The Cthulhu Encryption Read online

  It was a flag, torn and tattered now, but still bright enough in the whiter design superimposed on a black background. The design depicted a skull and crossbones. It was what modern legend called a “Jolly Roger.” Indeed, I strongly suspected that it was the Jolly Roger: the very one invented by the pirate Edward England.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE PIRATE NARRATIVE CLARIFIED

  It was a large enough house, although we were not given a tour, but merely shown to the rooms where we would be sleeping that night. We had one each. The beds seemed comfortable enough, but the furniture was otherwise sparse and the walls undecorated. Better that, I thought, than to sleep beneath the pirate flag.

  I was provided with a basin of hot water in a small dressing-room annexed to the bedroom, so I took the opportunity to wash myself thoroughly and change into cleaner clothes. Dupin and Chapelain did likewise before we made our way back to the drawing-room into which we had first been introduced.

  When I arrived there, I had the impression that the hollow eye-sockets of the skull painted on the flag were staring at me in a curiously knowing fashion.

  Oberon Breisz offered us each a glass of red wine, which we accepted gladly. Ysolde Leonys came in while the glasses were being handed out, but Breisz did not offer to pour her one. She was still wide awake, but was, I thought, still somehow in thrall. I wondered whether her wakefulness might be illusory—a matter of glamour, like her fresh skin and sleek hair. She had undoubtedly recovered a measure of self-consciousness, and probably thought herself free, but I had a suspicion that, as soon as she had stepped into this encrypted space, she had also stepped back into Oberon Breiz’s possession. He had said that he wanted her back, having somehow lost her more than a decade before, but now that he had her, he almost seemed to have lost interest in her. At the very least, he was taking her future compliance with his plans for granted.

  Among other things, I thought, that confidence in her total possession probably meant that her promise of protection was worthless. Here and now, we were all at Oberon’s mercy.

  Fortunately, the renowned bilbiotaph did not seem to have the slightest shred of animosity toward any of us. He was playing the host gladly—which surely implied that he must want something from us. Obviously, he did not want it from me, or from Chapelain. But what was it that he wanted from Dupin—badly enough, perhaps, to have planned and mounted this entire charade?

  “You must have a great many questions to ask, Monsieur Dupin,” said our host, when we were all seated. “I’m sure that Ysolde has done her best to answer the ones you have asked her, but she probably has a great many questions herself, now that she is finally coming round from her long nightmare. That was Angria’s doing, I fear. The British eventually sacked Callaba, as I had known that they would, in spite of any pact made in the past, but he was bound to escape—and they never recovered the Flaming Cross of Goa, as they doubtless hoped to do. With the Buddhists firmly in possession of Karla again, I thought that he would probably head north for the mountains and lose himself there, but the sea had got into his blood too. He did not stay long in Paris in 1830, although it’s possible that he’s come back again, if he’s still alive. It has occurred to me that it might have been his presence that mobilized the shoggoths, although I doubt that they needed his mediation. In any case, it seems more likely to me that he followed poor Jack Taylor’s example, if he’s addled enough to think that he can draw any advantage from R’lyaieh. That kind of madness, mercifully, I’ve always been able to stave off.”

  What kinds, I wondered, can he not stave off? It was a silly question. He was as deeply enmeshed in his own madness as Ysolde Leonys…and his madness, I suspected, extended much further than hers. She was merely a fly caught in his spider-web.

  “Taylor, at least, must be long dead,” Dupin observed.

  “I certainly hope so, although I’ve heard rumor that he’s encrypted too, on a ghost-ship. It’s probably nonsense, as most such rumors are. I was the one entitled to vengeance, but you understand how these things work, Monsieur Dupin.”

  Does he? I wondered.

  “If my crews had only let me make a deal with Captain Mackra while we were fortunate enough to have him in our custody,” the man who had once been Edward England continued, “we’d all have been far better off—but that snake Taylor convinced the men that I was selling them out to John Company for my own selfish profit. If Jack were still alive…well, what a bad man he would be by now! Fortunately, Monsieur Dupin, men of our sort are rare…and those who need to come back, once having died, have a hard road to follow to remembrance. Few accomplish it without help…but I can help you, if you’ll let me.”

  Dupin ignored the bait. “I hope you’ll forgive me, Monsieur Breiz…Mr. England…but I still haven’t quite grasped all the details of the pirate narrative. Would you be prepared to fill in the gaps for me?”

  Breisz shook his head, not in denial but in mock-commiseration. “I do hope you’re not still thinking in terms of finding Levasseur’s legendary treasure,” he said. “I had not suspected you of such vulgarity. There’s still a little of it left in my cofffers, mind…most of the gold is spent, but some of the gems remain. La Buse had to take the cross back to Angria, though, along with a weighty tribute. He should never have imagined that he could get away with keeping a prize that was not really his.”

  “But he and Taylor did capture Nossa Senhora del Cabo, did they not?”

  “They boarded her, it’s true—but they did not cripple her and they certainly did not destroy her escort. They were merely the carrion crows, descending on to the bloody field when the battle was over—and what a battle it must have been! I would have played my part in it had Angria let me, but…well, I was his guest, after all. He rescued me from the island where Jack Taylor left me to die, and there was some justice in his notion that he had the right to command me…and some justice too, in his claim that I was then too precious to be risked in mere pirate enterprises, since I was operating as his go-between with the Company. At any rate, It was Angria’s fleet that found and fell upon the Lady’s guardians, and engaged the in the fiercest conflict the Indian Ocean had ever seen. The Lady escaped, after a fashion, but she would certainly have had to put into port somewhere for repairs. She was dead in the water, ripe for the plucking—but Jack and La Buse should never have imagined, even for a moment, that they’d be allowed to keep their booty.

  “Jack was the more cunning of the two—he went to the British first, knowing, as I did, that John Company would be obliged to root Angria out eventually—but they weren’t yet ready to try, even though his naval capacity had been badly dented, and Mackra still had a powerful grudge against Jack. Instead, Jack had to go to Callaba, simply to avoid being sent home to hang—but he dared not go there until he knew that I had put to sea. Angria would not let me play my part in the battle for the Lady, but he knew that I was the best man to chase and make a deal with La Buse.

  “As things turned out, I had to follow Levasseur all the way to Brittany, and then convince him of the necessity of making his peace with Angria, which wasn’t easy, once he was on home ground and thought himself safe. The mere fact that the French wanted to hang him wasn’t intimidation enough; the Bretons have never considered themselves French, and they make their own assessments of a man’s criminality. In fact, it wasn’t until he had seen shoggoths that the inclination to treachery finally deserted him. Eventually, he agreed to go back, albeit very reluctantly, taking all the manuscripts that Angria wanted but insisting on leaving the gold and gems hidden, for the sake of further leverage—that was in ’25.

  “I went back too, as I had promised—but I went back equipped to make a new deal of my own. Jack Taylor fled to Poona before I arrived, else I’d have killed him. La Buse and I came back to Brittany again in ’27, and Taylor returned to Callaba. Levasseur had no alternative but to take the flaming cross and the greater part of the gold and gems to Angria, but he never made it back here, and I can’t
say that I’m sorry. I suspect that Angria betrayed him to the French, but I don’t know for sure—La Buse wasn’t short of enemies, any more than Jack or I was. Men like us are never short of enemies, are we Monsieur Dupin? I stayed here when La Buse returned for the second time, and didn’t get back to Callaba until ’31. Taylor fled again to escape me. It wasn’t easy persuading Angria to let me return, let alone to bring the girl with me, but the Mahatma hadn’t made much progress with her, so he gave in. I had no choice—I needed her, if I were to make progress in my own endeavors. I broke some of the promises I made to Angria, of course—but we were all pirates then, no matter what we had been before and were ambitious to become again. I knew that the British would smash him eventually, and that I only had to play a waiting game. There’s a price to be paid for immortality, even though it’s a slippery prize at best.”

  Again, Dupin refused to take the bait—but he was pensive now, as if he were trying furiously to work out what Breisz could possibly mean.

  “What possible need could you have had for Taylor’s thirteen-year-old daughter?” I asked our host—although I have to admit that I was risking disobedience of Dupin’s injunction to be polite. “Were you intent on exacting your revenge on her, since her father had fled?”

  Oberon Breisz met my gaze frankly, and laughed. “Do you imagine that I debauched her?” he said. “She was far too precious—and anyway, I’m not the sort of man to hold a child guilty of her father’s crime. He betrayed me; she had not…not then, at any rate. No, I had very different plans for her, far more ambitious than mere rape, and my need had little to do with her being Jack’s daughter—if she was offered as a tribute, that was in response to Angria’s demand, not mine. I’ve been a bad man in my day—as bad as Jack Taylor, some might say—but I’m not a vile man, no matter how history paints me. I’ve cherished that child like a true father, and made a better job of it than Taylor or Angria could ever have done.”

  “But you have used her,” I retorted, unwilling to be fobbed off so easily. “She is in your possession now, is she not?”

  “I have kept her alive,” Breisz retorted in his turn, showing a little intemperance. “Had she not run off with the ghost that Angria sent to worm his way into her dream, she’d have avoided a great deal of pain and suffering. Do you really think that she’d rather be dying in Bicêtre than here with me? Ask her, if you doubt it.”

  I didn’t have to ask; she had already told me the answer. Even if she hadn’t, I would only have had to look at her. Reflexively, I did look at her. She met my eyes, and said: “I’m better now. I’ve been punished enough. I didn’t want to die.” There was a hint of a strangeness in her lovely blue eyes, though, as if she were asking silently for forgiveness, for bringing us here. I was convinced, at least, that she wanted to protect us, even though I wasn’t sure that she could.

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” I said to Oberon Breisz, stubbornly. “Why did you want her, and how have you used her?”

  “I wanted her,” he replied, looking at Dupin rather than at me, “because of what Angria had made her.”

  “What was that?” Dupin asked, this time answering his cue mildly.

  “A skryer.”

  “And what did that involve?” I said, attempting to take back the initiative—but my question overlapped Dupin’s, which was: “And how did Angria do that?”

  Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was Dupin’s question to which Breisz elected to reply directly—although, in fairness, he did eventually clarify both.

  “You have to understand,” he said, “that the British and Portuguese view of Angria as a pirate or petty warlord does him little justice. Indeed, it was precisely because he had begun his career as a common bandit that he conceived ambitions that would never have occurred to any hereditary maharajah. He became determined to master the secrets of Indian magic, and undertook that quest as a serious scholar. You have doubtless heard traveler’s tales about the magic of the fakirs, including their ability to grow fully mature plants from seeds in a mater of minutes, and their ability to climb ropes and vanish—but the most significant of all those abilities, witnessed on numerous occasions by British observers, is that of suspending animation, to the extent that they can be buried alive for months on end.

  “Because they continue to live, their bodily needs are merely slowed down, not halted, so there is a limit to their endurance in that state, but the suspension also slows down the aging process drastically. Fakirs who make frequent use of the ability are able to live for as much as two hundred years—nor is the hundred and fifty years they spend entranced wasted, for it frees their consciousness to undertake explorations in the dream-dimensions. The dreams in question are admittedly slow, but they’re nevertheless enlightening. The most enlightening of all are the ones that are least frequently interrupted—which can be contrived, provided that the individual whose animation is suspended can be fed while still entranced. The magicians working in the more exotic Eastern monasteries place particular value on the hallucinatory explorations experienced by an innocent, unquestioning soul. Rumor has it that there are children concealed in such institutions who have reportedly been in such a state of suspended animation for centuries, directed in their explorations by suggestion and delivering their findings by somniloquism, but rumor always exaggerates. At any rate, that’s what Angria attempted to do with Jack Taylor’s daughter—with Jack’s full, if somewhat reluctant, co-operation.”

  Dupin took a few moments to digest that. For once, however, I was quick on the uptake, immediately seeing the consequence of what had been said in the context of my own question.

  “You mean,” I said, aghast, “that she really is more than a hundred years old—but that she has spent eighty years of that life in a deep trance?”

  “It was only a year and a day, subjectively speaking,” Oberon Breisz told me, coldly. “And it was only in dreams within the dream that she did my specific bidding. She was as pliable as I could have hoped, and built her own fantasy to occupy the primary level of her decelerated consciousness: a confabulation compounded out of stories that she had been told and books she had read. You mustn’t blame me for her fantasies of living as a queen in a legendary court, surrounded by knights and magicians. That was her own doing: a concoction cooked up with a little assistance from tales Jack had told her, when he was in a fatherly mood…and perhaps more than a little from the tales La Buse told her while he and I were in Callaba together in the mid-twenties. He took quite a shine to her, in his own crude way, and Taylor had run for the hills. The poor child only got to see him once in more than two years. Levasseur tried to take his place, after a fashion.

  “In fact, Levasseur even tried to weaken Angria’s control by taking away the medallion that Angria had given her before we set sail for Brittany in ’27, but he had misunderstood its purpose. The amulet was intended to protect her while she was in suspended animation, for that kind of encryption can render a sleeper vulnerable to leakage from R’lyaieh. La Buse was no ready-made scholar magician, any more than Jack Taylor was…but they didn’t have my advantages. I could have taken the amulet back from Levasseur, but there seemed to be no point—Angria could have given her another had he thought it worthwhile, and by the time I took her away from Callaba, I was sure that I could provide protection for both of us without the aid of toys of that sort. I went looking for the medallion after Levasseur was hanged, of course, but I never found it, any more than I could pick up Ysolde’s trail. I went back to Paris periodically, using different pseudonyms, discreetly putting the name about, but it wasn’t until…well, you know the rest.”

  “You must have spend a good deal of time in a trance yourself,” Dupin observed, evidently having taken that inference from Breisz’ reference to periodic returns.

  “Not as much as you might think,” Breisz replied. “I have other ways to preserve myself from aging—but yes, I have spent abundant time in crypts of more than one sort. I’ve carried out my own explorat
ions of that dangerous kind. So should you, Monsieur Dupin, if you want to know who you really are, and to come into your full intellectual inheritance.”

  “I think I have a sound grasp on my identity,” Dupin told him. “Sounder, at any rate, than the Comte de Saint-Germain.”

  “You shouldn’t mock the Comte,” said Breisz. “He has a long way to go yet, but he shows promise. I’m thinking of joining his Society. Cagliostro invited me once before, but I was too preoccupied. Now…perhaps it’s time. It would then be my Society, of course, and the Comte my apprentice. It might be a useful resource, for its library is not uninteresting.”

  “But not as good as yours?” Dupin was quick to say.

  “Perhaps not,” said Breisz, with blatantly false modesty. “Is there some particular text about which you want to inquire.”

  “Do you have John Dee’s copy of the Claves Demonicae?”

  “I have Edward Kelley’s copy of the Claves Demonicae,” was Breisz’s corrective counter to that.

  “And the copy of the Necronomicon that Dee inherited from Roger Bacon?”

  “Yes, I have the Latin version—but not the original Sanskrit text from which the Arabic translation was made. I had to cede that to Angria. What use he has made of it since, I cannot tell.”

  “Do you have…?” Dupin never revealed the third title he had in mind, however, because the old manservant came in just then to announce, with ostentatious formality, that dinner was served.

  According to my watch, it was rather early—but I was ravenously hungry, and did not mind at all. Besides which, what did Paris time have to do with the encrypted time of Oberon Breisz’s lair?

  “When we have eaten, Monsieur Dupin,” said our host, graciously, “I shall be very happy to reintroduce you to those two books, and many more of similar interest. There is a great deal more that might be gleaned from them, by two minds such as ours, working in collaboration again.”