The Fall of the House of Cabal (2 page)

‘What if it is?'

The cold blue eyes turned to regard him. ‘Tell me all about it.' And he produced a good stout English ten-bob note, and all animosities were shortly forgotten.

*   *   *

The stranger left the tavern some hours later, a room for the night secured and the locals rendered glazed and garrulous by the application of a multitude of ten-bob notes and the ale thus purchased.

In truth, they had told him little he did not already know, but the investigation was not purely based upon what they said, but upon how they said it. They believed every word of it, that much was plain. Every word was, of course, nonsense, but they held those words with a fervent regard. Even the most aggressively masculine of them would not venture upon the moor at night without an excellent reason, and that intrigued and satisfied the stranger, who was Johannes Cabal,
*
a necromancer of some little infamy. This job description he left off the battered ledger the inn used as a guest book, instead entering ‘Gentleman scientist'. In a rational and well-ordered world, he would have been perfectly happy to write ‘Necromancer', but the world was not rational, and little enough of it was in any sort of order of which he could approve. Had he used that word, he would likely have received sour looks, poor service, and a lynch party, and so he did not.

The landlord looked at the not entirely inaccurate substitute term and wrinkled his brow. ‘So what are you doing here?' Clearly the locals didn't hold with any of that newfangled science stuff like evolution or gravity.

‘My current interest is folklore and legends,' replied Cabal. ‘The tales of the moor drew my attention. I am considering a monograph upon the subject.'

‘A monograph?'

‘A monograph, yes.'

They looked at one another, both men with secrets. Cabal's was that he had no intention of writing a monograph. The landlord's, that he had no idea what a monograph was.

*   *   *

Presently, Cabal left the inn to ‘go for a walk' and ‘get a breath of fresh air'. These claims were true, as both were unavoidable. His main aim was to carry out an experiment that was esoteric in both field and morality, true, but he would have to walk to get to the location he had chosen for the experiment and would doubtless have to breathe one or more times
en route
.

Cabal wore a soft Homburg in a dark grey bearing a sedate curve, an unimposing pinch, and a small black feather in the band, the loss of which had surely not inconvenienced the bird from which it came in the slightest. His suit was dour, but hard-wearing, and his boots—as mentioned previously—eminently suitable for tramping around on rough terrains. He carried a Gladstone bag and a cane topped with a tarnished silver skull. If one maintained a mental image of how a gentleman scientist might conceivably appear, it would certainly have been along the lines of Cabal's wardrobe.

He walked in a brisk line along the road that bordered Perkis Moor until he was safely out of sight of the pub, and then performed a sharp left-hand turn that took him directly onto it. There was not a great deal of daylight left, but that was all to plan.

He did not need to go far onto the moor itself, just up onto a ridge at its edge that he had noted on the Ordnance Survey map of the area. The area it overlooked was a natural arena, a wide, flat depression rising into the flat of the main part of the moor. A natural arena, or perhaps ‘theatre' was a better term. The vast majority of sightings of the unusual happened in or near this area. The closeness of the road was perhaps the primary explanation for the place having the most witnesses. The closeness of the pub was often mooted as the primary explanation for the sightings themselves, perhaps unkindly.

Perhaps not. Having found himself a dry spot at the ridge's edge to sit upon, Cabal wasted no time tying a length of rubber tubing around his bicep, flicked the skin of the inside of the elbow to bring up a vein, and injected himself there with a syringe he drew from a sterile metal cylinder he took from his bag. The syringe contained a rare and potent narcotic that might threaten addiction if overindulged. This was not a concern; Cabal did little enough for recreational purposes as it was, and even amongst these rare hobbies and pastimes, becoming a junkie came very low upon his list of life goals.

The act done, he loosened the tubing and placed it, the syringe, and its container back within the Gladstone bag. In their stead he removed a small tripod with telescoping legs and set it up by him. From its apex dangled a length of fine silver chain and upon its end a small silver sphere, its surface regularly pitted and a seam around its equator, where it might be unscrewed. Thus prepared, he relaxed and allowed himself to take in his surroundings, looking without seeing, hearing without listening.

The day died around him, and the night grew in its stead, unhurried and unheralded. Somewhere a lonely meadow pipit called. The sound was allowed into his ears and to merge with his awareness without him troubling to identify the bird, even down to naming it (
Anthus pratensis
) as was his usual wont. In the common run of things, this degree of mental slackness would have been impossible to him. It was the duty of the drug he had taken intravenously to render his mind less focussed, less capable, less analytical, or—to put it differently—more like those of normal people.

He relaxed as deeply as he was capable, a great deal more deeply than he might have managed without narcotic aid, and measured his breaths, focusing entirely on the steady metre of inhalation, exhalation. He allowed the outside world to become nothing, the interior not much more than that. He sought a state of semi-consciousness, in which his awareness of the mundane was blunted, and his perception of those things less mundane equivalently sharpened.

Beside him, the silver plumb upon its silver chain swung gently in the light evening breeze that blew up across from the moor before him. Presently it stopped moving with a sudden shudder and hung canted at an angle of some twenty or so degrees from the vertical. Slowly, quivering as if base iron in a strong magnetic field, it swung degree by degree upwards further still, up until it was pointing directly into the centre of the large, low basin before him.

Cabal was unaware of it, but that didn't matter. The tripod was not some manner of indicator, although it could fulfil that role, too. It was more in the nature of bait.

Somewhere far, far away and yet so very close at hand, the note of a sword striking a sword sounded. Cabal heard it, but his eyes had sunk shut and he did not trouble to open them. Not yet. The time was not yet.

A scream now. A single solitary scream of mortal agony and the fear of death brought close and immediate. It died away, as the man who had once screamed it must also have died away. The whinnying of terrified horses rose in a faint chorus, borne to him on the breeze. The clang of swords, both great and broad, echoed above it, the dull battering of a struck shield, the rattling of the horses' tack and barding. Cabal's face showed some small phantom of emotion. Specifically, disgust.

There was a sound like thunder, but it was the roar of cannon. Ancient artillery firing in an ancient battle. Cabal's pupils could be discerned through his eyelids as small bumps in the skin, and these bumps swung high and around. Cabal was rolling his eyes.

The individual sounds grew together, forming a soundscape, an auditory painting in action. Men grunted, horses snickered, blows were given and taken, warriors killed and died. The timbre grew, the sounds became more distinct, the silver pendulum pulled so hard towards the sounds, so filled with unnatural vivacity, that only the fact that the tripod's legs ended in spikes driven into the sod kept it upright at all.

When the phantom battle was all but bellowing in Cabal's face, he deigned to open his eyes.

And there it was in all its spectral glory, the great battle of Perkis Moor more sharply defined than any man or woman had ever seen, this thanks to the precision of Cabal's preparations. Men-at-arms clashed with knights, musketeers of the English Civil War engaged Roman legionaries, naked men painted in blue woad charged Napoleonic artillery pieces and were duly cut down by grapeshot. It was, in purely historical terms at any rate, bollocks, just as the archaeologists had always said. It was also, just as they had said, very exciting indeed if one's job consisted of watching sheep for lengthy periods.

Perhaps once, a very long time ago, there had been some small fight here. Not even necessarily a fatal one. Perhaps Og of the stone tribe had grunted something needlessly deprecatory about Ug of the fur tribe's mother, and Ug—who loved his mother dearly although not in the manner alluded to by Og—had struck him smartly in the face, putting him on his arse with a split lip.

In the retelling, the blow had become a fight, the fight a skirmish, the skirmish a battle, a pebble of truth gathering the moss of invention as it rolled down the years. And people were
so
stupid, they couldn't tell one period from another. Cabal had once seen an early medieval Bible lovingly illustrated with men and women dressed in clothes contemporaneous with the age in which it was created. Jericho was shown being besieged with siege engines a thousand years out of their time. In uncountable minds' eyes down the centuries, the Battle of Perkis Moor was fought in whatever best pleased the daydreamer. Knights in gleaming armour to please the heart of Malory, soldiers of the War of the Roses, swords and spears, crossbows and muskets, rocks and rockets.

It hardly mattered; all that was important was that the device worked. He wasn't even convinced that the drug had been necessary and would try the operation again the following evening, this time without. In the meantime, the drug hadn't so purged him of reason that he couldn't be judgemental of the sideshow for fools playing out before him. This was the least of examples, he was sure. One clumsily glued together by generations of unimpressive intellects. He was after greater fare. Out there were five particular sites, and his suspicion was that they had been created deliberately by methods that escaped him. Not that he needed to know, of course. He had no great interest in replicating such things, only in exploiting them. Exploiting five. It was no small undertaking. They would be cathedrals of the intellect as compared to Perkis Moor's small mud hut.

In a single movement Cabal took up the tripod and slid home its legs against a stone, closed it, flicked some small fragments of soil adhering to the spikes clear with a gloved finger, and put the device back into his bag. As he did so, the battle suddenly attenuated, its combatants thinning out like magic lantern projections when the curtain is drawn back and the daylight re-enters the room. Now they looked like ghosts, and now they looked like suggestive shapes in the evening mist rising from the damp land, and now they were gone altogether.

Cabal cared not a jot. His main concern was how on earth he was supposed to entertain himself for a full day in a place as devoid of interest as Perkis Moor. After all, it was only haunted, and the ghosts were boring.

*   *   *

A week later, two mourners stood by an open grave in a concrete field, and looked down upon a glass coffin that held a beautiful corpse.

‘My God,' said one, dead himself. ‘She's perfect. Just as she was.'

‘I made no mistake,' said the other, dead himself once, half-dead on enough occasions to be worth several more extinctions. Yet now he was living and vital, because some people are just jammy like that. ‘I have never made a mistake where she was concerned. At least,' and here he paused and frowned at painful memory, ‘no mistake in method or theory. There are other mistakes possible, however. The metaphysics of my endeavours are far from clear or simple.'

The first man, a monster by some authorities, a good chap by all the rest, smiled a sympathetic smile. ‘You speak of the morality of it?'

‘I do.' The second man was only considered a monster by the law and most churches, and who were they to judge him, anyway? ‘It used to be simple. She is dead, therefore I move heaven and earth to save her.'

‘Simple…' echoed the other.

‘And yet, despite the clear practical problems involved in my practises, it transpires there are philosophical matters to consider, too. Once I discounted philosophy as a pastime for earnest young men with unconvincing beards and the be-sweatered young women who hang upon their every word, for old men in barrels or on top of pillars. I have made war upon angels and demons and, worst of them all, humans to arrive at this juncture, and yet it was only recently that I realised there is a pressing question that I had never once addressed nor even considered.

‘Would she actually wish to be brought back to the land of the living?'

‘Those are heavy matters indeed,' said the first, who was a vampire. A nice one.

‘Indeed,' said the second, who was a necromancer.

They pondered in silence.

Finally, the vampire said to the necromancer, his brother, ‘Is “be-sweatered” actually a word?'

*   *   *

They replaced the great stone cover upon the concrete grave—and went to leave the hidden laboratory adjoining the cellar of the house of Johannes Cabal, the necromancer. As they left the laboratory and made their way through the cellar, the vampire, Horst, paused by a large barrel, a butt of the type popular for the drowning of dukes. This example, however, did not contain an awkward rival for the throne of Richard III pickled in Malmsey wine.

Horst laid his hand on the wood of the barrel's head a little guiltily. ‘This seems very undignified in comparison.'

Cabal knew his brother well enough to detect the forced lightness in his tone; he did not comment on it. Instead he said, ‘Practicality was the concern. The barrel was handy, and undoubtedly made its …
her
transport across the Continent a great deal easier. It's just as good a container as a glass coffin. Better, perhaps. It's certainly a great deal less fragile.'