Beyond the ship’s figurehead—which was shaped as a bare-breasted woman with snakes for hair and claws for hands—the water of the sea was seething, as if another whirlpool were about to open up. Then a head burst through the surface, and a gigantic body began to rise up from the sticky waves. It was humanoid in from, but its flesh was compounded out of the flesh of the thousands of shoggoths—or the single shoggoth reflected thousands of times—that had digested and excreted Oberon Breisz’s encrypted enclave on the margin of reality.
It was, in terms of its form, not much different from the shoggoth-possessed footpads who had attacked me in Saint-Sulpice—but when it had risen fully from the water, it was thirty feet tall. It could probably have stepped over the ghost-ship, if it had been so inclined, but in fact it walked around her prow, shattering the figurehead with a casual flip of its left hand. With its right forefinger, it stabbed one of the glowing megaliths that had previously barred the way to its smaller brethren—and the megalith shattered, forcing everyone within the circle to duck the flying splinters.
The gap was wide enough for the giant to step through, but it seemed to be in a mood for destruction, and it flicked another megalith with the index-finger of its left hand. That one shattered too.
The giant bent down then, and stared at us with its baleful eyes: human eyes in which we could see all the slimy tentacles in the world, and, beyond them, the draconian entity that that was numerical and symbolic magic not-quite-incarnate.
The giant’s face was the one that had belonged to Oberon Breisz. Nor was it only Breisz’s face that the monster had: it had his wrath, too. The shoggoths that had destroyed the enclave had been blind, devoid of any real purpose, merely following the dictates of their nature. This one was different. This one had human malevolence.
It was all unnecessary. Breisz could have been saved. He could have taken advantage of the ghost-ship, accepted the assistance of his old comrades and adversaries—but there was too much bitterness in him, too much gall, and too much vanity. Centuries of life had dried up all the humility that had once been in him, and had left him a creature of arrogant obsession, a miser in every sense of the term.
Now, he was all wrath, all resentment, all chagrin. He wanted revenge on the person he believed—falsely—to be responsible for the death of his dreams. He wanted to kill Auguste Dupin.
Now that the protective circle had been breached, it seemed that nothing could stop him, no matter how loudly Dupin’s guardian might howl her spells, in company with Saint-Germain. In fact, though, Saint-Germain had backed away very hurriedly. The gorgon was alone in her defiance—except, of course, for her master himself…and me.
Glad, at last, to have an unambiguous opportunity, I took out my revolver and fired, five times.
The shots should have been effective; the giant was solid, after all, and the bullets ripping through his flesh did material damage. Alas, the giant was too solid. The bullets lost impetus within its mass, lodged in its blubber, unable to reach any vital or vulnerable point of its perverted anatomy.
The giant simply soaked up the bullets. It did not even deign to recognize me as a nuisance, let alone a threat, so intent was it on reaching the object of its ire.
Madame Lacuzon would have stood her ground; the giant would have had to trample her to get to Dupin—but Dupin did not want that. He stepped swiftly in front of her, and in a loud but perfectly steady voice, he recited: “Ph’nglui mglw’nat Cthulhu R’laiyeh wgah’ngl fhtaign….” And then he added the seventh set of seven sounds, which I shall not reproduce, because they are not to be written down in any form but the one in which they were hidden.
I remembered what he had said about there being a price to pay for such usage—but I remembered, too, what Ysolde Leonys had promised him with her dying breath.
Dupin assured me, later, that he had been working on the problem incessantly, in his mind, ever since he had first seen Chapelain’s copy of the cryptogram, and that he had solved the mystery by means of logic alone. He had not needed to read it in Ysolde’s magical flesh, even had he been able to do so—which he could not, for he was a rational man, even in his nightmares. For once, I did not believe him. It seemed more likely to me that Saint-Germain was right, and that he was really a secret magician, posing as a skeptic in order to put potential rivals and adversaries off the scent. But what do I know?
I know, at least, that the complete formula stopped the giant in its tracks, re-encrypting Oberon Breisz and the shoggoth with whom he had fused.
The giant did not go down, but it froze, and then slowly dissolved into oily mist, while the ghost-ship cast off its moorings and sailed away. It had to go, I imagine, while it still had a sea of sorts on which to sail. Its captain did not want to run aground on the Grand’Lande.
Then I lay down and went to sleep—again—extremely glad that the danger was over at last.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
LEVASSEUR’S TREASURE
When the Comte de Saint-Germain finally succeeded in shaking me awake, I was not at all surprised to find that I was lying on the ground at the foot of one of the surviving megaliths in the stone circle. I would have been extremely astonished to find myself back in my bed in Oberon Breisz’s house, having been summoned to breakfast. I would have been equally astonished even to see Obern Breisz’s house, perched upon the summit of its steep hill. Even the hill was not there now. Instead of rising ground there was a rounded depression, at the bottom of which was a sullen stretch of water. I suspected that it was one of those deceptively small lakes that rumor would one day call bottomless.
“Chapelain says that we should bury the woman here,” Saint-Germain told me. “Fortunately, I brought a spade with me, in case I had occasion to dig for buried reassure. You’ll have to take your turn, for the ground is stony and more than a trifle recalcitrant, and none of us has hands hardened to such labor by long experience in the fields. Breisz’s servants have all decamped, alas, else we could have paid them to do the job with a little silver.”
“Is there no better ground to be found?” I asked. “Surely the soil is softer nearer to the lake.”
“Apparently,” sad Saint-Germain, with a sigh, “she told Chapelain before she died exactly where she wanted to be buried. Like all physicians, he’s well used to burying his mistakes, and seems to have a code of conduct with regard to honoring their last wishes.”
The spot that Ysolde had allegedly chosen was in the shadow of one of the unbroken megaliths. It was slightly different from the others, in being slightly thinner and top-heavy. It was, I suppose, as worthy a tombstone as many I had seen.
Someone had laid a sheet over hr body, but I lifted it briefly to look at her. She was exactly as I had seen her the first time, in the ward at Bicêtre: ugly, old before her time, with sallow skin, thinning hair and syphilitic sores around her lips. All glamour had gone.
“What will you tell Leuret?” I asked Chapelain, when I had the chance.
“That she died,” Chapelain said, simply. “He will not be surprised—and he will not think it matters in the least whether she passed away in Paris or Brittany, or where she is buried. Better here, I think, than in an unmarked ditch outside the walls of Paris, with a dozen assorted whores and lunatics for company.”
“If the story she told us was really true,” I observed, “then she had a truly remarkable life.”
“If it was not true,” Chapelain replied, “it was hardly less remarkable for its falsehood…but I certainly shall not report it to Leuret as an instance of infectious madness. I cannot, in all honesty, tell him that she died sane, or even at peace…but I shall refrain from going into detail.”
“By the time we get back to Paris,” I said, “we shall all be taking comfort in the knowledge that it was, after all, merely a hallucination…one whose like, with luck, we shall never experience again.”
“Amen to that,” he said.
By the time it was my turn to dig, there’re was not much further to go, and
the ground had become a little easier, free of pebbles and grass-roots. The worst problem was that I had to throw the earth that I shifted out of the deepening hole, which required considerable effort. I was soon sweating, and cursing the dirt that was spattering my clothing. My spare clothes had, I assumed, gone down with the impossible house. At least I had transferred my journal, my purse and my portfolio to the jacket I was wearing, along with the revolver that had proved, in the circumstances, to be impotent.
I was just about to give up when the spade hit the box.
As treasure-chests go, it was nothing very spectacular—not the kind of decoratively brass-bound chest one seen on stage in the Boulevard du Temple, but merely a rectangular wooden box, already soft with rot. It was locked, but I smashed it open with a single blow once Saint-Germain and I had lifted it out of the grave. It was small, but it was heavy.
When we had sorted out the contents from the wooden shards, we counted forty gold pieces and twenty small diamonds.
“Is that all!” Saint-German complained. “Legend spoke of millions!”
“Legend always speaks of millions,” Dupin observed, softly. “Talk is cheap—but those sad remains, I suspect, were dearly won.”
“But forty coins, damn it!” Saint-Germain complained. “That’s only ten apiece!”
“Eight,” Dupin corrected.
“You can’t….” the Comte began, but stopped when he looked around, met Madame Lacuzon’s eyes, and decided that we could. He shrugged his shoulders, and muttered: “It’s as well there weren’t thirty-nine, and nineteen diamonds, else we’d have been haggling over them for hours.”
I contemplated suggesting that we should deduct the costs of the expedition before making the split, but decided against it. As Saint-Germain had said, the arithmetic was too convenient to warrant that kind of petty disruption.
“But if she really did know that it was here,” Chapelain said, “why did she leave it where it was? Why live as a common streetwalker in Paris, when she knew the location of a treasure—a treasure that is certainly enough for one person’s needs, even if it seems less than a fortune when split five ways?”
“She did not dare come back, until the spur of imminent death left her to choice,” I said, simply. “Besides which, she felt that she deserved her punishment. She was little more than a child, after all, no matter when she was born.”
Dupin, of course, was utterly miserable, having found nothing but gold and diamonds.
“Not a single manuscript saved,” I observed, sympathetically. “The Necronomicon, lost. The only existing copy of the Claves Demonicae, lost—and hundreds more. To see them, and touch them, and then to lose them…it must be hard.”
“It feels hard,” he admitted. “But we are wiser for the experience, and must be content with that. We’re alive after all…and a little richer.” The gold and gems were, of course, a great deal more significant in the context of his economic condition than they seemed to Saint-Germain…and to Madame Lacuzon, they must, indeed, seem a veritable fortune.
“We should complete the burial,” I said. “Which of us will stand in for the priest?”
No one rushed to volunteer; after a moment’s hesitation, Chapelain decided that the duty was his, and improvised as best he could.
When the makeshift ceremony was complete, Dupin took me aside, and said: “Are we entitled to keep this treasure? Are we not pirates ourselves if we do?”
“I suppose the Portuguese ambassador would be happy to take it off our hands,” I said, “but where does the chain of piracy begin and end? Who really has a legitimate claim of ownership? And we have undergone a trial by ordeal, have we not? Why not take your prize, and use it wisely?”
He stiffened himself then, and said: “You’re right.”
“It’s an all-round victory for reason and piracy,” I said, supportively. “We win the treasure, even if we do have to share it with Saint-Germain—and you now know the whole solution to the cryptogram, in case you should ever require it again.”
“God forbid,” he said.
“The problem is,” I said soberly, “that He doesn’t seem to.”
“No,” said Dupin, “and that is why we must strive to live as best we can, within the laws of nature as we find them.”
* * * *
MUCH LATER, LONG after our return to Paris, I had a dream. In the dream, I was back on the ghost-ship, with Angria and Jack Taylor. We were all three standing on the bridge, with the skull and crossbones fluttering overhead, looking toward the prow, where the misty figure of Ysolde—the beautiful Ysolde, not the wreck—was standing in company with a ghost that I knew to be the Tristan de Léonais of her dream. I could not see the expressions on their faces, for I could only see them in profile, but I knew that they felt serene as they looked out over the infinite ocean.
It was only a dream. It meant nothing. I can’t help hoping, though, that when I am dead and gone, somewhere in the world, someone else will still be capable of dreaming the same dream, uncomprehendingly but accurately, thus preserving and protecting it from its ultimate decay into oblivion. I have done my part by writing it down, albeit in a language that will one day stand in need of deciphering before it can be understood, if it ever is, by other-than-human eyes.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Brian Stableford was born in Yorkshire in 1948. He taught at the University of Reading for several years, but is now a full-time writer. He has written many science-fiction and fantasy novels, including The Empire of Fear, The Werewolves of London, Year Zero, The Curse of the Coral Bride, The Stones of Camelot, and Prelude to Eternity. Collections of his short stories include a long series of Tales of the Biotech Revolution, and such idiosyncratic items as Sheena and Other Gothic Tales and The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. He has written numerous nonfiction books, including Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890-1950; Glorious Perversity: The Decline and Fall of Literary Decadence; Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia; and The Devil’s Party: A Brief History of Satanic Abuse. He has contributed hundreds of biographical and critical articles to reference books, and has also translated numerous novels from the French language, including books by Paul Féval, Albert Robida, Maurice Renard, and J. H. Rosny the Elder.
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