On the workbench before him lay his Webley Boxer .577, freshly cleaned and tested. It wouldn’t do for it to fail now. He took it up, enjoying its weight for the last time, placed the muzzle in his mouth and fired.
Chapter 15
IN WHICH LITTLE IS SAID, BUT MUCH IS CONVEYED
Johannes Cabal was not expecting anything very much from death, but the dizziness surprised him. He opened his eyes to find himself in a hemispherical chamber carved into stone. Before him sat a happy man of puppyish demeanour, whom Cabal thought somewhat familiar.
‘Well,’ said Bose, ‘how’d you like those apples, eh?’
Cabal could do little but stare at him for an incontinently long time. Then he looked at his hands. They were the hands of a man in his late twenties, steady and unmarked by liver spots. He looked back up at Bose.
‘Nyarlothotep,’ said Cabal, more calmly than he felt. ‘You little bastard.’
Chapter 16
IN WHICH CABAL PLANS IN THE LONG TERM AND LAUGHTER PROVES TO BE THE WORST MEDICINE
‘How’d you like those apples, eh?’ is a ghastly, uncouth phrase to hear from anybody, and coming from a god did not improve it in the slightest.
‘What a ridiculous waste of time,’ said Cabal, trying to think of a verbal barb sufficiently sharp to sting even an immortal, cosmically puissant being. It was an endeavour doomed to failure.
‘Not for me,’ said Bose. ‘Not a second has passed for me. Or for you, if we’re being pedantic, and I know how much you enjoy your pedantry. Subjective time doesn’t matter a jot, does it, old man? Well, I say old man but, of course, not as old a man as you thought.’
Bose’s complacency was such that it took a gargantuan effort of Cabal’s will not to stride over to him and slap him as the impertinent schoolboy he was affecting. That would, however, have provided only momentary satisfaction before Bose – it was so hard to think of him as Nyarlothotep – retaliated in some profoundly horrible though topographically challenging way.
‘When I’m not running billets doux between my employers, Johannes, I deal in terror, and chaos, and madness primarily. Death also, but that’s just a hobby, really. Sometimes you want something with a little piquancy, though, and despair does it for me. You say what I have shown you is a ridiculous waste of time, but I have not wasted a moment. What you should be realising is that your life up to now has been a ridiculous waste of time. Your goal is unachievable. You will die in misery just as you saw.’
‘I will not die in a retirement home,’ said Cabal, ‘surrounded by strangers. Your vision was wrong on that count.’
‘Details, details.’ Bose curled his lower lip and wafted his fingers about. Cabal hoped this was an honest response and not a piece of play-acting to counter his own. He dared not test Bose’s knowledge of what Cabal had experienced beyond this without drawing his attention unduly. It would have to do, and he would base his plans on the presumption that the details of the vision were his and his alone. He did this with a degree of trepidation. Nyarlothotep was the most psychologically human of the Old Ones, but the gap in intellects dwarfed that between, say, a border collie and Leonardo da Vinci. Galling though it might be to him, Cabal’s best hope was that Nyarlothotep could not think down to his level.
Bose’s next comment, however, scuppered at least part of that hope. ‘I know what you’re thinking, though, Mr Cabal,’ he said, with an inscrutable smile. ‘You’re thinking that I’ve actually done you a big favour. I’ve saved you decades in research by letting you live through them in the blink of an eye, and that you can just go home and reproduce the latter stages of your experiments.’
Cabal’s face was inexpressive, but inwardly he winced. That was exactly what he had been hoping. He was also hoping that this reality was the one he thought it was, and Nyarlothotep had not packed him away into a Chinese puzzle box of nested realities interconnected in unexpected ways from which he would never escape. It was a possibility, and the Dreamlands were the ideal environment in which to make it work.
‘The secret you seek is as simple as ABC,’ said Bose, demonstrating godly understatement. ‘It was equally simple to concoct a likely but ultimately fallacious path of research and set you off on it, substituting the happy result that you experienced. It was a happy result, wasn’t it? You must have wept tears of joy.’
‘As practical jokes go . . .’
‘My whoopee cushion is to die for,’ said Bose. He smiled wistfully. ‘Horribly. Oh, I meant to ask, your brother, was he there?’
Cabal felt anger flare and took a moment to damp it down again. ‘My brother is dead.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Bose. ‘Running around, drinking blood dead. I’ve heard of that. I may even have invented it.’
‘No, not undeath. Not any more. I mean dead. Utterly irrevocably dead.’
‘Really?’ Bose rubbed his chin in contemplation. ‘Well, I suppose the line between undeath and death is crossed rather easily, one way or the other. Very well, no brother. Any other family members to haunt your conscience?’
Cabal could feel his anger squirming its way loose of the leash, a development that probably would not go well for him in the present circumstance.
‘I refuse to rise to your childish taunts,’ he said stiffly. ‘You’ve had your fun. I’m going now.’
‘Hmm? Oh, yes. Of course. You must do as you see fit. I suppose I should crack on myself. Lots of little errands to run and chores to do that have been mounting up while I’ve been playing with you and those other two animals. Azathoth will want the newspaper reading to him, and Shub-Niggurath always wants help changing the nappies.’
‘I’m sure the epithet mother of a thousand young is only metaphorical.’ Cabal paused to consider. ‘At least, I think it is only metaphorical.’
‘Oh, don’t I wish,’ said Bose, and sighed. He stirred himself on his throne and sat up. ‘Well, no time for dawdling. You had better see yourself out. I’m bored with being an inoffensive solicitor so I’m going to put on something a little less coherent that will probably shatter your sanity if you look upon it.’
‘How exactly do I get off this island?’ asked Cabal.
Bose’s last few friendly affectations faded away and he looked stonily at Cabal. ‘I wasn’t joking about your sanity,’ he said, in a gravelly voice that no longer sounded much like Bose or, indeed, much like any human. It sounded just like gravel might talk.
There seemed little more to be said. Cabal nodded curtly, turned on his heel and walked out with dignity, while all the time being unable to shake the thought that his exit looked no more decorous to Nyarlothotep than a cockroach attempting a dignified scuttle. As he climbed the corridor towards the crevasse-edge chamber, he could hear something particularly disturbing happening behind him, something that made wet noises, ripping noises and other sounds he could not categorise but which he suspected were generated by happenings neither common nor comprehensible to a mere mortal such as he. Curiosity is one thing, but there comes a point when a wise man sees all the dead cats lying around the place and thinks, I’ll just get along fine without that particular experience. Cabal hastened his step.
The sunlight was harsh after the subdued illumination of the ‘Phobic Animus’ chamber, and Cabal flicked his blue-glass spectacles out of his pocket instinctively and put them on quickly. He walked down the zigzag path, and found a boulder to perch upon at the bottom. He would risk re-entering the cave again the next day, by which time even the most sluggardly of multidimensional creatures should have had ample opportunity to change form and leave. He doubted there was much of use in there, but all it would cost him was time and that, at least, he had plenty of.