The Brothers Cabal by Howard Jonathan L

Author:Howard, Jonathan L. [Howard, Jonathan L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Horror, Humour, Vampires, Paranormal
ISBN: 9781250037534
Goodreads: 21408348
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Published: 2014-09-30T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

IN WHICH THE HAMMER FALLS

It was daytime. It was impossible. Dark, overcast in some way he couldn’t quite understand, but it was daytime. Horst threw open the door and leaned heavily on the jamb as he tried to take in what was happening in the confused world outside.

The first thing that didn’t happen was that he didn’t burst into flames. Sunlight was falling on him, but its purifying power to remove spiritual aberrations like him from the world in a fount of dust and agony was gone but for a slight, unpleasant prickling. It was as if the sun’s ferocity had been somehow drained away, and this was all it could do to discomfort him, like receiving impolite personal comments in the post from a great white shark. He could almost feel the frustration in it.

The sun was up, but it looked the wrong colour; not how he remembered it at all. But everything looked wrong. The grass and trees looked diseased, the people at the showground were washing around making a dull roar, the sky seemed strange and alien, dominated by a great cloud that, he noted with the disinterest of the otherwise distressed, was moving against the wind.

Somebody said ‘Horst?’ and for a moment he thought the voice was in his own head, a filament of the confusion that swirled there, but then he heard it again, and looked up. Alisha was standing directly over him, looking down from the carriage roof, astonishment written in her expression.

‘How are you awake?’ she demanded. ‘It’s only mid-afternoon!’

He tried to speak, but there were too many things going on inside his head, an inability to talk to somebody whose head appeared upside-down from his current position being too much to process in his disrupted intellect at that moment. He jumped down, took a couple of steps, and turned. Yes, that was much better. Now she was the right way up and had a body, standing on the train carriage roof, and so helped him anchor down his sanity a little in the high wind that was blowing through his mind.

‘I don’t know. Something’s wrong.’ The prickling of the ineffectual sun made his shoulders twitch at the formication. ‘Everything’s wrong. What’s happening? What’s happening to me? Johannes … he’s going to die.’ He swung drunkenly about to face the showground, thoughts boiling in cascades of irrelevance in his head. He could see one of the entomopters was landing—the Spirit of ’76, he could identify it by its silhouette—while the others milled in a stack. He couldn’t see what was happening through the mass of the crowd for the next few seconds, but his grasp on time was reduced to events rather than progressions, and he knew only that it took as long for the next thing to happen as it took him to crouch on the gravel, close his eyes, and try to squeeze the pandemonium from his thoughts.

Then he heard Miss Virginia Montgomery’s electrically amplified voice crackle out over the lowing of the crowd, and he raised his head to listen, but kept his eyes shut.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.