Cabal tried to imagine dread Cthulhu rising from the corpse city of R’lyeh, seeing humans, and squealing like a Hausfrau who discovers mice in the pantry, before pounding them to death with a broom. Then again, perhaps Cthulhu did squeal, but in a form and context unimaginable to the human mind, or imperceptible to human senses. It hardly mattered if it were true; Cthulhu could still eradicate all life on Earth whether he was squealing like an enormous transdimensional schoolgirl or not.
‘But know this, Johannes Cabal, you have a small part in a grand plan, and whatever you decide to do, it is destined. Fall on your sword or live until you are ninety, whatever you do, you do for us. And that is all you need to know. To be honest, it is all you are capable of understanding.’
There was a short, awkward silence. ‘And the Phobic Animus?’
‘That? Oh, there isn’t one, not in the convenient package that the Fear Institute believed. No, irrational fear is always where everybody thought it was – sweating away in the human heart. Once I became aware of their brave little project, though, well, it was so convenient to my plans I just couldn’t resist. I recovered the Silver Key from its last owner – that was Hep-Seth incidentally, and you were right, he is at the bottom of the crevasse – then inveigled it into the hands of the Fear Institute.’
‘And sent them to me,’ finished Cabal. ‘I shan’t bother asking why – you’ll only get all mystical.’
‘Reasons and reasons. But you might understand one.’
Bose looked steadily at him, and Cabal thought he caught the scent of brimstone. ‘This “thought experiment” of yours,’ he said slowly. ‘Just how hypothet—’
‘I told you we weren’t done at the time, Johannes Cabal,’ said Bose, but his voice was not his own.
Cabal swallowed very carefully. ‘So,’ he said tonelessly, ‘what now?’
‘What now?’ Bose’s voice was still of the pit, flaming and dangerous. Suddenly he smiled and sat up. ‘How would you like your heart’s desire?’
As Johannes Cabal gathered himself up from the grass, he wondered just how many times he was likely to be translocated around assorted plains of existence in his lifetime. He looked around as he dusted himself off, peeved but unsurprised that the Phobic Animus, or Nyarlothotep, or Gardner Bose Esq., or whatever else it might be styling itself this week, had not allowed him to keep his bag. The loss of Ercusides he could manfully bear, but the loss of his notebook, phials of reagent, his death’s head cane and, worst of all, the Silver Key were nuisances great and small. He was wondering how likely recovering them might be when a large crow settled on a nearby boulder, eyed him with mercenary glee and croaked loudly, ‘Kronk!’
Cabal almost groaned with rancour and disappointment. He recognised the crow. He recognised the rock on which it was perched. He knew exactly where he was, and he knew that his bag and its contents were lost beyond any reasonable chance of recovery. It was very annoying, but there was nothing to be done about it, so he put them aside in the vast mental jumble room he kept for memories of abject failure, and set his face towards a new day. He was nothing if not a pragmatist.
He allowed the crow to perch upon his shoulder as he walked along. The last time he had been coming this way, it had been to meet Messrs Shadrach, Corde and Nyarlothotep at the pub in the village. How long ago it seemed. Now they were all dead or alive in some metaphysical way that he doubted was expressible to poor creatures like himself. Whom the gods would destroy, the ancients tell us, they first make mad. Cabal often wondered why they would bother destroying anybody whose sanity they had already shattered. It seemed petty, but then, that was gods for you.
The house was just as it always was: bleak, solitary, and with a perilous front garden. He went up the path, ignoring the tiny eyes that watched him from within the shrubs and beneath the ivy, unlocked the door – hardly necessary, but old habits die hard – and let himself in.
And there, in his front hall with the black-and-white tiled floor, he stopped and stared in utter astonishment at what lay before him. For there, just by the mat, was an envelope.
It made not a ha’penny of sense. He collected his post, what little there was of it, poste restante from the post office in the village, both because he didn’t care to have more people than necessary coming to his house, and because the post office did not enjoy having its postmen eaten by the recalcitrant fairies and other little folk of Cabal’s front garden. For a while, he had trained the garden folk to acknowledge a list of people they should let by, which included the postman, but the training required constant refreshing as the gossamerwinged little proponents of chaos tended to forget it at the first hunger pang. Then there had been a moderately ingenious attempt to kill him by a disgruntled relative of somebody or another that he’d dug up for research materiaclass="underline" they had dressed as a postman and actually made it into his house before becoming research material themselves. It was all too distracting, so he had made a poste restante arrangement, and everybody was about as happy about it as they were likely to be.
The envelope had not therefore been delivered by a postman, or anybody else who might reasonably be considered edible to tiny mouths full of very sharp tiny teeth. He looked suspiciously at the crisp white envelope for a second longer before reopening the door and calling into the front garden, ‘Who has been to the house?’
‘Nobody,’ came a plaintive chorus of small voices. ‘We are ever so hungry, Johannes Cabal.’ Cabal grunted dismissively, and went back indoors. The garden folk were lousy liars, and on this occasion they seemed to be telling the truth. He crouched by the envelope and tried to see if there was anything obviously dubious about it, such as razors or the faint shimmer of a dried contact poison, but he could see nothing. Finally picking it up gingerly between finger and thumb, protecting his skin with a handkerchief, he took it up into his attic laboratory.
The letter remained inscrutable to close observation under lens and ultraviolet light. Finally, wearing his heaviest rubber gauntlets and an army-surplus gas mask, Cabal opened the envelope with his favourite Swann & Morton No. 22 scalpel, being careful to cut the paper at the opposite end from the flap. Inside he saw nothing more malevolent than a folded sheet of foolscap parchment, which he removed with tweezers, and opened gently for fear of triggering some trap so subtle as to baffle conventional physics and, indeed, common sense. But then, as Cabal knew full well, nobody ever died from being too careful. Well, apart from that man who suffocated in cotton wool, but he was an idiot.
The sheet of parchment was, however, looking much like a sheet of parchment at present. That wasn’t to say it was harmless: there are certain runic patterns that can draw the attention of unwelcome supernatural attention on whoever has the misfortune to look upon them, so Cabal continued to be delicately cautious long after the point when he had disproved the possibility of every form of magical trap known and several more open to conjecture. Finally, even after he had conceded that the letter was merely a letter – though it bore no name and address, and had somehow been posted without the knowledge of his front garden – he still felt misgivings as he opened it fully and studied its contents.