The Cthulhu Encryption Read online

  The master of the lodging-house assured us that we would have no trouble, provided that we stuck to the road, which was clearly marked and still in reasonably good condition in spite of the seasonal mud. Besides, the optimistic fellow assured us, the sun still climbed high enough in the sky in October to dispel mist of this sort by noon at the latest. Not until December would entire days pass without the fog clearing, so that the korrigans would have free rein upon the heath. We would reach Loudéac with no difficulty before sunset, he assured us.

  Which as all very well, except that—so far as I knew—we were not going to Loudéac. We had no clue as to exactly where Ysolde Leonys might be leading us, but wherever it was, it was unlikely to be on the Rennes-Loudéac road. If she expected to arrive there before noon, she would presumably take us away from the main road very soon, on to some ill-trodden bridle-path. Would the carriage, light as it was, be able to cope with the final phase of the journey, I wondered—and what would we do with it if it could not?

  That was probably a matter of little relevance to Mademoiselle Leonys, and not a question to which Auguste Dupin would deign to pay attention, but I was the person who had hired the carriage and horses, and I was the man who would be accountable if we could not return them safely. I did not suppose that a relatively bleak stretch of road leading into the Breton heartland would be replete with highwaymen, but there are brigands everywhere; even heathland has its hamlets, its cultivated fields, its mills and cider-presses…and wherever there are peasants there are opportunistic horse-thieves.

  Nevertheless, we set off. I took what reassurance I could from the fact that I could ride close enough to Dupin not to lose sight of him, and that he could ride close enough to the carriage not to lose sight of its rear wheels. I also took some comfort from the fact that I still had my revolver in my coat pocket, tucked behind my journal, with five bullets loaded.

  I do not know how long we were on the road before leaving it. By the time a seasoned traveler is on the third day of a journey, his mind is easily dulled, so that the passage of time loses all urgency and all measurement—all the more so when he is in an underpopulated region where the traffic is thin and one cannot even hear the occasional clanging of cracked church bells ineptly attempting to sound the hours.

  The traffic was exceedingly thin. I cannot swear to the number of pedestrians we passed, for a few might have slipped by unnoticed in the mist, but I know that we did not encounter a single laden cart, let alone a horseman or another carriage. Perhaps that was not unusual, the last of the harvest having been brought in and redistributed some while before, but to someone accustomed to the relentless crowds of Paris, it seemed positively eerie.

  The road was not straight, because the heathland was far from flat; it wound around in shallow curves and I became so used to the meandering course that I would not even have noticed when we left the road had it not been for the noticeable change underfoot, of which my mount was certainly conscious and did not entirely approve. At the time, I was astride the largest of our animals, which had broad hooves and heavy shoes, and it did not appreciate the more glutinous mud.

  Fortunately, the worst of the mud lasted less than a mile, for we soon began climbing a slope. That did not suggest to me that we were getting closer to any kind of underworld, but it did offer the hope that we might climb out of the mist and be able to see our way again. That optimism lent a slight alleviation to the dullness of my patience…but again, tedium soon numbed it.

  We paused twice to change the horses round, but I did not even bother to take my watch out and check the time. It did not matter what the instrument said—which was, in any case, still adjusted to Paris time and not to local time. All I knew, and all I needed to know, was that we were somewhere between where we had been and where we were going, and that—barring accidents—we would eventually arrive…hopefully before the invisible sun reached its incalculable zenith.

  And we did arrive, after a fashion.

  The path we were following petered out, although the carriage rolled on for a further hundred paces or so. In the meantime, I was able to glimpse two huge slabs of stone to either side of our course, and knew that we were among a cluster of megaliths. I was not surprised when the carriage stopped thereafter.

  Dupin dismounted; so did I. The mist was clearing, finally. As the passengers in the carriage got down, and we all gathered together, I perceived, vaguely, that there was an entire circle of standing stones, and that we were in the center of the formation. There was, I knew, a great abundance of such monuments scattered throughout Brittany. No one knows why they were constructed. In many of them, fearful of pagan echoes, Christian latecomers had raised crosses or established saintly shrines—but there was no sign of anything of that sort here, so far as the silver mist permitted me to see.

  I thought at first that we were pausing yet again to rest and water the horses, and to take some food from our luggage, but as soon as I looked at Ysolde Leonys at close range, I knew that our situation had changed. Her situation had changed, and ours was entirely dependent on hers.

  Chapelain had told us that if she woke up from her somnambulistic state her metamorphosis would melt away and she would likely fall down dead. I did not doubt that he had been correct, in Paris; but we were not in Paris any longer. We were now in a place where she was able to awake, not as her direly mortal, pox-ridden self—her true self, as I stubbornly persisted in thinking of it—but in her present one. In a sense, she had now completed her metamorphosis, which was not, after all, merely from almost-hag to almost-beauty, but from human to…what?

  Fairy? Enchantress? Ghost?

  She was still solid, though, and just as ill-dressed as before.

  It was to Chapelain that she addressed herself first.

  “Thank you, Doctor,” she said. “In another age, or another world, you would have been a great magician…but I think you can be well content with your work as a physician. I could never have come home without your help.”

  Then she turned to Dupin. “Thank you, Monsieur Dupin,” she added. “Your help was as valuable as Dr. Chapelain’s, if not more so—and you recovered my medallion for me.”

  I felt a twinge of envy at that, for I thought that I was entitled to the lion’s share of any credit not due to Saint-Germain, but I made no protest.

  “Am I not Tristan de Léonais any longer, then?” Dupin asked Ysolde, in a perfectly level tone that refused all astonishment.

  “I fear that I was lost, for a while, in an old dream,” she said. “I sought comfort there, because I had obtained comfort there before…before things went awry. I have been mad lately, and by no means myself—but I’m home now, thanks to the four of you. I don’t know how Oberon will receive me, but if he is disposed to be generous, there is a chance that I might live for some time yet. Thank you all.”

  I looked around, at the megaliths half-hidden in the magical mist, and could not imagine anything further from “home”. The bare ground within the stone circle seemed very solid, and I could not imagine that any of the massive blocks of stone could be moved without tremendous effort and very sturdy levers.

  “Where, then, is the entrance to the Underworld?” I asked. “Where is Oberon Breisz’s lair?”

  “Why, this is the Underworld,” she said, “or at least its threshold. Oberon’s house is on the hill. We shall have to walk from here, but it is not far.”

  This time, I was prepared to believe that it really wasn’t far—but that did not make the prospect of the approach any less intimidating.

  “We seem to have mistaken the sense of the prefix under,” Dupin observed, with scholarly scrupulousness. “The limitations of three-dimensional thought, I suppose.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Have we somehow stepped out of the world, into some other universe, displaced in a dimension other than three we measure with Cartesian co-ordinates?” I knew enough about his theories to pose as something other than a complete novice.

  “No,” he replied
. “We have not gone nearly as far as that, and certainly could not have crossed the barriers that separate material worlds as easily. We are still in Brittany, and if we have been displaced at all, it is by means of some petty trick with time, not the dimensions of space…but we have been encrypted, after a fashion.”

  “Are we dead, then?” I asked, alarmed.

  Ysolde Leonys laughed. “Quite the opposite, my friend. That is not dead which can eternal lie…and here, no matter that it is a lie, one might indeed be eternal, if Oberon will permit it. He will probably send you packing though…you and Chapelain, and the witch. To Monsieur Dupin, on the other hand…you might not know it yet, Monsieur Dupin, but you and he have business to settle. If you cannot remember of your own accord, he will help you.”

  “Remember what?” Dupin asked.

  “You’re in the Underworld now, Monsieur Dupin—you can remember, if you wish. It isn’t always easy, at first….oh, how difficult it was when I was still a child, in Karla! But I remembered, in the end. I forgot again…but dreams are so hard to maintain, are they not, when there are others intend on guiding them?”

  “Can you tell us, now, who you really are?” Dupin asked.

  “Oh, but I told you all of that, when Dr. Chapelain held me in thrall. I’m Ysolde Leonys, daughter of Mark Leonys of Cornwall, alias John Taylor the pirate…although I have other, further memories, just as you have, if only you can reach them. Once, I was another Ysolde, who really was beloved by Tristan. Once, too, I was a demoiselle in Ys…so this really is my home, you see. My roots are here. I could have been a seer even in Karla, but to reach into eternity, I had to come here. Oberon knew that. Angria accepted it. All Indians are fatalists—even kings. Especially kings.”

  “By Oberon,” said Dupin, “you really mean Edward England?”

  “Not at all,” said a new voice—that of a man, certainly no dwarf, who had just emerged from the mist, between two of the standing stones. “By Edward England, Monsieur Dupin, you really mean Oberon…unless, of course, you can remember the name I had when we last met, to which I will answer gladly enough.”

  Dupin turned to face the newcomer, and looked him up and down. “We have never met,” he said, confidently.

  “It was a long time ago,” conceded the man that the Comte de Saint-Germain had identified to me as Oberon Breisz. “I apologize for interrupting you, but I really had grown very impatient, even though I did not complete my return from Paris until yesterday. I had hoped that you might demonstrate more urgency, and more cleverness…but you are here now, and you must come to the house without further delay, where you can wash and change your clothes, while my servants prepare a meal. You’ll have to leave the carriage and horses here—there are steps that only human feet can climb—but they’ll be quite safe. No one dares steal so much as a rabbit or an apple from my land.”

  Dupin was about to ask another question, but Oberon Breisz had already turned away from him, to confront Ysolde Leonys. He made no move to embrace or kiss her, or even to greet her with a polite bow.

  “You shouldn’t have run away, my child,” he said.

  “I know that now,” she replied, “but I was a child, was I not, in spite of my years? I was foolish…and there was something within me that moved me to revolt. If I had only kept the medallion…but even you could not keep my dream unsullied, while you were ambitious to direct it to your own ends.”

  “That’s true,” he admitted. “It wasn’t your fault—not entirely.”

  Personally, I thought that she should have left out the last two words; the fact that he had felt obliged to include them was revealing of his character. He was a vain man, and not a forgiving one, although he knew how to keep a straight face.

  “Can you save me, my king?” she asked. “Can you still make use of me?”

  “I believe so,” Breisz replied. “I’m a magician, after all—more powerful now than the old Mahatma. Besides, you were my queen once…together, we might accomplish anything. Provided that you are obedient….”

  He left it there. Arrogance again—but if he really was a powerful magician, perhaps arrogance was unavoidable, if not forgivable.

  Madame Lacuzon tugged at Dupin’s sleeve very urgently, and he was forced to listen to a whispered speech longer than I had any I had ever seen her utter before. I studied them closely, hoping to pick up the thread of their conversation, and was slightly startled to find Ysolde Leonys suddenly beside me.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said, in a low voice—perhaps addressing Chapelain as well, since he was also close by. “You’re under my protection. You’ll get back to Paris safely, I promise you—even if I have to summon help. I believe that I can do that…if the old man is still able to come.” She dropped her voice even further, and leaned close to my ear, to add: “Oberon doesn’t know everything.”

  I looked at Chapelain, wondering how long he would grant his patient to live now, in his expert opinion. The physician was evidently troubled, but he said nothing, contenting himself with a slight bow by way of response to her promise. He knew as well as the rest of us that we really were standing at some kind of boundary, neither wholly in the world we knew nor wholly in Oberon Breisz’s curiously mislabeled Underworld.

  “Thank you, Madame,” I said, on behalf of both of us.

  Dupin finally looked up again. “Madame Lacuzon will stay here, with the horses,” he said. “The rest of us will be pleased to accept your invitation, Monsieur Breisz.”

  Oberon Breisz bowed to the gorgon. “I’ll have some food and wine sent down to you, Madame,” he said. “I harbor no hard feelings over the fact that you would not let me see Monsieur Dupin in Paris. That was your home after all—and I delivered my invitation regardless.”

  As Oberon Breisz turned away to lead us out to the stone circle and up the hill, I made haste to fall into step with Dupin and whisper to him in m turn. “What should I do?”

  “Be polite,” he murmured. “We have been invited to visit this man’s house—let us do so. Perhaps it is not quite as fully in the word we know as any other dwelling we have ever visited, but I doubt that he intends to hold us prisoner within his crypt. I don’t know what business he thinks he has with me, but I dare say that we can settle it like gentlemen.”

  The way up to the house was steep, and the crude stone steps that wound around the hill were chipped and crumbling, but the mist was clearing now, and I had no fear of missing my footing by virtue of poor sight. There were brambles growing on the hillside—which, was, in truth, more like the face of a cliff, and at one point there was a rickety wooden bridge over a mysterious torrent that had no obvious source, but no more than a quarter of an hour had passed when the house appeared.

  I had been half-expecting a vast Medieval edifice with turrets and battlements, but it was far more compact that that, and if any of it was genuinely old, the building had certainly been renovated to modern standards. Its windows were square and neatly glazed with the aid of sturdy wooden frames. Its roof was tiled and pitched to accommodate mansards to serve as servants’ quarters. The edifice did have rounded corners, but they only gave the illusion of towers; that was an affectation, such as one sees in the more pretentious town-houses in every city. It undoubtedly deserved the title of manor-house, perhaps that of château, but it was no quasi-Medieval fortress or relic thereof. The perron leading up to the front door was in much better condition than the steps leading up the hillside, and the brass fittings on the door were brightly-polished.

  When he reached the perron, Oberon Breisz paused, and so did we. He turned and gestured expansively with his arm, inviting us to look back the way we had come.

  We did. We were above the mist now, but it still filled he valleys between the various hills stretching away to the east and south. There were, however, plenty of ridges and crags looming up above the silver ocean. Many of those peaks, I knew, should have had human dwellings on them: not merely ruins of ancient feudal holds but farmhouses and cottages. There should
have been roads looping over the shallower hills. Somewhere, between my station and the distant horizon, there should have been towns and cities, whose church spires and high flagpoles, at least, ought to be projecting from that silent silver sea.

  There was nothing—except for a few single standing stones, like gorgonized sentinels keeping watch on a deserted land. Much of it was heath, but the entire horizon seemed to be ringed by a vast, illimitable forest.

  “We really have stepped back in time,” I murmured to Dupin.

  “Nothing so extreme,” Oberon Breisz interjected. “Civilization is still there…my powers of encryption don’t go as far as projecting my house back in time, alas…but the view is another matter. To play with light…that kind of magic is mere illusion. Think of it as a kind of picture…a landscape in the wild Italian style.”

  The servant who opened the door when our host rang was not dressed in livery. He seemed little different in age and bearing from my own Bihan, and might even have been a distant relative.

  There was nothing reminiscent of Perrault or Charlemagne in the furniture, either. Some of it was certainly old, but no older than the furniture accumulated in any aristocratic house in the environs of the Faubourg Saint-Germain, and much of it was a good deal plainer. There were armchairs in the drawing-room into which we were initially taken, but no sofas and no rugs; the principal item was a huge Breton dresser laden with crockery. There were no sideboards or bookcases, nor was there very much ornamentation on the walls in the traditional forms of paintings, tapestries or the kinds of panoplies that serve as conventional souvenirs of voyages to India or Africa. There was, however, one item of decoration suspended over the fireplace that was as impressive as it was sinister.