The Fall of the House of Cabal (6 page)

‘And what will you do with this secret, assuming there even is a secret, and assuming you get your grubby little paws on it?' Frank Barrow was still not convinced that Cabal was anything other than the soul-stealing huckster he had once been and made few pains to hide it. ‘Sell it? Use it for nefarious ends?' Barrow had once heard a chief constable speak of nefarious ends and been impressed by the phrase. Whatever these ends were, they sounded like they were an end unto themselves, self-contained little parcels of villainy that malefactors collected as a scout collects badges.

Cabal started to reply, but was overcome by nonplussedness for a moment. When he recovered his wherewithal, he asked, ‘What sort of “nefarious ends”, exactly?'

Barrow grimaced at such sophistry. Inwardly, he imagined one nefarious end being
The Commission of Arson Using Only Two Matches
. ‘You know full well what I'm talking about.'

‘In the first instance, Herr Barrow, you may have been led astray by my activities when first we met. I am not usually engaged in business, not even the running of a carnival. Money matters little to me. I only seek to save someone.'

‘Who?'

‘That,' said Cabal, a little steel showing in his voice, ‘is my concern. You need not worry that I intend to raise some dreadful dictator or similar from the grave. Politics concerns me fractionally less than business, and business concerns me not at all.'

‘Not good enough. You can't expect my daughter to go along with your schemes without so much as a hint as to the reason for it all.'

‘I don't need to know,' said Leonie. ‘You're a man of honour, Dad. I've always respected that. Well, this is my honour, and Cabal … Mr Cabal saved my life. I owe him a debt.'

Cabal shook his head. ‘No. I make no claim upon any such debt, not least because you saved my life, too.'

‘I did?' Leonie looked astonished.

‘You could have reported me to the authorities at any point. I doubt my life would have seen out an hour subsequent such a denunciation. That is by the bye. Even if a debt did stand, I cannot impose upon you to help me in this undertaking from any sense of obligation. There will undoubtedly be danger. I hope and trust the goal will be more than worth any such peril, but the peril will be real, nonetheless. You must make your decision based upon whatever merits you see in this enterprise.'

‘And if I think it's a fool's errand?'

‘Then you would be a fool to agree.'

‘Very well.' Leonie sat back, cosseting her wine glass. ‘Convince me. Why should I help?'

‘Simply put, because lives depend upon it. Two lives.'

Leonie glanced at her father and back at Cabal. ‘That's not some sort of ham-fisted threat, is it?'

Cabal was silent for a moment while he digested the implication. ‘No, no. As I think I said to your father once, I really do not care for threats very much. Warnings, perhaps, but threats, no. The lives to which I allude are already extinguished. Unfairly, and before their time.'

‘Life's unfair,' said Barrow. He regarded his hands clasped together on his lap, anything to avoid looking at the picture of his wife on the mantel. ‘Death twice as much. You can't go gallivanting around undermining eternal verities just because they happen to nark you off a bit.'

‘Two questions, Mr Barrow. Firstly, why ever not? All science is based on the precept that we know too little. Ignorance is not bliss. It is only ignorance. Its bed partner may be the inertia of the conservative. Often it is only fear. If death may be cured, why should we regard it as anything different from curing the common cold, or cancer? Secondly, if an eternal verity turns out to be neither eternal nor true, why defend it? It is said that death and taxes are the only inevitabilities in life. It is, I understand, meant in a jocular manner, but nevertheless, if there was some miraculous economic formula that meant you never had to pay a penny in taxes ever again, yet there were no dreadful repercussions, no collapse in public services, would you not rush to embrace it?'

‘That's chalk and cheese—'

‘Is it? What, then, is your objection?'

‘This thing you're looking for, it's against nature.'

‘If the mechanism exists, it is part of nature. By definition, it cannot be anything but natural.'

Barrow's face flushed. ‘It's against God's law.'

It was possibly not the best argument to employ against a necromancer. Still, by a remarkable feat of self-control and a mental image of Horst slowly mouthing the word
Diplomacy,
Cabal managed not to burst out in peals of bitter laughter.

‘Mr Barrow, I appreciate that God's opinion probably matters a great deal to you, but—truly—He doesn't care. If the object of this quest is against God's notoriously morphic and ill-defined law, it wouldn't exist. The only promise we have from the mouth of that deity worth spit is that of free will and self-determination. Everything else is open to negotiation.'

‘You're a blasphemous bugger, Cabal.'

‘I'm rational, unlike your God. Really, when has He ever stuck to His word?'

Barrow smiled grimly. Finally, Sunday school was going to prove its worth. ‘The Flood. God promised never to do it again.' He crossed his arms. ‘And He never has.'

Cabal was underwhelmed by this argument. ‘Really. And when somebody drowns in a natural flash flood, say, what's that? A white lie? No, Mr Barrow, the only time your God takes a blind bit of notice of you is when you die. Either you go off to the petty sadist in the other place—'

‘You mean the devil? Satan?'

‘The devil, yes. Satan, I'm no longer so sure. I'm beginning to think it's a job description rather than a personality.' He waved an impatient hand, as if wafting away a cloud of dumbstruck theologians. ‘But that is neither here nor there. Or, as I was saying, you end up in the personal collection of the entity you call “God”. He … it chamfers off any awkward corners that might indicate bothersome traces of individuality, and stacks the homogenised souls into the eternal equivalent of pigeonholes.'

Barrow flinched at Cabal's description of Heaven. ‘You can't know that.'

‘I know enough to know God does us no favours. The heavenly afterlife is very much what atheists have long suspected: nothingness. Where they are wrong is that it isn't the simple cessation of all sensation and awareness, but the engineered nothingness of an entity who hates mess and fuss. Consciousness … poo. Will … won't need that. Memories of life and love and everything … tiresome. God is not your friend. God has
never
been your friend.'

The room grew quiet.

‘Perhaps,' said Leonie, ‘perhaps working to undermine my father's faith wasn't the best way to talk me into coming along.'

‘Wasn't it?' Cabal thought about it, and salted that information away for some future date when it might come in useful. ‘Oh.' He nodded at Frank Barrow. ‘Well, he started it, believing in nonsense.'

‘Not an improvement. Look, Cabal, you're setting about this all wrong. I'm not very interested in having you gain the secrets of life, whether it be bringing back the dead in a way that doesn't involve brain-eating, or potentially immortality. For one thing, just think what it'll do to the population figures.'

‘I wasn't planning on marketing it…'

‘I appreciate that. No matter what, it's not my concern. It has never been my concern.'

‘Ah.' Cabal picked up his glass as if considering finishing the drop of wine at the bottom, but put it down again undrained. ‘I'm sorry to hear it, Fräulein Barrow. I am sorry I've wasted your time. Mine, too, but I regarded it as necessary.' He rose awkwardly. ‘I shall see myself out.'

Leonie watched him complacently. ‘You're adorable when you do that, you know? Your injured-pride face would melt a puppy.'

Cabal's expression was uncertain; he had seen a molten puppy once, and it hadn't been
that
adorable.

‘Sit down,' she said. ‘We're not done yet.'

‘With respect, Fräulein Barrow, I understood that we were. You do not wish to help me. I shall have to look for aid elsewhere.'

‘I said nothing of the sort. You forget, Cabal, I'm a scientist myself.'

‘Criminology, I believe?'

‘You remembered.' She smiled a sweet smile like icing on a razor. ‘I have my own interests. For one thing, bringing back the dead would make my job a lot easier. Or, I admit, obsolete.' She adopted a poor workable Cockney accent. “Orright, Bert, 'oo did you in?” “It were 'im, guv'nor! Stabbed me to death good and proper an' dropped me in the river. I'll swear to it in court.”'

She observed conflicting expressions on the faces of Cabal and her father, the former somewhat taken aback by the amateur dramatics, the latter suddenly remembering a few old cold cases from his career that might finally be brought to book by this development.

‘But that's not what I'm talking about in this case. These fragments of myth of yours, Cabal. They exist?'

‘I believe so, yes. I believe so very strongly. I have seen variants of the same mechanism; these “fragments” are hybrids of the two. The only reason that they are not generally known is because they are not easily discovered or entered.'

‘Now
they
fascinate me.' She shrugged. ‘Who wouldn't be by the thought that our world contains such things, like reading a novel and finding pages of another book mixed in?'

‘It's dangerous,' both men chorused and looked at one another.

‘Life is brief, opportunities to see the extraordinary are rare. It's not as if I'll be by myself, Dad. Cabal here is a rare survivor. If I have his word that he will not abandon me, that's good enough for me.'

‘Ah,' said Cabal slowly. ‘That's not
quite
the plan.' He looked out of the window. Beyond the net curtains, dusk deepened.

‘It isn't?' said Leonie.

‘Not quite. Pardon me a moment.'

Cabal rose and left the room. They heard him go to the door and open it. Frank and Leonie Barrow heard Cabal speak in lowered tones. A voice, male, answered him. The Barrows looked at one another with cautious surprise. A moment later Cabal re-entered the room.

‘I should like to introduce you to my brother, Horst,' he said.

A tall man in his early twenties, handsome, pale, and with curls of light brown hair curling out from beneath his hat stepped into the room. He was dressed well in a suit of black with flashes of imperial purple at the breast pocket and lapels, the left of which bore a clove-red carnation as a
boutonnière
. He doffed his hat, and bowed to the Barrows.

‘Hullo,' said Horst. ‘More of a reintroduction, I think? We've met before.' He smiled, and his eye teeth seemed somewhat pronounced, yet it was no less charming a smile for all that. ‘Hullo.'

*   *   *

It took a week to settle matters. Frank Barrow spent two full days of this trying to talk Leonie out of what he sincerely believed to be a disastrous decision. To his every argument, she would smile consolingly and answer with a counterargument that always, reduced to its most fundamental terms, ran thus: ‘Science.'

To this, he had no response.

When it became apparent that no appeal to intellect, sympathy, or sentiment (he was too good a man to resort to emotional blackmail, no matter how profoundly he feared her loss) would dissuade her, he instead turned his attention to improving the odds of her safe return. The first step of this was when, on the morning of the third day, he came to her bearing, not argumentation, but a well-crafted but undecorated box of pale, varnished wood.

They sat together at the breakfast table, and he opened it. Inside lay a .38 revolver in a shaped covert lined with green felt. Around it, also snuggled into slots and alcoves, were the accoutrements of maintenance, and six live rounds.

Leonie looked at it for a long moment, expressionless. Then she took it up to examine it. ‘Webley Mk.1,' she said. ‘Cabal would approve. He usually carries a Webley .577.'

‘I'm not giving it to you for his bloody approval.' It disconcerted him to see a firearm in his daughter's hands, frightened him, and he sat down to forestall the desire to take it from her. She was a grown woman, after all. She had an M.Phil and was working on a Ph.D. She wasn't his baby any more. Would never be his baby again.

‘I thought you didn't like guns, Dad.'

‘I don't. Bought that after … after the last time.'

He didn't clarify this, but he didn't need to.
The last time Cabal came into our lives
.

She weighed the weapon in her hand a moment longer, and returned it to its case. ‘It's a kind thought, Dad, but I'm not taking this.'

‘You need to be able to protect yourself. God only knows what sort of mess that maniac wants to drag you into. A vampire!' He looked around helplessly, as if something in the kitchen would appreciate his discontent. ‘A bloody vampire he's got you running off with!'

‘Horst seems nice enough,' said Leonie carelessly. ‘He never wanted to become one.'

‘Oh? So how did
that
happen? Caught vampirism off a toilet seat or something?'

‘No. I
think
it was his brother's fault. Some experiment or something that went wrong.'

‘Cabal made his own brother into a blood-sucking monster? Well, that makes me so much more confident about the whole thing now. If only he'd said, I'd have offered to go along myself.' He paused. ‘I should go with you.'

‘Dad, we've been through this. You're in your sixties, now, and—be honest—you've not kept yourself in the best condition.' Barrow looked down at his gut glumly; even his own adipose was betraying him. ‘Cabal's a planner. He doesn't take risks he doesn't have to. And, when all's said and done, Horst is a blood-sucking monster, yes, but he's
our
blood-sucking monster. I'll be safe.'