The Cthulhu Encryption (6 page)

I will concede that there was no screaming going on at the moment when we appeared, and relatively little sobbing and whimpering—but that, I suspect, was because our arrival provided a welcome distraction, and provoked a great deal of interest, from the patients and orderlies alike. There was certainly a great deal of agitation. Even though our arrival at the hospital had been unannounced, we had been there long enough for all manner of rumors to go around, and I doubt that there was anyone on the ward who did not know by now that two more respectable gentlemen had come to contemplate the mystery that was Ysolde Leonys. I suspected that the celebrity would not increase her popularity, and would probably lead to an amplification of the prevailing whispers of diabolism.

The women on the ward were, almost without exception, quiet and docile; their agitation was almost entirely confined to hardly-audible inarticulate muttering and ill-suppressed quivering. Whether that was due to the fact that they were heavily dosed with laudanum, the everpresence of patrolling orderlies, or merely the fact that most of them were in such an obvious state of total despair that it was a wonder their hearts could still muster the energy to beat, I could not tell. The great majority were old, although I suspect that some of them looked a great deal older than strict chronology might have implied—but that was presumably an effect of the sorting process by which they had been allocated to the ward rather than a statistical summary of the hospital’s population as a whole.

Dupin was not a man to let his emotions show, and he did not react to the initial sight of the ward with any evident expression of horror, but I knew him well, and I could see the tightening of his facial muscles as he controlled himself. I knew that he was affected, perhaps more deeply than I was, by the sheer ugliness and hopelessness of the situation. I could see that Chapelain was nervous about what Dupin might say, and perhaps a little ashamed of the fact that he had so long grown used to such sights himself that they no longer had any measurable effect on him.

All Dupin said, however, was: “Which bed is it?”

Leuret led us to the bed in question. It was no different from any of the others, although it was placed—evidently by design—in a corner, and there seemed to be nothing to distinguish the woman lying on it. The single thin and filthy blanket with which her body was covered did not conceal its emaciation, and the syphilitic sores on her face did not, alas, mark her condition out as significantly worse than that of her neighbors to the one side where she had neighbors—indeed, the woman in the next bed was unconscious, and seemed likely to die at any moment.

Ysolde Leonys’ eyes were also closed, and she seemed to be unaware of our presence at first, but I did not get the impression that she was actually asleep. She seemed, rather, to be removing herself mentally from her environment, refusing to admit that she was where she actually was.

Leuret stepped forward first, and tried to attract her attention. He addressed her, with scrupulous politeness, as “Mademoiselle Leonys.”

She did not open her eyes. Then Chapelain stepped forward and spoke, reminding her that he had visited her yesterday, and telling her that he had brought other visitors to see her. That must have piqued her drowsy curiosity. She could not have been expecting visitors, and cannot have had any others, save for visiting alienists.

When she opened her eyes, only by a crack, at first, she looked at Chapelain first. “Merlin,” she said, as if the two syllables were explanation enough of his presence. Then her gaze alighted on me. She looked at me in the strangest way, as if weighing me up and trying to place me. Finally, she murmured: “Tom.”

As soon as she had named me, she glanced back at Chapelain, and smiled, apparently in gratitude. Leuret was still trying to attract her attention, and was so close as to obstruct her view somewhat, but she paid him no heed at all, trying to look past him.

Dupin had to move sideways in order to let her have a clear sight of him, and was clearly hoping for some sort of reaction when she did—but he could not possibly have expected the nature or intensity of the reaction he got.

Her face changed completely—so completely that it seemed to me to be more than a mere change of expression, although it could not, in logical terms, have been anything more. One often says of people, carelessly, that “their eyes lit up,” but it seemed to me that her eyes really did acquire a literal illumination, perhaps caused by a sudden surge of her latent fever. I cannot say that she smiled again, but a new life of some sort suddenly entered into her, and a new consciousness too.

“Tristan!” she said. “They told me you would come, but I hardly dared believe…I thought I would need to die first…or am I dead?”

Dr. Leuret wanted to assure her that she was not dead as yet, but Chapelain took hold of his arm and drew him gently back, bidding him to be silent in some private non-verbal language known to alienists. Chapelain only wanted to give Dupin more room to be seen, but Dupin took advantage of the cleared space actually to kneel down by the bed.

I would not have set my knee upon that miry floor unless literally forced—and I do not think of myself as an unusually fastidious man—but when Dupin is gripped by fascination, mere matters of dirt become irrelevant…and the fact that the woman had addressed him as “Tristan” had very obviously caught his attention.

I knew, without Leuret or Chapelain having to tell me, that the woman was still in the mesmeric trance in which Chaplain had left her, and that she was obviously hallucinating. I guessed that Leuret’s first impulse, on observing the fact, was to try to dispel the hallucination and return her to reality—but he had probably tried to do that before, after Chapelain had left, and failed. My sympathies, however, were with Chapelain, and with Dupin. Looking at that dismal wreck of a woman, hovering on the brink of death, I thought it kinder by far to leave her hallucinated until she actually passed away, and to pander to her illusion if the opportunity arose.

Dupin was no mere pander, however; he had questions to ask, and was already prepared to improvise in the manner of his interrogation. “Who told you that I would come?” was the first.

“The angels,” she replied. “But I dared not trust them…they have told me so many lies.”

“I am here, though,” he said, “and you are not yet dead. Did I not promise to come?” That was obviously a guess, but I could see why he had made it.

“Yes,” she replied, “but that was so long ago…so long ago…and I thought that I would have to die. Have you really come to take me away from this place? Have you come to take me back to the Underworld?” Her expression clouded then, and she added: “But Oberon might not permit that…he might kill us both…even though I have surely been punished enough.”

Dupin had no difficulty avoiding the question as to whether his intention was to take her to some phantom underworld. “Does it matter where you are?” he asked, probably not quite able to bring himself to say
we
. Even in the interest of a scientific investigation.

“No,” she answered. “Not any more. There’s no good place to die. But will they let you stay here, Tristan? This is not your world.”

“Oddly enough,” he said, contributing a smile of sorts, “I seem to have mislaid my world, and cannot quite remember where I left it. Do you find yourself forgetting things, Ysolde?”

She brought her hand out from beneath the paltry cover, and reached out toward him. I would have had extreme difficulty in doing so, but I think, in the circumstances, that I could have taken it. Dupin did so with no apparent hesitation. The handclasp seemed almost to electrify her, or whatever was possessing her. She brightened even further.

“Oh yes,” she said. “I forget so much…sometimes, I wish I could forget so much more…but not you, Tristan…never the year in which I was the faithless Queen of the Underworld. I have been punished enough for that, have I not? Oh, you do not know, Tristan…at least, I pray that you do not know…or would pray, if I had a God to pray to…any god but Oberon….”

Chapelain, I could see, was fascinated. Even Leuret seemed a little interested in the content of the hallucination, even though he considered that his vocation—his very purpose in life—was to take arms against such strange afflictions and drag his patients back to reality, kicking and screaming if necessary, and with cruel deluges of cold water if the necessity seemed absolute.

“Oberon has forgiven you now, Ysolde,” Dupin told her. “There is to be no further punishment.”

“But you,” she murmured, her voice becoming fainter in spite of the seeming revivification of her flesh. “What has he done to you…you faded away…I was sure that he had taken you back, to kill you.”

“I’m here, am I not?” Dupin said. “Whatever has been done is done, and is over…but for one thing. Do you remember the legend inscribed on your flesh, Ysolde?”

“Oh yes,” she said, he voice regarding a little of its force. “My flesh forgot, for a while, but my inner self never did…I never could…but let’s not speak of that, Tristan. We have so much more….”

“Indeed we have,” said Dupin, “but there are things I need to know. Do you know what the inscription
says
, Ysolde. Can you pronounce it?”

“No one can,” she replied. “Except perhaps Oberon….”

It was, I think, a frank denial on her part. She meant what she said. She had no intention of attempting to pronounce anything…but there seemed to be some kind of contest going on between her flesh and her consciousness, which was no mere side-effect of the great pox. She fell silent, but there was something inside her that would not tolerate silence. Her madness was layered; there was something behind or beneath her comforting legendary fantasy that did not want to let her rest easy. Perhaps something within her did not believe that she had, as yet, been punished
enough
.

She was, I think, stricken unconscious
before
her lips moved—but her lips moved, nevertheless.

She was right, though.
Nobody
could have pronounced the mock-syllables that whatever was in her wanted to pronounce. The nonsense was strangely memorable, but it was utter nonsense. Had I not had occasion to hear it several more times in the course of the next few days, I would never have been able to scribble the various representations of it that enable me to reproduce it, very approximately, here and now.

What her lips said, as far as I can estimate it, was: “
Ph’nglui mglw’nat Cthulhu R’laiyeh wgah’ngl fhtaign
.” Each individual letter in that written version, however, needs to be pronounced as a distinct syllable, no matter what the conventions of English orthography might imply as to their pronunciation in combination.

Dupin dropped the sick woman’s hand as if he had suddenly realized that he was holding a venomous snake by the tail. I could feel the eyes of half a hundred patients and half a dozen orderlies fixed upon us, as if we were players on a stage, at some crucial point in a melodramatic plot. There was audible muttering now, and more violent convulsions, to which the orderlies were slow to respond.

It did not matter that “Tristan” had dropped “Ysolde’s” hand, for she was already oblivious—but not certainly not dead. Her face seemed to be on fire—and I suspected that her whole body might be streaked with scarlet as well.

Dupin stood up and turned to Chapelain. “Will you help me turn her over,” he said. “I need to see the inscription on her back.”

Leuret had had enough. “I must protest, Monsieur Dupin,” he said. “I cannot pretend to know what you are doing, but I really do not think that this is helping my patient in the least. I know that there is a school of thought that advises humoring patients in their hallucinations, and it is a method that I have tried myself in the hope of achieving further insights into their condition, but I have found it wanting as a means of helping patients to recover their sanity. We must not lose sight of our objective in treating the mentally ill, which is to dispel their hallucinations and return them to a safe and secure grasp of reality.”

“Forgive me, Dr. Leuret,” Dupin replied, smoothly, “if what I am doing seems unorthodox, or even offensive—but I really am trying to act in your patient’s interest…and my ultimate objective, as always, is to make sure that reality continues to maintain a safe and secure grasp of
us
.”

He should not have added that last remark, in my opinion, but he never could resist the temptation of clever wordplay. The sage of Bicêtre was not yet in a position to accuse him of madness, though, no matter what suspicions he might have formed.

In the meantime, Chapelain had chosen his own side, and for the time being, it was not Leuret’s. He removed the blanket covering the stricken woman, and helped Dupin to roll her over, as gently as possible. Then, with as much reverence and decency as could be contrived, in the circumstances—which was not a great deal—he displaced the shift that was her only garment to reveal a square array of characters inscribed on her back.

They seemed very tiny—certainly much smaller than the magnified version on the piece of paper in Dupin’s pocket. A casual glance from a distance would not have identified anything other than a pattern of grazes, which might have been made by raking fingernails, were there no so many of them.

Dupin, however, was not content to look at them from a distance. He pored over them intently, and then took the piece of paper out of his pocket in order to determine whether it was an accurate transcription. I could not help leaning over too; nor could Chapelain.