Johannes Cabal The Necromancer (37 page)

Cabal felt his legs starting to go and sat heavily on the floor. “Oh, Horst,” he said. “Oh, what have you done?”

“I’ve killed you, brother. Just like you killed me. I would like to think there’s some small degree of nobility in my actions, though.”

Cabal couldn’t tear his eyes from the paper. “When did you do it?”

“I picked your desk drawer and stole this about ten months ago.”

“Ten months? You’ve had that for ten months?”

“It took me until then to notice that you never counted the contracts, only ticked them off in that silly book of yours, and a tick is easy enough to forge. You had faith the contracts themselves would stay where you put them. Reasonable faith, as it turned out when I tried to get at them: that lock was incredibly difficult to pick. It took perhaps ten attempts.”

“It pays to invest in quality,” said Cabal faintly. “Why? Why did you take it?”

“When this all started out, all the people who you got to sign were obviously going to the Bad Place no matter what. I had no problem with that. But sometimes you’d be almost at the point of pulling the cap off your pen for some poor schmo whose only sin was being a bit stupid or gullible. Yes, I know those are cardinal sins as far as you’re concerned. Not for me, though. I’d have to jump in and distract you with some more suitable prospect. That’s when I decided I needed a bargaining counter.”

“So you stole the contract.”

“So I stole the contract.”

“But how was that supposed to modify my behaviour if I didn’t know you had it? What use is a threat if you don’t make it?”

“There we have the difference between us. It was never intended as a threat. If we’d arrived here and I’d been convinced that you were doing this the right way, I’d have got this thing signed for you myself. Even somewhere like Penlow, there were still some likely prospects. When you took the soul of that woman in the arcade—”

“Nea Winshaw,” said Cabal quietly.

“At least you remember her name. Yes, Nea Winshaw; that was it. I gave up hope. I knew you were beyond redemption.”

“Well, I am now,” said Cabal with no rancour. “I’m going to have this mortal coil violently stripped from me on Satan’s own orders and spend the rest of eternity in boiling sulphur or being impaled by tridents or something equally tedious. Thank you, Horst, ever so.”

“I’m sorry, Johannes.”

“You should be.”

“No, I’m not sorry for what I did. I’m sorry for everything that brought us to here and now, everything that meant I had no choice. I am truly, deeply sorry. If it’s any comfort, I still believed you could be saved almost up to the last moment.”

“Saved? From what? The only thing I really needed saving from turns out to be my own brother. Redemption? You keep saying that as if it’s something I needed. Shouldn’t you produce a tambourine from somewhere and start dancing around when you talk like that?”

He rested his crossed arms on his drawn-up knees and rested his forehead on the forearms. His whole life was a waste. His researches hadn’t added a pennyweight’s value to human knowledge. He was no closer to reaching his goal. Soon he would be dead, and everything that he had done would be forgotten or a cheap joke. If he had applied himself to something useless, like money, he would be a rich man now. Ironically, he was a rich man: running a lucrative business that doesn’t pay wages can do that. Unfortunately, he was going to be dead long before he’d even get a chance to do something worthwhile with the wealth. “I should never have gone back to the Druin crypt. I should just have put an advertisement in the entertainment press. ‘Required: deputy manager for travelling carnival. Talent and greed essential. Moralists need not apply.’”

Horst looked down on Cabal, started to open his mouth to speak, but changed his mind. He had the air of somebody who finally realises that he’s been wasting his time. Instead, he walked to the window and looked out at the eastern horizon, tearing up the useless contract as he stood. “The sky’s getting light. It’s almost dawn. I haven’t seen the sun in nine years.” He opened the door and climbed down.

Johannes Cabal sat alone with his self-pity and self-loathing for a long minute. Finally, he looked up with an expression of awful realisation. “Dawn?” he said in a horrible whisper. He threw himself to his feet, staggered slightly as the circulation returned to his legs, recovered, and ran to the open door.

Outside, Horst had walked some fifty feet and was taking off his jacket, neatly folding it and putting it on the ground. Cabal paused on the step and shouted desperately, “For pity’s sake, Horst! Come in! Come in! Don’t do this!”

Across the Flatlands, light from the new dawn swept rapidly towards them. Horst watched it approach with unconcerned equanimity and a gentle smile. Cabal didn’t. He jumped down, landing heavily, and started to run towards his brother, pulling his own coat off as he ran, swinging it around to act as a shield against the brightness. “Please, Horst! I’m begging you, don’t! You can get back to cover if you run!”

Horst looked at the brightening horizon and felt his skin starting to heat with an odd prickling that was neither pleasant nor unbearable. He could hear his brother, and the naked fear in his voice touched him unexpectedly. He couldn’t look at him; he had to stay resolved. He’d lived, one way or another, longer than some, and that was something to be thankful for. Now it was undoubtedly time to go. His eyes didn’t waver from the distance.

“Sorry, Johannes. I’m going wherever I should have gone nine years ago.”

His last and strongest impulse for self-preservation came and went, and now it was too late. Even he couldn’t reach shade in time. He wondered if this was all his fault somehow, whether the sun was going to hurt, hoped that he’d done the right things, knew that these were his last thoughts and that they meant nothing. “Goodbye, brother,” he said, and then he thought nothing at all, as then the sun caught them both, momentarily blinding Cabal as it spilt over some distant mountain range. He blinked and cursed and tried to find Horst with his outstretched hands, but there was nobody there anymore. He whirled and clutched, but he knew it was already far too late. When finally he could see, there was nothing to see. Just some brown leaves fluttering, and a grey dust flying, and the faint scent of lost chances. Cabal spun around, looking to the far horizons, but he was alone, just as he was always alone.

The new day found Johannes Cabal the necromancer sitting by a ruined and rotting train on a long-abandoned spur line, his head in his hands, the gravel between his feet splashed wet with drops of saline, his sunglasses tossed carelessly to one side when he couldn’t see anymore.

IN WHICH A SCIENTIST RETURNS TO HELL AND A DEAL IS BROKEN

“Mad Dan” Clancy carefully considered his next answer. As an outlaw of the Old West, he had never really considered what awaited him after death; he had been far too busy rooting and tooting at the time. Coming off second best in a gunfight, however, he had been flung into the abyss, and confronted with eternity, Limbo, and a fistful of printed foolscap sheets in rapid succession. Of the three, the last terrified him most.

The question (Form UNCH/14/K, Section 45, No. 215) was headed with a warning: “This Form Will Be Invalidated by Any Metachronism Whatsoever.” Clancy didn’t have the faintest idea in—or just outside—Hell what a metachronism might be, and that frightened him. He’d had seventy-six earlier stabs at filling in UNCH/14/K rejected, but was never told why. Trubshaw, hated Trubshaw, loathed Trubshaw, had said, “We ain’t got the hands to mark every one up with all the mistakes. This ain’t a schoolhouse, boy! If’n you want to get through this here door, you’d better just get a mite more careful, y’hear?” Then he would cackle and slam the little window in the door shut. Clancy made an almost physical effort to shut Trubshaw out of his mind and concentrated on the question. Halfway through answering it, he distractedly put an extra stroke on an “F”—“All responses must be made in BLOCK CAPITALS except where otherwise noted”—and turned “FOUR FEATHER FALLS” into “FOUR FEATHER EALLS.” He stopped and stared at the mistake, trying to erase the errant stroke with sheer willpower. No good. He tried artfully re-forming letters to make it look a little closer to the correct answer but just ended up with “BALLS.” It was hopeless. There was nothing for it but to queue for three months again to get a requisition form to get a new copy of this form.

A shadow fell across him, and before he had a chance to turn, something fell onto the parched ground between his crossed legs. He reached down, and what he found amazed and astonished him. It was the holy of holies, the thing he’d wished for almost as long as he’d been in that godforsaken place. An eraser.

“It’s a little greasy, but that should rub off,” said the shadow. It had a faint German accent. “Enjoy.”

Johannes Cabal approached the Gates of Hell for the second time in his life. Nothing much had changed here except the introduction of a melamine notice over the porter’s door reading Queue Here. Cabal headed straight for it.

At the door, the procession of transient pre-damnees was in temporary hiatus thanks to a pitched argument that had broken out between Hawley Harvey Crippen and Kunigunde Mackamotzki, aka Belle Elmore, aka Cora Crippen.

“Why am I here?” she wailed theatrically. “He’s the one who murdered me! And cut me up!”

“Cora, please listen,” said Crippen for what was clearly not the first time. “I didn’t murder you. It was manslaughter. An accident.”

“You accidentally cut me up and buried me under the cellar floor? In quicklime? That’s some accident, you little worm!”

“Damage limitation, ma’am,” said a U.S. soldier in the line behind them, better known for his skill with a document shredder than with a rifle.

“But I’m the victim!” she screamed. “What am I doing here? Why am I here? Why, why, why?”

Arthur Trubshaw looked up from the Rolodex he was consulting. “Adultery. Multiple counts,” he said in a bored voice. He flicked onto the next card. And the one after that. “Lots and lots and lots of counts.”

Everybody looked at Cora Crippen. She wilted slightly under the attention. “Well,” she said quietly, “I was lonely.”

“Fascinating,” said a new voice. The sight of the fully clothed Cabal parted the head of the queue from the door like a razor shaving a hair. “Hello, Trubshaw. I’m back. Kindly open the door.”

Trubshaw squinted at him for a moment. Then a horrid grin settled upon his face. “Oh, so it’s you again, is it, Mr. ‘Let me in, I ain’t got no appointment’ Cabal? Well, sure, you can come in.” He cackled again, ducked out of sight, and then reappeared with a hefty form that he thrust out of the little window at Cabal. “Soon as ye’ve done the paperwork!”

Cabal didn’t bother taking the wad of sheets but just cocked his head to read the top leaf. “‘Form VSKW/I, Special Circumstances Living Person Admittance Docket Application.’” Cabal straightened up and looked at Trubshaw. “You’re not serious, are you?”

“Damn right I’m serious! I wrote this ’n up jus’ for you. Gotta admit, it’s kinda tricky. You might find yerself havin’ to do it a few times afore ye get it right! Say two, three hundred? Heh-heh-heh-heh-he-urrrk!”

It is received wisdom that you can’t put a square peg in a round socket. As is common with received wisdom, this isn’t entirely true. It is quite possible to put a square peg in a round socket if you are very stupid, are very wilful, or just don’t like the square peg very much.

Cabal reached through the window with both hands, grabbed Trubshaw by the ears, and pulled. Shrieking woefully, Trubshaw was dragged through the window until there was enough head showing for Cabal to put him in a neck lock and bring his weight to bear. Trubshaw was not a large man, but his shoulders still wouldn’t fit through the window frame at all, until one broke with a crack that made the onlookers wince. Cabal dragged him all the way through and dumped him on the baking ground.

“You sonovabitch!” Trubshaw sobbed. “You goddamn sonovabitch! You jus’ wait ’ntil I tells His Worshipfulness what ye’ve been a-doin’ an—”

Cabal wasn’t about to listen. He dragged Trubshaw to his feet and snapped fiercely in his face, “I really, really don’t care. As for you, you’ve got other things to concern yourself with. Arthur Trubshaw …” He whirled Trubshaw to face out onto the plains of Limbo. As far as the eye could see, there were people. People with forms and pencils that they were throwing to the ground as they rose to their feet, a great expanding wave of outraged humanity face-to-face with its tormentor. “Meet your public,” finished Cabal, planting his foot in the small of Trubshaw’s back and shoving him into the great sea of people, which closed over him in a second.

Cabal had little time for lynch mobs as a rule, but at least if one had ever caught up with him, unconsciousness or death would have made the experience a brief one. No such mercies were available to Trubshaw. As Cabal reached through the little window in the Gates of Hell and undid the porter’s door bolt, he smiled. If he was going to have a lousy day, he didn’t see why a few other deserving cases couldn’t share the fun.

When General Ratuth Slabuth, general of the Infernal Hordes, received word of an invasion of Hell and some sort of riot on the plains of Limbo, he checked his pocket diary against what had happened a year ago, tutted, and said that he’d deal with it. He caught up with Cabal on the Fourth Circle.

“Hello, Cabal,” he said, manifesting as discreetly as possible. “Back again, I see.”

“You worked that out all by yourself? I can see why you became a general, Slabuth.”

“Sarcasm ill behoves you,” replied Slabuth archly as he made a mental note to look up “behove” later.

Cabal gave him a look that made him wish he’d looked it up beforehand. “I’m not interested in your ideas for my personal development. I’m here to see Satan, as you well know. Now, step aside”—he looked at Slabuth’s distinct lack of legs—“or do whatever it is that you do to get aside. I have an appointment.”

“Very well. But first, purely as a matter of interest, did you get all the souls? All one hundred?”

“Hardly your business.”

“So you didn’t.”