The Cthulhu Encryption

by Brian Stableford

But I wasn’t Tom Linn, and I couldn’t sing.

  “I wanted to be in Ys,” she said, then, to herself rather than to me, “but not like this. Not like this.” It occurred to me then that she thought that she had brought this fate upon us, by means of a careless dream.

  “It wasn’t you,” I told her. “It’s not your fault—not at all.”

  “So you can sing, after all,” she murmured.

  She had not stopped moving; she was still striving with all her might—but it was obviously hopeless. We had sunk too deep to walk or wade, and we could not swim in that dense, worm-infested subatomic soup. The symbols were almost extinct now, and their protection could not last much longer.

  “You should have gone to the library,” I said to Dupin. “There, at least, you would have stood a chance, even if you could not have given him the help he wanted and expected from you. He might yet succeed in preserving that corner of his domain.”

  “I hope he can,” said Dupin. “We three are only human, after all, and a dozen infants will be born in Paris at the very moment of our death—but there are books in that room that are irreplaceable. The two lost volumes of Sanchuniathon alone….”

  I was shoulder-deep in slime by the time he finished, and thought that there was nothing left to do but look up at the stars, and try to take what comfort I could from my own utter irrelevance within the universe, let alone the plenum.

  I felt the worms writhing inside my flesh again. This time, they reached my heart.

  I felt Ysolde’s hand slip out of mine, and Dupin’s too.

  I could not hold on. There was no longer anything to hold on to. I was disintegrating, in body and mind alike.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  THE JOLLY ROGER

  As my molten head went under the surface of the now-oceanic liquid, and the flesh of the worms flooded my mouth, squirming through my lungs and brain, I raised my arms instinctively, as drowning men do.

  Incredibly, both wrists were instantly gripped, and I was suddenly hauled out of the morass again, spitting and spluttering, by strong arms, regaining my solidity and integrity as I came. I was hauled up and up—further than seemed probable, if merely human arms had reached down to grab me—and was dragged over a bulwark on to a wooden deck. The wooden deck seemed to be sucking the worms out of me, although that might have been an illusion. In all probability, they were simply losing their purchase again.

  The help that Ysolde had promised to summon had arrived. No matter how impossible it seemed, even in terms of dream-logic, help had arrived, gliding through the margins of the world as certain mythical entities can.

  Cthulhu had not yet triumphed over human resistance, no matter how easily other matter had yielded to its dread tide.

  With that thought in mind, I rubbed my sticky eyes—which had closed reflexively as I went under—and opened them gingerly, peering into the darkness in search of some cryptogram of white fire.

  There was white fire a-plenty, but it was in the form of a flaming cross, mounted on a mast. Above the flaming cross was a flag, whose silver symbols stood out clearly, inscribed by reflected light. They depicted a skull and crossbones. My rescuer was flying the Jolly Roger.

  Angria flies it now, Ysolde had said. The scholarly warlord had given the original back to Edward England, after taking it from John Taylor, but he had not surrendered the symbolism, or the right to deploy it.

  My rescuers, I should say, in the plural, for Angria was far from being alone—and I should also have said our rescuers, for I was not alone either. I had not been the first to be hauled out of the ocean of uncanny flesh, nor was I the last. Ysolde helped me to my feet while the two men who had hauled me out did the same for Dupin, and then for Chapelain.

  The ship seemed to be fully crewed, with a captain and a mate—or perhaps two captains. Although one seemed to be a wraith compounded out of unnaturally sturdy mist, the other apparently still owned his flesh, albeit that he was as thin as a rake, seemingly on the brink of starvation, and clad only in a loincloth.

  “Not such a bad man, after all,” I said to Ysolde, who was staring at the wraithlike ghost, trying to remember who he was.

  Jack Taylor was looking back at her, with eyes of mist that held more expression than any eyes of flesh and fluid I had ever seen. He had been dead a long time, but something of him still survived, perhaps by courtesy of Indian magic. Having been born into a Protestant family before lapsing into agnosticism, I had never believed in the Roman notion of purgatory and posthumous repentance, but this, I knew, was a penitent soul—not under the pressure of any repentance forced by torture or divine bullying, but of his own free will.

  Ysolde had called for help, but I think he would have come anyway, had he been able to do so.

  That he was able to do so was surely due to Angria, the captain of the ship—who was, I suspect, not dead yet, and still endeavouring to find his way in life, through a treacherous labyrinth of negotiation and deception. While his henchman looked at Ysolde, he kept his eyes on a different prize—save for one belief glance in my direction.

  I only imagined that I could read minds, taking the gift for granted as one can in a dream, but I still think, even at a long removed, that my intuition regarding John Taylor’s thoughts was accurate. Angria’s dark eyes were far more opaque, and even though they actually met mine, for a split second, there was still a mystery behind them. He too had come of his own free will, though, glad to have been summoned, glad to be able to make a small payment on a debt that he had carelessly incurred when he was a younger and more reckless man. He, I think, probably did believe in metempsychosis, and in karma too, and knew that there were moral accounts to be balanced before it would be safe to die.

  Then I got to my feet, steadied myself on the cluttered deck, and turned to Dupin. “For a moment there,” I said, “I almost believed that this was not a dream, and that I was actually going to die.”

  “This is most certainly a dream,” he told me, grimly, “but that does not mean that we have an automatic entitlement to wake up. I suspect that better men than us have died in dreams of this dire sort.”

  It was Angria, not John Taylor, who screeched orders at the crew and brought the ghost-ship around—headed, not for the island of the megaliths, which seemed more distant now than it had been while we were still making progress toward it, but for the remainder of the house, which now seemed an island itself, consisting of nothing but the second storey, the mansards and the crumbling roof. I could see the heads of people in the mansards through gaps in the tiles. I tried to count them but could not be sure that there were five.

  The principal intention of our rescuers, I was convinced, was to save the man they had known as Edward England. They had been direly treacherous men in their time—pirates as bloodthirsty as any that had ever committed mass murder—but they were working on the side of the angels now. They wanted to save England, his servants, and perhaps the books too.

  Oberon Breisz did not see matters that way. He undoubtedly thought that Angria and John Taylor both had old scores held against him, and were coming to settle them while Cthulhu had weakened him. It was Taylor who shouted out to him, trying to reassure him, but it would not have made a difference even if his old mentor John Dee had instructed him to be calm and trusting. As Dupin had observed, there comes a time when broken composure turns entirely to emotion—usually to uncontrollable wrath.

  Breisz paused in the tiresome work of keeping Cthulhu’s agents at bay long enough to curse the ship, and everyone sailing in her. Perhaps, in that reckless action, the shoggoths lent him a little of their own force, but I doubt it. Cthulhu’s agents were not really agents, in a pedantic sense, because Cthulhu was not the kind of entity that was possessed of agency, in a pedantic sense. At any rate, the core malevolence of the curse was Edward England’s, and his alone. A storm wind ripped through the sails and rigging of the ghost, and might have shattered her masts and hull had it not been for the glaring cross, which soaked up much of t
he blast.

  The ship survived the maleficent formula. Had I ducked, I would have stayed safely on her deck. As it was, however, I was tumbled backwards into the bottom of a small, shallow jolly-boat tucked into a covert between the foredeck and the bridge. As the ship lurched, the angry wind snatched the jolly-boat into the air, and dropped it overboard.

  Fortunately, it landed bottom down, and floated. Unfortunately, I had no oars—no means of propulsion, or of steering.

  The jolly-boat was whipped away from the ship by a wayward current, and tentacles immediately began reaching up from a surface that now seemed much less viscous, groping for me and forcing me to flatten myself out in the bottom of the boat. I took my gun out of my pocket again, intending to blast any tentacle that contrived to wind itself around me, but none did while I stayed low, even though bulky shadows rose up and fell back to either side of the boat.

  I had given up all hope of saving myself from the nightmare by waking up, but I told myself that it could not last forever, and that I was far from being alone in the conflict.

  If the tentacles could not quite contrive to grasp me, though, they could certainly grasp the boat, and they had strength enough to crack and splinter the hull. I could almost feel the little craft coming apart, and risked raising my head to see where the ship was, in the hope that some further rescue might be possible from that direction.

  It was not. I could see the shining cross and the skull-and-crossbones lit from below, but they were a long way off now. I could also see Oberon Breisz’s lighted window behind it, but the voices that carried to me over the tortured surface were distorted in passing, and bore more resemblance to he muttering of demons that human beings engaged in urgent but constructive negotiation.

  By way of compensation, however—and I felt entitled to a measure of compensation, by now—the hectic flight of the boat from Angria’s ship and Breisz’s unsteady island had bought me a great deal closer to the megaliths, where Madame Lacuzon and the Comte de Saint-Germain were still waiting, eager to help if their assistance ever became practicable. I could not hope that the seething and swarming sea would deliver me to within their arms’ reach of its own accord, but now that the liquid was indeed authentically liquid, I wondered whether I might be able to swim through it in spite of its deadly infestation.

  I had no time to reflect at length; if the boat split open beneath me I would surely be doomed, so I pocketed my revolver yet again, leapt to my feet, ran the length of the jolly-boat—which was not, alas very far—and dived into the water, poised to swim as fast as I could as soon as I surfaced.

  Tentacles and eel-like entities immediately tried to capture me, but they were clumsy as well as blind, and the greater danger came from the mathematical omnipresence beyond those crude artefacts, which was ambitious to get inside me again. Once more, I felt the algebraic worms invading my flesh—but this time, instead of starting at the legs and working their way up, they struck directly at the head, and dug into my defenceless brain.

  As soon as they made contact with my thoughts, they seemed to metamorphose into something even less imaginatively graspable, but far more inimical. There had been a moment during my second encounter with the shoggoths when the most distant aspect of them had seemed to be musical as well as mathematical, and now that aspect became foremost in its insistence, mounting a full frontal attack on reason itself—but I had heard demonic music more than once, and my reflexive reaction had been educated, at least to a degree. It hurt me, but it did not damn me.

  In was on the very brink of madness and annihilation—but then, in addition to my own resistance, I heard shouting of a peculiarly rhythmic kind, and I realized that there were two voices nearby, howling in unison. It was not mellifluous, by any means, but it was virtuous music, not merely to my ears but—more importantly—to my fugitive consciousness. As another castaway might have clung to a spar of driftwood with all his might, I clung to that barbarous shanty with all the force of my sanity—and I truly believe that it literally pulled me to the shore, where the two singers seized me avidly and dragged me from the glutinous waves on to the solid ground within the ancient circle.

  Saint-Germain howled with triumph—not so much because he thought my life worth saving but simply because the victory really had been a triumph of his magic over malign circumstance, of which he might be proud, even if he had been forced to join forces with the wise woman to achieve it.

  Madame Lacuzon said nothing; I was not Dupin. Saint-Germain, on the other hand, pulled me to my feet and demanded: “What in Heaven’s name is going on over here?”

  “It’s a ghost-ship,” I said, “come to redeem a little of the debt its crewmen owe to human kindness. The repentant pirates will save everyone if they can—but I’m not sure that Oberon Breisz, alias Edward England, alias Edward Kelley, will consent to be saved. When I was blown overboard, he still seemed very intent on going down with his library. Dupin will save the books if he can, though—you may depend on that.”

  “What about the gold?” the Comte demanded, intemperately. “Is that the Flaming Cross of Goa on the ghost-ship’s mast?”

  “Very likely,” I said, “since Angria is the ghost-ship’s master, and Olivier Levasseur had to return the cross to him—but I doubt that you’ll ever get your hands on it, or even the meager fraction of the treasure that is still somewhere in the house…unless, of course, you volunteer to join the ghost-ship’s crew. Mind you, they might refuse to take you, as you’re no mariner. There are conventions to be observed, after all.”

  “Damn it!” he said. “Hell’s bells and buckets of blood!” He seemed to be practising what passes for pirate parlance on the Parisian stage, but if he was momentarily tempted to pursue the golden cross even on to a ghost-ship, he rapidly abandoned the idea. “So the treasure was still here, after all,” he murmured. “To get so close and then to have to stand and watch…what exactly am I watching?”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s just a hallucination: a stray madness that was wandering the winds of the world in search of victims, and found us. It will all be gone in the morning…if we live that long, and can contrive to wake up. And you didn’t really get close—I’ll wager you only got this far because Madame Lacuzon was desperate for whatever help she could find, in the hope of pulling Dupin from the quagmire.”

  “She certainly didn’t try to keep me out, for once,” Saint-Germain admitted. “If that ship doesn’t turn away soon, you know, the monsters in the sea will have them all. Can ghost-ships perish, do you suppose, or will it simply reappear in some distant ocean if it founders here?”

  “In this arena,” I said, “I suspect that it can go down with all hands…except perhaps for Angria, who might still be alive and asleep, somewhere else in the great wide world, still capable of finding his way home if he loses his dream-vessel.”

  The ship did not turn away. I saw the shadows, at least, leap from the windows of the mansards on to her deck—but so far as I could tell, Oberon Breisz’s window was still firmly closed. I think he was still chanting—but he was alone, with no one to form a chorus.

  And the remains of the house did eventually go down, dragged into a vast whirlpool.

  The ghost-ship immediately began circling the vortex, whirled helplessly around by the furious water. Silently, I began counting the seconds while it battled against the avid mouth, and had reached thirteen before Angria’s loyal crewmen contrived to steer it clear of the rotating funnel, with the aid of a seemingly-haphazard gust of wind.

  Then the ship set a course for us—and seemed to be skimming over the waves, with all the speed expectable of an artful pirate. The monsters were helpless now, or seemingly so. The ghost-ship had the upper hand, even though its pickings had been thinner than its captain hoped.

  It reached us within minutes, and crewmen threw ropes by which we were able to make it fast to the megaliths. Then people began leaping down from the deck on to the solid ground.

  I was there beside Madame
Lacuzon to catch Dupin when he landed, and prevent him sprawling on the ground in an ungainly fashion. He was overjoyed to find me. “We thought you were lost!” he said

  “Did you get Breisz away before his house finally sank?” I asked, in case my impression had been mistaken.

  “No,” said Dupin, “and he took the books with him, alas. We saved his servants, though. That’s something, I suppose.” It was an unusually generous concession on his part. I knew how devastated he must be by the thought of the lost treasure, far beyond the price of gold and diamonds in his eyes.

  We found Chapelain then, and checked that he was uninjured—but he was looking up at the deck of the pirate ship, and had no time for us. He was looking at Ysolde Leonys, who was poised on the balustrade of the forecastle.

  “Don’t jump!” he yelled. “Stay aboard!”

  John Taylor’s ghost was clambering up on to the forecastle, evidently with the same thought in mind—but Ysolde took no notice. She jumped—perhaps because she was foolish, and perhaps because she felt that she had no choice. She had summoned help for us, because we were under her protection; she had not summoned it for herself, because she did not believe that she had any entitlement to rescue.

  Dupin and Madame Lacuzon ran to help her, and succeeded in preventing her from slipping back into the water, although she could not stand up. Dupin retained her on her knees, and she gripped his hand convulsively, clasping it to her upper torso, as once she had clasped her stolen medallion. The medallion was long gone, having served its purpose and used up its residual power.

  “Read me, Monsieur Dupin,” she croaked. “Read me, for Heaven’s sake—I will pay the price.”

  Then she collapsed; his efforts to hold her up were unavailing.

  Chapelain knelt down beside her, but he must have known that it was hopeless. He picked her up and carried her into the circle, and there was still enough life in her to allow her to whisper something in his ear—but that was as much as Dupin and I saw, for we whirled around as a fearful clamor went up from the deck of the ghost-ship.