The Cthulhu Encryption

by Brian Stableford

  “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.

  “Perhaps she’s saving herself for her impending revenge on her persecutor,” I suggested, in one of my more whimsical moments, when Dupin climbed back up after our penultimate stop before Alençon.

  “I hope so,” he said. “That is to say, I hope she’s saving herself—I’m not yet convinced that she’s seeking revenge on Oberon Breisz for the kind of sexual exploitation to which you imagine he must have subjected her.”

  “I don’t suppose you are,” I said. “We’re always reluctant to see such things in our own culture, preferring to scapegoat foreigners. In Paris they call child prostitution an English vice, like flagellation, but in London they think it a continental affair. In the same way, the French call syphilis the Italian disease, while Englishmen call it the French disease and the Italians the Spanish disease.”

  “Whereas Americans have no such delusions?”

  “About themselves, certainly. About Europe, none.”

  When we reached the inn where we were to spend the night in Alençon, Dupin was quick to jump down again, to help Mademoiselle Leonys out of the coach. After what he had said about her being as frigid as a statue, I half-expected that he and Chapelain might have to carry her, but she stepped down in a lady-like manner, and thanked her loyal Tristan kindly. She even favored me with a brief smile, but it seemed to come from a long way away. She was obviously capable of speech, but I doubted that she would respond meekly to any sort of interrogation.

  The inn was large, and moderately comfortable; the innkeeper came out into the courtyard to make arrangements for our feeding and accommodation, and I was able to hire two rooms upstairs for our exclusive use during the hours during which the coach was due to pause. Once we had sorted out our luggage, while my companions were still preoccupied with our enigmatic guide, I stepped into the inn’s dining-room to investigate its comforts. The dining-room and pot-room were both very quiet, but not quite deserted. A few local drinkers were gathered in the pot-room, while a lone traveler, who must have arrived not long before on horseback, was enjoying a hearty meal in a corner of the dining-room.

  He looked up as I came in, and our eyes met. Strangely enough, he seemed more surprised that I was. It was the Comte de Saint-Germain.

  “My God!” he said, when I had moved forward to confront him. “You’re at least twenty-four hours ahead of schedule. I had no idea that Dupin was capable of solving the puzzle as quickly as this. I expected him to be running around Paris for at least a day, digging up all the information he could find regarding Oberon Breisz, and poring over the medallion for hours on end.”

  Feebly, I could think of nothing better to say than: “What are you doing here?”

  “Going to Britanny, of course,” he replied. “I expected to wait for you in Rennes, with plenty of time in hand to make my preparations, and then to follow you clandestinely…assuming, that is, that Dupin knows where to….” He broke off suddenly, having seen something over my shoulder. I looked back, and saw my four companions making their way up the stairs, moving swiftly but not surreptitiously.

  The President of the Harmonic Philosophical Society had been surprised to see me, but now he was flabbergasted. “Is that…,” he said, weakly—and then stopped in order to swallow. When he resumed speaking, it was to mutter: “I always knew, in my heart of hearts, that Dupin was a secret magician, only posing as a skeptic as a means of self-concealment—but I had never thought him capable of anything like that.”

  He was referring to Ysolde Leonys’ transformation, of course, and had completely mistaken the manner in which it had occurred. I did not feel that I was under any obligation to correct his error. To tell the truth, I had occasionally suspected myself that Dupin was a secret magician, only posing as a skeptic for reasons of concealment. The conversation we had just had on the roof of the coach had done nothing to counter that suspicion.

  A few minutes later, Dupin came downstairs again, and immediately came forward to stand beside me.

  “I fully expected you to follow us,” he said to Saint-Germain, “but I did not expect you to ride so hard as to get here ahead of us. I pity your poor horse.”

  “Actually,” Saint-Germain said, stiffly, “I came at a very leisurely pace, allowing my mount to rest at regular intervals. I would never abuse a fine horse. I know what kind of man you think I am, but you really ought not to keep hurling these careless slanders at me whenever we chance to meet. I see that you’ve brought your gorgon along—not to keep me at bay, I hope?”

  Dupin turned on his heel and went to speak to the innkeeper, presumably to arrange for Ysolde, Madame L
acuzon and Chapelain to be served with food and drink in their rooms. I did not know what his own intentions were, and thought that he might intend me to take exclusive responsibility for dealing Saint-German, since I was the one who had gone to meet him at Saint-Sulpice. Thus, when the self-styled Comte invited me to set down at his table I did so, meekly.

  “I suppose I still owe him a debt of gratitude for helping me to recover my stolen Guadagnini,” Saint-Germain said, with a sigh, “so I ought to be generous in regard to his rudeness, even though I have paid him back in triplicate by lending him the medallion. I do wish we could be friends, though. Imagine what the Society might accomplish if he and Oberon Breisz would consent to join it! We really are all on the same side, in the quest for enlightenment. We are scientists now, and ought to work together, in the common cause…not that the members of the Académie des Sciences are free of churlish rivalries and the hoarding instinct, of course.”

  “How much do you know about Breisz?” I asked, conscious of my duty to play the interrogator, if Dupin really was going to leave that job to me.

  “Very little, alas,” the Comte replied, contriving another sigh. “Not enough, obviously, else I’d not have been so astonished by his appearance last night. Who could have anticipated that he’d intervene on our behalf—and not even with the intent of taking possession of the medallion? I could have dispelled the hallucination myself, of course—but perhaps not in time to save your sanity as well as my own. Given that he’s been searching high and low for documents relating to Levasseur and other pirates of the Indian Ocean for many years, it’s difficult to imagine why he didn’t demand the amulet when he had the chance. I confess that I don’t understand the game he’s playing. Obviously, he doesn’t know where the treasure is, but…perhaps he’s pinning his hopes on Dupin’s ability to solve the cryptogram too. Has he solved it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, evasively, but could not resist the temptation to add: “But I don’t believe he’s looking for the kind of solution you seem to be expecting.”