“You are John Dee,” our host affirmed, with a certainty that had to be based in hope rather than reason. “If you would only let me help you, you could remember. If you would only consent to help yourself, you would remember. You have lain idle too long, my friend, while I have made progress. We achieved great things once, you and I—but circumstances were against us. We shall achieve greater things, now that I may play the guide and you the skryer. Innocence has its value, but childhood dreams are too easily corrupted by confabulation. The best skryer of all would be a man with vast knowledge, but an open mind. I think you know how rare that combination is.”
“A knowledgeable man with an open mind can hardly help but be skeptical about the possibility, and the wisdom, of skyring,” Dupin observed. “Innocence has the virtue of generating childish confabulations—what nightmares might an educated mind produce?”
“If that is an accusation, my friend, it is unworthy of you. I played my part in the generation of the Claves Demonicae, it’s true—but the Necronomicon existed long before Edward Kelley was born. I wish you could have set your hand on the Sanskrit version…but even that cannot really have been the first. All the texts attempting to render its peculiar wisdom in human tongues are mere shadows of the book the angels could have written, had they been able to write instead of merely dream.”
“The Edward Kelley that John Dee knew,” Dupin said, thoughtfully, “had been convicted of forgery—a crime whose penalty, at the time, was the amputation of the ears. Your ears, Monsieur Bresz, seem to be in very good condition.”
Our host’s immediate response to that was a wry smile. “You’re determined to resist the truth,” he said. “It will not matter. You’re in my domain now, where I am in command. I make no threats, mind—but this is not your little nook in Paris, and even though you have carefully left your dragon on my threshold, there’s no escape. This is Fate, John…it has been determined since the dawn of time. None of us really has a choice, or ever had. You’ll play your part, as I am playing mine.”
“There is no Fate,” Dupin replied, soberly. “Even Cthulhu, which has moved heaven and earth in the attempt to play that role, cannot fully control the dreamers it has made, even in the absence of the defenses bequeathed to us by the entities you call angels. We are free to choose, Monsieur Breisz—but not alas, to choose who we are, merely in answer to a whim. The sad truth is that we are far more impotent in the face of circumstances than our self-made dreams urge to be believe…but still, we are free; there is no Fate to force our capitulation.”
Oberon Breisz did not seem annoyed, or intimidated, by the contradiction, although I could not imagine that he liked it. “It’s getting late,” he said—inaccurately, according to Paris time. “We will all benefit from sleep…and you might see things differently in the morning.”
Dupin let him have the last word. Coupled with the enigmatic anxieties that Ysolde had generated, it seemed a distinctly ominous last word to me.
On the stairway, as we went up to our rooms, I said to Dupin: “Should we leave now, do you think? Perhaps it would be better to gallop away into the night than to risk sleep in this strange domain.”
“No,” he said. “If we flee, we shall invite pursuit—and he who invites pursuit is half way to being caught. A challenge has been laid down, and is better met head on. I’m not entirely certain that I can resist the pressures that might afflict our dreams, but I feel obliged to try—and you must try too. Reason may sleep, but it does not die; it remains available to us, even in the worst of nightmares, if only we can remember how to find and use it. I have confidence in you, as I have in Chapelain. We are sane men, and we know the value of our sanity. Oberon Breisz is not, and does not understand the treacherousness of his madness. He cannot seduce us, and has no wish to hurt us, as yet…and we might still save him, if we have time enough”
“As yet?” was the phrase I elected to echo. It implied that the time might comes, and soon, when Edward Kelley reincarnate might want to hurt his former mentor, and those associated with him
“He seems uncommonly robust,” Dupin said, “but dreams are brittle, and ever wont to shatter. When they do, wrath often burst forth.”
“I’ll keep my revolver under my pillow,” I decided.
“It might be direly ineffective weapon, in the heart of a nightmare,” he said. “Don’t allow its possession to make you forget that you have others.”
The bedroom, as I have observed, was as ordinary as any guest bedroom, save for its total lack of decoration. The bed, however, was capacious and comfortable, very conducive to sleep—and that seemed a useful luxury, after the hard floor of the inn on the road to Rennes. I was tired, and I do not think that I could have stayed awake even if I had determined to try. At any rate, Dupin had said that he had confidence in me, and I was obliged to live up to that expectation. I did not undress, though, and I did place my gun beneath my pillow, just in case.
How much of what followed as real, I cannot tell for certain; nor can I even specify very clearly what real might mean in the circumstances in which I found myself. I know that I went to sleep, which certainly licenses the belief that it was all the merest kind of hallucination, and that is definitely the preferable interpretation—but I did not wake up where I went to sleep, so, at the very least, it was a somnambulistic adventure. Nor was it only my adventure, for I was not alone for very long, and there were other survivors of the dire dream to confirm at least some of its details.
Did Oberon Breisz intend to take action while we slept? Did he believe that he could risk some magic to entrap us, and draw us by degrees into his fantasy? I believe so. Did Ysolde Leonys have her own agenda, her own vague plan to exploit the dream-conducive environment to build a new safe haven to replace the one she had lost sixteen years before? I am certain of it. Neither plan, however, came to fruition. Whatever contribution those pre-hatched schemes made to the hallucination we actually experienced was a minor one, usurped, perverted and altered out of all recognition by a much-superior force. Even minor contributions can be vital, though; they can determine the difference between life and death.
Was it Cthulhu that invaded all our dreams, and almost destroyed us all? In a manner of speaking, yes it was—but not in the sense that the creature encrypted in the borderlands of the earthly ocean had any particular interest in the petty affairs of half a dozen human beings. It was not bent on any kind of piracy, predation or revenge. It was not really acting at all, but merely being…waiting and dreaming, as it had been condemned to do, in the immeasurable past, by the unimaginable angels who had imprisoned it, in order to protect the coherency of the plenum. It was not malevolent, in the sense that it wished specific ill to any particular individual, world or universe, although humans, and other thinking beings, cannot possibly regarded it as anything but utterly inimical and implacable destructive. It was simply being what it was…and it was our misfortune that some among us, and people with whom they had had contact in the past, had deliberately involved themselves in its being, trying to summon its phantom aspects in the hope of drawing power therefrom, or even to make some kind of pact with the vast whole—a futile endeavour, given that it was not at all the kind of Devil that they imagined the Devil to be, but something far more horrid.
As I had anticipated, the sequence of my own involvement continued to progress. I had seen the shoggoths in semi-human guise, and I had seen them, as it were, naked. On both occasions, I had been aware of the superficiality of what I was seeing—that the furthest removed and most abstract of their multi-dimensional aspects was, in some sense, the core of their being, the heart of their dream.
On both occasions that I had seen then, I had assumed that they were trying to take possession of the medallion, or at least to remove it from our possession, in order to nullify its repellent authority, but now I think that such an interpretation was overly anthropomorphic—Dupin, as a pedant, would probably prefer the term anthropopathic, since the familiar term is to do with ma
tters of form. Anthropopathy, if my Greek can be trusted, is falsely to credit unhuman creatures with human purpose, human endeavor and human feeling. If, instead of partially humanizing them as malevolent marauders, one thinks of the star-spawn as drifting fragments of random hallucination, unthinkingly and unfeelingly following unnameable and incalculable tropisms, that might be a little nearer to the unspeakable, unthinkable truth—but perhaps that too is a futile endeavour, and the words “unspeakable,” “unthinkable” and “unnameable” really do go to the heart of the matter.
Whether or not Cthulhu perverted Earth’s native life so as to fabricate the human race, in order produce a legion of dreaming minds that might one day forge the key to its release, either by accident or design, I cannot tell. The logic of the situation, however, suggests that it does have an innate interest in dreaming, thinking minds, and in the shapes of their dreams and thoughts—to which its instruments respond, reflexively or instinctively.
Our involvement with Ysolde Leonys had attracted the shoggoths twice before; it was inevitable, I suppose, that it should attract them again, in greater force—and doubly inevitable that they should find us all the more easily in a tiny cranny of space and time that was itself encrypted, where their force might be multiplied tenfold, as if they were in their own element.
In all probability, they could not have done anything without a bedrock of human dreaming to work with—but there was no shortage of human dreams and nightmares in our company, on that night of all nights. Oberon Breisz had made an exception to his reclusive habit by inviting guests into his home, gladly and eagerly—but perhaps recklessly.
At the merest suggestion of the cephalopod aspect of the invaders, I sat up in bed and took out my revolver—but this time, the tentacles did not reach out for me, and there was no embrace to taste. This time, they made no move to seize or enter into me at all. This time, they were in the walls of the house, and the fabric of the pinnacle on which it stood.
I did see the ultimate form of the monsters, and felt that presence, after a fashion, although I cannot quite explain the dream-logic that allowed me to see and feel through solid matter, perhaps curving my lines of sight and extrapolating my sensations of touch through higher dimensions. I saw the dragon-worms more clearly than before, like abstruse mathematical and musical sequences writhing in the guts of the earth and flowing into the walls of the house.
Microscopists tell us that there are worms everywhere—that if all the substance of the Earth were to vanish, save for the worms, a hypothetical observer would still be able to see the ghostly outlines of people animals and trees, buildings and rivers and mountains, by virtue of an infinite host of tiny white eelworms, both parasitic and free-living. The dragon-worms comprising Cthulhu-dreams are not tiny and not white, however, but vast and multicolored, in all their algebraic glory. Nor are they mere blind tapering cylinders of flesh, undifferentiated in their ultimate simplicity, but eyed and mouthed and scaled and winged and clawed, and hideous in their ultimate geometrical complexity. Nor are they patient parasites, lying docile in their hosts, absorbing aliments while creating the absolute minimum of disturbance, but impatient trigonometric aggressors, utterly careless of disruption.
No sooner had I perceived them, in fact, than they began to digest the house, dissolving it in unearthly acids and equations, liquefying and differentiating its solidity—and I could feel the floor becoming treacherous beneath my feet as the house and the hill on which it stood began to sag and sink.
Is this, I wondered, how legendary Ys sank, before being covered by the sullen waves? What became of its poor delicate demoiselles?
I ran, then—out of the room and down the stairs.
I heard the echoes of other running feet, but could not see whose feet they were. All I could see were the worms, writhing and coiling, like an immeasurable and irrational Gordian knot, not merely inside everything solid but instead of it, more real, for the moment, than the cold and brittle solidity of mere matter, or the active, bloody warmth of flesh.
I could hear, though, and what I hard was the angry voice of Oberon Breisz, pronouncing the now-familiar formula: “Ph’nglui mglw’nat Cthulhu R’laiyeh wgah’ngl fhtaign.”
It had no effect. He tried another formula, and then a third, his voice becoming louder every time—but the shoggoths were on safer axiomatic ground this time, from their own transcendental point of view, and were not to be so easily dislodged. The formulae undoubtedly had their effect, for I saw ripples of agony flowing along the bodies of the worms, and their horrid red eyes bulging, and their vicious jaws chattering—but they were determined to do their work no matter what, and they were working with terrible rapidity.
I knew that I had to get out of the house—by leaping through a glazed window if the door was firmly locked—but I knew before I reached the bottom of the stairs that I could not even hope to reach the vestibule. The shoggoths were not assaulting my flesh directly, but they were stealing all purchase from it. My feet were sinking ankle-deep into the substance of the floor, and the air that I was sucking into my lungs was decaying into unbreathability.
I brandished my revolver, but did not fire. I might as well have fired at a tempest, hoping to cripple a thunderbolt.
I contrived to reach the ground floor, but I could get no further. I was thigh-deep now in the worm-infested slime, and now the worms were in my flesh as well, surging up within my limbs and bowel, aiming for my heart and brain. I put the revolver back in my pocket, in order that I could use both hands to support myself against the wall—but the wall had become treacherous, and when my hand touched it, I had difficulty tearing it free again. I began waving my hands in the air and I twisted my body, trying to pull my legs free from the slime without the aid of any authentic leverage, and therefore hopelessly.
I felt the tide of alien flesh welling up inside my own, and knew that I was within a second of death—but then a hand reached out, as if from nowhere, to grasp my flailing wrist, and a dazzling white light appeared amid the multicolored chaos, resolving the series of my distress into reassuring finitude. That light spelled out two cryptograms, back to back, each inscribed in letters at least an inch across—but it was evident in the way that the symbols moved that they were inscribed on a invisible human body…a female body.
Ysolde Leonys was not pronouncing the cryptograms—the only voice I could hear was that of Oberon Breisz, chanting spell after spell—but their incarnation fore and aft of her heart was a protective cage, extending throughout her own flesh and any flesh she touched. The moment I made contact with her, the worms within my lower body disappeared, in hectic retreat and division. She transferred her grip from my wrist to my hand, so that the clasp was mutual.
“Reach out,” she whispered—and I could hear the whisper perfectly, in site of Oberon’s chanting.
I reached out, and felt another hand grasp mine. It was Dupin’s; I recognized it.
“I have Chapelain,” he whispered in his turn.
The symbols of the encryption moved past me then, heading for the door, and the human chain they drew behind them followed in their train.
The door was locked, but it did not matter. The encrypted symbols passed through it, and so did everything they encaged.
That was not the end, though—not by any means. The hill was still dissolving, and the steps that had been crumbling even when they were humbly material had already been crudely subtracted from the sum of all things. The whole enclave was still sinking, as if ambitious to become the Underworld that Ysolde had named it, in every sense of the word. The steep crag was becoming a glutinous mass, flowing away in every direction.
The starlight was very faint, and the surrounding landscape was profoundly steeped in shadow, but the symbols incarnate in Ysolde’s flesh were not the only things glowing. In the distance—a very long way away, it seemed—there was a circle of rough-hewn lights, roughly oblong in form, standing on their ends.
It was, I realized, the megalithic circl
e: the threshold of Oberon Breisz’s perverted domain. And between the stones that formed the gate through which we had entered the heart of that domain the previous day were two human shadows, already reaching out for us.
There were two because Madame Lacuzon, Dupin’s faithful gorgon, was not alone. The Comte de Saint-Germain was with her, having succeeded in following us to our goal. They were both waiting for us now, ready to pull us from chaos if they could…but they were so very far away, that I could not believe that we could reach them before the earth swallowed us up and plunged us into its bowels.
The worms could not get inside us while we were caged by Ysolde’s magic, but they did not have to. They merely had to suck us down into the slimy morass of their digestive chyme, from which there could be no escape.
There was still a battle in progress, though, for the house was not dissolving as rapidly as the hill. Indeed, as I looked back, it was not obvious that the uppermost floor of the house was dissolving at all, although it was slowly descending into the protoplasmic prenumerical urschleim that the worms were making of the lower floors.
Oberon Breisz was visible, at least in silhouette, behind the lamplit casement of what I assumed to be his library, where he was raging still against the threat. He was doggedly determined to hold chaos at bay, at least from his books and his own precious person.
In the meantime, Ysolde kept moving forward, heading for the megaliths, drawing me behind her, while I drew Dupin after me and Dupin drew Chapelain after him. The glow of the symbols in her flesh was fading, though, and when I heard her sob, I knew that she had no more faith than I had that we could actually reach the megaliths.
“Would that you really were Tom Linn,” she murmured, plaintively “for at least you could sing us a song while we die.”
The Cthulhu Encryption Page 20
