Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute by Jonathan L. Howard Read Free Book Online Page A

horrified gasp of shock from the onlookers. It is not true to say that the Key’s passage between Harwell’s frontal lobes left no mark: the flesh and bone crumbled and melted into thin white smoke and what was left was nothing more or less than a neatly defined keyhole. None of them thought this strange at the time, but only afterwards in reflection; at that moment it seemed that the keyhole had always been there, obvious and apparent to them as soon as they had seen Harwell, yet somehow they had forgotten about it. It was a curious, half-formed memory, their first experience of the nature of the Dreamlands while waking, as its influence escaped through the opening gate into the mortal world like jasmine-scented air escaping a garden.
    Only Cabal and Harwell made no sound, until Cabal turned the Silver Key in its lock and Harwell made a soft sigh as of realisation or perhaps recognition. Certainly, his eyes widened as though he could see things that had lain hidden from him his whole life. ‘It’s . . . beautiful,’ he whispered, and a solitary tear rolled down his cheek as the confused miasma of half-glimpsed possibilities that had haunted him since that night at the Pickman Gallery finally grew sharper in focus. ‘It’s all so . . .’
    Then his face grew tense, the skin pulled back against the bone. ‘There’s something else, something else . . .’
    Cabal finished turning the key and gently withdrew it from Harwell’s head. The keyhole remained, and from it lines of liquid light rolled up vertically across the centre of the brow and down along the ridge of the nose.
    ‘The Gateway . . .’ said Corde. ‘The Gateway of the Silver Key.’ The silver line of light was extending over Harwell’s head and down his chest, the glow becoming fiercer as it travelled. ‘I’d naturally assumed—’
    ‘Walls do not dream,’ interrupted Cabal, and Corde fell silent.
    The line had almost bisected Harwell and with every inch the line travelled, his expression of disbelief warped slowly into horror. ‘No . . . no! I can see it! I can see it! I cannot . . . must not . . . God help me!’
    ‘What can you see?’ demanded Cabal, standing close to Harwell. He noted that the stricken man’s eyes seemed to be growing further apart. The gateway was opening.
    ‘I see . . . it all!’ Harwell’s eyes were focused on something far beyond Cabal, beyond the grubby little room, beyond this world and the realms of space that it sits within. ‘Oh, mercy! Is there no mercy?’
    And, with that, the tips of the line of light joined, the Gateway of the Silver Key opened wide, and that was the end of Eldon Harwell. He became something, but what it was, living or dead, was without definition. He shattered into crumbs that sublimed into gas that smeared into liquid that sublimed into something else again until all that was left was the gateway, burning in the air with the light of a bright afternoon into a dirty garret at midnight.
    ‘You . . .’ Bose was, for once, lost for words. ‘You killed him.’
    Cabal shrugged, as if Bose had accused him of using the wrong spoon at dinner. ‘He was already dead. He’d allowed certain conceptual theomorphs to take residence in his mind. He would have killed himself or been killed within a few months in any case. At least this way he served a purpose.’ He noticed some pieces of paper lying on Harwell’s writing-table and studied them for a moment. ‘He was a poet. No loss, then.’
    ‘You are a cold man, Mr Cabal,’ said Corde, not entirely disapprovingly.
    Cabal did not answer. He was looking at the portal, stepping around it to gauge its width. ‘This will not be a quick passage. I estimate it will take approximately a minute for each of us to complete the transition from here to there. We must start immediately.’
    ‘We are leaving now?’ Shadrach was shocked and a little angry. ‘When we came on this little reconnaissance of yours, you gave us to believe that we would only be