‘I just tapped it, old man,’ said Bose. ‘Hadn’t you tried tapping it yet?’
‘Look at this!’ demanded Cabal, gesturing at the dozens of closely written sheets arranged into neat piles upon the table. ‘Look at all this! This is just basic theory, the very least I would need to understand before going on to intermediate theory, then advanced theory and, finally, the extreme edges of theory where Hep-Seth was working before I could even think of touching that damnable thing! No, “just tapping it” was weeks away.’ He swallowed, and took several deep breaths. ‘Get your things together. We don’t know how long the gateway will remain open.’ Bose opened his mouth to say something, but Cabal interrupted him: ‘If you were about to say that if it closes before we’re ready you can just tap it again, don’t. It would be more than your life is worth at present.’
They had few belongings by this point in any event, the few knick-knacks that Bose had collected being abandoned aboard the Audaine, while Cabal kept all he needed, and several things he might, in his Gladstone. It was the work of a moment to find something similar to a carpet bag in Hep-Seth’s wardrobe (he was, it seemed, especially given to very high collars and wide sleeves judging by its other contents), and to load it with food, water and wineskins. Then they stood before the coruscating light contained within the shifting heptagonal gateway and paused a second. Cabal could not help but be reminded of a similar occasion, weeks before, when they had stood before a similar gateway in an Arkham garret – and just look at how that had turned out. Then, they had been hounded by a ghoulpack and time had been pressing. Now, the only pressure upon them was the possibility of the gateway closing, and that did not seem quite so urgent. Cabal had a sense that if he went through that wavering sheet of distorted reality, things would change, hugely, radically, in ways he could not predict. It was an irrational feeling, and normally he would have crushed it easily, but in that place it circled inside his mind, making his neck tense and uncomfortable, and he knew the Phobic Animus was at work again.
He considered briefly whether he should allow Bose to go first or give him a firm shove into the portal, should he demur. It would be pointless, however: there was no easy way to tell if a disparition was disintegration followed by a distant reintegration, or just disintegration followed by nothing at all. Besides which, the odd ill-formed conviction of change that flittered around his mental battlements, like a translucent sheeted ghost, assured him that the change would not simply be one of being alive to being dead. So, he took a deep breath in through his mouth, let it out through his nose, and stepped into the gateway.
It was a lot less pleasant than travel via a discorporated poet. Cabal had a momentary sense that he had turned to very fine sand, and that the sand was falling away from him. He especially resented it when his eyes flowed away from him like pollen in a breeze, but a moment later the rest of his skull followed and it subsequently became difficult to resent anything very much. He did wonder distantly if this was the nature of the change he had intuited, that he would spend the rest of eternity as a cloud of minutely powdered necromancer, wafting around the cosmos and unable to get very concerned about anything any more. He felt he should be concerned that he couldn’t be concerned, but he couldn’t be concerned enough to care, so he wasn’t. A Jovian perspective, to be sure, but one hard to become enthusiastic about if the job didn’t come with thunderbolts. But then he considered ‘enthusiasm’, and found his own memories of it drained of colour, dimensions and veracity, like a badly written strip cartoon in a cheap newspaper.
Falling apart had been so easy. Mildly disconcerting to begin with, but one got used to one’s molecules going their separate ways, and then the atoms within those molecules trailing off by themselves, and then the electrons and neutrons, and the strangeness and charm, and down ad infinitum in far less time than it takes to say ad infinitum.
Coming back together, on the other hand, hurt like blazes.
There was sun, and there was sand, and there was a screaming, burning man being reforged from the stuff of creation, and he was not enjoying it in the slightest. It would have been a boon if his nervous system had re-formed a little later in the process than it did, but that’s magic for you – even when it’s helpful, it finds a way to be surly with it. Thus his nerves were in place to tell him just how shatteringly painful it is to be glued back together from cosmic clay and fairy dust. The only positives about the experience were that it was educational – being reconstructed is precisely this painful – and it was short.
Johannes Cabal flopped on to the beach, eyes wide with still vibrant memories of recent agony, and rolled on to his back, his hands clenched tightly enough for his fingernails to draw blood from his palms, his face in a humourless rictal grin. He had no idea how long he lay there, the sound of the waves breaking as ignored as the azure sky his eyes saw but did not comprehend. Then he blinked, and sense began to return to him.
‘Gosh,’ said a familiar voice. ‘That stung a bit, didn’t it?’
Cabal sat up. He was on a beach, a beautiful beach of golden sand, beneath a golden sun. It would have been idyllic but for the presence of Bose sitting on a nearby rock, a man with the ability to render the greatest wonders prosaic by his mere presence.
Reaction to the translocation set in a moment later: Cabal leaned over and vomited upon that golden sand, which was not improved by the addition. When he had finished bringing everything up, he felt febrile, weak and oddly ashamed, so he scooped sand over the vomit to hide it. He fumbled in his pocket to find his blue-lensed glasses and put them on to conceal his reddened, watering eyes and save them from the strong sunshine.
‘It stang a bit?’ he managed to say. ‘How are you so composed, Bose? That was the single most unpleasant physical experience I have ever suffered, and I’ve had some bad ones, believe you me.’
Bose shrugged. ‘Yes, it was rather horrid, wasn’t it? But I was here for a full hour before your arrival, Mr Cabal. I’ve had a chance to get over it. Where were you?’
‘Where was I?’ Cabal rose shakily to his feet and dusted himself off. ‘Neither here nor there, it seems.’ He looked around. The beach stretched for about a mile in either direction before vanishing in the curve of the coastline. It gave way to palm trees, then thicker vegetation as it rose up sharply towards a great rocky crag that formed the centre of the island, assuming it was an island and not some promontory on a larger landmass. Directly between them and this feature, however, there was no forest at all, but only a hill of bare rock into which a crude zigzagging path had been carved. At its head, some five hundred yards up the rockface was an equally primitive great stone face cut from the living rock, a demoniacal countenance with a cave entrance for a mouth, befanged, behorned and terrible in its clichés. Cabal had seen a few scary cave entrances in his time, and this one scored low points for originality.
‘This is Mormo, I presume?’ he said, semi-rhetorically, as he expected little insight from Bose. ‘I would hate to have to enter some hideous cave of secrets and face whatever terrors it contains, and then for it to turn out to be the wrong one.’
Bose shook his head. ‘Can’t say, old boy. But unless you plan to make a boat or just settle down here, I don’t suppose we have much choice but to investigate it.’
‘No,’ admitted Cabal. ‘I don’t suppose we do.’
The day was still young, and Cabal felt enervated by the trip and empty by its effects, so they took a little time to eat slowly some of the food they had brought with them, and regarded the cave mouth frequently with guarded suspicion as they did so, just in case the Phobic Animus came galumphing out to share their meal and then, in recompense, kill or unhinge them with a torrent of pure fear. It did not, but the possibility that it might took away most of the small pleasure to be had from eating outside.