Ouroboros Ouzo: A Johannes Cabal Story (Johannes Cabal series) Read online

  Inwardly, Cabal shrank the spectrum of animosity so that it no longer included shooting himself six times across a table.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “I have no intention of harming you.”

  “Well, I know that,” said the man impatiently. “That’s not what I meant. I must admit, I wish I could recall this conversation better.”

  “I shall make notes,” said Cabal, reaching for his inner jacket pocket.

  “No, no, no,” said the man with a sudden glint of real anger that absolutely confirmed to Cabal’s satisfaction that he was talking to himself. “Don’t do that. Why would you do that? You’ll make this whole conversation unbelievably tedious if you know exactly what’s going to be said. Far more fun just to forget about it.”

  “Fun,” said Cabal, his tone hollow. Perhaps this was not his future self, after all.

  “Yes. Fun. At some point, you will unexpectedly come down with an attack of fun and find that you actually rather like…” The man paused, even flinched slightly. “I remember this.”

  “I very much doubt…” began Cabal, but the man was gone. Or, at least, he had been replaced by himself, but different. Where he had been wearing a suit much like Cabal’s current linen affair, now he was in black. He was tanned, weathered, and gaunt, and he had but one eye, the dead socket covered by an eye patch. Running down his brow to the cheek was an ugly, jagged scar, a reminder of the incident that must surely have taken the eye.

  Cabal looked at this new vision of his future and blinked. “No pre-determination,” he said in little more than a whisper.

  “Of course there’s no pre-determination, you fucking idiot,” said the man, “except where the lines cross. That staples things down. This,” he gestured at the room they were in then slapped both palms on the table for emphasis, “is predetermined. You had to be here because I’m here. And so was he, the version you just shunted off into oblivion because ‘fun’ is a dirty word to us.”

  Cabal did not reply; he was too busy taking in the actual nature of the vision that the ouzo granted him. He had not been expecting anything so contingent on factors he could not foresee. “This is not what I expected. I simply wanted…”

  “…to know if your current research is worthwhile, because you can see it taking years to find out the hard way.” He fell silent and looked at Cabal. It was hard to know if he did so with loathing or whether that was just how his face looked in that future.

  “And does it?” asked Cabal.

  “In my life, I’m still working on it. But, there have been distractions.” He tapped the lower end of the scar. “In that last… version’s, I don’t know. You eliminated him before finding out.”

  “I didn’t mean to,” said Cabal, sounding somewhat feeble even to his own ear.

  “I didn’t mean to.” It is bad enough being mimicked disrespectfully at the best of times, but it is immeasurably worse when one does it to insult oneself, and is thus rather too accurate for comfort. “God’s teeth, boy,” snarled the man, “didn’t your experience in the ghoul warrens teach you anything?”

  “Ghoul warrens? What ghoul warrens?”

  The man settled back in his chair, exasperated with himself for making an unforgivable temporal faux pas. “Ah, scheiße,” he said, and then he was no longer there. It was not simply the case that he vanished, but that he had never been, nor would he ever.

  His replacement was – and would be – no improvement. Cabal took in the canine muzzle, the erect ears, the horrible rubbery flesh, the nakedness. His new interlocutor was not at all interested in him. Instead it poked around amidst his plate. “No Pope,” it reported at last, clearly disappointed.

  “No,” said Cabal, both to the inferred question, and to the possible future.

  The chair was empty. Cabal looked at it, his brow furrowed. Did this mean that his current state of mind would take him down a path in which he would surely die? Or, there was a faint possibility that…

  He took up a piece of onion from his salad and tossed it at the chair. It behaved exactly as one might expect.

  So, he didn’t end up invisible in that future. Or he also had to consider the possibility that the ouzo had run its course and he had endured all the glimpses of the future he was going to. Neither of these was the most likely explanation for his absence in the chair and therefore his future, but this most likely explanation was not one he cared to think about in any great detail.

  Instead, he tried flexing his potentiality; he made up his mind that he would do this rather than that in the future, go here rather than there.

  The chair remained stubbornly empty.

  Cabal swallowed slowly. He couldn’t be dead in all those futures, could he?

  He picked up the miniature bottle. Perhaps there might be a few drops left, and surely that would count as part of the same dose? He was just about to upend the bottle over the shot glass when there chair was suddenly occupied by himself, looking much the same as his already did, but for some obvious putrefaction and the eternally confused mien of the average zombie.

  “Oh, dear,” said Cabal quietly. The undead him looked across the table at the alive him, and shrugged hopelessly. “I don’t suppose you recall what led you to your current state, do you?” Cabal asked without any great expectation of an answer.

  He was therefore surprised when the zombie pointed at the bottle in his hand and wagged a rotting finger at him.

  “Really?” asked Cabal. He carefully put the bottle down as one might a slumbering scorpion. “A second dose will..?”

  The zombie nodded, and indicated itself mournfully with a jab of the thumb.

  “Well, I shan’t do that, then,” said Cabal. The zombie was just swivelling its wrist to give him a thumbs up when it disappeared, likely to their mutual relief.

  In rapid succession he was treated to visions of himself as a college don, a miserable morphine addict, a semi-mechanical butler and, to his considerable astonishment, a woman.

  “How is that possible,” he asked her, which is to say himself. “How is that possible even in a general sense?”

  “Complicated, darling,” said his female alter ego, affixing a cigarette into a holder.

  “Complicated? It’s well nigh inconceivable.” She did not look at all like him, although when she looked sideways at him, he recognised those eyes very well from his shaving mirror. To his horror, he also found her, which is to say him, which is to say himself, attractive.

  His confusion either showed in his face, or she remembered this interview all too well. She smiled with amusement. “So vain,” she said.

  She blinked out of existence even as she was reaching for her lighter.

  He was caught by the lea for a long moment. Everything else he could see a path to; even the semi-mechanical butler, a fate he’d dodged once and he would apparently have to watch out for again in the future. A woman, though? How…

  “Kindly attend,” said the man sitting opposite. It was Johannes Cabal, of course, but unscarred, untramelled, and his usual gender. He was also unaged in any way, and wearing exactly the same cream linen suit.

  “How far from me are you in time?” asked Cabal.

  The man consulted his pocket watch, then held it up for Cabal to see. A swift comparison showed a difference of only three minutes. Cabal’s brow clouded as he put away his watch. “I don’t understand.”

  “I know,” said the man, “so listen. That stuff,” he nodded at the ouzo bottle, “is a trap. It puts you into the impossible position of second-guessing yourself for the rest of your life. Every possibility, every contingency will haunt you and persecute you. Presently, you will find it impossible to make a decision for fear of what may result.”

  “Are you saying all this effort was for naught?”

  “No. You’re saying that. I’m saying that while the Ouroboros ouzo may not give you the clear cut path that you hoped for, nor is it entirely useless. For example, quite small decisions in your immediate future, ones t
hat you consider as a matter of course, may lead you to the fates that you have seen. Not all are so bad.”

  “I do not wish to be a woman.”

  “Yet you… we seemed quite reconciled to it. That is by the bye.” He checked his watch. “There is little time left. The lesson from today is that we tread a path that is unusual rather than unremittingly deadly. You have had some warnings. Be on your guard against the ones where you end up dead and buried, dead and wandering around, or a solicitor.”

  “What about the morphine addiction?”

  “Yes,” the man said. “That as well, I suppose. But also remember the ones where you were happy.”

  “I do not do what I do to be happy,” said Johannes Cabal.

  “You cannot lie to me,” said Johannes Cabal.

  Suddenly, he was alone once more.

  He had been so startled by the first appearance, that Cabal had not entirely sensed the change in his perceptions brought on by the ouzo. When the change faded from him now, however, he was entirely aware of it. The prickling at the back of his neck as countless potentials elbowed their way into the actual was gone.

  He could see the truth he had discovered within and from himself. The liquor was a trap, he could see that now. It would have removed his ability to take risks if he let it. Yet he had given himself wise counsel; he was the captain of his own fate, just as he had always been. It was good to know it for a fact, and to see some of the rocks that lay in the gloomy ocean of the yet undone before him.

  He rose, eager to be on his way, eager to be back in his laboratory and working once more. Halfway to the door, he faltered and looked back. In the chair that faced the door was the slightest shadow of a man. It looked nonplussed, perhaps by some startling revelation. Cabal considered walking out just to see what might happen, but decided not to. After all, one can only tempt Fate so far.

  Johannes Cabal sat in the chair whose back was to the door, and he waited.

  Author’s Afterword

  I hope you enjoyed the preceding story. One of the nice things about Cabal is that he allows for a wide variety of narratives, including a more character driven piece like this. It’s hard to think of many other characters who live in a milieu where they can quite literally end up talking to themselves in a variety of modes. It’s a somewhat unusual story in that respect, and it has a somewhat unusual genesis.

  Back in March of 2013, Messrs Chuck Wendig and Richard Kadrey, of Miriam Black and Sandman Slim fame respectively, were using Twitter to its best advantage, i.e. talking entertaining nonsense. I mentioned that following their logic on one particularly train of thought (that was showing signs of abandoning the rails altogether and crashing through the fireplaces of unsuspecting trackside properties) was like watching Ouroboros after it had been at the ouzo.

  It seemed self evident to me that Ouroboros would drink ouzo, being Greek and alliterative. I use a similar logic myself; Jonathan drinks gin.

  To this Mr Kadrey responded with, and I quote, “I expect to see a Cabal story within the year titled ‘Ouroboros Ouzo.’ Get on it.”

  He daresied me, dear reader. He daresied me.

  I had the fourth Cabal novel to get out of the way, but played with ideas as to what “Ouroboros Ouzo” might conceivably be about during that period. At first it was going to be a treasure hunt for the rare liquor, even though that struck me as an obvious idea and not one I felt very engaged with. Then I got to thinking why did Cabal want this stuff, anyway? Up until then, it had simply been a MacGuffin, an object of contention that has little narrative importance beyond that fact. As I imagined what Ouroboros Ouzo might be and what it might do, the original sub-par “Raiders of the Lost Ark” pastiche fell away and I realised that this was where the core of the story really lay. The result of those thoughts is what you have here.

  Incidentally, when I sent the story to Messrs Wendig & Kadrey (who really ought to form a law firm, or at least run a haunted fairground with names like that), Mr Kadrey was astonished I’d actually written it (I repeat, I was daresied), and called me a madman. I consider that high praise.

  Jonathan L. Howard, January 2014