Johannes Cabal The Necromancer (18 page)

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

“How quickly did it heal?”

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

“How long?”

“My nose?”

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

“How long?”

“Yes.”

“My nose?”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Good, keep it up.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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