The Cthulhu Encryption (10 page)

I did not feel able, even within the scope of my duties as host, to rein in Leuret or Chapelain, but I did think it my duty to exercise some diplomatic restraint over my friend, so I hastened to put in: “But Monsieur Balzac is more than a little mad, is he not? I’ve only seen Hugo at a distance, but if rumor can be credited, and the evidence of
Notre-Dame de Paris
can be trusted, there more than a little madness in his genius too.”

“Dr. Leuret agrees with Dr. Lélut that
all
poets are mad,” Chapelain put in, a trifle mischievously. “He thinks the same of all mesmerists, too. Indeed, were he to examine his conscience thoroughly, I think he might be forced to the judgment that there is not a single sane man in all Paris—including himself.”

“That is not true, Dr. Chapelain,” Leuret replied, in a thoroughly dignified manner, “although I will concede that the vast majority of the sane are those who do not trouble themselves overmuch with the intellectual and moral conundrums that tax men like ourselves—and I will also confess that I sometimes thank God that I am not a genius.”

“I’m no genius myself,” Chapelain replied, in a more conciliatory tone, “but I will confess that I have difficulty thanking God for it.”

All three of us looked at Dupin then, although I doubt that any of us was looking for a confession of lack of genius. “Oh,” he said, blithely, “I have no hope of denying, in company like this, that I am mad. Were I to make a claim of sanity, the explanation I promised Dr. Leuret would surely convince him otherwise, and probably Chapelain too. My friend, of course, already knows full well that I am mad.”

I shook my head, more in sorrow than anger. “I must confess,” I said, “that I cannot see the harm in reading fantastic novels, and even less in listening to nursery tales of magic and chivalry. Such pastimes are delightful, in spite of all the violence and ugliness to which such tales repeatedly play host. Even the insane can surely take as much solace from fairy tales as from dance or music, and I cannot believe that they pose any danger at all to the sane. Hallucinations are not contagious, in the way that measles and smallpox are.”

“But they
are
contagious,” Leuret insisted. “Not merely in the wards of Bicêtre, but in the drawing-rooms of Paris—they spread like wildfire. You might think that you are safe from their contagion if you refuse belief, insisting that they are
only stories
—but they get into your head, and once there, they alter our thoughts and feelings, for the worse rather than the better. They may seem harmless, but their corruption is all the more insidious in consequence.”

No one call him mad for saying that, although I cannot vouch for anyone’s private thoughts.

“Dr. Leuret is right, of course,” Dupin said. “Legends are contagious, for they are designed to be. And he is right too, to suggest that we underestimate the extent to which they influence our thinking, even when we withhold our belief. When Isaac Newton became convinced that there were cryptograms in Biblical legend, however, and that the whole world is one vast cryptogram, in which all the secrets of Creation lie hidden, he was not entirely wrong. Legend is a species of encryption…although I really ought to explain what I mean by encryption….”

“Indeed you ought,” my friend, “I said, for you have promised to do exactly that, in order to explain to us exactly what the Cthulhu encryption is, and why it might be important that it is engraved in Mademoiselle Leonys’ flesh…if, indeed, it is. But it is time now for us to move from the dining-room to the smoking-room, into a very different atmosphere.”

There were nods all round; all the three of them were enthusiastic to develop the discussion in a more concrete fashion

Even as we stood up from the table, however, the doorbell rang.

Reflexively, I made as if to go and answer it, but Dupin actually put out a hand to stop me, and his grip on my arm was firmer than mere politeness would have required. I heard him mutter: “So soon!” too quietly for the other guests to have heard.

Somewhat to my surprise, as we all paused expectantly, I heard footsteps coming down the stairs; it was Madame Lacuzon, not either of the Bihans, who was going to answer the bell.

I was not sorry about that; as I had told Dupin, I was sure that the Devil himself would not get past that fearsome woman, if she were able to look him in the face.

We all paused, as if petrified, listening for the sound of voices. We heard them, but the front door was too far away for us to make out exactly what was being said, or to have any chance of recognizing the voice of whoever was arguing with Madame Lacuzon.

In the end, I think we all emitted a sigh of restrained relief when, after a long and seemingly pregnant silence, the door closed again. A few second later, Madame Lacuzon appeared in the doorway, bowed politely to the assembled company, and then came to me to hand me a folded piece of paper. Then, without saying a word, she withdrew and went back upstairs to resume her vigil.

I unfolded the note and read it.

Dupin’s dragon will not let me in
, it read.
It is absolutely imperative that I speak to you, whether Dupin forbids it or not. I will wait in one of the chapels in Saint-Sulpice, all night if necessary. Come when you can. It is a matter of life and death—yours, mine and Dupin’s. In this, we are on the same side. Do not fail me.

Saint-Germain

Dupin was looking at me curiously, but I did not hand him the note. I knew well enough what his reaction would be to any approach from Saint-Germain, and I strongly suspected that he might indeed forbid me to go to meet him—but I wanted to make up my own mind about that, and I had never been convinced that the President of the Harmonic Philosophical Society was my enemy, even if he was something of a charlatan and a crook. For that reason, I folded the note again and put it in my pocket, muttering: “Nothing urgent—it can wait until later.”

CHAPTER SIX

ENCRYPTION

“You will forgive me, I hope,” Dupin said, “if my explanation seems rambling, and a trifle disparate, at least to begin with, but this is a complicated matter.” He gathered himself then, holding his pipe just so and sucking on the stem. Then he blew out a cloud of smoke, as if to symbolize the expulsion of thought and fancy that he was about to undertake,

I had gone to open the window slightly, in the hope of clearing the air by some small but substantial margin—but then I spoiled the effect by poking the fire and throwing on another log, which crackled and hissed as its sap seethed and its bark went up in flames.

“When Dr. Chapelain first showed me the cryptogram yesterday,” Dupin continued, “my initial reaction was to dismiss it as a matter of no significance, having seen many such scribbles before. I was disinclined to believe that it was a genuine cryptogram, even in the trivial sense that construes encryption as a process of converting information from a readily comprehensible format to an incomprehensible one, by means of a substitution cipher—a process that can as easily be applied to a laundry list as to a message from a political spy or directions to a hidden treasure. Such mundane uses have been common since the days when Athens and Sparta employed spies to report on one another’s political intentions by means of scytales, and became rife in such periods of turmoil as the Latin decadence, when early Christians used symbolic and numerological codes to communicate information that might have facilitated persecution if understood by their enemies.

“Before that, however, the Pythagoreans construed the entire world as a vast cryptogram in need of deciphering, and they were the ones who devised the ancestral term whose double meaning has been carried forward ever since by the word in question. The literal meaning of encryption is, of course, to
put in a crypt
, to
entomb
. The Pythagoreans believed that the great cryptogram of nature did, indeed, contain much that had been deliberately buried and concealed. Exactly why this had been done they were not certain, but they were in no doubt that various encryptions had been carried out in the immemorial past, and naturally attributed the work to the gods. Most encryptions, they assumed, had been done for virtuous reasons, in order to prepare the world for the advent of humankind. The legend inevitably arose, as a corollary of this assumption, that a particular individual had taken on the role of sweeping the world clear of forces that would have been inimical to humans, entombing them all by means of magic formulae of encryption. That legend, transfigured within new religious contexts, became the myth of Solomon imprisoning the demons and setting his seal upon their prisons—a seal which might be reversed by the right incantatory key.”

“A key whose use implied the ability to make a pact with the demon thus released?” Leuret queried.

“Some Christian conjurors seem to have believed that,” Dupin agreed, nodding his head, “although many legends of that sort warn against potential treachery. Arabic folklore, too, is profoundly uncertain about the controllability of liberated djinn, and their likely generosity—but I doubt any encrypted entities of that sort have ever been properly liberated….”

“As opposed to
improperly
liberated?” I could not resist putting in—but that only elicited a frown from the pedant.

“There may well be degrees of liberation,” he said. “Physical liberation into the world of matter is one thing; liberation in the realm of dreams, hallucination and madness might be possible without that. Indeed, if there are figurative windows in the metaphorical cells where the entities are encrypted, that is the realm on which they look out—and if the entities in the metaphorical tombs can still walk the earth in any measure at all, it is as ghosts and phantoms that they do so, haunting the minds of their privileged seers.”

“You are speaking poetically, of course,” Leuret observed. Coming from a man whose opinion of poets was as low as his, it was almost a sneer, although his voice was level and its tone polite.

“Of course,” Dupin admitted, freely enough. “What other language could I employ but the language of legend, myth and poetry to speak of such matters? We have no science, as yet, with a technical vocabulary equal to the task. If I might continue…?”

“Please do,” said our guest of honor.

“Wherever there is an orthodox view, of course,” Dupin went on, “it spawns antitheses. Some Pythagoreans inevitably wondered whether the encrypted entities really had been encrypted in order to make the world safer for humankind. Some wondered whether they might simply have been placed in store in order that their eventual release might put an end to the world of humankind—a notion similarly transfigured in the Christian mythos, in the Apocalypse of St. John and similar nightmares. A few, even bolder, wondered whether humans were of any relevance at all, and whether the beings that encrypted others might have been working entirely out of motives of their own. Now that we have a better understanding of human insignificance in a universe vast in time and space, the last-cited possibility has come to seem the most plausible of the three, in purely rational terms.

“The Pythagorean philosophers were exceedingly curious, and some among them undoubtedly endeavored to find answers to such conundrums. The entire cult was, however, secretive by habit and by nature—although the legend is probably false that one of its members was put to death for revealing the existence of irrational numbers—and scant rumor of the greater part of such endeavor was handed down in any manner that has reached our time. Their descendants, the neo-Pythagoreans and neo-Platonists of the Roman Era, were even more secretive, and probably made even more use of ciphers and symbols than the early Christians. Their further descendants, the alchemists and astrologers of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, continued and intensified the habit, and the modern adherents of the so-called Hermetic Tradition, exemplified by the Inner Circle of the Harmonic Philosophical Society of Paris, now conduct themselves in that fashion as a matter of routine, as much for reasons of intellectual addiction as for any real fear of persecution—although I will admit that the latter pressure has not entirely disappeared, even now.”

“Indeed not,” murmured Chapelain, who had doubtless experienced a good deal of unreasoned prejudice in his time.

“The Pythagoreans were, of course, intellectually under-equipped by comparison with modern philosophers,” Dupin went on. “Their science was very primitive, although they did understand the importance of mathematics as an analytical tool. It is, however, a mistake to think that because we have so much more reliable information about the natural world that ancient philosophers were merely ignorant and misled, and that everything they thought they knew has been superseded. The men of the what we now call the Renaissance were acutely aware of the fact that much of the heritage of the ancient world had been lost, if only for the simple reason that so many of the manuscripts in which it had been recorded had fallen victim to decay, vandalism and sheer neglect. It was not until the fall of Byzantium, where a larger fraction of the heritage of Western Europe had been preserved than in Rome itself, that Italian and French scholars were to begin the work of salvage, belatedly copying what they could—and even then the work was highly selective, guided by the Church. To this day, previously-unknown manuscripts are still being discovered in the monasteries and churches of the old Eastern Empire, and that is a process that will doubtless continue long into the twentieth century. The great triumph of printing has been the preservation of much that might otherwise have been lost, even though paper decays as parchment did, and it is not that much harder for a printed edition of five hundred copies to disappear completely than it was for two hundred copies of a manuscript produced by monks or scribes.”