The Cthulhu Encryption (5 page)

“Leonys,” I put in swiftly, eager to claim what little credit I could for deductive acumen. “Hence the bibliotaph’s speculative linkage of the two names.”

“Exactly,” Dupin confirmed.

“You think my patient might be this John Taylor’s descendant, four or five generations removed?” Chapelain queried. “Or do you think she might have acquired the name by marriage to one of the pirate’s descendants?

“I am in no position to judge, as yet—but the possibility seems to be worth investigating.”

“A pity, in either case,” Chapelain went on, “that it’s the wrong pirate—the one who never came to France—although I suppose that they might both have had a copy of the cryptogram, and might each have tried to preserve it in his own way. If she had the key to a fortune in gold and gems inscribed on her back, though, she’d hardly have ended up as a streetwalker in the gutters of Paris. It’s all too tenuous, in any case—probably the merest of coincidences.”

“But you said before that she might not even have known that the inscription was there,” I reminded him, “and if she had, she surely would not have had the key to the cipher.”

“As I remarked previously,” Dupin observed, patiently, “fortunes can disappear with remarkable rapidity, when one does not have the wherewithal to husband them and help them grow. In the course of the five generations the separate us from the seizure of
Our Lady of the Cape
, even a million francs might evaporate.”

“And manuscripts might rot, especially in the torrid climes of India,” I put in, causing him to wince.

“That’s true,” he admitted. “Speech and script are only a little less transient than dreams, alas…unless one takes great care to preserve them. Even signs and symbols hewn in stone eventually fade away before the forces of erosion…but with the aid of copyists, some things do survive, only gradually corrupted over hundred, or even thousands of years…and even dreams sometimes recur.”

“So you really think this woman might have been…let’s call it tattooed, until I can figure out exactly what was done…in the interests of preserving this…magic spell…for want of a more reliable kind of copying?” Chapelain was clearly finding that hard to swallow.

“I have an open mind,” Dupin repeated, “and no particular expectations, but you know how hard it is for me to resist a puzzle, and this”—again he held up the copy of the cryptogram—“is now a very intriguing puzzle, even if it has only become so by virtue of my fanciful elaborations. Will you take me to Bicêtre in the morning, in order that I might investigate the matter further?”

I frowned slightly at that, because he had said
I
, not
us
.

“I have a consultation at nine, and another at ten,” Chapelain replied. “I might be free by noon, though. I doubt that Leuret will object to my turning up without an appointment, in spite of our little spat. At the end of the day, he needs my help desperately if he is to impose any order at all on the chaos of his crowded wards. Shall I meet you here, or at your apartment?”

“Here,” Dupin said—and my frown cleared. He had, after all, no intention of excluding me from what promised to be an intriguing adventure.

“If all three of us are going, we’ll have to take a fiacre,” Chapelain observed. “My fly can only carry two.”

Dupin did not even hesitate. “We will take a fiacre,” he said.

Mention of the fly seemed to remind Chapelain that he was extremely tired, and he stood up to go. I fetched his coat, hat and stick myself, not having quite accustomed myself to the fact that I now had a manservant to take care of such things in my stead, for whom I only had to ring. Naturally, the doctor volunteered to drop Dupin off at his apartment on the way—although it was not “on the way” in a strictly geographical sense—and Dupin naturally accepted.

“I’ll see you in the morning,” Chapelain said to me, as he bid me goodnight. “Noon, at the latest.”

“I’ll be here,” I promised.

“So will I,” Dupin put in. He had put the cryptogram in his jacket pocket, and I suspected that he would be poring over it for hours when he got back, comparing it to those in his esoteric texts in the hope of finding clues to its origin and meaning.

When they had gone, I went to my own bookshelves and pulled out the latest issues of the
Bulletin du Bibliophile
, and hunted through them in search of any reference to Roger Bacon, John Dee, the Bishop of Goa, the Key of Solomon or a text called the
Necronomicon
. There was nothing, so I allowed myself to the sidetracked by loving accounts of rare incunabular editions of
Ars Moriendi
and
Theuerdank
—which seemed, on the whole, to be saner and more reliable documents than any magic spell scrawled on a streetwalker’s pox-scarred back.

CHAPTER THREE

THE SAGE OF BICÊTRE

Inevitably, once I had written my diary—a longer entry than I had made for a month—and taken myself off to bed, I immediately thought of a dozen other questions that I ought to have raised regarding cryptograms, grimoires and buried treasures, but I figured that they could wait until morning, and went to sleep peacefully enough. If I had any dreams, I forgot them as soon as I woke up, before I could scribble so much so a single note about their content.

I do have a tendency to forget dreams easily—even those I have while awake, which François Leuret would call hallucinations and identify as preliminary signs of madness—and that is now the principal reason why I am making such records as this one, based on diary entries made at the time. The entries themselves are insufficient, for memories require reinforcement if they are to survive, and narrative coherency too. Poe is long dead, alas, so I no longer have anyone to whom I might confide my raw materials; I have no alternative but to do such work as might be done myself.

I hoped that Dupin would come early, so that I could ask him to clarify certain murky issues before Chapelain arrived, but I assume that he was carrying out preliminary research of his own, and not in the pages of the
Bulletin du Bibliophile
. In the end, he turned up less than five minutes before Chapelain arrived, even though Chapelain was not far in advance of the time he had specified as the latest moment of his arrival. At least I remembered to let Bihan answer the door. I had to keep reminding myself not to think of him as “Monsieur Bihan,” even though it was permissible to continue thinking of Madame Bihan as “Madame Bihan.”

My problems in dealing with servants did not arise from my being American—there had been plenty of servants around when I was growing up in Boston or living in New York—but rather from a private awkwardness. I had sometimes been tempted ask Chapelain about it, but I always refrained, lest doing so should somehow elevate it to the rank of a “symptom.” Chapelain was not an alienist, strictly speaking, but every mesmerist is continually confronted with problems of mental illness, especially since the reform of the lunatic asylums has usurped madness, very forcefully, as a medical problem. I had suffered hallucinations enough in my time to have some slight fear of my sanity being bought into question.

We live in a strange world; although I could make no particular claims on my own behalf, I was always well aware of the paradoxicality of the fact that Auguste Dupin, who was surely the sanest man in the world, and a Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur to boot, was often called mad by the ignorant, simply because of his intelligence, his scholarly interests, his open mind and the awesome power of his imagination. I had not read Leuret’s
Fragmens
myself, but I had read other works of a similar stripe, and I was well aware that he was not the only man in Paris to consider the supposed madness of poets and artists to be in direct proportion to their imaginative power, and dreaded to think what his opinion might have been of my good friend Poe.

Once we were settled in the fiacre, the opportunity was there to fill in some of the gaps left by the previous evening’s conversation, but Dupin was rarely as talkative in the mornings as he was in the evenings, darkness rather than daylight being his true element, and I could sense his resistance. He probably had not slept for more than an hour, although I judged from his lack of exuberance that he had made little or no progress in deciphering the cryptogram. He was also impatient to see the mysterious ex-Queen of the Underworld for himself, and examine the inscription that Chapelain was strangely reluctant to call a tattoo, and his impatience further augmented his peevishness.

In any case, Bicêtre is less than four kilometers south of the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and once we had got to the end of the Boulevard Saint-Michel and passed through the
barrière
the roads were relatively clear in that direction, so the journey time was too short to allow any detailed discussion.

I was content to wait and see how matters developed, gearing myself up to meet the so-called sage of Bicêtre and see his reformed empire for the first time. The morning had started cold, but now that the sun was up, relatively uninhibited by cloud, the temperature had become quite mild, and the journey was pleasant enough. It is not until one passes the
barrière
that one realizes how stale the air in Paris is, by comparison with that of the surrounding countryside.

What immediately struck me about Dr. Leuret, when we were eventually introduced to him, was that he did not seem to be a well man himself. He was in his mid-forties and sufficiently robust in his build, but he did not seem to me to be the kind of man likely to attain his allotted threescore years and ten. His complexion was sallow, his hair and beard already three-quarters grey, and his eyes slightly jaundiced. His career, I imagined, had taken a heavy toll on him. One cannot spend one’s life in the company of the terminally-diseased without becoming corrupted oneself. He was, however, nervously active and clearly very interested to meet us…or, at least, to meet Auguste Dupin.

“I’ve heard a great deal about you, Monsieur,” he told Dupin. “Pierre is always quoting your opinions—he certainly holds them in higher esteem than my own, and, if I measure him rightly, higher than Esquirol’s or Lélut’s.” Esquirol had long been the guiding star of the Saltpêtrière and a leading pioneer of modern psyhological analysis; Lélut’s was the leading name in that specialism since Esquirol’s death

“I’m merely a layman,” Dupin assured him, although I could see him swelling slightly with pride under the influence of the compliment. “I never had the honor of meting Dr. Esquirol, alas, and remain in awe of Dr. Lélut, whose
Du demon de Socrate
is one of the most fascinating philosophical texts of recent years….along with your own
Fragmens
, of course.” He knew how to pay a compliment when the occasion warranted it, and the recipients of his flattery rarely noticed his oddly mechanical manner of delivery.

“Our case-studies do seem to have been markedly different,” Leuret remarked. “My good friend Monsieur Groix tells me that he has often consulted you in mysterious criminal matters.”

“Occasionally,” Dupin admitted. His dealings with the Prefect of Police were mysterious in themselves, and I was surprised to hear that Groix had mentioned them at all—but I assumed that Leuret was exaggerating slightly, for effect.

“I have looked after some famous murderers in my time,” the alienist said, “But that was when I was at Charenton. Things have changed at Bicêtre, mercifully. I hope you will be impressed.”

The formalities over, the tour began. Leuret did not want to take us to the ward where Ysolde Leonys was confined without showing off his reforms in advance, so we visited the music room first, and called in on two of the educational classes then in progress—although the latter seemed to involve little more than elementary lessons in reading and simple arithmetic. Dupin was impatient, and Chapelain had to invoke all his diplomatic talents to persuade Leuret to escort us to the relevant ward in reasonable time.

When we did reach the ward, I must confess that I had something of a shock. Having heard so much about Pinel’s reforms and Leuret’s continuation of them, I had not expected the sight to be quite so horrific. Leuret was quick to point out how well-lighted the room was, and what facilities had been made for its ventilation, but the fact that the high windows were better than mere slits and that ventilation-shafts had been excavated in the outer wall did not seem to me to have made overmuch impact on the prevailing odors of excrement and putrefaction—which could hardly have been less than powerful, considering the crowded state of the ward. Had there been half as many beds, there might have been some slight hope of maintaining fugitive standards of cleanliness, but there was no way that an army of laundresses could have kept up with the task confronting them.

Leuret hastened to tell us how unfortunate and inconvenient it was that so many individuals on the threshold of death either beat a path to his door or were dumped there. “But what can I do?” He said, mournfully. “Other people may turn them away, but ours is the last resort. We have to take them in and accommodate them as best we can. The other wards are much better than this one, even though they too are overcrowded. Paris is a huge city….”

And you have no Heracles to clean your Augean stables,” Dupin said, as sympathetically as he could. “You are doing a heroic job, Dr. Leuret, in impossible circumstances. That is the truest heroism of them all.”