The Cthulhu Encryption

by Brian Stableford

Mention of the fly seemed to remind Chapelain that he was extremely tired, and he stood up to go. I fetched his coat, hat and stick myself, not having quite accustomed myself to the fact that I now had a manservant to take care of such things in my stead, for whom I only had to ring. Naturally, the doctor volunteered to drop Dupin off at his apartment on the way—although it was not “on the way” in a strictly geographical sense—and Dupin naturally accepted.

  “I’ll see you in the morning,” Chapelain said to me, as he bid me goodnight. “Noon, at the latest.”

  “I’ll be here,” I promised.

  “So will I,” Dupin put in. He had put the cryptogram in his jacket pocket, and I suspected that he would be poring over it for hours when he got back, comparing it to those in his esoteric texts in the hope of finding clues to its origin and meaning.

  When they had gone, I went to my own bookshelves and pulled out the latest issues of the Bulletin du Bibliophile, and hunted through them in search of any reference to Roger Bacon, John Dee, the Bishop of Goa, the Key of Solomon or a text called the Necronomicon. There was nothing, so I allowed myself to the sidetracked by loving accounts of rare incunabular editions of Ars Moriendi and Theuerdank—which seemed, on the whole, to be saner and more reliable documents than any magic spell scrawled on a streetwalker’s pox-scarred back.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE SAGE OF BICÊTRE

  Inevitably, once I had written my diary—a longer entry than I had made for a month—and taken myself off to bed, I immediately thought of a dozen other questions that I ought to have raised regarding cryptograms, grimoires and buried treasures, but I figured that they could wait until morning, and went to sleep peacefully enough. If I had any dreams, I forgot them as soon as I woke up, before I could scribble so much so a single note about their content.

  I do have a tendency to forget dreams easily—even those I have while awake, which François Leuret would call hallucinations and identify as preliminary signs of madness—and that is now the principal reason why I am making such records as this one, based on diary entries made at the time. The entries themselves are insufficient, for memories require reinforcement if they are to survive, and narrative coherency too. Poe is long dead, alas, so I no longer have anyone to whom I might confide my raw materials; I have no alternative but to do such work as might be done myself.

  I hoped that Dupin would come early, so that I could ask him to clarify certain murky issues before Chapelain arrived, but I assume that he was carrying out preliminary research of his own, and not in the pages of the Bulletin du Bibliophile. In the end, he turned up less than five minutes before Chapelain arrived, even though Chapelain was not far in advance of the time he had specified as the latest moment of his arrival. At least I remembered to let Bihan answer the door. I had to keep reminding myself not to think of him as “Monsieur Bihan,” even though it was permissible to continue thinking of Madame Bihan as “Madame Bihan.”

  My problems in dealing with servants did not arise from my being American—there had been plenty of servants around when I was growing up in Boston or living in New York—but rather from a private awkwardness. I had sometimes been tempted ask Chapelain about it, but I always refrained, lest doing so should somehow elevate it to the rank of a “symptom.” Chapelain was not an alienist, strictly speaking, but every mesmerist is continually confronted with problems of mental illness, especially since the reform of the lunatic asylums has usurped madness, very forcefully, as a medical problem. I had suffered hallucinations enough in my time to have some slight fear of my sanity being bought into question.

  We live in a strange world; although I could make no particular claims on my own behalf, I was always well aware of the paradoxicality of the fact that Auguste Dupin, who was surely the sanest man in the world, and a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur to boot, was often called mad by the ignorant, simply because of his intelligence, his scholarly interests, his open mind and the awesome power of his imagination. I had not read Leuret’s Fragmens myself, but I had read other works of a similar stripe, and I was well aware that he was not the only man in Paris to consider the supposed madness of poets and artists to be in direct proportion to their imaginative power, and dreaded to think what his opinion might have been of my good friend Poe.

  Once we were settled in the fiacre, the opportunity was there to fill in some of the gaps left by the previous evening’s conversation, but Dupin was rarely as talkative in the mornings as he was in the evenings, darkness rather than daylight being his true element, and I could sense his resistance. He probably had not slept for more than an hour, although I judged from his lack of exuberance that he had made little or no progress in deciphering the cryptogram. He was also impatient to see the mysterious ex-Queen of the Underworld for himself, and examine the inscription that Chapelain was strangely reluctant to call a tattoo, and his impatience further augmented his peevishness.

  In any case, Bicêtre is less than four kilometers south of the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and once we had got to the end of the Boulevard Saint-Michel and passed through the barrière the roads were relatively clear in that direction, so the journey time was too short to allow any detailed discussion.

  I was content to wait and see how matters developed, gearing myself up to meet the so-called sage of Bicêtre and see his reformed empire for the first time. The morning had started cold, but now that the sun was up, relatively uninhibited by cloud, the temperature had become quite mild, and the journey was pleasant enough. It is not until one passes the barrière that one realizes how stale the air in Paris is, by comparison with that of the surrounding countryside.

  What immediately struck me about Dr. Leuret, when we were eventually introduced to him, was that he did not seem to be a well man himself. He was in his mid-forties and sufficiently robust in his build, but he did not seem to me to be the kind of man likely to attain his allotted threescore years and ten. His complexion was sallow, his hair and beard already three-quarters grey, and his eyes slightly jaundiced. His career, I imagined, had taken a heavy toll on him. One cannot spend one’s life in the company of the terminally-diseased without becoming corrupted oneself. He was, however, nervously active and clearly very interested to meet us…or, at least, to meet Auguste Dupin.

  “I’ve heard a great deal about you, Monsieur,” he told Dupin. “Pierre is always quoting your opinions—he certainly holds them in higher esteem than my own, and, if I measure him rightly, higher than Esquirol’s or Lélut’s.” Esquirol had long been the guiding star of the Saltpêtrière and a leading pioneer of modern psyhological analysis; Lélut’s was the leading name in that specialism since Esquirol’s death

  “I’m merely a layman,” Dupin assured him, although I could see him swelling slightly with pride under the influence of the compliment. “I never had the honor of meting Dr. Esquirol, alas, and remain in awe of Dr. Lélut, whose Du demon de Socrate is one of the most fascinating philosophical texts of recent years….along with your own Fragmens, of course.” He knew how to pay a compliment when the occasion warranted it, and the recipients of his flattery rarely noticed his oddly mechanical manner of delivery.

  “Our case-studies do seem to have been markedly different,” Leuret remarked. “My good friend Monsieur Groix tells me that he has often consulted you in mysterious criminal matters.”

  “Occasionally,” Dupin admitted. His dealings with the Prefect of Police were mysterious in themselves, and I was surprised to hear that Groix had mentioned them at all—but I assumed that Leuret was exaggerating slightly, for effect.

  “I have looked after some famous murderers in my time,” the alienist said, “But that was when I was at Charenton. Things have changed at Bicêtre, mercifully. I hope you will be impressed.”

  The formalities over, the tour began. Leuret did not want to take us to the ward where Ysolde Leonys was confined without showing off his reforms in advance, so we visited the music room first, and called in on two of the educational classes then in progress�
��although the latter seemed to involve little more than elementary lessons in reading and simple arithmetic. Dupin was impatient, and Chapelain had to invoke all his diplomatic talents to persuade Leuret to escort us to the relevant ward in reasonable time.

  When we did reach the ward, I must confess that I had something of a shock. Having heard so much about Pinel’s reforms and Leuret’s continuation of them, I had not expected the sight to be quite so horrific. Leuret was quick to point out how well-lighted the room was, and what facilities had been made for its ventilation, but the fact that the high windows were better than mere slits and that ventilation-shafts had been excavated in the outer wall did not seem to me to have made overmuch impact on the prevailing odors of excrement and putrefaction—which could hardly have been less than powerful, considering the crowded state of the ward. Had there been half as many beds, there might have been some slight hope of maintaining fugitive standards of cleanliness, but there was no way that an army of laundresses could have kept up with the task confronting them.

  Leuret hastened to tell us how unfortunate and inconvenient it was that so many individuals on the threshold of death either beat a path to his door or were dumped there. “But what can I do?” He said, mournfully. “Other people may turn them away, but ours is the last resort. We have to take them in and accommodate them as best we can. The other wards are much better than this one, even though they too are overcrowded. Paris is a huge city….”

  And you have no Heracles to clean your Augean stables,” Dupin said, as sympathetically as he could. “You are doing a heroic job, Dr. Leuret, in impossible circumstances. That is the truest heroism of them all.”

  I will concede that there was no screaming going on at the moment when we appeared, and relatively little sobbing and whimpering—but that, I suspect, was because our arrival provided a welcome distraction, and provoked a great deal of interest, from the patients and orderlies alike. There was certainly a great deal of agitation. Even though our arrival at the hospital had been unannounced, we had been there long enough for all manner of rumors to go around, and I doubt that there was anyone on the ward who did not know by now that two more respectable gentlemen had come to contemplate the mystery that was Ysolde Leonys. I suspected that the celebrity would not increase her popularity, and would probably lead to an amplification of the prevailing whispers of diabolism.

  The women on the ward were, almost without exception, quiet and docile; their agitation was almost entirely confined to hardly-audible inarticulate muttering and ill-suppressed quivering. Whether that was due to the fact that they were heavily dosed with laudanum, the everpresence of patrolling orderlies, or merely the fact that most of them were in such an obvious state of total despair that it was a wonder their hearts could still muster the energy to beat, I could not tell. The great majority were old, although I suspect that some of them looked a great deal older than strict chronology might have implied—but that was presumably an effect of the sorting process by which they had been allocated to the ward rather than a statistical summary of the hospital’s population as a whole.

  Dupin was not a man to let his emotions show, and he did not react to the initial sight of the ward with any evident expression of horror, but I knew him well, and I could see the tightening of his facial muscles as he controlled himself. I knew that he was affected, perhaps more deeply than I was, by the sheer ugliness and hopelessness of the situation. I could see that Chapelain was nervous about what Dupin might say, and perhaps a little ashamed of the fact that he had so long grown used to such sights himself that they no longer had any measurable effect on him.

  All Dupin said, however, was: “Which bed is it?”

  Leuret led us to the bed in question. It was no different from any of the others, although it was placed—evidently by design—in a corner, and there seemed to be nothing to distinguish the woman lying on it. The single thin and filthy blanket with which her body was covered did not conceal its emaciation, and the syphilitic sores on her face did not, alas, mark her condition out as significantly worse than that of her neighbors to the one side where she had neighbors—indeed, the woman in the next bed was unconscious, and seemed likely to die at any moment.

  Ysolde Leonys’ eyes were also closed, and she seemed to be unaware of our presence at first, but I did not get the impression that she was actually asleep. She seemed, rather, to be removing herself mentally from her environment, refusing to admit that she was where she actually was.

  Leuret stepped forward first, and tried to attract her attention. He addressed her, with scrupulous politeness, as “Mademoiselle Leonys.”

  She did not open her eyes. Then Chapelain stepped forward and spoke, reminding her that he had visited her yesterday, and telling her that he had brought other visitors to see her. That must have piqued her drowsy curiosity. She could not have been expecting visitors, and cannot have had any others, save for visiting alienists.

  When she opened her eyes, only by a crack, at first, she looked at Chapelain first. “Merlin,” she said, as if the two syllables were explanation enough of his presence. Then her gaze alighted on me. She looked at me in the strangest way, as if weighing me up and trying to place me. Finally, she murmured: “Tom.”

  As soon as she had named me, she glanced back at Chapelain, and smiled, apparently in gratitude. Leuret was still trying to attract her attention, and was so close as to obstruct her view somewhat, but she paid him no heed at all, trying to look past him.

  Dupin had to move sideways in order to let her have a clear sight of him, and was clearly hoping for some sort of reaction when she did—but he could not possibly have expected the nature or intensity of the reaction he got.

  Her face changed completely—so completely that it seemed to me to be more than a mere change of expression, although it could not, in logical terms, have been anything more. One often says of people, carelessly, that “their eyes lit up,” but it seemed to me that her eyes really did acquire a literal illumination, perhaps caused by a sudden surge of her latent fever. I cannot say that she smiled again, but a new life of some sort suddenly entered into her, and a new consciousness too.

  “Tristan!” she said. “They told me you would come, but I hardly dared believe…I thought I would need to die first…or am I dead?”

  Dr. Leuret wanted to assure her that she was not dead as yet, but Chapelain took hold of his arm and drew him gently back, bidding him to be silent in some private non-verbal language known to alienists. Chapelain only wanted to give Dupin more room to be seen, but Dupin took advantage of the cleared space actually to kneel down by the bed.

  I would not have set my knee upon that miry floor unless literally forced—and I do not think of myself as an unusually fastidious man—but when Dupin is gripped by fascination, mere matters of dirt become irrelevant…and the fact that the woman had addressed him as “Tristan” had very obviously caught his attention.

  I knew, without Leuret or Chapelain having to tell me, that the woman was still in the mesmeric trance in which Chaplain had left her, and that she was obviously hallucinating. I guessed that Leuret’s first impulse, on observing the fact, was to try to dispel the hallucination and return her to reality—but he had probably tried to do that before, after Chapelain had left, and failed. My sympathies, however, were with Chapelain, and with Dupin. Looking at that dismal wreck of a woman, hovering on the brink of death, I thought it kinder by far to leave her hallucinated until she actually passed away, and to pander to her illusion if the opportunity arose.

  Dupin was no mere pander, however; he had questions to ask, and was already prepared to improvise in the manner of his interrogation. “Who told you that I would come?” was the first.

  “The angels,” she replied. “But I dared not trust them…they have told me so many lies.”

  “I am here, though,” he said, “and you are not yet dead. Did I not promise to come?” That was obviously a guess, but I could see why he had made it.

  “Yes,”
she replied, “but that was so long ago…so long ago…and I thought that I would have to die. Have you really come to take me away from this place? Have you come to take me back to the Underworld?” Her expression clouded then, and she added: “But Oberon might not permit that…he might kill us both…even though I have surely been punished enough.”

  Dupin had no difficulty avoiding the question as to whether his intention was to take her to some phantom underworld. “Does it matter where you are?” he asked, probably not quite able to bring himself to say we. Even in the interest of a scientific investigation.

  “No,” she answered. “Not any more. There’s no good place to die. But will they let you stay here, Tristan? This is not your world.”

  “Oddly enough,” he said, contributing a smile of sorts, “I seem to have mislaid my world, and cannot quite remember where I left it. Do you find yourself forgetting things, Ysolde?”

  She brought her hand out from beneath the paltry cover, and reached out toward him. I would have had extreme difficulty in doing so, but I think, in the circumstances, that I could have taken it. Dupin did so with no apparent hesitation. The handclasp seemed almost to electrify her, or whatever was possessing her. She brightened even further.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “I forget so much…sometimes, I wish I could forget so much more…but not you, Tristan…never the year in which I was the faithless Queen of the Underworld. I have been punished enough for that, have I not? Oh, you do not know, Tristan…at least, I pray that you do not know…or would pray, if I had a God to pray to…any god but Oberon….”

  Chapelain, I could see, was fascinated. Even Leuret seemed a little interested in the content of the hallucination, even though he considered that his vocation—his very purpose in life—was to take arms against such strange afflictions and drag his patients back to reality, kicking and screaming if necessary, and with cruel deluges of cold water if the necessity seemed absolute.