Johannes Cabal the Necromancer

CHAPTER 7 in which Cabal discovers that Hell comes in different flavours and that one should always make time

Horst castled and looked out of the window. “How much longer is that signal going to keep us here?”

Johannes Cabal ran a fingertip along his eyebrow while he ruminated, shifted a bishop, and said, “Your game is coming to pieces. Checkmate in three.” He stood, stretched, and looked out along the track. “Over half an hour thus far. It’s an outrage. I’m going to find out what’s going on.” He took his long coat down from the hook. “Care for a walk?”

Horst checked his watch. “A little over half an hour until dawn; that should be more than enough time. Very well.”

Swathed in coats and mufflers, they climbed down onto the track and made their way towards Murslaugh Station, only two hundred yards away but unattainable by train until the signal changed. “A points failure?” hazarded Horst.

“Hardly. There’s been furious activity on the line ever since we got here. Something’s afoot, and the churlish scum have failed to tell us what.”

“You’re in a good mood.”

“No.”

They arrived at the end of platform two and climbed up. The scene was indeed one of furious activity. A locomotive that seemed to have been pulled out of a museum was making a head of steam while civilians, frantic with anxiety, fought for places in the antiquated carriages. The concept of “women and children first” seemed to have escaped a few people there.

“It’s an evacuation,” said Horst, aghast. “What’s caused it? What’s going on? Hi! You there!” He strode forward to argue with a man who’d just pulled two children out of a carriage to give himself space.

Cabal hadn’t time for social justice. All he could see were potential souls skipping town. Looking around, he saw a harassed railway official surrounded by a huddle of desperate people. It seemed as good a place to start as anywhere. He made his way through the group, cracking skulls with his death’s-head cane and hacking shins with his feet. After the first few cries of pain, a path magically opened. Cabal touched the brim of his hat and said, “I am Johannes Cabal, theatrical entrepreneur. What is happening here?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t got time to tell you, sir. The town’s in a state of emergency. You’ll need to get out as quickly as possible.”

Behind him, Cabal was passingly aware of a serious argument breaking out. He recognised one voice as his brother’s. To the official he said, “I don’t think so. We’ve only just arrived. I am joint proprietor of the Cabal Brothers Carnival. I am Johannes Cabal.”

“Yes, sir, you already said,” replied the railway official testily.

Behind Cabal, the argument stopped abruptly with a solid thud. The man who had pulled the children off the train flew past at head height. After a moment, Horst joined Cabal. “I shouldn’t have done that, but he was just so infuriating. I hope I haven’t hurt him.”

“You’ll have to ask him when he lands. This,” said Cabal to the official, “is my brother, Horst.” The official’s testiness evaporated. A strong sense of self-preservation can do that.

“And how can I help you, gentlemen?”

“What’s going on?”

“The most dreadful calamity, sirs. We just heard but two hours ago, and the town’s been in an uproar ever since. I haven’t ever seen anything like it.”

“That’s as may be, but we’ve been stuck just spitting distance from the station for the last half-hour or so. Didn’t it cross anybody’s mind to at least inform us as to what’s amiss?”

“What is amiss, anyway?” added Horst. “Nobody’s being very clear on that.”

“What?” said a small, greasy man, rubbing a death’s-head-shaped bump on his forehead. “You came here by train?”

“No,” said Cabal. “We’ve got an entire carnival in our pockets.”

But a muttering had started. “They’ve got a train… They’ve got a train.” The appearance of a new escape route from Murslaugh was causing a sensation.

“It’s not a passenger train, so don’t get your hopes up,” said Cabal wearily, but it was too late. A small group of men, to whom the phrases “Act in haste, repent at leisure” and “Why a mouse when it spins?”[3] were equally cloaked in incomprehensible mystery, had rapidly coagulated into a mob and were already climbing off the end of the platform before rushing off into the darkness with the intention of taking control of the train.

“Oh, sir!” cried the railway official. “You have to stop them! They’re likely to do anything!”

“You’re familiar with the theory of evolution?” asked Cabal.

“Sir?”

“They’re about to find out why intelligence is a survival trait. Now, what’s all the panic about?”

“There’s an army heading this way, sir! An army!”

Horst and Cabal exchanged glances. “We weren’t aware that anybody had declared a war,” said Horst.

“Oh, no, it isn’t that kind of army, sirs. It’s an army of lunatics!” In the distance, the bullish “Huzzah!”-ing of the men who’d gone to take the carnival train stopped abruptly.

“An army of lunatics. Fancy. There’s a football match on, then?”

“No, sir! It’s … the Maleficarian Army!”

If the official had been expecting a spectacular reaction, he was to be disappointed. Cabal rolled his eyes and Horst said, “Who?”

“Rufus Maleficarus,” said Cabal. “Who let him out?”

“I think he broke out, sir. With most of the inmates.”

In the darkness beyond the end of platform two, the screaming began. The official started, white-faced. “Nothing to worry about,” said Horst reassuringly. “Just those men meeting our security personnel. Johannes, who is this Rufus … thingy?”

“Maleficarus. Self-styled warlock and Great Beast. Actually, rather a — what’s the term? — wanker. Stole some esoteric tome from one of the great universities, after a lot of work managed to read it, after a lot more work managed to comprehend it. Which is, of course, the last thing you want to do. All that knowledge needed lots of space inside his head, so it heaved his sanity out of his ears. Casting himself as some sort of manifestation of pure evil on Earth, he made unwholesome sacrifices to his dark gods and demanded great power in return.”

Horst touched his forehead and feigned dizziness. “Ooh, déjà vu.” Cabal ignored him.

“His dark gods obviously have their standards; they gave him a few party tricks and cut him loose.”

“Dark gods?” said the official, dismayed by such wickedness.

“Extra-cosmic entities with names that sound like they were typed up by a drunken Egyptologist. Anyway, being able to pull a squid out of a top hat didn’t keep him ahead of the authorities. The last I heard, they’d banged him up in a spherical cell at Brichester Asylum. So he’s loose again? How nice.” The thinness of his lips implied that it was anything but.

“What are you going to do, Johannes?”

“I’m going to deal with it. I’ve encountered Mr. Maleficarus once before. Not what you’d call a meeting of minds. I’ll have a word with him, tell him to take his army of the touched elsewhere.”

“He’ll listen to you, then?”

“I doubt it, but I ought to give him the option before killing him. In the meantime, we need to do something to stop our potential customers leaving town.”

“That’s my department,” said Horst, and, almost too quickly for the eye to see, he ascended a stack of trunks.

“Ladies and gentlemen, might I have your attention?” he said in a loud, clear voice. There wasn’t a shred of interest from the churning crowd. It seemed that the ladies and gentlemen had grown resistant to calls for calm. People continued to fight for room on the train.

The incredibly loud report of a gun followed by the tinkle of glass from the platform roof focussed their attention wonderfully. Even the train seemed to be stunned. Cabal blew the smoke from the barrel of his Webley revolver and replaced it in his gladstone bag.

“My brother has something to say,” he said simply in the profound silence.

“Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, I am Horst Cabal of the Cabal Brothers Carnival. The man with the gun and the will to use it is my brother, Johannes. It is our intention to deliver you from the approaching menace of the Maleficarian Army and provide you with the best in travelling entertainment. All that we ask is your patience while the former is dealt with and your attendance when the latter is prepared. Thank you again, and bless you all.” He jumped down.

“Bless you all?” hissed Cabal.

“They’re going to need it,” replied Horst.

The sun was half an hour up by the time Cabal encountered Rufus Maleficarus and his army of the mad. Directed by many grateful citizens, he had made his way through the town lauded on all sides as some sort of hero, which was something of a turnabout, given the way he was usually treated by mobs. Flowers and kisses were a novel change from burning torches and lynch ropes. Not that he liked them much, either.

Then up he walked, out of the town, and onto the broad moor that lowered there like a huge expanse of earth, covered with grass, sheep, and drystone walling. Rufus and his cohort were just marching towards the town when Cabal arrived and stopped and watched and waited. As they got closer, he realised that they were singing. From the tune, their choice of song seemed inappropriate until they got close enough for him to make out the lyric.

The Maleficarian Army sang with the vigour of scouts fresh out of camp. They could probably keep this drivel up for hours on end. “All together now!” boomed the leader. Even at this range, Cabal could recognise Rufus by his hideously deformed dress sense.

“And the Tcho-Tcho sing …?” demanded Rufus in the tone whose subtext ran, “Anybody not having fun will be smashed in the face with a skillet.”

Cabal dimly recalled that the musical genius who’d decided to put on Necronomicon: The Musical had got everything he deserved: money, fame, and torn to pieces by an invisible monster.

Rufus had finally spotted him and, throwing up his hand in a gesture suitable for halting a column of war-elephants, advanced alone. He stopped some ten yards from Cabal and eyed him contemptuously. Cabal put down his bag and held his cane in the crook of his arm while he wiped his nose. Behind Rufus, the insane, the deranged, and the eccentric but poor formed up into a herd thirty or forty strong. Rufus was a big man with a fine beard and a romantic mane of hair that got him halfway to being a poet without so much as having to dip a nib. Both beard and mane were, inevitably, red. He wore an Inverness cape, plus fours, and stout shoes. Inexplicably, he also wore a tea cosy on his head, into which the symbol of an eye in a pyramid had been stitched. “Well, well, well,” he roared. This was his only volume. “If it isn’t Johannes Cabal” — the army jeered and hissed — “the necromancer.” The army went very quiet and tried to hide behind Rufus.

Cabal put away his handkerchief. “Hello, Rufus,” said Cabal flatly. “Turn around and go away. Thank you.” He picked up his bag and started to go.

“Go away?” roared Rufus (vide supra). “GO AWAY? Do you know who I am?”

Cabal turned. Even behind his blue-tinted spectacles, you just knew that his eyes had narrowed. “I called you ‘Rufus,’ Rufus. Perhaps I made a hash of the pronunciation? Let’s see, that’s ‘Rufus,’ pronounced ‘egotistical, megalomaniac, half-arsed, half-witted, half-baked, swivel-eyed, bubble-brained, slack-jawed, slope-browed, prattling, porcine, dimwit Scheißkopf.’ There, was that better?”

“You shouldn’t have said that,” whispered Rufus in a knuckle-whitening fury. If one imagines a tyrannosaurus appearing in light opera and delivering a line sotto voce, that was the effect. “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”

“I don’t like you anyway, so it makes few odds. I don’t like you happy, sad, beamish, or maudlin. The only way that I will like you is if you take yourself and your friends there away to where you came from.”

“I should have dealt with you years ago, Cabal, when we first met. You never understood the powers that I was acquiring, never understood the cosmic influences that ran through this mortal frame. I have magic that you cannot begin to comprehend.”

“You’re talking about the one where somebody signs a playing card, you burn it, and then it reappears whole, rolled up in the middle of an orange, yes? You’re right, that one’s always baffled me.”

Some of the Maleficarian Army sniggered. Rufus was too angry to notice. “You’ve had your warning, Cabal. Now, prepare to face the terrible arcane wrath of Maleficarus!” Somewhere, a sheep bleated and quite ruined the effect. Maleficarus tilted his head forward and glowered at Cabal through bushy eyebrows. Placing his index and middle fingers on each temple, he started to mutter diabolical incantations.

Cabal blew his nose again. “You haven’t got anything that works on colds, have you? I think I may be coming down with one.” Rufus doubled the intensity of his mumblings. Seconds passed. Cabal checked his watch. “Could you speed this up, please? I’m a busy man.” Rufus redoubled. Cabal waited. The only effect he could feel was that his damn nose was itching. Perhaps he intends me to sneeze myself to death, he wondered. He clapped his handkerchief to his face as another sneeze came, and so missed Rufus’s magical incantation working.

After a momentary sense of falling, Cabal hit the ground going backwards, trailing heels striking the grass first. Belatedly, he realised that something had bodily picked him up and thrown him. He lay on the wet grass for a moment, marshalling his thoughts. He felt all right, although he knew that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Still, he could feel his toes, the dampness soaking through his clothes, the fine rain falling on his upturned face. He was just starting to formulate some really unpleasant things that he was going to do to Rufus and his troop when he thought, But it wasn’t raining a moment ago.

Suddenly somebody was standing over him, a sad, grey man with thin, grey hair plastered to his skull and eyes like failed experiments in egg poaching. “Hello,” said the man. “Would you like some tea?”

Cabal sat up. He was most definitely no longer on the moor. Instead, he seemed to have landed in a garden — the sort of large, carefully designed garden that stately homes have resting in several acres. He couldn’t see any stately home, though. Just an expanse of slightly undisciplined lawn pocked with bushes and the rotting remains of summer-houses and gazebos. They were in the middle of a large shallow bowl of land that hid the true horizon, the false one itself being obscured by copses of trees that ran in a broad circle about him. Here and there, he could see people sitting in the little buildings or walking, slowly, between them. Nearby, three men and a woman played a very sedate game of croquet. Cabal knew enough about croquet to know that it is a game with undercurrents: calculating, ruthless, and with a cold-blooded desire to destroy the opposition. Not here, though. Here they were just puttering around, shunting balls through hoops. Very odd.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” asked the man again. Cabal looked at him and then at the bone-china cup and saucer he was proffering. The rain had filled the cup to the brim and made it overflow into the already flooded saucer. The only evidence of tea was a faint sepia tinge in the rainwater.

“No, thank you,” said Cabal. “I would like to know where I am, however.”

“Oh,” said the man. “Oh.” He had to think for a moment and then added, “Oh. You’re in the garden.”

“And where precisely is that?”

The man gestured with the teacup, spilling some. “Why, it’s here. Where we are.”

Cabal had a sinking feeling that he might have been abducted by Dadaists. He tried again. “No, I mean what’s beyond the garden?”

The man smiled gently, and Cabal had a sudden urge to punch him. “The garden,” said the man.

“More garden.”

“No. The garden.”

“How big is this garden?”

“It goes from the trees” — the man pointed in a random direction — “to the trees.” He pointed in the opposite direction.

“And what lies beyond the trees?”

“The garden.”

Cabal succumbed to his urge. He left the man sitting on the grass nursing his bloody nose and set off for the tree line. Nobody raised the slightest objection, nobody even seemed to notice. He walked in long, rangy strides — all the better to be out of this place of the dull — past a decaying bandstand, overgrown statuary, and the croquet players. He noticed in passing that one was crying. Great shuddering sobs made his shoulders quake with misery as he leaned on his mallet for support. The other players were apparently waiting for him to finish his breakdown and get on with the game. They watched him with long, grey faces without a flicker of animation, and Cabal realised that such incidents were common here. No matter. He had a carnival to get back to.

“Fun, fun, fun,” he said to himself as he climbed the shallow slope to the trees. When he had reached them, he stopped and looked back. It was slightly odd that there was no pond or lake in the middle of the depression. It must have remarkably good drainage. He shook his head and entered the trees. The copse was dense and dark, and great drops of water never stopped percolating their way down from the dismal sky. He actually seemed to be getting wetter as the stuff managed to get past his hat and scarf and inside his long coat. This couldn’t be doing his cold any good. Actually, his cold seemed to have vanished. He paused and wiggled his nose experimentally. There was no itch, no impending sneeze. This was odd, too: Cabal didn’t often get colds, but when he did, they stayed. He was starting to have a very bad feeling about his whole situation. He shoved his way through the trees with renewed vigour.

When he finally burst out into the open again, he was disappointed not to be surprised. There, before him, lay the garden, exactly as he’d seen it just before going into the trees. He sighed, found a new entry point into the copse, and tried again. He wasn’t optimistic; he knew his course might have deviated some way from a straight line while he was negotiating his way between the trunks, but there was no possibility that he’d performed a complete about-face without being aware of it. Still, he owed it to himself and the scientific method to try again. Several minutes later, he was again rewarded with a vista of grass, garden furniture, and very depressed people playing croquet the way it isn’t supposed to be played.

Of course, he’d heard of pocket universes, but he’d always imagined them as rather larger than this. More interesting, too. Rufus seemed to have spent his institutional time on something other than macramé potholders. It didn’t look like the sort of place he’d have created as a dump for his enemies; Rufus liked his tortures to involve spikes and straps. Some long-dead sorcerer or thaumaturgist might well have crafted this garden originally as a place for contemplation. Rufus then found it lurking somewhere between the planes and hijacked it. Yes, thought Cabal, that would seem to fit the facts. Well, there had to be a way out. Its original creator must have designed an exit of some description after all. Stifling his displeasure down to a downward cast of his mouth, he made his way back to the heart of the garden.

The man with the cup of tea was waiting. Not especially for Cabal, but just standing around with the cup and saucer in his hand. “You punched me,” he said without rancour.

“I broke your nose,” said Cabal in a tone of mild disbelief. The man’s nose was looking very unbroken. He tapped experimentally at it. Either the nose had healed itself at incredible speed, or the man was taking stoicism to extreme lengths.

“Oh. I suppose you did. I don’t think it was meant to be at that angle.”

“How quickly did it heal?”

“How quickly?” asked the man with wide-eyed incomprehension.

“How long?”

“My nose?”

“No,” said Cabal with an implausible impersonation of patience. “I can see how long your nose is. How long did it take your nose to heal?”

“How long?”

“Yes.”

“My nose?”

“Yes.”

The man placed his thumb beneath his nose, where it joined the upper lip, and the index finger upon the tip. He carefully preserved the distance between the fingertips as he showed it to Cabal. “About an inch.”

For the second time in a short while, Cabal felt he had no choice but to repeat an experiment. The man, cup, and saucer went flying in disparate directions. He lay on his back for a few moments, blinking. “You punched me again,” he said, bemused at such strange behaviour.

“Yes, I did,” said Cabal. He watched the freshly broken nose with interest as he fished his watch out of his pocket and made a mental note of the time.

The blood stopped flowing almost immediately, after a few seconds the ugly contusion that had started to form was already in abeyance, and then, astonishingly, the nose straightened itself with no external help at all until it snapped back in place with a slight pop. The whole process had taken — Cabal consulted his watch — no time. He shook the watch and checked it again. Its hands stayed defiantly still. His first thought was that he had forgotten to wind it, but, thinking back, he’d definitely done so earlier, back on the train, while he’d been waiting for Horst to make a move in their chess match. Then he wondered if water had got into it, but, no, it had been bone-dry when he’d produced it from his pocket, and he’d sheltered it in his hand while he watched the man’s nose repair itself. “Have you got the time?” he asked the man as he helped him back to his feet.

“Time?” said the man. “Oh, no.” He held out his hand to show Cabal his wristwatch. Its hands were still. “Nobody has any time here. No time at all.”

Never had relativity seemed more pertinent. Cabal could count up to sixty if he liked, but that didn’t really prove anything. It seemed like a minute, but that was all. “Seemed” didn’t seem to butter many parsnips in the garden, and he said as much to one of the croquet players. “No,” agreed the woman, “it’s not a vegetable garden.” Nor could anybody tell him how long they’d been there. Before long, Cabal realised that everything was “before long.” He made the rounds of the twenty or so other inmates, asking them questions to which they had no answers. Objectively, there was no possible way he could have conducted that number of interviews in that depth in less than a couple of hours. Yet, subjectively, it still felt as if he’d been there only a couple of minutes, and this was beginning to do unpleasant things to his psyche. The temptation was to withdraw, perhaps indulge in repetitive behaviour so that it didn’t matter when you’d done something — you’d done it lots of times before. Trying to smooth out reality by making each passing moment a tree in a forest of identical trees.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” asked the man. Cabal looked at him, appalled. He suddenly felt like a condemned man seeing a body swinging in the gibbet.

“No, I don’t want a cup of tea.” He gripped the man by his upper arms. “Listen. This is an artificial pocket universe. Do you understand what that means?” He went on, regardless of the man’s silence. “Somebody created it. That means they must have put in an exit, an escape route, so they could get out. Do you understand that? Somewhere here, there must be a way of getting out.”

For the first time, a gleam of intelligence entered the man’s eyes. “Oh!” he quavered. “Oh, yes! An escape route! The way out! Oh, yes! Oh, yes! How I wish, how I wish, how I wish!”

“Good. I’m glad I’ve engaged your enthusiasm. Now, I’m going to talk to the others, but you have to do something for me. You’re going to have to remember how important it is to find the exit and keep remembering it. Is that clear?”

“Oh, how I wish, how I wish, how I wish!”

“Good, keep it up.”

Cabal had taken perhaps two steps when the man continued, “How I wish I’d remembered to put the exit in!”

Cabal stopped for a long, subjective moment. He turned slowly to address the man. “I beg your pardon?” he said with awful calmness.

The man paused to take a sip of rainwater. “Oh, how I wish, how I wish, wish, wish … Oh!”

Cabal had grabbed him by the lapels. “How you wish you’d remembered to put an exit in? Is that what you said? Is that what you said?” He realised that he was shouting, shaking the man, that he’d badly lost his temper. He pushed the man away. “Who are you, anyway? Why did you create this place?” The man blinked at him. “How could you forget to put an exit in, you damned fool?” Cabal spat venomously.

“Just … forgot,” said the man, his voice breaking in despair.

“‘Just forgot,’” hissed Cabal, and walked quickly away, before he lost his temper again.

Cabal didn’t know how long it took him to calm down: it felt like half an hour, but that didn’t mean anything, either. He sat in some sort of faux-Oriental gazebo and watched the croquet match. After a while, they got through all the hoops, but instead of going for the home stake, they just set course for the first hoop again. It was a game that could never end, and that seemed to sum the garden up all too well.

I can’t believe it will end this way, thought Cabal. I can’t believe that I will be trapped here for eternity in the garden. There has to be a way out. The stupid bastard was too absent-minded to put in an exit; he must have made other errors in this place, exploitable errors. If only I could see them. He looked at the sky. If only it would stop raining. The light behind the low clouds never changed, the drizzle never altered in intensity.

The gazebo was shared with a young man in spectacles who was sitting on a wicker chair, playing with brass discs on a wooden board shaped like an arched window. Straight lines had been burnt across it. The young man held out one of the discs to Cabal. “Shove ha’penny?” he asked. Cabal told him to shove something else entirely and walked out.

He found himself in the middle of the endless croquet game. The players had ground to a halt, confronted by the ugly apparition of making a tactical decision. One of them had unaccountably won a roquet and was unsure how to proceed. He placed his foot on his ball, took it off again, made as if to replace it, wavered. This was an unusual situation, and the variation in routine was forcing them to think.

“Allow me,” said Cabal, taking the mallet from the vacillating man when the sound of grinding thought processes became too much to bear. The man seemed grateful to have been released from the spectre of the roquet, although having strangers abruptly take his mallet away was also disturbingly new. He looked at Cabal, blinking foolishly. “Tricky shot,” said Cabal cheerfully. He eyed the ball, carefully placed his foot on it, and then smashed the vacillating man’s brains out with a single powerful blow to the side of the skull.

The other players were stunned for a moment. Then they applauded uncertainly, no longer able to recall whether or not this was actually in the rules. “Well played, sir,” said one.

Cabal ignored them. He was already on one knee by the body and checking its pulse. None; the blow had killed him outright, which was just as it should be. But he waited. His own heart sank as the corpse’s stuttered back into life, fibrillated, and stabilised. The rapid reconstruction of the broken skull and presumed re-formation of the liquidised brain within predictably followed. By the time the former dead man’s eyes had flickered open and he’d said, “Ouch,” Cabal had already lost interest. So — there was no death here, either.

He walked slowly in the rain, collar up and hat brim down. He mustn’t despair. With despair came acceptance, and with acceptance came the inevitable dulling of his faculties. The vacillating man was already back at his game of croquet, his recent brush with death — less of a brush and more a full-on head-butt — having changed nothing. Cabal couldn’t, mustn’t allow the same to happen to him. So lost in deep concentration was he that he almost walked into the sundial.

The sheer incongruity of it made him smile bitterly. A sundial in a place where the sun never shone. Ridiculous. Beads of rain stood on the engraved bronze disc or ran down the gnomon. At its edge he noticed some writing. He wiped the drops away with his fingertip and read “TEMPUS.” That was all. After it, the metal seemed disturbed in faintly familiar patterns, almost as if another word was trying to force its way through. In slow distraction, he drew his watch again and looked at the face. The hands still hadn’t moved even so much as a second. Time, he thought. Time’s the key somehow. An idea started to crystallise in the melt of his imagination. It might not work, of course, and there was always the possibility that he might have to upset or hurt a few of these excuses for people. So it wasn’t all bad news.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” said a familiar voice.

“Thank you,” said Cabal, accepting the cold china. He gave the saucer back, poured the contents of the cup on the ground, and put it in his pocket. “Thank you very much.”

He walked away, leaving the garden’s architect and first inmate looking at the saucer, the slightly damper part of grass where the liquid had fallen, and Cabal’s receding back. “You’ve got my cup,” said the architect plaintively.

The vacillating man was still lining up for his roquet. His ball was now slightly submerged in the turf, having been tentatively stood on so many times. “Allow me,” said Cabal cheerfully, and took his mallet. The man immediately shied away, protecting his head. Cabal reached down and drew a croquet hoop from the ground. “You weren’t using these, were you?” he said, and walked off.

En route for the faux-Oriental gazebo, he snagged and pulled down a length of vine from a statue of a man in a toga looking thoughtful. At the gazebo, he reached over the young man’s fitful game of shove ha’penny and took one of the brass discs. On closer inspection, he realised that they were indeed meant to be halfpennies but looked unfinished. Somehow rushed. On the way out, he passed the architect.

“You’ve got my cup,” he protested. An edge that might have been returning intelligence glimmered in his voice. He was sounding dimly peeved.

“You’ve got a poor eye for detail,” replied Cabal, showing him the disc. “And here” — he showed the architect one of the ivy leaves — “no veins. Very poor, could do better.”

“It’s not easy, you know. Remembering all these details.”

“I didn’t say it was. But if a job’s worth doing — ”

“You pompous prick.” The architect threw the saucer down and glared at Cabal.

“It’s worth doing well,” grated Cabal. “Look around you. We’re all here because you made the simplest and most ridiculous mistake. No exit. I believe you made another simple and ridiculous error. I need your cup to prove my hypothesis and, incidentally, get us all out of here. Now, are you going to help or just stand there insulting me?”

“Help? Help how?” the architect asked. His curiosity was outrunning his rancour. Currently, he was curious as to why Cabal was lashing the teacup to the end of the croquet mallet’s handle with the ivy.

“Mainly by staying out of my way,” said Cabal. He finished tying the cup in place and then started trying to balance the mallet on the edge of his hand. After a few adjustments, he had it seesawing sedately in place. “Look like the centre of gravity to you? It does to me.” Marking the place with his thumb, he started to hack at the wood with the edge of the disc. To his dismay, the wood started to re-form slowly. Apparently, it wasn’t only the animate that had immortality here. “Nothing for it. I don’t need this to function long; I’ll cut a new notch just before I need it.”

Cabal stepped outside the gazebo and looked up into the sky. The rain showed no sign of changing in intensity. “Perfect,” he said out loud. He placed the croquet hoop against a vertical strut at head height and was about to hammer it home with the mallet when he realised that it had the teacup at the other end. “Damnation!” he swore. “I should have done that penultimately. Getting difficult to plan ahead. You!” He pointed at one of the croquet players. “Give me your mallet!”

The woman looked at him uncomprehendingly. “You’ve already got his,” she said, indicating the vacillating man.

In a few long strides, Cabal was standing before her. He tore the mallet from her grasp. “And now I’ve got yours.”

He was gathering a small crowd as he hammered the hoop into the gazebo’s doorframe. He relocated the mallet, ivy, and cup assembly’s balancing point and feverishly started to hack a notch into the handle there. His ability to forward-plan was being eroded as his sense of time evaporated, he could feel it. He also had an unpleasant feeling that if this experiment failed, the jig would be up with him. He could look forward to an eternity of repetitive actions, just like everybody else here. In fact, he could forget about the luxury of being able to look forward at all.

The notch was cut. Its ragged edges were already starting to smooth as he settled it onto the wire of the loop. The strange construction wavered gently and settled. “I want my mallet,” said the vacillating man, and stepped forward to take it. The architect pushed him away.

“Idiot!” he barked. “Can’t you see what it is?” He glared at the vacant faces. “God’s teeth, it’s a water clock! Don’t you see?” He looked cautiously in the china teacup, anxious not to disturb it. The trickling run-off draining from the gazebo roof was quickly filling it. “Time,” he spoke reverentially. “We have time.”

As the cup filled, the arm of the mallet bearing it dipped slowly, but gathered speed as the centre of gravity moved over the fulcrum. Abruptly it dipped low, and the contents of the cup spilled out. “One Cabal Chronal Unit,” intoned Cabal. The cup swung up again and started to refill.

Somewhere in the causal clockwork of the little universe, a pendulum — long still — began swinging.

“Do you think it will work?” asked the architect.

“It already is,” replied Cabal. It was true: the light was beginning to change as the clouds scurried across the sky. “You know, I think we may be in for some fine weather.”

“The sun!” exclaimed the architect, laughing. “The sun!”

They walked to the sundial. The rain had turned to a fine drizzle illuminated by shafts of sunshine breaking through the clouds. They waited until the dial was caught in light.

The architect leaned low and examined the plate where the gnomon’s shadow fell. “It’s about three o’clock,” he said. Then to Cabal he said, smiling, “Just about time for tea.”

Cabal said nothing but smoothed the raindrops from the writing on the edge of the plate. The disturbed metal had resolved itself, inevitably, into the word “FUGIT.”

“Time will be …” the architect started to say, but Cabal stopped him.

“Time is …” he corrected.

Time was when people thought they could stand against us!” roared Rufus.

“Hurrah!” exulted the Maleficarian Army, who were nothing if not uncritical.

“That time has passed! See how our enemies are consigned to oblivion!” He gestured to Cabal’s gladstone bag, still lying where he had put it down to blow his nose. Of Cabal himself there was no sign. The army had been very impressed when Rufus had made Cabal vanish like that. “See how resistance crumbles before us! This very day, that town down there will be ours!”

“Huzzah!” This was great. A popcorn vendor could have made a fortune.

“And soon this country! This continent! The wor — ”

“Oooooh!” chorused the army, looking straight past him at Cabal’s bag. Some of the more proactive pointed. Rufus cast a cursory glance over his shoulder and committed a gross double take that made his plus fours flap in disbelief. Cabal was back. Oddly, in the thirty seconds he’d been gone he seemed to have been caught in a shower, although there wasn’t a rain cloud in the sky. He brushed himself down, took his hat off, combed his fingers through his hair, and replaced the hat.

“Hello, Rufus. You’re probably surprised to see me.”

“But… but I … I consigned you …”

“To oblivion. Yes, well, I didn’t have time for it. Although, in a sense, yes, I did.” And he smiled one of his smiles. Several of the more nervous Maleficarian soldiers whinnied with trepidation. “All of which is by the by. As I was saying, that town belongs to me, Rufus. Continue at your peril.”

“You have tasted the least of my power once, Cabal! Prepare to suffer its full fury!” Once more Rufus tilted his head, placed his fingers on his temples, and started to chant under his breath.

“I must admit, that translocation caught me unawares. You’re not a very impressive warlock, but you have your moments. Thus” — Cabal picked up his gladstone bag and opened it — “I’m not prepared to take any more risks with you.”

Rufus ignored him, muttering in the lost tongue of a pre-human civilisation that had worked great sorcerous happenings yet had never invented the vowel. Cabal continued talking as he fished around in his bag.

“Your problem, Rufus Maleficarus, is that you never understood why magic was superseded by science. If you listen to the sad old wizards up in their keeps and the witches in the dales, you might believe it had something to do with the passing of the Seelie and the Unseelie from our world. Or the dust-sheet of cynicism settling on our hearts and driving out the wonder. Or children refusing to say that they believe in fairies. Poppycock. I’ll tell you why. Convenience. I only practise necromantics because there’s no other way of doing it. But when it comes to applied sciences, technologies, any spotty Herbert with a degree and a lab coat can perform greater wonders than Merlin.”

Rufus was working himself into a frenzy. The summation of his hexing could only be seconds away. Still Cabal seemed unconcerned.

“You’ve wasted your mind and your life. Do you understand that? Science can do it all so much cheaper, easier, and, indeed …” Will-o’-the-wisps were dancing around Rufus’s head as arcane powers peaked. Cabal sighed. Nobody ever listened. “And, indeed,” he continued, “faster.” He drew his revolver from the bag and fired rapidly three times. Rufus was a big man, but he’d just become host to enough lead to build a platoon of toy soldiers. His chanting stopped on the first impact, and he only grunted when the others caught him. He looked at Cabal with rising horror as he realised that he was dying. He blinked, unable to believe that his life was now measured in seconds. He made a strange beseeching gesture to Cabal, his upper arms against his chest and his hands reaching out as if he thought Cabal could somehow reverse the damage, somehow save him. Then his body betrayed him, and he fell forward heavily in a way no living person can. The will-o’-the-wisps danced over the carcass for the moments it took for them to fade away.

“Now,” said Cabal, “what am I going to do with you lot?”

The Maleficarian Army shifted en masse from foot to foot. They weren’t sure, either. A cry went up: “Our new leader!” It was quickly taken up and expanded upon.

“Our new leader, Cabal! Cabal! Our new leader, Cabal!”

Cabal put away his gun. “Very well,” he said dryly. “You can work for my carnival. Follow me.” The army formed up behind him as he set off.

“One thing, though,” he called over his shoulder. “There are some forms that will need filling in.”

“And stop that!”