The Cthulhu Encryption

by Brian Stableford

  “Do you know the name with which he was baptized?” Chapelain demanded, trying to focus on the datum he wanted.

  “He was never baptized.”

  “Do you know the first name he had, before he became Oberon, or adopted any other nicknames?”

  Silence. Again, she did not understand, or could not answer.

  “How old were you when Oberon made you Queen of his Underworld?”

  This time, her face seemed to light up slightly.

  “Thirteen,”

  Thirteen! I thought. That was when she had her fatal romance with Tristan de Léonais. In 1736, if her chronology can be trusted! I did not suppose for a moment that her chronology could be trusted, objectively, although I was quite prepared to believe that she was not lying, and that she honestly imagined that she was well over a hundred years old.

  “And how long were you queen?”

  “A year and a day.”

  “Where did you go when you left the Underworld?”

  “Paris.”

  “And when did you arrive in Paris?”

  “During the Revolution.”

  “The Revolution of 1789?” said Chapelain, obviously surprised by the chronological inconsistency.

  Mesmerized subjects do not usually respond to rhetorical questions, but Ysolde was an exception to the rule.

  “No,” she said. “The July Revolution.”

  The July Revolution had taken place in 1830, but this time Chapelain made the effort to swallow his incredulity.

  Briefly slipping into the role of Thomas Linn the Rhymer, I was not surprised. According to folklore, a year and a day spent in fairyland can easily be the equivalent of a century in the mundane world. I carried out a rapid operation of mental arithmetic. If Ysolde had been thirteen when she went into Oberon’s Underworld, she must have been fourteen when she came out, which meant that she was now, in terms of lifetime elapsed, thirty years old. Not nearly as old as she looked, in fact—but syphilis is a cruel disease, and if she had been walking the streets of Paris since 1830, she was fully entitled to look a great deal older than she really was…if really actually meant anything, in this context.

  Chapelain changed tack. “Ysolde,” he said, “Have you ever heard the name Cthulhu?” He tried to pronounce the word as Dupin had, but did not quite succeed in emphasizing every one of the name’s seven elements as if it were a distinct syllable. The attempt was good enough, though; she knew what he meant.

  The light in her eyes became strangely feverish.

  “Yes.”

  “Where did you first hear the name?”

  “In Karla.”

  “How old were you then?”

  No answer—too young to remember, probably.

  “Are you aware that there is an inscription on your back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know how it was put there?”

  No answer—perhaps because the question was badly-phrased rather than because she did not know the answer. Chapelain did not attempt to repeat it, though.

  “How old were you when was it put there?” he asked, instead.

  Again, no answer. Very young, presumably.

  This time Chapelain risked the direct approach. “How was it put there?”

  “By magic.”

  “Has it always been visible?”

  “No.”

  “When did it become visible?”

  No answer.

  Chapelain tried again: “When did you become aware that it was visible?”

  “While I was in Bedlam.” She obviously meant Bicêtre, but I was surprised by her substitution of the English slang term, which she must have known and used habitually before she committed herself to Leuret’s care.

  “Do you know what the inscription means?” Chapelain, persisted, doggedly. I knew, before he had even completed the sentence, that it was a mistake…that these were questions he ought not to be asking, no matter how much Dupin wanted to know the answers. He was stirring up something that would be better left undisturbed—but if he realized that, it was too late.

  Suddenly, the sick woman was in desperate distress—but not because she was waking up. I think she actually tried with all her might not to answer the question, but she was in a mesmeric trance and was not the mistress of her own ill-treated flesh. She tried to remain silent, but she failed. It was, however, another voice—I am morally certain of it—that used her poor sore lips to say, or rather screech: “Ph’nglui mglw’nat Cthulhu R’laiyeh wgah’ngl fhtaign.”

  When she had pronounced the formula before, in Bicêtre, it had not seemed to have any manifest effect on our physical surroundings, although it had clearly disturbed the other patients on the ward. That had been a very bleak and rather gloomy room, though, and the awful fecal stench had drowned out more subtle sensory indications.

  Now, we were in a pleasant, if slightly Spartan room, and the daylight, though no less grey, was coming into the room from a better direction at a more kindly angle. It would have been even brighter had I not been blocking it partially with my upper body. When Ysolde pronounced the formula, though, it seemed to me that the daylight blurred, that the room became distinctly chillier, and that there was a distinct whiff of rotting seaweed in the air. It might have been purely subjective, of course—an echo of the horror and terror of the night before.

  If Chapelain noticed any change in the ambience, he did not react. Nor did he stop following his script. Instead, he said: “Those are only the first six lines of the cryptogram. Do you know the seventh?

  “Nobody knows the seventh,” she replied. “It is only to be pronounced in cases of the direst need. Angria judged that I would never need it, and should not be trusted with it.” She was speaking in her own voice again, but she had become suddenly loquacious, in a way that obedient somniloquists were not supposed to do.

  I knew that something was wrong—that among the things we did not know about her history there was something that made it dangerous to inquire about it. This time, Chapelain was puzzled, and looked at Dupin for guidance. Dupin pointed to her hands, still clasped around the medallion, holding it pressed to the top of her sternum.

  “Do you know the purpose of the cryptogram on the medallion you are holding?” Chapelain asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Don’t ask her to pronounce it! My inner voice screamed, although not a whimper escaped my sealed lips.

  When Chapelain checked with Dupin, however, the great man’s reply was another insistent nod of the head.

  “What is its purpose?” Chapelain.

  “To protect me.”

  “From what?”

  No answer—but she was disturbed again, and a visible frisson ran through her supine body.

  I wanted to say “Please stop!” but my tongue seemed to be glued to the roof of my mouth. Dupin was frowning now, though, evidently disappointed and frustrated by the difficulty Chapelain was experiencing in making progress, but also anxious. He refrained from making any signals—but for once, Chapelain was not looking to Dupin for his lead. He had a question of his own that he had doubtless waned to ask for some time.

  “Ysolde,” he said, “Do you know where the remnants of the treasure of the Nossa Senhora del Cabo are hidden?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Dupin looked furious, although I could not imagine why. I had heard him ask her where “the manuscripts” were on his own account. He shook his head furiously, but Chapelain could not be restrained.

  “Where are they?” he asked, a trifle breathlessly.

  “Some are in the Underworld,” she replied, perhaps predictably—although it seemed to me to be useful information. If the mysterious Oberon who had brought her to France from India had taken her to somewhere near Rennes, then the Underworld, or its entrance, must be in Brittany.

  I almost had to pinch myself to remind myself that the woman was dying, and mad, and that everything she thought she knew, about herself and everything else, was the product of pox-ind
uced, or pox-encouraged, hallucination. Even the stigmata, striking as they were, were a product of her fantasy: what Leuret and Chapelain both called a “psychosomatic symptom.” They were bizarre, but not impossible. The incantation was, it seemed, real—but probably only “real” in the sense that it had been written down in esoteric texts, available to be memorized by bibliophiles like Auguste Dupin…and bibliotaphs like Oberon Breisz.

  That Breisz knew Ysolde Leonys, I did not doubt. That he had known her while she was a child, I did not doubt. But what he had done to her while she was a child, I could not imagine, and was not sure that I wanted to try. He had saved me from the shoggoth, apparently—but Dupin was certain that Madame Lacuzon’s instincts were sure. If Jack Taylor had been a bad man, what was Oberon Breisz?

  Again, I tried to remind myself that this was madness, and that anyone who tried to make sense of it was responding to a dangerous lure. I almost wished that Leuret was present, to remind us all that he would have taken a very different approach to the treatment of the dying woman. He would have tried to bring her back to reality. He would also have bought a priest into the ward to administer extreme unction, and hear her last confession, if she were capable of making one.

  Perhaps, on the whole, it would be kinder if she were not.

  Chapelain did not stop, but he reverted to what was presumably a further phase of the approximate script he had agreed with Dupin.

  “Was Tristan de Léonais in the Underworld before you became its Queen?” the mesmerist asked.

  Hesitation, then: “Yes.”

  “How did he come to be there?”

  “He was one of Oberon’s knights.”

  “How many knights did Oberon have?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Were they all in the Underworld?”

  “No.”

  “How many knights were in the Underworld when you were there?”

  “Seven.”

  “Does that number include Merlin?”

  “No.”

  “Does it include Tom Linn?”

  “No.”

  “How many other people were in the Underworld, in addition to the knights?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can you tell me the names of the other knights.”

  “Huon, Gauvain, Roland, Lanval, Meliador and Lancelot.”

  Well, I thought, at least she and Oberon had the grace to omit the saintly Perceval from their ironic roll-call. Their reading seems to have been conventional, though. I wondered, however, whether Dupin was now regretting his readiness to stand in for Tristan of Léonais. If my growing suspicion as to the true nature of Oberon’s mesmeric game and the roles played by the “knights” turned out to be true…but I did not feel able to voice it, even as a suggestion.

  Perhaps Dupin had begun to conceive similar suspicions, for he raised his hand, giving Chapelain a clear instruction to pause. He wanted a break in the interrogation, in order to confer with the mesmerist.

  It was Chapelain’s turn to shake his head and reply in mime. He, at least, had not entirely forgotten that this charade as supposed to be for his patient’s benefit, rather than the satisfaction of Dupin’s curiosity. He wanted to plant suggestions in Ysolde’s mind that would ease her pain next time she woke up to harsh reality.

  Dupin was not a cruel man, but he was obviously uncertain as to whether any such success might somehow prejudice his own enquiry. He repeated the gesture bidding the mesmerist to suspend the session and confer.

  Whether Chapelain would have continued to be stubborn I do not know. He was interrupted.

  Somniloquists are supposed to be utterly meek, entirely under the control of their inquisitor, but Ysolde Leonys apparently did not know that rule, and had already demonstrated that she was capable of loquacity.

  Suddenly, she sat up in bed, and said, in her own voice: “They’re coming. This is why I needed protection. This is why Angria gave me the amulet. He knew that the Mahatma had made me vulnerable, in making me useful.”

  Dupin and Chapelain could not have looked at her with more amazement and alarm if she had been a statue of Isis or Astarte who had suddenly taken it into her head to speak. All that Dupin could find to say, eventually—and I had never known him so stupefied—was: “Who is coming?”

  “Not who, but what,” Ysolde Leonys told him. “Pray that I can remember, for we are all in mortal peril—but it was so long ago!”

  I would like to say that I did not know what she meant—but I did. Abruptly as they had arrived, before she reached the end of her sentence, there was no mistaking them.

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE SHOGGOTHS

  The first time, when they had come in search of me—or, more probably, of the medallion—the shoggoths had used human carriers, and their actual presence had been removed in another dimension, perhaps to some neighboring universe or, more likely, to the encrypted borderlands that separate the universes. Those desert regions are haunted by the Dwellers of the Thresholds, but I doubt that the Dwellers ever try to scavenge that kind of carrion.

  This time, the shoggoths arrived directly, not by moving through the intangible walls of the universe or the perfectly solid walls of my house, but rather by perverting space in such a way as to make the room in which our mesmeric séance was taking place ambiguous. They—or whatever was guiding them—twisted our reality, encrypting it in such a way that the loathsome predators could reach us without any intermediary of earthly space and time, let alone any vehicle of flesh and bone.

  They had been so horrible before that I dare not say that they were any more horrible when they came again, but their presence was certainly more visible and more tangible, if no less easily describable. They were still unspeakable, still unthinkable—but whether I could speak or think of them or not, they were here.

  Oddly enough, the most overwhelming accompaniment of their presence was the smell, whose faint preliminary echo I had earlier described, in the privacy of my mind, as “rotting seaweed.” The impression of rotting remained, but if there was seaweed in the decaying morass, it was far from being alone; it was as if the life of an entire ocean had fallen into rapid putrefaction, concentrated by the lens of their advent.

  If the stink made its impact more swiftly than any other sensory response, however, it did not hit harder. What I saw was what I had seen before: something like a cross between a squid and a sea-anemone, with more avid tentacles than I could ever hope to count, all possessed of a strangely intense viscosity that far was far beyond mere stickiness or sliminess, but seemed to be a partial liquefaction of space itself: a dissolution into some kind of primeval urschleim…which was, alas, far from being the worst of it.

  The first time, I had only had a slight impression of the other aspect of the monster: the dragon behind the cephalopod; the thing with claws and wings and fiery breath. This time, I understood clearly enough that it was some kind of censor in my mind that had made me see the reaching entities as claws, the fluttering entities as wings, the fire as breath and the whole as a draconian worm. This time, the censor’s kindly magic failed. This time, I realized how unrealizable the creature was, how lacking in anything authentically parallel to earthly substance it was.

  The most fundamental aspect of the shoggoth that moved to possess me was not made of matter at all, even alien matter; it was made of something more akin to sound: harsh, cacophonous, obscene sound…but sound, however ugly, which as not lacking in rhythm, or, at least in a purely technical sense, harmony. It was in some strange, perhaps irrational and certainly transcendental, way mathematically ordered. In some bizarre way, it was alive…and because it was alive, it was deadly.

  Apart from seeing into and through the shoggoths—for I remained aware of the others as well as the one that was focused on me—I had no visual impression of the room or its other occupants. It was not dark; it was simply that the part of my brain interpreting visual signals could not or would not see ordinary objects and individuals through that hi
deously twisted space. To the presence of Dupin and Chapelain, and that of Ysolde Leonys, not to mention the bed, the chairs and the fugitive copy of A General History of the Pyrates, I was now wilfully blind.

  Would that I had been able to ignore my particular assailant as easily.

  Paradoxical as it might seem, in view of what I have just written, I actually heard very little by means of my ears, except for a strange, high-pitched modulated whistling…but had I been younger, and had the kind of oral register that can hear bats in flight, I think I might have heard a great deal more, for most of the rhythmic sound of which the shoggoths were composed was undoubtedly beyond the spectrum of human perception.

  The worst of it all, however, was what I felt and tasted.

  This time, one of the shoggoths reached out to grasp me, not merely with its tentacles but with whatever reaching limbs its draconian aspect possessed. Those quasi-limbs reached for me, and they reached into me—and the first thing they reached for was not my brain but my tongue. Rumor has it that while carrion birds invariably aim for a corpse’s eyes before savoring other flesh, marine predators attacking whales or other giant prey always go for the tongue before, and sometimes instead of, any other meat.

  That my tongue was suddenly robbed of any power of speech, seemingly frozen into a solid, gnarled slab, seemed unworthy of anxiety, compared with the taste of the shoggoth, which was indescribably vile. Perhaps I should not be speaking in the singular here, although it seems inconceivable, in logical terms, that more than one shoggoth should have seized me, for the experience seemed somehow essentially plural. Perhaps, on the other hand, there never was any more than one shoggoth, and its seeming plurality was merely an effect of the twisting of space, like reflections in a mirror maze—but I can only repeat that they seemed plural to me, and that one in particular seemed to have singled me out for…for what? Possession? Consumption? Transfiguration?

  Nothing harmless, at any rate—and certainly nothing pleasant.

  I tasted it, or them, and it was worse than seeing it, or them, and perhaps even worse than feeling it, or them, although I was incapable of making much distinction, at that point in time, between tasting and feeing.