Johannes Cabal The Necromancer (34 page)

ayla had been born perhaps fifty weeks before and would never see her first birthday. It didn’t matter; she’d seen more in those brief months than most saw in a lifetime. Horst Cabal had found the parts that made her up pre-packaged in a catering-size coffee tin labelled Layla in one of the cars. He had taken the tin to Johannes and shown it to him.

“Have you seen this?” he’d said, emptying the contents onto Cabal’s desktop. Cabal had looked at the mess for some moments before asking, “Well? What is it?”

“Layla the Latex Lady, I would guess from the label and contents. Remember that board I showed you? She must have been one of the very few members of this carnival that they sorted out before the plug was pulled.”

“So—less work for you. Why should I be concerned?”

“Why? Just look at this stuff, Johannes. I’m having second thoughts about animating her.” Cabal had looked quizzically at his brother before taking a pencil and sorting through the mess. There was no rag and no bone. There were several rubber items in place of a rag, most recognisable, some less so. Cabal had located a small sheet of latex, perhaps two dozen erasers, a few objects that he was glad hadn’t been used previously, and a couple of others that had made him think some designers must have a difficult time explaining in polite company exactly what it is that they design. For hair, there was a long, loose ponytail gathered into a knot at one end. He’d held it up to the light and marvelled at the multitude of different colours. There didn’t seem to be an analogue for bone until Horst had pointed out a large tube of silicone gel. “Oh my,” Johannes Cabal had said, otherwise lost for words just for once.

Then there had been the clippings. Held together with a treasury tag was a motley collection of old and yellowing advertisements for corsets, high heels, stockings. Farther in had been pages snipped from the lingerie sections of more modern home-shopping catalogues, photographs of public-toilet walls covered in childish drawings and closely written fantasy, mimeographs of anonymous letters, detailed and disturbing. Cabal had coughed and put the items back in the tin. “People like that sort of thing, you said so yourself.”

“That’s before I saw all this stuff. I have my doubts.”

“We don’t have time for doubts,” Johannes Cabal had said, cast the tin’s contents on the floor, and invoked her then and there.

Cabal had discovered early on that Layla was the carnival’s star performer in most senses and deployed her frequently to great effect. He didn’t like being anywhere near her, though. She appealed to him in a certain way, and Cabal didn’t like being influenced at such a base level.

For Layla was the very epitome, the very physical embodiment, of guilty eroticism: the spirit of the peep show, the sly glance up the library stepladder, the thumbed postcards, the denied impulse, the addictively tawdry, the illicitly thrilling. Fortunes had been built upon it in dilution. Concentrated in one form, lines drawn by a thousand million fevered imaginations and topped with a face that was all things to most men and a fair proportion of women, the effect was nothing short of devastating. Men came to her, and afterwards they found that they had been lessened. Less dignity. Less self-respect. The complex roadmap of the average intelligence was reduced to a one-way highway with no off-ramps and no U-turns in her presence. Everything became dangerously simple.

hings were getting dangerously simple for Barrow right now. He looked raptly up at her. How had he ever thought that her skin was featureless when, wherever his eyes fell, detail bloomed: anatomical, perfect, titillating, and quite mesmerising? The higher centres of Barrow’s mind, his Ego and Super-Ego, were aware that all was not well and were hammering on the bridge door of his mind. Unfortunately, the beastly Mr. Id wasn’t receiving visitors today, so Barrow just sat there and trembled and sweated and breathed shallowly. “There, there,” said Layla, taking control as always.

She slowly knelt astride him and took his head in her hands. He had the faint sensation of her nails dimpling the skin at the back of his skull. How could she have nails? Her hands were coated in latex, weren’t they?

Barrow’s Super-Ego was standing on his Ego’s shoulders and bellowing through the air vent to the bridge, “We are in big trouble unless you do something, you hairy oaf! Fight or flight! Fight or flight!” Id wasn’t listening, naturally. He just sat in the captain’s chair with an unseemly tent in his jockey shorts and looked foolishly deep into Layla’s eyes, perfect pools of enchanting quicksand from which few escaped.

Barrow didn’t, couldn’t move as her lips parted and she bent forward to kiss him. Even when her mouth deformed elastically but oh so artistically, he just sat there and waited for whatever she had in mind. Even when her lips settled across the bridge of his nose and the base of his chin, encompassing everything in between, he only distantly wondered where you learn tricks like that. They stayed like that for a few moments as he breathed her breath and remembered having a tooth out under gas when he was seven. Her tongue played across his lips and playfully tickled his nostrils.

Then, with a powerful spasm that ran from her throat to her abdomen, she sucked the air out of his lungs. She was tired of fulfilling human fantasies, she just wanted to kill somebody for a change.

Barrow’s brain snapped into working order, albeit a little late in the day to do any good. He grabbed her hair and pulled back frantically, beat at her head with his balled fists, tried to break her grip somehow. All in vain; she was strong as sin, very literally. As he struggled and fought, she didn’t move a muscle, just looked into his eyes with a cool alien satisfaction as she waited for the life to leave him. He could feel himself growing weaker as his lungs tried to drag some little vitality from the thin dregs of air that were left to them. The room was becoming less distinct as tunnel vision constrained his sight closer and closer to a full blackout, unconsciousness, and death. His fists struck feebly and erratically against her. It felt like punching a tyre and the thought made him want to laugh but he couldn’t and he wondered if that was to be his last thought and hoped not because he wanted his last thought to be of Leonie and who was going to look after her when he was gone although obviously she was an adult woman and isn’t it dark? an adult woman and could and could and could and cadwallader Memphis divot spigot olly olly oxinfree …

arrow’s brain regretfully closed down all verbal functions and awaited the moment when it would have to close down everything else.

… and you only appreciate fresh air when you’ve been cooped up indoors in a tyre factory all day although there’s a still a faint smell and what are you staring at?

Barrow’s vision blurred and cleared. He was still staring at Layla’s face and she was still looking at him, but the orientation had changed, and Layla’s eyes looked vaguely disappointed somehow. Suddenly he remembered that she was trying to kill him and he ought to get back to fighting her. He punched out at her body, but his hand met no resistance. He tried slapping at her face and, unexpectedly, she let him go, just like that. His faint but appreciative surprise increased by several magnitudes as he watched her head bounce away from him and come to rest some feet away. He cried out and pushed himself away from it until he came up against the chaise-longue. He looked around frantically, trying to reorientate himself, panting. He was still in the sideshow, still on the floor. Layla’s head lay some feet away, grimacing slowly, while to the other side her decapitated body was still on its knees, writhing. Behind it, a nondescript little man with what looked like a breadknife in one hand scrubbed ineffectually at the great quantity of colourless clear slime that had covered much of the front of his jacket.

“Oh dear,” said the man conversationally when he noticed Barrow looking at him. “I don’t think this is going to come out.”

“Hello, Mr. Simpkins,” said Barrow hoarsely.

“Hello, ex-Detective Inspector Barrow,” said the man, and continued scrubbing at the stain. “You know, you get used to bloodstains, but this is a new one on me.” He indicated Layla’s disparate parts. “I didn’t actually intend to behead the young lady, incidentally, just cut her throat. But there was nothing to her at all. Once the blade had cut the—well, I hesitate to call it skin—it just kept going. Like slicing German sausage. And—pop!—off comes her head. Which would have been gratifying in a professional sense, but then all this dreadful goo came spraying out. Geysers of blood I’m used to—you just brace yourself for it as a necessary unpleasantness, like going to the dentist. But this?” He nodded gravely as if communicating a great discovery. “I doubt it’s natural.”

“What now, Mr. Simpkins?” asked Barrow. Simpkins cocked his head quizzically. “You said you were going to kill me one day. Is that today?”

“Oh, that old thing,” said Simpkins dismissively. “I’ve saved your life today, ex-Detective Inspector Barrow. In some cultures, that means your life belongs to me. Why should I kill you now? Why take what’s already mine?”

“A nice thought, Mr. Simpkins, but relevant only if you subscribe to one of those cultural views. I’m not sure you do.”

Simpkins laughed, a suppressed sniffing noise. “You’re quite right, of course. Always the detective? No, I was still intending to kill you, but, you know, I don’t think I shall now.” He held out his hand with two fingers extended in a “V”-for-victory salute. “Two reasons. Firstly, having saved your life for admittedly selfish grounds—I was determined that if anybody was going to kill you, it was going to be me—it seems almost churlish to then go ahead and take it. But secondly, and for me far more pressingly, you remembered me. I don’t know if you recall, but as soon as you could talk you said, ‘Hello, Mr. Simpkins,’ which was touchingly polite in this day and age. Very civil. You remembered me, and I have no doubt you will always remember my little part in your rescue here.”

“You can rest assured on that count,” said Barrow. Rescued from a synthetic succubus by one of the world’s most notorious serial killers— no, he wasn’t likely to forget that in a hurry.

“You’re precisely the sort of person—indeed, the only example to date of the sort of person—that I want to preserve. I would as soon kill myself as kill you. I’m not the suicidal sort, by the by.”

“You were hiding in the Hall of Murderers, weren’t you?”

“Yes, that was me. With the card pinned to my jacket calling me Albert Simmonds, among many other inaccuracies.”

“So Cabal’s sheltering the Laidstone escapees, is he?”

“Oh gosh, yes. We outnumber the waxworks.”

“Why?”

“Why, for the price of our souls. I’m an atheist, so it was no great loss to me.” He looked at Layla’s corpse, which was slowly deflating and puddling into oddly regular forms. “At least, I was an atheist. Besides, we were all Hell-bound long before we signed his forms, so it’s still six of one and a half-dozen of the other.”

“Forms?” asked Barrow. “He had forms?”

“Oh, yes. I read mine before I signed. The others didn’t, a mixture of illiteracy and relief to be out in the open, I think. Rather nicely drafted, although peppered with archaic terms. Still legally binding, though. The bearer has all rights to the signatory’s soul on the occasion of his or her death. Probably quite standard if you happen to be working for Satan, I would think.”

“Look, Mr. Simpkins …”

“You even remember to pronounce the ‘p’! Bless you, ex-Detective Inspector Barrow!”

“I need to find those forms and destroy them. Will you help me?”

“Me? Oh, I’m sorry, I’m no action man.”

“But, and I hope you’ll forgive me for bringing this up, you can go unnoticed where I would be spotted.”

Simpkins shook his head with clear regret. “Not here, I’m afraid. That’s how I first gathered that there was something amiss in this carnival. Lots of the staff notice me, although, if this young lady is anything to go by, they notice me precisely because they’re not people at all. In fact, the less like people they appear, the more likely they are to spot me. No, I’m afraid I can’t offer any direct help. If you would value my opinion, though, you might do a lot worse than examine the desk of Mr. Johannes Cabal. It’s in the office car of the train.” He looked at the knife. “I don’t suppose I’ll be needing this anymore.” He dropped it to the floor and watched it clatter into silence. He smiled. “That was easier than giving up smoking. Good evening, ex-Detective Inspector Barrow.”

“Good evening, Mr. Simpkins,” said Barrow, and watched him leave via the rear door. He gave him two minutes and then followed, stepping over an odd collection of rubber knick-knacks and yellowed magazine clippings, and picking up the discarded breadknife en route. The rear door had been unlocked with the key. Nearby was a bone wrapped in rag and hair and liberally smeared with fat and beefcake. Barrow guessed that Simpkins had caught the sideshow bodyguard unawares. This was an odd place, but he was finally beginning to understand its rules. He checked his watch. Twenty past eleven. He set off for the train.

IN WHICH MIDNIGHT STRIKES AND DAWN BREAKS

Cabal stood at the top of the Helter-Skelter with a pair of opera glasses and directed operations. He was in the way of the late-evening revellers but, characteristically, really couldn’t give a tinker’s cuss. “Hey, daddio,” said a hip young dude, demonstrating that everything old is new again. Cabal slowly lowered the glasses and gave the offending youth a look that would have chilled dry ice. The youth, lacking experience but possessing chutzpah in excess, didn’t notice. “You’re cramping my style, man. Yo dissin’ mah main squeeze.”

His main squeeze simpered, curtseyed, and said, “Good evening, sir.”

“Let me see if I understand your outlandish mélange of argot, young man,” said Cabal, who was fewer than ten years older but who already regarded “young” as a synonym for “stupid.” “You’re suggesting that by standing at the top of my own Helter-Skelter I am in some way imposing upon your”—he looked at the girl, who simpered some more—“young lady.”

“Get hip to the jive, mah man,” said the youth, jiggling on the spot, crossing and recrossing his arms while making horned hands. Cabal wondered about his sanity. “Ah’m a-saying this, fool, you’d—”