Johannes Cabal The Necromancer (36 page)

“Dad!” said Leonie, and slapped her hand over her mouth. She frowned at uttering the traitorous word. Cabal realised that she didn’t want to upset her father any more than he already was. She was letting him play this game out. Even at this pass, she was still thinking of him. A remarkable woman. Why did he always meet them in such unfortunate circumstances?

“You won’t,” said Barrow.

“What is this? A dare? Ye gods, man, it’s your daughter’s life!”

“I know that. I also know you, Cabal. I saw how you reacted when you first saw her in town. It took me a little while to understand what was going on in that mausoleum you call a mind, but I finally got it, distasteful as it seems.”

“I don’t have time for amateur-psychology demonstrations, Barrow. I’m going to start counting—”

“It was love at first sight.”

Despite everything, Cabal actually laughed an honest laugh of disbelief. “Love? Love? You are so very, very wrong, Barrow. I’m sure Leonie’s a lovely person. In other circumstances, perhaps we could have been friends, and I really would be loath to blow most of her head off, I’m sure. But”—he deliberately thumbed the hammer back—“I’ll do it without hesitation.”

“You won’t do it,” Barrow said with finality, crossed his arms, and leaned back in his seat. The tableau was held for a long moment: Barrow certain and determined; Cabal looking at Barrow, and his gun hand levelled unwaveringly at Leonie; Leonie trying not to look frightened, watching Cabal’s trigger finger, and noticing it was barely touching the trigger itself.

Suddenly the carnival fell totally silent; the calliope stopped in mid-phrase, the barkers stopped barking. Cabal blinked, raised the gun to a ready position, and checked his watch. “What’s this, Bones?” he demanded. “There’s still a minute left.”

Bones stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat. “That’s right, boss. Still a minute for you to get that there contract signed, but as for this here carnival, we’re packin’ up.”

“What?” Cabal rose to his feet. “How dare you? This is my carnival, and I say—”

“You say way, way too much with all them big words of yours. And it ain’t your carnival, and it’s never been your carnival. You just borrowed it for a while, and the loan term’s up, boss. This last minute, it’s ours. And it starts”—he struck a dramatic listening pose by the window; the calliope churned back into life, and Cabal recognised the tune within the first few notes as a deranged, discordant version of “The Minute Waltz”—“now!” Bones danced around like a ferret and clapped his hands. “Time for some real fun round here.” He stopped by Cabal. “Hey, did I ever mention what a pig’s-ass job you did of makin’ me in the first place?”

“Frequently.”

“I means to say, look at this.” Bones’s face sloughed off the front of his skull, revealing bare bone and muscle. It hit the floor with a noise like an accident with a rice pudding. Cabal just glared at him. Barrow had attended enough autopsies to have seen worse. Leonie looked away. She had the feeling that the next minute was going to be the worst of her life, one way or another. “That’s just shoddy, now, ain’t it?” He laughed a high shrieking laugh, rolled the door open, and leapt down to the ground.

The open door let in a tide of sound, including a lot of screams and shouts. “What the Hell is going on?” Cabal said, and stepped forward to the doorway.

Hell was exactly what was going on.

The carnival was falling apart and re-forming into new, horrible shapes before his eyes. He was forcibly reminded of Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. It didn’t seem like a place to bring the family. The Things from the Ghost Train were flying low and fast between the blossoming flowers of destruction that used to be sideshows, harassing panicking townsfolk into headlong stampedes. The giant gorilla had left the Ghost Train, ascended the Helter-Skelter—now a looming tower of spikes and blades—and stood triumphantly atop it, swatting at what used to be the four jockeys from the Day at the Races concession but who now looked like personifications of Death, War, Pestilence, and Hunger, although they still wore their bright racing silks. The gorilla was holding in its spare hand some hapless individual that was fighting feebly to get away. At the base of the tower, Denzil waved up at Dennis, who paused in his struggles to wave back. He didn’t feel cut out to play Fay Wray at all.

“Stop that!” bellowed Cabal. Nobody stopped at all. “Joey? Joey! Pull your verdammt trousers up this instant! You’re frightening people!”

“That’s rather the plan, actually, old bean. Sorry and all that,” called back Joey, the most well-mannered and polite expression of diabolical will one is ever likely to meet.

Cabal looked around. “Bones, stop them! I’m still in control here!”

“For the next thirty seconds,” shouted Bones from a hundred yards away. He became sober. “I’ll see what I can do, boss.” He turned to the pulsing boil of chaos that used to be a carnival. “Stop that,” he said in an effete voice, wagging his finger. He exploded laughing, staggering around with delight at his own wit. Then his head just exploded.

Cabal drew back the hammer on his smoking gun. “I will not be mocked,” he said to nobody in particular. He turned back to face Barrow. “Sit down,” he said to Barrow, who had started to rise. Cabal looked around the office. The panelling was starting to rot, the polish vanishing from the desktop, a smell of damp and abandonment returning to this place, just as he’d found it. He walked back to the Barrows and placed the gun barrel against the side of Leonie’s head. “Fifteen seconds. Sign now.”

“No,” said Barrow, inevitably.

“Then it’s all over,” Cabal said tonelessly, and aimed at Frank Barrow’s head.

Without drama but in swift, certain movements, Leonie snatched the contract and pen from where they lay and signed. She thrust the paper at Cabal. “Leave my father alone,” she said simply.

“No!” cried both men, making Leonie jump.

Cabal glared at Barrow. “Now look what you’ve done with your idiotic intransigence!”

Barrow wasn’t so aghast at Leonie’s act that he couldn’t be taken aback still further. “What I’ve done?”

Distantly, the clock of Saint Olave’s struck twelve.

The flow of dust in the hourglass abruptly ran out, settled in the lower bulb, and lay still.

“Time’s up!” said Bones’s body, appearing at the door carrying a boater full of skull fragments. The voice came directly from the wet stump of his neck and sounded a little muffled. “All aboard the Damnation Express!” He swung out of sight again, and through the open door Cabal could see that the carnival field was empty but for a few people running aimlessly about.

Cabal turned to Barrow and his daughter to speak, but then paused. Barrow was crying freely, Leonie holding him and telling him it was all right. Cabal looked at the contract in his hand and opened his mouth, but suddenly the train heaved forward and he was thrown onto his back. Leonie looked around fearfully. It was odd; the train seemed to be pulling away, but they—she and her father— seemed to be staying still. The walls of the car were becoming translucent, as if they belonged somewhere else or were made of mist. Even Cabal, rolling heels over head in slowed motion, didn’t seem very solid anymore.

The train slid away from beneath the Barrows, and they were dumped gently onto the tracks. Except there were no tracks, no sleepers, and no sign that there had been for years. The train, a phantom monster in glowing greens and blues, howled past the station and left it a ruin from an old, old fire, the stationmaster saluting sadly as he was whisked back out of the land of the living and dumped into the place reserved for and deserved by suicides. At least, that was the thinking when the rules were drawn up.

Screaming and ranting, the engine shot away into the night and towards a black horizon. Leonie even had the impression, just before it vanished from sight, that it had lifted from the ground altogether and was travelling into the midnight sky like a great luminous eel from the ocean depths.

“Why did you do it?” asked her father, deep in misery.

“He was going to kill you, Dad. I had to take a risk.” She looked at the empty sky. “A calculated risk.”

Cabal felt a faint tickling on his lip. He moved his hand to swat it away but had trouble co-ordinating his hand. He tried once, twice, and was just at the point where he decided that it wasn’t that unpleasant a sensation, and it was too much bother to deal with it anyway, when somebody else swatted it away for him. Actually, somebody else slapped him hard.

“Uuurgh!” said Johannes Cabal, rolling away from the blow. He climbed onto all fours, his head hurting abominably, feeling disorientated and nauseous.

Horst watched without comment as his brother vomited miserably on the office floor. When he was sure Cabal was just about empty, he reached down, grasped him by the lapels, and threw him across the room. Before he had time to recover, Horst had picked him up again and pinned him against the wall.

“You didn’t listen to a word I said, did you?”

Cabal tried to pull himself together. Beside his brother’s coldly furious face, he could make out that they were still in the office. It must have carried on rotting while he’d been unconscious—mild concussion, that would explain why he felt so dreadful—for it was now no more than the car full of rubbish it had been when he first found it. The only change was a poster on the wall, decaying and curling already: “The Cabal Bros. Present Their World Famous Carnival of Wonders!” A woodlouse unsuccessfully tried to negotiate it and fell to the floor—Cabal realised what the tickling on his lip had been. Through the windows he could see gnarled trees and a suspicion of low, rolling land. They were back in the Flatlands. The carnival was back in mothballs.

“You took another innocent soul, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t take anything—”

“Don’t lie to me! I was right there in that bloody box, listening to you!”

“Then you know that I didn’t take anything!” barked Cabal, wrestling himself free. He glared at Horst as he tried to straighten his jacket. “She gave it to me.”

“Gave it to you,” said Horst contemptuously.

“Gave it to me! Don’t come the moral guardian with me! If you were right there, why didn’t you do something?”

“I was ready, believe me. If I’d heard that distinct click your finger makes when squeezing a trigger, it wouldn’t have got as far as making the second click it makes when it’s finished.”

“You didn’t stop me shooting Bones.”

“You were leaning out of the door and obviously pointing in the wrong direction.” He smiled grimly. “You shot Bones, did you? Can’t say I’m sorry. I never trusted him. I never trusted any of them. They finally betrayed you, then?”

“Like you were expecting it.”

“Damn right I was. Just like you were. You’re not stupid, Johannes. Inhuman and morally bankrupt perhaps, but not stupid. Chose their moment, didn’t they?”

“Oh, yes, they did that right enough.” Cabal brushed some of the debris from the desk corner and sat there. His favoured leather chair seemed to be home to a nest of mice. “Look, I’m not proud of what I’ve done, but it’s done. I’ve been manipulated from pillar to post, committed acts I’d prefer to forget about, but that’s all done with. I’m not pretending that the ends justify the means, but the fact remains, I’ve won the wager. I get my soul back, and I can get on with my research.”

“Whoopee,” said Horst.

Cabal stifled his annoyance. Horst had put up with a lot. “Now, I’m sorry about last night, the things I said. In my defence, I can honestly say I wasn’t quite myself. I’m not insensitive to all the work and effort you put into the carnival, and, well, it would have been a failure without you.”

“Rub my nose in it, why don’t you?”

“The point is,” said Cabal, talking through him, “the point is, you kept your side of our deal, so I’ll keep my side. I’ve had a few ideas about how your condition can be treated. If you’ll come back to the house with me, I promise you that I won’t rest until I’ve found a cure.” There was a long pause. “I’ve said my piece,” finished Cabal.

Horst looked at him for a long moment. “No. No, it won’t do. I’m afraid I’ll have to turn down your kind offer for several reasons. Firstly …” He started to walk to the window but kicked something. He picked up the crowbar, touched the tip, sniffed it. “That’s blood. Is this what you hit Frank Barrow with?”

“It is,” said Cabal, irritated by the distraction. “He used it to try to get into the locked drawer, to get the contracts. I was expecting something more artistic from him.” He stopped, thought. “Just a moment.” He walked to the desk and inspected the drawer. There was a scratch on the lockplate, which had previously confirmed to his satisfaction that Barrow had tried to force it. He cursed himself for addled thinking.

“Firstly,” carried on Horst, regardless, “I really have no interest in being stuck in the same house as you for the years your experiments would inevitably take. Secondly, we both know that your interest would slide back to your main researches and probably leave me high and dry. Thirdly, you’re a despicable human being who should have died at birth.”

“Sticks and stones,” said Cabal, otherwise paying no attention. “The crowbar was on the chair over there. How, then, did Barrow even manage to attempt to jemmy this drawer when the tool was nowhere near to hand?”

“Fourthly, I am never going to be able to live with myself for helping you, not if I live to be a thousand, which, given my condition, is a real possibility.”

Cabal was still ignoring him. “And, further, why attack the lock when surely a crowbar would be used against the catch?” He examined the scratch. “This is too fine to have been caused by that bar. This lock’s been picked.”

“Fifthly, lastly, and I think most tellingly, I’m not going to accept your offer because you’ve lost your bet.”

Cabal looked up at him with dawning horror as Horst reached into his waistcoat pocket and produced a couple of shining lockpicks. He held them up for inspection as, with the other hand, he took a familiar-looking piece of parchment from an inside pocket. He shook it open and turned its face towards Cabal.

It was one of the contracts. It was unsigned.