The Cthulhu Encryption (28 page)

Whether or not Cthulhu perverted Earth’s native life so as to fabricate the human race, in order produce a legion of dreaming minds that might one day forge the key to its release, either by accident or design, I cannot tell. The logic of the situation, however, suggests that it
does
have an innate interest in dreaming, thinking minds, and in the shapes of their dreams and thoughts—to which its instruments respond, reflexively or instinctively.

Our involvement with Ysolde Leonys had attracted the shoggoths twice before; it was inevitable, I suppose, that it should attract them again, in greater force—and doubly inevitable that they should find us all the more easily in a tiny cranny of space and time that was itself encrypted, where their force might be multiplied tenfold, as if they were in their own element.

In all probability, they could not have done anything without a bedrock of human dreaming to work with—but there was no shortage of human dreams and nightmares in our company, on that night of all nights. Oberon Breisz had made an exception to his reclusive habit by inviting guests into his home, gladly and eagerly—but perhaps recklessly.

At the merest suggestion of the cephalopod aspect of the invaders, I sat up in bed and took out my revolver—but this time, the tentacles did not reach out for me, and there was no embrace to taste. This time, they made no move to seize or enter into me at all. This time, they were in the walls of the house, and the fabric of the pinnacle on which it stood.

I did see the ultimate form of the monsters, and felt that presence, after a fashion, although I cannot quite explain the dream-logic that allowed me to see and feel through solid matter, perhaps curving my lines of sight and extrapolating my sensations of touch through higher dimensions. I saw the dragon-worms more clearly than before, like abstruse mathematical and musical sequences writhing in the guts of the earth and flowing into the walls of the house.

Microscopists tell us that there are worms everywhere—that if all the substance of the Earth were to vanish, save for the worms, a hypothetical observer would still be able to see the ghostly outlines of people animals and trees, buildings and rivers and mountains, by virtue of an infinite host of tiny white eelworms, both parasitic and free-living. The dragon-worms comprising Cthulhu-dreams are not tiny and not white, however, but vast and multicolored, in all their algebraic glory. Nor are they mere blind tapering cylinders of flesh, undifferentiated in their ultimate simplicity, but eyed and mouthed and scaled and winged and clawed, and hideous in their ultimate geometrical complexity. Nor are they patient parasites, lying docile in their hosts, absorbing aliments while creating the absolute minimum of disturbance, but impatient trigonometric aggressors, utterly careless of disruption.

No sooner had I perceived them, in fact, than they began to digest the house, dissolving it in unearthly acids and equations, liquefying and differentiating its solidity—and I could feel the floor becoming treacherous beneath my feet as the house and the hill on which it stood began to sag and sink.

Is this
, I wondered,
how legendary Ys sank, before being covered by the sullen waves? What became of its poor delicate demoiselles?

I ran, then—out of the room and down the stairs.

I heard the echoes of other running feet, but could not see whose feet they were. All I could see were the worms, writhing and coiling, like an immeasurable and irrational Gordian knot, not merely inside everything solid but
instead
of it, more real, for the moment, than the cold and brittle solidity of mere matter, or the active, bloody warmth of flesh.

I could hear, though, and what I hard was the angry voice of Oberon Breisz, pronouncing the now-familiar formula: “
Ph’nglui mglw’nat Cthulhu R’laiyeh wgah’ngl fhtaign
.”

It had no effect. He tried another formula, and then a third, his voice becoming louder every time—but the shoggoths were on safer axiomatic ground this time, from their own transcendental point of view, and were not to be so easily dislodged. The formulae undoubtedly had their effect, for I saw ripples of agony flowing along the bodies of the worms, and their horrid red eyes bulging, and their vicious jaws chattering—but they were determined to do their work no matter what, and they were working with terrible rapidity.

I knew that I had to get out of the house—by leaping through a glazed window if the door was firmly locked—but I knew before I reached the bottom of the stairs that I could not even hope to reach the vestibule. The shoggoths were not assaulting my flesh directly, but they were stealing all purchase from it. My feet were sinking ankle-deep into the substance of the floor, and the air that I was sucking into my lungs was decaying into unbreathability.

I brandished my revolver, but did not fire. I might as well have fired at a tempest, hoping to cripple a thunderbolt.

I contrived to reach the ground floor, but I could get no further. I was thigh-deep now in the worm-infested slime, and now the worms were in my flesh as well, surging up within my limbs and bowel, aiming for my heart and brain. I put the revolver back in my pocket, in order that I could use both hands to support myself against the wall—but the wall had become treacherous, and when my hand touched it, I had difficulty tearing it free again. I began waving my hands in the air and I twisted my body, trying to pull my legs free from the slime without the aid of any authentic leverage, and therefore hopelessly.

I felt the tide of alien flesh welling up inside my own, and knew that I was within a second of death—but then a hand reached out, as if from nowhere, to grasp my flailing wrist, and a dazzling white light appeared amid the multicolored chaos, resolving the series of my distress into reassuring finitude. That light spelled out two cryptograms, back to back, each inscribed in letters at least an inch across—but it was evident in the way that the symbols moved that they were inscribed on a invisible human body…a female body.

Ysolde Leonys was not pronouncing the cryptograms—the only voice I could hear was that of Oberon Breisz, chanting spell after spell—but their incarnation fore and aft of her heart was a protective cage, extending throughout her own flesh and any flesh she touched. The moment I made contact with her, the worms within my lower body disappeared, in hectic retreat and division. She transferred her grip from my wrist to my hand, so that the clasp was mutual.

“Reach out,” she whispered—and I could hear the whisper perfectly, in site of Oberon’s chanting.

I reached out, and felt another hand grasp mine. It was Dupin’s; I recognized it.

“I have Chapelain,” he whispered in his turn.

The symbols of the encryption moved past me then, heading for the door, and the human chain they drew behind them followed in their train.

The door was locked, but it did not matter. The encrypted symbols passed through it, and so did everything they encaged.

That was not the end, though—not by any means. The hill was still dissolving, and the steps that had been crumbling even when they were humbly material had already been crudely subtracted from the sum of all things. The whole enclave was still sinking, as if ambitious to become the Underworld that Ysolde had named it, in every sense of the word. The steep crag was becoming a glutinous mass, flowing away in every direction.

The starlight was very faint, and the surrounding landscape was profoundly steeped in shadow, but the symbols incarnate in Ysolde’s flesh were not the only things glowing. In the distance—a
very
long way away, it seemed—there was a circle of rough-hewn lights, roughly oblong in form, standing on their ends.

It was, I realized, the megalithic circle: the threshold of Oberon Breisz’s perverted domain. And between the stones that formed the gate through which we had entered the heart of that domain the previous day were two human shadows, already reaching out for us.

There were two because Madame Lacuzon, Dupin’s faithful gorgon, was not alone. The Comte de Saint-Germain was with her, having succeeded in following us to our goal. They were both waiting for us now, ready to pull us from chaos if they could…but they were so very far away, that I could not believe that we could reach them before the earth swallowed us up and plunged us into its bowels.

The worms could not get inside us while we were caged by Ysolde’s magic, but they did not have to. They merely had to suck us down into the slimy morass of their digestive chyme, from which there could be no escape.

There was still a battle in progress, though, for the house was not dissolving as rapidly as the hill. Indeed, as I looked back, it was not obvious that the uppermost floor of the house was dissolving at all, although it was slowly descending into the protoplasmic prenumerical
urschleim
that the worms were making of the lower floors.

Oberon Breisz was visible, at least in silhouette, behind the lamplit casement of what I assumed to be his library, where he was raging still against the threat. He was doggedly determined to hold chaos at bay, at least from his books and his own precious person.

In the meantime, Ysolde kept moving forward, heading for the megaliths, drawing me behind her, while I drew Dupin after me and Dupin drew Chapelain after him. The glow of the symbols in her flesh was fading, though, and when I heard her sob, I knew that she had no more faith than I had that we could actually reach the megaliths.

“Would that you really were Tom Linn,” she murmured, plaintively “for at least you could sing us a song while we die.”

But I wasn’t Tom Linn, and I couldn’t sing.

“I wanted to be in Ys,” she said, then, to herself rather than to me, “but not like this. Not like this.” It occurred to me then that she thought that she had brought this fate upon us, by means of a careless dream.

“It wasn’t you,” I told her. “It’s not your fault—not at all.”

“So you
can
sing, after all,” she murmured.

She had not stopped moving; she was still striving with all her might—but it was obviously hopeless. We had sunk too deep to walk or wade, and we could not swim in that dense, worm-infested subatomic soup. The symbols were almost extinct now, and their protection could not last much longer.

“You should have gone to the library,” I said to Dupin. “There, at least, you would have stood a chance, even if you could not have given him the help he wanted and expected from you. He might yet succeed in preserving that corner of his domain.”

“I hope he can,” said Dupin. “We three are only human, after all, and a dozen infants will be born in Paris at the very moment of our death—but there are books in that room that are irreplaceable. The two lost volumes of Sanchuniathon alone….”

I was shoulder-deep in slime by the time he finished, and thought that there was nothing left to do but look up at the stars, and try to take what comfort I could from my own utter irrelevance within the universe, let alone the plenum.

I felt the worms writhing inside my flesh again. This time, they reached my heart.

I felt Ysolde’s hand slip out of mine, and Dupin’s too.

I could not hold on. There was no longer anything to hold on to. I was disintegrating, in body and mind alike.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

THE JOLLY ROGER

As my molten head went under the surface of the now-oceanic liquid, and the flesh of the worms flooded my mouth, squirming through my lungs and brain, I raised my arms instinctively, as drowning men do.

Incredibly, both wrists were instantly gripped, and I was suddenly hauled out of the morass again, spitting and spluttering, by strong arms, regaining my solidity and integrity as I came. I was hauled up and up—further than seemed probable, if merely human arms had reached down to grab me—and was dragged over a bulwark on to a wooden deck. The wooden deck seemed to be sucking the worms out of me, although that might have been an illusion. In all probability, they were simply losing their purchase again.

The help that Ysolde had promised to summon had arrived. No matter how impossible it seemed, even in terms of dream-logic, help had arrived, gliding through the margins of the world as certain mythical entities can.

Cthulhu had not yet triumphed over human resistance, no matter how easily other matter had yielded to its dread tide.

With that thought in mind, I rubbed my sticky eyes—which had closed reflexively as I went under—and opened them gingerly, peering into the darkness in search of some cryptogram of white fire.

There was white fire a-plenty, but it was in the form of a flaming cross, mounted on a mast. Above the flaming cross was a flag, whose silver symbols stood out clearly, inscribed by reflected light. They depicted a skull and crossbones. My rescuer was flying the Jolly Roger.

Angria flies it now
, Ysolde had said. The scholarly warlord had given the original back to Edward England, after taking it from John Taylor, but he had not surrendered the symbolism, or the right to deploy it.

My
rescuers
, I should say, in the plural, for Angria was far from being alone—and I should also have said
our
rescuers, for I was not alone either. I had not been the first to be hauled out of the ocean of uncanny flesh, nor was I the last. Ysolde helped me to my feet while the two men who had hauled me out did the same for Dupin, and then for Chapelain.