Johannes Cabal the Necromancer by Jonathan L Howard

Author:Jonathan L Howard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: SteamPunk
ISBN: 9780385528085
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2010-06-01T11:52:07+00:00

“No, not at all, not in the way that you mean. I actually think he’s a very moral man. I just don’t think that he’s using the same morals as everybody else. I think …” This was it. He’d painted himself into a corner, and a thousand lazy reporters and ever-so-sincere politicians had rendered the only word that he could use comically melodramatic. “I think … Johannes Cabal… is evil.”

Leonie looked at him in disbelief. Evil. The word had lost its power through overuse. Now it just meant incomprehensible to the uncomprehending. Barrow wanted to explain the complexities of it, this language of suffering that he had learned at countless crime scenes and in too many interview rooms.

The serial killer and the serial burglar shared far more than either would like to admit: the need that has to be fed until next time, the need that results in the suffering of others, the easy justifications. They shouldn’t have left it unlocked. They shouldn’t have gone down that alley. They shouldn’t have been dressed like that. Barrow had heard it all, and he’d always smelled the sour smell of a failed human.

Cabal, though, he was of another order altogether. There was almost a nobility in the corruption of the spirit that Barrow was sure was there, was sure that he had detected. There was something different, though. If he could just put a name to it, he was sure that he would understand Cabal all the better. Evil, in as far as he had experienced it so far, was always selfish. It was always just an extension of the most stupid behaviour of the infant playground: “It’s mine because I say so. It’s mine because I take it.”

Belongings, sexuality, life. But not in Cabal’s case. Barrow played with words mentally as he tried to explain to Leonie what he meant. Cabal’s was a (what?) evil. Clinical? Displaced? Remote? Deviant?

Altruistic?

Altruistic? How can evil ever be altruistic?

“It’s against its nature,” Barrow said, thinking out loud.

“Evil?” Leonie was still stuck on the word. It wasn’t one her father used often. In fact, she couldn’t remember him ever using it at all. “Are you serious?”

“I’m serious when I say I don’t want you to go to the carnival.” He tightened his grasp of her hands. “I’m scared for you. I’m scared for every person who walks through those gates.”

“You are serious.” She nodded slightly, and her trust in him closed the distance. “I won’t go.”

After she had gone, Barrow reached into his pocket and studied the two tickets. “You,” he said to one of them, “are surplus to requirements.” He threw the piece of pasteboard onto the fire. “You,” he said to the survivor, “are going to get me inside that carnival tonight. Then we shall see.” He went to the window to reread the printing on the ticket.

As he turned his back on the fire, he failed to see the ticket that he had thrown there flutter up the flue.

It seemed miraculously unburnt. Indeed, as it made its way up the chimney, even the scorch marks faded away.

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