Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

CHAPTER 3 in which Cabal covers old ground and gets the show on the road

Burial: it’s a personal choice. There are, of course, those who don’t care to be buried at all but prefer to be burnt or left in the open for vultures to pick at or something else equally unhygienic.

They are of no concern here.

Those who do want their bodies interred have different visions of how they’d prefer the environs, as if it would make a difference to them at this juncture. Some imagine a green churchyard on a spring day, the sound of bells calling the faithful to worship, the immaculate grass verges, the white pebbled paths. Some — usually the ones who wear a lot of black and think that Byron must have been mad, bad, and fabulous to know — dream of tenebrous graveyards in the shades of monstrous Gothic churches, beneath a dark, lowering sky that threatens thunder and lightning any second. Being near a mountainous sea wouldn’t hurt, either. Others would like a tree to be planted over their otherwise unmarked graves, so that their bodies might nourish the roots of a mighty oak or sycamore.

All these desires can be understood and to a greater or lesser extent sympathised with. It is, however, impossible to have the faintest idea what was going through the minds of the people who bought plots in the Grimpen Burial Ground. Perhaps they hated their relatives and wanted to drag them into one of the ugliest and most depressing places on Earth, if only for the funeral.

The Grimpen Burial Ground stood — if that is the right word, and “lay” if it is not — in the heart of the last marsh in the land that, until recently, contained malaria. No effort had been necessary to wipe out the last of the disease-carrying anopheles mosquitoes; they simply seemed to give up the will to live.

The burial ground itself had been cunningly placed on the head of a peninsula that could be safely reached only by traversing a long and serpentine isthmus surrounded on all sides by a sucking bog of the sort that makes frequent appearances in adventure stories. None could guess how many arch-criminals, diabolical Gypsies, and Things Man Was Not Meant to Know had breathed their last, frantic, gasping breaths before vanishing beneath the clinging filth. It was likely to be a fair few.

Then onwards, along the winding, desperate path, until one reached the burial ground’s rusting gates. Predictably, one hung from a single hinge and screeched eerily, given the excuse of the faintest breeze. And in the Grimpen Burial Ground, breezes never got stronger than faint, for anything stronger might perhaps have made headway in shifting the mists. That would never do. People talk about the London pea-soupers, but although those legendary fogs may have been yellow, unhealthy, and thick enough to bottle, they had absolutely no class. The Grimpen mists, in contrast, had style to spare. They drifted slowly and enigmatically, eldritch and eerie, ever encroaching, enveloping all. They had the air of watching and waiting. People hated attending burials there; the mists, the infamous mists, seemed to be watching the living. And waiting for them to die.

Yet the burial ground was closed because it was full. Full of the dead that people wanted to forget. The malevolent fathers and the bastard sons, the insane mothers and the diseased daughters. They came, one and all, in their coffins of bare pine or fashioned teak, to be interred in this distant place and conveniently allowed to slip the memories of the people who stood, dry-eyed, by their yawning graves. Some of the last resting places were marked with ornate gravestones of exotic marble or hard granite brought from far away. Others, less wealthy or less hypocritical, marked the sites of the less-than-dearly departed with local slate, cheap limestone, or even wood. Loathed magnate and embarrassing heir by the second under-stairs maid lay side by side, their gravestones sagging in the moist soil, united by the simple fact that no living human heart had any place for them.

For all that, however, the burial ground wasn’t quite filled. In the rear of the burial ground, overlooking the bogland at the farthest point from the gates, there was one place that lay only partially occupied. It was the one and only family crypt to be found there, and its story is an extraordinary one.

The Druin family could follow its line back to the Norman invasion; their name was presumed to be a corruption of “de Rouen,” although there was no evidence that they originally came from that place. Their ancestor’s role in the invasion is open to interpretation. The family claimed that he rode at William the Conqueror’s side because he was a trusted aide and confidant. In light of their more recent and documented history, it has been mooted that William was simply keen to keep an eye on him. Whatever the truth of it, it is fact that the family was granted a plot of land for perpetuity, a plot that included the bogland that the burial ground now stood upon.

The family muddled through the centuries, frequently backing the wrong horse in a multitude of conflicts yet always managing to get onto the winning side at the last through some dazzling act of treachery. Richard III is rumoured to have known he was doomed when the Druin’s defection to the House of Lancaster actually during the battle was reported to him. He made some comment about rats and sinking ships before going off to look for his horse.

From the Plantagenet years onwards, the Druins were said to be capable of swapping from Protestant to Roman Catholic and back again within the period of a single church service. Indeed, a secret library discovered during renovations of Druin Manor contained a copy of the catechism; the Bible in Greek, Latin, and English; a treatise on Calvinism; the Koran; the Tripitaka; and an Arabic book bound in curious leather that was later stolen by a gang consisting of an antiquarian, a mobster, and a woman with a lisp.

The family managed to maintain a place in court throughout many changes until the Industrial Revolution happened along and they discovered that they could make more money the nouveau-riche way. Mills and railways were heavily invested in, children sent down mines, the word “philanthropy” carefully crossed out in the family dictionary; the Druins became richer and richer and richer.

It was about then that the effects of great wealth and a small gene pool started to spell their doom. Inbreeding, largely imposed upon them by a world that put too much store in bad reputations, started to strip the gears of their collective sanity. They became madder and madder and madder, and they never did so cheaply.

Beatrice built the Museum of the Legume, housing the world’s largest collection of peas. Horace excavated an inversion of the Palace of Westminster, a huge jelly mould of the Mother of Parliaments. Jeremy formed a hunt of foxes with which he used to go beagle-hunting before moving up a level and storming people’s houses with a troop of crack badgers.

The atmosphere of mutual loathing and unilateral insanity became almost palpable. Aunt Sophia, the only one to maintain a marble count in double figures, went abroad in a determined attempt to find some curative Measure.

Apparently, she failed. Yet she came back, after years of travel, curiously calmed and tolerant, perhaps even a little smug.

Her first action on her return was to create the Grimpen Burial Ground and have the Druin family crypt built in its most inaccessible corner. Every surviving member of the family had a place allocated, with the sole exception of Sophia herself. Asked why, she replied with grim satisfaction that if she had learned anything in her travels, it was that the family could never hope to lose the taint of madness and was doomed to extinction. As to why she had no place reserved in the crypt, it was because she would survive them all.

The rest of the family looked at one another significantly. Mad or not, they needed no weatherman to tell them how the wind blew.

Sophia’s luck suddenly seemed to leave her. She suffered a series of accidents, all of them fatal. Several times she was declared dead, as misfortune — sometimes embodied as a plummeting sack of concrete, sometimes as some other heavy, fast item that had coincidentally happened to cross her path at head height — dogged her every step.

By a striking happenstance, the rest of the family was always some distance away when misfortune struck — heavily — and always had cast-iron alibis, sometimes typed up days in advance. Yet Sophia would inevitably sit up on the mortuary slab, stretch, and ask what time tea was.

Ultimately, however, she was overtaken by a particularly unfortunate accident that brought together a steamroller, Sophia, and almost four tons of gelignite at the same time and the same place. This time there was no possibility of any requests for elevenses during the post-mortem. Aunt Sophia was taken down from the trees, scraped off the road, and plucked from the surface of the duck pond with shrimping nets, placed with all due ceremony in her favourite hip bath along with her favoured bathtime accoutrements, and interred in the darkest corner of the family crypt. And that was that. For very nearly two months.

Then, one morning, the surviving family woke up and found themselves one short for breakfast. They discovered Beatrice tied by her ankles to the chandelier. Her expression was one of purest horror, and she was quite dead. There were a lot of peas in the room. The post-mortem discovered another five pounds of them forced down her throat, jamming her oesophagus shut and clogging her airways. A month later, Jeremy’s head appeared on a plaque in the trophy room. A fortnight after that, Horace’s shattered body was found at the peak of the inverse Westminster Tower, some three hundred feet below the surrounding ground.

One by one they died, apparently at the hands of somebody who knew all their little foibles very well indeed. Felix died beneath a menhir. Daphne drowned in aspic. Given Julian’s favourite pastime, it’s perhaps just as well that they never found the lower half of his body. Quickly the Druin crypt filled.

If only somebody had thought to check Aunt Sophia in her hip bath. If only somebody had cared to investigate where she’d been during her years abroad. If only somebody had made enquiries into the sudden outbreak of childhood anaemia in the area. Ah, the mysterious “Grimpen Plague.” No child died from the disease, and any that moved away for their health quickly improved. The doctors were baffled.

If they had compared notes more carefully, they might have been intrigued by another curious trait that all the child victims shared. All had suffered the same nightmare the night the sickness had taken hold. All had dreamt of a dark, grimy room, like a cellar or a gaol, with deep recesses in the wall. All had found themselves compelled to walk to a corner where the room turned into a dingy alcove. In that forsaken place they had been surprised to find an old-fashioned hip bath. Then, before their terror-stricken gaze, they realised that there was somebody sitting there, a pale old woman with cruel, hypnotic eyes and an expression of such bottomless hunger that they whined and keened at the memory of it. They hadn’t been able to move, or to run, as the woman rose from the bath and advanced on them, slowly and surely, with horrible inevitability, like some great albino spider. “The Loofah Lady! The Loofah Lady!” they screamed.

Even after the last of the Druin family had vanished into the crypt, the anaemia outbreak continued. For years it was assumed that the bogland was unhealthy, and those parents who could afford it sent their children away until they were old enough to “resist” the “disease.” Meanwhile, the burial ground slowly filled with the discarded dead that nobody wanted. When it became full, it was curtly abandoned. Time began to crumble the place back into the ground.

Nobody would visit that place unless he absolutely had to. Even the most cynical and laudanum-crazed poet could think of a lot of things that he’d rather do than sit on one of the burial ground’s tombs and compose a sonnet. Even a haiku would require more time than felt comfortable.

So the ugly and forsaken place was forgotten, and the “anaemic plague” continued.

Until, that is, about eight years ago.

Johannes Cabal stepped past the ruined gates and looked around speculatively. The burial ground had deteriorated quite visibly in the eight years since he’d last been here. Nor were there any signs that the place had been visited in the interim. This didn’t surprise him in the slightest. The gravestones leaned a little more crazily, the moss had encroached a little farther across the stonework, and it would take time with a wire brush and oblique lighting to read the inscriptions on anything. Of signs of any human interference, however, there were none at all. Good, he thought. That would remove further variables from what already stood to be a tricky business. He hefted the carpetbag he held in his left hand and moved on. The crow bobbed around on his shoulder, its gaze flicking this way and that. An air of wariness hung about it; it didn’t like this place at all.

Cabal wended his way through the stones and the high tufts of grass, proceeding as directly as he could to the Druin family vault. As he walked, he remembered his early studies on the nature of life, of death, and of something in between. Studies that had brought him to this place and finished with him, if not running, certainly walking quickly back down the causeway.

Distracted by his memories, he tripped over something lost in the long grass and staggered briefly — the crow flapping fantastically — before recovering his balance. Turning back, he opened the shutter on his dark lantern to find what had tripped him. An inexpressive man by nature, he still raised an eyebrow and mouthed a quiet “Oh.”

It was an old army-surplus field-telephone box, its wooden box in an advanced state of decay, and he did not care to touch it. The Bakelite handset lay discarded by it, and the telephone wire itself led, Cabal discovered after a moment’s investigation, down into a tomb whose lid had been slightly moved. Cabal distantly remembered seeing this box on his last visit. He pursed his lips and straightened up. The abandoned field telephone doubtless had some weird tale associated with it, but he really didn’t have the time or the inclination to find out what. He had come here with a mission and could countenance no distraction. He turned once more towards the Druin vault and walked on.

The vault was mainly underground, sealed against the high-water table by superior craftsmanship and a lot of lead. Above the surface, the entrance was a small, utilitarian structure not unlike a coal shed with Gothic pretensions. Its only features of note were the name DRUIN in large roman capitals over the door, and the door itself, an impressive feature of stone plates held together with anodised iron straps. Cabal was more concerned with the lock. The door’s own internal lock had been destroyed in the past by an amateurish attempt to pick it. It had originally been backed up with a huge padlock running through hasps anchored firmly to the surface, but this lock lay partially concealed by the unwholesome scrub grass that grew in clumps around the area. Cabal didn’t need to look at it to know it had been laboriously cut through with a hacksaw. In its place was a gleaming padlock of stainless steel. He hefted it with one hand and slid back the sliding keyhole cover with his thumb. It moved easily: the whole lock seemed in pristine condition, despite its years in such damp conditions. There were no signs of tampering. Cabal took a key ring from his pocket with his free hand and selected a small key. He placed it in the keyhole and slowly turned it. He was aware of every sliding piece of metal within the padlock’s case as the key turned slowly and with no impediment through a full circle. The click of the lock releasing was barely perceptible. Cabal was quietly pleased with it as he gently disengaged it from the hasp and put it into his pocket. It pays to invest in quality, he thought.

The door opened with a low whining growl to reveal a stone stairway, barely wide enough for a coffin and bearers to descend. A pale, preternatural glow faintly illuminated the steps, apparently generated by a phosphorescent lichen. It seemed to cover everything in a thin patina, disconcertingly producing a light so dim that his eyes couldn’t be sure it was there at all. Like an afterimage seen on the inside of the eyelid, he could make out the edges of the steps, the stones stained with ghost light, and something at the bottom of the stairway that might have been shattered pieces of wood.

Out of sight, around the corner, something moved across the floor, across fragments of coffin that shifted and scraped.

The steady sound of the crickets and the whippoorwills and frogs croaking out in the bog ponds stopped abruptly. The crow launched itself from his shoulder and headed for the gate, emitting a solitary worried “Kronk!” as it did so. Cabal looked around peevishly.

“So. It’s like that, is it?” he said quietly. Lifting the dark lantern up, he opened the shutter fully and threw the light of the bright acetylene flame down into the depths. Whatever was moving stopped immediately. Cabal cleared his throat in the ensuing silence.

“I’ve come back,” he said. Down in the crypt he heard a sharp exhalation, almost a hiss. It sounded very nearly human. “I have a proposition to make,” continued Cabal. Nothing. Cabal leaned forward, placing his hand on the doorframe. “D’you hear me? A proposition.” Still nothing. Cabal’s finger started tapping on the frame. “I know damned well that you can hear me. We can talk like grown-ups, or I can just lock you up again, throw the key in the handiest bog, and forget all about you. It can’t be much fun down there. Imagine it for decades. Centuries.” He heard movement again, but it stopped almost instantly. “Right,” said Cabal. “That’s fine. If that’s your attitude, then I hope it keeps you good company. You’re going to need it. Goodbye.” He made as if to close the door.

Down below, the thing moved again. Out into the circle of light it came, creeping slowly on four thin limbs like a great spider. Dishevelled and ill defined, it crept or crawled through the wooden fragments until it was at the bottom of the stairs. Cabal reduced the light from the torch a little. He found he had trouble looking at that awful thing.

“There,” he said with a confidence he didn’t feel. “That’s better.” The thing in the crypt brought its head up sharply at the sound of his voice, and Cabal recoiled slightly under the withering gaze: a gaze that swept up towards him from faintly luminescent eyes alight with a hatred of chilling intensity. Cabal became aware that, despite the coolness of the night, he was sweating. This was much harder than he’d thought it could possibly be. The thing coughed gutturally, as if making its throat work for the first time in years.

“You bastard,” it said. Its voice was gravelly with disuse. “You utter, utter bastard.”

Cabal blinked. He hadn’t expected quite this amplitude of enmity. “How’s Sophia?” he asked, working for time. The thing never looked away.

“Dust. Like you should be.” It lowered its gaze. “Like I should be.”

“You got her, then? I knew you would.”

The thing made a noise that could have been a cough or a laugh.

“Oh, yes. I got her. Too late to do me any good.”

“Were any of the others …?”

“No. Why should they be? She never killed anyone that way. Always those idiotic murders. Ironic, they were meant to be. Ironic. The children, she didn’t want to harm them permanently. The others down here were just corpses. Or at least they didn’t squeal when I ate them.” A pause. “I got hungry.”

Cabal heard the note of unconscious apology in the voice. Good, there was still some humanity left there. Perhaps this could be resolved after all.

“As I said,” he continued, “I have a proposal to make to you.”

“A proposal.” The thing made the noise like a cough or a laugh again. “I always expected you to come back. I always hoped you’d come back. To release me, rescue me. Now you turn up with a proposal. You haven’t changed at all.” The glowing eyes focussed on Cabal’s face again. “Why did you abandon me? I thought your nerve had gone, but now you make me wonder. Perhaps you just left me salted away down here for some time in the future when you might need me. Was that it?”

Cabal thought of the way his guts had wrenched when he’d heard the scream from below all those years ago. He remembered how the stone-and-iron door had felt under his hand, how it had sounded as he slammed it shut, closed the hasp, and locked it with the padlock they’d brought with them for emergencies. He remembered running in an ecstasy of fear, falling over the stones and leaping back to his feet in single paroxysms of panic. He remembered running until his lungs had burned inside his chest like a furnace, falling in the long grass, and sobbing until the sun rose again. Most of all, he remembered the voice calling behind him, muffled by first the door and then the increasing distance, until the ends of words became indistinguishable. He still knew what they were. “Johannes! Help me! Help me!” He breathed deeply until he was sure that he could speak without his voice trembling.

“Something like that,” he lied evenly. “But what happened, it was never planned.”

“The sun went down a full hour earlier than we’d planned for. You were the one with the almanac. How could you make a mistake like that?”

“The clocks had gone forward. I hadn’t reset my watch. It was a simple oversight.”

“You don’t make mistakes like that,” hissed the thing with palpable loathing. “You never made mistakes like that.”

“I made one this time,” replied Cabal sharply, distraction making him snap. “I’m only human.”

The coughing laugh again. “How nice for one of us.” The pause grew until it became embarrassing.

“My proposal. I’ve — ”

“I’m hungry,” the thing interrupted. “How long have I been down here?”

Cabal did the calculation in the time that it took to blink. “Eight years. A little over.”

“How ‘little over’?”

“Thirty-seven days.”

“Eight years and thirty-seven days.” The thing thought for a moment. “I’m very hungry.”

“I’ll find somebody for you,” said Cabal impatiently. “Can we get on now?”

“You’ll find somebody for me?” The laugh was losing the coughing element, but only to replace it with a hard cynicism that Cabal found far more threatening. “Have you any idea how cheap that makes you sound? From amateur necrothologist to pimp. You have gone up in the world.”

“Necromancer,” corrected Cabal without thinking, and immediately regretted it.

“Don’t give yourself airs. We discussed that, remember? To get that sort of knowledge you’d have to … Oh, Johannes. You didn’t?” The thing gasped with disbelieving joy. “You did! You idiot!” The thing started to laugh, a full-throated laugh that made it double up with glee. “You moron! Nothing’s worth that.” The thing rolled around in hysterical laughter, too hysterical for comfort.

Cabal’s lips had drawn into a thin line. “It was necessary.”

“For what?” The thing was on its back, the laughter slowly ebbing. “For what? You’ve no idea why you do this anymore, have you?”

“The same reason as ever,” said Cabal quietly. The last dregs of laughter died abruptly.

“It’s been over eight years, Johannes,” said the thing disbelievingly. “You’ve even made the sacrifice. I thought you must have failed.”

“I haven’t tried yet. I have to be sure I can succeed. There’s no second chance. It might…” Cabal faltered. “It might already be too late.”

“I can’t help you. It’s already too late for me. You might as well lock me up again and walk away.”

“No,” said Cabal firmly. “I need your help.”

“The last time I helped you, I ended up with an extended tenancy in somebody else’s crypt. Y’know, I don’t feel really very motivated to help again.”

“I think you should.”

“What? Help you or feel motivated?”

“Both. I think I might be able to reverse what happened to you.”

“You think you might. Boy, positivism like that has just got me fizzing with enthusiasm. How?”

“The … disease … that you were infected with contaminates the soul. I’ve had a lot of experience with that area recently, including the authorities that deal with them. I might be able to get you a cure.”

“There’s that ‘might’ word again.” The thing sighed. “All right, what do you want me to do?”

“I’ve …” Cabal looked for the best way to phrase it, but they all sounded ridiculous. “I’ve recently come into the ownership — temporary ownership — of a carnival.”

The thing looked at him with open disbelief. “You? You? A carnival? They haven’t changed the definition while I’ve been away, have they? A carnival is still a place where people go to have fun, isn’t it?”

“I believe that’s their purpose.”

“With all the best will in the world, Johannes, you’re as much fun as a leper at an orgy.”

“Why are all your similes sexual? That always irritated me.”

“You’ve answered your own question. A carnival? What possessed you to buy a carnival?”

“I didn’t buy it. I’ve just borrowed it. For a year — less now. It’s part of a wager.”

“A wager. Will wonders never cease?” The thing shook its head. “You don’t bet, you’re no fun. This doesn’t make any sense.”

“The wager is — ”

“No, don’t tell me. Let me work it out. I’ve had little enough to amuse me all this time. The highlight was the spider races. I used to eat the losers. Then I’d eat the winner so he wouldn’t get cocky. Anyway, let me see if my brain still works.” It paused, deep in thought. “You’d never have made a wager unless it was for something that you wanted incredibly badly from somebody who would never willingly part from it. So whoever this other party is must be the one who can’t turn down a pleasing bet. They must have made the terms — you’d never have suggested something involving a carnival. That suggests somebody with a sense of irony — that word again — or at least a sense of petty sadism. Who does that remind me of?”

It didn’t need to think for long.

“Oh, Johannes,” it moaned in exasperation. “You utter idiot. This is to get your soul back, isn’t it? Don’t you know anything? You can’t beat him. He only bets on certainties.”

“So people keep telling me,” replied Cabal, growing exasperated himself. “Well, I say ‘people,’ but that’s a fairly loose term. I need my soul back. That’s not open to negotiation. I took the only deal he would offer. Take it or leave it. I took it. Perhaps he can’t be beaten. I don’t know, nor shall I until I give this the best I can. And if I fail, it won’t be through lack of will or defeatism setting in. I’ll be able to look Satan in the eye and say, ‘I did my best, and it came pretty close. And while you just sat down here on your fat, sulphuric arse, I stretched for the impossible, so don’t imagine for a moment that this is your victory, you smug, infernal bastard.’” He stopped, breathing heavily.

“Well,” said the thing, “I’m glad you’ve got your gracious loser’s speech all worked out in advance, because you’re going to need it. What exactly are you supposed to be doing with a carnival anyway?”

“It’s one of the diabolical carnivals, like the Dark Carnival or the Carnival of Demons.”

“Does this one start with ‘D,’ too?”

“The Carnival of Discord. It was mothballed, apparently for reasons of internal politics. Can you believe it? One would have thought immortal beings would have better things to do.”

“Pointless and time-consuming. Seems perfect for passing the millennia. Carry on.”

“The wager is to garner a hundred souls in a year.”

“A hundred.” Cabal noticed something unfathomable in the thing’s voice. “A hundred souls.”

“I know. It’s a tall order.”

Cabal thought he heard the thing sigh.

“So why are you here? Why aren’t you tearing up and down the highways and byways relieving the great unwashed of their souls for, I assume, the usual beads and mirrors?” it said.

“I … don’t actually have a working carnival, per se. I’ve got a lot of equipment in a fairly poor state of repair, and the wherewithal to fix it up and provide staff.”

“Sounds lovely. Don’t forget to send me a Kewpie doll.”

“A what?”

“A Kewpie doll. A cheap doll that you can give away on the concessions as a prize.”

“Concessions to what?”

The thing shook its head slowly. “You’re going to have to rewrite your loser’s speech, Johannes. Get rid of the bit about coming pretty close. You haven’t the faintest idea what you’re doing.”

“I know,” Cabal accepted. “That’s why I need you. You know what goes on in places like that. I don’t. I need your expertise.”

“Expertise? I never worked on anything like that.”

“But you visited some. I remember that you visited some.”

The thing heard the note of desperation in Cabal’s voice. Somewhere deep within itself, something human softened just a little. “Well, yes, I went to carnivals whenever I could. Used to hang around them. Even considered joining one. Perhaps I should’ve. I wouldn’t be here now.”

Cabal shrugged. “For all the good it does, I’m sorry I left you. I thought you were dead. Or worse.”

“Right on both counts,” said the thing bitterly. “I still don’t see why you’ve come to me, though. So I visited a carnival or two. It hardly makes me an expert. There must be people who can be hired to do this, who actually have some real experience?”

“I don’t think that degree of knowledge will be necessary. In many respects the carnival will run itself. It has few overheads — no wages, and the prizes, food, and drinks are provided. We don’t even have to worry about taxes, as the place will cease to exist before the end of the next tax year, and — despite their reputation for tenacity — I doubt even tax collectors will descend into the Infernal Pit just to collect the revenue. What I really need is somebody who understands people. What they want when they come to a carnival. Besides, finding somebody with a better curriculum vitae might well founder on the vexed ‘Incidentally, the carnival’s sponsored by Satan, and we’re far more interested in stealing a hundred souls than in making money’ issue.”

The thing grunted in amusement. “I take your point.” It crouched in silence for some moments, before raising its head to look Cabal in the eye. “Do you really think you can undo” — it gestured hopelessly at itself — “this?”

Cabal found he couldn’t lie. Not this time. “I don’t know. But you have my solemn word I’ll try. I think I have an insight into your condition that has only recently been vouchsafed to me. I’ll try. I’m sorry. That’s all I can promise.”

The thing looked closely at him and, after a very long moment, smiled. A rapacious smile to be sure, but one Cabal knew was honest. Even so, the sight of those yellow-white teeth and the thought of what flesh they’d torn made him uncomfortable.

“That’s about the only thing I ever admired about you, Johannes. You’re a man of your word. Or at least you used to be. I’ll take the risk that you still are, soul or no. Very well, I’ll run your carnival for you. Decide what’s fun, lose what’s not. That’s what you want, yes?”

“Yes, exactly.” Cabal couldn’t keep the relief out of his voice. “I need somebody to attend to the day-to-day …” The thing looked hard at him. “I’m speaking figuratively, of course. The diurnal? — nocturnal? — nocturnal running of the carnival. While I attend to the winning of this ludicrous wager. Are you agreeable?”

“Not as a rule, but, yes, you know me, anything for a laugh.”

“Excellent. There just remains one thing. The matter of my personal safety.”

The thing’s eyebrows raised in all innocence. “Why, Johannes. Do you really think I’d hurt you?”

“Yes,” replied Cabal levelly. “Sitting down there in the darkness for eight years …”

“And thirty-seven days.”

“… may have made you feel uncharitable towards me. You may have thought I was somehow responsible for what happened. To you.”

“Oh, heaven forfend that I have such unpleasant thoughts. Just because I was out here in the first place at your insistent request, went down here in the lead because I was ‘more sure-footed,’ was attacked by something thoroughly unpleasant thanks to your incompetence at keeping up with whether the clocks had gone forward or not, and then, in my moment of need, was abandoned. Just because of all this, you think I might have some sort of grudge against you? Dear me. How unkind. I’m quite hurt.”

“Spare me your mordancy. I need your assurance. Otherwise, I’ll just close this door and find another partner. What do you say?”

The thing looked at him with an air of quiet amusement that Cabal didn’t like at all. “What do I say? Let me put it this way.”

The thing blurred. Cabal had a momentary impression of something dark shifting through the light beam far too fast for his eye to register, and suddenly he was on his back with the thing on top of him, his arms pinned to the ground. It had travelled up the twenty feet of steep steps in the pause between exhalation and inhalation. Cabal gulped. He had an awful feeling that might be the last time he might ever gulp, so he did it again in an attempt to calm himself.

“That,” said the thing, nose to nose with him, “is what I say. I could have killed you at any moment since you opened the door. I could have torn your head off and sucked your kicking corpse dry.

“But, despite everything, I’m a reasonable man. I waited to hear why you’d come back after such a long time, when anybody else, even if they were as terrified as you obviously were, would at least have come back at daybreak, when they knew they’d be safe. Would have at least made the effort, even if they knew it was probably hopeless.

“Well, I’ve listened to your deal. A deal. You arrogant little shit. If you had any way of reversing this, you should have come back here to offer it to me with no strings attached. There’s only one thing preventing me from killing you right now, and next time it won’t. Believe me.” It leapt easily to its feet and stepped away. “You have your deal. But that’s all you’ve got. I run this carnival for you, you reverse what happened to me, I walk away.”

Cabal climbed to his feet more slowly. “I thought your clothes would probably be in poor condition by now,” he said, studiously pretending that nothing had happened. “Here are some new ones.” He opened the carpetbag and unrolled a suit and shirt from it. The thing took them, looked critically at the cut, sighed, and started to get dressed. “I’ve also got some toiletries. A comb and brush and some shaving kit.” A thought occurred to him. “You do cast a reflection, don’t you?”

The thing, now beginning to look more human, glanced at him with disgust. “How should I know? Give that here.” He examined himself in the mirror. “Seems to work perfectly well. Another old legend bites the dust. Good grief, I’ve hardly aged. Handsome dog. Still look terrible, though. Ill.” He looked meaningfully at Cabal. “I need feeding.”

Cabal backed away. “You said you wouldn’t hurt me.”

The thing looked at him and smiled slightly. “I said I wouldn’t kill you. You’re not going to die.”

“If you infect me, I won’t be able to help you!” said Cabal urgently.

“It doesn’t work like that. None of the children changed, remember? It has to be a reciprocal thing. It’s the blood mingling that spreads the infection. I just wish I’d thought of that before I tried eating Sophia.” Cabal was looking for the lichgate and was obviously planning to run. The thing stopped following him and spread his hands. “Look, what’s bothering you? It’s the homoerotic aspect, isn’t it?”

Cabal was running. “Well, don’t flatter yourself,” shouted the thing after him. He had been heterosexual before his unfortunate change in circumstances, and now he had doubts that he was even that. “It’s just a transfusion, for crying out loud.” Cabal had almost reached the gates. “You always were such a nuisance,” said the thing to himself, and blurred into motion.

It took slightly longer to get back to the train than it had to get to the Grimpen Burial Ground, as they’d only been able to travel at night. Eventually, the low hills gave way to the marshlands, and soon they were close to the disused rail spur. Even at a distance, they could see the long ridge rising above the surrounding land, and the flare of work lights in the middle of the obviously thinned copse of trees. As they got closer still, Cabal pointed out the train itself, its dark bulk looming ominously along the length of the earthwork.

As he spoke, he absent-mindedly placed his hand on the twin puncture wounds over his jugular vein. He had been relieved to discover that he was still able to go around in the sun with only his hat and dark glasses for protection, rather than the coffin lined with the soil of his homeland that he had feared. Even the detail of the coffin had turned out to be an old wives’ tale; Cabal’s travelling companion had been happy to sleep anywhere during the day, just so long as no ray of sunlight had been able to touch him.

As they got closer still, they started to make out more details. The trees blocking the train’s access to the main line had been chopped down and the stumps torn up. Many of the other trees in the copse had also been felled. The woodpile on the train looked impressively high. The logs would be green and damp, but at least they would fuel the train until it could get better supplied. Great naphtha torches had been thrust into the chippings of the rail bed, flaring into the night sky. Here and there, figures worked diligently and without pause. Bones had created some extra personnel of his own volition. Cabal wasn’t sure if that was good or bad at first, but, given the scale of the work, it couldn’t possibly have been done in time if Bones had only had the dubious services of Denzil and Dennis to call upon. Bones had done the right thing, he concluded.

“My God,” he heard his companion sigh when he saw the locomotive close up, and he was secretly pleased. Bones and his workers had done a magnificent job. The demoniacal locomotive had been carefully cleaned and repainted. The black was so intense that it was hard to say where the train stopped and the night sky started. A thin red line, the colour of venous blood, ran along the side of the boiler and detailed the cowcatcher and smokestack, the only concessions to colour. But it was the first car after the fuel tender that caught the eye. Painted in reds and yellows against a blue-and-black background, the name of the carnival curved and twisted in extravagant fairground curlicues, ornate yet instantly readable. His companion stopped and laughed.

“You were very confident, Johannes,” he said.

“I knew if I couldn’t get your help it was a hopeless case. Alternatively, you’d kill me. Either way, it couldn’t do any harm to anticipate.”

Bones spotted them and stepped down to the edge of the track. “Hi, boss! How do you like her?” He gestured up at the board. “‘The World Renowned Cabal Bros. Carnival,’ just like you asked.”

“Excellent work, Mr. Bones. I knew I could rely on you. Incidentally, I’d like to introduce …”

His companion stepped forward, smiling, and held out his hand to Bones. “Horst Cabal. Delighted to meet you.”