The Fall of the House of Cabal by Howard Jonathan L

The Fall of the House of Cabal by Howard Jonathan L

Author:Howard, Jonathan L. [Howard, Jonathan L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy, Horror, Humour, Vampires, Paranormal
ISBN: 9781466879850
Goodreads: 29437867
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Published: 2016-09-27T07:00:00+00:00


The Fourth Way: HORST CABAL, LORD OF THE DEAD

The darkness swirled about them like liquid, flowed, and finally began to ebb.

‘Welcome to Sepulchre!’ said Horst, and favoured them all with a showman’s bow, as if he had built the place in his lunch hour.

‘Sepulchre?’ Cabal looked about them through the thinning coils of darkness. ‘It looks remarkably like London.’

‘It is quite grand in places, true. Miss Barrow and I were at a huge theatre, quite as large as anything in London. Larger.’

‘I see. And this Sepulchre of yours also contains its own Nelson’s Column?’

‘Oh, I doubt it. That would be silly.’ He looked up. ‘Oh!’ A reasonable exclamation from somebody who had just been successfully stalked by 169 feet of granite and bronze. They were undeniably in Trafalgar Square.

Putting the impermanence of their path from his mind for the moment, Cabal crouched by Zarenyia. Her transformation was complete, but she was plainly sorely weakened by her recent travails.

‘I’ve hardly eaten since we started on this quest of yours, Johannes,’ she said as he propped her back against the stone wall of the strange little cylindrical police box from which they had emerged. ‘You promised murders.’ She said it with a mannered pout, but the import behind it was plain.

Cabal nodded, rose to his feet, and looked around. It was a public place; there must be somebody expendable around. It was then that he realised something was very wrong with London, which is to say, in addition to all its more usual flaws.

‘Where is everybody?’ They seemed to be at the tail end of the day, and the overcast sky was darkening. There was no conceivable reason that one of the metropolis’s busiest junctions should be entirely devoid of any living people. On the nearby roadway at the junction with the Strand stood a horse-drawn tram, unattended. Cabal took a few steps to examine it more closely, and saw whitened bones lying between the traces.

‘I suspect…’ He looked around at the darkened buildings. None showed the signs of extended neglect, but there was something undeniably unkempt about the scene for all that. ‘I suspect that we are not safe in the open. We should seek shelter as soon as possible. The Five Ways are working at full effect once more now that we have left Hell, and we know nothing of this place.’

‘It looks like London,’ said Horst.

‘Apart from that it looks like London. Thank you, Horst. I know I can always depend upon you to state the blindingly obvious.’

‘It’s a talent.’ Horst looked at the sky. ‘I’ll tell you something else that’s a talent. Knowing just how likely the sun is to do me a mischief. I don’t know what’s up behind those clouds, but it isn’t the sun.’

‘Of course not. It’s merely a representation of the sun, in much the same way this is only a representation of London, and this Sepulchre place was only the representation of some sort of materialised metaphor.’

Leonie Barrow and Miss Smith were helping Zarenyia to her feet.



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.