Now there was a final test to make. It seemed advantageous to re-create a certain set of circumstances, so he travelled to the city and made the acquaintance of a woman in her late teens whose time was for sale, and when they were comfortably sequestered in a discreet hotel of a certain sort, he drowned her in the bath. He then conveyed her away in a large trunk he had waiting for precisely this purpose, by train and hired cart, and so to his house and laboratory.
Here, he applied his newly developed procedures and processes, which involved an extraterrestrial crystal, the blood of a demon and a great deal of new research hitherto unguessed at in the esoteric field of necromancy. Three hours and fifty minutes later, the young woman was sitting on the old sofa in Cabal’s front room, shivering with a blanket around her shoulders as she drank a cup of Assam tea Cabal had made her. He spun her some story about her collapsing and how, in a panic, he had brought her away. She couldn’t remember any of the unpleasantness in the bathroom, and barely remembered meeting Cabal in the first place. He insisted that she stay the night, ostensibly because it was already the evening and the railway station was a long way away, but actually to observe her. She behaved much as any startled young woman might, and responded within norms when he lied to her about being a doctor and carried out some tests on mental and physical function. Among these, he sprinkled in a few to make sure that her spirit had not been corrupted or supplanted in the process, dripping holy water and garlic essence on her tongue under the pretence that it was a neural test to check that her senses of taste and smell were still working.
She reported that the water tasted like water, that the garlic essence tasted like garlic, and Cabal observed that at no point did her tongue burst into flames or her head explode, both of which would have constituted negative indicators. She behaved normally throughout, slept normally on the sofa, and at no point during the night was observed to fly around the house with her eyes glowing, or decide at breakfast that what she really wanted to eat was a nice plate of human brains.
He drove her to the second closest railway station by a circuitous route, and pressed a generous sum of money into her hand for her expenses, the inconvenience, and for being an excellent test subject, although he didn’t actually mention this last point. He was breaking his original plan by letting a potential witness go – the rational thing to do would have been to kill her again, saw her up and get rid of the evidence in the house’s furnace – but he was tired of death. He had never enjoyed killing, except in a few well-deserving cases. Now his time as a necromancer was drawing to a close, and he did not regret it.
He did regret, irrationally and momentarily, that he had failed to preserve Miss Smith in any sort of form useful for resurrection now that the secret was in his grasp. Then again, the good turn she had done him had been after her death and dissection, and he truly doubted that he could bring life back to the few bits of her that still existed, bobbing about in formaldehyde. Besides, she seemed happy in her post mortem career as the witch of Hlanith necropolis. Attempting to cram her spirit into a few bits of pickled offal would likely irritate her.
It took him a fortnight to gather the nerve to break the seals on the glass coffin. There it had lain all these years, concealed beneath the floor of his hidden second laboratory in the cellar, a secret within a secret. He spent the two weeks planning and preparing, again and again, assuring himself that this was not procrastination, not fear, but solid, sensible forethought. There reached a point where such rationalisations ceased to convince even himself, however, and so, early one clear Friday morning and after a good breakfast eaten slowly, he went down the cellar steps. He walked reluctantly, as if going to his own execution rather than to the sum of all his ambitions. He knew that there could be only one attempt, and that if he failed, he failed for ever.
His step wavered as he considered going to the city and carrying out his previous experiment again. After all, one can have confidence in one’s results only if they can be consistently repeated. It was a lie to himself, though, and he had always been good at telling when he was lying. He continued the descent.
Once he was committed, he did not hesitate. The seals were broken quickly, for once the first was opened, the conditions within the glass coffin, filled to the brink with a fluid of occult formulation, altered, and its contents were no longer held outside time and from corruption. The coffin was a large structure, almost filling the four-by-eight-foot hole it occupied beneath the laboratory floor. Between the thick glass and the great weight of liquid it contained, there had never been any intention of removing it. Indeed, even shifting the lid required the use of the same winch he had employed to lift the false floor slabs that concealed the coffin in its pit.
It was a struggle to lift her from the coffin and he feared his plan might founder on this slightest of details. He had already lost almost a minute when he reached in and took her arm by the wrist. He had not touched her in so long, and for that minute he was overcome and could hardly breathe for the slow pulse of guilt and sorrow that he had managed to lock away for all those years. Time was wasting, though.
And so he carried out the procedures and the processes, the apex of necromantic science, the final catholicon, a cure for death.
Three hours and fifty minutes it took, just as with the woman from the city, and it succeeded perfectly, just as with the woman from the city.
She was shaking from the reaction, so he coddled her in a warm blanket, and made her tea, and she thanked him for his kindness, and asked where everybody else was, and how far downriver had she been swept before the kind gentleman saved her.
Cabal had been ready for anything, ready for any possibility, or so he thought. He knelt by her, took her hand in his and said her name, and then he said, ‘It is me. Johannes. Your Johannes.’
Then her eyes widened with recognition, and she reached out to touch his hair, which had once been blond but was now grey. ‘How long was I asleep?’ she asked, her voice breaking.
She was stronger than him in so many ways. Everything she had known had faded away in the decades she had lain dead in her fairytale coffin. Only Johannes Cabal was left, but now he was old and, somewhere along the way, he had died too. The man she saw was not the man she loved; she consigned that man away into her lost years. This Johannes Cabal was kind, but just now and then something he said or something he did betrayed an inner desperation she pitied, and sometimes a heartlessness grown habitual that she despised. She was kind to Johannes Cabal, which pained him, and he could feel her pity towards him.
Thus it was no surprise to either of them, not really, when one day he walked her to the railway station, and put a bag containing all the wealth in paper and gold he could gather together in her hand, and sent her to the city. He left her there before she might try to kiss him. It would have been the kiss one gives an elderly relative whom one is moderately fond of, and it would have crushed his heart where he stood. He left her on the platform as the train approached, and he did not look back.
In his house, in the attic laboratory, he sat at his workbench and looked at the noticeboard upon which was still pinned that strange piece of parchment. He felt nothing, not any more. In the cellar the furnace burned fiercely as it consumed his notebooks, a lifetime flaming into light and smoke. He had made some adjustments to the boiler valves. Soon there would be a catastrophic explosion that would be heard from the village. He had little doubt there would be celebrations there that evening. Let them have their fun. He wouldn’t even be alive to be taken by the explosion.