The Cthulhu Encryption (11 page)

“We have national libraries now,” Leuret pointed out, “dedicated to the prevention of such losses.”

“The ancients had Alexandria,” Chapelain interjected. “How many times did it burn? I forget.”

Dupin frowned at the interruptions, and continued, more insistently: “The idea that there is an esoteric heritage that has survived alongside the exoteric one—that there are manuscripts that survived the Dark Ages other than in Christian monasteries, or survived in monasteries where they had no right to be, according to the tenets of the Christian orthodoxy—is nowadays derided because so many of the modern documents that claim to be copies of those ancient esoteric sources are obvious fakes. It would, however, be very surprising if there were no such documents at all, or if their custodians had not made efforts to conceal them from Christian persecution exactly as the Christians had tried to preserve their own early secrets from would-be persecutors. Whether the authentic survivals contain anything but intellectual dross—dismissing them as dross is the strategy by which positivists reject them
en masse
—I do not know, but I try my utmost to keep an open mind, and I am proud to follow in the footsteps of men like Roger Bacon and John Dee, who were, before anything else,
bibliomaniacs
: obsessive and relentless book collectors.”

You are more than proud,
I thought—but did not dare say anything aloud.

“Bacon and Dee were men of genius too,” Dupin continued, “and men of conscience, but their first concern, in approaching the matter of ancient manuscripts, was not to judge them as worthy or unworthy, on either religious or scientific grounds, but to accumulate and preserve them. In so doing, they knew that they were running real dangers—that their lives would literally be imperilled by the self-appointed judgers of books—but they did it anyway. Indeed, by virtue of an altogether natural and laudable perversity, they invested more interest in the books that they were forbidden—
literally
forbidden—to read than in those that they were obliged or encouraged to read. They both suffered as a result of that decision, eventually warranting recognition as martyrs, not merely in terms of what became of them materially, but in terms of their posthumous reputations, which were thoroughly blackened with charges of wizardry and diabolism. It has always been safer, in this corrupt world, not to read at all, or, if one must read, to read the books that one is obliged or encouraged to read, or, if one absolutely cannot help being infected with bibliomania, to operate as a bibliotaph: an entomber of one’s books, and oneself with them.

“There are, inevitably, all kinds of legends that have grown up around the supposedly forbidden books that reside in various bibliotaphic crypts. Some such texts have even been printed—and the great majority of the ones that have been printed are undoubtedly fakes. Some, however, are more interesting than others. I possess a few of them myself; I dare say that the library of the Harmonic Philosophical Society of Paris includes far more—and I could not begin to hypothesize what serious bibliotaphs like Monsieur Breisz of Brittany, who is something of an esoteric legend in his own lifetime, might possess.

“What I do know, however, is that one of the rarely-seen and most talked-about of all the forbidden books is the so-called
Necronomicon
: an improvised title that implies something like
the book of dead names
. It is a Latin text, but is usually credited to a ‘mad Arab’ by virtue the frequent allegation that it was originally written in Arabic; its original title is said to have been
Al Azif
, that possibly being the name of a demon in the demon’s own language. Although I know of no one who has ever seen a copy of the
Necronomicon
, let alone
Al Azif
, I have heard various rumors of what the text is supposed to contain. As well as a series of cryptograms that were probably cast initially in the seven-by-seven format beloved by the Pythagoreans—their format is said to be only partly preserved in the Latin text—it apparently contains fragments of a narrative, which Dr. Leuret would doubtless consider to be the very acme of madness, and is certainly very fanciful by any standards, although it is not entirely implausible in the context of my own theories regarding the true nature of reality—for which I have evidence of a sort, although it is not evidence likely to convince the followers of August Comte.

“It is getting late, so I will do my best to be brief. In short, I have no sympathy with the recent revival of atomic theory, and the void theory attendant upon it. I am a plenarist, who agrees with Aristotle that the notion of void is essentially abhorrent. The apparent emptiness of space is, in my view, an illusion; all space is full, but its fullness is concealed from us by the fact that the vast bulk of the matter contained in the plenum is inaccessible to our senses. The universe we see, and detect by means of our scientific instruments, is only the merest slice of a vast collection of incompletely-separated slices. Unwittingly, we live in parallel with countless other universes, whose own matter and apparent space is interleaved with our own, but which is inaccessible to our senses. Furthermore, I believe that to be a necessary condition of existence: I do not believe that our universe could exist, and maintain its integrity, were it not part of such a manifold. Were it not for the invisible and intangible matter unavailable to our sensory perception, the visible and tangible matter that is available could not be organized as it is—but that is a side-issue.

“The point is that the separation between the universes is not absolute; there is a certain amount of what might be called
leakage
. This leakage can be physical, but only briefly and temporarily, save for exceptional circumstances that threaten to remove, transfigure or obliterate sectors of universes, and sometimes entire universes. It is more often mental. Insofar as humans have any experience of the other universes, that experience arrives in the form of dreams and hallucinations, for which reason the other universes neighboring ours within the manifold are often referred to in esoteric texts as
the dream-dimensions
. In that context, hallucinations can certainly be contagious—and some of those that are contagious are also toxic, sometimes fatally.”

Leuret could not help interrupting there. “I have long been an exponent of the view that there are authentically mental illnesses,” he said, “which is to say, diseases of the mind that are by no means mere echoes of physical distress or electrical and chemical events in the brain. The idea that there are kinds of madness that originate outside the individual, however, capable of injection or infusion like a poison, is not one that I can endorse. I think that toying with hallucination is dangerous for sane minds, but the danger comes from within, not without.”

“You might be right, Dr. Leuret,” Dupin relied. “Indeed, I hope that you are—but I’m not so sure that the distinction between
within
and
without
is as clear as you are trying to draw it. Much of what I have just said is, admittedly, conjecture based on the extrapolation of limited evidence. The remainder of what I have to tell you, I cannot offer as anything more than matters of hallucination and legend—although I do contend that, even if they are no more than that, they have real power to hurt us, and even to destroy us. I feel perfectly sure, Dr. Leuret, that you will not deny, on the basis of your long experience to Charenton and Bicêtre, that hallucination has the power to hurt and destroy us very cruel ways. The only possible dispute there is between us is how best to counter and ameliorate those cruel inflictions, on a case by case basis.

“This, then is what hallucinatory legend has to say. There are entities within the other dimensions that lie close to us in the plenum, and even between the dimensions, that pose a threat to their neighbors, and perhaps to the entire manifold. There are also agents that work to neutralize those threats. You may categorize them as demons and angels, if you care to use that drastically oversimplified and ideologically loaded terminology, but they probably have no interest at all in human beings, and were certainly not specially created merely to afflict or defend us. Our world—the planet Earth, that is—has surely been invaded by those agents in the past, on occasion, and is surely still subject to the threat of further invasions. Indeed, that threat might be intensifying considerably at the present time, for the ironic reason that civilized humans have now evolved, physically and culturally, to the point at which we can begin to investigate and interrogate the underlying processes of dream and hallucination, and the underlying properties of matter.

“Such invasions might well have less practical before there were humans on Earth to dream and think, but the Earth has a very long history—no one knows how long, as yet, but it must be measured in millions of years, if not thousands of millions—and it is possible that there were dreamers and thinkers abroad on its surface before the advent of humankind. At any rate, legends of such invasion were preserved in oral tradition, albeit in corrupted and perhaps encrypted form, long before anyone wrote them down. The narrative that was eventually written down in the text ancestral to the
Necronomicon
describes the temporary invasion of Earth, long before the appearance of humankind, of an entity named Cthulhu. Attempts to describe that extremely alien entity are highly impressionistic, but it is likened to a strange kind of compound of draconian, cephalopod and humanoid characteristics, and there is some suggestion that it might be a compound being, with smaller associates of some kind, sometimes called ‘star-spawn’ but more frequently named ‘shoggoths’. The former name is obviously a recent improvisation, but the latter, like Cthulhu itself, might well be an attempted phonetic rendering of an alien term.

“According to the esoteric legend, Cthulhu’s invasion might have been far more destructive than it was. It might have rendered the Earth uninhabitable for the life-forms indigenous to it, but the likelier possibility is that native life would simply have been co-opted as creative material into some vast project of unknown purpose—that being the motive for the invasion. In fact, Cthulhu was prevented from carrying through its project, not by destruction or conclusive banishment, but by a process of encryption. It was, in some fashion that is literal as well as metaphorical,
entombed
. And the mechanism of that entombment was, of course, a cryptogram: the so-called Cthulhu encryption, the ultimate model for the Seal of Solomon.

“According to legend—and I believe that there is at least
some
truth in the legend—that cryptogram has survived into modern times, even though it must initially have been invoked before any human tongue and guiding mind existed to attempt its awkward pronunciation. The key to its survival lies in the translation of the part of the cryptogram that is still to be heard being pronounced by individuals that Louis-Antoine de Bougainville and other explorers have described, not entirely accurately, as ‘Cthulhu-worshippers.’ You have seen the symbolic form of the cryptogram inscribed in Ysolde Leonys’ misfortunate flesh, and you heard her lips attempt to pronounce forty-two of the forty-nine symbols his afternoon. I will not attempt to reproduce her pronunciation, for more reasons than one, but the usual translation derived via Arabic and Latin is: ‘In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.’ The operative word is
dreaming
. Inert and encrypted as it is, presumably dead by any criterion that human physicians could apply, Cthulhu is still dreaming….and its dreams are capable of interacting with the dreams of human beings. That is how humans came to know of its existence, and such dreams are the source of all that we know about it—not, alas the most reliable one imaginable.”

“Why forty-two?” Chapelain put in. “Why did she not voice all forty-nine?”

“Opinions differ,” Dupin said. “Presumably, the last seven change the significance of the whole, but no one knows how. If they could be translated, so that the quotation could be completed, we might have a better idea—but the
Necronomicon
is said only to translate the forty-two that are routinely voiced, and the same is presumably true of
Al Azif
.”

“But you’re working on a translation yourself?”

“I’m trying to work out how the remaining symbols might be pronounced—and if that leads me to an understanding of their significance, so much the better.”

Not necessarily
, I thought.
Given the multitudinous uncertainties in your story, it could as easily be so much the worse
.

“Legend is unclear,” Dupin continued, stubbornly—hastening his speech slightly now that the end of his discourse was evidently near, “as to whether or not the process of dream-infection by means of which humans have come to know of Clthulhu’s existence and nature is accidental or purposive, but legend being what it is, much is made of the suspicion that it is deliberate and malign. If that were the case, it would imply that the ultimate purpose of the infection is the reversal of the entombment, and the liberation of Cthulhu to complete its long-dormant plan for the usurpation and transfiguration of the Earth, including the human species…a transfiguration for which humankind is now allegedly ripe.