The Cthulhu Encryption (23 page)

“My father.”

“You told us that the medallion that Tristan returned to you was not Levasseur’s. Whose was it?” He was just checking; we already knew the answer.

“Mine.”

“Who gave it to you?”

“Angria.”

“How did you lose it?”

“Levasseur took it.”

“When?”

“Before he returned to Brittany, the first time.”

“How many times did he return to Brittany?”

“Twice.”

“Did you tell Angria that Levasseur had taken the medallion?”

“Yes.”

“What did he do?”

Silence.

Chapelain opened his mouth to ask another question, but it was too late. The somniloquist had lapsed into a deeper sleep, in which speech was no longer accessible.

Madame Lacuzon whispered something in Dupin’s ear, and he nodded. “Go to sleep,” he advised us. “If we’re fortunate, we shall find out more tomorrow than Mademoiselle Leonys can tell us in this state. If she can guide us to her Underworld, and her Oberon, answers will surely be far more freely available there than they are here.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IN THE MIST

I was not entirely unused to sleeping on a stone floor, but it was not an experience I could relish now that I was no longer young. I was, however, quite exhausted; it is surprising how tired a day in the saddle can make a man, given that he only has to sit while his mount carries his burden. I was sore too, in spite of having ridden on a regular basis since I was a boy, but that only added a further edge of discomfort to my dreams, which were hardly in need of the assistance. Fortunately, I still possessed the invaluable faculty of forgetfulness, and was able to dispel my visions as soon as I awoke, without magical aid. Once I had stretched and shaken my limbs, I felt fully human again—and I say that because it describes exactly how I felt, although I couldn’t quite imagine how I had been less than fully human while I slept.

Primitive as the hostelry was, the mistress of the house had flour and a good oven with which to bake bread, and goat’s milk heated almost to boiling-point to warm us up—which we needed, for the floor, in spite of the straw we had used as makeshift mattresses, had grown very cold once the fire had lapsed into sullen embers.

Plain as the fare was, I felt sufficiently repaired once I had eaten my fill. I even contrived to feel optimistic at the prospect of reaching journey’s end before another day had run by—at least until I stepped outside, and walked into a wall of mist.

The rainclouds had cleared overnight to leave clear skies and allow the temperature to fall sharply. The result of that, as the Chevalier de Lamarck has taken care to explain in his tedious text on the fledgling science of clouds, had been that all the water saturating the atmosphere close to the ground had turned to crystalline vapor. This was not the foul fog of Paris, which is impregnated with smoke and other by-products of industry, so that it retains a faintly organic texture and a nasty odor; this was a pure, unsullied mist, more silver than white or grey—but still, it was exceedingly dense mist, and although I could still see my hand clearly enough when I stretched out my arm to its full length, everything further away was cloaked and hidden.

The master of the lodging-house assured us that we would have no trouble, provided that we stuck to the road, which was clearly marked and still in reasonably good condition in spite of the seasonal mud. Besides, the optimistic fellow assured us, the sun still climbed high enough in the sky in October to dispel mist of this sort by noon at the latest. Not until December would entire days pass without the fog clearing, so that the korrigans would have free rein upon the heath. We would reach Loudéac with no difficulty before sunset, he assured us.

Which as all very well, except that—so far as I knew—we were not going to Loudéac. We had no clue as to exactly where Ysolde Leonys might be leading us, but wherever it was, it was unlikely to be on the Rennes-Loudéac road. If she expected to arrive there before noon, she would presumably take us away from the main road very soon, on to some ill-trodden bridle-path. Would the carriage, light as it was, be able to cope with the final phase of the journey, I wondered—and what would we do with it if it could not?

That was probably a matter of little relevance to Mademoiselle Leonys, and not a question to which Auguste Dupin would deign to pay attention, but I was the person who had hired the carriage and horses, and I was the man who would be accountable if we could not return them safely. I did not suppose that a relatively bleak stretch of road leading into the Breton heartland would be replete with highwaymen, but there are brigands everywhere; even heathland has its hamlets, its cultivated fields, its mills and cider-presses…and wherever there are peasants there are opportunistic horse-thieves.

Nevertheless, we set off. I took what reassurance I could from the fact that I could ride close enough to Dupin not to lose sight of him, and that he could ride close enough to the carriage not to lose sight of its rear wheels. I also took some comfort from the fact that I still had my revolver in my coat pocket, tucked behind my journal, with five bullets loaded.

I do not know how long we were on the road before leaving it. By the time a seasoned traveler is on the third day of a journey, his mind is easily dulled, so that the passage of time loses all urgency and all measurement—all the more so when he is in an underpopulated region where the traffic is thin and one cannot even hear the occasional clanging of cracked church bells ineptly attempting to sound the hours.

The traffic was exceedingly thin. I cannot swear to the number of pedestrians we passed, for a few might have slipped by unnoticed in the mist, but I know that we did not encounter a single laden cart, let alone a horseman or another carriage. Perhaps that was not unusual, the last of the harvest having been brought in and redistributed some while before, but to someone accustomed to the relentless crowds of Paris, it seemed positively eerie.

The road was not straight, because the heathland was far from flat; it wound around in shallow curves and I became so used to the meandering course that I would not even have noticed when we left the road had it not been for the noticeable change underfoot, of which my mount was certainly conscious and did not entirely approve. At the time, I was astride the largest of our animals, which had broad hooves and heavy shoes, and it did not appreciate the more glutinous mud.

Fortunately, the worst of the mud lasted less than a mile, for we soon began climbing a slope. That did not suggest to me that we were getting closer to any kind of underworld, but it did offer the hope that we might climb out of the mist and be able to see our way again. That optimism lent a slight alleviation to the dullness of my patience…but again, tedium soon numbed it.

We paused twice to change the horses round, but I did not even bother to take my watch out and check the time. It did not matter what the instrument said—which was, in any case, still adjusted to Paris time and not to local time. All I knew, and all I needed to know, was that we were somewhere between where we had been and where we were going, and that—barring accidents—we would eventually arrive…hopefully before the invisible sun reached its incalculable zenith.

And we did arrive, after a fashion.

The path we were following petered out, although the carriage rolled on for a further hundred paces or so. In the meantime, I was able to glimpse two huge slabs of stone to either side of our course, and knew that we were among a cluster of megaliths. I was not surprised when the carriage stopped thereafter.

Dupin dismounted; so did I. The mist
was
clearing, finally. As the passengers in the carriage got down, and we all gathered together, I perceived, vaguely, that there was an entire circle of standing stones, and that we were in the center of the formation. There was, I knew, a great abundance of such monuments scattered throughout Brittany. No one knows why they were constructed. In many of them, fearful of pagan echoes, Christian latecomers had raised crosses or established saintly shrines—but there was no sign of anything of that sort here, so far as the silver mist permitted me to see.

I thought at first that we were pausing yet again to rest and water the horses, and to take some food from our luggage, but as soon as I looked at Ysolde Leonys at close range, I knew that our situation had changed.
Her
situation had changed, and ours was entirely dependent on hers.

Chapelain had told us that if she woke up from her somnambulistic state her metamorphosis would melt away and she would likely fall down dead. I did not doubt that he had been correct, in Paris; but we were not in Paris any longer. We were now in a place where she was able to awake, not as her direly mortal, pox-ridden self—her true self, as I stubbornly persisted in thinking of it—but in her present one. In a sense, she had now completed her metamorphosis, which was not, after all, merely from almost-hag to almost-beauty, but from human to…what?

Fairy? Enchantress? Ghost?

She was still solid, though, and just as ill-dressed as before.

It was to Chapelain that she addressed herself first.

“Thank you, Doctor,” she said. “In another age, or another world, you would have been a great magician…but I think you can be well content with your work as a physician. I could never have come home without your help.”

Then she turned to Dupin. “Thank you, Monsieur Dupin,” she added. “Your help was as valuable as Dr. Chapelain’s, if not more so—and you recovered my medallion for me.”

I felt a twinge of envy at that, for I thought that I was entitled to the lion’s share of any credit not due to Saint-Germain, but I made no protest.

“Am I not Tristan de Léonais any longer, then?” Dupin asked Ysolde, in a perfectly level tone that refused all astonishment.

“I fear that I was lost, for a while, in an old dream,” she said. “I sought comfort there, because I had obtained comfort there before…before things went awry. I have been mad lately, and by no means myself—but I’m home now, thanks to the four of you. I don’t know how Oberon will receive me, but if he is disposed to be generous, there is a chance that I might live for some time yet. Thank you all.”

I looked around, at the megaliths half-hidden in the magical mist, and could not imagine anything further from “home”. The bare ground within the stone circle seemed very solid, and I could not imagine that any of the massive blocks of stone could be moved without tremendous effort and very sturdy levers.

“Where, then, is the entrance to the Underworld?” I asked. “Where is Oberon Breisz’s lair?”

“Why, this is the Underworld,” she said, “or at least its threshold. Oberon’s house is on the hill. We shall have to walk from here, but it is not far.”

This time, I was prepared to believe that it really wasn’t far—but that did not make the prospect of the approach any less intimidating.

“We seem to have mistaken the sense of the prefix
under
,” Dupin observed, with scholarly scrupulousness. “The limitations of three-dimensional thought, I suppose.”

“Why?” I asked. “Have we somehow stepped out of the world, into some other universe, displaced in a dimension other than three we measure with Cartesian co-ordinates?” I knew enough about his theories to pose as something other than a complete novice.

“No,” he replied. “We have not gone nearly as far as that, and certainly could not have crossed the barriers that separate material worlds as easily. We are still in Brittany, and if we have been displaced at all, it is by means of some petty trick with time, not the dimensions of space…but we have been encrypted, after a fashion.”

“Are we dead, then?” I asked, alarmed.

Ysolde Leonys laughed. “Quite the opposite, my friend. That is not dead which can eternal lie…and here, no matter that it
is
a lie, one might indeed be eternal, if Oberon will permit it. He will probably send you packing though…you and Chapelain, and the witch. To Monsieur Dupin, on the other hand…you might not know it yet, Monsieur Dupin, but you and he have business to settle. If you cannot remember of your own accord, he will help you.”

“Remember what?” Dupin asked.

“You’re in the Underworld now, Monsieur Dupin—you can remember, if you wish. It isn’t always easy, at first….oh, how difficult it was when I was still a child, in Karla! But I remembered, in the end. I forgot again…but dreams are so hard to maintain, are they not, when there are others intend on guiding them?”

“Can you tell us, now, who you really are?” Dupin asked.

“Oh, but I told you all of that, when Dr. Chapelain held me in thrall. I’m Ysolde Leonys, daughter of Mark Leonys of Cornwall, alias John Taylor the pirate…although I have other, further memories, just as you have, if only you can reach them. Once, I was another Ysolde, who really was beloved by Tristan. Once, too, I was a demoiselle in Ys…so this really is my home, you see. My roots are here. I could have been a seer even in Karla, but to reach into eternity, I had to come here. Oberon knew that. Angria accepted it. All Indians are fatalists—even kings. Especially kings.”

“By Oberon,” said Dupin, “you really mean Edward England?”

“Not at all,” said a new voice—that of a man, certainly no dwarf, who had just emerged from the mist, between two of the standing stones. “By Edward England, Monsieur Dupin,
you
really mean Oberon…unless, of course, you can remember the name I had when we last met, to which I will answer gladly enough.”