Cabal smiled or, at least, his face creased in a manner only suitably described as a smile, but there was little warmth there. ‘You wish to isolate fear. Ah, well, if only I’d realised your ambitions were so simple. Perhaps we can work up to it by capturing faith, bottling hope, and presenting love to the world as a commodity, available by the pound, wrapped in greaseproof paper and topped with a bow.’ He sighed. ‘How can you possibly hope to isolate the incorporeal? If it were a true spirit, you could amuse yourself with salt and pentagrams, but fear, sirs? You waste your time and mine.’
Surprisingly, the three men did not seem at all put out or taken aback by Cabal’s response and he realised that they’d anticipated it. Indeed, they seemed to relish it. ‘Sir, our researches are conclusive. We are certain, absolutely certain, that fear may manifest and be captured. But not, sir, in this world.’
‘There is another place, Herr Cabal,’ said Bose, ‘another world where things are not as they are here. Where the most fanciful concepts may prove sterling truth, and the incorporeal take form.’
Cabal straightened a little in his chair, interested despite himself. ‘You speak of the Dreamlands.’
The name notwithstanding, the Dreamlands are neither a retailer of mattresses, a retirement home nor a particularly nasty permanent funfair in a rundown coastal resort. Neither are they where our minds go when they sleep. Those are merely dreams, and the Dreamlands are too strange and, in their own curious way, too noble to trouble themselves with endless variations on wandering the corridors of one’s old school on the first day, alone, lost, naked, and having just discovered that an exam nobody told one about had started ten minutes ago. No, the Dreamlands were formed by dreams, but are not a dream themselves. They are a world of curious and exotic sights, a collision of myths, of lands as ancient as thought and oceans as deep as imagination. They are home to those who have abandoned their waking bodies, or been abandoned by them. But, as the Dreamlands are true and material even though they hide behind the veil of sleep, there have been other immigrants from other realities, and here lay Cabal’s interest. One of those immigrants was a fierce and protean magic that might, just might, carry a spark of itself back into the waking world, should it be brought by somebody strongly willed enough to shade it from the mundanities of the everyday. Somebody like a well-motivated necromancer.
‘Yes, I researched them exhaustively myself years ago. But they are beyond reach.’
‘They are not, sir.’
‘To trained or talented dreamers, no. To the users of certain highly dangerous and unreliable drugs, no. To the holder of the Silver Key, no. I am none of these things, meine Herren, and neither are you. The Dreamlands, while an interesting destination, are beyond the reach of any of us.’
Alarmingly, the three men still seemed splendidly unconcerned and, indeed, rather smug. Cabal ran the alternatives through his head rapidly and settled on the most likely, though staggeringly unlikely it was. ‘You . . . have the Silver Key?’
It was Shadrach who spoke. ‘We do, sir. We have the Silver Key of the Dreamlands. We may enter and leave as we will.’
Cabal tried to keep the quiver out of his voice. ‘You . . . How . . . did you come by it?’
‘As a bequest. An explorer of that world learned of our endeavours and, I’m delighted to say, passed it on to us.’
‘As a bequest,’ Cabal echoed. ‘How did he die?’
‘Oh, he may not be dead. He was simply declared deceased by the coroner’s court. He’d been missing for some time and, well, I’m sure you know how these things work.’
Cabal, who was very familiar with the workings of all the institutions that dealt with death, grunted. ‘It does not worry you that this gentleman probably died in the Dreamlands?’
‘Worry,’ said Corde, evenly, ‘is a product of fear. We will not submit to it. Instead, we will add this datum to the rational caution that such an enterprise must engender.’
Ah, thought Cabal, now we come to it.
‘There are many possibilities, many things that may go awry in the Dreamlands,’ said Shadrach. ‘This may be the only opportunity that we of the Institute will ever have to venture there. We must maximise our chance of success in every way that we can.’
‘And this, I would guess, is why you have come to me,’ said Cabal. Although he showed no sign of it, he was impressed by their methodology. If irrational fear had something approaching a physical form, then it could surely survive only in a world formed from dreams where the rules of existence were intuitive rather than scientifically rigorous. From there it could leak its influence back into the sleeping minds of the mundane world to soak into their waking lives and colour every decision with delicate shades of uncertain terror. It all sounded very interesting, Cabal was sure. There was, however, a problem. ‘I’m afraid that I must disappoint you. I have no experience of the Dreamlands. I have never been there.’
‘We know,’ said Corde. ‘You’re alive and sane. It seemed very unlikely that you’d ever visited.’
‘So, why . . . ?’
‘Because we have little use for a dead or insane guide. You may not have immediate experience of the Dreamlands, Herr Cabal, but you do have plentiful experience of the, ah, occult,’ he said apologetically, ‘and the unusual. You also have a reputation for formidable sang-froid, which will come in useful given the stressful environment.’
Cabal smiled, a little less humourlessly this time. It always amused him that, when you wished to flatter somebody, you would describe them as possessing sang-froid, whereas if you wished to sting or insult them, they were simply cold-blooded.
‘Our proposal is that you should lead an expedition into the Dreamlands, Herr Cabal,’ said Shadrach, ‘to seek out, capture and bring back into this world the archetype of fear, its principle, the very phobic animus itself.’
‘And if it refuses to come quietly?’
‘Then it will be put down.’
There was a heavy silence after that for some seconds. Then Cabal said, ‘You are asking me to risk my life and sanity. What am I to gain from this?’
Bose coughed. ‘The Silver Key, Herr Cabal. Once we have the animus, we shall have no further need of the Key. Indeed, rational caution dictates that it is never used without good cause, and our cause would already be fulfilled. We think that you, however, would have cause to use it again, in future, in the continuance of your own field of research.’
Cabal considered. Then he spoke: ‘Gentlemen, your proposition is not without interest. I should like to think upon it. You will make your way back to the village and, if you have not already done so, take rooms there. I would suggest that you don’t tell them you have any dealings with me or the standard of service will suffer. I shall send word of my decision to you some time tomorrow. Good day.’ And so saying, he shooed his visitors from his house, ensuring first that they successfully negotiated the path without being ambushed from the tea roses.
Later that evening, Cabal was to be found at the table, the contents of a box file labelled ‘Dreamlands’ spread out before him. He had been accruing data on the place for years, although never as a definite piece of research. After all, while the usefulness of the Dreamlands in his work was beyond dispute, accessing it in a safe and reliable way had always been little more than . . . well, a dream.
Others had attempted it, and some had even done so successfully. As a group, however, they were a bunch of arty sorts – Orientalists and sensualists, who could be depended upon to be undependable, sitting around in silken robes with a book of poetry in one hand and a hookah pipe in the other. They disgusted Cabal for their practical rather than moral shortcomings; if Cabal was to go exploring, he would be inclined to do so with a sola topi on his head and an elephant gun loaded for tyrannosaur in his hands.