The Cthulhu Encryption Read online

  He chewed his lip, as if screwing up his courage. “In August,” he said, “when Dupin asked me to look after you, it really was a case of heatstroke-induced delirium, was it not? You were not really possessed by some vampiric demon, as Saint-German seemed to believe?”

  “I wish I could be sure,” I told him, not dishonestly.

  He turned his head to look at the wall-clock, which was only a few minutes short of chiming four. “I have to go now,” he said, abruptly. “Apologize to Dupin for me, and tell him that I’ll return as soon as I can—but I have other obligations. I’m willing to entrance the woman for him when I can, and I’ll certainly return this evening, when Leuret comes—if only to hear Dupin’s explanation of his conduct—but for now….”

  “I understand, Doctor,” I assured him, and fetched his coat, hat and stick, assuming that Bihan was probably busy.

  “It won’t have done any good, you know,” he said, as we parted, “to swear Leuret to secrecy. He won’t say a word, of course—but the orderlies on the ward saw and heard everything. Their gossip will have been repeated all over Paris by this time tomorrow…and it’s bound to reach the ears of exactly the people you wouldn’t want to hear it.”

  “I can handle Saint-Germain, if he comes snooping,” I assured him.

  “I have a suspicion that you might have more than the mystics and would-be magicians of the Harmonic Philosophical Society to deal with this time,” was his parting shot.

  I had the same suspicion, but I put a brave face on as I bid him au revoir.

  When I returned to the smoking-room, Dupin was there—without the gorgon, thankfully. I explained Chapelain’s absence. He frowned, but made no complaint.

  “I’m truly sorry about this imposition, my friend,” he said, “but it’s a matter of dire necessity.”

  “So I assumed,” I said. “Would you care to tell me why?”

  “Of course—but can it possibly wait until this evening, when Leuret comes? That will save me unnecessary repetition—and in any case, I want to go up and sit with her in case she wakes up. If she does, before Chapelain returns, I shall try to interrogate her myself…always provided that she wakes into her dream of the magical underworld rather than…well, rather than whatever else is lurking in the depths of her unconscious mind. I fear that the lady has been sorely abused, perhaps long before she became a whore. There’s mention of such things in von Junzt’s Unaussprechlichen Kulten, but so much of that text is based on traveler’s tales that I never believed them. I must find out, if I can, before she dies…and I must take what advantage I can of the fact that she has appointed me her Tristan.”

  “You intend to play this farce to the end, then, and capitalize on the fact that the poor woman has mistaken you for someone else, in the hope that she might let you in on her secrets?”

  “She has not mistaken me for someone else,” Dupin pointed out. “Her Tristan of Léonais is a figment of her dream; she has merely invited me to take a part in her fantasy.”

  That triggered a belated realization. “That’s why your concierge seemed to recognize the name Leonys,” I said. “Like Chapelain, she took it for an anglicized pronunciation of Léonais—and she’s a Breton, like her cousin.”

  “English folklore usually refers to the mythical equivalent of Léonais as Lyonesse,” he said, ever the pedant, “and insists on confusing the forest of that name—which gave its name to the region—with the drowned city of Ys. But the confusion is probably Breton in origin. In parts of Britanny, the forest is more often called Broceliande.”

  Quibbles of that sort were of no interest to me.

  “Do you believe that the inscription on the woman’s back really is the Key of Solomon?” I asked him, point-blank.

  “No,” he said. “It’s far worse than that, alas. It’s the Cthulhu encryption. Her pronunciation of it was missing the final set of symbols, as Bougainville’s version and every other printed version is, but it did not have the abbreviated form of R’laiyeh and one or two of the other syllables differed from the form in which Bougainville recorded them. But this is Paris, not the Pacific wilderness, and Chapelain thinks that the woman was born in India to an English family. How did the inscription get into her flesh, and why was it inscribed there? I need to find out, if I can. Whether she can tell me, or even give me a clue, I don’t know—but I have to try. I must go upstairs now—you’re welcome to come with me, of course.”

  He evidently wanted me to go with him. “Then I will,” I said, assuming that we could continue the conversation upstairs.

  He nodded, as if to thank me. Before we left the room, however, he said: “I’ve warned Monsieur and Madame Bihan already, but I ought to warn you too—there might be danger, if Leuret’s orderlies are slack-mouthed, and anyone takes them seriously. You might want to put a revolver in your pocket…and be careful, if your reflexes get the better of you and you open the door yourself when someone rings.

  “Is Madame Lacuzon still here?” I asked.

  “For a little while longer, if you don’t mind,” Dupin said.

  “I don’t mind, if there’s danger. If the Devil himself comes to call, he’ll surely not want to argue with her.”

  Dupin smiled wryly. “She looks fearsome, but she has a heart of gold,” he said, not very convincingly.

  “I expect it has to be gold,” I said. “The acid in her veins would surely dissolve any vulgar metal.”

  As things turned out, though, we had no opportunity for further conversation. As soon as we opened the door to Dupin’s old room, Ysolde Leonys opened her eyes.

  She looked swiftly around, but did not seem to be in the least astonished to discover that she was not where she had been when she fell unconscious. She lifted the bedclothes briefly to look down at her own body, which was now respectably clad in one of Madame Bihan’s capacious nightshirts.

  “You kept your promise, Tristan,” she said, when she looked back at Dupin. “The angels said you would, but I dared not believe them.” She looked at me then, as if wishing that I was not there, so that she might talk to her imagined lover in private.

  I thought perhaps I ought to go, in order to allow Dupin to continue with his inquiry under optimum conditions, but he gestured to me to be still.

  “I came with a friend,” he said. “I could not have found you otherwise. Do you not recognize him?”

  In reality, she could not and did not recognize me—but she was far from reality jut now, and fantasy is flexible in so many ways.

  “Is it really you, Tom?” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Tom Linn, the Rhymer?”

  “Of course it is,” said Dupin, although I knew that he must be smiling inwardly at the notion that I might be a rhymer. As a young man, I had always relied on Poe to make up for my deficiencies in that arena. I would rather have been Huon of Bordeaux, but I suppose it added an extra item of information to our cabinet of curious facts to know that she was familiar with Scottish ballads as well as Breton folklore and romance.

  The identification seemed to add another drop to her cup of joy. I only hoped that she was not going to ask me to play or sing. My cello-playing days were behind me forever.

  “That was a terrible place you found me in,” she said. “But you came regardless, like Orpheus in search of Eurydice—except that this story has a happier ending, or at least a merciful delay. Will Merlin return too? His spells are not as powerful as they once were, but the herbs are soothing.”

  In the versions of the popular legends with which I was familiar, Merlin had been imprisoned in a tree, Tristan had died and Thomas the Rhymer had returned to his own world only to find that so much time had lapsed during his brief sojourn in fairyland that everyone he had known before was dead. I wasn’t entirely sure that her self-induced hallucination was as pleasant as it seemed, even if one set aside the suggestion that something more sinister was concealed beneath it. Where are you now that we need you, King Arthur? I wondered. I wish you were here, instead of this mysterio
us Oberon—who sounds to me more like Huon’s enigmatic accursed dwarf than Shakespeare’s counterpart to lovely Titania.

  I had to collect myself, and tell myself not to be silly—but the world of legend is so seductive of thought. How could it be otherwise, since that was the purpose for which it was designed?

  Ysolde Leonys’ face clouded over suddenly, and she said: “But I do not deserve your succor, Tristan, for I have been wicked and faithless. My punishment has been just.”

  “No such punishment as yours is just,” Dupin assured her—honestly enough, I felt sure. “We must not waste what time we have in dwelling on such thoughts. Let us summon happier memories. Let us talk about your childhood. You were born in India, were you not?”

  “My happiest times,” she said, “were in the Underworld—with you, Tristan. Ought we not to talk of those?”

  “Later,” he said, a trifle abruptly—and could not being himself to soften the word with any endearment. “You were happy in India, were you not?”

  “Sometimes,” she said. “I went to Poona once, in the hills, when my father was there—but I was never happy in Callaba, or in Karla. Karla was a dark place…darker than our Underworld, my love.”

  I had just enough knowledge of India to know that Karla was a cave-system in which a subterranean temple had been constructed, perhaps to some Hindu god or the Buddha.”

  “What was your surname, Ysolde, before it was changed to Leonys?” Dupin asked.

  She seemed uncomfortable, and I wondered whether Dupin was in danger of doing, without wanting to, exactly what Leuret had tried and failed to do: to bring her back to painful reality. She offered no answer to the question.

  “Have you ever heard of Olivier Levasseur, Ysolde?” Dupin asked.

  “He was a pirate.” She knew more than I did, then—but it was a titbit of information that anyone might have known.

  “Have you ever heard of a pirate named John Taylor,” Dupin persisted.

  Again she looked deeply uncomfortable, and I was sure that she would not answer. Abruptly, however, she said: “Jack Taylor was a bad man.”

  “Was your father a descendant of John Taylor the pirate?” Dupin asked, doggedly.

  She seemed puzzled by that question. “Jack Taylor was a bad man,” she repeated—as if it were a phrase that she had heard someone else say, and which had stuck in her mind for some reason.

  “Is your father still in India?” Dupin continued.

  “He sailed for the South Seas…salt in his blood…darkness in his heart…to raise the Devil…for protection….”

  Her voice was fading; I was sure that she was about to fall unconscious again. So was Dupin, for he consented to change the subject.

  “Our Underworld was brighter than Karla,” he said, tempting a return to kinder fantasy.

  “Oh yes,” she said, smiling—hideously, alas, for the syphilitic sores about her mouth quite spoiled the normal effect. “I was queen there, for a year and a day, and radiant. Even the angels loved me. I should not have run away…but what would have happened to me had I stayed, when the year and a day was over? What would have become of me?”

  I had always thought of Underworlds as gloomy places, but I was not about to protest against her judgment. It was her hallucination, after all.

  “Remind me,” Dupin said, curiously, “how it was that Oberon came to choose you for his bride.”

  “Oberon did not choose,” she said, in a slightly reproachful one. “Oberon never had a choice. Marriages are made in Heaven.” She said no more, and it was probably my own imagination, acing alone, but I could not help silently adding: …or Hell.

  “Of course,” Dupin was quick to agree. “But I chose you, did I not?”

  “Did you really?” she answered. “I never knew that. Were some of us free, then? Were we not all driven? But would that not make it our fault that things went so badly awry? We have been punished for it, after all…did you say that you had been punished too, my love?”

  I couldn’t quite remember whether he had or hadn’t, but I didn’t suppose that it mattered overmuch. Dream logic was firmly in charge here.

  “We have been unlucky, Ysolde,” Dupin said. “Direly unlucky. Do you know where the manuscripts are?”

  “Manuscripts?” she queried, her voice alarmed this time, becoming shrill. “What manuscripts?”

  I thought for a moment that he might give her a long lecture on John Dee’s importance as a bibliophile and educator of navigators, but he was too impatient for that.

  “The pirate’s manuscripts,” he said. “The manuscripts that your ancestor took from Our Lady of the Cape.”

  That was probably more reality than she could stand, at present.

  “Jack Taylor was a bad man,” she whispered—and fell asleep.

  Dupin was furious. I thought for a moment that he was about to shake her, to make her wake up, but he was only fluttering his hands because he was furious at himself, for mishandling the interrogation. “What a fool I am!” he muttered. “Too clever to play the simpleton, too much the logician to feign affection! It’s not as if I had never….” He stopped suddenly and looked at me. “Well,” he said, resignedly, “we have one piece of valuable information.”

  “That Jack Taylor was a bad man?” I suggested. “But which one? Her father, or the pirate?”

  “One of them, at least,” he said, pensively, “seems to have sailed for the South Seas…perhaps to raise the Devil…or perhaps as an explorer.”

  The last conjecture, I supposed, was his inference, for I had heard nothing in what the woman had said to support it. “An explorer?” I queried. “Looking for what?”

  “R’laiyeh,” was his terse reply.

  “Did he find it, do you think?”

  “I hope not,” he retorted. “My God, I hope not.” Then he stood up. “Food,” he said, succinctly. “I need food—and strong coffee.”

  “I shall have to send the Bihans out in search of supplies,” I said. “After all, the sage of Bicêtre is coming to dinner tonight, and we must put on a show. Do you have any conception, Dupin, of how drastically you have upset the pattern of my life?”

  He pulled a face—which was quite uncharacteristic of him. “Yes, I have,” he said, “and I’m truly sorry.”

  “But it was a matter of dire necessity,” I added, on his behalf.

  “And is,” he said. “I wish I knew how dire the necessity might become.”

  “We have faced Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos and the Dwellers of the Threshold,” I reminded him, “not to mention the Egregore of Parthenope. Will this be very much worse?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “I have no idea how Ysolde came to have the Cthulhu encryption engraved into her very flesh, or for what purpose—and I have no idea who or what might come to search for her, once the word spreads that it is manifest. No one in that ward but me could possibly have recognized what she said, of course—but there’s enough detail in the story to attract unwelcome attention and curiosity. I only hope that Père France’s obsessive bibliotaph is in Brittany just now, not in Paris. Once he scents her name….”

  “If it’s scent that you’re worried about,” I observed, “perhaps we should have left her where she was. The keenest bloodhound in the world could not have detected her there.”

  “I was speaking metaphorically,” the notorious pedant said.

  “I had already inferred that,” I told him. “Let’s go downstairs and make our preparations shall we? There’s fresh bread in the larder, so we can have a bite to eat as well.”

  “Tom Linn,” he said, “your every word is music.”

  “My memory’s a little sketchy,” I said, “but didn’t Thomas the Rhymer’s story end tragically—just like Tristan’s?”

  “Folklore is full of sticky ends,” he told me. “And yet, somehow, fairyland always seems so pleasant and peaceful in modern dreams and hallucinations. Perhaps Monsieur Leuret can explain the psychology of that to us, after dinner tonight.
”

  “Perhaps,” I agreed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A PHILOSOPHICAL DISAGREEMENT

  Leuret arrived very punctually at seven o’clock, scrupulously well-dressed and very self-composed. I got the impression that he was glad to be away from Bicêtre, and did not often have the opportunity. I could understand why, even though he was a gentleman through and through, and I fully expected him to by an amiable dinner-companion. The kinds of people who plan dinner-parties as a matter of routine would probably think twice about inviting the director of a lunatic asylum as a guest—especially a reformist who might wax lyrical about the humane treatment of the insane, or the danger posed to the cause of progress by Romantic poets and story-tellers.

  Chapelain was late, and did not arrive until near quarter past, but that did not delay the serving of the soup unduly. Madame Lacuzon was still in the house, “helping out,” but she had been appointed to sit with the sleeping Ysolde Leonys, leaving the preparation of the meal and the actual serving to the Bihans—who did a very creditable job, in my opinion, given that it was not a kind of service to which they were accustomed. The soup was first-rate, and the magret de canard served as the centrepiece of the entrée was not far short of excellent. I blessed the circumstances that had led me to hire servants, for I dread to think what the meal might have amounted to had I still been living alone.

  As convention required, the talk prior to the serving of the coffee—for which we would retire to the smoking-room—was conspicuously general, light and polite. That was in spite of the impatience of all concerned, and I have to admit that it carried a certain underlying edge by virtue of a measurable tension between Leuret and Chapelain, on the one hand, and Leuret and Dupin, on the other. The first two obviously respected one another, and would probably have been unhesitating in naming one another as good friends, but the philosophical differences between them had been further sharpened by the day’s extraordinary events, while the second two did not, as yet, know quite what to make of one another.

  As the soirée’s host, I suppose I might and ought to have deflected the conversation away from any matters likely to prove controversial, but given that Leuret was an exceedingly determined psychologist, Chapelain an exceedingly devoted mesmerist physician and that Auguste Dupin was exceedingly eager to involve himself in their differences of opinion, it would have needed a conversationalist far more talented than myself to deviate them in the slightest.