The Cthulhu Encryption (19 page)

“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
.”

“I can understand why Ysolde banished them, even though I have no idea how she was able to do so,” I said, “but why did Oberon Breisz stop them the previous night, if he didn’t want to take possession of the amulet himself?”

“I don’t know,” Dupin told me, apparently growing a little impatient with the necessity of confessing so much ignorance. “Perhaps he knows how dangerous possession of the amulet can be, but doesn’t want it to fall into the control of Cthulhu’s minions. Perhaps he is as enthusiastic to lure us to his den in Brittany as Ysolde now is to take us there—he implied as much in the message he asked you to deliver. If we’re fortunate, time will tell. If not…we might never know.”

He frowned, evidently wishing that he were inside the diligence, able to question Ysolde further, no matter what his fellow passengers might think. Chapelain, I felt sure, would be more discreet, He had a reputation to protect and a career to preserve, and might have been secretly recognized by one of those fellow passengers.

“But while we have the amulet,” I said, “or insist on keeping company with the person who has—given that we dare not take it back from Ysolde in case it precipitates her return to normality, and death—we are perpetually in danger of a further assault, are we not?”

“In danger, yes—but we now know that Ysolde has the means to repel such assaults, as Breisz apparently also has. I think, now that I have heard the incantation inscribed on the amulet, that I might even be able to repel them myself.”

“I’m sure that I couldn’t,” I said, a trifle piqued. “Whatever I heard—and I’m not entirely sure that I
heard
anything—was far too confused for memorization.”

“But I was already familiar with six-sevenths of the other encryption,” Dupin reminded me. “I really think, now, that I ought to be able to work out the seventh part, if I could just figure out the underlying theoretical pattern of the encryption, and its mathematical harmony.”

“What is Ysolde’s insistence that the amulet is hers supposed to imply?” I asked him. “Does it mean that the wooden disk is not the object that Levasseur threw into the crowd on his way to be hanged, or that Levasseur had no right of ownership to it in the first place?”

“Probably the latter,” he opined. “If Saint-Germain can be trusted….” His skepticism on the latter point was so evident that he did not bother to finish the observation.

“Are you and Chapelain going to make another attempt to question her when we stop in Alençon?” I asked. “After all, she’s still entranced.”

“I hope so,” he said, “but it’s a decision I might be forced to leave to Chapelain’s discretion. I shall consult him when we reach Alençon—if we survive the journey.” The last comment was a perfectly normal complaint about the state of the road, and its effect on the
impériale
, where we felt every jolt as if it were magnified. Dupin was not a great traveler, save for blithely setting sail on the ocean of the imagination, so he very rarely had to endure such discomfort as he was now experiencing. I had had far more experience, although I always traveled inside a coach when I could.

“What do you hope to find in Brittany, Dupin?” I asked him. “You dangled the lure of Levasseur’s gold in front of Chapelain, and you jumped to the conclusion that Saint-Germain has the same interest—but you don’t care about that. Are you really hoping to find precious manuscripts looted from John Dee’s collection?”

“What I hope to find,” he told me, grimly, “is a little enlightenment—there is no other prize, I can assure you, that would tempt me to endure a journey like this one.”

“Enlightenment about what? Cthulhu? The magic of encryption?”

“Yes,” he replied, shortly.

After a few minutes’ silence, I said. “I met a seaman named Pym once, who told bizarre tales of the South Seas. Poe based the longest of all his tales on the seaman’s story, but could not provide a proper ending any more than Pym could. I gave you the book to read, if you remember.”

“I do,” he said. “I thought the ending quite appropriate, in its conscientious insistence on leaving the mystery incomplete and insoluble. The mysteries of the sea do not lend themselves to ready conclusion. I have met seamen myself who have recognized me as a sympathetic ear, as Pym evidently recognized Poe. Those who have had strange experiences are reluctant to speak of them in earnest to men who will automatically judge them liars and make fun of them.

“John Dee, who knew every captain that set sail from Elizabeth’s England, might well have been the last man that was trusted wholeheartedly and universally in that regard. While mariners kept the secrets of his navigational tables and devices, he kept the secrets of their strangest tales. It was probably England’s seamen, rather than Edward Kelley, who provided the most valuable raw materials of the
Liber Loagaeth
, the
Claves Angelicae
and the
Claves Daemonicae
.

“Dee was present when the British East India Company was founded, and was a key participant in its planning. If anyone ever knew what became of the three ships Elizabeth sent out in 1596, prior to the formation of the company—which were allegedly lost—Dee was in on the secret. Although he only crossed the English Channel on a handful of occasions, he probably knew more about the mysteries of the sea—including and especially R’lyaieh—than any other man who ever lived. Individual sailors only knew of individual encounters, but Dee caught a glimpse of the bigger picture.”

“Which is?” I said.

“I wish I knew. He could not put it in the terms that we use today, but he undoubtedly knew that the boundaries between the universes are sometimes weakened in the deserts of the ocean, as they sometimes are in actual deserts and subterranean caves. How much more he knew I cannot tell—not without access to the lost manuscripts—but he certainly knew that there are crypts in the dream-dimensions, and that seers have access to the dreams imperfectly imprisoned within them. He also knew how direly unreliable seers can be, of course—although that did not prevent him from making what use he could of Edward Kelley, the most talented skryer he ever found…but a
bad man
, apparently.”

“But why are the boundaries between the universes weaker in remote regions of the sea than anywhere else?” I wondered.

“I’m not sure. There seems to be something about the absence of humankind…or, perhaps more accurately, the absence of human civilization and self-confidence…that permits such flaws to appear and facilitates their growth.”

“Growth?” I queried.

“Perhaps that’s the wrong term—but such breaches can certainly increase, or deteriorate, either by virtue of blind and random processes—Nyarlathotep, the crawling chaos—or by deliberate effort that we are bound to see as malign.”

“Cthulhu?”

“Among others…but in respect of the ocean, mostly Cthulhu. I don’t know whether R’lyaieh, the earthly component of his transdimensional crypt, actually has a specific physical location on the deep sea-bed—if it has, it is probably somewhere in the South Seas—but I do know that its influence is not confined to that region. It extends across the Earth’s surface, although it’s mostly manifest beneath that surface, only emerging with difficulty. The tribes that know his name, and can chant the first six lines of the Cthulhu encryption, are mostly found on islands and in coastal regions, although some are troglodytic.”

“But how do they know the name and the chant?” I asked.

“They discover it in their dreams. Our civilized culture makes rigorous attempts to forget dreams, or at least to exile their content from our view of the mundane world, using folklore, legend and literature as a kind of safety-valve or treasure-chest, but some tribal cultures take an opposite view, and search the dream-dimensions to which they have fugitive access, by means of shamans and other seers. Far travelers—especially seamen—often fall prey to similar kinds of madness.”

“It is madness, then?”

“Oh yes—there’s no doubt about that. But sanity is a refuge, far less of a stronghold than François Leuret would like it to be, and sometimes inaccessible even to the wisest of men.”

“And where did
you
come across the name and the chant?” I wanted to know.

“Initially, in one of Bougainville’s reports.”

“I’ve read Bougainville’s
Voyage autour le monde
,” I told him. “I do not remember any such mention.”

“He and his scientific collaborators made numerous reports,” Dupin said, as if I should have known that. “The popular version is a selective summary. Some of the stranger details are known only to a limited number to scholars, having been rejected by the voyage’s sponsors as products of ergot-induced delirium. That has become a virtual custom since John Dee’s day. There is no worldwide conspiracy of silence demanding the hiding of such reportage—it hides, as it were, if its own accord, following the logic of the situation. Once one knows where to dig, it is not so very difficult to unearth it, in dribs and drabs. The bigger picture, however….”

“Remains elusive.”

“Indeed—and perhaps will always remain so, given that scholars are mortal, and tend to die almost as soon as they begin to get a grasp on any subject whatsoever. Those who claim to be immortal or reincarnate seem to do no better than commoner men, alas…and they also tend to be the ones who forsake sanity altogether, to cast themselves adrift on seas of madness.”

“In brief then,” I said, “we are following a madwoman to the lair of a madman, in the hope that we might discover some shreds of enlightenment regarding the farther shores of madness?”

“You have an admirable talent for synopsis, my friend,” he said. “And I’m glad that you’re with us, for we might yet find a voice of pure sanity useful.”

“But
you
are the sanest man I know,” I protested. “And you told me last night that Madame Lacuzon is the sanest person
you
know. I’m surely superfluous to requirements, and far too vulnerable to bad dreams.”

“Never superfluous, my friend,” he said, “and not as vulnerable as you imagine.”

I was flattered by the compliment. “And we have Chapelain too,” I added. “All for one and one for all—like the three musketeers, Athos, Porthos and Aramis.”

“More like Ethos, Pathos and Logos,” he muttered, drawing his cloak around him to protect him from a sudden gust of wind. He had named the three components of classical rhetoric, from which Dumas had presumably derived two of his three musketeers’ names, but not the third. Chapelain, I presumed, was Ethos or Athos, and I was Pathos or Porthos. I hoped that the adventure confronting us was one in which a Logos would, after all, prove more useful than an Aramis.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE INN AT ALENÇON

We were all heartily glad when the diligence finally reached the outskirts of Alençon. We had stopped to change horses on several prior occasions, but express coaches do not linger over such necessities, and we had not had more than five minutes to stretch our legs at any of those relay stations. I had not even bothered to get down from the impériale, knowing that I would only have to climb up again and not being the most agile man in the world, but Dupin had got down every time to check on Ysolde Leonys.

He reported on each occasion that she was now as rigid as a statue, almost as if she had somehow stopped time within her body, but that Chapelan has assured him that she was still very much alive. Her heart-rate was slow and she was cold, but she was in better health now than she had been before her strange metamorphosis.