Free Exeunt Demon King by Jonathan L. Howard

 
     
    Christmas comes around but once a year. To Johannes Cabal,
this showed shocking over-familiarity and ill-breeding.
    Winter
as a whole was a trial to him, forcing his attention from his work
and to the necessities of running a house as the mercury dropped
and the pipes threatened to burst at the first frost. Even when his
house – a three storey building apparently stolen from the middle
of a row of late Victorian townhouses and dropped on a remote
hillside intact down to its small front and back gardens, woodshed
and ingrained soot – even when his house was in good repair and
proof against the December cold, there was little he could do
professionally but bring his notes up to date and plan new
experiments for the thaw. It was, after all, terribly difficult to
rob a grave when the soil was frozen. Johannes Cabal’s profession
was analytical necromancy.
    It
wasn’t a calling that attracted adoration or even tolerance. It
seemed ironic to him, while escaping one torch-bearing mob or
another, that doctors were regarded so highly for their stumbling
and short-termed treatments when all he wanted to do was surpass
their greatest efforts. The man who attempts to cure the common
cold is a popular hero. The man who tries to defeat death is
hounded from pillar to post. He appreciated that the practicalities
of necromancy might be unpalatable to some but, really, what was a
robbed grave here, a summoned demon there, compared to the possible
gains? Oh, but no. The public could never see past the occasional
and unavoidable mistakes, bleating on about how the science of
necromancy was somehow intrinsically evil just because some of the
higher profile failures had ended up wandering the countryside with
a hunger for human brains. Sanctimonious fools, the lot of
them.
    Still, Christmas Eve , Cabal thought
as he looked at the calendar on the parlour mantelpiece. A family time . Usually,
his solitary lifestyle was not only necessary to his researches,
but very much his preference. Sometimes, though, just sometimes… He
sighed heavily. He wasn’t entirely alone, strictly speaking. There
were the things in the garden, and the things he kept in the
woodshed, but he would rather open a vein than have them tracking
grave mould and pixie dust onto the carpets. He’d been forced to
take action against the things in the skirtingboards some time
before so that only really left the thing in the box. He looked up
at the wooden box that sat on the deep shelf above the
fire.
    “ Merry Christmas,” he said.
    After a moment, the box started to whistle Good King Wencelas in a melancholy
but not unpleasant key. Cabal lowered his head and listened for a
few bars. Something like a smile of happy remembrance flickered
across his lips, or perhaps it was just the flickering firelight
illuminating his face as the daylight died outside.
    Abruptly, a sharp knocking at the door made his head snap up,
the ghostly smile instantly replaced by his habitual expression of
tight-lipped distaste. Cabal wasn’t in the habit of receiving
visitors at all, not least because not many actually made it as far
as the front door. The garden folk – pixies, sprites and fairies
whose activities would have made Enid Blyton very sad – didn’t
usually permit it.
    On the
doorstep, Parkin waited patiently. It had been snowing earlier and
he was wrapped up warmly. It hadn’t surprised him at all to see
that his where the only tracks that went anywhere near Cabal’s
house; quite the contrary. He rocked gently on the balls of his
feet and blew out a cloud of hoary breath. In one of the flowerbeds
near his foot, something small, fey and unutterably malign
moved.
    “ Hullo, sonny,” said Parkin, apparently sensing the movement by
sonar and not even deigning to look down. “Before you get up to any
nonsense with fairy–shot or the like, I think you really ought to
know my boots are nailed with cold iron hobs.” He looked down, his
expression hard. “And I’m more