The Cthulhu Encryption (27 page)

“I don’t know anything about that,” said Ysolde, “but I was very glad to get the medallion back…even before its magic took effect.”

Chapelain evidently wanted to question her further about the hidden gold, but as soon as he opened his mouth, she put her finger to her lips again, insistently. I could see that he was still having second thoughts about returning to Paris in the morning.

“Do you know what Oberon wants with Dupin?” I asked her.

“He wants to use Dupin as he has used me.”

“He wants to put Dupin into suspended animation—to use him as some kind of seer?”

“Yes.”

It was on the tip on my tongue to ask:
Why Dupin
?—but there seemed no need to voice the question. Dupin was the sanest man I knew, and the most knowledgeable. What a seer he would make, if there really were a kind of magic that might give him the visionary reach!

I was convinced, though, that Dupin would not agree to any terms that Oberon Breisz might offer. If ever he undertook any such experiment, he would want to do it by himself.

The door opened then. I had not expected Breisz and Dupin to come down again so soon, but I presumed that Breisz had only offered his guest a teasing glimpse of his library, as yet another lure, another diabolical temptation.

“I’m sure that you would be glad of the opportunity to study here at your leisure,” Breisz said to Dupin, as he went to the dresser in order to pour his guests a liqueur from a decanter that must have been set there by one of the servants. It had the color and distinctive odor of Benedictine.

“It might be interesting,” was all that Dupin would concede.

Breisz frowned slightly at Dupin’s lack of enthusiasm. “Don’t be so coy, my friend,” he said, as he handed Dupin a glass with his right hand, and gave another to Chapelain with his left. “You would give your right arm to have those books in your possession again—and you know what a sacrifice it is for me to offer you the opportunity to possess them, for I know what the booksellers of Paris whisper when they mention my name. Literary miser! Biliotaph! Yes—and proud of it. But they were
our
books once before, Monsieur Dupin, and can be ours again…and what use we shall be able to make of them, now that we and civilization are a little older, a little more mature!”

“I’m sorry to repeat myself yet again,” Dupin said, “but I really have never seen those books before—nor you.”

“You have owned and treasured them,” Breisz retorted, letting impatience make his voice shriller as his vanity took offense, “if you will only make the effort to recollect the memory. I really can help you remember, if you still cannot do it unaided, but I must admit that I had expected better of you, once you were here.”

“I can assure you that I have never seen the
Necronomicon
before, Monsieur Briesz,” said Dupin, with scrupulous politeness, “although I have read several second-hand reports of it.”

“You, of all people, need not call me that,” said our host, handing a glass of Benedictine to me and offering to pour another for Ysolde, who shook her head. He poured one for himself instead.

“I apologize, Mr. England,” said Dupin, serenely, having taken a sip of the liqueur. “I do not mean to offend you with my inability to tell you want you want to hear.”

“You always used to call me Edward,” Breisz told him, reproachfully, “and you know full well that England is no more my true name than Breisz.”

“I do know that,” Dupin admitted, “but I confess that I have no idea what your true name is.”

Our host sighed deeply, finally tiring of his game. “It’s Kelley,” he said, after a pregnant pause. “Edward Kelley.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE SLEEP OF REASON

That was something of a bombshell, I admit, but Dupin did not seem shocked, nor did he laugh. I think he must have guessed some time before, and had been teasing Breisz as Breisz had been teasing him. They were, after all, as arrogant as one another.

“Are you implying that I am John Dee reincarnated?” Dupin asked, calmly.

Why not?
I thought, remembering the enthusiastic way in which he had talked about his hero—and his determination to construe Dee, not as the deluded wizard that legend painted him, but as a man very much like himself: an inquisitive and thoroughly rational bibliophile and scholar. Except, of course, that I did not believe in metempsychosis any more than Chapelain did—and Dupin’s open mind would never yield to the conviction of a man like Oberon Breisz, no matter what games the magician could play with space and time.

“You
are
John Dee,” our host affirmed, with a certainty that had to be based in hope rather than reason. “If you would only let me help you, you could remember. If you would only consent to help yourself, you would remember. You have lain idle too long, my friend, while I have made progress. We achieved great things once, you and I—but circumstances were against us. We shall achieve greater things, now that I may play the guide and you the skryer. Innocence has its value, but childhood dreams are too easily corrupted by confabulation. The best skryer of all would be a man with vast knowledge, but an open mind. I think you know how rare that combination is.”

“A knowledgeable man with an open mind can hardly help but be skeptical about the possibility, and the wisdom, of skyring,” Dupin observed. “Innocence has the virtue of generating childish confabulations—what nightmares might an educated mind produce?”

“If that is an accusation, my friend, it is unworthy of you. I played my part in the generation of the
Claves Demonicae
, it’s true—but the
Necronomicon
existed long before Edward Kelley was born. I wish you could have set your hand on the Sanskrit version…but even that cannot really have been the first. All the texts attempting to render its peculiar wisdom in human tongues are mere shadows of the book the angels could have written, had they been able to write instead of merely dream.”

“The Edward Kelley that John Dee knew,” Dupin said, thoughtfully, “had been convicted of forgery—a crime whose penalty, at the time, was the amputation of the ears. Your ears, Monsieur Bresz, seem to be in very good condition.”

Our host’s immediate response to that was a wry smile. “You’re determined to resist the truth,” he said. “It will not matter. You’re in my domain now, where I am in command. I make no threats, mind—but this is not your little nook in Paris, and even though you have carefully left your dragon on my threshold, there’s no escape. This is Fate, John…it has been determined since the dawn of time. None of us really has a choice, or ever had. You’ll play your part, as I am playing mine.”

“There is no Fate,” Dupin replied, soberly. “Even Cthulhu, which has moved heaven and earth in the attempt to play that role, cannot fully control the dreamers it has made, even in the absence of the defenses bequeathed to us by the entities you call angels. We
are
free to choose, Monsieur Breisz—but not alas, to choose who we are, merely in answer to a whim. The sad truth is that we are far more impotent in the face of circumstances than our self-made dreams urge to be believe…but still, we
are
free; there is no Fate to force our capitulation.”

Oberon Breisz did not seem annoyed, or intimidated, by the contradiction, although I could not imagine that he liked it. “It’s getting late,” he said—inaccurately, according to Paris time. “We will all benefit from sleep…and you might see things differently in the morning.”

Dupin let him have the last word. Coupled with the enigmatic anxieties that Ysolde had generated, it seemed a distinctly ominous last word to me.

On the stairway, as we went up to our rooms, I said to Dupin: “Should we leave now, do you think? Perhaps it would be better to gallop away into the night than to risk sleep in this strange domain.”

“No,” he said. “If we flee, we shall invite pursuit—and he who invites pursuit is half way to being caught. A challenge has been laid down, and is better met head on. I’m not entirely certain that I can resist the pressures that might afflict our dreams, but I feel obliged to try—and you must try too. Reason may sleep, but it does not die; it remains available to us, even in the worst of nightmares, if only we can remember how to find and use it. I have confidence in you, as I have in Chapelain. We are sane men, and we know the value of our sanity. Oberon Breisz is not, and does not understand the treacherousness of his madness. He cannot seduce us, and has no wish to hurt us, as yet…and we might still save him, if we have time enough”

“
As yet?
” was the phrase I elected to echo. It implied that the time might comes, and soon, when Edward Kelley reincarnate
might
want to hurt his former mentor, and those associated with him

“He seems uncommonly robust,” Dupin said, “but dreams are brittle, and ever wont to shatter. When they do, wrath often burst forth.”

“I’ll keep my revolver under my pillow,” I decided.

“It might be direly ineffective weapon, in the heart of a nightmare,” he said. “Don’t allow its possession to make you forget that you have others.”

The bedroom, as I have observed, was as ordinary as any guest bedroom, save for its total lack of decoration. The bed, however, was capacious and comfortable, very conducive to sleep—and that seemed a useful luxury, after the hard floor of the inn on the road to Rennes. I was tired, and I do not think that I could have stayed awake even if I had determined to try. At any rate, Dupin had said that he had confidence in me, and I was obliged to live up to that expectation. I did not undress, though, and I did place my gun beneath my pillow, just in case.

How much of what followed as real, I cannot tell for certain; nor can I even specify very clearly what
real
might mean in the circumstances in which I found myself. I know that I went to sleep, which certainly licenses the belief that it was all the merest kind of hallucination, and that is definitely the preferable interpretation—but I did not wake up where I went to sleep, so, at the very least, it was a somnambulistic adventure. Nor was it only
my
adventure, for I was not alone for very long, and there were other survivors of the dire dream to confirm at least some of its details.

Did Oberon Breisz intend to take action while we slept? Did he believe that he could risk some magic to entrap us, and draw us by degrees into his fantasy? I believe so. Did Ysolde Leonys have her own agenda, her own vague plan to exploit the dream-conducive environment to build a new safe haven to replace the one she had lost sixteen years before? I am certain of it. Neither plan, however, came to fruition. Whatever contribution those pre-hatched schemes made to the hallucination we actually experienced was a minor one, usurped, perverted and altered out of all recognition by a much-superior force. Even minor contributions can be vital, though; they can determine the difference between life and death.

Was it Cthulhu that invaded all our dreams, and almost destroyed us all? In a manner of speaking, yes it was—but not in the sense that the creature encrypted in the borderlands of the earthly ocean had any particular interest in the petty affairs of half a dozen human beings. It was not bent on any kind of piracy, predation or revenge. It was not really
acting
at all, but merely
being
…waiting and dreaming, as it had been condemned to do, in the immeasurable past, by the unimaginable angels who had imprisoned it, in order to protect the coherency of the plenum. It was not malevolent, in the sense that it wished specific ill to any particular individual, world or universe, although humans, and other thinking beings, cannot possibly regarded it as anything but utterly inimical and implacable destructive. It was simply
being what it was
…and it was our misfortune that some among us, and people with whom they had had contact in the past, had deliberately involved themselves in its being, trying to summon its phantom aspects in the hope of drawing power therefrom, or even to make some kind of pact with the vast whole—a futile endeavour, given that it was not at all the kind of Devil that they imagined the Devil to be, but something far more horrid.

As I had anticipated, the sequence of my own involvement continued to progress. I had seen the shoggoths in semi-human guise, and I had seen them, as it were, naked. On both occasions, I had been aware of the superficiality of what I was seeing—that the furthest removed and most abstract of their multi-dimensional aspects was, in some sense, the core of their being, the heart of their dream.

On both occasions that I had seen then, I had assumed that they were trying to take possession of the medallion, or at least to remove it from our possession, in order to nullify its repellent authority, but now I think that such an interpretation was overly anthropomorphic—Dupin, as a pedant, would probably prefer the term anthropopathic, since the familiar term is to do with matters of form. Anthropo
pathy
, if my Greek can be trusted, is falsely to credit unhuman creatures with human purpose, human endeavor and human feeling. If, instead of partially humanizing them as malevolent marauders, one thinks of the star-spawn as drifting fragments of random hallucination, unthinkingly and unfeelingly following unnameable and incalculable tropisms, that might be a little nearer to the unspeakable, unthinkable truth—but perhaps that too is a futile endeavour, and the words “unspeakable,” “unthinkable” and “unnameable” really do go to the heart of the matter.