The ghoul lifted its long index finger, a finger graced with too many joints to be seemly, and counted, ‘One thing. Johannes Cabal is necromancer. Necromancers get respect from gravefolk. From ghouls. Johannes Cabal needs help, Johannes Cabal gets help. Two things. If Johannes Cabal is unhappy as gravefolk, he should not be gravefolk. Three things. Stealing is fun.’
Cabal nodded, satisfied. He had certainly heard less worthwhile reasons given to commit the most appalling crimes in the past. A willingness to help and a raison d’être for a bit of racial kleptomania were better than most.
The apparatus was constructed rapidly, though some of the more unconventional reagents intended for its retorts took longer to procure. One in particular required special care, and Cabal led a party of ghouls to help him acquire it. He returned sombre and quiet, bearing the skeletal tip of a left-hand little finger. ‘That grave remains sacrosanct,’ he told the leader. ‘Spread the word among the gravefolk: if any break into it – man or ghoul – they will regret it.’ He held up the small bone and regarded it with melancholy. ‘Apart from me, obviously.’
The leader did not need to enquire why, for it had already been informed that the gravestone above the coffin they had so respectfully robbed bore the words,
Gottfried Cabal. Survived by his wife Liese, and son Johannes, gone to join his elder sonHorst in God’s Grace.REQUISCAT IN PACE.
Instead it watched Cabal painstakingly clean the bone and then carefully powder exactly as much as he needed before placing the remainder in a fresh test-tube, sealing it and stowing it in his Gladstone bag.
Cabal’s motivation was high: every day he found it a little harder to remember things or to carry out mental calculations. He was heading towards average human intelligence, and he found the experience stifling and claustrophobic. On the one hand it appalled him that people were content to live with such small intellects, although on the other it went a long way to explaining so many things about society that otherwise defied belief. At least the ghouls seemed as highly motivated as he: he had only to suggest that an item might be useful for a gang to run off and return anywhere from hours to a couple of days later with it in paw. That at least was one less thing to worry about, but the narrow window of opportunity the elixir presented and the impossibility of securing further supplies of some of the reagents needed meant that he had little latitude for supporting experimentation. The few tests he was able to conduct were highly encouraging – it seemed that Culpins’s obsessions with werewolves, plumbing and naked ladies had actually borne fruit – but there could only be a single acid test, and as much as he wanted to hold it off until he could be sure he was doing the right thing, its time was growing inexorably closer.
At last, Johannes Cabal ran out of excuses for himself. Time was short, the principles of his work were already beginning to escape him, and he knew he must act now or for ever be trapped in the Stygian places beneath the Earth and its close neighbours in dream and out of it. He carried out the last reactions, filtered away an unnecessary precipitate, added another reagent drop-wise until the contents of his test-tube went from sepia to colourless and clear. He added the powdered bone, marking the elixir with a trace of his own former humanity, and shook it vigorously for ten minutes until the bone had entirely dissolved. Then he neutralised the remaining solution, and distilled it. He was left with perhaps a fluid ounce of clear, slightly oily liquid, which he gathered in a small test-tube. He allowed it to cool, and then stoppered it. It was so small, little more than an ampoule, yet everything rested upon it. He gathered his faculties, arose from his laboratory stool – obligingly stolen from a Brazilian university by the ghouls – and went out into the main cavern.
He stood before them, straining to stand upright as a man stood, instead of the slight crouch that the ghoul form encouraged, and held up the elixir. ‘Friends,’ he meeped, and it was true that he had rarely felt so friendly towards anybody or anything. ‘Friends, I come before you today to thank you for your aid in my work.’ The ghouls were already scampering over on all fours to be close and catch his every word. ‘This transformation clearly suits many of you, and is, I think, a more honourable and honest career than, say, the judiciary. It is not, however, a career suited to everyone.’ Cabal could see the ghoul leader standing nearby, nodding slightly in silent appreciation of these sentiments. ‘I have found my stay with you highly educational, and a wide expansion of my horizons, and as I have come to know the gravefolk, I have also come to understand you, and to respect and appreciate you. When I return to the world above, I will never forget you. Indeed, I believe that we may combine our forces in many mutually advantageous ways.’ Cabal had learned to see expression and emotion in the muzzled grey rubbery faces, and he could see sadness there now. They were sad to see him go, he knew, and probably sad that all the justified thieving had to stop. Despite himself, he felt quite fond of them.
‘Now?’ asked one to his right.
‘Well, let me get home first, and then . . .’ began Cabal, but the ghoul was not speaking to him.
‘Now,’ said the leader, quietly but firmly.
Suddenly Cabal was being held down, his arms and legs pinioned. ‘What?’ he shouted. ‘What are you doing?’ He thrashed in their grip, but there were too many of them, and they were far too strong. Then he felt his paw being gently but inexorably forced open. He could only swear and damn them as the elixir was taken from him. ‘No! Get off me, you verdammt animals! It’s no use to you! It’s too late for you!’
He fought until he was exhausted and weeping with anger and fear of his certain future. The ghouls continued to keep him still as their leader stood before him. He held up the small glass tube that held all Cabal’s hopes and said, ‘I am sorry, Johannes Cabal. I am sorry as you will be sorry, too. But not yet.’
‘It’s useless to you,’ rasped Cabal, through a larynx grown unused to human speech. ‘You cannot use it. You are fully transformed.’
‘Yes. Full transformation. Sorry again. I lied.’
Cabal looked up suddenly at him. ‘You did what?’
‘Body change, yes, six . . . eight weeks. Mind change, much longer.’ Still looking thoughtfully at the elixir in its right paw, it batted self-referentially at itself with its left. ‘Mind finally going but not gone yet. Not too late for me.’ He looked at Cabal. ‘Long as you fight it, not too late for you either.’
‘If you take that away from me,’ said Cabal looking at the test-tube, ‘then it is too late for me.’
‘No,’ said the leader. ‘You do not understand yet. You will understand.’ It started to turn away and paused, looking back guiltily at Cabal. ‘I am sorry, Johannes Cabal. Wish there was other way.’ And suddenly it was off at a bound, running into one of the tunnels and, from there, to anywhere and anytime.
‘No!’ Cabal called weakly after it. ‘It won’t work for you. You don’t understand. It wasn’t formulated for you, it isn’t keyed to you. Please. Come back.’
The leader did not, and the other ghouls held Cabal prisoner until pursuit became hopeless. Then they released him, and slunk away, ashamed.
Cabal sat alone, unable to take in the enormity of what had just happened to him. No, that isn’t quite correct. Cabal was a man who had bandied words with gods and devils, and had yet to experience anything of sufficient enormity to prevent him functioning. It wasn’t the scale of the disaster that distressed him so, vast though it was. It was the irrationality of it. The ghouls might be childlike sometimes, but they were no fools, their leader least of all. Cabal had made no secret of the elixir’s specificity, so what did the ghoul leader hope to gain? To crush Cabal’s spirit? Possibly, but everybody – everything – had seemed almost as upset about it as he did. He tried to visualise the ghoul leader stopping in some lightless tunnel to open the phial and gulp down the contents, waiting for several minutes while nothing at all happened, then looking faintly put out. Cabal could not understand it. It made no sense at all.
Until the slowing mechanisms of his mind stumbled upon an idea, and he considered it and found it was not wanting in any respect, and realised that it was therefore likely enough to be the truth. He sat frozen by the idea as its ramifications rippled out and illuminated his ignorance like a flare down a pit. It was at first breathtaking, and his breath was duly taken. Then he started to laugh. It was an open, full-throated laugh, with an air of relief so strong in it that it occasionally tended a little to hysteria, but was reined back whenever it did so. It was an honest laugh, and it was the laughter of a man, not that of a ghoul.
When finally he was able to bring it under control and it quietened to sobbed chuckles, he said, loudly enough that anyone nearby would hear it, ‘Oh, I won’t forget. I won’t forget what I am. I will never forget who I am.’ Then he stood and bellowed into the empty darkness. ‘I am Johannes Cabal! Necromancer! Mildly infamous in some quarters! Rise up, ghouls, and come to me! There is work to be done! There are preparations to be made!’
From every corner, every tunnel they crept and slunk and crawled and scampered to form a great mass of a corpse-eating audience before him. They were no longer filled with guilt and regret at what they had done, because they knew he now understood. They grinned their mad-dog grins, happy again.
The ghoul leader bounded through blackness, the curving rocky tunnel flaming in smudged colours to his eyes. It wasn’t perfect sight – light was required for that – but it was substantially better than running into walls and off precipices. He had wondered how it worked for some time, but had known that that was beyond his ability to deduce. Still, that would be changing shortly, just as soon as he drank the stolen elixir. He felt no guilt at its theft. Why should he? He knew that Cabal would soon understand his reasons, then come to regard his new ghoulish existence not as a malign curse but as the great opportunity it truly was.
It turned a corner, scurried across a nexus in the great deep darkness frequented by the fearsome gugs, and darted into a new narrow tunnel that had been melted through the rock by a juvenile cthonian twenty millennia before. The ghoul knew the giant worm-like cthonian in question, at least by repute; it was now a young adult of truculent demeanour and a burden to all seven of its parents. But the ghoul had more important matters to concentrate on today than the soap opera lives of the selfish and invertebrate.
It paused, sensing the eddies in time that surged in those strange places as gentle as breezes. The hackles of its neck arose and it knew it was close, sniffing the air for a scent of a particular time and space. The creatures in those tenebrous extents wandered up and down the years, like cows in a field, unaware and uncaring, but the ghouls understood instinctively the opportunities and dangers since they were among the few who ever ventured into the worlds that abutted the Dreamlands, and among the even fewer who cared.
Soon the scent of fresh air would have been apparent even to a sense of smell less perceptive than a ghoul’s. The ghoul leader stopped, and looked back as if half expecting pursuit, but the tunnel was empty except for himself and an explosion of roots that entered the space from above. The ghoul searched roughly within them, quickly locating a hollow from which it withdrew a brown-paper parcel, packaged as incompetently as only a ghoul or a schoolboy could manage. It reached further into the hollow and pulled out Cabal’s Gladstone bag and cane, both stolen only hours before while Cabal’s attention had been on the latter stages of the elixir synthesis. Stolen by subordinate ghouls, hidden here at their leader’s command.
The ghoul fumbled with the parcel’s string, quickly grew frustrated with trying to untie the knots and tore away the paper instead, with its long powerful fingers, snapping the string as easily as it could a neck. Within lay Cabal’s sloughed skin: the carefully folded and stored bundle of clothes. The ghoul measured its arm against that of the suit jacket and grimaced at how much shorter the sleeve was than the distance from its shoulder to its wrist. Still, there was a solution to that. Holding all the stolen goods in its arms, it moved onwards in a stooped lope, up the sloping path until the rock turned to clay and compacted soil. The tunnel stopped abruptly in a convex wall of cut stone, each block about the size of a loaf. With no hesitation, the ghoul drew the stopper from the little tube of elixir and gulped it down. Now, working quickly, it removed the stones and stacked them carefully on the tunnel floor until there was a gap large enough for it to manoeuvre its scrawny frame through, and take the stolen things with it.
The village was asleep, its occupants deep in sleep, though few sank deep enough to visit the lands from which the ghoul had so recently departed. There was nobody around to see the long-fingered hand, tipped with gore-stained talons, rise from the shadows of the well on the village green, and grasp the edge, or to witness the grey, hideous form that rose up after it. The ghoul looked cautiously around before jumping soundlessly into the moon shadow of the quaint little roof that stood over the well shaft. Behind it, the water bucket swung slightly where its shoulder had touched it. Possessed of a surprisingly tidy mind for a grave-robbing cannibal, the ghoul reached out and stopped it. It had already given orders that the stones in the well wall some thirty feet down the shaft would be replaced before morning, and was in no doubt that it would be obeyed. It was important that no trace was left of this journey.
Across the green, the only light in any building burned in the windows of The Old House at Home. No doubt Parkin had interrupted his evening patrol for a quick half of bitter about two hours ago, and was now on one of its many successors. The ghoul’s long ears flicked back and forth as it listened to the police sergeant, and anyone else in no hurry to go home, quietly talking. Nobody was saying their goodbyes. Excellent: nobody was likely to exit the pub and see a lean dark form dash from the cover of the well, across the green and down the road.
The ghoul could feel the elixir working. The flaring colours of its dark-penetrating sight were becoming attenuated; it no longer loped but was starting to walk more upright; its skin was becoming lighter and more human in texture. Unexpectedly, it was also growing weaker. Humans had not a fraction of the strength of a ghoul, but as its ghoulish strength left it, it seemed to drain deep into the human strength that lay beneath it too. Soon the ghoul’s indefatigable trot became a walk, then a slouch, and finally a stagger. It paused at a rock by the path, having left the road a mile or so before, and sat heavily upon it. It looked at its limbs, at their increased girth, their shortened length, and found them disgusting. At least the clothes would fit now.
