The ghoul leader bounded through blackness, the curving rocky tunnel flaming in smudged colours to his eyes. It wasn’t perfect sight – light was required for that – but it was substantially better than running into walls and off precipices. He had wondered how it worked for some time, but had known that that was beyond his ability to deduce. Still, that would be changing shortly, just as soon as he drank the stolen elixir. He felt no guilt at its theft. Why should he? He knew that Cabal would soon understand his reasons, then come to regard his new ghoulish existence not as a malign curse but as the great opportunity it truly was.
It turned a corner, scurried across a nexus in the great deep darkness frequented by the fearsome gugs, and darted into a new narrow tunnel that had been melted through the rock by a juvenile cthonian twenty millennia before. The ghoul knew the giant worm-like cthonian in question, at least by repute; it was now a young adult of truculent demeanour and a burden to all seven of its parents. But the ghoul had more important matters to concentrate on today than the soap opera lives of the selfish and invertebrate.
It paused, sensing the eddies in time that surged in those strange places as gentle as breezes. The hackles of its neck arose and it knew it was close, sniffing the air for a scent of a particular time and space. The creatures in those tenebrous extents wandered up and down the years, like cows in a field, unaware and uncaring, but the ghouls understood instinctively the opportunities and dangers since they were among the few who ever ventured into the worlds that abutted the Dreamlands, and among the even fewer who cared.
Soon the scent of fresh air would have been apparent even to a sense of smell less perceptive than a ghoul’s. The ghoul leader stopped, and looked back as if half expecting pursuit, but the tunnel was empty except for himself and an explosion of roots that entered the space from above. The ghoul searched roughly within them, quickly locating a hollow from which it withdrew a brown-paper parcel, packaged as incompetently as only a ghoul or a schoolboy could manage. It reached further into the hollow and pulled out Cabal’s Gladstone bag and cane, both stolen only hours before while Cabal’s attention had been on the latter stages of the elixir synthesis. Stolen by subordinate ghouls, hidden here at their leader’s command.
The ghoul fumbled with the parcel’s string, quickly grew frustrated with trying to untie the knots and tore away the paper instead, with its long powerful fingers, snapping the string as easily as it could a neck. Within lay Cabal’s sloughed skin: the carefully folded and stored bundle of clothes. The ghoul measured its arm against that of the suit jacket and grimaced at how much shorter the sleeve was than the distance from its shoulder to its wrist. Still, there was a solution to that. Holding all the stolen goods in its arms, it moved onwards in a stooped lope, up the sloping path until the rock turned to clay and compacted soil. The tunnel stopped abruptly in a convex wall of cut stone, each block about the size of a loaf. With no hesitation, the ghoul drew the stopper from the little tube of elixir and gulped it down. Now, working quickly, it removed the stones and stacked them carefully on the tunnel floor until there was a gap large enough for it to manoeuvre its scrawny frame through, and take the stolen things with it.
The village was asleep, its occupants deep in sleep, though few sank deep enough to visit the lands from which the ghoul had so recently departed. There was nobody around to see the long-fingered hand, tipped with gore-stained talons, rise from the shadows of the well on the village green, and grasp the edge, or to witness the grey, hideous form that rose up after it. The ghoul looked cautiously around before jumping soundlessly into the moon shadow of the quaint little roof that stood over the well shaft. Behind it, the water bucket swung slightly where its shoulder had touched it. Possessed of a surprisingly tidy mind for a grave-robbing cannibal, the ghoul reached out and stopped it. It had already given orders that the stones in the well wall some thirty feet down the shaft would be replaced before morning, and was in no doubt that it would be obeyed. It was important that no trace was left of this journey.
Across the green, the only light in any building burned in the windows of The Old House at Home. No doubt Parkin had interrupted his evening patrol for a quick half of bitter about two hours ago, and was now on one of its many successors. The ghoul’s long ears flicked back and forth as it listened to the police sergeant, and anyone else in no hurry to go home, quietly talking. Nobody was saying their goodbyes. Excellent: nobody was likely to exit the pub and see a lean dark form dash from the cover of the well, across the green and down the road.
The ghoul could feel the elixir working. The flaring colours of its dark-penetrating sight were becoming attenuated; it no longer loped but was starting to walk more upright; its skin was becoming lighter and more human in texture. Unexpectedly, it was also growing weaker. Humans had not a fraction of the strength of a ghoul, but as its ghoulish strength left it, it seemed to drain deep into the human strength that lay beneath it too. Soon the ghoul’s indefatigable trot became a walk, then a slouch, and finally a stagger. It paused at a rock by the path, having left the road a mile or so before, and sat heavily upon it. It looked at its limbs, at their increased girth, their shortened length, and found them disgusting. At least the clothes would fit now.
Dressed, although not a sartorial triumph in any sense, the ghoul lifted Cabal’s bag and discovered it to be far heavier than it remembered. It ran its hand – it could no longer really be called a ‘paw’ – over its head and was gratified to discover hair growing there, so quickly that it could almost feel it doing so, driving out of his scalp like clay extruded from a nozzle. Belatedly, it realised that the sheer speed of the transformation was also the reason for the overwhelming weakness. It was too fast for his body to bear. If it didn’t stop soon, it might kill him.
He dared not abandon his bag, and half carried it, half dragged it for the next mile until at last he saw the house. It looked cold and forbidding in the moonlight, but it was his salvation, and he must reach it if the long plan he had mapped out was to see fruition. It was another quarter of an hour before he finally reached the garden gate and slumped down by it, mortally tired. He tested his face: the muzzle had gone and his skin felt like human skin, just as it had before his transformation, just as it had before he had been forced to trick himself.
Cause and effect were never certain things in the Dreamlands, and what was objective there was subjective here. Time and place shifted in chaotic patterns between the two realms and it had always astonished him that the ghouls, free travellers that they were, had never taken advantage of it. Now he had come within a hair’s breadth of assuming full ghoulhood, he understood very well. The ghouls simply didn’t care, any more than a rat on a warship or a spider in a clock might care about the greater possibilities of its environment. He, however, had realised how this could save him. He wasn’t sure at what point he had realised this or when he had acted upon it. Paradox had stolen the exact sequence of events from his mind and he doubted it would do his sanity much good to try to re-evaluate it, but what was sure was that he had acted upon it, and now the ghoul warrens housed among its many unpleasant material artefacts this one gloriously elegant temporal one. He knew Cabal would settle into the role of ghoul leader easily. After all, he always had.
Cabal sat by the wall of his house and remembered how he had realised the truth of it from the depths of despair when the ghoul leader had stolen the elixir from him for no apparent reason. He had known what he must do, and he had done it with precision: the ‘attack’ on the house in Arkham, making contact with the witch of Hlanith, and being there to hint to himself about the sinew-wood construct in the nameless city. He had known where he would descend into the crevasse in Mormo, and had marshalled his ghouls to harvest several thousand dead heads of hair to ensure he had a soft fall when the rope broke, as it always had and it always would.