Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

CHAPTER 6 in which Cabal makes an unplanned stop and talks about the war

So the carnival moved on and moved on, and it left a thin line of misery and discord behind it at town after town.

Cabal lifted the unsigned contracts from their box, placed the signed ones at the bottom, and replaced the blanks on top of them. Then he put the lid back on, placed the box in the top right-hand drawer of his desk, and locked it. One day, and it had better be some day within a year after he’d started on this whole ridiculous wager, the topmost form would be signed as well, and he would have won. Then he could have his soul back.

And, a small, still voice said within him, you can spit in Satan’s eye, because that’s really what this is all about now, isn’t it, Johannes? It might have started with your soul, but it’s all about your pride now.

But Johannes Cabal didn’t have a great deal of time for small, still voices. He ignored it, and in that small, deliberate inattention, he summed himself up.

Cabal arched his fingers and rested his chin on their tips while he carried out a rapid mental calculation. Providing they stayed on schedule, and providing the other communities they visited were as base and venal as Merton Pembersley New Town, Carnforth Green, and Solipsis Supermare had proved to be, then the target would be reached comfortably within the time limit.

At which point, the train shuddered to a halt.

Cabal jumped down onto the track and looked around. This couldn’t be right; the track was in only slightly better condition than the line on which he’d originally found the train. They were in a long cutting that ran through the countryside, and Cabal couldn’t see an end to it in either direction. The embankments were overgrown with straggling bushes and well-established trees whose branches loomed almost into the train’s path. To one side, Cabal could see a family of rabbits sunning themselves while they watched the carnival with mild interest. This definitely couldn’t be right. This was supposed to be a main line they were on. Cabal made his way to the locomotive but was met by Bones coming the other way. The unnaturally thin man was carrying a rolled-up map.

“Bad news, boss. We are on the wrong line.”

“Really?” said Cabal, looking at the healthy growth of weeds along the track bed. “You do surprise me.”

“It’s true,” replied Bones, long inured to Cabal’s easy resort to sarcasm. “It’s a definite done deal.”

“How did it happen?”

“Dunno. Those smart folk on the footplate didn’t notice anything was wrong for an age, far as I can figure. I’m guessin’ some kids tripped the points and we just” — he planed his hand through the air — “whoosh into the middle of nowheres.”

“How do we get back?”

“Depends on where we are. Look.” Bones unfurled the map on the gravel and weighted its corners down with stones. “We could be on this spur here, or that one there. See? Now, if we’re on that one” — he pointed at a thin line that branched off a thicker one — “well, that’s cool. We just go on till we reach the main line again, there, and we don’t hardly lose no time. If we’re on that one, though, there ain’t nothin’ but buffers in a hillside. We got to go back if we’re on that.”

“And there’s no way of knowing which one we are on?”

“Not without some sort of landmark, no.”

Cabal pursed his lips. Kids tripping the points? He doubted it. Far more likely it was the handiwork of one of Satan’s avatars. Anything to make things difficult. Without a word, he went back to the train and hoisted himself up onto an external ladder.

“Where you goin’, boss?” asked Bones, shielding his eyes against the cold sun.

“Looking for a landmark. Pass me the chart, would you?”

From the top of the car, Cabal still couldn’t see very far. The sides of the cutting were simply too high. Discarding the options of jumping up and down or standing on tiptoes as both pointless and damaging to his dignity, he looked up and down the length of the track instead. Ahead he could see nothing beyond the long, gentle curve. Looking back, however, he could just make out the roof of a building that must lie beside the track. Checking against the chart proved fruitless; both potential lines had assorted unidentified buildings along their lengths. Still, perhaps he could get a clue there. He dropped the chart back to Bones and climbed quickly down.

“There’s a house or something back there,” he said, pointing. “I’ll go and make enquiries.”

Bones looked along the track without enthusiasm. “You want me to come with you?”

Cabal was already walking along the sleepers. “Unnecessary. I’ll be back shortly.”

As the impatient huffing of escaping steam grew quieter behind him, Cabal began to feel oddly alone. He had spent the vast majority of his life alone, of course; both his temperament and profession had made that a given. This, however, was different. Every step he took away from the train made him feel more isolated from all humanity, and the sensation, combined with its very unfamiliarity, was becoming more than disconcerting. He stopped and was alarmed, as well as slightly disgusted, to feel a shiver travel through him. Then, worse still, the hairs on the nape of his neck rose.

Unusual, he thought. I think I’m frightened. Fear wasn’t entirely a stranger, true, but on those previous occasions he had always had something to be frightened of. Things of his creation that had got out of the laboratory or the oubliettes or, once, out of the furnace, and had hung around the house in the shadows waiting for an opportunity to jump on him and kill him. That had worried him. That night at the Druin crypt. Yes, he might have felt a little discomfited then. On those occasions, however, there had been a very real threat to his life and work. Here there was … nothing. He looked back at the train and seriously considered returning, reporting that there had been nothing of interest at the building, and carrying on until they either reached the main line again or were forced to back up.

“Pull yourself together,” he said quietly to himself. “There’s no time for this childishness.” He mentally shook himself by the shoulders, drew himself up, and marched down the line.

The fear grew still worse. Now, however, an uncompromising mixture of determination and pride outmatched it. The feeling deepened into an impression of impending doom mixed, oddly, with loss. The burden of a sudden nameless longing made Cabal gasp with unfamiliar emotion. No. No, it wasn’t unfamiliar at all, just suppressed, and the sudden whirl of remembrance made his eyes prickle. He gulped, then sucked in a breath and kept walking. With agonising slowness, the building revealed itself around the bend as he walked purposefully on, and he belatedly realised that it was a station. This was good news; although it had clearly been abandoned years ago, there must still be a sign or something to say which station it was, information enough to deduce which line it stood on. He willed the clue to be somewhere obvious: the pain in him was so intense now, he just wanted to sag to his knees. The feeling of loss was like a spear through his heart. Keep walking, he kept telling himself. If you succumb, you’re lost. Just get the information and then walk back to the train, mission accomplished. Don’t run. Don’t falter. Control it.

The station had clearly once been very well run indeed. By the platform were flower beds in which nasturtiums and poppies fought gamely for soil against weeds. The stones that surrounded the beds still showed signs of having been assiduously whitewashed a long time ago. The paint was peeling, posters hung from their frames, and the windows were grimy. Yet there was a sense of order gently giving way to entropy. The fact that the windows were all intact was interesting; Cabal had learned a lot about human nature over the past few weeks and knew full well that where there were boys and unattended glass, there was also likely to be some property damage in the near future. Cabal had already had several run-ins with wilful young lads who seemed to believe that their age and sex gave them some sort of dispensation to commit petty acts of vandalism. One such had particularly infuriated him and was now a permanent fixture in the House of Medical Monstrosity. They’d moved smartly out the next day before the local constabulary got involved.

That the station windows were still in place argued that the station was rarely if ever visited, which, in turn, raised the question “Why build a station in the middle of nowhere, where nobody is ever likely to use it?” It was a question that turned the balance in Cabal’s mind. Up to now, he would have been content to learn the station’s name and go back to the train. Now, however, there was a mystery, and Cabal hated mysteries. The strange emotional turmoil he was in still frightened him, and because it frightened him, it also angered him. It felt so … imposed.

And, of course, it was. He felt foolish for imagining that its root had been within him at all. It was from outside. It was from … He looked up at the station. It was coming from here. The vague feelings that had so disturbed him were replaced with cold logic as he put them in their place. It was some form of empathy, he knew now, almost certainly supernatural. He still felt the fear and the loneliness and the dreadful sense of loss, but now it no more touched him than being warm or tired could emotionally touch him. It was simply a sensation, something that his body had detected and that he’d stupidly assumed to be part of him. He climbed up off the line, walked to the waiting-room door, in passing checked the station’s name — Welstone Halt — and entered.

If he was expecting an immediate solution to the mystery, he was disappointed. The waiting room obviously hadn’t been used for many years. There were a few tables, and a bar with a large tea urn on it, and glass displays that must have once been temporary home to sandwiches and cakes. The strange feeling was very strong here, Cabal noted. Sometimes a spasm of tension travelled down his back, making his head twitch involuntarily. He noted that, too. There were yellowed newspapers lying on one of the tables. He picked one up and studied its front page. There were a couple of advertisements for cigarettes that consisted of the name of the brand reprinted several times in a column — cutting-edge marketing for the time — and the headlines “BIG PUSH EXPECTED” and “ALL OVER BY CHRISTMAS.” Cabal shook his head. It had been no such thing. Why did people always expect wars to be over by Christmas, as if a kindly fate wanted all the families to be back together and all that unpleasantness over and done with? As a man who dealt with life out of death, he was perhaps more appalled by war than most. He had been chased out of towns by any number of solid citizens, all of whom obviously considered themselves morally superior to him, although they would cheerfully send their sons to die in conflicts that could and should have been resolved diplomatically. Cabal, on the other hand, rarely killed unless absolutely necessary. In the cases of Dennis and Denzil, it had admittedly been a question of eugenics as well as self-defence. It was the gene pool or them. But war? Cabal threw the newspaper back on the table with contempt.

The otherworldly feel had been with him for so long now that he had begun to acclimatise to it, like getting used to a cold: he knew it was there, but it wasn’t the be-all and end-all. He walked to the grimy window and looked out into the bright world beyond. This wasn’t getting him anywhere; he should just return to the train with the name of the station, see where they were, and leave. But… he knew he couldn’t. Not until he knew why this place stank psychically to high heaven and why it had been left to fall into stately disrepair for so many years. Cabal didn’t just call himself a scientist; he had those vital necessities that so many scientists lack — an enquiring mind and almost painful curiosity.

“I’ll just stay for a few minutes,” he said aloud. “Then I really must go.” Silence was the only answer. “I’m a necromancer. I understand your concerns. I may be able to help you.” He thought of the box of contracts and added, “We may be able to help one another.” He continued to look out of the window as he drew a slim cigar from an inside pocket. He didn’t smoke as a rule, but he liked the novelty of having at least one vice that he couldn’t be hanged for. As he unwrapped the cellophane from the cigar, crinkling it pleasantly between his fingers, he felt the ambience shift in the room. The fear and loneliness were leaving him, leaving the air. He had enough experience of such things to know the source of these feelings beginning to coalesce somewhere nearby. No matter, it would present itself when it was ready. Pocketing the cellophane, he put the cigar in his mouth, took his father’s silver matchbox from his waistcoat, and struck a match.

“Spare a light, sir?” said a voice that was near him yet as distant as the grave.

Cabal paused for the briefest moment. Then he lit his cigar. There wasn’t a tremor in the flame. He turned slowly and held the still-burning match out. “There you are,” he said evenly to the soldier.

Cabal watched him with dispassionate calm as the soldier leaned forward and lit a roll-up. He was dressed in a khaki uniform contemporary with the old newspapers; a cheap peaked cap, gaiters, a corporal’s stripes, and buttons polished to a high sheen, despite which they didn’t catch the light. It was as if Cabal were looking at him through a light mist. The soldier drew appreciatively on his cigarette, held the smoke for a long second, and released it through his nose in languorous streams. “God bless, sir. It seems like a month of Sundays since I last had a gasper. My mate Bill borrowed me matches off me and never gave ’em back, which is Bill all over. I’ve been waiting for the tea counter ’ere to open so I can buy some, but I ain’t sure it’s going to. Rationing, I suppose.”

“Not rationing, I’m afraid,” said Cabal, making his way to one of the tables and seating himself there. “The buffet is closed permanently. Please, join me.” He gestured to the chair opposite him. The soldier smiled brightly and came over. The smile wavered slightly when he saw that the chair Cabal had indicated was drawn under the table. The chair beside it was largely out, and he sat on that one instead.

“Closed permanent? But there’s loads of people use it. The works are just over the ridge.”

“Really? I must admit, it doesn’t seem like a humming hub of commerce here. When was the last time you saw somebody in here?”

“Oh, not long. It can only be a couple of hours since I got off the train. It was odd, though. The place was empty. The stationmaster’ll get in trouble over it, I don’t doubt.”

“A couple of hours,” echoed Cabal without comment. “What have you been doing since then?”

“I …” The soldier touched his forehead as if trying to recall. “I … fell asleep, I s’pose.”

“And what did you dream?”

The soldier looked at him oddly. “Who wants to know?”

“You look rather wan,” replied Cabal with masterly understatement. “I think your dreams must have been very disturbing. Sometimes they have meaning.”

“And you know what they mean?”

“I might. If you don’t tell me, I won’t be able to tell you.”

The soldier took off his cap and laid it on the table. He ran his fingers through sandy hair as he tried to concentrate. “But what if I don’t want to know?”

“Then that’s your concern. But don’t you think you’ve spent long enough not wanting to know?”

The soldier didn’t answer immediately. He slipped Cabal a hard glance, then clasped his hands and laid them against the table edge. He looked intently at them for almost a minute. Speaking quietly, he said, “I dreamt I was on a train. I sat alone in a carriage. I’d been given leave. From the army.” He looked up and said, like a well-worn mantra, “Do you think the War will be over by Christmas?”

Cabal knocked the ash off his cigar into an ashtray decorated with the arms of a railway company that had gone into receivership before he was born. “No, it wasn’t. Carry on.”

“I’d had to tell the guard to stop here when I’d got on. Can you imagine that? A busy little station like this. I had to tell him to stop here.” He took a long drag from his cigarette and crushed it out. “I waited for ages. For me dad and me little sister to come. And Katy.” He smiled in desperate reminiscence. “She’s my lass. We’ve been courting since school. We’re going to get married in the new year, when the War’s over and I get demobbed.

“Then I s’pose I fell asleep.”

Cabal was watching the smoke curl from his cigar. “And what did you dream?”

“I had a dream about my commanding officer. Captain Trenchard. He was telling me something over and over again, and I just wasn’t getting it. It must have been a dream, because the captain’s an ’ard man and he don’t like repeating himself and he’d have you on jankers like a shot if he thought you were taking the rise, like. He puts the wind up me, and I know I’m not the only one. Anyway, he was saying the same thing over and over, and I wasn’t getting it, but he wasn’t getting angry, and I wasn’t scared of ’im, I was just sort of laughing like I couldn’t get my breath back. He’d say something and I’d miss it, and he’d be all patient and say it again. That’s how I know it was a dream. The captain don’t have a bit of patience in his whole body. It couldn’t have been real.”

“You have no idea what he was trying to tell you?”

“No. ’course not. It was only a dream, see? It wasn’t real.”

“This dream, do you remember what happened when you woke up?”

“I don’t know if I do. I think I sort of half woke up, and then had another dream.”

“You were back here.”

“Yes. I was standing over there.” He pointed toward the window. “And I saw this bunch of lads standing out on the track. I don’t know what their parents are thinking of, letting them run around on a busy line. I was about to go out and tell them to stop playing silly beggars when one came in. He took one look at me, screamed like a little girl, and ran off with the others behind him.” The soldier tapped his stripes. “Authority, see? They just saw a uniform and scarpered.”

Cabal examined his cigar, decided it wasn’t worth continuing with, and stubbed it out. “I’d agree if it weren’t for a small but important detail that you’re having trouble coming to terms with.” He got up and walked over to the window. He stopped just short of it and looked at the floor, scraping away dust with his foot. Quickly crouching, he scratched at the floorboards with his fingernail and examined it minutely, angling his head to get the strongest light. Satisfied, he straightened up and walked over to the end wall. As he examined it, he absent-mindedly scraped the dirt from beneath his nail with a small file before using the file to probe at a damaged spot in the panelling.

The soldier watched uncomprehendingly. “What’re you doing?”

“Have you read any of the Sherlock Holmes stories?” answered Cabal.

“No. I’ve heard of them, though. Who hasn’t?”

“That’s a shame. When I was young and still read fiction, I read the whole canon. I liked the application of the scientific method to resolving the chaos that crime generates.” Cabal stepped to the window where he’d been standing when the soldier had first spoken to him, looked over his shoulder, turned, and took a long step.

“This,” he said, “is where you were standing when you asked me for a light, yes?”

“I think so. Why’s it important?”

“You should know. It’s also where you were standing when you saw the children on the track, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. Why do you ask?”

“Apart from the Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle also wrote tales of horror and the bizarre.” Cabal looked at the soldier. “Some ghost stories, too. Would you like me to tell you a ghost story?”

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” said the soldier, but he said it like a poor liar.

“You should. I do. But, then, I’ve seen them. Let me tell you about the three types I’ve come across.” The soldier said nothing, but his discomfort was obvious. Cabal came over and sat down.

“Firstly,” said Cabal, “there are the ghosts that aren’t ghosts at all. Just recordings of dramatic, usually traumatic events. The murder on the staircase, the garret suicide, vicious battles fought out over and over again on bleak moors to terrify the shepherds. That sort of thing. People don’t like dying as a rule. All that fear and anxiety, hatred and passion burns their last acts into” — he waved his hands to encompass the air about them — “the ether, for want of a better word. But those aren’t real ghosts any more than a photograph of a dead man is.

“The second type isn’t really a ghost, either, but at least it has pretensions. I’m talking about how a particularly powerful personality can distort things around the place of its death, or even just where it spent most of its life. These are the kind of ghosts who give the ghost-hunters employment, because, more often than not, they’re created by aberrant personalities. That means aberrant effects after death: blood running down walls, screaming skulls, the living being given helpful shoves out of windows. All the sort of things the yellow press gets excited about. But the ghost isn’t an entity. It’s more like a series of practical jokes left behind by a wilful man or woman. It may give the impression of intelligence, but you can’t reason with it. It has no reason.” Cabal rubbed ruminatively at his shoulder blade and remembered a provincial theatre that gossip held to be haunted. He’d been lucky to get away with only a fractured scapula.

“And that leaves us with the third type, and the only type that I really think of as a true ghost. The lost soul who doesn’t know that it’s dead yet. Not common, not common at all. In fact, I’ve only ever met one.” He put his elbows on the tabletop, interlaced his fingers, steepled his index fingers, rested his upper lip on their tips, and looked directly at the soldier.

“Who?” asked the soldier cautiously. Cabal’s face darkened.

“The sheer obtuseness of the dead never fails to stagger me. You’d think I’d be used to it by now.” He slapped his hands on the tabletop. The slight breeze stirred the cigar ash in the ashtray. The cigarette ash remained entirely still. Cabal rose quickly and walked in impatient strides to the spot where he’d first seen the soldier standing. He stood with his back to the soldier and pointed at the floor to his left.

“Bloodstains, long spray pattern running from there to there. Over on the far wall” — he pointed — “there’s a pockmark in the wood. It’s a bullet hole. The slug has long since been extracted, but I’d make an educated guess that it was a revolver round, probably a thirty-eight. I notice you’re right-handed, so I assume you were looking out of the window at the time. Heaven knows there’s nothing very interesting within the body of the room, so that would seem to make sense.”

“No,” whispered the soldier, “please.”

“Don’t ‘No, please’ me,” barked Cabal over his shoulder. “I was under the impression that non-commissioned officers weren’t issued with sidearms. Bring it back from the trenches, did you? Given the slaughter, you can’t have been short of dead officers to loot a revolver from, hmm?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re mad,” said the soldier, but his words were only meant to soothe himself.

“Mad, is it?” Cabal looked out of the window. “You said you were given leave. Compassionate leave, I assume. You came back here to a station that wasn’t used anymore, made them stop the train, came in here.” Cabal put his right index and middle fingers to his right temple. “Bang! Blew your brains out.” He turned. The soldier looked at him in shrinking horror.

Cabal pointed at the stained floor and said gently, “That’s your blood, isn’t it? And that hole in the wall is where the bullet came to a stop after it had gone clear through your head.” He walked back to the table and sat down. The soldier had buried his face in his hands and was breathing in sobs.

“You’ve always known it, of course. It’s just been a problem accepting it,” Cabal said. “The children didn’t run from your uniform. They ran from the ghost at the haunted station. And they didn’t feel they were in danger on the track because that line hasn’t been used as anything but a siding in many years. I’m sorry. You’re a lost soul. That’s all there is to it.” He watched the sobs wracking the corporal’s shoulders for a few moments. “The only thing left to you now is to be freed.”

“The captain, the captain kept trying to say what had happened,” cried the soldier, sounding very young. “He kept saying it, and I couldn’t take it in. I sort of got a bit of it and thought it was a joke. I was laughing at him while he told me they were all dead. My family. Just gone. And Katy. And Katy.” He looked up at Cabal with eyes red-rimmed with misery. “She was my lass. We’d been courting since school. We were going to get married in the new year when the War was over and I got demobbed.”

“I know. I know,” said Cabal quietly. All dead simultaneously, he thought. Odd. “You must have loved her very much.”

“She was … Katy. There was no life without her. I just … just couldn’t go on. You can’t imagine what it’s like.”

Cabal coughed. “You might be surprised. Do you want to leave here?” The soldier looked at Cabal blankly. “I can free you. I’ve had some experience with life after death. Do you want to leave here?”

“I keep falling asleep. Every time I wake up, I can just remember another screaming face in my dreams. I don’t think I can stand it much longer.”

“Then, if you just fill in this form, I can get you on your way.”

The soldier looked at him, dazed. “A form? I have to fill in a form?”

“Just a technicality. A signature is all that’s needed.” He was checking his inside pockets without success. Belatedly he remembered that he’d used the last form he’d taken from the box just before leaving Solipsis Supermare. “Ah. I don’t appear to have one on me. If you can bear with me for ten minutes while I get one from — ”

“Will Katy be there?”

There was a hope in the young man’s eyes that made Cabal suddenly feel very old. He thought of the expanses outside Hell, and the toiling masses trying to come to grips with the notorious question one thousand and twelve of Form KEFU/56. Then he thought of what eternal damnation really means.

If I don’t release him, staying here is a sort of damnation anyway, he thought. What difference does it make if he serves it out in Hell or a rural station? He looked at the soldier’s eyes again and knew what the difference was. In the sheer cliff over the Gates of Hell, defying modernisation and innovation, was still carved Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.

“You and I have something in common,” he said finally. “You don’t have to fill in the form.”

Cabal got up and walked to the door, opened it wide, and stepped over the threshold. He took a piece of white chalk from his cigar case and carefully drew a line from the lower edge of one side of the doorframe, across the threshold, and a little way up the opposite jamb. He stepped back into the room, squatted by the line, and wrote a series of peculiar characters alongside it, mumbling under his breath in a discordant chthonic tongue as he did so. Satisfied with his work, he straightened up, put the chalk away, and looked at the soldier. The corporal had stood and moved closer to see what Cabal was doing. Cabal noticed that he was standing in exactly the same spot where he’d taken his own life. Cabal walked to his side and pointed at the open doorway.

“There. Walk through. It’s as simple as that.”

The soldier bit his lower lip. “I’m not sure I can. I’ve sort of tried in the past. I couldn’t leave here.”

“That was before I opened the way for you. See those signs? Those are P’tithian sigils, the single most powerful and dangerous way of forming a portal known to humanity and, guessing from the evidence, four other intelligent species. Believe me, you can leave.”

“And Katy?”

“There I can’t make promises. But I think the chances of meeting her again are excellent. Now, will you please go? My train is waiting.”

The soldier walked hesitantly towards the open door. The sun had moved low, above the top of the cutting opposite, and he was silhouetted. Cabal was unsurprised to see he was faintly translucent around the edges. He stopped right at the threshold.

“Go on,” said Cabal. “There’s nothing to hold you here. Get moving before I change my mind about the form.”

The soldier looked back, and he might have smiled as he stepped forward. Cabal had the vague impression of something dispersing with unbelievable rapidity, and then the doorway was empty. Outside, there was nothing to see. Cabal walked out and looked up and down the track before looking up into the cold blue sky. “Good luck,” he said almost to himself. “Give my regards to Katy.”

Eventually, he went back to the doorway and looked down at the strange symbols. I knew learning P’tithian would come in useful one day, he thought. The P’tithians had been a particularly useless tribe who’d managed to wipe themselves out almost three thousand years before. Cabal had discovered and painstakingly translated a series of tablets he’d liberated from a small museum that he believed hadn’t realised their significance. The translation showed that they probably had, after all. The P’tithians seemed to have managed to poison themselves with bread made from rye infected with a particularly virulent form of ergot. In an hallucinogenic haze, they had first assured themselves that they were great sorcerers and then demonstrated their extraordinary abilities by levitating, en masse, from a high place. Perhaps they should have chosen a low place to start with. Cabal rubbed out the phonetic characters with the toe of his shoe as he enunciated them, “‘Eenie. Meenie. Minie. Mo.’ There, all gone.” Satisfied, he left the station for the last time.

Back at the train, it took less than a minute to find Welstone Halt on the map and discover that they were therefore on the right track. Dennis and Denzil gave the engine its head, and soon they were barely behind schedule.

At the junction with the main line, they had to get the signalman to change the points for them. Cabal went over himself, climbed the wooden steps up to the signal box, and delivered the customary bribe.

“No trouble at all, sir,” said the signalman. “I’ll have to call ahead so that you’re expected. It’ll take a few minutes for confirmation. Care for a cuppa while you wait?” Cabal took a look at the large tin mugs that hung from pegs behind the sink, thick with accumulated tannin, and declined with passable politeness. Instead, he amused himself by looking at the signal board and found his eye wandering onto “Welstone Halt (Disused).”

“Welstone Halt, sir,” said the signalman when Cabal drew his attention to it. “That’s been closed since the War. Nothing there, that’s why. Not no more.”

“I understand it was once a thriving place.”

“Oh, it was. I went over there years ago, when I was a kid. On a dare, see? It’s meant to be haunted.”

“The station?”

“Oh, yeah. But the town, too. Not much of Welstone itself left now. The station’s the only bit that looks in any sort of fair nick. It was a terrible thing that happened to the town. Well, I call it a town, but it was really not that big. Really a big village with a market. That’s what made it busy.”

The telegraph chattered. The signalman read the tape with interest. “There you go, there’s your clearance. You’d best get a move on or you’ll lose your slot.”

On the steps Cabal asked, “Welstone. I need to know. What happened to it?”

“It were wartime, right? These lines were full of soldiers and equipment for the effort. Well, down the far end of the line you just came down, a munitions train ran into trouble. Caught fire. The best thing to have done would have been to take it halfway up and then abandon it. It would have taken the line with it when it blew, but at least the cutting would have forced the blast up, where it couldn’t do no harm. But the driver was new on this line. Thought he could save the tracks by taking her down the spur that goes behind the station. He jumped out, did the points himself, and took her there. You can imagine what he thought when he came around on th’ spur and found it overlooked Welstone. You could see every house from where that munitions train stood. You’ll have to imagine what he thought, ’cause he didn’t live to tell anybody. She blew up, then and there. There’s a ridge between where the spur was and the station, so the blast was sort of reflected straight out over the town. There was hardly two bricks left standing on top of one another when the smoke cleared. Most of the people living there died in the instant, of course. The irony of it was that the station wasn’t touched at all, but without a village to serve, they closed it down anyway. Anyway, you’d best get a move on, sir. Bon voyage.”

In his office, Cabal found Horst awake and in his chair. “Well, brother,” said Horst without looking up from his book. “What acts of petty despicability have you wrought this day?”

Cabal smiled, and, just for once, it wouldn’t have frightened children and old people. “You might be surprised” was all he would say.