The Cthulhu Encryption

by Brian Stableford

  The whisper went on considerably longer than would have been required simply to impart the news that Ysolde Leonys was awake, and I saw Dupin’s eyes glance reflexively in my direction, but I was not unduly worried. I had faith enough in Dupin’s deductive abilities to know that he would have guessed easily enough who was at the door during dinner, and enough faith in his morals to know that he would not persist in any attempt to forbid me to do whatever I wished, however reluctant he might be to let me go.

  As Madame Lacuzon turned to go, Dupin turned to Leuret and said: “Mademoiselle Leonys is awake again. I fear that I did not get very far when I attempted to question her this afternoon, and I would like to call upon Dr. Chapelain’s expertise now, if I may. With his assistance, I’m sure that we can make some progress, at least in discovering when and where the Cthulhu inscription was imparted to her flesh—although it might be a good deal harder to figure out how and why. Will you stay to witness the proceedings, Dr. Leuret, no matter how much you might disapprove of their objective?”

  “I will, if I may,” said Leuret, glancing in my direction for politeness’ sake.

  “You’re very welcome, Dr. Leuret,” I told him. “I hope you’ll forgive me, though, if I don’t join you. I am exceedingly curious to discover what will happen, but Monsieur Dupin will doubtless give me a scrupulously full account when it is convenient. In the meantime, I need to go out for a while.”

  Dupin looked me full in the face then, but I met his gaze boldly, having steeled myself to do so. How long I could have withstood his gaze had he interrogated or challenged me, I don’t know, but in fact he did neither. Indeed, there was nothing forbidding in his stare at all—quite the reverse. He seemed quite glad that I was prepared to take on the burden of gleaning additional information, no matter where it might come from.

  All he actually said was: “Be careful, my friend—and be wary.” He meant that I needed to be careful in case the wings of rumor had reached other ears than Saint-Germain’s and perhaps excited other interest in my house-guest, but also to be wary of anything that Saint-Germain might tell me or ask of me. I nodded in what I hoped would seem a reassuring manner.

  My heart was fluttering, though, as I collected my coat, hat and stick and let myself out. There was a stern autumnal chill in the air, darkness having fallen some hours before. I took out my watch, and found that it was nearly midnight; I had not realized that it was so late. The streets were by no means deserted, though; it is not true that Paris never sleeps, but the city does not go to bed early, even in the dead of winter, and is always optimistic in October that a brief Indian summer might yet revive its legendary gaiety for one last fling. The Church of Saint-Sulpice was only five minutes’ walk from my house, so there was no need to take a cab and no time to catch a chill.

  I must confess that I have never liked Saint-Sulpice. Had I been in the habit of worshipping at all, I would have gone to Saint-Germain-de-Prés, in spite of its raucous bell. Saint-Sulpice is too large and draughty, and its surroundings—especially the square around the new fountain—are so overburdened by commercial enterprise that I cannot imagine that Jesus would have approved. The term Saint-Sulpicerie has, of course, become a by-word for religious artefacts of the tawdriest variety. The interior of the Church is far more austere than its immediate surroundings, and the paintings on the walls of genuine artistic merit, but it always seemed to me to be a strangely louche environment, whose holiness is patchy at best.

  The churches of Paris are never empty, even late at night, but late worshippers tend to cluster in small groups around the altar or the candle-racks, and the secluded side-chapels—especially those lit by a single tokenistic candles, are usually deserted after sunset. That, I imagine, was exactly why the Comte de Saint-Germain had selected it as a convenient meeting-place—convenient for him at least.

  It took me some time to locate him—naturally enough, he was in the gloomiest and most isolated place he had been able to locate—but he wanted to be found, so he was on the lookout for me, and beckoned me into his hidey-hole as soon as he caught sight of me. He did at least pull me into the corner of the side-chapel where the candle was, so that we could see one another’s faces.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said. “I feared that I really might have to wait all night, in vain. Did anyone attempt to follow you?”

  “I don’t know,” I confessed.

  He pulled a face. “Did Dupin not warn you to be careful?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I admitted, “but….”

  He waved way the impending excuse. “No time,” he said. “I have something to give you—but first, I need to convince you that, this time, I really am sincere in wanting to help you. This time, we really are on the same side…and to be perfectly honest, I’m not entirely sorry that it’s Dupin who’s in the front line. If he needs my help, mind, he only has to ask.”

  “You’ve said that before,” I reminded him.

  “You sound skeptical—but I always mean it.”

  I could not help thinking of the boy in the moral tale who cried wolf, and was then eaten because no one came to help when a wolf actually came.

  “Come, now,” Saint-Germain continued, hurriedly. “I have surely been honest enough in my past dealings with you to earn a measure of trust, no matter how determined Dupin is to damn me as a villain. This time, even he will have to admit that he is in my debt.”

  The words be wary were ringing in my ears. “Why do you think Dupin might need help?” I asked, cautiously.

  “Because he took a patient out of the asylum at Bicêtre this afternoon, who has manifested the Cthulhu encryption in the form of stigmata. Oh, don’t worry—there’s not one man in a hundred thousand within the city enceinte who could have recognized the cryptogram for what it was from the orderly’s drunken description, but the news was bound to reach the Society sooner or later, and it just happened to be sooner. You might have cause to be grateful for that, especially if Dupin can decipher the ultimate line of the incantation—and don’t tell me he won’t try, for even if he really were the sanest and most virtuous man in the world, as you seem to believe, he can’t resist that temptation. He’ll be determined that he won’t recite it, under any circumstances, but there really are some things that it’s better not to know…or, if one can’t help finding them out, shouldn’t be known with out having the right counter-spell already in your possession.”

  “Counter-spell?” I queried.

  “I can’t be certain, of course,” he said, “but I believe that’s what it is. The Society has always held that the Key and the Seal are two different things, not one, as many would-be conjurors seem to have believed in the past. Whether it is or it isn’t, it’s in the same script as the Encryption Dupin has—and whether he needs it or not to stave off any threat, it will certainly help him decipher the symbols. For that reason alone, he’ll be grateful.”

  So saying, he took a small parcel out of the inside pocket of his frock-coat, and held it out to me. It was a round object, wrapped in a piece of linen.

  “What is it?” I asked, refraining as yet from reaching out to take it.

  “The Levasseur medallion,” he said.

  “The pirate’s locket?” I queried. “The one with the cryptogram inside?”

  “It’s not a locket,” he said “and the cryptogram is on the outside, not the inside—but apart from that, yes.”

  “What do you mean?” I said, puzzled.

  He sighed. “Rumor always gets things wrong,” he said. “It’s one of the more perverse laws of nature. Yes, when Levasseur was imprisoned, he was allowed to keep the ornament he wore around his neck, which was thought to be devoid of value by his judges and jailers alike. It was a wooden disk, with a carved image on the front and an array of forty-nine tiny symbols in the back. He probably had no more idea of what those symbols meant than his captors—but the news reached someone who knew something of their significance, in time for that person to attempt to strike a bargain of sorts. The
inevitable difficulties of communication via a moronic warder made negotiations difficult, and things moved too quickly for any significant recompense to be arranged, but Levasseur agreed to hand over the medallion. The man who wanted it was unable to secure the prize while Levasseur was in custody, but Levasseur threw it to him while he was on the way to the gallows, making some remark as he did so about the solution to its secret leading to his fortune. It was, I assume, a final jest on his part. The members of the crowd who overheard him—and the guards escorting him, of course—inevitably misunderstood what had happened, and started a thousand fruitless treasure-hunts.”

  “And who was the man to whom Levasseur threw the medallion?” I demanded.

  “Me,” said the Comte de Saint-Germain. “But don’t tell Dupin that—he won’t believe you.”

  “You in a previous life, you mean?” I queried, skeptically—but I had heard him claim to be immortal, or reincarnated, before, so I was not unduly surprised by his claim.

  “Perhaps so,” he replied, dismissively. “That doesn’t matter. The important thing is that this is the Levasseur medallion. It has been the custody of the Society ever since it founding, having been placed in its safe keeping by the Comte de Cagliostro. It has been locked away under Cagliostro’s protective seal, but I have felt for some while that the time had come to retrieve it. I’m sending it to Dupin, as I said, because he might well need it—if he can decipher it. If he doesn’t need it, of course, or there comes a time when its purpose has been served, I shall want it back. This is a loan, not a gift. And I shall expect gratitude too, to be redeemed in kind. Monsieur Dupin need not accept me as a friend, although I wish he would, but he must stop branding me a villain. In this instance, I repeat, he and I are both on the side of the angels…and I pray that they will appreciate the fact too, for if there is the slightest possibility that Cthulhu might awake from the dream of death…well, we all have our nightmares, do we not? Now, take the damned medallion and go home, as swiftly as you can. Be careful.”

  I finally accepted the package, and carefully put into the inner pocket of my own frock-coat, without unwrapping it.

  “Good luck, my friend,” Saint-Germain added, in a whisper. He seemed to mean it—but then, he was an expert mesmerist, and probably capable of making an innocent like me believe anything he said.

  Unfortunately, he then spoiled the effect by muttering a curse that was far stronger than any mere Sacré bleu!

  He was looking at something behind me. I turned round.

  As an apprentice pedant, I suppose I ought not to say that the blood froze in my veins, but I did obtain a sudden understanding of what the man who invented that phrase might have meant. I really did feel a horridly unpleasant frisson, which really did feel as cold as ice.

  In terms of the elementary physics of vision, I could hardly see anything at all, for the two silhouettes in the broad doorway of the chapel were little more than dark shadows carved out of slightly-less-intense darkness. The light of the chapel’s candle hardy reached them, and the residual glimmer from the main body of the church was fainter than starlight. What I “saw,” therefore, I could not literally have seen, and must reckon it as a hallucination. At the time, however, I was in no state to make such nice distinctions.

  The figures confronting us were vaguely human in outline—as they had to be, since the material bodies they had were certainly human—but whatever was possessing those bodies, in my perception, was not human at all, but far more reminiscent of some slimy octopus or squid. The overall impression it made on my mind was, at least, that of writhing, sticky, inquisitive tentacles. But that was not the whole of the illusion, for if the cephalopod was somehow inside the man, there was also something inside the cephalopod…or, more accurately, if there was something inhabiting a dimension adjacent to the man that resembled a horrific and loathsome cephalopod, there was something else in a further but still adjacent dimension that was even more horrific and loathsome.

  Having heard Dupin’s account of the Cthulhu legend not long before, I could not help the word draconian springing to mind, and if a dragon really is a kind of worm, with legs, wings and the ability to breathe fire, I suppose that might have been as good a term as any for the impression that further being imparted—but in reality, any attempt to encapsulate it with earthly comparisons was bound to fail. It was unnamable. Indeed, it seemed to me to be unspeakable, or even unthinkable: that it was something beyond the reach, not only of description, but also of conceptualization.

  It was not the first time that I had looked into dimensions other than our own, at least in the context of a hallucination, but the horrors I had seen before were not nearly as extreme as this one.

  I was petrified, unable to move—at least until Saint-Germain reached out and gripped my arm.

  I had always been sceptical about the mesmeric fluid, but I felt its flow then, and knew that the fake Comte was exercising every ounce of his real power.

  “They’re human insofar as they’re more than mere phantoms!” he hissed. “Flesh and blood! Whatever else you see or feel isn’t material. They’re human—they can be fought, and even killed.”

  I turned to look at him, primarily in order to tear my eyes away from them.

  With a flick of the wrist, he split his cane in two—which is to say, he bared the blade of his sword-stick. My cane was, alas, just a stick, and I had not followed Dupin’s advice to put a revolver in my pocket. As Saint-Germain put himself en garde, I could not believe that it would make much difference that he had a blade while I had only a frail cudgel. I had no doubt that he was a practised fencer, and the blades that the two monsters had in their hands were no longer than his own stubby weapon, but whatever he might say about them, I knew that they were not entirely human—and the part that was not was completely immune to the mesmeric thrust of his eyes as well as the brutal thrust of his steel.

  I put myself en garde too, even though my weapon was wooden, hoping that its extra length might count for something—but when the monsters moved to attack, flowing rather than moving on their feet, I was soon convinced that neither of us stood a chance. Our enemies could doubtless be killed, but I did not think that we could kill them—and I did not think that I could hurt one badly enough to keep it at bay.

  The weapons clashed as the conflict was engaged: steel against wood and steel against steel. There was more than one contact made, so there was a fight of sorts—perhaps there were even parries and ripostes on our part—but it was to no avail. I felt my stick torn from my grasp, and I heard a blade clatter on the ground, which I knew, without looking, to be Saint-German’s sword. We were not stabbed, though, let alone run through—that was not what our adversaries had in mind.

  Instead, they closed in on us, backing us up against the cold stone wall of the chapel.

  They continued to move forward, blades held wide of their bodies, their arms extended as if to wind around us like tentacles, presumably then to crush us…or perhaps swallow us whole.

  Now, I could not help but see the one that was intent on embracing me. Saint-Germain’s brief touch had lost its effect; I had no mental insulation whatsoever against the horror, the terror and the sheer disgust of looking into that multidimensional prospect, at a transdimensional creature that could not be given a true name….even though it surely had to be what Dupin had called a star-spawn, or a shoggoth.

  It had time to kill me, but it did not. It was content to press me every more tightly against the wall—until a human hand that was surely not moved by human volition reached for the inside pocket of my frock-coat.

  The situation suddenly seemed quite absurd. Monsters from beyond the world operating as common thieves? As pickpockets?

  Perhaps, I thought, it really was human volition that was moving the hand—that in possessing two footpads abroad in the dark streets for nefarious purposes, the shoggoths had taken possession of their motives as well as their flesh. I had no doubt, though, that the prize for which the hand was
reaching was Levasseur’s medallion, not my purse or my watch.

  It was not only the solid hand that was reaching, however—the tentacles that Saint-Germain had assured me were merely phantoms were reaching too, into my mind. The footpad, it seemed, did not intend to murder me—but what the effect might be of the shoggoth reaching inside me, I dared not contemplate. I did not want to die, but I wanted even less to be possessed by a demon of that sort.

  Just as the probing fingers were about to touch the cloth-swathed medallion, however, and just as I was about to be touched in a far more intimate fashion by the hallucinatory tentacles, perhaps to be kissed by that loathsome worm, someone spoke.

  I did not know what the voice was saying, and I am certain that I could not have pronounced whatever it said myself, but someone spoke—and the hallucination was ripped apart.

  I do mean ripped. It did not fade, or merely vanish: what happened was savage and abrupt.

  Suddenly, our attackers were only human—and they were still holding their blades wide, at arm’s length.

  Instinctively, without even a fragment of intention, I smashed my forehead into the face of the man who was crowding me. I felt and heard the cartilage in his nose break under the impact. I have no idea what Saint-Germain did, but his opponent recoiled too, perhaps not yet unconscious but certainly inconvenienced to such an extent as to be unable to resist when Saint-Germain shoved him away. I did the same to my man—but I think, in all honesty, that they would have collapsed anyway. The ripping apart of their ultradimensional component had delivered an incapacitating shock to their human component.

  There was another shadow in the doorway now. “You really ought to be more careful with that medallion, Saint-Germain,” said a voice that was not recognizable as the one that had spoken before, although it surely came from the same mouth. “This is not what I would call safe-keeping.”

  Saint-German laughed—to relieve the tension, not because he was amused. He must have been far more confident than I had been that he could resist possession by the monster, but he had certainly been scared. “Well,” he said, “it seems that I owe you a debt of gratitude now. I can no longer surrender the medallion to you, though—I have just given it to my friend, in order that he might let Dupin see it.”