The Cthulhu Encryption (18 page)

“That’s an illusion—mere glamor,” Dupin muttered, “and there are precedents a-plenty in the lore of legend, if not in the records of mesmerism. Are you sure that she is still deeply entranced?”

“Absolutely certain,” Chapelain said.

“And how long will the phenomenon last?”

“I don’t know,” Chapelain confessed. “There are reports of metamorphoses lasting several days…but they were far more trivial than this one. These are uncharted waters.”

Ysolde Leonys’ eyes had been open throughout this exchange, but she had not seemed to be able to see anything within the room. Now, though, she turned her head—not, as might be expected, to Dupin, but to me. “Would you fetch me a mirror, Tom?” she asked, politely.

Mechanically, almost as if I were a marionette on strings, I went to my dressing-room to fetch my shaving-mirror.

When I gave it to her, she studied her reflection with evident interest. “Is this who I am?” she asked, pensively—and added, without waiting for an answer: “Is this who I
might have been?
”

Then she laid the mirror down and turned to Dupin. “We must go,” she said. “I do not know how much time we have, but certainly little enough that we must race against the clock.”

“Go where?” Dupin asked.

“The Underworld,” she said. “He might well try to imprison us when we get there, and all the advantages will be his, for he will be in his own lair, but we must go nevertheless. This needs to be settled, now, for the shoggoths will return again, and I doubt that I can hold them at bay on my own. We will be more vulnerable still in the Underworld, but that, at least, is ground on which we might resist, and ground on which we might be able to summon help. If we stay here, they will destroy us…or worse. I’m sorry that you have become involved in this, for it might have been wiser to let them take me from Bicêtre…or to let Oberon take me back directly, if he would consent to do so. Now, though, you’re committed. There is no longer any safety in the world you know.”

But it was a hallucination
, I reminded myself, yet again.
It was not real
. It did not matter, though; real or illusory, the shoggoths would be deadly, if we no longer had the means to keep them at bay next time they came.

“The Underworld in Brittany?” Dupin queried, naively—but then, suddenly, he seemed to get a grip on himself, and added: “Yes, of course.” He turned to me, suddenly self-composed. “Send Bihan to the
Messageries
to reserve five seats in this afternoon’s diligence to Rennes,” he instructed. “If that is not possible, get whatever seats he can on whatever coach is departing in the right direction, within the hour if possible.” I did not have time to ask
why five
before the answer came, as he continued: “Send Madame Bihan to my house, and instruct Madame Lacuzon to come immediately. Find clothing and a cloak for Mademoiselle Leonys, then pack your bags with more spare clothing, and some food. Then summon a fiacre.”

“You can’t mean to race off to Brittany at a moment’s notice,” Chapelin objected. “I can’t possibly….”

“Stay if you must, Chapelain,” was Dupin’s brutal reply, which I overheard as I was already hastening along the corridor to the stair-head, “but if you ever hope to clap eyes on what’s left of Olivier Levasseur’s treasure….”

Dupin knew how to frame a convincing argument. When the fiacre set off for the
Messageries
, less than an hour later, there were five of us aboard. Perhaps we were the strangest crew that ever undertook such a journey, thanks to the supplementary presence of the witch and the magically-awakened but rather ill-dressed beauty, but I could not help thinking that Dupin, Chapelain and I were the three musketeers, finally about to play our allotted roles in an authentic melodrama. This time, I had put my revolver in my pocket.

I could not help thinking, though, as I tried to slow my heartbeat and relax while the fiacre trotted across the Île de la Cité, that I had now seen the monsters that were pursing us in possessed-human guise, and in shoggoth guise.
Next time
, I wondered,
will I have to face the dragon directly? And if I do, can I possibly survive, no matter what enchanted amulets we have to hand, or magicians to pronounce their ugly incantations?

CHAPTER ELEVEN

OVERLAPPING NARRATIVES

There was a diligence leaving for Rennes that afternoon, with an overnight stop in Alençon. Unfortunately, there had only been three seats left in the cabin, so two us had perforce to travel on the impériale. Fortunately, the cold weather was not yet so intense that we were in danger of freezing to death once the sun set. Dupin insisted that Madame Lacuzon should sit inside to guard the entranced woman—who was very definitely a somnambulist now rather than a somniloquist—and that Chapelain must sit with them too, in case of further developments in her condition. What the other passengers might have thought of that trio, I did not know or care; I was on the top of the coach with Dupin, sitting amid the luggage like two peasants going home from market, and begrudged them all their seats inside. Fortunately, there were no actual peasants going home from market to share our discomfort.

While waiting for the departure I had tried to bring my journal up to date, but it was impossible to write once the coach set off. Dupin had been studying his cryptograms, but even reading was difficult with the coach lurching on the muddy road, and he was afraid that the wind might snatch the papers from his hand, so he put them away again. By that time, however, they were probably so firmly engraved in his memory that he could continue their contemplation even in the absence of the models. His conversation seemed a trifle distracted, as if some partitioned part of his mind were far away, displaced in a different dimension where the inspiration of mediation could be given freer play.

“What do you expect to find when we get to Brittany?” I asked Dupin, once we were on the road and there was time to relax, at least to the extent that one can on the roof of a diligence.

“We need to get there first,” he reminded me. “We have no idea how long Mademoiselle Leonys can hold herself together, and I am inclined to take Chapelain’s word for it that reversion to her former state might be very rapidly followed by her death.”

“But if she can survive long enough to do it,” I said, “you believe she can guide us to this Underworld where she was held prisoner as a child, while mesmerized into believing that she was a fairy queen?”

“We shall see,” was as far as he was prepared to commit himself.

“I am understanding the story that she told in the same way as you, I assume?” I said. “There are two overlapping narratives there, one of which can only be read between the lines of the fantasy. She really was brought from India, and she really was kept underground, if not for a year and a day then for some similar period. There she was compelled to take part in some elaborate charade, persuaded actually to believe that she was queen of a magical court, surrounded by characters from legend and romance, while she was actually…well, let us say that, if I’m interpreting her tale correctly, she began her career as a whore long before she reached Paris, without knowing what she was doing, poor child.”

“That does seem to be a plausible interpretation,” Dupin agreed, although his tone was dubious. It was the pedant in him that came to the fore, though, rather than the doubter. “There were not two overlapping narratives, however—there were three, of which the remotest of the three is the most puzzling of all.”

“Cthulhu,” I said, stumbling yet again over the improbable pronunciation.

“Cthulhu,” he agreed.

“Personally,” I said, “I can’t see where the pirates fit in, let alone the encrypted monster from the dawn of time. The Oberon charade I can now comprehend, after a fashion, but not the constant refrain of ‘Jack Taylor was a
bad man
.’ I can see why Oberon Breisz might have felt obliged to provide his innocent captive with a revised account of an Indian childhood that she could hardly remember, and why he might have been tempted to persuade her that time had gone awry while she was in fairyland, but why drag in the pirates?”

“I don’t know,” Dupin said, frankly. Being the man he was, however, he could not help adding: “But there are one or two hypotheses I could frame, if I were prepared to risk being fanciful, and being led up the garden path.”

“Go on,” I said.

“Do you remember the other nicknames that Oberon attributed himself, for Ysolde’s benefit?”

“The Ancient Mariner,” I said. “Borrowed from the Coleridge poem, no doubt. Captain Nemesis.”

“And who might those nicknames fit—as well as the continual assertion that John Taylor was a
bad man
?”

“The other pirate,” I said, solving the puzzle almost instantaneously. “The one Taylor usurped and marooned—the one who must have been extremely annoyed when Levasseur and Taylor captured the fabulous prize that, in his eyes, should have been his. Edward….”

Momentarily, I could not quite bring the name to mind.

“England,” Dupin supplied, “although that too was a pseudonym, of course.”

“But Oberon Breisz cannot be Edward England,” I said, “any more than Ysolde can really be the daughter of John Taylor the pirate, rather than some descendant namesake.”

“Perhaps not,” said Dupin, although he seemed to mean the
perhaps
literally rather than as a polite denial. “But even if we are dealing with descendants, the tradition of vendetta is not purely Italian. It is not unknown for quests for vengeance to be extrapolated to the fourth or fifth generation, especially when there is money at stake.”

“You think that what Oberon Breisz did to Ysolde was a theatrical kind of revenge, visited by a descendant of Edward England on a descendant of John Taylor? In the great tradition of the Boulevard du Temple, they would have to be the only surviving descendants, and the treasure must have been stolen from the hapless child by the wicked villain.”

“That is one possible construction that might be put on the superficial events,” Dupin conceded.

“What’s the other?” I demanded.

“Possibilities are always endless, my friend, especially in such phantasmagorical territory as this. If Saint-German is correct about Oberon Breisz being a good magician, and something of a clown, perhaps he really might be Edward England, in the flesh.”

“I beg leave to doubt
that
,” I said.

“And rightly so, my friend—but there were other items in Ysolde’s replies to Chapelain’s interrogation that recalled Captain Johnson’s chapter on Edward England, and I suspect that we might only have glimpsed a corner of the pirate narrative thus far.”

“What items?” I asked

“Ysolde named her birthplace as Callaba, and said that John Taylor sailed for the South Seas to seek protection from Angria, as well as a ghost. Callaba was Angria’s fortress, not far from Bombay. Johnson calls Angria a pirate, but he was much more powerful than a mere robber. He was certainly a relentless predator of ships, though, and a serious thorn in the side of the British East India Company until he made common cause with them, at least for a while, against their rivals. It was partly on the Company’s behalf, I suspect, that he went to war with the Viceroy of Goa, the Conde de Ericeira.”

“The Viceroy whose treasure was plundered from the Portuguese galleon.”

“The same. When I talked before about the difficulties that the pirates must have had in capitalizing on their good fortune, I had it vaguely in mind that Taylor might have tried to form an alliance with the East India Company himself, but it seems more likely now that he actually took his share of the treasure to Callaba and made common cause with Angria—a common cause that eventually went sour. Perhaps that was only to be expected, given Angria’s reputation…but there might have been another reason. We know that Taylor got rid of England while they were both associated with Levasseur, but we do not know how relations stood between England and Levasseur…or between England and Angria. If England really did escape, having been marooned by Taylor, and really was grimly intent on seeing revenge, he might have sought out Levasseur, or Angria, in the hope or expectation of remaking an old alliance.”

“Which is all very interesting, from a purely antiquarian viewpoint,” I said, “but does not help at all to explain how England might still be alive and calling himself Oberon Breizsz. That remains absurd. No man can live for more than a hundred and fifty years.”

“Can he not? Personally, I feel compelled to maintain an open mind. After all, if our Comte de Saint-Germain really is the eighteenth-century Comte de Saint-Germain, as he now seems perfectly convinced that he is, it would become unlikely that there were not others in similar situations.”

“I thought that Saint-Germain believed himself to be some kind of reincarnation of his notorious namesake, rather than an immortal continuation of the same physical existence?” I said, with a hint of contempt.

“I doubt that Saint-Germain knows exactly what he believes,” said Dupin. “Given that he does believe it, though, and that he recognizes Oberon Breisz as a peer….”