The Cthulhu Encryption Read online

  Was it a point in time, though? Was time any longer possessed of moments?

  The previous night, I seemed to have lost an hour or so, somewhere between midnight and two, when I finally got around to feeling and noting time again. This time, I thought, I might lose days, or years, or an entire eternity. Indeed, I had the bizarre sensation of whirling through the entire cycle of time, to an end that was identical to the beginning, and back again, while there was nothing at the focal point of my thinking mind but that taste, that feel….

  And then, if time was any longer possessed of a then, the febrile modulated whistling turned into a scream of agony.

  I thought that it was mine. I thought that it was my death-agony—but it was not.

  The shoggoths screamed, and the reason that the shoggoths screamed was that the twisted space-time was suddenly full, of a sound that was not the fabric of the worm-within-the-squid but the fabric of something even more powerful, even more predatory. I cannot say what sort of shape it might have had, had my brain been able to translate it into organically-understandable imagery, but I can say that it was organized mathematically and phonetically into forty-nine syllables, which were somehow arranged, in that convoluted space, into seven sets of seven, spoken simultaneously but in the correct order.

  And the sound ripped the shoggoths apart.

  Whether the shoggoths were actually destroyed, or were merely re-entombed in some mysterious encrypted space, I do not know—but I do know that I was suddenly free.

  I collapsed, of course, falling off my slender misericord and instinctively coiling myself into a fetal position. Real time passed, in not insubstantial quantity. Five minutes, at least, must have elapsed before the echoes of unearthly sight and hearing, smell and touch and taste, finally consented to die.

  Then I got up, slowly. Chapelain got to his feet at the same time. Dupin was already standing, looking with frank astonishment at Ysolde Leonys.

  She was still recognizable—just. The syphilitic sores were no longer visible about her lips. Her skin was clear. Her complexion was no longer sallow. Her hair was raven-black, her eyes bright blue. She might have been thirty, for her beauty seemed maturely majestic rather than youthfully fresh, but surely no older. She was recognizable, but she was not the same disease-ridden individual that we had taken from Bicêtre. She was healthy. She was holding both her arms clasped hard to her breast. I could still make out the wooden medallion between her fingers, but they were no longer cupped around it; instead it was pressed to her flesh, with the encryption facing inwards.

  I was unable speak as yet, and I suspect that Dupin was equally incapable, but Chapelain made the effort, because he had an urgent command to impart.

  “Whatever you do,” he whispered, hoarsely, “don’t wake her. If she comes out of the trance now, the shock will surely kill her.”

  When Dupin finally recovered his voice, it was to ask the mesmerist, in an absurdly earnest whisper: “Have you ever seen this phenomenon before?”

  “Only the faintest echo of it,” Chapelain replied. “Mesmeric metamorphosis is a well-documented phenomenon—entranced individuals sometimes seem to take on new personalities, with new appearances to suit the alteration, and the most common shift is to a younger self, with an apparent rejuvenation of appearance, but there is nothing on record as extreme as this. She seems to have cast off her disease entirely.”

  “That’s an illusion—mere glamor,” Dupin muttered, “and there are precedents a-plenty in the lore of legend, if not in the records of mesmerism. Are you sure that she is still deeply entranced?”

  “Absolutely certain,” Chapelain said.

  “And how long will the phenomenon last?”

  “I don’t know,” Chapelain confessed. “There are reports of metamorphoses lasting several days…but they were far more trivial than this one. These are uncharted waters.”

  Ysolde Leonys’ eyes had been open throughout this exchange, but she had not seemed to be able to see anything within the room. Now, though, she turned her head—not, as might be expected, to Dupin, but to me. “Would you fetch me a mirror, Tom?” she asked, politely.

  Mechanically, almost as if I were a marionette on strings, I went to my dressing-room to fetch my shaving-mirror.

  When I gave it to her, she studied her reflection with evident interest. “Is this who I am?” she asked, pensively—and added, without waiting for an answer: “Is this who I might have been?”

  Then she laid the mirror down and turned to Dupin. “We must go,” she said. “I do not know how much time we have, but certainly little enough that we must race against the clock.”

  “Go where?” Dupin asked.

  “The Underworld,” she said. “He might well try to imprison us when we get there, and all the advantages will be his, for he will be in his own lair, but we must go nevertheless. This needs to be settled, now, for the shoggoths will return again, and I doubt that I can hold them at bay on my own. We will be more vulnerable still in the Underworld, but that, at least, is ground on which we might resist, and ground on which we might be able to summon help. If we stay here, they will destroy us…or worse. I’m sorry that you have become involved in this, for it might have been wiser to let them take me from Bicêtre…or to let Oberon take me back directly, if he would consent to do so. Now, though, you’re committed. There is no longer any safety in the world you know.”

  But it was a hallucination, I reminded myself, yet again. It was not real. It did not matter, though; real or illusory, the shoggoths would be deadly, if we no longer had the means to keep them at bay next time they came.

  “The Underworld in Brittany?” Dupin queried, naively—but then, suddenly, he seemed to get a grip on himself, and added: “Yes, of course.” He turned to me, suddenly self-composed. “Send Bihan to the Messageries to reserve five seats in this afternoon’s diligence to Rennes,” he instructed. “If that is not possible, get whatever seats he can on whatever coach is departing in the right direction, within the hour if possible.” I did not have time to ask why five before the answer came, as he continued: “Send Madame Bihan to my house, and instruct Madame Lacuzon to come immediately. Find clothing and a cloak for Mademoiselle Leonys, then pack your bags with more spare clothing, and some food. Then summon a fiacre.”

  “You can’t mean to race off to Brittany at a moment’s notice,” Chapelin objected. “I can’t possibly….”

  “Stay if you must, Chapelain,” was Dupin’s brutal reply, which I overheard as I was already hastening along the corridor to the stair-head, “but if you ever hope to clap eyes on what’s left of Olivier Levasseur’s treasure….”

  Dupin knew how to frame a convincing argument. When the fiacre set off for the Messageries, less than an hour later, there were five of us aboard. Perhaps we were the strangest crew that ever undertook such a journey, thanks to the supplementary presence of the witch and the magically-awakened but rather ill-dressed beauty, but I could not help thinking that Dupin, Chapelain and I were the three musketeers, finally about to play our allotted roles in an authentic melodrama. This time, I had put my revolver in my pocket.

  I could not help thinking, though, as I tried to slow my heartbeat and relax while the fiacre trotted across the Île de la Cité, that I had now seen the monsters that were pursing us in possessed-human guise, and in shoggoth guise. Next time, I wondered, will I have to face the dragon directly? And if I do, can I possibly survive, no matter what enchanted amulets we have to hand, or magicians to pronounce their ugly incantations?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  OVERLAPPING NARRATIVES

  There was a diligence leaving for Rennes that afternoon, with an overnight stop in Alençon. Unfortunately, there had only been three seats left in the cabin, so two us had perforce to travel on the impériale. Fortunately, the cold weather was not yet so intense that we were in danger of freezing to death once the sun set. Dupin insisted that Madame Lacuzon should sit inside to guard the entranced woman—who was very definitely
a somnambulist now rather than a somniloquist—and that Chapelain must sit with them too, in case of further developments in her condition. What the other passengers might have thought of that trio, I did not know or care; I was on the top of the coach with Dupin, sitting amid the luggage like two peasants going home from market, and begrudged them all their seats inside. Fortunately, there were no actual peasants going home from market to share our discomfort.

  While waiting for the departure I had tried to bring my journal up to date, but it was impossible to write once the coach set off. Dupin had been studying his cryptograms, but even reading was difficult with the coach lurching on the muddy road, and he was afraid that the wind might snatch the papers from his hand, so he put them away again. By that time, however, they were probably so firmly engraved in his memory that he could continue their contemplation even in the absence of the models. His conversation seemed a trifle distracted, as if some partitioned part of his mind were far away, displaced in a different dimension where the inspiration of mediation could be given freer play.

  “What do you expect to find when we get to Brittany?” I asked Dupin, once we were on the road and there was time to relax, at least to the extent that one can on the roof of a diligence.

  “We need to get there first,” he reminded me. “We have no idea how long Mademoiselle Leonys can hold herself together, and I am inclined to take Chapelain’s word for it that reversion to her former state might be very rapidly followed by her death.”

  “But if she can survive long enough to do it,” I said, “you believe she can guide us to this Underworld where she was held prisoner as a child, while mesmerized into believing that she was a fairy queen?”

  “We shall see,” was as far as he was prepared to commit himself.

  “I am understanding the story that she told in the same way as you, I assume?” I said. “There are two overlapping narratives there, one of which can only be read between the lines of the fantasy. She really was brought from India, and she really was kept underground, if not for a year and a day then for some similar period. There she was compelled to take part in some elaborate charade, persuaded actually to believe that she was queen of a magical court, surrounded by characters from legend and romance, while she was actually…well, let us say that, if I’m interpreting her tale correctly, she began her career as a whore long before she reached Paris, without knowing what she was doing, poor child.”

  “That does seem to be a plausible interpretation,” Dupin agreed, although his tone was dubious. It was the pedant in him that came to the fore, though, rather than the doubter. “There were not two overlapping narratives, however—there were three, of which the remotest of the three is the most puzzling of all.”

  “Cthulhu,” I said, stumbling yet again over the improbable pronunciation.

  “Cthulhu,” he agreed.

  “Personally,” I said, “I can’t see where the pirates fit in, let alone the encrypted monster from the dawn of time. The Oberon charade I can now comprehend, after a fashion, but not the constant refrain of ‘Jack Taylor was a bad man.’ I can see why Oberon Breisz might have felt obliged to provide his innocent captive with a revised account of an Indian childhood that she could hardly remember, and why he might have been tempted to persuade her that time had gone awry while she was in fairyland, but why drag in the pirates?”

  “I don’t know,” Dupin said, frankly. Being the man he was, however, he could not help adding: “But there are one or two hypotheses I could frame, if I were prepared to risk being fanciful, and being led up the garden path.”

  “Go on,” I said.

  “Do you remember the other nicknames that Oberon attributed himself, for Ysolde’s benefit?”

  “The Ancient Mariner,” I said. “Borrowed from the Coleridge poem, no doubt. Captain Nemesis.”

  “And who might those nicknames fit—as well as the continual assertion that John Taylor was a bad man?”

  “The other pirate,” I said, solving the puzzle almost instantaneously. “The one Taylor usurped and marooned—the one who must have been extremely annoyed when Levasseur and Taylor captured the fabulous prize that, in his eyes, should have been his. Edward….”

  Momentarily, I could not quite bring the name to mind.

  “England,” Dupin supplied, “although that too was a pseudonym, of course.”

  “But Oberon Breisz cannot be Edward England,” I said, “any more than Ysolde can really be the daughter of John Taylor the pirate, rather than some descendant namesake.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Dupin, although he seemed to mean the perhaps literally rather than as a polite denial. “But even if we are dealing with descendants, the tradition of vendetta is not purely Italian. It is not unknown for quests for vengeance to be extrapolated to the fourth or fifth generation, especially when there is money at stake.”

  “You think that what Oberon Breisz did to Ysolde was a theatrical kind of revenge, visited by a descendant of Edward England on a descendant of John Taylor? In the great tradition of the Boulevard du Temple, they would have to be the only surviving descendants, and the treasure must have been stolen from the hapless child by the wicked villain.”

  “That is one possible construction that might be put on the superficial events,” Dupin conceded.

  “What’s the other?” I demanded.

  “Possibilities are always endless, my friend, especially in such phantasmagorical territory as this. If Saint-German is correct about Oberon Breisz being a good magician, and something of a clown, perhaps he really might be Edward England, in the flesh.”

  “I beg leave to doubt that,” I said.

  “And rightly so, my friend—but there were other items in Ysolde’s replies to Chapelain’s interrogation that recalled Captain Johnson’s chapter on Edward England, and I suspect that we might only have glimpsed a corner of the pirate narrative thus far.”

  “What items?” I asked

  “Ysolde named her birthplace as Callaba, and said that John Taylor sailed for the South Seas to seek protection from Angria, as well as a ghost. Callaba was Angria’s fortress, not far from Bombay. Johnson calls Angria a pirate, but he was much more powerful than a mere robber. He was certainly a relentless predator of ships, though, and a serious thorn in the side of the British East India Company until he made common cause with them, at least for a while, against their rivals. It was partly on the Company’s behalf, I suspect, that he went to war with the Viceroy of Goa, the Conde de Ericeira.”

  “The Viceroy whose treasure was plundered from the Portuguese galleon.”

  “The same. When I talked before about the difficulties that the pirates must have had in capitalizing on their good fortune, I had it vaguely in mind that Taylor might have tried to form an alliance with the East India Company himself, but it seems more likely now that he actually took his share of the treasure to Callaba and made common cause with Angria—a common cause that eventually went sour. Perhaps that was only to be expected, given Angria’s reputation…but there might have been another reason. We know that Taylor got rid of England while they were both associated with Levasseur, but we do not know how relations stood between England and Levasseur…or between England and Angria. If England really did escape, having been marooned by Taylor, and really was grimly intent on seeing revenge, he might have sought out Levasseur, or Angria, in the hope or expectation of remaking an old alliance.”

  “Which is all very interesting, from a purely antiquarian viewpoint,” I said, “but does not help at all to explain how England might still be alive and calling himself Oberon Breizsz. That remains absurd. No man can live for more than a hundred and fifty years.”

  “Can he not? Personally, I feel compelled to maintain an open mind. After all, if our Comte de Saint-Germain really is the eighteenth-century Comte de Saint-Germain, as he now seems perfectly convinced that he is, it would become unlikely that there were not others in similar situations.”

  “I thought that Saint-Germain believe
d himself to be some kind of reincarnation of his notorious namesake, rather than an immortal continuation of the same physical existence?” I said, with a hint of contempt.

  “I doubt that Saint-Germain knows exactly what he believes,” said Dupin. “Given that he does believe it, though, and that he recognizes Oberon Breisz as a peer….”

  “But you don’t believe in immortality or reincarnation,” I said, “Do you?”

  “You know perfectly well that I try to avoid belief and keep an open mind,” was his inevitable reply. But he added: “Besides, those are not the only possibilities.”

  “No,” I conceded, sarcastically, “possibilities are always endless. What’s the third, then, in order of approximate likelihood?”

  “That knots are being tied, or bridges built, in time. That the present is somehow being connected to the past, so that the narratives really do overlap.”

  Having seen, felt and tasted a shoggoth in the margins of space and time, that did not seem at all implausible, for the moment. “And that’s how Cthulhu fits in,” I said.

  “Perhaps so,” said Dupin, “given that it definitely fits in somehow.”

  “Those things have now attacked me twice,” I said, “and the fact that their presence, strictly speaking, was no more than hallucinatory did not mean that they could not hurt of destroy me. Why? Were they trying to take possession of the amulet on both occasions?”

  “Probably,” Dupin opined. “It seems to attract them as well as having the power to repel them—but if the medallion really has been safe in the Harmonic Society’s vaults since the Society’s foundation, it must have been under some sort of protection there. It is only since Saint-Germain took it out and the symbols inscribed in Mademoiselle Leonys’ flesh became visible that the star-spawn have become active…or become active again. She says that Angria gave her protection because he knew that she would become vulnerable when he made her useful…I must instruct Chapelain to ask her what she meant by useful.”