The Fear Institute

JOHANNES CABAL: THE FEAR INSTITUTE

Jonathan L. Howard

Copyright © 2011 Jonathan L. Howard

The right of Jonathan L. Howard to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Chapter heading illustrations by Snugbat

Map by the author, using Campaign Cartographer 3

Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

First published as an Ebook by Headline Publishing Group in 2011

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

eISBN: 9780755373734

HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

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For Marsha and Michael Davis

Contents

Title page Copyright Page Dedication Foreword: A WARNING TO THE CURIOUS Epigraph Map Chapter 1: IN WHICH THE FEAR INSTITUTE VISITS AND CABAL IS CONFRONTED BY THE POLICE Chapter 2: IN WHICH THE UNITED STATES ARE VISITED, THOUGH BRIEFLY Interlude: THE YOUNG PERSON’S GUIDE TO CTHULHU AND HIS FRIENDS: NO. 1 GREAT CTHULHU Chapter 3: IN WHICH CABAL LEADS AN EXPEDITION BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP Chapter 4: IN WHICH THE FAUNA OF THE DREAMLANDS PROVE UNPLEASANT Chapter 5: IN WHICH CABAL WANDERS FROM THE BUCOLIC TO THE NECROPOLITIC Interlude: THE YOUNG PERSON’S GUIDE TO CTHULHU AND HIS FRIENDS: NO. 2 NYARLOTHOTEP, THE CRAWLING CHAOS Chapter 6: IN WHICH THE EXPEDITION CROSSES THE SEA AND CABAL TAKES AN INTEREST IN THE LEG OF A SAILOR Chapter 7: IN WHICH THE EXPEDITION EXPLORES A NAMELESS CITY OF EVIL REPUTE Chapter 8: IN WHICH CABAL HAS A SURPRISINGLY CIVILISED CHAT WITH A MONSTER Chapter 9: IN WHICH A HERMITAGE IS DISCOVERED AND A GREAT TERROR REVEALED Chapter 10: IN WHICH THERE IS A BATTLE AND CABAL MAKES IT QUICK Interlude: THE YOUNG PERSON’S GUIDE TO CTHULHU AND HIS FRIENDS: NO. 3 AZATHOTH, THE DEMON SULTAN Chapter 11: IN WHICH IT TRANSPIRES THAT DYLATH-LEEN IS NOT VERY NICE Chapter 12: IN WHICH THERE ARE MONSTERS AND CATS, WHICH IS TO SAY, VERY MUCH THE SAME THING Chapter 13: IN WHICH THE DOMESTIC WONTS OF SORCERERS ARE INVESTIGATED AND CABAL CANNOT BE CONCERNED Interlude: THE YOUNG PERSON’S GUIDE TO CTHULHU AND HIS FRIENDS: NO. 4 YOG-SOTHOTH, THE LURKER AT THE THRESHOLD Chapter 14: IN WHICH WE CONTEMPLATE THE LIFE AND DEATH OF JOHANNES CABAL Chapter 15: IN WHICH LITTLE IS SAID, BUT MUCH IS CONVEYED Chapter 16: IN WHICH CABAL PLANS IN THE LONG TERM AND LAUGHTER PROVES TO BE THE WORST MEDICINE Interlude: THE YOUNG PERSON’S GUIDE TO CTHULHU AND HIS FRIENDS: NO. 5 AN ABC Chapter 17: IN WHICH CABAL EXPERIENCES OMOPHAGIA, ANNOYS THE VATICAN, AND ENDURES MUCH Author’s note Acknowledgements

Foreword: A Warning to the Curious

Gentle reader, what follows is the third novel in the series of stories concerning Johannes Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy. There will doubtless be some of you have come here seeking some fanciful little tale for your amusement, to furnish you with a smile or two, perhaps even a giggle. You are fools, as are the benighted wretches who ever suffered the poor judgement to spawn you. What follows is, in truth, a horrible story of madness and corruption, of lost hope and new destiny, of vicious but stupid crabs. You will not read this and walk away untouched.

Or perhaps you will. People are so insensitive, these days. Once upon a time, all you had to do was finish a story with a revelation in the form of a single short declarative sentence paragraph in – and this was the powerful part – italics to shred the sanity away from anyone more psychologically vulnerable than a lamppost.

It was his own face.

Or . . .

There were still two glasses upon the mantelpiece.

Or . . .

The library book was terribly overdue.

Not so these days. Everyone is so desensitised that the potency of artfully deployed italics has long been lost. It was good enough for H. P. Lovecraft, but apparently it isn’t good enough for the modern world, filled as it is with obtuse bastards.

You know what? Forget the warning. Read the book. Go insane. See if I care.

JLH

If poets’ verses be but storiesSo be food and raiment stories;So is all the world a story;So is man of dust a story.

Colum Cille

Chapter 1

IN WHICH THE FEAR INSTITUTE VISITS AND CABAL IS CONFRONTED BY THE POLICE

It was not such a peculiar house in and of itself. A three-storey townhouse – four, if you counted the attic – Victorian in design, tall and thin and quite deep. To the fore, a short path ran from the door (to the left of the frontage) perhaps ten feet past what might have been intended as a rose garden in some long-past year. Now it was overgrown, but in a strangely artful way, as if chaotic minds had planned a new and not entirely wholesome horticulture for the little garden. Indeed they had, but we shall return to that aspect of the house shortly.

Although at one point it had clearly been a middle terrace house, its neighbours were no longer in evidence but for broken half-bricks protruding from the end gables. A single house, the lone survivor of a terrace, marked darkly with the smoke of nearby industrial chimneys, a short front garden and a somewhat longer back one, the former bounded by a low wall, the latter by a tall one. Not a common sight, but neither one to excite much comment in the normal run of things. If, that is, it were sited within an industrial town or city. It was not.

The house rose solitary and arrogant on a green hillside some few miles from the next dwelling. The nearest factory chimney capable of layering the soot on the house was further still. If one were to see the house in its rural location, apparently scooped up by some Goliath and deposited far from its proper place, one might feel inclined to investigate, to climb the pebble and earth trail that leads to the garden gate, to walk up the flagstoned path beyond it, and to knock upon the door. After all, somebody must live there. The building is well maintained and smoke curls from its chimney.

This is an inclination to be fought at all costs, for this is the house of Johannes Cabal, the necromancer. There are all manners of unpleasantness about the place, but the front garden is the foremost.

Johannes Cabal was sitting in his study, making notes in the small black book that he customarily carried in the inside pocket of his jacket. They were pithy to the point of acerbity – Cabal was not in a good mood. That in itself was no rarity, but he was particularly ill-tempered today as his latest attempt to secure – which is to say, steal – a rare copy of de Cuir’s very useful Enquêtes interdites had failed. Cabal was used to his frequent necessary descents into criminality coming to nothing, but it especially galled him on this occasion.

‘Verdammt kobold,’ he muttered, as he crossed a ‘7’ with unnecessary vigour. He had faced many horrors in his life, many ghastly supernatural guardians, but this was the first time he’d been bested by a blue goblin, especially one with poor diction.

The blue goblin (specifically – as may be understood from Cabal’s mutterings – a Germanic form known as a kobold), had acted as a guardian of sorts for an unusual library. Where most libraries are content to sit by or near a road, this one had occupied a pocket existence of its own, slotted neatly between the world of men and the world of the Fey. It was an extensive and useful library, but it did not encourage lending or even browsing. After a few bruising encounters with heavy volumes flung at him from shelf tops, Cabal had discovered the book he sought and made a hasty but victorious retreat. His victory lasted exactly until the moment he had had the time and leisure finally to examine the looted book and found that it had unaccountably become a small manual on the subject of waterproofing flat roofs. He belatedly thought of the Fey’s ability to alter appearances, and then he thought of a kobold vivisection, which cheered him up a little.

So absorbed in his writing and muttering was he that the pebble that bounced off the window failed to draw his attention. The second, thrown vigorously enough to threaten the glass, succeeded. Cabal sighed, put down his pen, took up his revolver and went to the window. Given that it was pebbles rather than bricks, and given that nobody who lived within ten miles would be so stupid as to irritate Cabal, who was not only a necromancer but, in the vernacular, ‘an utter bastard’, it seemed likely that the thrower was a child on a dare. Cabal intended to shoot to miss, albeit narrowly. He was therefore surprised when he saw three soberly dressed men standing on the other side of the garden gate. One looked like an undertaker and Cabal, who had had a similar experience once before, checked his pulse just to be sure. Pleased to find he wasn’t dead again, he went to the front door.

The three men, who had been watching the house with polite if slightly distant attention, now turned it upon Johannes Cabal. They saw a clean-shaven man with short blond hair, physically in his late twenties though he carried an air of cynicism and worldliness that would have seemed premature in a man twice his age. They saw his black trousers, black waistcoat, thin black cravat, white shirt, tartan slippers, and they saw his enormous handgun.

The last time Cabal had been to the gunsmiths’ in town to buy more cartridges for it, the man behind the counter had told him that the pistol, a Webley .577 Boxer, was ‘guaranteed to stop a charging savage’, according to the literature. Cabal had replied he didn’t know about that, but it could stop a Deep One with its dander up and that was good enough for him. The man behind the counter had considered this, and then talked about the weather. It was, in short, a fierce and unfriendly gun, and its very appearance was usually enough to cause nervous shuffling among spectators. The three men, however, seemed no more put out by it than by Cabal’s slippers, and those hadn’t caused any obvious consternation either.

Cabal considered. He did not encourage visitors, he had no colleagues per se, he had no friends, few acquaintances, and his family were all either dead, or had disowned him – or were dead and had disowned him. Occasionally other necromancers turned up to try to steal his researches in much the same way that he tried to steal theirs, or assorted self-elected paragons of virtue arrived to slay him as if he were a dragon. He was not a dragon; he was a much better shot than most dragons and the paragons’ last sight was of the fierce and unfriendly Webley .577 Boxer and Cabal’s irked face sighting over the wide muzzle at them. The three men seemed to fit none of the categories. ‘Who are you?’ asked Cabal. ‘What do you want?’

One of the party, a short middle-aged man with receding hair, snowy mutton chops, and the open, sanguine air of a defrocked priest spoke up: ‘We wish to make you a proposal, Herr Cabal.’

‘A proposal?’ Cabal pushed his blue-glass spectacles back up his nose and regarded the trio suspiciously. ‘What sort of proposal?’

‘That,’ interrupted the tall man in the top hat, who looked like an undertaker, ‘is better discussed in private.’ He pursed lips that looked well used to it. ‘Our immediate concern is to reach your front door.’

‘My front . . . ? Oh!’ Cabal understood and laughed. He looked down. Just over the tile-ridged edge of the garden alongside the path was a faded circular for patios and conservatory extensions. There had probably been others, but they had blown away long since, this one staying only because it was trapped beneath a discarded human femur. The surface of the bone was pocked with tiny bite marks. He looked back up at the men, a sardonic smile on his face. ‘You’re concerned about the denizens of this little plot. Gentlemen! They are only pixies and fairies! You’re not afraid of them, are you?’

‘Yeah! We’re harmless!’ piped a tiny voice from beneath a hydrangea, until it was shushed by other tiny piping voices.

For his answer the tall man stepped back and read the notice on the gate out loud: ‘No circulars, hawkers or salesmen. Trespassers will be eaten. We are not afraid, sir. We are showing rational caution.’

‘Yes,’ conceded Cabal. ‘Put like that, I see your point. Very well.’ He spoke to the garden. ‘Let these men by.’ There was a muted chorus of dismay from the hidden watchers, but the three were allowed to walk up the path unmolested. By the time they reached the doorstep, Cabal had already gone inside.

He was waiting, seated, in his study when the three men caught up with him. They stood gravely clustered around the door, unable or unwilling to sit without their host’s invitation. Cabal was entirely unaware of a host’s duties, and contented himself by sitting with one leg crossed over the other and the pistol held idly in his lap. He looked at the men and they looked back at him for several uncomfortable moments. ‘Well?’ he said finally.

‘My card,’ said the funereal gentleman, producing one from his pocket and offering it. Cabal did not rise to take it, but suffered the man to advance, hand it over, and then withdraw in the manner of a priest delivering a votive sacrifice.

‘Mine also,’ added the third man, speaking for the first time. He had, to Cabal’s eye, the air of a recovering alcoholic who now ran a small printing company dedicated to the publication of religious tracts.¹ He, too, had mutton chops, but these were black and as lustrous as a dog’s coat. His eyes were quick and dark, and he wore the disreputable shortened form of a top hat known as a ‘Müller’.

‘Mine too!’ added the one with the appearance of a disgraced priest.

Cabal studied the cards casually. ‘So, you are Messrs Shadrach,’ he thumbed the card from the top of the small pile and allowed the funeral director’s card to flutter to the floor, ‘Corde,’ he dropped the former alcoholic’s, ‘and Bose.’

‘It’s pronounced Boh-see,’ said the unfrocked priest, although – disappointingly – it appeared from his card that he was actually a dealer in artworks.

‘You were never a priest, were you, Mr Bose?’ asked Cabal, just to be sure. Mr Bose shook his head and looked confused and that was that.

Mr Corde was – equally disappointingly – a solicitor and not a reformed alcoholic publisher of religious screeds, but Mr Shadrach really was a funeral director. This also disappointed Cabal, whose grave-robbing activities in search of research materials were often complicated by the eccentricities of those who carried out the burials. One doesn’t want to spend all night excavating down to a coffin only to discover that it is lead-lined, sealed with double-tapped screws, and proof against crowbars.

‘All very good, but none of which answers the question that I believe I implied when I said, “Well?” An art dealer, a solicitor, and a funeral director. What business have you with me, sirs? Indeed, what business have you with one another?’

‘We belong to a society, Herr Cabal. A very special society, dedicated to a noble but arcane purpose. It is this purpose that has brought us to your door.’

Cabal looked at them with a raised eyebrow. ‘Grundgütiger! You don’t all want to be necromancers, do you? It’s thankless work, gentlemen. I advise you strongly against it.’ Their blank expressions assured him that, no, this was not the purpose of their visit. ‘Well, what, then?’

‘Let us start from a hypothesis, Herr Cabal,’ said Mr Bose, with wheedling enthusiasm. ‘And let that hypothesis start from a question. Is the human creature as perfect in function as it might be?’

‘Meaningless,’ replied Cabal, ‘with no definition as to what that function might conceivably be. We are good communicators, passable runners, middling swimmers, and poor at flying.’

‘Just so. But even there, we are capable of communications of great subtlety over very long distances, we build locomotives that can outrun the fastest animal, steam launches that can give even dolphins a good run for their money, and aeroships that have formed our conquest of the skies. You see my point, of course. But do you take my greater meaning?’

‘Natürlich. You are suggesting that the function of the human creature, to use your phrase, is to adapt itself to its environment or even to adapt its environment to itself by virtue of its intelligence. Then my answer is no. Humanity is nowhere near perfection even with regard only to its intellect. Have you ever looked at your fellow man? It is not edifying. I have hopes that time and evolutionary forces may improve matters or, failing that, eliminate us and give something else a chance. I think the insects deserve a turn.’

‘But in the shorter term, how may we improve ourselves?’

Cabal shrugged. ‘Eugenics. Kill the lawyers. Vitamins. There have been all manner of suggestions.’

Corde had been growing visibly exasperated with Bose and cut in: ‘Think rather in terms of what limits us, Herr Cabal. What holds us back in our everyday lives? What Mr Bose is trying to say is that our little society seeks to eliminate the most profound of all these limiting factors.’

‘Death,’ replied Cabal, without hesitation. ‘You do wish to become necromancers.’

‘No, sir!’ said Corde, a little heatedly. Gentlemen do not wish to hear themselves described as nascent necromancers, even by a necromancer. ‘I mean the little death that eats away our lives from the moment we are old enough to realise that a final death certainly awaits us.’

Cabal frowned. He was aware of the phrase ‘little death’, as used by the French, but it seemed very much out of context here, where the context consisted of Messrs Bose, Corde and Shadrach. ‘I am bemused.’

‘I mean, Herr Cabal,’ and here Mr Corde took an unconsciously dramatic step closer to Cabal, ‘fear!’ Satisfied that he had made his point with sufficient emphasis, he stepped back again. ‘Every waking moment of our lives we spend as hostages to the terrible “perhaps”. We dread the unnameable that lurks beyond our doors. We collapse into ridiculous phobias with the most fleeting provocation. Clowns! Birds! The number thirteen! Each one a nail driven into the fabric of our lives, limiting our movement, hemming us in, draining our futures of possibilities. How many better tomorrows have been lost because of natural human timidity? How many wonders have never seen the light because those who dared dream them could never dare build them?’

Cabal laughed: a humourless sound. ‘You wish courage, gentlemen? I believe it may be found in any public house, by the pint. Good day.’ He rose to escort the men out, but then Mr Shadrach spoke, and Cabal listened.

‘We have considered long and carefully before coming to you, Herr Cabal. You are quite right. A sufficient measure of liquor will drive out fear from any man, but it will take all rationality with it too. My companions have not perhaps made our aim quite as clear as they might. We understand the role of fear as a safeguard, but we dispute its effect on a higher creature such as the human being. A rational man should be able to look upon a situation and weigh its dangers – physical, moral or financial – as coldly as if weighing tea on a scale. That is denied us because fear is essentially irrational. We seek nothing more or less than to remove it. Our dream is that one day the human race will walk this good Earth, free from the invisible tethers of fear, subject only to the kindly effects of rational caution.’

Cabal sighed and sat down again. ‘You mentioned a society. What sort of society? Do you hold annual general meetings, raise funds by selling cakes, and all go on a charabanc holiday together with funds raised by subscription?’

‘We do not,’ replied Shadrach, a little icily.

‘Ah,’ said Cabal. ‘Yours is the other sort of society, then. The type with impractical handshakes.’

Shadrach also regarded their society’s secret handshake as unnecessary, infantile and not even very secret, as it looked like the first shakee was attempting to put the second into a half-nelson. Thus, he did not dispute Cabal’s description, but said, ‘Our numbers are relatively few, but contain men and a few women of influence and insight. Scientists, logicians, entrepreneurs. Our resources, both intellectual and monetary, run as deep as our ambitions.’

‘No churchmen, I notice. Of course not. What use have they for a world without irrational fear? And how did an undertaker, an art dealer and a solicitor happen to join such a society?’

‘Irrelevant,’ said Corde, a little snappily.

Shadrach, however, was happy to elucidate. ‘My own interest was founded in the lack of fear of the dead that I feel, a lack created by my long familiarity with the practicalities of dealing with the recently departed. One cannot do such business without wondering at the fear the public hold for a population that can offer them no harm.’

Cabal, whose experience with that population indicated that they were perfectly capable of offering harm in the right circumstances, held his silence.

‘Mr Corde, if I may speak on your behalf?’ Corde jerked his head in an impatient affirmation, so Shadrach continued: ‘Mr Corde deals with people every day who make bad decisions based upon fear and not logic, whether to create a fund here, or a trust there, even fear of writing a will in case it should tempt Fate in some ill-imagined way. In both our cases, you see, we watch people blunt their lives with silly fears, fears that offer them nothing, not even safety. And Mr Bose . . .’ here, Shadrach did not ask permission ‘. . . is fascinated by the deeper mysteries, of life, of death.’

‘I meet all sorts in my job,’ smiled Bose, as if discussing the vagaries of collecting matchbox labels. ‘One of my clients told me about the society, and I said, “Oh, that sounds like fun!” So here I am.’

Shadrach looked at Bose for a long moment, unsure how to proceed. Cabal filled the silence a little impatiently by saying, ‘Yes, it’s all very laudable I’m sure, but I am still at a loss to understand my part in all this. How do you intend to achieve your goal? Brain surgery?’

Bose grimaced. ‘Tried that. It didn’t work,’ he said, before being shushed by Corde.

‘We have conducted much research, Herr Cabal,’ said Shadrach, ‘both experimental,’ here he shot a sideways glance at Bose, who looked suitably abashed, ‘and theoretical. It is the latter that has led us to a possible – indeed probable – solution. What we intend is nothing less than to isolate the very spirit of fear and, thence, to focus our energies on finding its anathema. The antibody to fear, if you will.’

Cabal smiled or, at least, his face creased in a manner only suitably described as a smile, but there was little warmth there. ‘You wish to isolate fear. Ah, well, if only I’d realised your ambitions were so simple. Perhaps we can work up to it by capturing faith, bottling hope, and presenting love to the world as a commodity, available by the pound, wrapped in greaseproof paper and topped with a bow.’ He sighed. ‘How can you possibly hope to isolate the incorporeal? If it were a true spirit, you could amuse yourself with salt and pentagrams, but fear, sirs? You waste your time and mine.’

Surprisingly, the three men did not seem at all put out or taken aback by Cabal’s response and he realised that they’d anticipated it. Indeed, they seemed to relish it. ‘Sir, our researches are conclusive. We are certain, absolutely certain, that fear may manifest and be captured. But not, sir, in this world.’

‘There is another place, Herr Cabal,’ said Bose, ‘another world where things are not as they are here. Where the most fanciful concepts may prove sterling truth, and the incorporeal take form.’

Cabal straightened a little in his chair, interested despite himself. ‘You speak of the Dreamlands.’

The name notwithstanding, the Dreamlands are neither a retailer of mattresses, a retirement home nor a particularly nasty permanent funfair in a rundown coastal resort. Neither are they where our minds go when they sleep. Those are merely dreams, and the Dreamlands are too strange and, in their own curious way, too noble to trouble themselves with endless variations on wandering the corridors of one’s old school on the first day, alone, lost, naked, and having just discovered that an exam nobody told one about had started ten minutes ago. No, the Dreamlands were formed by dreams, but are not a dream themselves. They are a world of curious and exotic sights, a collision of myths, of lands as ancient as thought and oceans as deep as imagination. They are home to those who have abandoned their waking bodies, or been abandoned by them. But, as the Dreamlands are true and material even though they hide behind the veil of sleep, there have been other immigrants from other realities, and here lay Cabal’s interest. One of those immigrants was a fierce and protean magic that might, just might, carry a spark of itself back into the waking world, should it be brought by somebody strongly willed enough to shade it from the mundanities of the everyday. Somebody like a well-motivated necromancer.

‘Yes, I researched them exhaustively myself years ago. But they are beyond reach.’

‘They are not, sir.’

‘To trained or talented dreamers, no. To the users of certain highly dangerous and unreliable drugs, no. To the holder of the Silver Key, no. I am none of these things, meine Herren, and neither are you. The Dreamlands, while an interesting destination, are beyond the reach of any of us.’

Alarmingly, the three men still seemed splendidly unconcerned and, indeed, rather smug. Cabal ran the alternatives through his head rapidly and settled on the most likely, though staggeringly unlikely it was. ‘You . . . have the Silver Key?’

It was Shadrach who spoke. ‘We do, sir. We have the Silver Key of the Dreamlands. We may enter and leave as we will.’

Cabal tried to keep the quiver out of his voice. ‘You . . . How . . . did you come by it?’

‘As a bequest. An explorer of that world learned of our endeavours and, I’m delighted to say, passed it on to us.’

‘As a bequest,’ Cabal echoed. ‘How did he die?’

‘Oh, he may not be dead. He was simply declared deceased by the coroner’s court. He’d been missing for some time and, well, I’m sure you know how these things work.’

Cabal, who was very familiar with the workings of all the institutions that dealt with death, grunted. ‘It does not worry you that this gentleman probably died in the Dreamlands?’

‘Worry,’ said Corde, evenly, ‘is a product of fear. We will not submit to it. Instead, we will add this datum to the rational caution that such an enterprise must engender.’

Ah, thought Cabal, now we come to it.

‘There are many possibilities, many things that may go awry in the Dreamlands,’ said Shadrach. ‘This may be the only opportunity that we of the Institute will ever have to venture there. We must maximise our chance of success in every way that we can.’

‘And this, I would guess, is why you have come to me,’ said Cabal. Although he showed no sign of it, he was impressed by their methodology. If irrational fear had something approaching a physical form, then it could surely survive only in a world formed from dreams where the rules of existence were intuitive rather than scientifically rigorous. From there it could leak its influence back into the sleeping minds of the mundane world to soak into their waking lives and colour every decision with delicate shades of uncertain terror. It all sounded very interesting, Cabal was sure. There was, however, a problem. ‘I’m afraid that I must disappoint you. I have no experience of the Dreamlands. I have never been there.’

‘We know,’ said Corde. ‘You’re alive and sane. It seemed very unlikely that you’d ever visited.’

‘So, why . . . ?’

‘Because we have little use for a dead or insane guide. You may not have immediate experience of the Dreamlands, Herr Cabal, but you do have plentiful experience of the, ah, occult,’ he said apologetically, ‘and the unusual. You also have a reputation for formidable sang-froid, which will come in useful given the stressful environment.’

Cabal smiled, a little less humourlessly this time. It always amused him that, when you wished to flatter somebody, you would describe them as possessing sang-froid, whereas if you wished to sting or insult them, they were simply cold-blooded.

‘Our proposal is that you should lead an expedition into the Dreamlands, Herr Cabal,’ said Shadrach, ‘to seek out, capture and bring back into this world the archetype of fear, its principle, the very phobic animus itself.’

‘And if it refuses to come quietly?’

‘Then it will be put down.’

There was a heavy silence after that for some seconds. Then Cabal said, ‘You are asking me to risk my life and sanity. What am I to gain from this?’

Bose coughed. ‘The Silver Key, Herr Cabal. Once we have the animus, we shall have no further need of the Key. Indeed, rational caution dictates that it is never used without good cause, and our cause would already be fulfilled. We think that you, however, would have cause to use it again, in future, in the continuance of your own field of research.’

Cabal considered. Then he spoke: ‘Gentlemen, your proposition is not without interest. I should like to think upon it. You will make your way back to the village and, if you have not already done so, take rooms there. I would suggest that you don’t tell them you have any dealings with me or the standard of service will suffer. I shall send word of my decision to you some time tomorrow. Good day.’ And so saying, he shooed his visitors from his house, ensuring first that they successfully negotiated the path without being ambushed from the tea roses.

Later that evening, Cabal was to be found at the table, the contents of a box file labelled ‘Dreamlands’ spread out before him. He had been accruing data on the place for years, although never as a definite piece of research. After all, while the usefulness of the Dreamlands in his work was beyond dispute, accessing it in a safe and reliable way had always been little more than . . . well, a dream.

Others had attempted it, and some had even done so successfully. As a group, however, they were a bunch of arty sorts – Orientalists and sensualists, who could be depended upon to be undependable, sitting around in silken robes with a book of poetry in one hand and a hookah pipe in the other. They disgusted Cabal for their practical rather than moral shortcomings; if Cabal was to go exploring, he would be inclined to do so with a sola topi on his head and an elephant gun loaded for tyrannosaur in his hands.

Practicality, however, was the enemy of the Dreamlands explorer. He would be standing around in the mundane world until his sola topi bleached and his elephant gun rusted, while in the meantime the disgusting woolly-minded artistic types were off writing bad sonnets by the lake at Sarnath, having wandered into the Dreamlands by the very virtue of being woolly-minded artistic types. It was as intolerable as, for example, the British Library suddenly enforcing a ‘Monkeys Only’ rule, leaving serious scholars fuming outside while, within the sacred walls, macaques made merry with the Magna Carta, and capuchins defecated on the Gutenberg. It galled Cabal beyond belief that those of analytic mind who could make most use of the strange resources of the Dreamlands were, by their very nature, denied entrance.

There was one way through, however: the Silver Key – always capital S, capital K because it truly was that important and that unique. There may be only one Holy Grail, but it is part of an entire junk shop’s worth of similar relics – fragments of the One True Cross, the Spear of Destiny, the Burial Shroud in Turin, and more miraculous bits of dead saints than bear thinking about. The Silver Key, however, was truly unique – the only artefact that allowed physical rather than psychic entry into the Dreamlands, and the only artefact that could be used by absolutely anyone with the will to do so, regardless of opium consumption.

Finding it, however, was the natural prerequisite to using it, and finding it had proved impossible. It seemed to have an irrational fondness for ending up in the hands of the very wastrels who could just as easily have reached the Dreamlands by the narcotic route, and as drug-addled wastrels make poor documenters, the trail of hands through which the Key had passed was as ephemeral as footprints by the low-tide mark.

And now, having been dismissed as, at best, unfindable and, at worst, non-existent, the Silver Key of myth and legend was almost in his hands, certainly within his reach. Cabal considered walking to the village in the night, murdering the men in their beds and stealing the Key, but discarded the notion. After all, they might not have it with them. Besides which, the idea of leading a funded expedition into the Dreamlands appealed to him. He could use the hunt for this ‘Phobic Animus’ of theirs as an opportunity to scout out the land, and gather intelligence for his own subsequent explorations. He did not even mind having three unctuous men following him around: he agreed with their aims and if, wonder of wonders, they succeeded, the mortal world would be that much more rational, and therefore personally bearable to Cabal. Also, he was confident that he could outrun any of them, and if the party ended up being pursued by one or other of the Dreamlands’ many horrors, it was good to know that there were three alternative meals that he could leave in his wake.

The village – it had a name, but Cabal rarely used it – lay some four miles away from where his house stood in its sheltered little valley, a location calculated to prevent the slightest tone of a church bell reaching it even with a tailwind. Four miles is also, incidentally, an awkward distance for a torch-bearing mob to cover: torches gutter, pitchforks grow heavy, and the length of the walk robs a lynching of its necessary spontaneity. Not that the villagers did very much of that, not after the last time.

Cabal kept his visits there to the bare minimum, and for their part, the villagers tolerated him with a forced civility that said as much for their Englishness as for any fear of him. The grocer would take his order in polite silence, only speaking to make the mandatory opening conversational gambit of greeting and comment upon the weather, then to clarify any ambiguities as he transcribed Cabal’s list of requirements, and finally to bid him a sincere and relieved goodbye. People on the street ignored him. Even the most wilful teenager knew the stories and avoided eye contact.

The only individual who sought Cabal out when he visited was Sergeant Parkin, the senior officer of the village’s police force, consisting of Parkin, two unambitious constables, and an ageing Alsatian called ‘Bootsy’. People liked Sergeant Parkin and were grateful for the calm way in which he dealt with the Cabal problem. ‘He knows better than to throw his weight around here,’ Parkin would say, while drinking on duty in the saloon bar of The Old House at Home. ‘We treat him polite, like, and he’s here and gone, and good riddance.’ The villagers might have been less pleased to know that Parkin’s public-relations efforts were entirely focused upon them, as Parkin himself was in Cabal’s employ. In return for a suitable emolument in a brown envelope every Christmas, Parkin kept the village in a state of delicate uncertainty, as a Swiss village might be beneath a mountainside deep in snow: providing they remained calm and quiet, no avalanche would descend upon them. Parkin saw no clash between his role and his actions. After all, his primary concern was to keep the peace, and this he did.

Parkin was talking football in the pub when Mr Jeffries, whose home overlooked the dusty and rarely travelled road that ran by Cabal’s house, entered, approached the sergeant directly, spoke quietly and calmly in his ear, and left again.

Parkin frowned and looked at the calendar hung behind the bar. Beneath a gaudy McGill painting of an exasperated judge and a smirking divorce case co-respondent (‘You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not sleep with this woman?’ ‘Not a wink, my lord!’), the date caused him some mild consternation.

He buttoned up his uniform tunic, put on his helmet, said, ‘Duty calls,’ to the landlord, slung the last inch of his pint down his throat, and went out to face the dreadful Herr Cabal.

Cabal was unsurprised to see Sergeant Parkin waiting by the pump, trough and rarely used well on the village green, his arms crossed, his expression vexed. He walked directly to the policeman, aware that every busybody in the place was watching them. It did not help Cabal to undermine Parkin’s authority, so he exhibited enough deference to maintain the sergeant’s standing, and just enough coldness to remind the onlookers just who they were dealing with here.

‘Funny time of the month for you to be out of your bailiwick, isn’t it, Mr Cabal?’ said Parkin, loudly enough to be heard by the watchers. Then, more quietly, he added, ‘Bugger me, chum, a word of warning would have been nice.’

‘Of course, Parkin,’ replied Cabal, also quietly. ‘I should have sent a member of my extensive household to tell you. The under-butler, perhaps, or a footman, or possibly one of the many grooms.’

Parkin, who knew that Cabal was the only inhabitant of his house, or at least the only living human inhabitant, grunted, and let the point go. ‘All right, so you’re here now. What is it you’re after? You only had your groceries last week. You haven’t run out, have you?’

‘No. I have had visitors. I believe they are staying at the tavern. I wish to speak to them.’

‘What?’ Parkin shot a glance at the Old House at Home. ‘The undertaker, the unfrocked priest and the bloke who looks like an alky? I knew all that codswallop about butterfly hunting was bollocks, but I didn’t know they were anything to do with you. I don’t recall you having any visitors before, Cabal.’

‘I have visitors, just not often, and they don’t normally stop here.’ Cabal was aware of hostile eyes upon him, and of the delicate status quo of the relationship between the villagers and himself seesawing dangerously. ‘Is this a problem, Sergeant?’

‘If you go blundering into the pub, yes. That’s sacred ground, Cabal. Don’t ever go in there. That’s somewhere safe where they can whine about you to their hearts’ content, safe knowing you’ll never show your face in the place. Going in would be . . . provocative. No, I’ve got a better plan.’

The villagers watched the doughty Sergeant Parkin and the vile Johannes Cabal negotiate quietly until, with dangerous anger showing clearly in his body language, the necromancer turned and strode back out of the village in a cold fury. Parkin stood, arms crossed and haughty, and watched Cabal go until he was past the post office. Then, duty done and the village once more safe, he strolled back to the pub to be bought a pint on the house, a suitable reward for a conquering hero. While the landlord pulled the pint, Parkin made his way into the snug and there found Messrs Shadrach, Corde and Bose eating lunch and muttering to one another in conspiratorial tones until Parkin’s entrance plunged them into an embarrassed silence.

‘Afternoon, gentlemen,’ he said jovially. ‘If you wouldn’t mind eating up smartish, like, packing your bags, and pissing off out of it, the parish would be grateful.’

There was a shocked silence. Shadrach made as if to say something, but Parkin leaned down and said, close enough to Shadrach’s face that he was momentarily overcome by pipe tobacco and beer fumes, ‘It’s not a request, sir. It’s not a request.’ Then, dropping easily to a penetrating whisper, he added, ‘You gentlemen have an appointment,’ and quickly pressed a folded piece of paper into Shadrach’s hand. ‘I wouldn’t be late if I were you, squire.’ Parkin rose, shot them a cynical salute, and went off to claim his beer.

They found Cabal sitting on a fence by the road a mile out of the village, shying stones at a crow. He didn’t appear to be working very hard to hit it, which was just as well since the crow was remarkably good at dodging, and indeed seemed to regard having lumps of rock cast at its head as a show of affection on Cabal’s part. ‘Kronk!’ it cawed joyfully, as a lump of flint the size of a baby’s fist hissed by the tip of its beak.

‘You received my communication, I see,’ said Cabal, as they approached. He climbed down and went to meet them. As he did so, the crow belatedly realised the game was over and flew up to land on Cabal’s left shoulder. He shot it a glance from the corner of his eye that it chose to ignore.

‘You have a crow for a pet, Mr Cabal?’ asked Corde.

‘Hardly that. More a fellow traveller. You want my decision?’ The three men nodded, more or less gravely. ‘I agree to your proposition. I shall guide you into and through the Dreamlands. I emphasise that the knowledge on the Dreamlands I bring to this enterprise is based upon the writings of others, and can only be considered as reliable as they are.’

‘Of course,’ said Shadrach.

‘So, if we get lost, I do not wish to hear a single solitary word that the failing is mine. If I do, I shall feed the complainant to the nearest gug.’

‘What is a gug?’

‘Exactly my point. I know, and you do not. My knowledge of the Dreamlands may be flawed, but it is still magnitudes greater than yours. With that caveat, do you remain committed to this undertaking?’

‘We do,’ they chorused, a little shakily.

‘You are sure?’ said Cabal, smiling slightly at their quavering voices. He fed the crow an aged macadamia he had found in his jacket pocket. ‘I ask merely because I have a sense that the Phobic Animus is here with us now, for some reason.’

Not trusting themselves to speak, the three men nodded their assent.

‘Good. Well, now. I assume you have easy access to your institutional funds, as I shall be spending a lot of them immediately. Equipment is by the bye: the Dreamlands will provide what we need, at least to begin with. We shall need to travel, however.’

‘Travel, Mr Cabal?’ said Bose. ‘But surely the Dreamlands are coterminous with all space and time? We can enter them as easily from here as from Timbuktu.’

‘I do not recall suggesting Timbuktu,’ said Cabal. ‘Yes, you are right, but simply standing beside a boundary does not allow you to move through that boundary. A high wall allows no access, not until you find the door. I cast lots before I came out today, and I have found a place where the veil between this world and the Dreamlands is suitably fine that the Silver Key will make short work of it. That is where the Gate of the Silver Key lies, gentlemen, and we should make haste before it decides to relocate to the heart of the Sahara, or the depths of the Antarctic, or – gods forfend – Wolverhampton.’

‘And where does it lie now, Mr Cabal?’

‘Somewhere beneath the sagging gambrel rooftops and behind the crumbling Georgian balustrades of Arkham, in the state of Massachusetts. Arkham, that lies upon the darkly muttering Miskatonic. I have not been there since . . .’ He paused, remembering, and that faint ironic smile twitched across his mouth. ‘Since for ever. Witch-cursed, legend-haunted Arkham. Ah, how I’ve missed it. Oh, and the university library has a copy of Enquêtes interdites. I must remember to steal it, time permitting. That is for later, however. Can your organisation foot the bill for our travel and accommodation?’

‘It can, Mr Cabal,’ said Shadrach, with encouraging firmness. ‘Ever since its creation some thirty years ago, the Institute has been saving its resources for this great endeavour. We shall have all we need, and more.’

‘Good, good,’ said Cabal, distractedly shooing the crow from his shoulder.

‘We will alert the treasurer of the Fear Institute by telegram immediately, and . . .’

He paused: Cabal was holding one index finger up in a gesture of enquiry. ‘The Fear Institute?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it named after a Mr Fear?’

‘No.’

Cabal laughed, a dry, cynical noise that stirred and died in his throat. ‘There is nothing mealy-mouthed about you, is there, gentlemen? Good. I approve.

‘To the Fear Institute, then, I offer my services.’

Chapter 2

IN WHICH THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ARE VISITED, THOUGH BRIEFLY

Neither were the claims of Shadrach, Corde and Bose unfounded. Money was requested, and money was forthcoming. They travelled by train to a major port, and there took passage across the Atlantic. Corde suggested they travel by aeroship, but Johannes Cabal made a face, said that air travel was very overrated and that he would prefer to go by surface ship. Thus, forty-eight hours after their first meeting with Cabal, the party was steaming across the ocean, due for arrival at New York in eight days.

‘From there, we take the New Haven railroad service to Boston, and thence . . .’ Bose consulted the back and front of a train timetable for some moments, dropping it to the table in the lounge in favour of another before going back to the first ‘. . . and thence a short trip, also by train, to Arkham station, which is in, ah . . .’ he read the fine print carefully ‘. . . Arkham.’

Shadrach and Corde nodded sagely at this intelligence. Cabal, for his part, had left his cabin only out of boredom, and was now considering this a folly. The journey so far had been low in incident and high in planning. While a staunch proponent of at least some preparation, Cabal had long since learned the utility and frequent necessity of extemporisation. Once one went beyond that, however, one effectively hobbled oneself, leaving oneself vulnerable and liable to one becoming zero, and one wouldn’t like that. Contingency plans were all well and good, but they were going into a very incognita sort of terra; it all seemed like just so much wasted effort.

When Cabal made a comment along those lines, however, Shadrach said, ‘We must expect the unexpected,’ before laying out his scheme to deal with pirates riding stilt-legged elephants to the others. It was a good plan, as it happened, but then, so had been the plans to deal with giant platypuses and killer begonias. Cabal wondered if they were simply going through the dictionary and evolving procedures to deal with every noun they came across. He hardly cared, having belatedly realised that the more planning they did, the less he had to talk to them.

He also realised, and this he kept to himself, that the Animus travelled with them. These men were afraid, so they planned for the silliest eventualities simply because it kept them occupied. They denied themselves pause for reflection, because fear breeds in the quiet moments.

Cabal also had a small fear: that eight days of their nonsense would drive him insane. He was regretting having been quite so efficient in his preparation that it left him few distractions. He had copies of two very rough maps and a notebook filled with the distilled wisdom of any number of laudanum-enhanced poets with respect to useful knowledge of the Dreamlands. It was a very thin notebook.

He was flicking through it when the others finally agreed on a plan in case of attack by soft furnishings, and Corde asked, ‘What was that creature you were speaking of the other day, Cabal? The gog, was it?’

‘Gug,’ replied Cabal, without looking up. ‘It’s called a gug.’

‘Well, I was just thinking, gentlemen,’ said Corde, addressing Shadrach and Bose, ‘that we should also plan for known threats in the Dreamlands. After all, it is that sort of information that Mr Cabal has at his fingertips.’ The others agreed, with much humming and stroking of chins, that addressing real threats might be a good idea. Having secured their agreement, Corde turned back to Cabal. ‘So, what can you tell us about this gug fellow, then?’

Cabal merely flicked through his notebook until he came to a sketch, and passed it over to them. He was gratified by their sudden pallor and widened eyes.

‘Yes,’ said Shadrach, finally. ‘Well . . . that looks . . . manageable.’ And the three of them started muttering about deadfalls and bear pits.

Cabal made a mental note that ‘manageable’ could apparently be applied as a euphemism for a furry monstrosity with too many forearms, a vertical slit for a mouth, poor dental hygiene and an uncritical worship of dark gods so debauched that even other dark gods would blank them at dark-god parties. He also decided not to burden them with the knowledge that ‘gug’ was the name of a race and not an individual, or to point out that the sketch bore no scale and so their assumption that a gug stood only at about man-sized was profoundly optimistic. He would wait until they had finalised their plan before politely enquiring how the gug would react on finding itself shin deep in their trap or, indeed, how any of its many friends might.

The eight days of the sea crossing became more bearable as the Institute members grew by degrees both bored of their over-planning, and cognisant of its futility after Cabal had dropped a few more bombshells into their sessions.

The final straw was when Cabal innocently enquired of them, ‘What is your plan for cats?’

‘Cats?’ said Shadrach.

‘Cats?’ echoed Corde. ‘Are we likely to be set upon by cats?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Cabal. ‘That rather depends on your plan.’

Bose, the least enthusiastic of the three when it came to covering every conceivable contingency, tapped the box file that lay on the table. It was stuffed with plans, and there were another four just like it in Shadrach’s cabin. ‘Which plan?’ he asked morosely.

‘Your plan for cats.’

Shadrach frowned. If Johannes Cabal had not previously demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that he was disinclined to frivolity, then Shadrach would have been sure that they were being made fun of. ‘Do I understand you correctly, Mr Cabal? Our plan for cats, which has not yet been formulated, depends upon our plan for cats?’

Cabal nodded sadly. ‘It might.’

Shadrach and Corde looked at one another for a long moment. Then, with a heavy heart, Corde took up his pen and wrote upon a virgin sheet of paper, ‘Cats’. He had barely had time to underline it when it was whipped out from beneath his nib by Bose, who tore the sheet into halves, then quarters, then eights, before letting them flutter on to the table. ‘I am having a drink,’ he declared. ‘And I do not mean tea.’

They watched him go off in the direction of the bar, so did not notice Cabal’s quiet smile of triumph before it vanished behind a two-day-old newspaper.²

On the eighth day, New York appeared on the western horizon, glittering monoliths caught in the morning sun. As the ship approached and the famous skyline became more distinct, Cabal’s expression became more sour. Finally, he declared it the most phallocentric conurbation he had ever seen or even heard of, and that they should escape from it as quickly as they could because ‘These subcultures get ideas of incipient superiority, combined with decadence across the social strata that make them psychologically inhuman. They will be tribalised and not subject to recognisable norms. We may even have trouble communicating with them. Mark my words, if we don’t escape that hive as soon as we possibly can, things could go badly.’

Neither did their subsequent experiences undermine Cabal’s expectations. The customs official they met on landing used ‘youse’ interchangeably for not only the singular and plural second-person personal pronouns, but also for the nominative, accusative, dative and possessive forms. A man they asked directions of also claimed to be a native, but his speech drawled on as if he were giving a running commentary on glacial shift. In contrast, the woman in the ticket kiosk at Pennsylvania station spoke rapidly and without pause for almost three minutes, leading Cabal to suspect that she was simultaneously inhaling through her mouth and talking through her nose.

Only when they were safely aboard the Boston train and it was en route did they relax. ‘I feel that much more prepared for the Dreamlands, now,’ commented Corde.

‘I don’t know,’ said Bose, as he watched New York thin out around them. ‘It didn’t feel that alien.’

‘You can’t get a decent bacon sandwich there, you know, old man.’

‘What?’ gasped Bose, scandalised. He glared at the slowly diminishing tall buildings. ‘Barbarians . . .’

Their first impression of Boston was that it had a far more European air about it, and was therefore patently more civilised and much more to everyone’s taste. As it was already mid-afternoon, they decided to break their journey there and find a hotel. They would reach Arkham the next day, and that would be soon enough.

That evening after dinner, they repaired to a private room, taking a large pot of coffee with them. Corde, Shadrach and Bose ranged themselves along one side of the table, cups and notebooks to hand, while Cabal stood opposite them in the manner of a lecturer.

‘It has been said,’ he began, ‘that what you do not know cannot hurt you. This would come as a revelation to many, if it were not for the fact that what they did not know had already torn them to shreds and giblets.’

‘I’m not sure that’s the context that—’ began Shadrach, a little prissily, but Cabal was not listening.

‘Our motto for this expedition, then, is forewarned is forearmed,’ he continued, neglecting to mention that his personal motto for this expedition was The devil take the hindmost. He paused, wondering where would be a good place to start and, as he did so, he saw Bose’s sheep-like expression and decided that brevity was the best policy.

‘The Dreamlands are an inexact quantity. A cartographer’s and a demographer’s nightmare – or perhaps jobs for life – because the Dreamlands are constantly changing. Slowly, I grant you, but their tectonics are as hummingbirds compared to those of the waking world. I have maps, but their reliability must be suspect to a degree. Thus, we ask, and we ask often. Which brings us to the people.

‘As we have already discussed, there are two ways for a mortal to enter the Dreamlands – corporeally or incorporeally. In the former case, their body accompanies them and all is straightforward. In the latter case, it is not clear where the matter comes from to form the dreamer’s new Dreamland body, or where it goes to when the dreamer awakes. Many dreamers, of course, never return. Either due to accidents in the mundane world while they sleep, or by dint of the injudicious use of drugs to bring them into the Dreamlands in the first place, they die here, yet live there. It is impossible to be sure, but it seems likely that the indigenous population are all – or largely – immigrants from here. No, Herr Bose,’ for Bose was looking around, startled, ‘not specifically from this hotel. I mean from Earth and Earth’s prehistory.’

‘Wouldn’t they be a bit . . . you know, old, by this time, Cabal?’ asked Corde.

‘Time is a more flexible asset there, Herr Corde, but I take your point. The current natives of the Dreamlands were born and bred there from ancient dreamers who either could not or would not return.’

‘Is that fact, Mr Cabal?’ asked Shadrach, making copious notes in a flowing cursive hand. ‘Or supposition?’

‘The latter,’ said Cabal unabashed. ‘It is difficult to explain the localised racial traits if it is true, but not impossible. Perhaps, millennia ago, immigrants from Ancient Greece or lost Mu came there and settled close together. That is human nature, after all. And so those populations naturally have Grecian or Muite characteristics to this day. It is impossible to be sure. The Dreamlands are . . .’ he waved at his folder of notes, his distaste very evident ‘. . . very woolly.’

Corde, who felt too much orientation would dull the romance of it, was happy to change the subject. ‘Then let us simply be on our guard and meet the Dreamlands as they meet us. We shall pick up the gist of them quickly enough, I have no doubt. Now, Cabal, the Gate of the Silver Key. You have its exact location.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Cabal was languid as he put the loose notes carefully back into their folder. ‘I know precisely where the keyhole is.’

‘Then . . . ?’

‘But I cannot give you a precise location.’

There was a silence, finally broken by Bose whispering to Shadrach, ‘He’s doing that thing again, like he did with the cats.’

‘I thought you had cast lots or some such . . .’ Corde resisted the urge to say ‘nonsense’ and instead said ‘. . . as a method for determining the current location of the Gate.’

‘I have, indeed,’ said Cabal, ‘and my findings have been precise and unambiguous. We shall catch the train to Arkham tomorrow morning and locate the Gate by evening.’

‘Why leave it so late?’

‘Because there will be less chance of witnesses.’

Shadrach regarded Cabal with the uncertain air of censure one might expect from a headmaster confronted by a boy who has smashed the atom, and the school with it. ‘You mean to say, we shall have to break into somewhere?’

‘No,’ said Cabal. Then he thought for a moment longer and added, ‘Yes. But no.’

‘Are you being deliberately obscure, Cabal?’ said Corde, his smile fading.

‘Partially, but – pace, gentlemen – the answer is obscure in itself. Explaining it will . . . Suffice it to say that you hired me for my ability to deal with certain situations with a certain professionalism. I must ask you to trust me when I say that this is one such situation. I could give you a more exact answer, but in doing so I would endanger the success of the mission. You must trust me.’

And so, with ill-grace but no alternative, they did.

Oxford has its dreaming spires, and Paris its lights and love, but neither place exerts quite the same influences upon the poetic and susceptible as Arkham, the city of shadows. Shadows, literal and figurative, that lie upon the homes and upon the minds of that strange town’s inhabitants. By European standards, of course, Arkham was a new town, not even half a millennium old, yet an air of ancient decrepitude had fallen upon the place scarcely after the first house was raised that baffled expectations and raised the hackles.

The land on which it had been built had been bought from the indigenes for the usual trinkets, but in this case there had rapidly grown an unspoken suspicion that the former owners had got the better part of the deal. At first glance, there was nothing wrong with the land: it stood green and promising, rising gently from the sullen waters of the Miskatonic river that ran through it. Plots were quickly drawn up and dispersed, and eager settlers arrived to make new lives there. Soon, however, their eagerness tarnished and faded, replaced by an uncertain feeling that all was not well. But the land was good, and the location perfect, and practicality overcame vague doubts. Soon, other settlements were established, like Kingsport to the south-east, Innsmouth to the east, and Dunwich inland to the west. Soon after, the rumours began.

The whole region seemed indefinably tainted. Bad things happened. Brutality, drunkenness and petty crime stained the reputations of the towns, but there were whispers of worse things still. Witchcraft was afoot in Arkham, incest in Dunwich, murder and cannibalism in Innsmouth went the gossip. The towns seemed mired in degeneration and sin against which the burghers had no recourse. But then the witch hunters came from nearby Salem, and cleansed by fire and rope. Though they killed only the hapless innocent in Salem, nobody ever made such claims for Arkham or her near neighbours. Here, the self-styled inquisitors saw things that assured them of their righteous cause, even while it shook their faith in a benevolent God.

And so, Arkham and Innsmouth and the others were saved from the atavistic blight, all was light and joy, and evil ne’er again haunted these places. Certainly, that was the impression the towns were keen to convey, if only to save themselves all that bother again, and – in common with the best self-fulfilling prophecies – that was how things seemed. Some carried this feat with more assuredness than others: Arkham became home to the popular and renowned Miskatonic University, which in turn attracted learned and artistic communities to the town; Kingsport grew lean and ascetic, as though time had lost interest in it, thereby holding the twin illnesses of decay and progress from its door. Innsmouth, however, kept its secrets and grew cunning in that keeping, while Dunwich just rotted amid its fields like an unharvested pumpkin.

But it is Arkham that claims our interest, amid its quaint old-world houses and its famous university, which, if not quite Ivy League, still brings to mind things that climb and creep.

The vast majority of Arkhamites are pleased with their town in many respects. It is architecturally interesting, it has a good university, it is pleasantly placed, and if it has some small historical opprobria attached to its name, then these have mellowed through time to lend nothing more than a delicious notoriety to the town. In this last matter, the vast majority of Arkhamites are deluded.

Arkham lies in a region of reality where the weft and warp have worn dangerously thin. Here, people may think things they ought not, see things they ought not, and be seen by things that ought not be. There are those within the town who know of these facts, and who willingly research into them, either for purposes of knowledge, protection or, most frequently, personal power. It is a perilous path, and few survive it intact, either spiritually or physically, those who reach the end finding that the prize is rarely worth the cost. As they suffer and die and suffer some more, beyond the thin veil there are dark shapes that gibber and pipe, and one voice laughs and never stops.

Yet there are always more who come to try to draw the veil aside. Which suits the dark shapes, for they know a secret that was ancient long before even amoebae floated in the primordial oceans of Earth. An ancient truth that sings throughout this universe and the others that crowd around it, a secret that may be expressed in words as ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’

One such sucker was Eldon Harwell, a young man recently dropped out of – before he could be sent down from – Miskatonic University. Eldon’s path into moral disintegration had begun when he had attended a showing at the Pickman Gallery on the corner of Pickman and West. It had been a poorly attended affair, and Harwell had been quite full of nibbles and cheap white wine when the proprietor had taken a shine to him, and invited him to see the ‘private’ collection after the public showing was concluded. Drunk and bored, Harwell had readily agreed, hopeful that the collection would be sufficiently debauched to please the jaded senses of a citizen of Eldersburg, Maryland, such as himself.

Harwell, as a former undergraduate, was confident of his worldliness, but what he saw behind the threadbare velvet curtain kicked open several doors in his psyche that would better have remained locked. He was, for example, familiar with the theory if not the practice of bestiality, but the beautiful – and in pure aesthetic terms, in ratio and technique, in application and style, it was beautiful – painting of women sporting with hounds unsettled him more than he had expected. First in the recognition that the hounds were not exactly hounds and, later when he thought back, the realisation that the women were not exactly women.

He slept badly that night, and when exasperation finally drove him from his bed, he looked out from his garret room across the junction of Lich Street and Peabody Avenue. There lay Arkham Cemetery, shadowed and silvered by the light of a gibbous moon that seemed to leer down upon the silent, empty scene.

But, no! What was that? In the corner of the burial ground, through the ivy-twined railings, he caught a glimpse of movement between the gravestones. It paused, as if aware of him, then stepped out into the cold moonlight, and he saw that it was a dog, only a dog.

And then it looked up at him, and rose on to its hind legs, and it walked like a man.

He awoke the next morning on the floor, a bump at the back of his head where it had struck the floor when he fell, fainting. This was a small blessing, as it allowed him to reorder the disordered events of the night in a form that caused him less distress. He had risen, and tripped in the darkness, banging his head in the fall. This had caused a horrible nightmare triggered by the paintings he had seen. There had been no dog in the graveyard. There had been no dog.

He was lying to himself and, in his heart, he knew it. What he did not know was he could never be the same man again. The doors had been opened, and they allowed transit in both directions. He began to have ideas, interesting ideas in the same way that the ideas of the Marquis de Sade or Samuel Taylor Coleridge were interesting. Perverse, out-of-the-usual-run-of-things ideas that buffeted around his head like especially muscular butterflies, seeking expression. This was of the greatest torment to Harwell for, though he was as debauched and worldly as a man of his age and means could reasonably expect, though he was now illuminated by the truth of everything and was mere baby steps from comprehension, he was entirely talentless.

Musically, his attempts at ‘Chopsticks’ sounded like Stravinsky in a temper, his art was inferior to a manatee’s attempts at finger painting, and what his prose lacked in style, it also lacked in adverbs. The overall effect was that Eldon Harwell was a blocked spigot; a kettle filled with meaning and a cork down his spout.

Such a situation has driven greater men into the arms of madness, and opiates, and barmaids. Being a lesser man, Harwell succumbed to all three, before settling into a state of melancholia, from which his few remaining friends could not stir him.

In that dismal garret, he sat with his head in his hands, unable to articulate the vistas that moiled and slithered across his mind. At hand were a pen, ink and a half ream of cheap paper, for Harwell could at least spell and therefore clutched miserably at writing as an outlet. One day, he hoped and prayed, the boiling light he could perceive but not describe would resolve into coherence, and he would be its conduit. A great poem would pour from him, and leave him empty and peaceful. He also knew his next act would be to burn the manuscript before it could infect anyone else or, worse, reinfect him. As yet he had remained frustrated in this. Every attempt to shake loose the cosmic truth within him had resulted in a garbled mess or, on one occasion, a limerick about vicious but stupid crabs.

The curtains remained drawn at all hours. He feared seeing something else in the cemetery, so when the knock came at his door late one night, it surprised him terribly and he cried, suddenly fearful, ‘Who is there? Who raps upon my chamber door at this late hour?’

Beyond the portal, there came the muffled sound of a whispered conversation. Finally, a sepulchral voice intoned, ‘I . . .’ There was another pause, amid fierce muttering. ‘Which is to say, we . . .’

Then Harwell heard a new voice murmur something that sounded exasperated and possibly defamatory in German before saying, ‘Oh, just open the door, Herr Harwell. We have business to discuss with you.’

Reassured by the matter-of-fact tone, Harwell unlocked his door and slowly opened it to reveal four men whose identities must surely be apparent to all but the most inattentive reader. Johannes Cabal was the first in, impatient energy written into his every movement. He looked critically but silently around the room as Shadrach, Corde and Bose filed in behind him and stood uncomfortably with their hats in their hands as Cabal wandered about the place with long strides. At the window, he twitched the curtain back a crack and looked out over the crossroad for perhaps half a minute, before allowing the curtain to fall back into place. He stood in silent thought for a moment before saying, ‘We do not have a great deal of time, gentlemen. We are not the only party with an interest in Herr Harwell. We arrived barely in time.’

‘An – an interest?’ stammered Harwell. ‘Who has an interest in me? Who are you?’

‘Elucidation would be redundant,’ said Cabal. He snapped his fingers peremptorily at Shadrach. ‘The Key, sir! Quickly now.’

‘The key . . .’ It took a moment for Shadrach to take Cabal’s meaning. ‘The Silver Key?’

‘Of course the Silver Key,’ said Cabal, his patience burning away as quickly as a powder trail. ‘You do have it, do you not? If we have come all this way, and it is sitting on the dressing-table at home . . .’

‘Yes, of course I have the Silver Key, but it is useless without a gateway. Isn’t that true?’

Harwell glanced around the group, now at least partially convinced that he was hallucinating this indecipherable gang of men cluttering up his room. He hadn’t realised it was possible to suffer absinthe flashbacks, but it seemed the most likely explanation.

‘Yes, it is true, and there is a gateway here. The Key, if you please?’

‘A gateway,’ said Harwell. ‘In my room?’

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Bose, as genial as Pickwick. ‘Your garret is home to a gateway to another world! Isn’t that wonderful? The land of dreams, no less.’ Shadrach shushed him, to no obvious effect.

Harwell’s expression showed dawning comprehension. ‘The land of dreams . . . the land of . . . Of course! It explains so much! My dreams, my visions! I understand now!’ He looked frantically around, turning on the spot. ‘Where is it? Where is this gateway? It must be near – I can feel it.’

Cabal meanwhile had accepted the Key from a reluctant Shadrach and was in the process of sliding it from the long chamois envelope in which it was kept. He let it lie in his hand for a long moment, feeling its weight wax and wane, watching the bittings ebb and flow, like crystals melting and re-forming. It was silver, certainly, but only in colour. What it was made of was an entirely different question.

He tucked the envelope into his coat pocket while taking a firm grip of the Key. ‘Yes, Herr Harwell. The Gate of the Silver Key is very close indeed.’

Harwell turned to him, his next question already forming on his lips, but he never had the chance to voice it. For Cabal raised the Silver Key to head height and, without hesitation, drove it between Eldon Harwell’s eyes.

There was no crunching of bone, no spraying blood or cerebral fluid as the Key slid through skin, subcutaneous fat, flesh, skull and brain. There was no sound at all, but for the collective horrified gasp of shock from the onlookers. It is not true to say that the Key’s passage between Harwell’s frontal lobes left no mark: the flesh and bone crumbled and melted into thin white smoke and what was left was nothing more or less than a neatly defined keyhole. None of them thought this strange at the time, but only afterwards in reflection; at that moment it seemed that the keyhole had always been there, obvious and apparent to them as soon as they had seen Harwell, yet somehow they had forgotten about it. It was a curious, half-formed memory, their first experience of the nature of the Dreamlands while waking, as its influence escaped through the opening gate into the mortal world like jasmine-scented air escaping a garden.

Only Cabal and Harwell made no sound, until Cabal turned the Silver Key in its lock and Harwell made a soft sigh as of realisation or perhaps recognition. Certainly, his eyes widened as though he could see things that had lain hidden from him his whole life. ‘It’s . . . beautiful,’ he whispered, and a solitary tear rolled down his cheek as the confused miasma of half-glimpsed possibilities that had haunted him since that night at the Pickman Gallery finally grew sharper in focus. ‘It’s all so . . .’

Then his face grew tense, the skin pulled back against the bone. ‘There’s something else, something else . . .’

Cabal finished turning the key and gently withdrew it from Harwell’s head. The keyhole remained, and from it lines of liquid light rolled up vertically across the centre of the brow and down along the ridge of the nose.

‘The Gateway . . .’ said Corde. ‘The Gateway of the Silver Key.’ The silver line of light was extending over Harwell’s head and down his chest, the glow becoming fiercer as it travelled. ‘I’d naturally assumed—’

‘Walls do not dream,’ interrupted Cabal, and Corde fell silent.

The line had almost bisected Harwell and with every inch the line travelled, his expression of disbelief warped slowly into horror. ‘No . . . no! I can see it! I can see it! I cannot . . . must not . . . God help me!’

‘What can you see?’ demanded Cabal, standing close to Harwell. He noted that the stricken man’s eyes seemed to be growing further apart. The gateway was opening.

‘I see . . . it all!’ Harwell’s eyes were focused on something far beyond Cabal, beyond the grubby little room, beyond this world and the realms of space that it sits within. ‘Oh, mercy! Is there no mercy?’

And, with that, the tips of the line of light joined, the Gateway of the Silver Key opened wide, and that was the end of Eldon Harwell. He became something, but what it was, living or dead, was without definition. He shattered into crumbs that sublimed into gas that smeared into liquid that sublimed into something else again until all that was left was the gateway, burning in the air with the light of a bright afternoon into a dirty garret at midnight.

‘You . . .’ Bose was, for once, lost for words. ‘You killed him.’

Cabal shrugged, as if Bose had accused him of using the wrong spoon at dinner. ‘He was already dead. He’d allowed certain conceptual theomorphs to take residence in his mind. He would have killed himself or been killed within a few months in any case. At least this way he served a purpose.’ He noticed some pieces of paper lying on Harwell’s writing-table and studied them for a moment. ‘He was a poet. No loss, then.’

‘You are a cold man, Mr Cabal,’ said Corde, not entirely disapprovingly.

Cabal did not answer. He was looking at the portal, stepping around it to gauge its width. ‘This will not be a quick passage. I estimate it will take approximately a minute for each of us to complete the transition from here to there. We must start immediately.’

‘We are leaving now?’ Shadrach was shocked and a little angry. ‘When we came on this little reconnaissance of yours, you gave us to believe that we would only be confirming the location of the gateway.’

Cabal waved a complacent hand at the tall, glowing ellipse hanging in the centre of the floor. ‘As we have.’

‘But what about our equipment? Our preparations? You are asking us to plunge into the unknown!’

‘This entire expedition is a plunge into the unknown, Shadrach. Your equipment is useless. Your preparations are moot. The Dreamlands shall provide. The one thing they cannot give us is time.’ He walked to the window and gestured for the others to join him. He drew the curtain back far enough for them to look out into the street. From the graveyard, dogs that were not dogs were streaming, running straight for the building in which they stood. They made a sound as they went, a strange gruff mewling unlike anything any of the men had heard before. It took little imagination to discern shifts in intonation that sounded worryingly like language.

‘Why are the streets empty of people?’ asked Bose. ‘It’s not that late. What . . .’

Cabal picked up his Gladstone bag, opened it and removed his revolver. ‘Because we are in the borderlands of dream and nightmare, and in nightmares, there is never anyone there to help. Is anyone else carrying a gun?’

Shadrach, Corde and Bose shook their heads. Cabal growled with displeasure. ‘Gentlemen! We are in the United States of America. Going armed is virtually mandatory. Quickly, then. Through the gateway. I shall hold off our visitors.’

He was halfway through the door on to the upper landing when Corde called after him, ‘What are those creatures?’

‘Ghouls,’ said Cabal, and then he was gone.

Cabal looked down the stairwell, and weighed up the options for defence. It was not the first time he had fought in very similar circumstances and the knowledge that he had survived that time lent his actions confidence. He opened the revolver’s cylinder and checked the load before reclosing it with a purposeful click. The sound of scrabbling at the door grew as the ghouls wrestled with distant memories of when they were human and knew how door handles worked. The door was locked – Cabal had made a point of securing it after they entered – but he knew the ghouls’ impatience would overwhelm their caution soon enough, and then a cheap door with a cheap lock would present no barrier to them.

Nor did it. The scrabbling at the wood became faster and more violent and then, suddenly, the door was smashed open to the clatter of the striker plate on the tiled hallway. Cabal hoped for their sakes that Messrs Shadrach, Corde and Bose were making their way through the gateway because he would be needing it himself soon enough, and if any of them was not through by that time, he would personally ensure that they became the expedition’s first casualties. The Gateway of the Silver Key was no longer just the immediate goal of their plans, it was now their only route to safety. Cabal drew back the revolver’s hammer and aimed down the stairwell.

The black tide of fast-moving shadows swamped the lower flights, swirling anti-clockwise up the well. Cabal held his fire – he had only six shots and doubted he would be afforded an opportunity to reload. It was when they reached the landing below him that he aimed at the first ghoul up the flight of stairs directly beneath him, and shot it through the back of the head. The .577 round proved as efficacious against the vile dun-coloured rubbery hide of the ghoul as it ever had against Deep Ones or, indeed, people. The discharge was staggeringly loud in the confined space, and the plume of smoke that jetted down served to add to the creatures’ confusion as their comrade slumped and rolled back down among them, leaving much of its vaguely canine face on the step.

Behind him, he heard Bose say, ‘Mr Shadrach is through, Mr Cabal! Quickly, Mr Corde! Your turn!’

Cabal performed a rapid mental calculation and decided that he would have to hold the ghouls off for a little longer than he had hoped. Down below, he could hear chewing. Ghouls are a notoriously unsentimental race, and once one is dead it is immediately redefined in the minds of its friends and colleagues as lunch. It would seem that even their great desire to reach the gateway before it closed came second to a quick snack.

Cabal drew back the hammer again, the loud click as the lock engaged serving to reconcentrate the minds of the ghouls marvellously. There was some muttered speech, a disgusting meeping and glibbering that appalled Cabal’s linguistic sensibilities. It appalled him even more to have to speak in the same tongue.

‘You down there,’ he garbled, aware that his accent was poor. Silence suddenly fell. ‘I have no argument with your people. Go back, and no more need die.’

‘You have the gateway,’ barked a voice, presumably that of the pack leader.

‘What need you of the gateway? Your people can travel to the Dreamlands easily. The gateway is ours for the moment. Leave us in peace.’

There was a pause. Then the ghoul said, ‘I know you.’

Cabal’s eyes narrowed. He could feel an uncomfortable tension uncurling like an electric eel across his neck and shoulders. It took him a moment to realise that it was fear. He stamped it down immediately: this was the very irrational terror that caused the Fear Institute so much exasperation. Yet it was the irrationality of it that concerned him more than the way his heart pounded or the sweat that suddenly beaded his cool brow. He had encountered ghouls before, and they had never given him more than momentary inconvenience. Why was he afraid?

With an effort, he brought his mind to bear on the situation at hand. This ghoul was a cunning one, but not nearly cunning enough. It would engage his curiosity to take him off guard and then charge the stairs. He braced his gun hand and prepared to fire. ‘I don’t know you.’

‘You would not, but you knew me once,’ said the ghoul, and it said it in English. ‘Oh, you knew me once, Johannes Cabal.’

Silence fell once more. The moment drew out. ‘You knew me once, Johannes Cabal,’ the voice repeated. Still, there was no reply. On the stairs, a hideous hiccoughing growl arose. The ghoul was laughing.

In the garret where Eldon Harwell once lived, and where a police investigation would later find no clues as to his disappearance but a bloodstain on the stairs that analysis showed not to be human, the Gateway of the Silver Key flickered and extinguished. Of Harwell and his four mysterious visitors, there was no trace.

Surviving fragments of Cyril W. Clome’s manuscript for The Young Person’s Guide to Cthulhu and His Friends: No. 1 Great Cthulhu

Now, best beloved, let us consider Great Cthulhu. He is the greatest of the Great Old Ones and is a god. Yes, he is. A real god. Not one of those pathetic gods that depend on silly people having ‘faith’ in them (‘Faith’ is a word that means ‘having to pretend’, O best beloved). Not one of those stupid, weak, powerless gods that simpering people invent to try to keep them warm in the endless freezing void of the true reality, in the aching futility of our fleeting, impotent lives. We know a song about that, don’t we?

(Text illegible due to scorching)

No, Great Cthulhu does not need us to worship him – he is real whether we do or not. But we better had, because one day he will wake in his cosy little sunken city of R’lyeh (which is at 47º 9´ S, 126º 43´ W in the South Pacific Ocean, make a note), have a lovely big yawn and a stretch I should think – ‘Yaaaawwwwwwn!’ – and then kill everyone. But if you’ve been good little boys and girls and worshipped him properly, he might not kill you first. Isn’t that splendid?

Chapter 3

IN WHICH CABAL LEADS AN EXPEDITION BEYOND THE WALL OF SLEEP

The mountain stood taller than any mountain had any right to stand without liquefying its own base with the sheer weight of rock upon it. Even close by that base, the four men looked out and stood speechless at the astonishing vista spread before them, like the world before gods. Well, three of them stood speechless with awe, the fourth was entirely preoccupied with beating dust from his trousers where he had stumbled on escaping the rapidly closing Gateway of the Silver Key.

‘My God,’ breathed Corde, finally rediscovering speech. ‘It’s . . . magnificent. I never dreamed . . .’

‘No, you doubtless have,’ said Johannes Cabal, as he smacked dust from his calves. ‘You have forgotten it, though. That is the nature of dreams.’ Finally, about as satisfied as he was going to be without a valet with a clothes-brush to hand, he straightened and took in the vast world that stretched out before them. He sniffed, stuck out his jaw and picked up his Gladstone. ‘If it were a view in the waking world, I would be impressed. As it is, it is the shared fantasy of a hundred billion sleepers. Impressive in its own way, but I shan’t be buying any postcards.’

‘A hundred billion, Mr Cabal?’ said Shadrach. ‘You are mistaken. There are not even two billions in the world today, and fewer than half are sleeping at any one time.’

Cabal turned to him and gave him the sort of look a teacher might give a disappointing pupil before correcting him, and then thrashing him. ‘You are correct in as far as there are no more than two billions in the world. You are in error if you believe that I am only considering the Earth.’ He paused and looked Shadrach up and down. ‘What in the name of Azathoth’s little drummer boy are you wearing?’

‘What am I wearing? That’s an . . . Good Lord!’

Shadrach no longer looked nearly so much like an undertaker. Instead, his clothing fell more into the category of ‘gorgeous’, not a description that had ever before been attached to him in all his years. He wore a burgundy simarre in the Tudor style, trimmed with fur of a curious pattern, over a doublet of cream samite, slit upper hose of the same burgundy but with a brave crimson silk within, black lower hose double gartered in yellow, and square-toed shoes. He reached up and removed the slouching brown velvet cap from his head and looked at it in wonder. The overall effect was of a successful merchant of the sixteenth century, an Antonio before all that unpleasantness with Shylock.

‘I – I don’t understand,’ stammered Shadrach, his usual bloodless composure shattered. For his answer, he received an equally astonished cry from Corde as he, too, discovered a change in his wardrobe.

Corde’s profoundly unenterprising twill three-piece, trilby and woollen tie had been replaced with something altogether more dashing. Again the tone was a strange mix of very late medieval and Tudor, but the cut seemed to owe more to the cinema: a brown leather jerkin with slashed sleeves over a white doublet, black breeches and knee boots, a sword at the hip, a soft black hat with a black feather tipped in red, held in place by a small brooch of a dagger bearing a single tiny ruby.

After all the crying out and holding out of hands in astonishment, Bose’s thunder had been too thoroughly stolen for him to do much more than look down at his own clothes and mumble a slightly surprised, ‘Oh.’ For he, too, had experienced a transformation. Gone were his previous clothes which, while conservatively stylish and expensively cut, had not made much of an impression on anyone. Now he wore a simarre much like Shadrach’s, but where that had complacently proclaimed wealth, this was of profound blackness, such that the moleskin collar seemed verging on the gaudy. The whole ensemble, from shoes to the four-sided flat hat perched upon Bose’s surprised head, was black, the only touches of colour being his pale face, the wide red-gold chain he wore running across his shoulders and down to a medal in the middle of his chest, and the blue carbuncle in the ring he wore upon the middle finger of his gloved left hand.

They spent some moments gawping at themselves and one another before turning their attention to Cabal who, they were confounded to discover, was still dressed much as he had been back in Arkham, although a scuff on his right shoe’s toecap that he had suffered on the street was now gone and a button on his left jacket cuff, formerly depending upon a loosening thread where it had caught in a doorway, was now perfectly secure.

Bose spoke for them all when he said, ‘I don’t understand, Mr Cabal.’

For his part, Cabal seemed to find something secretly amusing about the whole scene, although the smirk was in a sense psychic, for his expression did not change at all. ‘Herr Shadrach, you remind me of a portrait by Holbein the Younger. A successful merchant. Tell me, did you ever harbour ambitions towards a mercantile life?’

‘No,’ said Shadrach, immediately. Then he frowned. ‘Well, briefly . . . once, long ago. When I was a boy, I visited my uncle’s warehouse. He was a trader in teas and bric-à-brac from the Orient. He travelled a lot. I wanted . . . My father told me not to be foolish. There was a family business to inherit, his business.’ Shadrach paused, looking at his hands. ‘Shadrach and Son, undertakers.’ He looked up at Cabal, frowning. ‘Is this . . . this what I could have been?’

‘You could have been anything, but you wanted to be a merchant, evidently. Herr Corde, I surmise, read far too many twopenny papers when he was young.’ Mr Corde was not listening. He had freed the sword from its scabbard and, while not fully drawing it, was admiring the blade. It shone white and blue as it caught the light, steel of such beautifully patterned perfection that the swordsmiths of Damascus would have torn their beards in frustration at the very sight of it.

‘You, however,’ said Cabal, turning to Bose, ‘you, sir, intrigue me. What is your heartfelt boon? Your great sublimated desire?’

‘Well,’ said Bose, before becoming distracted by the gold chain. He lifted the medal and tried to read it, without success. ‘Well, I was thinking that, perhaps, one day, I might like to be a magistrate.’ Everybody looked at him. He blushed and smiled awkwardly. ‘It’s good to have an ambition.’

Cabal nodded. ‘A chain of office, of course. Another historical trapping. The Dreamlands seem incapable of letting any lily go ungilded.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Shadrach, profoundly uninterested in Bose’s long-term ambitions to hand out small fines and morally improving lectures in court. ‘But what about you, Mr Cabal? Why haven’t your clothes changed?’

Corde slammed his sword back into its scabbard with jaunty gusto. ‘Because you’re already what you want to be, eh, Cabal?’

‘Just so,’ said Cabal, and this time the spectre of a smirk flittered around his mouth. He turned to look down the slope of the valley, and the smirk diminished to nothing. ‘Now, to business.’

He reached down for his bag, and paused. It seemed that he had not managed the transition into the Dreamlands quite as unaltered as he had thought. The bag was open, as it should have been. He had left it open on the floor of the garret, the Silver Key lying within. When he had abandoned his post at the top of the stairs, he had dropped his pistol in before snatching up the bag and throwing himself into the vortex. The Key, he was relieved to see, was still where he had left it. His cane still remained secured to the bag by the leather straps that ran up the sides. Of his gun, however, there was no sign. Instead, lying along the open maw of the bag, like a stick in a toothless dog’s mouth, there was a sword, scabbarded and attached to a belt.

Cabal bit back a snarl. Of course the Dreamlands would not tolerate something so prosaically mechanical as his Webley. Here, progress was held back by a vast romantic inertia as great as that of the mountain on which they stood. One day, it might finally allow flintlocks, perhaps at some future date when the waking world was using death rays and germ bombs.

Cabal took up the sword by the belt and strapped it on. It hung neatly at his left hip, and added a pleasing weight to his stride that he knew a real sword would never match. Demonstrating none of Corde’s bashfulness, he drew the blade in a swift motion and tested its balance. Predictably, it was perfect, although it was no sort of weapon that he had ever held or even seen before. It was a rapier of sorts, but of a combative nature rather than for fencing: flat-bladed with a shallow curve that swept up to a right angle a finger’s length from the sharp tip. Cabal slashed and thrust at the air for a few seconds. An interesting weapon, he concluded. At heart a rapier, but with just enough sabre in its family tree to allow the easy hacking of unfortunates when the mood took one.

He returned it to its scabbard with precision, and looked up to see Corde watching him with interest. ‘You’ve fenced before, Cabal?’

Cabal noticed that familiarity was breeding sufficient contempt for them no longer to address him as ‘Mr Cabal’. ‘I have. Have you?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Corde drew his sword, and it was as different from Cabal’s as a Viking one-and-a-half-hander bastard sword is, unsurprisingly, from a rapier with a bit of sabre on the side. ‘Nothing like this, I grant you.’ He whirled the sword in the air and it seemed for a moment that its path was made of a gleaming arc of solid steel. He swept it back again and then around his head, his eyes filling with undisguised joy. ‘It’s wonderful . . . wonderful!’

Suddenly his sword stopped in mid-air with a sharp cry of steel on steel. Cabal stood with his own once again drawn, halting Corde’s in an exact parry. ‘It is a dream, Corde.’ He lowered and scabbarded it. ‘Time is pressing, and we shall have plenty of time for you to demonstrate your dazzling swordsmanship. I would remind you that we have an entire world to search and we are by no means immortal.’ He took up his bag while Corde reluctantly slid his blade into its scabbard.

Cabal took out his folder of notes on the Dreamlands and found a flattish section of ground on which to unroll a map.

‘You have a map, Cabal?’ said Shadrach. ‘By all that’s wonderful . . . !’

‘Please do not become overly excited by it, gentlemen,’ Cabal warned. ‘It was drawn from the fancies of poets and the ravings of maniacs – which is to say much the same thing – and is therefore only slightly more useful than a blank sheet of paper. Why it is always poets, who are at the laudanum trough or gulping down absinthe, instead of somebody useful like cartographers, I have no idea. In any event, we have an unreliable map. And upon it, we are . . .’ Cabal stabbed his finger down ‘. . . here.’

The others crowded around and looked at the map. After a few moments of angling his head this way and that, Shadrach asked, ‘How can you be so sure?’

Cabal took up the map, rolled it and put it into his bag. ‘In all the Dreamlands, there is one particularly famous mountain, Mount Hatheg-Kla. We are about one mile up it.’ He turned and pointed towards the cloud-wreathed summit. There was something unpleasant about the mountain’s perspective, as if there were simply too much of it and it had somehow furled itself just enough for it to be acceptable to the human psyche. Once inside the mind, however, it popped open like an umbrella with an unreliable catch, jabbing the sensitive fleshy parts with the spiky tips of its ribs and poking about with its contradimensional ferrule. Cabal, from long mental exercise, firmly closed the umbrella again and dropped it into the elephant’s foot of his super-ego. The others, less prepared, were struck dumb by the immensity of the prospect.

Insensitive to his fellows’ state, Cabal continued: ‘Seven miles further up is the highest any human has ever climbed. Barzai the Wise was his name, which just goes to show that names don’t tell you everything, for two miles further up is where the gods themselves sometimes sport. I have no idea what comprises sport for a god – don’t ask. In any event, they took exception to Barzai getting close enough to irk them.’

‘What happened to him?’ asked Corde, the first to discover that the best cure for an umbrella in the psyche was simply not to look.

‘Oh, something ghastly. It usually is with gods. They have no sense of proportion. If you are particularly interested, there is a rock at the eight-mile point that has the full story carved into it as a warning to the curious. Why, Corde? Curious?’

Corde was, but not enough to risk either the climb, or the possibility of getting his very own memorial, courtesy of the gods.

Cabal smiled, technically. He turned his back on the peak and pointed out over the land. ‘That river is the Oukranos. If we follow it down to the sea, we shall find ourselves in the city of Hlanith. Hlanith is a useful sort of place for dreamers, as it is close to the Enchanted Wood.’ He pointed at a great forest visible south of the river a good way off. ‘A twee name, but furiously dangerous. It is where most mortals who enter the Dreamlands through the usual route of sleep first emerge. On the other side of the river is the Dark Wood. A less twee name, but no less dangerous, just in case you were hoping for some sort of inverse relationship between names and peril here. Almost everywhere is dangerous, so you should get used to that idea as soon as possible, if you wish to survive this world.’

Shadrach and Bose had finally managed to tear their eyes away from the peak of Hatheg-Kla with the help of Corde, who had taken firm hold of their chins and steered their gaze in a safe direction by force. ‘How will this . . . Hlanith,’ Shadrach chewed on the unfamiliar word, making it sound like a small mining village in Wales ‘. . . how will it help us, Mr Cabal? We are not dreamers.’

‘Not in any sense,’ said Cabal. ‘But as a result of every Tom, Dick and Harry with a talent for the particular mode of dreaming required to travel here, Hlanith is a gathering place for people whose minds are not altogether mired in the sticky romanticism of this place. In short, gentlemen, there we will find people who will give us straight answers to straight questions.’

Bose shielded his eyes against the sun, an orb whose light seemed a little more golden than that which shone over the Earth they had so recently left. ‘I can’t even see the coast from here. How long will this journey take? How far must we go?’

‘Time and space are not measured in the way we are used to,’ warned Cabal. ‘To give you a time in hours or a distance in leagues would be useless.’

Corde gestured over his shoulder with a jerk of his thumb. ‘Just a minute ago you were telling us that this boulder commemorating Banzai the Wishful –’

‘Barzai the Wise.’

‘– is eight miles up the mountain. Now you’re telling us that units of measurement are meaningless. Well, which is it?’

‘Ah,’ said Cabal, sagely. Before anyone could complain that ‘Ah’ did not really answer anything, he said, ‘We have over a mile of treacherous mountainside to traverse before we reach gentler slopes, gentlemen. Perhaps we should begin.’

‘A mile!’ exclaimed Corde, in an attempt to make his point again, but Cabal was already stepping from the promontory that the Silver Key had dumped them upon, and on to the great steep field of scree and bare rock beneath them.

The most peculiar thing about the descent was how it seemed to take hours, yet when they reached the bottom of the long, ragged escarpment, the sun had barely moved a degree in the sky. Cabal muttered something about subjective objectivity, and there the matter lay. The second most peculiar thing was that, while Shadrach and Bose were neither of the utmost physicality nor especially well dressed for shinning down a mountainside, both arrived at their destination winded but not exhausted, their clothes as pristine as when they had set off.

They walked down towards the bank of the Oukranos in near silence, taking in the wonders around them. At this point they consisted largely of a ruined mansion off to the south, through whose abandoned orchards – in themselves covering the area of a small town – the party made their way. At first glance, the only truly unearthly thing about the environment was the sheer scale of everything: Mount Hatheg-Kla was huge, the ruined mansion was huge, the orchard was huge and contained trees of ancient growth; even the river before them was Amazonian in proportion. To Cabal’s searching eye, however, there were more details that proclaimed the alien nature of the place, and the more he looked, the more subtle they became.

He saw a creature that was neither caterpillar nor butterfly, but rather a caterpillar with broad wings projecting from a chrysalis-like band about its upper third, as if a butterfly’s life cycle had been cut and stitched into a single stage. He saw a rat scurry into a hole, but when it peered out again he thought he must have been mistaken for it had a little flat face like a capuchin monkey’s. He finally realised it had the body of a rat but forelimbs ending in apelike phalanges, and the face of a tiny man with sideburns and a widow’s peak. It glared at him with a mixture of angry hatred and curiosity until it understood they had no interest in it. At which point it grinned like a happy little man, and vanished deeper into its burrow.

The most subtle of the anomalous details, however, was all around them, its very ubiquity making it difficult to notice. The Dreamlands did not, quite, make sense to the eye. The most overt expression of this had been Mount Hatheg-Kla’s ill-mannered refusal to be comfortably comprehensible to the viewer. It was not only big, it was the very epitome of bigness, and it wedged itself into the viewer’s perception like a fat man into a small armchair. All around them now, however, the same perceptual unwillingness was always apparent. It was never quite clear just how far away the ground beneath one’s feet really was. As they passed a tree, the degree by which the trunk’s hidden side was exposed never quite matched up with the degree by which the trunk’s side previously visible was turned away from them. Nothing worked quite as expected. Very nearly – 99 and a good number of percentage places – but never quite perfectly enough to escape a keen eye and an analytical mind. Cabal had these attributes, in addition to something verging on an allergy to whimsy, so he noted these anomalies early, and he noted them often.

This, then, was the stuff of dreams, and it nauseated him. Sloppy, half-baked fancies oozing from a countless multitude of sloppy, half-baked minds. He could hardly wait to conclude his business with the Fear Institute, the quicker to quit that land of the dazed. Those of an artistic bent would doubtless find much to admire in the Dreamlands’ hanging gardens, their crystal fortresses, their gargantuan waterfalls and their towers of brass and steel. To Cabal, however, they were fripperies; momentarily impressive, but ultimately risible. His interest in the place was predictably prosaic.

Many necromancers had travelled to the Dreamlands before him for a variety of reasons – to speak with gods, to seek dark knowledge, or even to grow powerful and gather wealth, respect and a harem of houris who found names like ‘Wesley’ or ‘Cecil’ inexpressibly exotic. Not a few of these predecessors had come with the express intention of never returning, and so they had come as sleepers, engineering the death of their sleeping physical forms by strange rites that guaranted their spirit lived on in the land of dreams. It was an immortality of sorts, as they would never age or die naturally, but Cabal sneered at them as failures. While real knowledge, even experimental knowledge, could be gathered in dream, it was of no consequence if it could not be communicated somehow to the waking world. With the Silver Key in his possession, Cabal planned to make several unannounced visits on such reprobates, and gather their knowledge, by hook or by crook or by the patient application of thumb screws. Cabal didn’t mind: once in the Dreamlands, he had all the time in the world.

There was the small question of the Institute members’ notable naïveté. It was customary for payment to come after the service, yet here he was with the Silver Key in his bag, which he wanted, and the company of three idiots dressed like mechanicals for a production of Henry VIII, which he didn’t. It would be simplicity itself to zig when they zagged, or duck into the shadows while they were otherwise occupied, or, if all else failed, shove them off a convenient cliff. The Dreamlands certainly didn’t seem to be short of dramatic landscapes, so Cabal imagined there must be any number of convenient cliffs to choose from. That he did none of these things, no matter how personally amusing he might have found them, was pragmatic. The Fear Institute Expedition could and probably would run around until it was blue in the face and never discover the Phobic Animus, if it had the decency to exist. He truly did not care. What was important to him was that they would cover ground in doing so, establish protocols of behaviour, perhaps even make reliable contacts. All of these things would be useful to Cabal when he undertook his own projects. So, while the others were under the impression that all were united in the fool’s errand, Cabal knew the true function of the journey was that of a reconnaissance. Plus, as he had realised earlier, there was safety in numbers, particularly when the rest of the party was made up of sacrificial victims to the higher purpose of Cabal’s continued existence. ‘All for one and one for all’ would be their motto, even if only Cabal knew that the former ‘one’ would always be him, and the latter would not.

‘You’re smiling, Mr Cabal,’ said Bose, smiling broadly himself. Cabal’s own slight tightening of a few muscles was not in the same league as Bose’s open and cheerful expression, but it was at least recognisable as a cousin. A fifth cousin of a disgraced forebear. Bose continued, ‘You have faith in our mission, then? You see a happy conclusion ahead?’

Cabal thought of the Silver Key in his bag and pushed his face another few millimetres. The muscles creaked a little, but it had been some time since he had felt something akin to joy. ‘Yes, Bose. I think with a little caution and circumspect prudence, combined with the will to take immediate action when the need arises, this could all go very well.’ He looked on towards the river. ‘Do those look like clifftops over there?’

Bose squinted. ‘I’m not sure. Perhaps. Why do you ask?’

But Johannes Cabal said nothing.

As it turned out they were clifftops, but the drop below them was ridiculous rather than vertiginous and entirely unsuited for ad hoc murder. It was little more than a bluff overlooking, by a height of a few yards, a sandy bend of the riverbank where perhaps once the Oukranos had considered meandering before deciding it was too much effort.

They stood atop the bluff in silence and admired the view because the view was impossible not to admire. The Oukranos river: as mighty as the Amazon, as broad as the Mississippi, yet as clear as a mountain stream. Light penetrated a long way down, allowing them to see the stony riverbed from the water’s edge out until the water grew too deep and blue and shadowed. Fish, extraordinary fish that had never swum in the seas of Earth, passed by or lazily beat their tails to hold position close by the rock- and pebble-strewn bottom.

Beside him, Cabal heard Shadrach breathe, ‘It’s beautiful . . . magnificent.’

‘I wonder what it’s like to swim in,’ said Corde.

Cabal had his notebook out again and was flicking through it. ‘Apparently it is safe, at least by Dreamlands standards. There may be a few things in it that will eat you, but they’re not common.’ He became aware of Corde’s expression. ‘Really, Corde, people swim in waters populated with crocodiles, alligators and sharks every day. Whatever happened to your defeating of fear, hmm?’

‘It is not fear. It is a rational caution,’ said Corde, falling back upon what Cabal now recognised as the standard Institute member’s response when scared. It was not a refutation nearly so much as a mantra intended to settle the speaker’s nerves.

‘As you wish. We should keep moving. The Animus awaits us elsewhere. Unless that’s it behind us.’ Any shame at the childishness of the trick was handsomely outweighed by the pleasure of seeing three grown men leap into the air, spinning about-face as they did so.

After the recriminations and finger-wagging – all of which Cabal ignored – were over, Bose said, ‘Look over there, about a mile or so downriver. Is that a quay?’

Cabal’s binoculars had also undergone a transformation, but only as far as becoming an unforgivably ostentatious telescope, all chased brass and inlaid with semi-precious stones. Cabal held it for a moment, glaring at it with downturned lips as if it were a mortal insult. Then, without comment, he snapped it out to full length and looked through it in the direction Bose was pointing. ‘Yes,’ he said, having finally got the telescope focused to his satisfaction. ‘There’s a small jetty with a boat moored there. Some sort of fishing boat, I think. The mast’s unstepped. I can see three people.’ He snapped the telescope shut and dropped it into his bag, ignoring Shadrach’s outstretched hand. ‘Hlanith is days away on foot, but perhaps only a day or so by boat.’ He started walking.

‘But what if they want payment?’ protested Shadrach.

Cabal didn’t pause, but called over his shoulder, ‘You are a rich merchant here. You can pay.’

‘I? But, sir, what shall I . . .’ At which point he noticed the bulging purse hanging from his belt. He opened it and, before the astonished eyes of his colleagues, discovered a multitude of thin golden coins of the Roman style. Each coin, however, was not stamped with the countenance of a Caesar but of a beautiful youth in profile, wearing a laurel that was not laurel. His expression was of tolerant indolence, almost sleepy, but the eyes beneath the half-closed lids were somehow ancient, knowing, and perhaps even wicked. Shadrach shuddered, and dropped the coin back into his purse. He hastened with Bose and Corde to catch up Cabal.

The fishermen, for fishermen they were, were taciturn, though not hostile. They listened in silence as Shadrach explained how urgently he and his colleagues needed to reach Hlanith, and did not bargain greatly when the subject of payment came up. They accepted a little of Shadrach’s gold, although later none of the party was sure how much had actually changed hands, only that it was ‘a little’.

Still in near silence, but for the occasional softly growled command from the boat’s skipper, they made ready to cast off while their passengers settled in for the journey. Cabal did not like the fishermen, although he was unsure why. They were quiet and competent, qualities he usually found admirable in people, but there was something more about them that gently raised his hackles by the mildest degree. He could not define this sense, however, so he disregarded it as much as he might. Which is to say, he gritted his teeth and attempted to ignore the nagging sense of wrongness that badgered him at an intensity roughly equivalent to the product of a mild headache and a child with a kazoo. He sat in the bow upon a small barrel, oblivious to the conversational gambits from his fellows, and wishing bitterly that he still had his gun.

It was probably nothing, he told himself. The entirety of the Dreamlands was ‘wrong’. This was just another manifestation of that. As the fishermen cast off and guided their boat into the centre of the great river, Cabal tried to distract himself by watching Shadrach, Corde and Bose. Their earnest pointing and muttering soon bored him so much, however, that he returned his attention to the fishermen. They were swarthy men, but no more than most who worked outdoors for a living, and wore breeches, shirts of rough cambric and scruffy turbans in pale shades of yellow and blue. Their gait was not that of sailors, and Cabal concluded that they rarely if ever left the river. Venturing out of the estuary and hugging the coast to Hlanith was probably a major expedition for them. Yet they seemed unexcited, even blasé, to be going to Hlanith, and uninterested in their passengers. Cabal shrugged inwardly. Perhaps this was normal here. Giving up on them, he turned his attention back to his colleagues for the best part of fifteen seconds before giving up on them, too. Perhaps, he hoped, the changing landscape might give him some distraction from the tedium of the company.

Here, at least, he was not disappointed. The river and the wide valley through which it ran had a curious quality about them that, while just as mysterious as the curious quality about the fishermen, was far more pleasurable. After some careful analysis of his feelings, Cabal abruptly realised that this quality was ‘beauty’, about which he had heard so much and seen so little. On either bank, trees crowded nearly to the waterline, willows by the thousand. He had never heard of the like, never mind having ever seen such a mass of weeping boughs all together. Further into the forests – calling them ‘woods’ was not merely understatement, it was a barking lie – he could see taller trees, oaks, elms, scatterings of evergreens and even a few isolated palms and banyans. These were no forests that ever were, but had merely been dreamed of once, and the fruits of that strange vision had settled and grown. Cabal wondered what sort of man could have dreamed a dream of such a dream and dreamed it so strongly. He watched the trees slide by for another few minutes before concluding that this ancient dreamer, this weaver of the very fabric of the Dreamlands, was an idiot. He’d got it all wrong. Banyans, indeed. Such a dolt.

And as in contemplation of matters arboreal Cabal sat and mused, the Dreamlands sudde

Chapter 4

IN WHICH THE FAUNA OF THE DREAMLANDS PROVE UNPLEASANT

nly changed. It was not a slow transformation but, rather, the abrupt sense of dislocation one might suffer when feeling tired on a train journey, closing one’s eyes momentarily, and reopening them to discover that one is two stations past one’s destination and can’t go back until you reach Crewe. Suddenness and shock are conjoined in that moment, and that was what the four hopeful adventurers experienced when, abruptly, they found themselves no longer on the river but standing in a small clearing in a wood. They reacted differently, as befitted their humours. Shadrach cried out and whirled around as if beset by invisible imps. Corde’s hand fell upon the hilt of his sword, and he looked about, alert and ready. Bose simply stood stock still while his face warred between two expressions of astonishment, one wide-eyed and open-mouthed, the other furrow-browed and jutted-jawed. The resultant facial indecision caused his ears to flap slightly.

Cabal, for his part, stood very, very still. Only his eyes moved as he gathered data in an attempt to deduce what had happened. To one side of the clearing, the tree cover seemed thinner, and the sunlight penetrated, as if they were by a larger clearing or even at the edge of the wood in which they had unexpectedly found themselves. Ignoring the others, he moved quickly that way, pushed by a barrier of bushes between the trees and found the latter case was true. Before him was the bank of the Oukranos, the river stretching away to the other heavily forested bank. There was the flow, running from right to left (Typical, he thought. We are in the Dark Wood), and there was the fishing boat, beating into the wind and the flow as it headed back upstream, presumably returning to the jetty at which they had first seen it. Shadrach appeared at his elbow.

‘Hey! Hey! Halloo! Come back!’ he shouted, but the fishermen just waved and grinned. Shadrach’s shoulders slumped. ‘They’re grinning at us. Is that a friendly grin, or a wicked one?’

Cabal was otherwise preoccupied. ‘“Halloo”? “Halloo”? Has anyone ever actually responded to that cry with anything but derision?’

‘The hounds like it,’ said Shadrach, somewhat ruffled. Cabal did not reply, but simply looked at him as a lady mayoress might look at a good-hearted but simple-minded orphan on a civic visit to the county and district simple-minded orphan facility. ‘I’m a member.’ This did not seem like news to Cabal. ‘A member of the Ochentree Hunt.’

‘Tally-ho,’ said Cabal, in sepulchral tones. ‘But, to answer your question, those are wicked grins. Definitely.’

Corde and Bose joined them as the boat turned a bend in the river and slid out of sight, the crew still waving, still grinning, still wicked.

‘What happened just then, Cabal?’ demanded Corde. ‘How did we end up here?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Cabal, opening his bag. It was interesting that he still had it, he thought, that both he and Corde still had their swords and, by the look of it, that Shadrach still had his purse full of coins.

‘You don’t know?’ said Corde, putting his fists on his hips, unconsciously striking an heroic pose. ‘We hired you because you were supposed to know your way around this place . . .’ He paused at Cabal’s index finger, raised in admonition.

‘No,’ said Cabal. ‘You secured my services – and do not refer to me as a hireling ever again – on the basis that I have dealt with unusual circumstances of a supernatural type before, and have survived with life and mind intact. As I emphasised at the time, I have no direct experience of the Dreamlands, and my knowledge is strictly second-hand. This was accepted by all of you, and it is rather too late in the proceedings to start whining about it now.’

Corde lifted his chin, the better to glare down his nose. ‘I was not whining about it,’ he said, nettled.

‘You were whining like a teething baby,’ said Cabal, watching Corde’s hand drift to the hilt of his sword. ‘Herr Corde. If you show steel, I shall kill you.’

Corde’s hand paused. ‘You’re very confident about that, Cabal.’

‘Why should I not be? I have had practical experience of fighting with swords, as distinct from fencing for sport. I am still here. You may draw your own conclusions.’

‘Gentlemen! Please.’ It was Bose, moving between them. ‘We are marooned and lost in a hostile land! Now, surely, is not the time for divisions within our party? United we must stand, gentlemen, for the alternative is oblivion.’

Corde’s hand twitched, then fell back to his side. Cabal, who had been on the point of verbally agreeing with Bose, instead kept his silence and allowed a carefully pitched mild smirk to cross his face. Thus, he was in the happy position of allowing Corde’s own pride to infer that Cabal considered him a coward, without actually having to go to all the trouble of implying it. It was the most effortless insult he had ever delivered, and its elegance charmed him.

Apparently unaware of the current of animosity that still ran between Corde and Cabal, and the potential differences it augured for the future, Bose seemed pleased by his peacekeeping efforts. ‘Mr Cabal, time seemed to jump. Is this something that you have ever read of in this or any similar context?’

‘It is not, which is suspicious in itself. One would expect such an effect to have been mentioned at least once in the great heap of portentous drivel that has been written about this place. Furthermore, it is not simply a skip forward in time, or – strictly speaking – the subjective perception of time that they use here instead of the real thing.’

Shadrach was nodding. ‘The fishermen. They seemed completely unmoved by what had happened. Indeed, they seemed party to it.’

‘Exactly so,’ said Cabal, quickly regaining the expositional high ground. ‘It is hard to imagine a chain of events by which all four of us would meekly agree to be marooned in the woods, so one is drawn to the conclusion that this has been engineered in some way by an external agency.’

‘To what end?’ asked Shadrach.

‘With that sort of ability, why didn’t this hypothetical agency of yours just kill us?’ said Corde, dismissively. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Believe what you will. You are in error if you attempt to ascribe Earthly motives to every mind in the Dreamlands. This could all be in the nature of a prank. Our death was not sought, only our inconvenience.’

‘A prank?’ This concept clearly did not sit well with Shadrach. If the Dreamlands were home to entities that could make time hiccup for a bit of a jape, then what they were capable of doing when they applied themselves hardly bore thinking about.

‘Or a distraction, or a pleasantry, or a comment, or something that cannot be interpreted by the human mind.’ Cabal shrugged. ‘Or it may just have been a fluke. A random fragment of awareness that momentarily settled upon us, Azathoth belching, the stars being not entirely wrong. Who knows? I doubt any mortal does. Whatever the intent, we must deal with the results. The very inconvenient results.’ He took the map from his bag and unrolled it once more. ‘Yes, there we are. The Dark Wood. We shall have to walk to Hlanith.’

The others gathered around, crowding into Cabal’s personal space and galling him immeasurably. ‘Whereabouts are we in the woods?’ asked Bose.

‘Somewhere.’

‘How far away is Hlanith?’ asked Corde.

Cabal measured out the distance from roughly the middle of the long length of riverbank where the Dark Wood met the Oukranos to the dot labelled ‘Hlanith’ between finger and thumb, then held up his hand. ‘About three and a half centimetres, I’d say.’ He rolled up the map, put it back in its tube and restored it to his bag. ‘You really must grasp the overriding principles at work in this place. Distances are measured in the difficulty of travel, time is measured by a sense of being either quick or slow. This is a world of subjectivism, loathsome though that may be.’

‘So the journey to Hlanith is what? Quick or slow?’

Cabal gestured carelessly at the trees standing densely behind them. ‘Is that not already painfully apparent?’

They tried to stay on the riverbank as they headed eastward, but quickly ran into an inlet that forced them inland. It was little more than a stream, but the cut it had created was steep and sharp and looked to be a great deal more trouble to climb out of than fall into, so nobody argued with taking the diversion. Soon, however, the wisdom of not risking the inlet became questionable.

The trees grew closer, the areas between them populated with bushes and tangles of high weed and briars. There seemed to be few paths, whether made by animals or people, and the ones they did find wound randomly about until they petered out into undergrowth and shadows. Cabal had anticipated the journey to Hlanith taking some time, but in the face of the extraordinarily hard going, he was forced to re-evaluate his estimate from ‘some time’ to ‘some considerable time’.

It was dark in the Dark Wood, indicating that in the Dreamlands, at least, things functioned as advertised. It was not simply the dappled verdant darkness of a normal wood, however, but a heavy, hungry darkness that seemed to sap the brilliance of every ray of sunlight that somehow penetrated the canopy of leaves until the light fell upon the ground attenuated and ghostly. No insects buzzed, no animals cried.

‘Anybody frightened yet?’ asked Cabal, suddenly, from a position of scientific curiosity.

‘We do not succumb to fright, Mr Cabal,’ said Shadrach, not at all convincingly. ‘Only rational concern.’ The grunts of agreement from his fellows lacked conviction also. These grunts are worth mentioning if only because, if there had been a little less disconsolate grunting, they might have heard the crying a moment earlier, and subsequent events might have gone a little better for them.

It was Bose who heard it first, pausing and looking off to one side, while waving a hand for silence. ‘Can you hear that?’ he asked.

The others listened intently. The woods were unnaturally quiet, but even so the sound was distant. ‘Good heavens!’ said Shadrach, finally. ‘It’s a baby! Do you hear it?’

‘I hear it,’ said Cabal. ‘And it causes me rational concern. We should be going.’ He took a moment to gauge the direction the crying was coming from, then pointed diametrically opposite. ‘That way. With speed.’

‘It could be a child, lost and frightened,’ said Corde, unwilling to take any advice from Cabal. ‘We should investigate.’

‘Excellent idea,’ agreed Cabal. ‘You investigate just what sort of child can move through this difficult terrain with such remarkable rapidity while the rest of us run away.’

It was true: where a moment before it had been necessary to demand silence and yet still barely hear the crying, now it was easily audible and becoming louder by the second. There was also the unpleasant realisation that more than one voice was crying.

Corde blanched and made to run, but paused as the sound spread around them as quickly as a forest fire. They were being flanked. ‘Oh, my God.’

Cabal, too, had given up hope of escaping on foot. His sword was already in his hand as he scanned the trees. ‘You know,’ he said, with a tone of mild distraction, ‘people keep saying that, but he never turns up.’

Corde did not reply, but his sword was drawn in a moment, and he fell into a fighting stance that, to Cabal’s mixed surprise and relief, looked competent. Bose and Shadrach inspired less confidence, having drawn the curved daggers that had come with their costumes (Cabal could not bring himself to think of their clothing as anything other than fancy dress). They stood there, eyes wide, the largely ornamental daggers held as awkwardly as if they had just been drafted in from the street to murder the Duke of Clarence. Cabal expected little of them apart from acting as distractions to whatever was coming. With luck, they would be identified as the easiest targets and attacked first, giving Corde and himself a moment’s advantage.

But the attack didn’t come immediately. ‘Back to back, gentlemen,’ said Cabal, tersely. ‘Cover all approaches. No, Shadrach on my left, Bose the right.’ This left Corde directly behind Cabal; it seemed better to have two weak 90-degree arcs in their defence than the uninterrupted 180-degree arc that would result from Shadrach and Bose standing together.

‘Come on,’ he heard Corde growl. ‘Show yourselves.’

Cabal didn’t bother commenting upon how one should be careful what one wishes for, partly because it was rather trite, but mainly because they had come on and shown themselves.

He heard Shadrach gasp, and Bose sob with rational concern.

The things were not children – or, at least, not human children. They had cherubic faces and golden curls upon their alabaster pale brows, and lips as red as rose petals. Their compound eyes, however, went a lot of the way towards ruining the effect, as did the large chitinous bodies split into two tagmata in the same way as a spider, but with only six legs, much like an insect. The angelic little faces were mounted at the front of the cephalothorax, just as a true spider carries its seeing and biting apparatus. Unlike a true spider, however, the creatures made as ungodly a din as a kindergarten at feeding time. An unhappy simile, Cabal inwardly admitted.

They crept out from between the trunks of the trees, and peered down from the boughs, each at least a yard long. A swift count gave Cabal a result of eleven, approximately ten more than he felt they could comfortably deal with. Perhaps, he thought, they would be lucky and the creatures would not be as formidable as they looked. Perhaps, and there was a degree of irrational optimism here, they would not even attack, but were just gathered around out of natural curiosity. Then one of the creatures let out a scream like burning cat, and leaped in a single effortless strike at Bose.

Bose, to his credit, saw it coming. Bose, to his debit, reacted by moaning and fainting. The creature sailed through the space where he had been a moment before and crashed into Shadrach’s back, sending him sprawling with a shout. Two more darted out from the trees at the defenceless undertaker, but were met by Corde’s steel. He roared and whirled, hitting the first hard across the side closest to him, severing two legs in a spray of brown ichor and sending it rolling and shrieking miserably into its partner. This one scuttled quickly over the wounded monster only to be met by Corde’s second blow, delivered down and across. The creature slumped, its legs spasming madly as its baby head sailed across the clearing to strike a tree trunk with a wet thud.

The creature on Shadrach’s back was far too excited by having a helpless victim to hand to pay any attention to the fates of its siblings. It gripped him fiercely by the shoulders, the barbed claws along the inner edges of its forelegs stabbing him painfully through his layers of clothing and making him cry out. Its mouth opened wide and a wet proboscis, tipped with a flexing rasp, slid smoothly out and towards the base of Shadrach’s skull. In a small part of a moment, the proboscis was joined by a second, but whereas the first was tubular and pulsingly organic, the second was flat, and steel. The creature was clearly baffled to find the tip of Cabal’s rapier driving out from between its eyes, but after a moment it seemed to conclude that it had been stabbed through the top of its skull where the face joined the carapace and the sword tip was merely exiting. In this, it was correct and died in a state of intellectual satisfaction, a nice enough way to go.

Corde stamped down on the intersection between the body segments of the creature whose legs he had cut off and was rewarded with a satisfying squeal of pain that ended abruptly with a crunch of splintering chitin. He stepped back to his mark and fell once more into a ready position. ‘Eight to go,’ he called to Cabal.

Cabal grunted in reply, secretly quite relieved that he had not got as far as fighting Corde earlier; it might not have gone as well as anticipated. Not that he felt that it had extended his life by very much; Bose and Shadrach’s limited usefulness in the fight had already been expended, which left Corde and himself to deal with the remaining spider-ant-baby things. The creatures seemed surprised with the speed by which three of their number had been dispatched and the remainder hung back, communicating with one another in a high cacophony of whines, screams, sobs and howls in a language that was both complex and uniquely irritating. The next attack, Cabal had no doubt, would be well co-ordinated and tactically sophisticated. He hefted his sword and wished once again that it was still a pistol.

The assault would certainly come in the next few seconds, and when it did, Cabal and the others would die. Therefore, waiting was a poor decision. Any chance of survival depended on taking the initiative. It fell into two categories: attacking first, or escaping. Escape was clearly hopeless: even if they were somehow to break the cordon around them, they would still be stumbling around in this warren of a forest, an environment that the creatures knew well and were admirably adapted to. Therefore, the best chance was to combat them somehow. Sheer force of arms would probably fail, but perhaps a bluff might work. The creatures had a level of intelligence, it seemed and a language. If a species has speech, it can be lied to.

These were the Dreamlands, after all. The place was littered with ancient sorceries and all that airy-fairy nonsense, Cabal reasoned. He was a magician of sorts, and even if his magic depended more on extensive laboratory time and a lot of glasswork than on waving staffs around and calling down damnation upon his enemies, the creatures were not to know that. He racked his mind for a suitable abjuration, quickly reaching down to pull his cane from the straps on his Gladstone. He levelled it at the nearest creature.

‘Aie! Fhtagn!’ he began, Aie! Fhtagn! generally being a good place to start when dealing with abominations such as these. It even impresses shoggoths – and it takes a lot to impress a shoggoth. He spoke the words again in the most impressive tone he could manage. Encouragingly, the creatures stopped their infernal noise and gawped at him, their cherubic faces agog, like a bunch of choirboys discovered raiding the sherry in the vicarage. Choirboys with compound eyes, shiny black carapaces and far too many legs for polite society, it was true, but otherwise the expression fitted.

He glared steely-eyed at them, while internally his mental cogs whizzed fast enough to burn oil. ‘Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn,’ he tried next. It wasn’t much – everybody in the Dreamlands surely knew that dead Cthulhu was happily dreaming in his house in R’lyeh: it was probably sewn into innumerable samplers on innumerable parlour walls – but at least it demonstrated that Cabal was willing to call on some big names. ‘Aie! Nyarlothotep! Chaos that crawls . . . messenger, mind and will of the gods . . . the haunted dark . . . devourer of grey lilies . . .’ The creatures twitched in a way that seemed to Cabal to indicate growing unease. They shied back a little. This was going well, he realised. Cthulhu was all very well, but Nyarlothotep was known and active. A few more threatening phrases and their morale might break altogether. ‘Aie! Nyarlothotep! See and smite my enemies! Crumble them to dust, and their kin, and their homes, and their . . .’ He dried for a moment, fumbled for a continuation, and made do with ‘. . . and their pets. Strike them down, your humble servant implores thee! I . . .’ And that was all he had to say.

It would be pleasant to report that Cabal’s ruse worked exactly as he had intended, that the creatures would decide that even if he wasn’t a great sorcerer, he was convincing enough not to trifle with, and scamper off into the woods, never to threaten Cabal and his party ever again. Unhappily, only the very last part of this came true.

The creature that Cabal had levelled his cane at was the first to die. It looked startled, then truly afraid. Its lips drew back in an expression of terror, the eyes grew wide, exposing even more of the vile tiny lenses of which its eyes were made, the skin grew ashen and then the whole beast became ashes – thin grey ashes, as if sieved from an intense fire. A rapidly advancing tide of colourless death swept from its head to the tip of its legs and abdomen, and where it passed, the creature just fell away in silent drifts and plumes.

Corde and Shadrach cried out in wonder and horrified joy – and Bose snored in innocent deep sleep – as the grey death came to every one of the creatures, striking them down where they stood or as they tried to run from that circle of destruction. After no more than a minute, the men stood alone, and they were triumphant.

‘By all that’s wonderful, Cabal!’ said Shadrach, his thin, joyless face temporarily invaded by a smile. ‘I thought the jig was up then but, by heavens, you showed them what for, eh? I knew he was the man for this job! Didn’t I say so, Mr Corde? Did I not say so?’

Corde regarded Cabal with new respect. ‘That was a nice piece of work, Mr Cabal,’ he said, wiping his sword clean on the swathe of dust-covered grass at his feet.

Cabal, however, was not exhibiting any signs of exuberant happiness. To the contrary, he was pale, and beneath his dark glasses, his eyes were as wide as the creatures’ at the moment they had met their doom. ‘Ach, Gott,’ he said, in a hoarse whisper. ‘What have I done?’

‘Done, old man?’ said Corde. ‘You’ve saved our bacon, that’s what you’ve done, and we’re all very grateful, believe me.’ He went to rouse Bose.

‘No. No, you don’t understand,’ said Cabal. He was breathing heavily.

Shadrach was appalled to recognise the symptoms of fear. ‘What is it, Cabal? Did something happen to you when you performed that magic?’

‘Magic?’ Cabal looked at him as if just realising that Shadrach was speaking to him. ‘Magic? I performed no act of magic. It was a ruse . . . a ploy. I intended only to fool those creatures, to scare them into thinking I am the sort of magician who goes around casting spells.’

Shadrach frowned, perturbed and surprised. ‘But they . . . You destroyed them.’

‘No, I did not.’ Cabal was recovering control of himself, but he was only hiding his fear, not dispelling it. ‘I called on other powers. I have done so before in similar circumstances on the basis that at least it buys me some time. The calls are hopeless, you see. They have no effect.’

Shadrach started to say something, but thought better of it. He looked around the trees and the scatterings of fine grey ash that lay about the place. Then he turned back to Cabal, but he did not voice the obvious question. Neither did he need to.

‘I called upon Nyarlothotep, the most vicious, arbitrary and sadistic of them all. Loki, Anansi, Tezcatlipoca, Set . . . All faces that it has worn over the millennia. A trickster god. Do you understand?

‘I called upon Nyarlothotep, and he heard.’

Shadrach tried to think of something comforting to say. As an undertaker, it was his stock in trade to be able to comfort people at difficult times, to mouth platitudes and make them sound worth something, to help people see the light of the next dawn. Now he could not think of a thing. Never, in all the burials and cremations that he had planned and attended, had he ever had to commiserate with somebody who had just gained the attention – the probably baleful attention – of a real and malevolent god. A god that, when prayed to, did not depend on or even expect faith, but simply smote one’s enemies. A price would surely be imposed later, at some future, unspecified Damoclean date. What can one say to somebody in such straits?

Instead he gave Cabal his most professional pat on the shoulder. It was his best pat, the one that said, You have my most sincere albeit non-specific sympathies. It was all he could do.

Cabal’s stoicism was enough to make a Spartan seem prone to the vapours. A casual observer would have seen no obvious signs of the great metaphysical disruption within his mind and spirit, but it was there none the less. For the first time, he truly understood what Nietzsche had meant when he had yammered about looking into abysses. Not only had the abyss looked into him, it had noted his name, address and shoe size. He was disturbed and distracted, and these made him voluble.

‘How bad can it be?’ he asked rhetorically, as the subdued party made their way in what they had judged was probably more or less the direction of Hlanith. ‘I’ve encountered worse. I’m sure I’ve encountered worse. I went to Hell. I met Satan.’ He didn’t notice the shocked expressions on the faces of the others. Whether they were shocked at the admission or perhaps at the possibility that Cabal was losing his mind hardly mattered. Whatever the reason, their faith in him and his abilities was as shaken as he was. ‘Satan was nothing,’ Cabal muttered to himself. ‘I spat in his eye.’ There was a short pause. ‘Figuratively. I figuratively spat in his eye. I couldn’t really spit in his eye.’ Another pause. ‘He was too tall.’

Mercifully for his unwilling audience, any further memoirs of supernatural entities into whose eyes he had expectorated, figuratively or otherwise, were curtailed by the discovery of a path through the wood. It was not much of a path, but it was the first time they had seen anything approaching a cleared route and it heartened them, as surely such a thing would only exist close to the wood’s edge.

After a moment’s quiet discussion as to whether they should follow the path this way or that, then a quiet argument, then a quiet flip of one of Shadrach’s golden coins, they went this way, and hoped that Fortune would favour them. Fortune seemed a much better travelling companion than, say, Nyarlothotep.

But even Fortune may behave wilfully on a slow day when she is looking for amusement. They followed the path in as much silence as they could manage, listening for the distant cry of babies. None came. There was only the oppressive quiet, punctuated frequently by their own poor efforts not to punctuate it.

The path turned sharply to one side and suddenly they found themselves in a clearing, a true clearing in the forest, not just one of the patches of slightly lower tree density that had been all of their previous experience. It was not, however, unoccupied.

With the expenditure of great effort, sections of fallen trees, anything from three to six yards long, had been dragged from elsewhere and placed on their sides. Then the cores of the logs had been patiently removed, apparently by many hours of gnawing. The result was crude but effective dwellings, a whole village of perhaps fifty or so. Each log was swathed with sheets of some organic substance that at first glance appeared to be webbing but that, seen close to, must have been extruded as great flat sheets, addled and crazed with imperfections.

The explorers were just wondering what sort of creature could have made such a place when they noted evidence at their feet which answered that question. The stunted grass and weeds were dusted with thin grey powder of a shade and consistency they had seen all too recently.

‘It’s their village,’ said Corde, his sword never having left his hand since they had discovered the clearing. ‘Those creatures, this is theirs.’

‘They are all dead,’ said Shadrach, strictly unnecessarily, yet it still needed underlining. He peered inside a slightly more complex structure of two tree sections that had been bound together to create a small hall. Inside, football-sized egg sacs hung from the walls. Within every one, there was no movement. They dangled dry and flaccid, half filled with grey dust. ‘Even the unborn,’ he whispered.

As he stepped back, his shoulder brushed the rough lintel. With a loud crack, a great section fell away, dropping to the hard-packed soil and smashing to dust. As if the sound had been all that was required to start the collapse, the roof fell in, breaking into greyness as it tumbled down. The men instinctively clustered together as the destruction spread. Hut after hut came crashing down, the sound of destruction starting harsh, but ending soft. Inexpressibly disturbed, they withdrew to watch the creatures’ village vanish as suddenly as any baker abducted by a snark.

‘They are all dead,’ said Shadrach again, looking at Cabal with fascinated repulsion as if he were a cobra. ‘They, their kin and their homes are destroyed.’

Bose was watching the last of the tree huts become nothing very much with childish amazement. ‘I wonder if you got their pets, too, Mr Cabal? If they had pets.’ He considered for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No, they looked the sort to eat anything vaguely petlike. I don’t suppose they were nearly so keen on companionship as they were on dinner.’

Nobody was listening to Bose’s ruminations. They were all too busy staring at Cabal, except Cabal, who was glaring back.

‘I say again, I am no sorcerer. The rules here, however, are apparently very different from our world in ways that we had not previously considered.’

‘That you had not previously—’ began Corde, but he was cut off by the increasingly testy Cabal.

‘Yes, that I had not previously considered. This world is disturbingly arbitrary, random . . .’ he looked for some term that would effectively communicate how repugnant he found it ‘. . . whimsical. I ask you, who spent so much effort planning for contingencies, did you ever consider anything even approaching our current situation?’ The question was only partially rhetorical, but Cabal was glad of the silence it provoked.

Into that silence crept the ever-perturbable Bose. ‘So . . . what do we do next? Shall we abandon the endeavour?’

Cabal shook his head, angry with himself for the weak leash on which his temper tugged eagerly. ‘That is not a decision for now. We cannot spontaneously leave the Dreamlands whenever we want to. We must either exit via another gate opened by the Silver Key—’

‘Will it be necessary to destroy some other hapless soul, Mr Cabal?’ asked Shadrach, coldly.

‘Usually not,’ said Cabal, blithely unaware of any implied criticism. ‘Gateways of the Silver Key rarely manifest in living creatures. Luckily, on this occasion it chose to do so in a poet and writer, not somebody important or useful. As I was saying, that is one way of re-entering the waking world. The other is to find a rising path, which brings one up and out physically from the Dreamlands. Those are few, and extraordinarily dangerous.’

‘As opposed to the nest of security and comfort in which we find ourselves now, eh, Cabal?’ said Corde.

Cabal looked at him coldly. ‘By comparison, yes, Herr Corde. This is a nest of security and comfort.’ He looked down the path leading away from the clearing that had once held the creatures, their kin, their homes and, presumably, their pets. ‘This must lead somewhere,’ he said, and without waiting for agreement, he set off down it. The others quietly followed.

Chapter 5

IN WHICH CABAL WANDERS FROM THE BUCOLIC TO THE NECROPOLITIC

The path did indeed lead them somewhere – and somewhere practical rather than to a cottage made of gingerbread or full of bears or dwarfs or all three. They emerged from the Dark Wood on a long, rolling meadow that sloped down towards a tree-lined road bounded by small fields of corn. The heavy silence that had travelled with them was lifted by clear air and sunlight, and their mood – but for the impenetrable sullenness of Johannes Cabal – lifted too.

‘That will be the road for Hlanith down there, eh, Cabal?’ said Corde, unaware of or unconcerned at Cabal’s metaphysical torment. ‘Finally, a bit of good luck on this expedition.’

‘Perhaps so.’ Cabal signalled a halt by the simple expedient of stopping and expecting everybody else to follow suit. He took out his telescope and surveyed the terrain. ‘There are a couple of people down there by the road. We shall ask.’

‘Isn’t that risky?’ asked Bose.

‘In this place, even blinking is fraught with peril. Yes, it is risky. They look like a pair of yokels doing whatever it is that yokels do during the day, but they may turn out to be hideous monsters intent on chewing out our spleens.’ He shrugged. ‘It happens, but what is one to do?’ He started walking again.

Bose pattered along in his wake, like an anxious pug. ‘Do you think that is likely?’

‘No. Yes. Perhaps. How should I know? I am a stranger here myself.’ And so, having put Bose’s doubts to rest, or not, he fell back into a ratiocinatory silence from which he would not easily be dislodged.

As they approached the road, Shadrach commented disapprovingly, ‘Look at those sheep. They’re in among the corn. They’ll bloat and die from eating it.’

‘You seem very knowledgeable on the matter, Mr Shadrach,’ said Corde.

‘I come from a farming family,’ said the tall, thin, ascetic and thoroughly unbucolic Shadrach. ‘We kept sheep on the top moor, and Heaven help anyone who let them get into the cornfields down by the river.’

They were now only a few dozen yards from the couple by the road, and conjectures could be made without recourse to a telescope. If they were hideous monsters with a penchant for spleen, they carried it well; Cabal’s guess of ‘yokels’ seemed far closer to the truth. They were young people: he a shepherd in a blue smock and red vest, brown-booted and gaitered, a wooden flagon hanging from his belt, his hair a coarse, wiry brown, his sideburns hedgelike; she equally rustic, though apparently wearing her best red dress and white embroidered blouse. A young lamb lay in her lap, crunching sour apples. Judging from Shadrach’s angry intake of breath, this was also something sheep should avoid. They were sitting by the edge of the road between the trees, chatting and giggling, and altogether unaware of anything else outside their sphere.

‘Excuse me,’ said Cabal, ‘how do we get to Hlanith from here?’ He did not ask if this was the right road for, on closer acquaintance, it clearly wasn’t much of a road at all, just a narrow avenue between two rows of unkempt trees. Perhaps once it had led to a great house or estate, but now it was overgrown and even pitted deeply enough in places to create small shadowed pools, one of which the girl was cooling her bare feet in.

The shepherd boy looked up at them with dull surprise, the natural stupidity in his rubicund face plainly enhanced by drink. Behind him, the girl leaned over to look at the newcomers. Her action was coy, but her expression was knowing, and Cabal disliked her for that just as much as he disliked her beau for his bovine inanity.

The boy scrambled to his feet, belatedly alive to his dereliction of duty. ‘Jus’ a moment, yer ’onours, jus’ a moment.’ He ran off to drive the more adventurous sheep from the corn, leaving Cabal’s party in an awkward silence with the girl. She, for her part, did not rise, but remained seated on the green swathe, idly playing with a strand of her russet hair and smiling slightly at them. Corde smiled back, to Shadrach’s disgust, Cabal’s incomprehension and Bose’s blithe ignorance.

‘I wonder, my dear,’ ventured Corde, eliciting a quiet snort from Shadrach, ‘if you could direct us to Hlanith. It can’t be far from here.’

She did not speak, but replied by pointing at the end of the avenue to the south and gesturing vaguely eastwards. Then she went back to toying with her hair and smiling at him.

‘Thank you,’ said Corde, low and slowly, and there was a definite air of twiddling a thin moustache, if he had been wearing one.

‘Thank you, miss,’ said Shadrach, in a tone of subdued outrage. ‘Come along, gentlemen.’ And he led off to the south, followed by Cabal, Bose and, in a desultory fashion, Corde.

As they walked away, the shepherd came back, his hands cupped around some interesting insect he had found. He watched them go with a dull lack of understanding or even remembrance. Then their presence slipped from his mind altogether and he sat down by the girl again to show her this new treasure. Corde watched all this over his shoulder and laughed. ‘As pretty as a picture,’ he said to the others.

Shadrach would have none of it. ‘A particularly vulgar picture. The product of a coarse and depraved artist.’ But that made Corde laugh all the more.

The girl, for all her dubious taste in suitors, was at least a reliable guide. The avenue ended beside a road between high embankments and topped with trees and bushes. It was clear and frequently travelled; they met a tinker coming from the east who confirmed that they were on the Hlanith road, and shortly thereafter they got a lift on a wagon taking fodder into the city. The four men perched on the swaying pile of hay with differing degrees of assuredness and dignity, and even gave voice to their belief that the expedition was past its stumbling stage and was now properly under way.

‘Yes, indeed,’ said Cabal. ‘Apart from the trifling facts that we have no idea where the Animus is, whether its whereabouts are known to anyone in Hlanith, or – and this is my personal favourite – if it even exists. Apart from those caveats, yes, everything is going swimmingly.’

Hlanith, however, was no disappointment on first sight. The land around it was low and marshy, but approached from many directions by causeways both natural and artificial. These converged on a great sloping plateau no more than a few dozen yards higher than the surrounding marshland, a plateau that sloped gently down towards its seaward side. The granite walls that ran around the town proper were almost unnecessary to the defences – the approaches could be made very difficult to any enemy – but it seemed that the town architects had felt that walls were necessary, so there they were.

Their wagon clattered up an artificial causeway whose length was broken here and there by bridges to let the highest tides wash in and out of the marshes unimpeded. The illusion of reality was remarkable, Cabal admitted to himself. The sea breeze blew in and brought the smell of brine with it. Gulls, identical to the birds of Earth, as far as he could see, wheeled and cried over the hummocks of harsh sea grass growing across what seemed to be the estuary of a great river that had disappeared. He watched as a gull flipped a fish out of a shallow pool where it had been stranded, immediately starting a fierce squabble among the rest of the opportunistic flock.

The wagon paused briefly at a guard post close to the end of the causeway. The guards’ questions and search were so cursory and disinterested that it seemed Hlanith had little need of any defences at the moment, natural or artificial. The wagon was directed onwards across the drawbridge and under the portcullis of a small keep that was built across the full width of the causeway – an artefact from a less settled time and a precaution against a dangerous future – and ten minutes or so later, they were clambering down and thanking the wagon driver outside a gate in the town wall. He, for his part, surprised them by refusing to take payment, and wished them a pleasant stay in the city before parting from them.

The guards on the gate were only fractionally more interested in Cabal’s party than the ones on the causeway had been, but only as far as discovering that they were new to the Dreamlands. They asked if they had come via the Enchanted Wood, and Cabal lied, and said that they had. He suspected that if the guards heard that their route had taken them through the far more dangerous Dark Wood, then there would be more questions, starting with ‘So, why aren’t you all dead?’

Once the guards’ initial prejudices that they were dealing with a bunch of tourists was confirmed, the expedition was allowed into the city proper. None of them were quite sure what they had expected Hlanith to look like, and this was as well for every expectation would have been beggared. The town was medieval in flavour, yet peculiar in execution. There was something very Scandinavian about the tall, peaked roofs, yet the crossbeams and plaster seemed more Tudor, and the mixture of thatching on some buildings, while their immediate and otherwise identical neighbours were tiled in the Mediterranean style, just seemed wilfully contrary. Bose looked around with hands on his hips, every inch the gormless tourist. ‘Well I never,’ he kept saying, which was both true and redundant.

‘Well, Herr Cabal,’ said Shadrach. ‘How do we proceed from here?’

‘We search, and we research. Herr Corde, you strike me as a man who would be at home gathering intelligence in a tavern. I would suggest you find somewhere busy and not too disreputable and start there. Herr Bose, there must be some form of library or university here. In your persona as a magistrate, you may be able to gain access to an archive that we cannot. Learn what you can, or at least gather lines of investigation that may prove fruitful. Herr Shadrach, Hlanith is primarily a trading centre and the mercantile guilds will surely be strong. Merchant ships criss-cross the world from here and may have brought back some useful data for us. I would suggest you make the acquaintance of the local merchant princes and discover what you can. We should all make our own arrangements for somewhere to sleep, then meet on the morrow.’

This seemed like a sensible use of their time, and none had any problems with it, beyond an understandable lack of confidence as to how well they might get on with the locals. This was quashed by a heavy implication from Cabal that they were subject to the influence of the Phobic Animus and so were behaving like – and this is not the exact phrase he used, but certainly gives a sense of it – a ‘big bunch of jessies’.

‘And what will you be doing all this while, Cabal?’ asked Shadrach, as he doled out coins to the others, mostly to Corde, who reckoned he might have to get in a few rounds of drinks, a duty he seemed very happy to be taking on.

Cabal did not answer immediately, but looked down the long avenue at whose head they stood to the defensive wall that would seal off the docks in case of seaward invasion, and beyond to the oaken wharves and ships, and still further to the great blue-grey Cerenarian Sea. ‘There are other questions to be asked, and other sources to be questioned,’ he said distractedly. Then, drawing himself back to the present, he added, ‘We will meet here at midday tomorrow to exchange what we have discovered and to decide what to do next. Are we agreed?’

And so they parted.

Cabal did not make enquiries: experience had given him instinct. He simply followed his whims until they brought him, as they always did, to the graveyard. In this particular case ‘graveyard’ was a poor sort of term for a true necropolis, a labyrinth of lanes and alleyways bordered by tombs like stone huts, opening out into fields of grave markers, and squares where the municipal buildings were great mausolea and temples to the departed souls. It might seem strange that there was death within sleep, but the truth of it was that the Dreamlands were as real as anywhere else, at least while you were within them. Judging from this town of the dead that nestled within a city of the living, many would never leave.

Cabal had entered the necropolis at its western gate, and walked until he found himself at its heart, a great circus – in the ‘metropolitan’ rather than ‘three-ring’ sense – of white gravel encompassed by great curving kerbs of stone tall enough to sit upon, which Cabal did. The kerbs were periodically broken by the beginnings of avenues that radiated outwards to every corner of the enormous area. Cabal watched a funeral enter the circus and depart down one of the avenues, a long column of figures in all encompassing black veils fore and aft, with a much smaller group of soberly dressed men and women following an open hearse drawn by six black horses. These latter people were dignified rather than mournful, unlike the veiled figures that sobbed and wailed and struck postures of extravagant spiritual distress. Cabal waited until the funeral had largely processed on to the avenue before getting to his feet and walking after it.

He caught up with the rearguard professional mourner and coughed until he gained its attention. ‘Excuse me, madam,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if you could perhaps help me?’

‘You can start by calling me “sir”,’ said a bass voice from within the veil.

‘Yes, quite. My mistake,’ said Cabal, after the shortest of pauses. ‘I was thinking that in your profession you must have a good knowledge of the layout of this necropolis and—’

‘Look, squire, I’m working,’ interrupted the mourner, continuing to strike attitudes of mortal grief. ‘The punters have forked out for forty mourners, not thirty-nine. If you want to talk, keep up and look mournful, savvy?’

‘I don’t have to be extravagant about it, do I?’ Cabal was watching the others, who looked like nothing so much as a dance troupe extemporising on the theme of electrocution.

‘You couldn’t if you wanted to. Takes years of practice and three guild examinations to get to this standard. No, just look as if you gave a bugger about the departed and follow along.’

Cabal doubted he was a good enough actor to manage that, but he had spent his whole life polishing sombreness to a dignified mahogany glow that looked much the same to the unpractised eye. Thus, he followed at a steady funereal pace, and that did very nicely.

‘So, what did you want to know, mate?’ said the mourner, when he was satisfied that Cabal’s presence was an asset to the procession.

‘I was wondering if you could direct me to the oldest part of the necropolis.’

The mourner almost stumbled in mid-mimed declamation. ‘You want to go where? What for?’ he said, in open astonishment. ‘That’s the bad place.’

‘It is also the interesting place and, for me, the necessary place.’

‘No, seriously, chum, you don’t want to go there. There’s ghouls up there. The gardeners only go once a month and even then under armed guard. You’re looking to get chewed if you go up there.’

‘I’m not afraid of ghouls,’ said Cabal. ‘In fact, I might even learn something of interest from them. They are not my current concern, however. Does anyone live there? Any soothsayers? Oracles? Anybody like that?’ He had the impression that the mourner was looking oddly at him.

‘How’d you know?’

‘It is a principle of the Dreamlands that themes of folklore are followed, even if they are altered or corrupted. Oracles and soothsayers are associated with shunned places. Therefore it seemed rational to seek out such a place. Given the predilection of ghouls to populate old graveyards and cemeteries in both worlds, I guessed their quarter would represent such a shunned place.’ The impression of being oddly looked at had not diminished, although its timbre had changed. ‘Well, you did ask,’ said Cabal, perhaps a little tetchily.

The mourner looked at him a moment longer, then started striking attitudes once more, albeit at an accelerated pace to catch up with the procession. When they were back in place, he said, ‘There’s supposed to be a witch.’

‘A witch,’ Cabal repeated. He shrugged. ‘Good enough. When you say witch, do you mean the sort with a cauldron and potions, or just a mad old lady who feeds stray cats?’

‘How should I know? Never been up there. But there is supposed to be a witch.’

A witch, then, would have to do. Cabal took leave of his short career as an amateur mourner with directions to the purportedly doom-haunted old cemetery in the north-eastern quadrant of the necropolis, and set off at a swift stride. Finding the right place had taken longer than he had anticipated and the sun was already low in the sky. While he truly did not fear the ghouls, he equally truly had a rational concern about being near one of their warrens after sunset. Between threats and a large Webley, he could keep a horde of them back for hours, but threats and a less immediate engine of extermination such as his sword offered no such certainty.

A decision to forgo the directions in an attempt to cut corners turned out to be unwise, and he wasted still more time while he backtracked first to where he had made the rash decision, and then to the circus. The shadows were long indeed by the time Cabal finally arrived at the old cemetery, where ghouls reputedly cavorted and a witch made her home.

The city of Hlanith had stood in the Dreamlands for as long as men have dreamed, and they have been dreaming for a very, very long time. It was a different place then, of course; crude and barbaric as those who dreamed it were crude and barbaric, but even from the first, it had known death. The necropolis was just a plot of land, then, in which the dead were interred with a few grave goods, their resting places marked with sticks and rocks and bones. Over time, the sticks and bones were discarded as too ephemeral in the former case, and too attractive to the local scavenging dogs in the latter. This left the stones, which grew larger, eventually sporting inscriptions of differing measures of accuracy, sincerity and spelling. These levels of increasing sophistication had travelled out, like ripples, from this original site until the differences became aesthetic and modish rather than fundamental. Seen from on high, however, the original burial ground still stood out like a black wart on a grey face. It had been shunned when it was first marked out, and it was shunned ground now, ancient, primal, dangerous.

There had been sundry ill-omened attempts to rehabilitate the area down the centuries. Every few generations, somebody would take it into their head that the ideal place for their inhumation or that of a respected family member, friend or client would be the oldest part of the necropolis. The builders would enter cautiously at dawn, and stampede out at dusk, spending the meantime erecting whatever tomb or crypt or mausoleum had seemed like such a good idea in the architect’s office. After the things were built, and occupied, they were rarely visited again when it had become plain that, rather than civilising the atavistic nature of the place, the new structures might as well have been built in a war zone. So, abandoned if still remembered, these tombs, crypts and mausolea stood around like gentry who had inadvertently wandered into a rough pub, and there they grew grubbier as the years passed.

Johannes Cabal stood at the edge of the old cemetery and paused to take in the ambience of the place. The last shunned burial ground he had been in had been more than two years before, an unusually long period between shunned burial grounds in his working life. That one had been beautiful in its way, misty and artful in its slow, entropic descent into ruin. It had also borne an air of waiting for death, of hungering for new inmates, of taking the role of a great pointing skeletal hand in a misty, artful memento mori. It had not been a pleasant place to dawdle for reasons beyond its aesthetics, but it had never felt especially malign.

This old cemetery, on the other hand, reeked of malevolence. There were no true paths through it; nor had there ever been. Just jumble and tumble, weeds and briars, markers and ancient bones, some belonging to local scavenger dogs who had allowed their hunger to override their sense that the nature of this land was changing. The newer structures stood sloped and grimy, overwhelmed and embarrassed by their incongruity in this place of primordial death. Some had already collapsed, and from where he stood Cabal could see a smashed marble sarcophagus on its side amid the ruin of the tomb once built to hold it. The sarcophagus was empty, which did not surprise him. In this place, it had probably been emptied within a day of the funeral ceremony. To the ghouls, these structures were not hallowed resting places: they were larders.

Cabal loosened his sword in its scabbard and walked slowly forward. He wished he had a canteen of water with him: he was probably going to be speaking ghoulish soon and it always played havoc with his larynx. Some water to moisten his vocal cords would have been very helpful. He took up station upon a mound, under which lay the mouldering bones of a tribal shaman, and waited as the shadows flowed like ghost blood and the darkness grew deep.

He was not sure when he first became aware of the eyes that watched him. They did not blink, nor did they move, but they watched him with unwavering intent as their faint phosphorescent glow, an unhealthy greenish yellow, slowly made them stand out from the growing gloom. While there was still light in the sky, he knew they would be too cautious to attack, so he decided that now would be a good time to start his entreaty to them.

He cleared his throat, and began with a creditable attempt at meeping: ‘I bear you no ill-will. I only seek counsel with one who lives in this place. My name is—’

‘I have told you once before,’ said a ghoulish voice from the shadows, and it spoke in English. ‘I know who you are, Johannes Cabal.’

‘Ah,’ said Cabal, his concern at the reappearance of the ghoul who had spoken to him in Arkham at least slightly offset by his relief that he could speak a more civilised tongue. ‘Guten Abend. We meet again, it seems. You still have me at a disadvantage, though.’

‘Only one, Herr Cabal? You are surrounded by sixty of my brethren. Your disadvantages multiply.’

‘I have made provision for that,’ lied Cabal. ‘No, I am more interested in who you are.’

‘Who I am is what I am, and I am a ghoul. That is all there is to me, and I am content in that.’

‘Obviously I am delighted that you have found satisfaction in your current employment, but you hide in semantics. As you wish, then. Who were you?’

A pause. Then, ‘Does it matter?’

‘It might.’

Another pause. ‘I forget. It all seems a long time ago when I walked in the light, and ate burned meat . . .’ There was a liquid throaty growl from the other ghouls, a sound Cabal knew to denote disgust. From a race that routinely ate gamey human cadavers, it wasn’t a sound that received much use. ‘. . . and vegetables.’ The liquid throaty growl sounded again, louder this time. Cabal noted that the Ghoulish language certainly maintained a higher level of incipient threat than human languages. It was hard to imagine sixty people managing to be so menacing while chorusing, ‘Eew . . .’

Cabal did not believe for an instant that the ghoul had truly forgotten its human identity, but they were inclined towards a wanton abstruseness. When one is a burrow-dwelling anthropophagist, one must seek entertainment wherever one can, so the ghouls had raised the sport of being mysterious to a level worthy of admittance to the Olympic Games. Not that they would ever actually turn up: they would just send some cryptic clues to the opening ceremony hinting that they might. Thus, this ghoul was almost certainly hiding its identity for some reason. That was comforting, as it implied that since the ghoul had a long-term plan for Cabal, it would not spoil it by eating him. At least, not by eating him prematurely. It was a toxic sort of guarantee but, for a man in Cabal’s profession, it was much better than he was used to.

As the ghoul did not wish to discuss its personal history at this juncture, Cabal decided that it was permissible to skip the pleasantries and get on to the real reason for his visit. ‘There is one who lives here . . . who I believe lives here.’

‘You speak of the witch,’ said the ghoul, barely before Cabal had finished. ‘Yes, she is here.’

Cabal was too shrewd to be elated by this statement: the ghoul had specifically not said that she lived there, only that she was there. It might mean nothing, or it might mean everything. ‘She lives here?’ he said, with some emphasis.

‘She lives,’ said the ghoul, and Cabal thought he had heard a note of amusement. Ah, he thought. So teasing people as to whether somebody’s alive or dead is what passes for humour in ghoul circles. Then the ghoul said, ‘You must speak with her. It is your destiny.’

Cabal’s hackles rose slightly. In his experience, people who talked in terms of destiny were those without sufficient reason to be doing what they were doing. Not so very long ago he had suffered the misfortune of being in conversation with a military man intent on starting a war with his country’s neighbours. He had spoken in terms of destiny, too, because, if that had been forbidden him, he would have had to admit that his motives were little better than rape, pillage and seizing the land of others. Calling it ‘destiny’ made it seem so much more noble. So it has always been, and so it will always be.

As if understanding his reserve, the ghoul said, ‘If you prefer, it would be wise to speak with her.’

‘Just to be clear,’ said Cabal, ‘do you mean wise purely as in pertaining to wisdom, or was it just an implied threat, with a flavour of or else about it?’

There was another pause. Cabal thought he heard the ghoul sigh. ‘Which will induce you to speak to the witch, Johannes Cabal?’

Cabal thought about it for a moment. ‘Under the circumstances, either.’

‘Then it hardly matters, does it?’ The ghoul was beginning to sound angry now. ‘You are just as contrary as your reputation suggests.’

‘What reputation?’ asked Cabal, slightly taken aback. It counts for something when ghouls consider one infra dig.

‘Go beyond the jade pagoda and look for the firelight. You will go unmolested by my people, but go quickly.’

The glowing eyes vanished quickly in scatterings of pairs. In moments the sense of being observed lifted from Cabal and he knew the ghouls were gone.

Breathing a sigh that might have been of exasperation or might have been of relief, Cabal looked around until he found a pagoda a few yards into the clutter of tombs. It stood some six yards tall, and was decorated with great slabs of jade. One lay by the pagoda’s base, along with the tools that a foolish thief had used to remove it. It seemed that they had found to their cost that this particular part of the necropolis had no need for night-watchmen. Cabal walked slowly around it – pausing en route for a moment when something that he suspected was part of the thief crunched under his foot – and finally reached the rear of the structure.

The firelight was easily visible from there, flickering by a Grecian temple that had been built by students of Socrates, according to logical paradoxes rendered in architectural form. Given this provenance, it was no surprise that it had long since fallen over. Amid the tumbled columns, a figure sat upon a large bust of Socrates at his most disgruntled. She wore a black cloak that made her outline difficult to discern against the encroaching shadows, made deeper around her by the inconstant light from the fire. As Cabal approached, he saw she was wearing her cloak’s hood over her brow and eyes. He could see the pale skin and red lips of a young woman but little else.

‘Pardon me, madam,’ he said, in the uncertain tones of a store detective running in a dowager duchess, ‘are you, and I hesitate to use the term, a witch?’

She smiled, and while it was a pleasing smile in purely aesthetic terms, there was something knowing about it that he did not like. It reminded him of the peasant girl with the lamb’s smile, not in appearance so much as in import. ‘What were you expecting, Johannes Cabal?’ she said. ‘Somebody uglier? Wartier?’ That smile again. ‘Sluttier?’

‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘Do I know you?’

She shook her head slowly. ‘No. We have never met, although . . . although you may know me by reputation.’

Cabal grimaced. ‘It’s all reputations around here.’

‘Not around here. Back there,’ and he knew she was speaking of the waking world. ‘You need a clue. Very well. Do you recall the last little book of Darius?’

‘The Opusculus V? What of it?’ Realisation was sudden. ‘You? I . . .’ He somehow rallied his dignity in the face of astonishment. ‘Madam, I was very much under the impression that you were dead.’

‘Death is a very relative term here, sweetie.’

Cabal was briefly unsure whether to be more rocked by the discovery that he was talking to a woman whom he knew beyond all reasonable doubt was dead, or being called ‘sweetie.’ He decided ‘sweetie’ could wait.

‘Miss Smith? That is you, then?’

‘Smith . . . That is a name I haven’t heard in a very long time. Here, I am simply the witch of the old cemetery, and it suffices.’

‘I heard that you killed yourself when they came for you.’

‘Then you heard the ramblings of ignorant minds. I was not dead, only sleeping. The Opusculus V contained a formula for a certain narcotic that allowed dream travel here, into the Dreamlands, even for somebody unskilled in focused dreaming. I was in a coma, as they would have discovered if they had had a doctor with them.’

‘Yes,’ said Cabal, gravely. ‘Torch-bearing mobs tend to be very weak on bringing along medical personnel.’

‘The first I knew that something was wrong was when the ritual of return failed, and I realised that it was because I had no body to return to. Tell me, Johannes, what did they do to me?’

‘Outside, they had hanged you in effigy. So . . .’

‘There was a rope handy. How cowardly. And what became of my body?’

‘They realised belatedly that they were in a lot of trouble, buried you in a shallow grave, and disappeared back to their homes to carry on the charade of being decent people.’

She cocked her head slightly, and Cabal had the unnerving feeling that she could see him perfectly well, despite the lowered cowl. ‘And how is it that you know all this detail, hmm, Johannes?’

‘You know full well that I wanted the Opusculus V for myself. I have the first four volumes, but they are of limited use without the fifth.’

‘Let me guess. You ransacked my rooms after the coast was clear? But . . . you did not find it.’

‘Because it was not there,’ said Cabal, finally feeling better about his searching skills.

‘And when you could not find it, you cut your losses by taking my body for experimental material.’ Cabal blanched. The witch laughed with delight and pointed at him. ‘Ha! Just an educated guess, Johannes. It’s what I’d have done in your position.’ She paused. ‘Oh, God. You’ve seen me naked.’

‘You made a very beautiful corpse,’ said Cabal, making an ill-judged attempt at gallantry.

She smiled at his discomfort, but it was not a cruel smile. ‘So here we are.’ Then the smile slipped away and she said, in the steady, forceful voice of an oracle, ‘Johannes Cabal, you are in terrible danger. You should never have accepted the commission of the Fear Institute. You should never have come to the Dreamlands. Now it is too late to avoid. You must face the coming dangers. You are a scientist, and the very idea of destiny is anathema to you, but there is more than one sort of destiny. Yours is not predetermined, but it is a narrow path. You must cleave to this path, for if you step from it you will fall.’

Cabal listened, impressed despite himself. ‘And how will I know this path?’

‘Your own will shall guide you. You must search for the Phobic Animus, and you must find it. You must do so with urgency and determination, never permitting distractions, never losing your way.’

‘But there will be false leads, wasted time. How can I be sure that I am staying on the path?’

‘To err is human, Johannes. Mistakes do not matter as long as they are honest, as long as you never, ever hesitate or give up. Do you understand me?’

Cabal was thinking hard. ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you helping me?’

‘Because this is the Dreamlands, and we all have a role to play here. You are the hero on the quest, and I am the wise woman who gives you counsel.’ She laughed, breaking character. ‘Neither of us is ideal for our job, but you just have to do what you can.’

‘Then why don’t you just tell me where the Phobic Animus is, Miss Smith?’

‘Oh, lots of reasons. First, that would make this a really short quest. “Oh, here’s the Holy Grail. It was down the back of the sofa the whole time.” Second, I honestly don’t know where it is. “Wise” isn’t the same as “omniscient”, you know. Third, one of your little pals is going to turn up at your meeting tomorrow with a strong lead. You should follow it.’

Cabal frowned suspiciously. ‘I thought you said that you’re not omniscient.’

‘I’m not. I’m just very well informed.’

‘And this is the extent of your power? Scientia potentia est? You have a spy network, and ghouls for bodyguards.’ He sighed. ‘You have no power to divine the future. So all that dramatic soothsaying was just that? Drama?’

‘I am doing a great deal for you, Cabal, even if you don’t realise it yet. As for power, the Dreamlands are different.’ Her voice had become dangerously calm. ‘A few weeks ago, a thief came here to steal jade from the pagoda. I like the pagoda, and told him to leave or face the consequences. He didn’t leave.’

‘So you set the ghouls on him. Yes, yes, I stood on his skull.’

‘How big a fool do you think that thief was? He came in broad daylight.’ Cabal furrowed his brow in surprise. The sun would drain the life from a ghoul. ‘No. It wasn’t the ghouls that made his eyes boil in his head or his roasting flesh peel from his bones.’ She lifted her face a little and, as she did so, the cowl fell back far enough for him to glimpse her eyes. Then he knew that she was telling him no more than the truth. ‘Not that the ghouls thanked me for doing their job,’ she concluded. ‘They hate cooked meat.

‘You should go now, Johannes. There’s nothing more that I can tell you.’

Cabal coughed awkwardly. ‘Thank you.’

She shook her head slowly. ‘No. Don’t thank me. I’m sending you into the worst trial of your life, and the only consolation is that the alternative is infinitely worse. I’m sorry. I wish it wasn’t like this. You’ve attracted attention of the wrong sort now, and there’s no going back.’

Cabal nodded grimly. ‘Nyarlothotep.’

‘Don’t say that name here,’ she snapped. ‘I may have power, but I’m a long way short of bullet-proof and I don’t need that sort of trouble.’ Then she laughed, surprising Cabal. ‘You know, I never have got into the hang of thee and thou and prithee and all that sort of stuff. “Bullet-proof.” I guess I’m just too modern for this place.’ She sobered a little and regarded Cabal through shadowed eyes. ‘But you’re right. You’ve caught on about him already, eh? You always were a clever one. The best rival a girl could hope for. I was so pleased with myself for nicking the Opusculus V before you. I knew you had the other four. You must have been so pissed off with me.’

‘Mildly,’ said Cabal, with extravagant understatement.

‘I’m sure. Look, you remember that town? On the high street, there’s a branch of Winwicks Bank with a safety deposit facility. You want box number 313. I can’t give you the key, but I doubt that will slow you down. A gift from me, Johannes. I hope you live to enjoy it.’

On the way out, Cabal happened upon two men doing a poor job of hiding bags of tools behind their backs. They looked at him, then back along the way he had come with some consternation. ‘’Scuse us,’ said one, ‘but have you just come from the old cemetery?’

‘Yes,’ said Cabal, casually resting his hand on his sword hilt in a not especially casual way.

The two men looked at where his hand lay, and the option of an impromptu mugging was almost palpably crossed off their inner ‘To do’ lists. ‘An’ you didn’t see no ghouls about?’

Cabal was interested if not surprised to see that, even here, the vast majority of criminals were stunningly stupid. ‘No,’ he said, with a pleasant sense of duplicitous honesty. ‘There were certainly no ghouls around just now. I was just admiring a magnificent jade pagoda there, and I felt entirely safe.’

The two men grinned at one another, thanked Cabal hastily and trotted off in the direction of the old cemetery. He watched them go with no ambivalent feelings. ‘A gift from me, Miss Smith.’ Then he continued on his way.

Surviving fragments of Cyril W. Clome’s manuscript for The Young Person’s Guide to Cthulhu and His Friends: No. 2 Nyarlothotep, the Crawling Chaos

Oh, Nyarlothotep is such a naughty god! Full of wheezes and wizard pranks – which often involve wizards – he is more fun than the human mind can comprehend. So all we poor mortals can understand of his jolly clever jokes is the agony and the suffering and the blood and the madness. Yes, humans just don’t have much of a sense of humour, I’m afraid.

Now Nyarlothotep is one of the Outer Gods, who are terrifically powerful and see we humans as less than germs, which is only right. Nyarlothotep is super-special, though, because he has lots of different faces and lots of different personalities. It must be so much fun to wake up in the morning and decide not only who you will be today, but even what species you will be. If you were Nyarlothotep, what form would you like to have today? I think I’d like to be a dense, oily mist that could creep into people’s homes as they slept and give them acute radiation burns. That would be a splendid jape, wouldn’t it?

He has lots of names, too, to go with every mask he wears, but really he is always good old Nyarlothotep. He isn’t just a very funny clown, though. He is also the soul of the Outer Gods and their messenger, so he is terribly, terribly busy. But don’t worry. Nyarlothotep always finds time to play his tricks. What fun!

Chapter 6

IN WHICH THE EXPEDITION CROSSES THE SEA AND CABAL TAKES AN INTEREST IN THE LEG OF A SAILOR

They met as arranged the next day, and immediately retired to an alehouse where they could drink wine or beer or a local tea, as they so desired, and eat seed cakes as they told of what they had discovered. All but Cabal, who said that he had researched the strange glitch in time they had experienced, but had discovered nothing of use. This was true, in a largely false way: he had asked a stablehand, who had said he’d never heard of the like. Then again, the stablehand had likely never heard of Damascus, apoplexy or soap, but as no one queried Cabal on the size or demographics of his sample, he did not feel the need to burden them with such details.

Cabal’s disappointing luck aside, everyone had something exciting to report.

Bose was the first. ‘I spoke with the archive keeper and asked him if he had ever heard tell of something called the Phobic Animus –’

‘Hardly likely,’ said Corde, ‘since we coined the term.’

‘– or anything similar,’ continued Bose, a little testily. ‘He had heard of something known as the “Frozen Heart”, which is described as being the epitome of all fears.’

‘The “Frozen Heart”,’ said Cabal. He was looking out of the window, drinking his tea slowly. His seed cake sat untouched. ‘How poetic.’

‘Yes, that was what I thought,’ said Bose, happily, entirely missing Cabal’s tone. ‘This whole world is built on poetic principles. That is what led me to believe in the veracity of this line of research. I asked if these reports had a specific locale or locales associated with them. And they do!’

He produced a rolled-up piece of parchment from his sleeve and unfurled it on the tabletop. At its head, he had written in careful block capitals, ‘LIKELY LIST OF PLACES (SHUNNED)’. Beneath it was a list of perhaps twenty locations.

‘Well, it’s a start,’ said Shadrach, uncertainly. ‘But those places must be hundreds of miles apart. Checking every one of them will take months, if not years, subjectively speaking at least.’

‘This one’s handy,’ said Corde. ‘It’s the old cemetery right here in Hlanith. We can go there now.’

‘You can cross that one off,’ said Cabal, with a bored languor he did not feel. ‘I went there myself last night.’ They all looked at him in astonishment. He shrugged. ‘I’m a necromancer. Cemeteries and the like are my meat and drink.’

‘Not literally, though,’ said Shadrach, smiling.

Cabal gave him a dusty look. ‘One has to drop in. It’s a professional courtesy. There’s nothing there but a bunch of ghouls and a mad woman who fancies herself a witch. The ghouls seem to believe it, as they leave her alone.’

Corde looked sceptical. ‘You just strolled in and had a chinwag with some ghouls?’

‘Hardly a chinwag. I walked in, they threatened to eat me, I threatened to destroy them, there was some sabre-rattling, literally in my case, and that was that.’

‘And then what?’

‘And then I had my dinner. White wine and chicken al fresco upon the tomb of a pair of tragic star-crossed lovers.’

Corde was not sure if Cabal was toying with him. ‘And that was all?’

‘Alas, yes. I had wanted some cheese, but couldn’t find any at short notice. It was a shame. Cheese goes so well with tragedy.’

Corde stared hard at Cabal, and it took Shadrach’s proclamation of his own results to regain his attention. ‘I was invited to a dinner at the merchant adventurers’ hall last night,’ he said, with due deference to his own importance. ‘This truly is a fascinating world, mixed from the epic poems of Greece and the sagas of the Vikings, the thousand and one nights of Scheherazade, the mystical tales of the Orient, and the Dreamtime of the antipodean Aboriginals. I heard so many strange stories . . . but none of the Animus. One place came up in conversation, however. By all accounts a terrible place, and it may be the one.’ He drew Bose’s list to him and cast an eye down it. ‘There, the sixth one down, Oriab Island. There are supposed to be some ruins where something terrible happened once upon a time, although nobody seems to know what.’

Cabal already had his bag open and his notes folder out. ‘Oriab Island is not small, and the ruins might be anywhere. We need more exact information before investing effort in going there.’

‘The ruins are on the banks of Lake Yath,’ said Corde, a little smugly. He leaned back in his chair, and took a decent draught from his flagon of beer before elaborating. ‘I got talking to some sailors . . .’

‘What you do in your own time . . .’ muttered Cabal.

‘. . . and they said Oriab Island was the place to go. Not because there’s much likelihood of the Animus being there, but because in the ruins by Lake Yath lives a hermit. He will speak to one person a year, and will answer one question that they ask. It doesn’t matter what it is, he will always know the answer.’

The others considered this. ‘How do we know that nobody has already asked him this year?’ said Shadrach.

‘Because,’ said Corde, with a wily grin, ‘nobody has asked him a question for at least two years, and the person who asked on that occasion died shortly afterwards from his wounds.’

Bose’s eyes had gone very large. ‘Wounds?’ he asked tremulously.

‘There is something in those ruins that doesn’t like strangers,’ explained Corde. ‘That’s the scuttlebutt, anyway.’ He took up his flagon and raised it to Shadrach, whose expression of moral outrage indicated that he thought ‘scuttlebutt’ was some act of frightful sordidness.

‘We shall have to book passage, then,’ said Bose. ‘Ah. How do we do that? I assume that we cannot simply walk into a shipping agent’s and buy tickets in the same way that we travelled to America.’

Shadrach took the opportunity to demonstrate his utility and, in so doing, distract himself from theorising as to exactly what scuttlebuttery consisted of. ‘I know the very man. I made his acquaintance last night. Captain Lochery, owner, master and commander of the Edge of Dusk. A galleon.’ He settled back to bask in the plaudits.

‘Galleon’ was putting it a little strongly. The party had proceeded down to the stout, oaken wharves, where stout, oaken ships waited at anchor, quite possibly crewed by stout, oaken sailors because, after all, this was the Dreamlands. Almost the only thing at the docks that was not stout and oaken was the Edge of Dusk, a ship that had probably looked like it had seen better days right from the hour it was launched. It was not a galleon, that was clear to all of them, but it was Corde who correctly identified it as a cog, an earlier and smaller form of ship. As a galleon is to a cog, a cog is to a small toy with a sail that one splashes around in the bath to amuse oneself when one is either very young or an admiral. It was something of a disappointment, but Cabal pointed out that a true galleon, one looking like a refugee from a Spanish plate fleet, would have been greatly surplus to their requirements and to their budget. The Edge of Dusk was not pretty, but she was small, and on closer inspection bore an air of competence and functionality about her that Cabal, for one, preferred to her romantic neighbours, their sails blowing like the ruffled shirt of a hero in a novel for spinsters.