The Brothers Cabal

 

The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way.
Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author's copyright, please notify the publisher at:
us.macmillanusa.com/piracy
.

 

For my brother, Neil, whom I have never sealed in a tomb in an abandoned cemetery, not even once

 

Contents

 

What strange creatures brothers are!

—Jane Austen,
Mansfield Park

 

 

Prologue

IN WHICH WE ARE REINTRODUCED TO A PAIR OF INDIVIDUALS WITH UNCONVENTIONAL INTERPRETATIONS OF THE TERM ‘DEAD'

Now, let us consider the life of Johannes Cabal, if briefly. He is closing on his thirtieth year and is ageing better than most, although this is a product of a lifestyle where sunlight is shunned rather than the assiduous use of moisturiser. He stands a little over six feet tall. He is blond, blue eyed, and, perforce, pale. These are not unusual characteristics; those are coming.

He has killed himself twice, been resurrected once (the second death was a practical joke of sorts), visited Hell twice, penetrated the Wall of Sleep into the Dreamlands
*
in corporeal form once—went as a human, came back as a monster, but the monstrousness has now left him, albeit ill unto death. He has time-travelled in a rambling and undisciplined fashion, but he was a monster at the time, and travelling time was of little import to him except as a means to an end, and as a way to upset the Vatican, which was a perk.

Ill unto death, he returned to his strange little isolated house to recuperate, yet could not enter since his front garden was conspiring to kill and eat him. He saw then that his was to be an ignominious death, to slowly shuffle off the mortal coil while propped against the gatepost of his home, mere yards from salvation. It did not surprise him—it is the lot of a necromancer to die, in all likelihood, an ignominious death, and he could only sigh a small sigh of relief that it didn't involve zombies, because that would have been tiresome. So, necromancer that he was, one of some little infamy yet, he settled down to rattle out his last breath in as much comfort as he could.

There he might have expired, and his bones lay to the inexpressible frustration of the criminally insane and eternally hungry fairies that were contained within his dangerous garden. Yet salvation came, and it came in the form of a taciturn figure who effortlessly lifted Cabal and walked up the garden path with the comatose necromancer carelessly slung over one shoulder. At this new presence, the starving unseelie of the garden scattered in fear, because that which is supernatural and nasty knows supernatural and nastier when it sees it.

The front door was a hefty artefact of English oak and triple locked with a London bar device to resist kicking and battering attacks. The figure kicked it clean out of its frame, and carried Cabal within.

The synthesis of an antidote for Cabal's overly energetic rehumanisation, slowing it to a rate his constitution could withstand, was managed within an hour or so, and he was saved. The recovery of his health, however, would not be so swift. For a week he wavered in and out of consciousness, rarely awake but for brief periods in the day during which he saw no one else. He was tended to as he slept during the hours of darkness, for his benefactor would not countenance the sun and, again, this was for reasons that had nothing to do with making savings in moisturiser. Cabal was fed and cleaned and he was barely aware of it, and the memory left him quickly with a glance into deep, inhuman eyes and a whisper. ‘Not yet, Johannes. When you are stronger.'

As Cabal's strength returned, he grew closer to the waking world and at some deep level he was glad of that, for the dust of the Dreamlands was still on his feet, and there were things he was happy to leave there. On the other hand, his awareness of his surroundings was increasing and, while his perception that he was back in his own home and not, say, swinging from a gibbet was soothing, the nagging gap in his memory between ‘dying by the gatepost' and ‘comfy under an eiderdown' was beginning to trouble him.

Finally the evening came when he fought his eyes open and looked upon the man who had saved his life, and the man judged he would not take away the memory and let Johannes Cabal sleep again, for time was passing, and it might be that another evening's sleep would lead to the death of the world. The man was not keen for that to happen.