Johannes Cabal and the Blustery Day (Johannes Cabal series)
Johannes Cabal and the
Blustery Day
by
Jonathan L. Howard
Copyright
Johannes Cabal and the Blustery Day
by
Jonathan L. Howard
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.
First publication: “H.P. Lovecraft’s Magazine of Horror” #1, 2004
Copyright © 2004-2013 Jonathan L. Howard
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Cover Illustration by Linda “Snugbat” Smith
www.snugbat.co.uk
In Memoriam
George H. Scithers
Experiment 472 was a failure. The worst sort of failure. The sort of failure that comes in a compact little bundle and hides in the dark corners of one’s laboratory, patiently awaiting an opportunity to leap out and sever any major blood vessels it might find in one’s neck. The sort of failure that seven crushing blows from a retort stand barely slows down. The sort of failure that is chased out onto the attic landing, whips between the banister railings, plummets three stories down the stairwell and yet need pause only a moment to recover its wits before darting off again.
It never got that moment. A cheap plaster bust of Napoleon Bonaparte followed it down from the attic landing, fell the three stories accelerating all the way and dashed the failure into failure pâté upon the instant of impact.
Johannes Cabal – a necromancer of some little infamy – leaned over the banister railing from where he’d dropped the bust and examined the effect of cheap statuary on reanimated flesh. It told him nothing new; he expected to commit this messy act of euthanasia every few months and the splash it made always looked very much the same. At the end of the landing was his remaining supply of ammunition, another five Napoleons. He would have to lay in some more if his current line of experimentation continued to be so disappointing.
By the harsh light of the unshaded light bulb that hung over the stairwell, Johannes Cabal looked older than his twenty-six years. He stood a little over six feet tall in his carpet slippered feet, his short blond hair was beginning to look unruly and he needed a shave. Black trousers, white shirt (sleeves rolled to the elbow), black braces and a black cravat that was coming undone through lack of attention completed his wardrobe. The tartan slippers were the only colour. He looked up at the light and wondered what time it was. He’d been working for almost three days without sleep but for a very few catnaps, he felt wretched, he looked worse and he suspected that he probably smelled by now. And for what? Another dent in the front hall’s parquet and more indelible stains on the dado. It was a hard life.
He switched off the lights in the attic laboratory and walked slowly down the stairs to the first floor. He paused by the bathroom but suspected he’d just fall asleep in the bath or do himself a mischief if he tried to shave. No, personal hygiene could wait until he didn’t feel quite so like one of the walking dead that were his professional stock in trade.
For once he didn’t carefully fold his clothes as he prepared for bed, but let them fall to the floor. He knew his sense of order would be outraged when he woke but, frankly, it could take a running jump at the moment. Leaving a duotone heap of cloth on the rug, he crawled under the sheets, switched off the light, put his head down, closed his eyes and knew immediately he was going to have trouble sleeping. He hated this, being so exhausted that he couldn’t drift off. There was nothing for it; he started to mentally plot out his lifeplan from the age of eighteen if things had gone a little more mundanely. He was just up to the apprenticeship at the firm of solicitors when he passed out.
Time went by and the only sounds were the ticking of his alarm clock, the more resonant clicks of the grandfather clock in the hall and the wooden box on the deep shelf by the fireplace in the living room singing “Underneath the Arches” quietly, to amuse itself. These were the usual sounds of the house and did not disturb Cabal.
At seventeen minutes past four, the whispering started. It began, inevitably, at the skirtingboards no more than a couple of inches above the floor and travelled across the room toward the bed. As it travelled, more tiny voices joined it in urgent discussion almost beyond the range of the human ear. Cabal didn’t hear it physically but psychically – it disturbed him and he was driven up from the well of sleep with ill grace. He didn’t need to look at the clock to know it was seventeen minutes past four. On the rare occasions that he suffered these visits, it was invariably at seventeen minutes past four. They even took account of summer and winter time. Why, he had no idea.
He waited, apparently still asleep but seething with impatience to get this over with. Sometimes they told him something useful. Usually they just woke him up to tell him something achingly obvious or irrelevant. “You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make him wash it all off, Johannes!” “Frederick Lewis, Prince of Wales, was mortally wounded by a cricketball!” Marvellous. If he’d really wanted little voices whispering gibberish in his ear, he would have invested in a radio licence.
The whispering moved up the side of the bed and stopped on the pillow by his ear. Cabal kept his eyes carefully shut – he valued his sight too much to do otherwise. These were the Skirtingboard People and to look upon them was to be blinded. Usually by rusty panel pins when least expected.
After an interminable wait that the Skirtingboard People evidently took to be dramatic, their elected spokesthing whispered sibilantly into Cabal’s ear. “Johannes Cabal! Johannes Cabal! The coldest wind is coming! So cold! So cold! Cold to your marrow, it will cut you to the bone, Johannes, to the bone!”
Having done what they apparently regarded as their duty, they took their leave. Cabal permitted himself a frown. What were they talking about?
He sat up – eyes still tightly shut – and called after them as they ran or flew or rolled back to their homes in the mouseholes of rather more than three blinded mice. “What? What do you mean? What are you talking about?”
One tiny voice called back to him. “The Bonewind, Johannes. The Bonewind is coming!”
Then it was gone and the only sound was the ticking. And the clicking. And the box la-la-la-ing because it had forgotten the words to the second verse.
Cabal fell heavily back into the horizontal and exhaled vexatiously through his nose. This was just bloody typical.
The library was proving reticent. Bathed, shaved, freshly dressed and breakfasted, Johannes Cabal once again felt capable of taking on the world, just so long as it engaged him one torch-bearing mob at a time. He was not, however, a happy man. Nowhere could he find any references to the “Bonewind” and that worried him in a “know your enemy” sort of way. Then again his library wasn’t really intended for research into the weather, no matter how preternatural the weather in question was. Even then he had no guarantee that it was a wind in any real sense at all – it might only be figurative. Metaphors irritated Cabal beyond reason; why couldn’t peop
le just say what they meant?
He remembered the tea chests of unsorted books sitting in the first cellar and wondered if any of them might be of any help. He’d been intending to index them properly at some point but pressure of work and the intractability of the Dewey Decimal Classification system when faced with the subjects he dealt in had conspired to put him off. Not a crastinatory personality as a rule, there were only so many seconds in the day to be spent scribbling new classes in the margins of Dewey that sometimes reached twelve decimal places. These were valuable seconds and Cabal wasn’t inclined to spend them indexing books he knew he would probably never need. Still, they were all drawn from assorted special auctions and the closing-down sales of failed cults so there might be something of use in his present predicament.
Down the steps and into the first, relatively innocent-looking cellar. There was a second but its entrance was hidden and contained items he doubted the local constabulary would accept as innocent and every day. He removed a dried-up bucket of size from a three-legged stool and made himself relatively comfortable beneath the dusty lightbulb, took a deep breath and delved into the first chest.
It was slow, laborious work. Several of the books weren’t in the impressive list of languages that he spoke and a couple looked very like they were in cipher. These he put to one side for later examination. The others were a pathetic collection of the heartfelt outpourings of deluded minds in the main and Cabal felt he might well be wasting whatever time he had before the mysterious “Bonewind” made its appearance. Then, towards the bottom of the second chest, he found a water damaged book with a provocative title.
“Cultus Meteorologicus,” he read, grimacing at the combination of Latin and Greek. Nothing good ever came of combining Latin and Greek. Look at television. “Being the Accumulated Knowledge of the Brotherhood of the Puissant Storm.” Cabal gauged that there were forty pages in it. Examination showed the last seven pages to be blank although they’d been helpfully headed, “Notes.” In his experience that put it on par with the accumulated knowledge of most cults.
A moment of concentration reminded him of the cult’s fate. It had discovered the principles of summoning certain manifestations associated with the weather. With more enthusiasm than care and more glee then sense, they had quickly arranged a ritual. It had gone very nearly to plan but for a slip of a pencil during the calculations pertaining to the scale of the incantation. Instead of summoning an entity roughly analogous to Frosty the Snowman, they’d got the Wendigo. The local police were fishing frozen corpses out of the treetops for weeks afterwards.
Cabal got up to go. If he had to read the maunderings of a bunch of meteorologically obsessed sociopaths, he could at least do it in comfort.
Cabal entered the living room and settled down with the book in his armchair. First came a lengthy introduction that put out the Brotherhood’s aims in arcing hyperbole of the most purple kind, riddled with the grammar of those who are prepared to do anything. The aims were, reduced to their simplest form, power, sex and money – the usual. The text didn’t mention how having arcane knowledge of weather would help them in their thinly veiled pursuits unless there were women about with a fetish for lunatics in galoshes.
Cabal adopted a disparaging expression and moved on. The notes went on to detail how they had taken the weather magics of other groups and cults and examined them to find why they worked. It was a reasonable methodology and Cabal found little here to make his lip curl. It didn’t, however, stay uncurled for long. Having condensed down other overly ornamented rituals, the Brotherhood had then put on layers of their own gingerbread. If they hadn’t been in such a rush to make their rituals better than everybody else’s – incorporating, for example, a strange hopping dance with umbrellas – they might still be alive. All things considered, thought Cabal, it had worked out for the best.
Next was a set of descriptions of creatures, entities and supernatural manifestations associated with the weather: Hail Goblins, “mandarin sleet”, the Purple Cloud, the Horrid Flesh Dissolving Red Snow of Umtak Ktharl that Makes a Sighing Noise, precipitate spriggan, parasite fog, the Bonewind, cumulonemesis…
Cabal sat up abruptly. The Bonewind?
The entry was short and to the point saying, in effect, that if the Bonewind turned its attentions to one, one should put one’s affairs in order and prepare for the inevitable with as much serenity as possible. Cabal had the sort of personality that was only ever serene when unconscious and read onwards. There were only a few notes – ironic, given the fate of the cult – about the inadvisability of summoning the Bonewind despite how easy an undertaking it was. Basically, a small ritual was performed and then you told the intended victim that the Bonewind was coming. That was all there was to it; none of that tedious mucking about with nail parings or scraps of runic parchment. Cabal was just nodding sagely at the elegance of it when he paused and looked at the skirtingboards. A frown crossed over his face, quickly evolving into an expression of ill-contained, teeth-grinding fury.
“You bastards,” he hissed. “You ungrateful little bastards.”
He made the trip down to the cellar to fetch a crowbar and went up to his bedroom. The skirtingboards were nice examples of the carpenter’s artistry but he didn’t hesitate for a moment. They made a horrible creaking noise as he jammed the end of the bar between the wood and the wall and applied pressure. With a shriek of failing nails it gave, revealing a long low cavern excavated into the plaster and brick behind. The Skirtingboard People had wisely made themselves scarce but had left a few items behind including several small doll-sized chairs, a flipchart on a stand and a tiny jug containing, guessing from the colour, lemon barley water. Cabal went flat on his chest, reached in and grabbed the chart. The markings on it were tiny and difficult to make out to the naked eye.
Moments later, as Cabal stood in the bright light of day shining through the attic laboratory’s unblinded skylights and examined the chart’s sheets closely through a jeweller’s loupe, their import became clear. They were the work of some Lilliputian architect showing a sideways projection of the house – his house – with its front wall removed to show the addition of new floors within. Lots of new floors, each slightly taller than a skirtingboard.
Cabal flung open the laboratory door and bellowed down the stairwell. “You little swine! Ingrates! I let you live here and this is how you repay me? You’ll turn this place into a condominium for louche pixies over my dead body!”
Which thought sobered him. That was the intention.
Forewarned is forearmed, thought Cabal as he ploughed through his books seeking a plan. Knowledge is power.
But he didn’t know enough. The Bonewind was a wind, that at least he knew now, but he knew precious little else about it. Some sort of entity, a portal to somewhere that froze and tore the very life breath from its victims, a living door. All he had to do was to think of a way of shutting it.
But no way presented itself, not after hours of searching. The only thing he knew for certain was that it could not stay past sunrise or nightfall, whenever it visited. If he could survive till the turn of the day, he would survive it all. He stood, stretched and rested his hands on the desktop, a sea of open books before him. He had no choice; he was going to have to extemporise and hope one cunning ruse or another would turn the trick. If not, well…
Cabal started to draw his plans against his unwanted visitor.
At midday, the grandfather clock struck. Slow and sonorous, the beats of the bell echoed around the house and were heard in every corner.
At the front door and the back door, sealed with strips of old papyrus upon which Egyptian hieroglyphs, Ogham runes and P’tithian sigils freely mixed. But there was nobody to hear the chimes there.
In the living room and the study the window catches were encased in wax from a damnable candle, a seal placed upon them by a signet ring that Cabal had handled awkwardly, the original owner’s finger still being in it. But Cabal had moved on now.
&nbs
p; In the kitchen a pendant that had once belonged to a Queen of the Nile – her name stricken from history by those that followed her reign of horrors – dangled incongruously from the taps over the sink. Nothing would pass through the water or up the drain while it hung there. Cabal had long since left the kitchen in the care of the trinket, other defences to emplace.
In the hallway, sitting on the fifth stair, Johannes Cabal sat and rolled up his shirt sleeves as the clock continued to strike. He had cast lots earlier that morning and the portents had been quite ridiculously strong. The Bonewind would arrive at midday, there could be no doubt. Apparently calm, he couldn’t help but lick his drying lips. He tried to avoid deluding himself whenever possible and appreciated that he had, at best, a fifty/fifty chance of surviving until dark. Still, if he was going to be the victim of a bunch of double-dealing pocket-sized property developers, he wasn’t going to go easily. It had only taken a few minutes to sabotage the pressure valve on the boiler down in the cellar – if it wasn’t opened manually by nightfall, there wouldn’t be enough left of the house to make a small rockery nor enough of the traitorous Skirtingboard People to butter a water biscuit.
He stood up, picked up a leather satchel from the step and slung it over his shoulder. If the Bonewind couldn’t get him before the sun set, it wouldn’t get him at all. His first line of defence was simply to keep it out of the house. If that failed then he would have to fall back on the weapons in the satchel. Their creation had been a hurried exercise and he doubted their efficacy. The house had to stand firm if he were to stand a chance.
The clock struck the last stroke of twelve and left the house in slowly encroaching silence as the note died away. “Well then,” said Cabal, walking to the middle of the hallway. “Where are you?”