The Cthulhu Encryption (17 page)

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 hideously 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.

Was it a point in time, though? Was time any longer possessed of moments?

The previous night, I seemed to have lost an hour or so, somewhere between midnight and two, when I finally got around to feeling and noting time again. This time, I thought, I might lose days, or years, or an entire eternity. Indeed, I had the bizarre sensation of whirling through the entire cycle of time, to an end that was identical to the beginning, and back again, while there was nothing at the focal point of my thinking mind but that
taste
, that
feel
….

And then, if time was any longer possessed of a
then
, the febrile modulated whistling turned into a scream of agony.

I thought that it was mine. I thought that it was my death-agony—but it was not.

The shoggoths screamed, and the reason that the shoggoths screamed was that the twisted space-time was suddenly
full
, of a sound that was not the fabric of the worm-within-the-squid but the fabric of something even more powerful, even more predatory. I cannot say what sort of shape it might have had, had my brain been able to translate it into organically-understandable imagery, but I can say that it was organized mathematically and phonetically into forty-nine syllables, which were somehow arranged, in that convoluted space, into seven sets of seven, spoken simultaneously but in the correct order.

And the sound ripped the shoggoths apart.

Whether the shoggoths were actually destroyed, or were merely re-entombed in some mysterious encrypted space, I do not know—but I do know that I was suddenly free.

I collapsed, of course, falling off my slender misericord and instinctively coiling myself into a fetal position. Real time passed, in not insubstantial quantity. Five minutes, at least, must have elapsed before the echoes of unearthly sight and hearing, smell and touch and taste, finally consented to die.

Then I got up, slowly. Chapelain got to his feet at the same time. Dupin was already standing, looking with frank astonishment at Ysolde Leonys.

She was still recognizable—just. The syphilitic sores were no longer visible about her lips. Her skin was clear. Her complexion was no longer sallow. Her hair was raven-black, her eyes bright blue. She might have been thirty, for her beauty seemed maturely majestic rather than youthfully fresh, but surely no older. She was recognizable, but she was not the same disease-ridden individual that we had taken from Bicêtre. She was
healthy
. She was holding both her arms clasped hard to her breast. I could still make out the wooden medallion between her fingers, but they were no longer cupped around it; instead it was pressed to her flesh, with the encryption facing inwards.

I was unable speak as yet, and I suspect that Dupin was equally incapable, but Chapelain made the effort, because he had an urgent command to impart.

“Whatever you do,” he whispered, hoarsely, “
don’t wake her
. If she comes out of the trance now, the shock will surely kill her.”

When Dupin finally recovered his voice, it was to ask the mesmerist, in an absurdly earnest whisper: “Have you ever seen this phenomenon before?”

“Only the faintest echo of it,” Chapelain replied. “Mesmeric metamorphosis is a well-documented phenomenon—entranced individuals sometimes seem to take on new personalities, with new appearances to suit the alteration, and the most common shift is to a younger self, with an apparent rejuvenation of appearance, but there is nothing on record as extreme as this. She seems to have cast off her disease entirely.”