The Cthulhu Encryption Read online

  Table of Contents

  BORGO PRESS FICTION BY BRIAN STABLEFORD

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  DEDICATION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BORGO PRESS FICTION BY BRIAN STABLEFORD

  Alien Abduction: The Wiltshire Revelations

  The Best of Both Worlds and Other Ambiguous Tales

  Beyond the Colors of Darkness and Other Exotica

  Changelings and Other Metaphoric Tales

  Complications and Other Stories

  The Cosmic Perspective and Other Black Comedies

  The Cthulhu Encryption: A Romance of Piracy

  The Cure for Love and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Dragon Man: A Novel of the Future

  The Eleventh Hour

  The Fenris Device (Hooded Swan #5)

  Firefly: A Novel of the Far Future

  Les Fleurs du Mal: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  The Gardens of Tantalus and Other Delusions

  The Great Chain of Being and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  Halycon Drift (Hooded Swan #1)

  The Haunted Bookshop and Other Apparitions

  In the Flesh and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels

  Kiss the Goat

  Luscinia: A Romance of Nightingales and Roses

  The Mad Trist: A Romance of Bibliomania

  The Moment of Truth: A Novel of the Future

  An Oasis of Horror: Decadent Tales and Contes Cruels

  The Paradise Game (Hooded Swan #4)

  The Plurality of Worlds: A Sixteenth-Century Space Opera

  Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

  Promised Land (Hooded Swan #3)

  The Quintessence of August: A Romance of Possession

  The Return of the Djinn and Other Black Melodramas

  Rhapsody in Black (Hooded Swan #2)

  Salome and Other Decadent Fantasies

  The Tree of Life and Other Tales of the Biotech Revolution

  The Undead: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  Valdemar’s Daughter: A Romance of Mesmerism

  The World Beyond: A Sequel to S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below

  Xeno’s Paradox: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  Zombies Don’t Cry: A Tale of the Biotech Revolution

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  Copyright © 2011 by Brian Stableford

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  DEDICATION

  For Elaine

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THIS STORY IS THE fifth in a sequence; although the story is independent and self-contained, some reference is inevitably made to the earlier elements of the series. “The Legacy of Erich Zann” can be found in a Perilous Press volume in company with a short novel from outside the series, The Womb of Time, while Valdemar’s Daughter and The Mad Trist make up the two halves of a Borgo Press/Wildside Press double. The Quintessence of August is also published by Borgo/Wildside.

  I was first struck by the potential narrative utility of the wordplay fundamental to this story when I heard it deployed in a fascinating paper by Minwen Huang of the University of Leipzig, “The Haunted House of Science Fiction: Modern Ghosts, Crypts and Technologies,” presented at the inaugural conference of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung in Hamburg in 2010. I am very grateful to Ms. Huang for making the full text of the paper available to me, in order that I could plunder it piratically.

  “Captain England having sided so much to Captain Mackra’s Interest, was a Means of making him many Enemies among the Crew; they thinking that such good Usage was inconsistent with their Polity, because it looked like procuring Favour at the Aggravation of their Crimes; therefore upon Imagination or Report, that Captain Mackra was fitting out against them, with the Company’s Force, he was soon abdicated or pulled out of his Government and marooned on the island of Mauritius….

  “Angria is a famous Indian Pyrate, of considerable Strength and Territories, that gives continual Disturbance to the European (and especially the English) Trade: His chief Hold is Callaba, not many leagues from Bombay, and has one Island in sight of that Port, whereby he gains frequent Opportunities of annoying the Company. It would not be so insuperable a Difficulty to suppress him, if the Shallowness of the Water did not prevent Ships of War from coming nigh; and a better Art he has, of bribing the Mogul’s Ministers for Protection, when he finds an Enemy too powerful….”

  Captain Charles Johnson, Chapter V of

  A General History of the Pyrates (1724)

  “J’ai lu monsieur Leuret, le sage de Bicêtre

  “Et j’ignore pas qu’un poète est un fou.”

  [I’ve read Monsieur Leuret, the sage of Bicêtre

  And I’m not unaware that all poets are mad.]

  Victor Hugo La Légende des siècles, deuxième série (1877)

  “Ph’nglui mglw’nath Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”

  [In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming]

  Reported phonetic version of the chant of

  Cthulhu-“worshippers”, as reproduced in H. P. Lovecraft,

  “The Call of Cthulhu” (1928)

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE CRYPTOGRAM

  There was a period of time, between the Autumn of 1846 and the revolution of 1848, when my regular meetings with Auguste Dupin—which almost invariably took place in my house, a far more comfortable and readily-accessible location than his apartment—were so frequently complicated by the supplementation of a third party that I almost began thinking of us as a threesome rather than a pair. I could not help borrowing an image from a recent popular feuilleton by referring to us, strictly in the privacy of my own mind, as “the three musketeers”—although I ought to stress that we were by no means violent individuals.

  The third party in question could not always be with us, for he was in great demand as a physician, while we were supposedly men of leisure—though certainly no idlers—but for a while, he was present nearly as often as he was absent at our conversational evenings. The man in question was the mesmerist Pierre Chapelain, who had become a regular visitor to my house in late August and early September 1846, when I had suffered a bad bout of heatstroke.

  The interval in question was a time of conspicuous rivalries, of which the long battle fought for the public’s attention by the clamorous feuilletonists Monsieur Dumas and Monsieur Sue seemed an apt symbol. Since the man who now styled himself the Baron Du Potet de Sennevoy seemed to have thrown in his lot with the self-styled Comte de Saint-Germain and Jana Valdemar to form an allegedly-unholy trinity at the heart of the Harmonic Philosophical Society of Paris, it seemed only appropriate—to me, at least—that his chief rival as a contemporary mesmerist, Chapelain, should have formed a complementary alliance with Dupin and myself, whom Fate had cast as scholars of a more skeptical and less personally-ambitious kind.

  The tacit rivalry between Du Potet and Chapelain was a recomplication of the long-standing dispute between the two principal schools of mesme
ric theory, the spiritualists and the physiologists. That distinction had become somewhat obsolete as conceptual boundaries had shifted; no one seemed certain any longer as to what such terms as “spirit” and “soul” ought to imply, and notions of the relationship between the human mind and body had shifted considerably since René Descartes had drawn such a clear-cut distinction. Du Potet had apparently started out as a physiologist, convinced that the phenomena of “animal magnetism” were physical in nature and subject to analysis by positivist scientific methods, but now appeared to be a convert not merely to the spiritualist conviction that the mind, or soul, had an independent existence of its own but to the thesis that ancient magic and modern mesmerism were essentially the same thing, essentially ungraspable by positivist thought and action but capable, if mastered, of enormous power. Chapelain had always a much more pragmatic approach, less interested in theory than in the workability and utility of mesmeric practices in the diagnosis and treatment of illness. He remained a conscientious agnostic on such questions as whether various forms of “hallucination” were merely the mental side-effects of bodily occurrences, or whether there really were “diseases of the mind” that not only lacked physical causes but might generate physical side-effects, as the newly-fashionable jargon put it, “psychosomatically.”

  I mention that question in particular because it was the one that had been exercising Dupin and myself before the mesmerist’s late arrival, on the evening on which all three of us became collectively involved in what turned out to be the most bizarre of all our “adventures”: occasions when Dupin and I were forced by circumstance to desert mere philosophical discussion for actual confrontation with what I continued, stubbornly, to regard as “the supernatural.” Dupin was, of course, equally stubborn in maintaining that there could be no such thing: that everything that happened, however out of the ordinary it might seem to timid human experience, must be regarded as natural, and must be fitted, somehow, into the coherent order of the universe—or, at he preferred to put it, “the plenum.”

  The fact that we had been discussing hallucination that day came to seem anticipatory when Chapelain finally arrived in my smoking-room, in a state of apparent exhaustion and evident exasperation. He had spent a highly stressful day at Bicêtre, where he was often summoned to consultations by the director, François Leuret. He had come directly from the asylum, without having gone home to bathe and change his clothes, so he still retained something of the reek of the place, which could not be covered up by any kind of eau-de-cologne or disinfectant fluid. Chapelain apologized for the slight offensive odor, and expressed the hope that he was not similarly tainted with an imperceptible but far more dangerous “miasma of madness.”

  Even though it was late October, and the night air was taking on a distinct chill, I opened a window—although, to be perfectly honest, the smoke from our well-exercised tobacco-pipes and the crackling log fire, imperfectly drawn into the sullen Parisian air by my chimney, not only drowned out Chapelain’s faint indecency with its sap-sweet and carbon-sour mélange but provided even more incentive to improve the circulation. The faint whiff of Bicêtre was a minor player in the olfactory cacophony.

  Bicêtre had once been a hell-hole in which incarcerated madmen—and madwomen—were kept in appalling conditions, direly abused and routinely exhibited to tourists who went to mock them and marvel at their afflictions. That had been in pre-Revolutionary days, however (the Revolution of 1789, that is), and ever since Philippe Pinel had taken over the institution in 1793, attempts had been made to introduce a more humane regime. Leuret had taken over where Pinel had left off, and although he still used cold showers as a punitive measure to control unruly inmates, the main thrust of the institution was now to care for its inmates and, where possible, to improve the state of their health. Under Leuret’s supervision, there were now educational classes, music and dancing at Bicêtre, and physicians like Chapelain made regular visits to attempt diagnosis and treatment of cases that seemed tractable, or at least capable of some amelioration. The results of these good intentions would doubtless have been much better had the institution not been so direly overcrowded, but there was, alas, no shortage of demand for places in the various asylums of Paris.

  I was not surprised by Chapelain’s distressed appearance, for I knew how seriously he took his work. People who regard mesmerists as mere charlatans may suppose that there is no real labor involved in entrancing patients, interrogating them in a somniloquistic state as to the causes of their ailments, and attempting to exert the power of suggestion upon those ailments, but I had seen Chapelain at work, and I knew that it not only involved exhausting effort but was frequently harrowing. It sometimes seemed to me that when he succeeded in relieving the pain and distress of his patients, he did so by accepting that burden into himself, and that when he went to Bicêtre, Charenton or the Saltpêtrière he sometimes placed himself in real danger of being infected by the tide of madness that surged through the worst wards of those establishments: the wards where patients doomed to die were stored while they awaited the arrival of the reaper. It was not hard to deduce that Chapelain had spent time in some such ward that day.

  I hastened to pour him a stiff glass of brandy as he slumped into what was now recognized as “his” armchair, and I instructed my cook to make him an omelette. Although Dupin has insisted that I sent back the cook and valet that the Comte de Saint-German had “lent” me following my bout of illness, I had grown so used to the care they had lavished upon me while I was still incapable of caring for myself that I had immediately hired replacements: a married couple, Breton in origin, named Bihan. Dupin could not help but approve of them because Madame Bihan was a cousin of his concierge, Madame Lacuzon—an old gorgon who had become legendary in Paris for her ability to force unwelcome callers into hectic retreat by the power of her stare alone.

  “I take it that your treatments did not go well today, my friend,” I said to him, when he had eaten the omelette and progressed to his second glass of brandy.

  “That is a matter of opinion, alas,” he replied, with a sigh, wriggling in order to mold the cushions of the armchair to his relaxed body.

  “Have you had another argument with Monsieur Leuret?” Dupin asked, trying to feign sympathy.

  “Yes, I have,” the mesmerist confirmed, “although I really don’t know why, given that the woman is dying, and Leuret knows as well as I do that we can do nothing for her except try to make her comfortable.”

  “Which is doubtless very difficult,” I put in, having no need to feign my own sympathy.

  “Not in this particular instance—provided that my approach to the problem is licensed. Alas, Leuret disapproves of my endeavor on principle, and is insistent that I am proceeding in the wrong direction.”

  “Please explain,” said Dupin, who did not approve of beating around bushes.

  “The patient is dying of syphilis. She might have a fortnight to live, a month at the very most, and laudanum is limited in its power to dull her pain, although I have prescribed a regular dose in order to obtain what advantage can be had. She is, however, unusually amenable to entrancement. Indeed, I am half-convinced that she was already in a trance of some sort before I saw her for the first time, a week ago. I had no difficulty in entrancing her a little more deeply—upon which, without any prompting, she lost herself spontaneously in a pleasant dream of her own manufacture: a childish fantasy compounded from fragments of folklore and romance. I have encountered such fantasies before, especially in patients who have previously been mesmerized, as this one clearly has. I could have tried to go even deeper, to attempt to discover what lay behind the fantasy, but that seemed pointless to me. Given that the dream seemed to comfort her, and relieve her distress to some degree, I thought the best thing to do was to let her enjoy it—and so I decided not to bring her out of the trance. Leuret objected at the time, but not strenuously. When I went back today, however….”

  We already knew, by courtesy of past convers
ations, that Leuret believed that his primary duty was to attempt to cure madness. He was endeavoring to build a taxonomy of madness, in terms of various categories of hallucinatory obsession, and had become increasingly insistent in the conviction that the only responsible curative strategy was to make every effort to dispel hallucinations and bring his patients “down to earth” or “back to reality.” I could understand, therefore, why he might have a principled objection to Chapelain’s encouragement of a delusion—although I could also understand Chapelain’s readiness to do that, if it might serve to relieve the distress of a woman who was bound to die.

  “Why have Leuret’s objections become stronger?” Dupin asked, when Chapelain’s momentary abandonment of his account seemed likely to drag on indefinitely as he savored his brandy and took a long draught on his pipe.

  “Primarily, because he believes that the woman’s fantasy is upsetting some of the other patients. It seemed harmlessly pleasant to me, but certain kinds of people are apt to find hints of diabolism in everything, and it does not take much to win women of unprepossessing appearance a reputation for witchcraft—as you know very well, Monsieur Dupin, given what is said about your concierge by people whom she turns away. You might expect women vulnerable to such accusations themselves to be more sympathetic, but…well, Bicêtre being what it is….

  “The specific problem, according to Leuret, is that the fantasy has had a strange psychosomatic effect, in bringing out a patch of inflammation on her skin. Given that she’s syphilitic, that isn’t unduly surprising, and Leuret’s interpretation is that the design is an amateurish tattoo that had faded, but has now been caused to stand out again by the progress of the disease. The thing is not very big, and it’s situated on her back, between her shoulder-blades, so there’s no reason why any of the other patients should ever have seen it if the orderlies hadn’t drawn attention to it, but…at any rate, some other madwoman has identified it as a ‘Devil’s mark,’ and that has caused whispers.

  “Apparently, there have been nightmares, demonic sightings…but this is a death-watch ward at Bicêtre, for God’s sake. When has it ever been free of nightmares and demonic sightings? For once, however, Leuret has found a scapegoat, and it is me. By leaving the poor woman to enjoy her comforting hallucination, I have apparently made the atmosphere in the ward even more infectious than it was before—and when I refused to bring her out of her kindly entrancement today, Leuret become quite angry. I stuck to my refusal, though. I will not bring a patient back to agony, to face death in the cold light of reality, while she has a mental refuge in which to insulate herself from that horror. It is her refuge, not mine—I have not supplied any of its imagery. Until she does die, though, I expect it will be a bone of contention between Leuret and myself, which might make him far more reluctant to consult me in future, in spite of his dire need of all the help he can get in making his reforms work.”