The Fall of the House of Cabal (3 page)

‘You're not going to—' Horst made vague gestures with his hands, as if pouring out a bucket—‘decant her, then?'

‘I am not,' said Cabal. ‘Doing so would be a risky operation and for little gain beyond, I admit, the aesthetic. In any case, from what I know of Fräulein Bartos's personality, I think she would prefer the barrel. Glass coffins are for fairy-tale princesses. Not someone as pragmatic as she.'

Horst nodded, reassured. It wasn't necessary for his brother to explicitly state that Alisha Bartos had been a trained killer, practised agent, and decent conversationalist. Had been, and would be again if Johannes Cabal could keep his promise.

*   *   *

In an ideal world, the reader would have the common courtesy to have read all the previous novels in this series and retained sufficient of the plot that a pithy summation would be unnecessary.

As has been noted by observers more perspicacious than the author, however, it is far from an ideal world, and a distinct proportion of those reading these words will have had more pressing matters than to avail themselves of the four novels preceding this one. To these people, the author says, ‘Yes,
four
. You jumped in at Book Five. What are you like?'

Thus, it falls upon the author (as diligent and kind as he is handsome and effortlessly virile) to offer a brief summation of previous events to aid these readers—Who starts reading at Book Five, I ask you?—as well as those who have read the preceding novels and would simply like their memories refreshed.

Johannes Cabal was once very nearly a solicitor, but a kindly fate saved him from this terrible future by killing his best beloved. She drowned, should you be curious, or just morbid.

Grief stricken, Cabal refused to accept the generally accepted absoluteness of death, and instead turned to certain esoteric, occult, and highly illegal paths of possibility. One such path took him to a remote, shunned graveyard where he was forced to abandon his brother, Horst, in a crypt wherein dwelt a vampire. Horst destroyed the monster, but not before he was contaminated.

Thus, Horst vanished from the purview of man. Missing, believed dead (which was both true and not true), his loss splintered
die Familie Cabal:
his father sank into a dreadful melancholy that ended with his premature death; his mother denounced the younger and less favoured son, Johannes, before leaving England and returning to her birthplace in Hesse, Germany.

All of this troubled Johannes Cabal less than perhaps it ought. Rather than doing anything to rectify matters, he instead relocated the family house by curious means from the middle of a terrace in a provincial English town to a lonely hillside in open country, by which he gained the solitude necessary to continue his studies.

He gained the knowledge to perform such research and, indeed, commit wanton acts of urban redevelopment by the simple expedient of selling his soul. Presently it transpired that this was a mistake, and that his soul was actually of use to him. Using a potent mix of ruthlessness, immorality, deception, diablerie, and candyfloss, he was able to reclaim his soul. In so doing, he upset Satan. If only that were the only time he had upset a major otherworldly entity.

At least Cabal had recovered his brother, Horst, from the ancient crypt in which he had been abandoned, albeit for selfish ends. Unhappily, there were words and hurt feelings, and Horst died, utterly and finally.

Until he got better. This was as great a surprise to him as to anyone else. Resurrected by a shadowy conspiracy (as distinct, presumably, from one of those highly publicised conspiracies), Horst was put in the difficult position of asking his brother to help save the world from the machinations of the conspiracy in general and of its prime mover in particular, a woman of means, intellect, and profound wickedness known as the ‘Red Queen'.

To his surprise, Johannes seemed older (this was because he was older), wiser, and altogether more human than Horst remembered, his experiences having mellowed him at least a little. He readily agreed to help Horst and his allies, and the world was saved. Saved again, strictly speaking, as it turned out Johannes Cabal had done it a couple of times before, usually by accident.

The victory was not without sacrifices, however. One such was Alisha Bartos, currently perfectly preserved by a strange chemical in a large barrel. Horst had developed a fondness for her—she had once shot him, then apologised nicely—but more pressingly felt responsible for her death.

Nor, however, was the victory without spoils. Johannes Cabal had recovered a book so rare that he had believed every copy had long since been lost or destroyed:
The One True Account of Presbyter Johannes by His Own Hand
.

This, you may rest assured, is a very important book. Why that should be has not been revealed to date, but probably shall be sooner rather than later. After all, Johannes Cabal, a necromancer of some little infamy, has rested much stock upon it and enthused in uncharacteristically vigorous terms how it changes everything without actually being overly specific about why that should be.

And so, we are up to date. If you have read the previous novels, I hope that has successfully refreshed your memory. If you have not, and have just lurched in here like a drunk into a cinema half an hour after the programme began, sit down and shut up. You are disturbing the patrons.

We may now continue.

*   *   *

The grandfather clock chimed midnight as they emerged from the cellar door and made their way to the front parlour. Cabal was nocturnal by habit (it was when the cemeteries and graveyards were most fruitful for his visits) and Horst by nature (sunlight caused him to burn rather than tan; burn in a brief moment of incandescence leaving naught but dust and regrets).

Horst was taking things as restfully as possible, delaying the inevitable moment when needs be he would seek blood. Even when that happened, he would take it carefully, a jigger here, a mouthful there, so as not to inconvenience anyone. His brother's material needs were less troublesome, and he went to the kitchen to assuage them with a pot of Assam tea and a plate of cold meat and pickles.

Horst sank into his favourite armchair and awaited Cabal's return. While he waited, he regarded the deep alcove by the fireplace and the high shelf there. Upon it was a row of three wooden boxes, each large enough to contain a human head. This is not a fanciful metric; two did contain human heads and the third something head-like that may well have been a head. Johannes Cabal was cagey on the subject of its contents. Whatever it was, it had a good singing voice. To the right of it was the living skull of the hermit and sage Ercusides, whose voice was a little reedy, but he tried all the same, bless him. The third box contained the living head of Rufus Maleficarus, although his was not the spirit that animated it. That was an entity of awful malevolence that had sought on several previous occasions to bring the apocalypse to earth, that loathed Johannes Cabal with a savage intensity, and that couldn't carry a tune in a bucket. Now it was forced to occupy the head of a former rival of Cabal's, and spent its days sulking, voicing threats and imprecations, and utterly failing to hit even middle C with any reliability. The thing in the first box's hopes for, with the addition of a hypothetical future fourth box, a barbershop quartet had foundered on the head of Rufus Maleficarus massacring ‘Carolina Moon'.

For the moment, however, the boxes were quiet but for a quiet burring snore from the second and subdued spasmodic expletives from the third.

Cabal returned with his supper. As he arranged his plate and saucer to his satisfaction upon the table, he noted Horst's languid gaze up at the shelf. ‘The erstwhile Herr Maleficarus turns out to be as poor a loser in the afterlife as he ever was when he had a body beneath his neck,' Cabal commented. ‘His father was no better.'

‘You decapitated him, too?' Horst's tone was no more astonished than if his brother had suggested he had taken up golf. Far less so, in fact.

‘I did not. I don't make a habit of that, you know.'

Horst regarded the row of boxes. ‘Of course you don't.'

‘There is a certain degree of coincidence with regard to living heads in my line of work, I'll grant you. Still, they are hardly unknown in occult circles. Bacon's head of brass leaps to mind, for example.'

‘Hmmmm.' Horst was not agreeing, as he had no idea as to whom Cabal referred. He was, however, remembering that he had once liked bacon and grieved privately that it could no longer be part of his diet.

‘So,' he said, stirring himself from memories of bacon sandwiches past, ‘has that book turned out to be as useful as you thought it would be? Are the secrets of the universe there unveiled?'

‘No,' said Johannes Cabal.

‘Too easy, eh?'

‘Too easy. I'm sure I have impressed upon you in the past what the word “occult” actually means?'

‘You have. It means “hidden”.' He saw Cabal's raised eyebrow. ‘You see? I do listen. Now and then.'

‘Much of that “hidden” quality is not on the part of nature, or the supernatural. Wizards, sorcerers, witches, and oracles have seen things for which the common herd are neither prepared nor tolerant. For their own safety, such people are inclined towards secrecy. I can only sympathise; many of my more potentially … contentious—'

‘Incriminating…'

‘—notes are enciphered for exactly those reasons.'

‘So Presbyterian Jack's big book of magic is in code, is that what you are saying?'

‘Presbyter Johannes, often called Prester John.'

‘Let's call him Prester John to avoid confusion.'

‘Quite, yes. That would be sensible.' Cabal stirred his tea and took a sip. ‘It isn't exactly enciphered, but it is in code. It uses allegory and allusion to hide its truths, mostly very esoteric imagery. Highly arcane. I have been working to squeeze sense from it.'

Horst could see this was no more than the truth. Cabal's sunken face and darkly rimmed eyes betokened near exhaustion. Horst was dead to the world during the hours of light and could not know what his brother did in that time, but it seemed to contain little enough sleep.

‘You should rest, Johannes.' He said it gently. ‘You are no use to anyone if you burn the candle at both ends.'

‘I have no time for rest.'

‘Make some.' The gentle tone slipped a little, leaving something steelier in its place. ‘Don't make me compel you.'

Cabal looked up sharply at him. ‘You wouldn't dare.'

‘I'm still the elder of us, even if you're the one who looks older now. I won't watch you work yourself to death, especially having brought you back from the brink once recently already. I have better things to do than nurse you through another convalescence.'

‘Don't even joke about exerting any of your … talents upon me, brother. I do not take well to coercion.'

There was an awkward silence. In truth, Horst had indeed used his vampiric powers to force his brother into deep recuperative sleep when he had been seriously ill some weeks before. This, he would never tell Johannes. For his part, Johannes had strong suspicions that Horst had done exactly that. This, he would never tell Horst. He was damned sure he would never permit it while in good or, at least, moderate health, however.

Cabal coughed. ‘In any case, it would be an unnecessary measure. I have wrung what truth I can from the book. I am reasonably confident that I have all of it. I shall attend to my health and well-being at this point. You are, quite accidentally, right for once. The trials I foresee shall require my constitution to be at a peak.'

Horst, who had been slouching back with his hands behind his head, sat up. ‘Trials? What do you mean? I thought that book was meant to be the be-all and end-all. The Philosopher's Stone, you called it. The Fountain of Youth.'

‘So I believed. I was wrong, but in some ways right. I have told you of my time in the Dreamlands?'

Horst nodded. ‘Zebras.'

‘Of all the aspects of that long and perilous journey, your first thought is of the zebras. Yes, then. The place with the zebras. The nature of the Dreamlands is that they are formed from the will of sleepers, not all benevolent, not all human. It is concrete enough, but mutable, and that mutability is a function of belief. The Dreamlands gain much of their permanence from being what they are anticipated to be.'

‘Yes,' said Horst slowly, uncertain as to the relevance.

‘The waking world impinges upon the Dreamlands. Indeed, many physical entities may gain entrance directly to them. Ghouls, for example.' Here a glimmer of fond remembrance passed across his face. ‘And gods.' The glimmer vanished. Cabal stared at a cold cut of beef and its pickled red cabbage accompaniment as if he held it personally responsible for some tragedy in his life. He sighed. ‘The point is that what is not, may be, and that which is, may not.'

‘Oh,' said Horst.

They sat in silence for a minute.

‘You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?' said Cabal.

‘Not a sausage.'

‘I am trying to say, in words of as few syllables as possible, that the principles of the Dreamlands hold some sway in the waking world. They may even be extrusions. This latter point I do not know, and nor do I care to find out. That they exist is all that matters.'

Now Horst started to get an inkling of what his brother was proposing, and his expression was suitably startled at the revelation.

‘Hold on. Are you suggesting that there are places in the world that don't actually exist?'

Cabal looked at him coldly. ‘If you say, “Like Norwich,” or similar, I shall not be responsible for my actions.'

Horst seemed insulted. ‘The very thought.'

He had been about to moot Swindon.

‘As I say, I do not know whether these locations are outposts of the Dreamlands or simply called into being by a similar process. It hardly matters. They will not be found on any map, that much I know. They exist in between the here and the now, edge on like the blade of a knife. If you don't know where to find them, you never shall.'