The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos

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The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Page 7

by Brian Stableford


  “The Medieval Apollonius and Erich Zann were, however, among the rare exceptions to this generalization. The former took his initial inspiration from his namesake, while the latter took his from his former mentor, Giuseppe Tartini, but both men set out in search of ecstasy: a musical and spiritual path to a paradisal state of mind. Both, alas, found their initial quests betrayed and subverted as soon as they achieved their initial successes.”

  “Subverted by what?” I put in. I was struggling to cope with Dupin’s discourse, as usual, but I knew from experience that inserting prompts and questions sometimes helped me to cling on to the thread of his arguments.

  “Something that has been given many names by those who have sensed its presence,” Dupin said. “The Sumerians called it Tiamat, the Persians Ahriman. Christians, inevitably, have subsumed it within the concept of the Devil, but the Christian tendency to personalize the Devil, as a caricature of Pan or, more recently, as an urbane Mephistopheles, is a distraction. Of all the various conceptualizations, the one perhaps best-suited to the description of the phenomenon as it is humanly experienced is Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos.”

  “I don’t know that name,” I admitted.

  “It is to be found in the Harmonies de l’Enfer and various other texts that are sometimes called forbidden, in a stronger sense than merely being placed on the Roman Church’s Index. Nyarlathotep is one of the Old Ones—a company of entities that are something other than gods or demons, although they have powers and inclinations that are somewhat similar. They reside, though not completely, in the dream-dimensions: spaces that surround and are connected to the three dimensions of space experienced by humans but lie beyond the scope of the human sensorium’s mundane sustenance of consciousness. Nyarlathotep’s seat is sometimes called Kadath: a region of the dream-dimensions that is exceedingly difficult to reach, even by the utmost exertions of the unentranced human mind.

  “In our scientific era, we tend to think of consciousness in terms of observation and recording, as if it were merely a device for collecting and collating data, organizing them into a coherent and meaningful image of the world—albeit a device whose efficient operation is troubled by the anarchic workings of emotion and appetite, and the sometimes-nightmarish absurdity of dreams. Ever since Plato, philosophers have routinely conceived of human being as something fundamentally divided, in which noble and orderly rationality is engaged in a constant struggle with baser animal urges and the hectic distractions of dreams—but humans are still capable of feeling whole and undivided on occasion, especially when immersed in works of art, and most especially of all when immersed in music.

  “It is possible, however, to conceive of consciousness in a different way, not as a collector but as a composer, not as a dealer in atomized data building rational edifices threatened, troubled and undermined by the seismic shocks of emotion and dream, but as a seeker and synthesizer of harmonies, forever attempting to bind all experience into a whole whose nature is essentially ecstatic, or sublime, in the technical sense of either term.

  “The creative process of consciousness, seen in this light, is a fundamentally hopeful one, in that it works on the assumption that ecstasy and sublimity, once fully achieved, will be blissful and paradisal: the mental and moral optimum of which the human mind is capable. Insofar as we have been able to determine the truth, however, the reality is that the final fulfillment of consciousness is not blissful or paradisal in any simple or straightforward sense, but has an emotional texture that is far more frightful and horrific.

  “Within this version of spiritualist philosophy, Heaven and Hell cannot be opposites or alternatives, in such a way that one might arrive at one or the other, dependent upon the moral health of one’s soul. In the holistic way of thinking, Heaven and Hell can only be co-existent, intricately inter-twined, not merely bound together but somehow in harmony. In this way of thinking, therefore, Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos, is not some external threat menacing the human mind with dissolution into madness, although it can easily take on that semblance in the rational imagination; it is something inherent within the human mind and essential to it—just as fundamental, in its own way, as the order inherent in methodical logic and mathematics.

  “However we may choose to conceive of consciousness in the broadest sense, however, one truth that remains is this: in our waking lives, we are fugitives, taking refuge in a deliberately limited consciousness that strives to master and control emotion and to deny the capriciousness of dreams. When we sleep, our defenses are eroded, but we have countered that erosion by the strategic forgetfulness that dispels our dreams. There are, however, states intermediate between waking and sleep, in which that physiological strategy is far less effective. We enter one such state when we listen to, and respond to, music; we enter another when we submit to the magnetic effects that induce a somnambulistic or somniloquistic trance. We become particularly vulnerable when the two effects operate in combination: when we surrender, as players or as listeners to somnimusicality. We are uniquely well-equipped, then, to storm the heights of ecstasy and sublimity, paradise and bliss—and, by the same token, we are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of the Crawling Chaos. As the wisest of modern aesthetic philosophers, Edmund Burke, has pointed out, the sublime always contains an element of horror, and that element of horror is its truest essence, its most fundamental note.”

  It was high time for another interruption. “And is that what Erich Zann achieved, by means of his spoiled Stradivarius?” I said. “He attempted to storm the heights of ecstasy and sublimity, but failed, and only opened his soul to horror: to Nyarlathotep, the Crawling Chaos.”

  “Sometimes, my friend,” Dupin said, despairingly, “I think that you are ever-intent on misunderstanding me, by oversimplifying everything I say. The whole point of what I have been saying is that Zann’s Stradivarius—Palaiseau’s Stradivarius—is not spoiled at all. In one scheme of reckoning, at least, it is the most perfect of all the instruments made by that man of genius, although even he seems to have been blind to the fact. Erich Zann did not make a failed attempt to storm the heights of ecstasy and sublimity, opening his soul to horror because he failed; it would be more correct to say that, thanks to his unique instrument, he succeeded in storming the heights of ecstasy—and that he opened his soul to horror in consequence of his success.”

  “But it killed him,” I pointed out.

  “Yes, it did,” Dupin replied. “Another fault of rational consciousness is to regard death as if it were a kind of failure of life. The neo-Pythagoreans, of course, saw things differently; to them life and death were not contrasted opposites, but aspects of the same whole, essentially and intricately bound together. The truth is that ‘death’ is not the point at which life ends, but a process that runs alongside it, acting in collaboration with it.

  “As individuals, we begin to die before we are even born; anatomists furnished with microscopes have now revealed that it is the selective death of cells within an amorphously-expanding embryo that sculpts the form of the individual, and physiologists of a more empirical stripe than the Marquis de Puységur have suggested that it is the selective withering of neural connections within the brain that sculpts the thinking mind. As a race, death is the price we pay for the eternally-progressive evolution that the Chevalier de Lamarck has recently identified, continually clearing the way for improved generations. We all must die, my friend, and we are all dying as we live; the horror of our consciousness of death is something intrinsic to that consciousness.

  “Yes, Erich Zann died, and he died in the grip of the ultimate horror of the Crawling Chaos. If the witness to his death can be believed—and I think, in the main, that he can—then he died trying to ward off some subsidiary chaos-spawn: one of those entities that humans call demons. As that witness concluded, however—correctly, in my opinion—he died of fright. He died because he tried, in the end, to undo what he had done; terrified by his own success, he tried to use his music to drive back the
horrors he had revealed, to refuse and escape them. From one viewpoint, at least, the tragedy was not so much that he died, but that he died a coward, having repented of his own success, trying in vain to retreat to mundanity—just as my tragedy, seen from that same viewpoint, is that, from the moment that I glimpsed what Erich Zann had seen in all its horrid glory, I elected to live as a coward, taking refuge to the full extent of my mental and moral abilities in fugitive, divided rational consciousness.

  “Palaiseau was quite wrong to believe that I craved his inheritance, for I was not so reckless or brave as that. Indeed, I wanted him to have the violin, precisely because I considered him too dull a fellow ever to be able to play it as it required to be played. Nor was I wrong—but I had not taken into consideration the potential effects of animal magnetism. If my guess is sound, Palaiseau has been entranced—willingly, of course, but in a fashion that he could not have achieved without assistance. He has a collaborator now, just as Erich Zann briefly had a collaborator in me, although the balance of the collaboration is very different. There is, it appears, someone in the circle of his acquaintances who wants to scale the heights of ecstasy and sublimity, at any cost, but who cannot play the violin himself...or herself...and requires Palaiseau’s assistance.

  “The process works both ways, I think: the player needs an audience, just as the audience needs a player. When I proved too weak a reed in terms of providing a suitable audience for his greatest endeavor, Erich Zann grasped at the only other available straw: his fellow tenant. I doubt that he could have succeeded in what he did without the presence of the witness—although the witness was probably lucky to escape with his life, let alone his injured sanity.”

  “What has all this to do with the murders?” I asked.

  Dupin groaned. “Is it not obvious, after all that I have said?” he complained. “Palaiseau has learned to play the Stradivarius at last, but he is no genius, no Erich Zann. He cannot improvise, as Zann could. He cannot compose as he plays; he can only play from someone else’s score. If he is to reach the heights of ecstasy and sublimity, he needs the music of Erich Zann. He needs the Harmonies of Hell. His partner in ambition thought that the scores might be found in Zann’s coffin, or in his lawyer’s files—but all that he, or she, was able to learn from Clamart was that I received the subsidiary fraction of Zann’s inheritance, and perhaps that I had burned it. We now know that Palaiseau could have told his partner that himself, had the question only been put to him—but somniloquists are notorious for their lack of initiative. If information is not demanded of them explicitly, they do not reveal it.”

  “Do you think that Clamart might have been magnetized too?” I asked. “Could that be how the murderer was able to strike him from behind, while he sat meekly in his chair?”

  “Of course it could,” said Dupin—but there was no contempt in his tone, and he seemed quite relieved that I had made an intelligent suggestion at last. “If that is the case, though—and I certainly cannot eliminate it from consideration on this account—then we are dealing with an exceptionally cold-blooded killer. If Clamart was Mesmerized, then he could easily have been instructed not to alert me to the danger I was in, and not to identify the source of that danger, without there being more than the slightest chance that the injunction might be ineffective. The fact that the Mesmerist preferred to murder his victim marks him as a very dangerous individual.”

  “Or her,” I supplied, as Dupin seemed to have grown tired of inserting the caveat.

  “Or her,” he agreed.

  “Are you convinced that it is someone involved in the production of the play?” I asked, my hand moving reflexively toward the pocket that held the program notes.

  “It seems likely,” he admitted, carefully, “but we must not blind ourselves to other possibilities.”

  “If your analysis of the situation is correct,” I said, after a slight pause, “the problem might be partly solved simply by giving our adversary what he, or she, wants—by simply handing over the subsidiary element of Zann’s legacy. I ask you again: did you really burn the manuscript?”

  “You seem to be convinced that I could not have done so,” Dupin observed. “You cannot believe that any collector of arcana could do such a thing.”

  He was correct in his estimation, but all I said in reply was: “It is as a collector of arcana that I have known you, my friend. I did not know you fifteen years ago.”

  “Well, if handing over the legacy was ever a possibility, it would have been eliminated from consideration now,” Dupin said, with a sigh. “Bernard Clamart is dead, and our adversary must be held accountable for that—as he or she ought to have realized, before committing the murderer and obliterating the possibility of a negotiated settlement. Perhaps the person in question did not know who and what I am when Clamart revealed my name...or perhaps he knew exactly who and what I am, and it was sheer frustration at the prospective difficulty of his task that drove him to murder...although I should not leave out of account the possibility that his plan is more convoluted than I have so far imagined.”

  “If it is only Clamart’s murder that has eliminated the possibility from consideration,” I pointed out, “then you must have been telling a strategic lie when you told Palaiseau that you burned the envelope containing your part of the inheritance.”

  “Must I?” he retorted, deliberately teasing me. “Well, perhaps. Have you also deduced, by means of your ever-scrupulous logic, why Zann split his legacy in two?”

  “You explained it yourself a few moments ago,” I pointed out. “He realized, after he began playing to you, that his endeavor was an implicitly collaborative one—that his ultimate success would require an audience of at least one. He realized that if Palaiseau was to continue his work after his wealth, then he would need a collaborator too. He was trying to bring the two of you together. Obviously, the ploy failed—if anything, it had the opposite effect, by promoting mutual suspicion and antipathy.”

  “Obviously,” Dupin echoed, in a sarcastic tone, which I took to imply that not only was the conclusion not obvious, but that it was obviously not the case. I was nettled by his seeming contempt; I felt that if I had made a mistake, it could only be by virtue of neglecting some item of information that he had not yet revealed to me. If his intention was to suggest that the mysterious Erich Zann had intended to provoke, and somehow to exploit, the mutual suspicion and antipathy that his divided bequest had produced, I could not see any possible motive for that in what I had so far been told.

  The cab drew to a halt, then, and the coachman took the trouble to shout: “Rue d’Auseuil.” I got down first, as I had to pay for the ride, and fumbled for coins. As I handed the correct amount over, with an extra few centimes as a tip, the fellow murmured: “You’ve a hard climb still ahead of you, mind.”

  I frowned, but did not take him to task. It was not until I turned round and looked at the most remarkable street in the entirety of Paris that I saw what he meant.

  8.

  The animal drawing the fiacre had not actually set foot on the Rue d’Auseuil itself, because that insane thoroughfare became too steep for easy negotiation within the span of the horse-drawn vehicle. We had been dropped on the bank of the stream, whose sluggish waters must have been as black by day as they were by night, to judge by the stench they emitted—although the surface carried a pallid shroud at present, by courtesy of a freezing fog that had formed as the evening cooled. The Bièvre was rimmed by brick warehouses whose greasy windows must have been almost opaque in daylight, although they reflected the light of the sparse lights distributed along a narrow towpath in an eerie fashion.

  The slope of the steam itself was gradual, but the initial phase of the Rue d’Auseuil climbed up the butte that loomed over it like a cliff path, consisting of sharply-inclined ramps punctuated by flights of steps, some of them stone and some of them wooden, like slanted bridges extending over gaps in the natural ledge. Then it veered inwards into the body of the hill, so that there was
a short and exceedingly narrow section with houses on both sides, before it emerged again as a mere ledge protected from the precipice by a wooden rail. All the houses distributed along the street, regardless of whether they faced the empty abyss or one another, seemed to be etched into the face of the butte, or jammed into crevices—all except for the one at the very top, which loomed up from the great mound of earth and rock like a battered hat unsteadily perched on a tramp’s head, its brim turned up into a high wall blocking off the edge of the abyss. Because of the broadness of the mound’s base, and the fact that the higher section of the street ran through a cleft, the house at the top was the only one that stood close enough to the edge to offer an uninterrupted view of the precipice, although its uppermost gable window was the only one whose view was not blocked by the wall.

  I never had the slightest doubt that the topmost house was the one to which we were headed, or that the gable window of its awkward mansard was that of Erich Zann’s garret. As Dupin and I toiled up that miniature mountain, I reflected that Erich Zann had made the same climb every night for years, having already walked all the way from the old Ambigu. Surely, I thought, exhaustion would have killed him eventually, if terror had not intervened.

  When we finally reached the house at the top of the hill, even though we could not yet look down upon the mist-shrouded stream, or outwards over the broader waters of the Seine and the vast city, I felt that we were already on the threshold of another world—even though, in terms of mere measurement, we were not nearly so far above the level of the river as the heights of Montmartre.

 

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