Free Johannes Cabal: The Fear Institute by Jonathan L. Howard Page B

bitterly that he still had his gun.
    It was probably nothing, he told himself. The entirety of the Dreamlands was ‘wrong’. This was just another manifestation of that. As the fishermen cast off and guided their boat into the centre of the great river, Cabal tried to distract himself by watching Shadrach, Corde and Bose. Their earnest pointing and muttering soon bored him so much, however, that he returned his attention to the fishermen. They were swarthy men, but no more than most who worked outdoors for a living, and wore breeches, shirts of rough cambric and scruffy turbans in pale shades of yellow and blue. Their gait was not that of sailors, and Cabal concluded that they rarely if ever left the river. Venturing out of the estuary and hugging the coast to Hlanith was probably a major expedition for them. Yet they seemed unexcited, even blasé, to be going to Hlanith, and uninterested in their passengers. Cabal shrugged inwardly. Perhaps this was normal here. Giving up on them, he turned his attention back to his colleagues for the best part of fifteenseconds before giving up on them, too. Perhaps, he hoped, the changing landscape might give him some distraction from the tedium of the company.
    Here, at least, he was not disappointed. The river and the wide valley through which it ran had a curious quality about them that, while just as mysterious as the curious quality about the fishermen, was far more pleasurable. After some careful analysis of his feelings, Cabal abruptly realised that this quality was ‘beauty’, about which he had heard so much and seen so little. On either bank, trees crowded nearly to the waterline, willows by the thousand. He had never heard of the like, never mind having ever seen such a mass of weeping boughs all together. Further into the forests – calling them ‘woods’ was not merely understatement, it was a barking lie – he could see taller trees, oaks, elms, scatterings of evergreens and even a few isolated palms and banyans. These were no forests that ever were, but had merely been dreamed of once, and the fruits of that strange vision had settled and grown. Cabal wondered what sort of man could have dreamed a dream of such a dream and dreamed it so strongly. He watched the trees slide by for another few minutes before concluding that this ancient dreamer, this weaver of the very fabric of the Dreamlands, was an idiot. He’d got it all wrong. Banyans, indeed. Such a dolt.
    And as in contemplation of matters arboreal Cabal sat and mused, the Dreamlands sudde

 

Chapter 4
     
    IN WHICH THE FAUNA OF THE DREAMLANDS PROVE UNPLEASANT
     
    nly changed. It was not a slow transformation but, rather, the abrupt sense of dislocation one might suffer when feeling tired on a train journey, closing one’s eyes momentarily, and reopening them to discover that one is two stations past one’s destination and can’t go back until you reach Crewe. Suddenness and shock are conjoined in that moment, and that was what the four hopeful adventurers experienced when, abruptly, they found themselves no longer on the river but standing in a small clearing in a wood. They reacted differently, as befitted their humours. Shadrach cried out and whirled around as if beset by invisible imps. Corde’s hand fell upon the hilt of his sword, and he looked about, alert and ready. Bose simply stood stock still while his face warred between two expressions of astonishment, one wide-eyed and open-mouthed, the other furrow-browed and jutted-jawed. Theresultant facial indecision caused his ears to flap slightly.
    Cabal, for his part, stood very, very still. Only his eyes moved as he gathered data in an attempt to deduce what had happened. To one side of the clearing, the tree cover seemed thinner, and the sunlight penetrated, as if they were by a larger clearing or even at the edge of the wood in which they had unexpectedly found themselves. Ignoring the others, he moved quickly that way, pushed by a barrier of