The Cthulhu Encryption (14 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

A GENERAL HISTORY OF THE PYRATES

I had not thought that I had been absent for more than an hour, and had not been conscious of any bells chiming the hours, but when I checked my watch I found that it was past two. Leuret and Chapelain had both gone and Dupin was alone in the smoking-room. He seemed to be extremely weary, and was certainly not his usual incisive self. Ysolde Leonys had apparently gone to sleep again, although Dupin’s concierge went to sit with her again as soon as she had let me in.

“I take it that the session was not a success,” I said, as I sat down heavily in my armchair. The normality of the cushions seemed very welcoming, and I was glad of their familiarity.

“It was not,” Dupin confirmed. “This time, she really did wake up fully, to all the agony of her condition. She was in great distress. Chapelain had to dose her with laudanum, and still had difficulty persuading her to go sleep again. There was no possibility of asking her any questions. Leuret did not seem overly disappointed about that. I fear that his opinion of me has gone down, and that he now thinks me even madder than Victor Hugo. What have you done to your head, my friend? That’s quite a bump.”

“I had a slight
contretemps
with a pickpocket. He came off worse than I did.”

“I’ve glad that you’ve got safely home. I’ll ask Madame Bihan for some hot water, so that we can bathe it.”

“Don’t bother,” I told him. “It’s nothing. It might have been a great deal worse, if Oberon Breisz had not come to our rescue.”

That caught his attention, as I had known that it would. He forgot all about the bump on my head and the possibility that it might need attention. I had the rare satisfaction of seeing his eyes grow wider, with patent astonishment. “I only ever heard his surname,” he murmured.

“It’s not a coincidence,” I said. “He asked me to give you a message.”

“What message?” Dupin demanded.

“He says that if Ysolde wants to come home, she’s more than welcome,” I repeated, “and that you’re more than welcome to visit his Underworld too. He says that it’s time for you to remember who you really are, and to resume your study of the
Necronomicon
. Do you have the slightest idea what he means by that?”

Dupin shook his head in wonderment. “I’ve never seen a copy of the
Necronomicon
. I’m truly sorry that I didn’t go with you, now—but I was so eager to discover what Chapelain might find out…and now it will have to wait until tomorrow anyway. We can’t hope to decipher the puzzle until then.”

“According to Saint-German,” I said, “Oberon Breisz is a magician—but also something of a clown. I suspect that his judgment may be faulty, at least in the latter instance. At any rate, Breisz could certainly have taken this, had he wanted to, when the pickpocket had failed—but he didn’t want to. He and Saint-Germain both seem strangely content for you to have it, at least temporarily. Saint-Germain was very insistent, though, that you’ll be in his debt if you so much as look at it.”

As I was speaking I took the linen parcel out of my pocket and handed it to Dupin, who took it without hesitation. “What is it?” he said, as he began to unwrap it.

“The Levasseur medallion,” I said, bluntly.

If I had astonished him before, I had electrified him now. He actually started—but he completed unwrapping the wooden disk, and then stared at it in wonderment for two full minutes, turning it over and over, in silence. I could see the array of forty-nine tiny characters carved on the obverse, which seemed sinister now that I knew their possible significance, but might have been hardly noticeable to an ignorant observer.

“Is it the same cryptogram?” I asked, finally, to check Saint-Germain’s assurance that it was not.

“No,” he said, “it’s a different one, but in the same script. With twice as much text, however, I’ll have a much better chance of deciphering both.”

“Do you really want to decipher the whole of the Cthulhu encryption?” I asked. “Is it even safe to try?”

He reflected for a moment, and then said: “Yes—but it probably isn’t safe…especially if Saint-Germain wants me to do it. Whatever he told you will be a lie, of course, but did he tell you why he wants me to have it?”

“He said that it was a counter-spell, and that you’d need it if you succeeded in deciphering the last line of the other. Breisz, on the other hand, said that Ysolde ought to have it, because she might need protection. If the monsters that came after me as soon as I accepted it return, we might
all
need protection…but you’ll have to figure out how to use it first.”

His avid eyes were soaking up the strange array of symbols, squinting in order to make them out in the lamplight, but the mention of monsters snatched him back from his contemplation.

“What monsters?” he asked.

“Shoggoths,” I said, succinctly, being in no mood for preliminary confessions of not-quite-certainty.

“You’ve seen the star-spawn?” he said, with more envy than horror in his tone. Then he made a further attempt to pull himself together. “Tell me
exactly
what happened,” he said. “Every tiny detail.”

I did the best I could, although my description of the two phantom monsters that had attempted to steal the medallion was inevitably vague.

When I had finished, he shook his head. “This needs further thought,” he said, “But not now. I need a clear head. I need sleep—and so do you. Chapelain will come as soon as he can in the morning, and we must make every effort to capitalize on his expertise. This is far more complicated than I had anticipated.”

My head was still aching, and I had probably never been in greater need of sleep, but I could not help saying: “Ysolde will not want to go back to Oberon, will she? She will want to stay with her beloved Tristan, now that she has found him again after so many years.”

No matter how exhausted he might be, Dupin’s inner pedant never became drowsy. “I am not Tristan de Léonais,” he said, “nor is that poor woman upstairs in my bed the Queen of any Underworld. Nor is the person who is calling himself Oberon Breisz the King of any Underworld. He is probably not even a Breton. Perhaps he is a magician, with some skill in encryption and decryption…and perhaps he believes that he has been disinterred himself, like Saint-Germain…if Saint-German’s assertions can be taken seriously. Whatever part Breisz is playing, though, I shall be glad to match wits with him. Now go to bed, my friend, and sleep. Tomorrow, we really
must
make progress in solving this puzzle.”

I did as I was told, but I slept very badly, and not entirely because my head was aching. I dreamed, inevitably, about cephalopods and dragons, magicians chanting incantations of forty-nine incomprehensible syllables, and the Comte de Saint-Germain—who, in my dream. had not aged a day since they day that Olivier Levasseur was hanged in 1730, even though he had been buried in the interim, and still reeked of grave-dirt.

Even so, I did feel better in the morning, and even better when I had eaten breakfast. When I enquired about Dupin, Madame Bihan told me that he had been up for two hours already, poring intently over “a bit of wood and some bits of paper” in the smoking-room. Now, though, he had gone to sit with “the lady.”

I was not unduly surprised that Dupin had risen before me; although he was a common mortal, and became tired when overstressed, he did not require much sleep to repair him, and often contrived to be an early riser as well as a night-owl, when he felt a sense of urgency.

“I’m very sorry for all this inconvenience, Madame Bihan,” I said.

She seemed surprised. I thought at first that it was because, after a life in service, she was unused to having her employers apologize to her, but her reply suggested otherwise. “It is a matter of life and death, sir,” she aid. “Antoine and I will not be found wanting, in such circumstances. Amélie has explained to us what is at stake.”

It took me several seconds to realize that Amélie must be Madame Lacuzon’s forename. “Really?” I said, wondering now much, and exactly what, Dupin had told the old gorgon.

“Don’t be afraid, sir,” Madam Bihan said, in a tone that was almost maternal. “She’s a wise woman. Everyone is frightened of her, and rightly so, but she’s not of the Devil’s party. She has seen the Devil, in her time, but she sent him packing.”

I knew that
wise woman
was a euphemism for
witch
, and I was not surprised to hear that suggestion being made, yet again, of Dupin’s intimidating concierge.

“She sent Oberon Breisz packing as well as the Devil, it seems,” I observed.

“She protects Monsieur Dupin,” thee wise woman’s cousin proclaimed, loyally—and adopted a more confidential tone to add: “He is a great and good man, she says…but he does not always know what is good for him.”

I finished my coffee in haste and immediately went up to Dupin’s old bedroom. The curtains were drawn to keep out the daylight, but there was a nightlight burning on the bedside table, and Dupin had obviously continued his intense study of the two cryptograms by means of its wan light, in spite of its unsuitability. When I came in, though, he laid two pieces of paper on the coverlet, where the wooden disk already lay, and looked up, blinking. He had evidently made a copy of the tiny symbols on the disk, magnifying them to the same degree as Leuret’s sketch, and had been studying the ninety-eight symbols in careful juxtaposition.

I took hold of a chair and pushed it into a position beside his own, although I had to remove a book that was lying on the cushion before I sat down. I placed the book on the coverlet beside the medallion and the pieces of paper, after glancing at its title. It was a recent reprint of Captain Johnson’s
General History of the Pyrates
, in English. I presumed that Dupin had brought it up, as it certainly did not seem to be the kind of reading-matter that Madame Lacuzon or Madame Bihan would have chosen.

“Madame Bihan just confirmed that Oberon Breisz has tried to see you at your apartment,” I told him, in a conscientious whisper, “but that Madame Lacuzon would not let him in. She seems to think, as Breisz did, that your concierge is a witch, who has appointed herself your guardian angel since sending the Devil packing.”

“Madame Lacuzon does have that conviction,” Dupin admitted, also moderating his voice, although he would not condescend to whisper, “and she does not always tell me when she sends someone away. I never scold her for it, because her judgment is usually sound.”

“You mean that her madness generally works to your advantage?” I said.

“She is not mad,” he told me, sternly. “Indeed, she is he sanest person I know.”

I was slightly hurt by the absence of an exception made for me, but I did not scold him for it. Instead, I asked: “How is Mademoiselle Leonys?”

“A little better, I think,” he said, “although still under the influence of the laudanum. She was probably in dire need of deep sleep, after what must have seemed a hellish week in the pandemonium of Bicêtre, but a good bed can work wonders. Hopefully, by the time that Chapelain gets here, she’ll be as ready as she ever will be to by obedient to his mesmeric authority, and to tell us what she knows. I hope so.” His gaze strayed back to the medallion, as if magnetically attracted to it.

“You should not try to study characters as tiny as those in this dim light,” I told him, “or even the copies you have made. Ordinary print is not much better.”

“My eyes are excellent,” he assured me. “I really do believe that I might be able to work out the pronunciation of the unknown characters, given time—and I can’t help feeling that the matter is urgent. As for the
History of the Pyrates
, it’s set in comfortably large type—although I’ve only glanced at it, to refresh my memory, in case there was any information about John Taylor that had slipped my mind.”

“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?”