal. Ninuka realised what he intended a second before he did it; she cried out, jumped to her feet, and reached for her own gun. It was all too late. Cabal fired once. The shot was deliberately placed off centre and the urn was untouched by the passage of the bullet. The glass shattered, leaving the urn still firmly affixed to its shelf by the locking collar around its base.

‘Ah, ah,' warned Cabal, swinging his aim to Ninuka as he walked to the urn. She froze, her hand over her pistol. ‘Good. I am tired of killing, but not so much that I will not kill to preserve my own life.'

‘Save me, Orfilia!' implored the urn in the voice of Count Marechal. ‘Cabal means to steal me!'

Cabal raised his eyebrows. ‘Your Majesty, amongst all your other myriad talents, do you happen to include ventriloquism?' She did not answer, but her face told him all he needed to know. ‘I thought it unlikely. And, yes, to clear away any uncertainty on your part, I did hear that urn speak to you. This is unusual behaviour for urns, you may be sure, and bears investigation. Step back from your desk, please. I would hate to have to shoot you before this business is concluded.'

Ninuka stepped away from the desk and watched him stonily, her arms crossed. Satisfied, he released the locking device from the urn's base and took it down from its place. He regarded it thoughtfully. ‘You realise how unlikely it is that your father's body was recoverable from the wreck of the
Princess Hortense?
I watched it burn. I cannot know for sure, but I think somebody has been playing a game with you for a long time now. Don't let that upset you; I have been a pawn in it, too. I hope this is the end of it.'

Resting the urn on an occasional table by the wall, he removed the urn's lid and looked inside. A brief smile passed over his face, equal in parts sardonic, relieved, and sad. He reached in and extracted a small crystal phial filled with a dram of colourless liquid, its cap sealed with white wax. He replaced it and tilted the urn to show the inside to Ninuka. Within there were no ashes, and never had been. Instead there was a bed of black velvet into which was embroidered a golden pentagram. At each vertex was a small padded well into which a phial lay embedded.

‘The Five Ways,' said Ninuka. There was a longing in her eyes, a hollowness in her tone.

‘I am told that they are cursed articles of the “Be careful what you wish for” variety, but the entity that told me is not always reliable. We shall see. And by “we”, I do not include you. You have lost.' He extracted his cigarillo case from his pocket, opened it on the table, and stowed the five phials there, using the cigarillos as bumpers to keep them safe. As he closed the case and returned it to his pocket, he said, ‘The trial is at an end, I think. I advise you to return to the mundane world with alacrity, along with whatever remains of your force. This world will soon collapse like a house of cards.'

As he retreated towards the door, she walked slowly to the table, took up the urn, and examined it. ‘I don't think so. You're right, Cabal. The game is over, and I do not care to be drawn into another.' She dropped the urn carelessly. ‘I am retiring from the field the only way I know how.'