The Cthulhu Encryption

by Brian Stableford

  “Was there?” I asked.

  “No,” he said—but he did not seem unduly delighted about the implicit compliment to his memory. “There’s very little said about him, and even less about Levasseur—Oliver de La Bouche, as a letter quoted by Johnson mistakenly calls him. The book was initially published in 1724, when both were still alive, but Johnson’s record is mostly an exhaustive list of captured ships, with occasional supplementary comments from survivors of pirate attacks. The chapter in which Taylor is briefly mentioned is titled for Edward England, who was the more famous of the two at the time—but England disappears part way through, when Taylor is named as his successor. It’s a rather pedestrian chapter, I fear, which cannot compare in melodramatic terms with the flamboyant account of the female pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read and their adventures with John Rackham—but that, I suspect, is pure fiction.”

  “Mere travelers’ tales?”

  “Probably,” he said, “Almost everything we think we know about many of the individuals whose stories are told herein, we owe to this one source. The dull passages drawn from official documents are presumably accurate, but the biographical additions regarding the pirates’ personal affairs are probably as fictitious as the author’s signature.”

  “Captain Johnson is a pseudonym?”

  “Indeed. There’s a rumor that the book was prepared for publication by Daniel Defoe, and that all the most readable sections are inventions cooked up by him—but I doubt that he added much to the chapter on Edward England, which is vague as well as tedious.”

  “But John Taylor is no fiction,” I said, “and he and Levasseur really did capture Our Lady of the Cape.”

  “That much is certain,” he said. “But where legend takes over…do you know, by the way, what flag pirates flew?”

  “The Jolly Roger,” I said, promptly. “The skull and crossbones.”

  “According to Captain Johnson,” he said, “Ned Teach flew a black flag, and most of his Caribbean emulators copied him. John Taylor, however, did fly the skull-and-crossbones—but only after usurping command of his fleet from the device’s inventor, Edward England.”

  “According to seamen’s fabulations,” I said, “it’s still flown by many a ghost-ship—but if all the ghost-ships that seamen claim to have seen were gathered into a fleet, they’d put the Spanish Armada to shame.”

  Dupin had no interest in ghost-ships, so I changed tack. “If John Taylor really did maroon the commander he deposed in Mauritius,” I said, “no matter how short or long a time elapsed before he was rescued, Edward England would surely have dedicated the rest of his life to seeking revenge on John Taylor.” I had spent time on the Boulevard du Temple; I knew how melodrama worked. “Wherever he was, he must have cursed Taylor with all his might when his usurper and Levasseur took the Portuguese galleon in his stead, and became fabulously rich.”

  “No doubt,” said Dupin, looking down at the book on the bed, contemplatively. “But legend has nothing to say about that. In any case, the particular tale of Our Lady of the Cape is only a tiny part of the vast tapestry of pirate myth and legend: a tapestry whose principal anchorage is this tome…or tomb.”

  “Tomb?” I echoed, slightly startled.

  “Legend is itself a form of encryption, as I’ve said before,” he murmured, pensively. “It’s a neutral zone in the borderlands of mundane history, into which exile all manner of dreams and delusions may be sent. Secrets may be buried there, hidden beneath symbols, and the unspeakable spoken there, albeit in code. Much of it, of course, is pure invention…if there ever was any such thing as pure invention…but there is hidden meaning in it regardless. If Dr. Leuret is correct, and the work of poets and arts is simply hallucination by another name, he’s still wrong to call it madness—but he’s right to recognize that the imagination underlies poetic creativity and legend-mongering, and that the processes of manufacture by which it works in those arenas is cousin to the manner in which it works in certain kinds of madness.”

  “Ysolde Leonys’ madness certainly fits that description,” I observed. “It’s stitched together from the legacy of folklore and romance; there’s nothing original in its fairyland at all…not even Cthulhu, since you say that the monster in question is legendary too, albeit in an esoteric sense.”

  “The legend of Cthulhu seems to be written in her flesh, not her dreams,” Dupin reminded me. “Indeed, it’s possible that her dreams might have been formulated to keep it out of her mind…perhaps deliberately, by someone other than herself, by means of what Saint-Germain would call magic. It’s probable that the cryptogram that has been lying dormant in her flesh has emerged quite naturally, as a result of the climactic crisis of her disease, but that emergence is evidently not inconsequential. If there is a scheme in all this….”

  “There is a scheme,” I assured him. “A mad, incomprehensible scheme, no doubt…but a scheme of some sort. I think Oberon Breisz could tell us a good deal about it, if he were so minded. Perhaps your protective concierge should have let him in when he called on you, so that he could have explained himself.”

  “Amélie’s instincts are sound,” he repeated, in a faint tone that was almost a whisper.

  “Have you made enough progress in your study of the two cryptograms,” I asked, “to have any idea what the purpose of the one on the medallion might be?”

  “You mentioned protection yourself,” he said, “although I’d be reluctant to take Saint-German’s word for that…or Oberon Breisz’s word. Did you examine the image on the other side of the medallion?”

  “I never got the opportunity,” I reminded him. “Faithful to my mission, I handed the object to you still wrapped. Is it an image of Cthulhu?”

  “There can be no such thing as a two- or three-dimensional image of Cthulhu, whose being extends across three distinct and different universes—perhaps more when he was not encrypted—but there is certainly a suggestion in the carving of human-cephalopod hybrid, with a hint of something further and more alien. I’ll continue my close study of the cryptogram once Chapelain has come and gone, in better light, but this mystery began with the patient, and I need to discover her story, if I can. Saint-Germain’s treasure-hunt can probably wait a while.

  “Treasure-hunt?” I queried.

  “Certainly,” he said. “Can you think of any other reason why a man like Saint-Germain would hand over an object like the Levasseur medallion? He has doubtless tried with all his might to decipher what he believes to be the guide to the treasure and failed, but he evidently hopes that I might succeed, especially now that I have the Chthulu encryption with which to compare it. I suspect, strongly, that he hopes that I might be able to lead him to Levasseur’s treasure, so that he can steal it for himself.”

  “Do you think that Oberon Breisz has similar hopes and expectations?” I asked.

  “I don’t know—but Madame Lacuzon would have told me that he had asked to see me if she did not think his intentions more sinister than that. I wondered momentarily whether your entire experience last night might have been an illusion impressed on your mind by Saint-Germain, but I think not. As he persists in telling us, he’s not really evil, merely greedy. Breisz, on the other hand…whose true name, we must remember, is neither Oberon not Breisz….”

  “He saved me from the monsters,” I pointed out.

  “Apparently,” Dupin conceded. He said no more, but I knew what he was implying. If Breisz had sent the monsters he had then called off, he might simply have been introducing himself in a flamboyant manner. What, I wondered, would Madame Lacuzon have done if a creature like the ones in the church had turned up on her doorstep, whether at midnight or noon, demanding to see Monsieur le Chevalier Auguste Dupin? “Sent it packing,” I presumed.

  I heard the doorbell ring then, and could not suppress a chill at the thought of poor Madame Bihan opening the door to…but less than three seconds passed before I heard the faint but recognizable sound of Pierre Chapelain’s voice drifting up the stair—to be
followed, a few minutes later, by the man himself.

  As the door to the bedroom opened and the mesmerist came in, Ysolde Leonys opened her eyes. It was exactly as if she had been waiting for a cue—and this time, she did not seem to have awoken to the agony of syphilitic reality, but merely to the fantasy with which she had cloaked herself before.

  It occurred to me that if she had ever come to call at the house containing Dupin’s apartment, the concierge would surely have sent her away too, just as I would have done to any syphilitic whore who knocked on my door…but here she was, lying in what I still considered to be Dupin’s bed, in what was still, in every meaningful sense of the term, Dupin’s room, monopolizing the great man’s concern as well as his intellectual interest.

  Her gaze went first to Dupin—her supposedly-beloved Tristan—and then to Chapelain, her faithful Merlin. Perhaps she would have spared me a glance too had her eyes not fallen on the three objects lying on the coverlet.

  “My medallion!” she said, snatching it up. “Oh, Tristan, wherever did you find it? Thank you!”

  Under other circumstances, I suspect that Dupin might have contended with her for the cryptogram’s custody, but he had been forewarned that she might have an interest in it, and he had made a more easily-legible copy, so he let her have it. He picked up his two pieces of paper, though, and put them in his pocket for safe keeping.

  Ysolde Leonys wrapped her hands around the wooden disk and then pressed them both to her chest, just beneath her neck—where the medallion might have hung had it been suspended from a chain.

  “Thank you,” she said again. “I thought that it was lost forever!”

  I could see that Dupin was burning to ask her where she had lost it, and where she had obtained it in the first place, but he had a plan of procedure worked out, and that plan was to delegate all questions to the mesmerist, at least for the time being.

  Personally, I had no doubt that she really did believe that the medallion was, in some mysterious sense, hers, even though it seemed impossible that any such entitlement could possibly exist…unless Saint-Germain had lied about it being in the custody of the Harmonic Philosophical Society since its foundation. Was it possible, I wondered, that Saint-Germain had stolen it from Ysolde Leonys? Was it possible that his pretence of handing it over to Dupin was a ploy to return it to her? If so, what could it all mean?

  There is certainly a scheme here, I thought, clever and convoluted as well as crazy. Pirate treasure is only one of the lures that have been set out to lead us through the maze…to meet the Minotaur.

  Such was the power of the scheme I had just invented that I immediately steered that train of thought into a brand new oasis, identifying not only the labyrinth but the myth of the labyrinth as a quintessential crypt, in which monsters and discomfiting ideas were safely confined and entombed in order to liberate the mind from their dire presence and free it for mundane and orderly intercourse with the everyday world.

  Dupin had told me more than once that consciousness is a refuge, whose walls and moat protect us from the hazards of the dream-dimensions. It was a poetic image, but he did not mean it entirely poetically.

  While these stray reflections were wandering through my mind, Dupin had supervised the rearrangement of the furniture, in order that Chapelain might be in the best position possible to commit Ysolde Leonys to a deeper mesmeric trance. I was obliged to retreat to the far side of the bed, and to do without a chair, but I took the opportunity to open the curtains and let a little daylight in.

  It was a dull day, the sky being completely shrouded in grey cloud, although it was not actually raining. Although the window faced the south-east, the masked sun could not send more than a mild, soft light into the room, which seemed entirely appropriate for experiments in mesmerism. I supported myself as best I could on the windowsill, which was at the right height to serve as a misericord.

  And the weak must go to the wall, I thought, taking what comfort I could from my knowledge of the true meaning of the phrase, which is the very opposite of the modern misinterpretation that condemns the weak to perish.

  Dupin, again in his guise as Tristan de Léonais, did his level best to reassure his former lover Ysolde that all was well and that she must put her trust in the wizard Merlin and his magic, but when she asked for a potion to soothe her ills, he told her that she must wait until the spell was complete. Such is the power of imaginary love that she consented, although my hasty arithmetic suggested that it must have been at least eight hours since she had last been dosed with laudanum, and she would soon be feeling the commencement of the crawling chaos of withdrawal.

  “This time,” Chapelain murmured to Dupin, “I think we shall gain access to her intimate secrets.”

  You could have had access to her most intimate secrets for a gros sou any time in the last twenty years, I thought, reflexively—and was immediately ashamed of myself for having done so. I reminded myself, sternly, that streetwalkers are made by dire necessity, not by choice, and that it is their clients who are the pirates, the plunderers, and the exploiters.

  Then I had to seal such casual thoughts away, in order to listen to the interrogation, and the narrative that it elicited.

  CHAPTER NINE

  YSOLDE’S STORY

  “What is your name?” Chapelain asked, when he was satisfied that the woman was in a deep trance.

  “Ysolde Leonys.”

  “Have you ever had any other name?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you born?”

  “Callaba, in India.”

  “On what date?”

  “Saint Sylvester’s Day, 1722.”

  Chapelain looked at Dupin, but Dupin immediately shook his head, instructing the mesmerist not to challenge the impossible claim.

  “Who was your father?” Chapelain continued.

  “He called himself Mark Leonys of Cornwall, but that was not his true name.”

  “What was his true name?”

  “John Taylor.” There as only the slightest of pauses before she added the inevitable mantra: “Jack Taylor was a bad man.”

  “Who told you that Jack Taylor was a bad man?”

  “Oberon.”

  Again, Chapelain looked at Dupin; again, Dupin shook his head.

  “What became of your father, John Taylor?” Chapelain asked.

  “He sailed for the South Seas. He never came back.”

  “Why did he sail for the South Seas?”

  “To seek protection.”

  “Protection from what?”

  “Angria—and the ghost.”

  Dupin raised his eyebrows at the mention of the name Angria, but did not attempt to deflect Chapelain from his course

  “What ghost?” Chapelain asked.

  “The ghost from the ghost-ship.”

  There! I thought. I knew that it was relevant. I knew that there had to be a ghost-ship in this somewhere.

  “Whose ghost was it?” Chapelain hazarded.

  No answer.

  Another glance; another shake of the head.

  “When did your father sail for the South Seas?”

  “In 1731.”

  “When you were eight years old?” Because Saint Sylvester’s Day is New Year’s Eve, she could only have reached her ninth birthday on the very last day of that year, so Chapelain’s arithmetic was accurate.

  “Yes.”

  “Were you left alone with your mother.”

  “My mother was dead. I only had my ayah, and the Mahatma.”

  The Mahatma in question was presumably the original after whom she had named Leuret.

  “Did you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “No.”

  “Who took responsibility for you?”

  Silence. Either she did not understand the question, or could not answer it. Dupin made a hand-signal to Chapelain

  “When did you first go to Karla?”

  That was the first question that seemed to disturb her. It surprised me too,
even though I had heard her mention the name before. Dupin and Chapelain were obviously trying to draw upon everything she had let slip.

  “I don’t remember,” was he answer she eventually gave. Presumably, she had been too young have any awareness of the date, or even her age.

  “When was the last time you went to Karla?” Chapelain persisted.

  “Before Oberon came.”

  “How old were you then?”

  “Twelve.”

  “When did you leave India?”

  “When Oberon took me away.”

  “And how old were you then?”

  “Twelve.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “To Oberon’s home.”

  “What port did the ship sail to?”

  “Le Havre.”

  “And by what means of transport did you leave Le Havre?”

  “A diligence.”

  “Bound for where?”

  “Caen.”

  “Did you stay in Caen?”

  “No.”

  “Did you take another diligence?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bound for where?”

  “Rennes.”

  “Did you take another diligence from Rennes?”

  “No.”

  “Did you stay in Rennes?”

  “No.”

  “Where did you go, after Rennes?”

  “To Oberon’s home.”

  This time, Dupin had to reach out with his free hand to touch Chapelain’s arm and attract the mesmerist’s attention to his head-shake.

  “Did Oberon have another name?” Chapelain continued.

  “Yes.”

  “What was it?”

  “He sometimes called himself the Ancient Mariner.”

  “Did he have any other names?”

  “Yes.”

  “What were they?”

  “He once called himself Captain Nemesis.” This was becoming frustrating.