The Cthulhu Encryption (2 page)

Even though it was late October, and the night air was taking on a distinct chill, I opened a window—although, to be perfectly honest, the smoke from our well-exercised tobacco-pipes and the crackling log fire, imperfectly drawn into the sullen Parisian air by my chimney, not only drowned out Chapelain’s faint indecency with its sap-sweet and carbon-sour mélange but provided even more incentive to improve the circulation. The faint whiff of Bicêtre was a minor player in the olfactory cacophony.

Bicêtre had once been a hell-hole in which incarcerated madmen—and madwomen—were kept in appalling conditions, direly abused and routinely exhibited to tourists who went to mock them and marvel at their afflictions. That had been in pre-Revolutionary days, however (the Revolution of 1789, that is), and ever since Philippe Pinel had taken over the institution in 1793, attempts had been made to introduce a more humane regime. Leuret had taken over where Pinel had left off, and although he still used cold showers as a punitive measure to control unruly inmates, the main thrust of the institution was now to care for its inmates and, where possible, to improve the state of their health. Under Leuret’s supervision, there were now educational classes, music and dancing at Bicêtre, and physicians like Chapelain made regular visits to attempt diagnosis and treatment of cases that seemed tractable, or at least capable of some amelioration. The results of these good intentions would doubtless have been much better had the institution not been so direly overcrowded, but there was, alas, no shortage of demand for places in the various asylums of Paris.

I was not surprised by Chapelain’s distressed appearance, for I knew how seriously he took his work. People who regard mesmerists as mere charlatans may suppose that there is no real labor involved in entrancing patients, interrogating them in a somniloquistic state as to the causes of their ailments, and attempting to exert the power of suggestion upon those ailments, but I had seen Chapelain at work, and I knew that it not only involved exhausting effort but was frequently harrowing. It sometimes seemed to me that when he succeeded in relieving the pain and distress of his patients, he did so by accepting that burden into himself, and that when he went to Bicêtre, Charenton or the Saltpêtrière he sometimes placed himself in real danger of being infected by the tide of madness that surged through the worst wards of those establishments: the wards where patients doomed to die were stored while they awaited the arrival of the reaper. It was not hard to deduce that Chapelain had spent time in some such ward that day.

I hastened to pour him a stiff glass of brandy as he slumped into what was now recognized as “his” armchair, and I instructed my cook to make him an omelette. Although Dupin has insisted that I sent back the cook and valet that the Comte de Saint-German had “lent” me following my bout of illness, I had grown so used to the care they had lavished upon me while I was still incapable of caring for myself that I had immediately hired replacements: a married couple, Breton in origin, named Bihan. Dupin could not help but approve of them because Madame Bihan was a cousin of his concierge, Madame Lacuzon—an old gorgon who had become legendary in Paris for her ability to force unwelcome callers into hectic retreat by the power of her stare alone.

“I take it that your treatments did not go well today, my friend,” I said to him, when he had eaten the omelette and progressed to his second glass of brandy.

“That is a matter of opinion, alas,” he replied, with a sigh, wriggling in order to mold the cushions of the armchair to his relaxed body.

“Have you had another argument with Monsieur Leuret?” Dupin asked, trying to feign sympathy.

“Yes, I have,” the mesmerist confirmed, “although I really don’t know why, given that the woman is dying, and Leuret knows as well as I do that we can do nothing for her except try to make her comfortable.”

“Which is doubtless very difficult,” I put in, having no need to feign my own sympathy.

“Not in this particular instance—provided that my approach to the problem is licensed. Alas, Leuret disapproves of my endeavor on principle, and is insistent that I am proceeding in the wrong direction.”

“Please explain,” said Dupin, who did not approve of beating around bushes.

“The patient is dying of syphilis. She might have a fortnight to live, a month at the very most, and laudanum is limited in its power to dull her pain, although I have prescribed a regular dose in order to obtain what advantage can be had. She is, however, unusually amenable to entrancement. Indeed, I am half-convinced that she was already in a trance of some sort before I saw her for the first time, a week ago. I had no difficulty in entrancing her a little more deeply—upon which, without any prompting, she lost herself spontaneously in a pleasant dream of her own manufacture: a childish fantasy compounded from fragments of folklore and romance. I have encountered such fantasies before, especially in patients who have previously been mesmerized, as this one clearly has. I could have tried to go even deeper, to attempt to discover what lay behind the fantasy, but that seemed pointless to me. Given that the dream seemed to comfort her, and relieve her distress to some degree, I thought the best thing to do was to let her enjoy it—and so I decided not to bring her out of the trance. Leuret objected at the time, but not strenuously. When I went back today, however….”

We already knew, by courtesy of past conversations, that Leuret believed that his primary duty was to attempt to cure madness. He was endeavoring to build a taxonomy of madness, in terms of various categories of hallucinatory obsession, and had become increasingly insistent in the conviction that the only responsible curative strategy was to make every effort to dispel hallucinations and bring his patients “down to earth” or “back to reality.” I could understand, therefore, why he might have a principled objection to Chapelain’s encouragement of a delusion—although I could also understand Chapelain’s readiness to do that, if it might serve to relieve the distress of a woman who was bound to die.

“Why have Leuret’s objections become stronger?” Dupin asked, when Chapelain’s momentary abandonment of his account seemed likely to drag on indefinitely as he savored his brandy and took a long draught on his pipe.

“Primarily, because he believes that the woman’s fantasy is upsetting some of the other patients. It seemed harmlessly pleasant to me, but certain kinds of people are apt to find hints of diabolism in everything, and it does not take much to win women of unprepossessing appearance a reputation for witchcraft—as you know very well, Monsieur Dupin, given what is said about your concierge by people whom she turns away. You might expect women vulnerable to such accusations themselves to be more sympathetic, but…well, Bicêtre being what it is….

“The specific problem, according to Leuret, is that the fantasy has had a strange psychosomatic effect, in bringing out a patch of inflammation on her skin. Given that she’s syphilitic, that isn’t unduly surprising, and Leuret’s interpretation is that the design is an amateurish tattoo that had faded, but has now been caused to stand out again by the progress of the disease. The thing is not very big, and it’s situated on her back, between her shoulder-blades, so there’s no reason why any of the other patients should ever have seen it if the orderlies hadn’t drawn attention to it, but…at any rate, some other madwoman has identified it as a ‘Devil’s mark,’ and that has caused whispers.

“Apparently, there have been nightmares, demonic sightings…but this is a death-watch ward at Bicêtre, for God’s sake. When has it ever been free of nightmares and demonic sightings? For once, however, Leuret has found a scapegoat, and it is me. By leaving the poor woman to enjoy her comforting hallucination, I have apparently made the atmosphere in the ward even more infectious than it was before—and when I refused to bring her out of her kindly entrancement today, Leuret become quite angry. I stuck to my refusal, though. I will not bring a patient back to agony, to face death in the cold light of reality, while she has a mental refuge in which to insulate herself from that horror. It is her refuge, not mine—I have not supplied any of its imagery. Until she does die, though, I expect it will be a bone of contention between Leuret and myself, which might make him far more reluctant to consult me in future, in spite of his dire need of all the help he can get in making his reforms work.”

“Is the woman a prostitute?” Dupin asked.

“Presumably,” Chapelain confirmed. “She appears to be her late forties, and undoubtedly contracted the disease long ago. It has now progressed to its tertiary stage—which, as you know, often generates symptoms of madness by itself. It is obvious, too, that she has been subjected in the past to the mercury treatment, which I have always considered to be more likely to do further harm than good. If the disease itself were insufficient to explain her tendency to hallucination, the mercury vapor to which she has been exposed is undoubtedly capable of making up the margin—but the particular hallucination that I assisted her to fabricate seems entirely benign to me. She imagines herself to be the queen of some enchanted underworld, whose king is Oberon—I think she might be English by birth, so that is probably an echo of Shakespeare rather than
Huon of Bordeaux
—and whose personnel is drawn syncretically from various traditional tales and romances.”

“Leuret would not approve of that,” Dupin observed. So far as I knew, he had never met Leuret, but he had definitely read one of the so-called sage of Bicêtre’s books,
Fragmens psychologiques sur la folie
. He had been very interested in its case-studies of hallucination and delusion—especially those in the final section on “terror and damnation.”

“Indeed he does not,” Chapelain said, with a heartfelt sigh. “I know that you’re an admirer of his work, Monsieur Dupin, as I am myself, but I feel that his attitudes are hardening, unnecessarily and undesirably, in the face of criticism from the dogmatic physiologists at the Saltpêtrière. He disapproves of the preservation of fantastic folklore, especially its use to amuse children. He considers the substance of romance as a species of hallucination, and hence as a species of madness, which would be best eliminated from our society. I had a patient once—a deputé from the Loire valley, a journalist and historian of some repute—who had a very similar view, lumping together all the enemies of progress under the heading “poetic” or “anti-prosaic.” Dr. Leuret has a similar distaste for the imaginative in art and literature, regarding Monsieur Nodier’s
Smarra
and Monsieur Hugo’s
Notre-Dame de Paris
as works direly dangerous to public health. He once looked after Monsieur Hugo’s younger brother when he was in Charenton, and considers the great poet no less mad than his unfortunate relative. Indeed, he suspects the elder Hugo of being a noxious source of infection, by virtue of his celebrity. Like Plato, I think Leuret would expel all poets from his ideal Republic, or put them all to death, for the crime of nourishing the excitement of the mind rather than sternly promoting the calm of reason. I was always sure, personally, that Plato had his tongue in his cheek when he wrote that—he was an accomplished romancer himself, after all—but Dr. Leuret seems to be serious now that he is becoming more cantankerous. That, too, is a factor in his reaction to this particular case.”

“There is no genius without a hint of madness,” I observed, quoting Aristotle. “Modern psychologists and artists seem to be in agreement about that—Joseph Moreau did not lack for volunteers when he started to conduct experiments in hallucination using Oriental drugs. Hugo’s acolyte Gautier was one of the most enthusiastic, I believe.”

“Indeed,” said Chapelain, with a sigh. “Actually, Monsieur Dupin, there is one aspect of the present case with which you might be able to help me. At the very least, it might be of some slight interest to you.”

So saying, he reached into the inside pocket of his frock-coat and brought out a piece of paper, which he showed to Dupin and myself. Inscribed on the paper was an array of forty-nine characters, symmetrically arrayed in seven groups of seven to form a square. If the characters were letters, they did not belong to any alphabet that I could recognize.

After a preliminary glance, Dupin took hold of the paper and studied it more attentively. There was a frown on his face that I assumed to be a frown of puzzlement and concentration.

After fifteen or twenty seconds of profound silence, Chapelian said: “Well, Monsieur Dupin—do you know what it means?”

“No,” Dupin admitted—but he was quick to add: “But I know, in a general sense, what it
is
.”

“And what is it?” Chapelain asked.

“A cryptogram.”

“You mean, a coded message of some kind,” I put in. “Those symbols stand for letters of the alphabet, which, when the correct substitutions are made, spell out a text in Latin, French or whatever?”

I had, of course, read my American correspondent’s excellent tale “The Gold Bug,” in which a coded message of that kind leads to treasure buried by the infamous pirate Captain Kidd. Tales of pirate treasure were very much in vogue in Paris in 1846, because the second phase of the rivalry between Monsieur Sue and Monsieur Dumas had spawned Dumas’ relentlessly melodramatic tale of the
Comte de Monte Cristo
, who had set out to take revenge upon the enemies that had confined him to the Château d’If after enriching himself fabulously with such a treasure.

“That is the vulgar understanding of a cryptogram,” Dupin confirmed, with such naked contempt in his voice that I felt momentarily ashamed for having innocently suggested it.