The Cthulhu Encryption (26 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THE DEMOISELLE D’YS

As convention demanded, the specific interrogation was suspended while we ate—but Chapelain, perhaps attempting mischief, asked Oberon Breisz whether he paid any attention to recent developments in the diagnosis, analysis and treatment of madness.

“I fear not,” Breisz admitted. “I confess that I had never heard of Dr. Leuret until rumor reached me—belatedly, alas—that Ysolde was in his care. I would be glad to hear your opinions on the subject, however, when we have time. I hope that you won’t rush back to Paris in to much of a hurry—you’re welcome to enjoy my hospitality for as long as you wish. I’m grateful to you for the help you have been able to give Ysolde.”

“I fear that I can’t accept,” Chaplain told him. “I really should not have left the capital at such short notice, for it will cause distress to several of my patients, with whom I had appointments. Mademoiselle Leonys’ need seemed urgent, but now that she’s safely home, I really must start back tomorrow—early in the morning if that’s possible.”

“Of course,” said Breisz. He could presumably see that Chapelain was not as firmly resolved as he alleged, partly because he was still anxious about Ysolde. The physician was still studying her intently, and I was not at all surprised by that, for her present wakefulness was surely as odd and disturbing as her previous somnambulism had been. She was forever touching the table, her chair and the wall behind her, as if savoring some precious texture—although I could not imagine anything more ordinary. When she breathed in, she seemed to be breathing some intoxicating perfume, and one could easily have imagined, from her silent reactions, that she was dining on ambrosia and nectar rather than plain food and mediocre wine.

In spite of Ysolde’s quasi-ecstatic responses, the banality of the occasion was bizarrely oppressive, eerie in its utter lack of distinction. The food, which included blue trout and jugged hare, was as acceptable as the nourishment routinely served in Paris restaurants, so Breisz’s cook was clearly competent, but it wasn’t gourmet fare. Breisz seemed well aware of that when he asked us, a trifle anxiously, whether the food was too our liking, just as any host who rarely entertained at home might have done. Indeed, but for the assurances I had received that Oberon Breisz was a powerful magician, who had contrived to encrypt his entire dwelling and the pinnacle on which it stood, so as to remove into some private margin of the world, I could easily have believed that he was a commonplace provincial gentlemen, awkwardly aware that he was a foreigner by birth, anxious to win the good opinion of cultivated Parisians.

Chapelain was suitably complimentary in response to enquiries about the food, although he was clearly distracted by his puzzlement regarding his patient’s evolving condition. Dupin made no effort to conceal his indifference, and seemed so guarded in his own attentiveness that he seemed almost to be in some encrypted psychological retreat of his own.

Absurdly I found myself asking our host how many servants he had, and whether they all lived in. He told me that he had five, and that they did indeed all live in. He didn’t say anything about their attitude to what must be a very peculiar lifestyle, so he obviously wasn’t pricked by the same sorts of anxieties that I had, even though he had surely not been nobly born. He had been a pirate captain once, and was well accustomed to the habit of command.

Coffee was served in the drawing-room—the house, in spite of its modernity, apparently had no smoking-room—but Breisz was quick to excuse himself in order to invite Dupin to his library. He didn’t invite Chapelain or myself, and seemed eager to have Dupin entirely to himself, but I think that the mesmerist was glad to have the opportunity to remain with Ysolde Leonys, and I had no objection to the arrangement.

Ysolde did not take coffee, and did not remain seated once Breisz had left the room. She got to her feet and wandered back and forth, sometimes pausing to look out of the window at the starry sky and the vast black shadow of the land, but sometimes also pausing by the dresser, or even the black walls, to run her fingers over them, affectionately. Once, she paused on front of the pirate flag, seemingly meeting the skull’s mocking stare.

“Angria flies it now,” she murmured. “My father added it to his fleet, before Oberon took it back…but Angria was not a man to give up his possessions easily, even when he had made an agreement.”

“They were
all
bad men,” I told her. “Products of their time and place.”

“I understand that
now
,” she said.

“The other walls are a trifle bare, though,” I remarked, when she passed on from the flag and paused to run her finger over the whitened plaster. “I can understand why Monsieur Breisz has no ancestral portraits to hang, but he surely might have invested in a few tapestries and mirrors, if not Oriental carpets and screens.”

“Can you not see how artful it is?” she asked, seemingly surprised. “Can you not feel the thrill of the space itself? I felt it even in the stone circle, which lies on the very edge of his domain, but here…there is magic all around us. Can you not see what a palace this is? If you were really my Tom Linn, you would. My knights understood how precious space becomes—how strangely taut and curved—when time slows.”

Automatically, I took out my watch, as if I might somehow be able to perceive an unnatural slowness in the passing moments, even though the naked eye cannot really perceive the normal movement of a minute-hand.

“You seem to be feeling quite well now, Mademoiselle Leonys?” Chapelain observed.

“Very well indeed,” she assured him, moving back to the window but keeping her back to it in order to face Chapelain as she spoke to him. “I was very ill in Paris, was I not?”

“Very ill indeed,” Chapelan confirmed, echoing her own formula. “I feared for your life.”

“I thought that I had lost my life,” she said. “There were moments when I wished that I were dead—but you saved my life, my faithful Merlin…oh, don’t look at me like that. I know that you’re Dr. Pierre Chapelain, of Paris…but for a little while, you were my Merlin, my wizard, my protector. Now I shall be yours, if I can.”

Exactly what are we in need of protection from?
I wondered.
Can she really provide it, if we are?

Chapelain was following a different train of thought. “I would love to claim the credit for such a miracle,” the mesmerist said, “but it seemed to me that you saved yourself, with the aid of the medallion. It isn’t the first time that I’ve seen talismans used to focus and concentrate a somnambulist’s powers of self-healing, but I never saw anything nearly as spectacular as your own transformation.”

“I was very glad to see the medallion again, after such a long time,” she said. “It was given to me for my protection, and it seems that I recovered it just in time, else those monsters would surely have claimed my soul.”

“Had you ever seen anything like those monsters before?” I asked, swiftly.

“When I was a child,” she said. “I had almost forgotten them, and the danger they pose—but I had forgotten so many things. Angria tried to conjure them, but they will not be conjured. They come readily enough when they are summoned, but also when they will, and there are no bargains to be made with them, no matter how one tries. Angria shielded me, and gave me the means to protect myself, but that was because he had plans for me…I never truly belonged to Callaba, though, and there were always bargains to be made with Angria. I’m beginning to remember everything, now—and to understand my memories. Oberon isn’t my father, but I was always his child…always. I think I shall be safe here now…at least for a little while.” She sounded far less than certain.

“Even if Oberon puts you back into suspended animation again?” I asked.

“I shall have to go back to the dream, of course,” she said, “but I can do that, now—and I know now
where
to go. I can’t go back to my knights, for that was a childish dream, and I ruined it by falling in love with Tristan and answering the ghost’s seductive call…but there is so much magic in these walls, in the very air I breathe, that I know that I can go further now, far beyond the dream I created for myself. That really was a childish yearning, beautiful but transient. I’m older than that now, and…I’ve been punished for my weakness.”

“What do you mean by
going back further
?” Chapelain wanted to know.

“I can find other selves now, just as Oberon has. I was a demoiselle in another court once, in Ys, before it sank beneath the sea. When I dream again, I shall go back there, far away from Oberon and Tristan. If I could take anyone with me, I think it would be you, Tom Linn, for the sake of your songs, but I cannot—and you must not worry, Tom, for I would never try to take you from your own world…and if he or anyone else should try, I will defend you. I know what I owe you, now.”

She was looking at me, but I wasn’t at all sure that she was talking to me, rather than to some ghost of her own imagination. I had some faint inkling of what she might be feeling; I had had occasion, in the past, to speak to ghosts of my own imagination

Chapelain was still pursuing his own agenda. “You believe that you have lived other lives, in the distant past?” he queried. “Other mesmerists have claimed to be able to enable patients to remember past incarnations—and when I first questioned you, I thought your answers reflected something of that sort—but I’ve always been skeptical about metempsychosis.”

“What’s metempsychosis?” she asked.

“The Pythagorean notion that the soul is eternal, moving from one incorporation to another in an endless sequence. I believe the Buddihsts and Hindus of India have similar notions.”

“I don’t know about an endless sequence,” Ysolde said. “If that’s so, than I still have a great deal more to remember…but I do have access to other dreams. Perhaps they’re fabrications, like my dream of being queen in Oberon’s court. Perhaps Ys never existed either, and is merely a further phase of my own slow maturity…or my own inescapable madness. If so…well, better that, I think, than murderously brutal reality. I have only ever been happy in dreams.”

How could Chapelain or I challenge that assertion? How could François Leuret ever have contended that she would be better sane than mad, given what reality and sanity had cost her in the past? But I didn’t need Leuret to tell me that she was a very rare exception, and that madness was usually far less kind—cruel enough, in fact, to make sanity a very welcome refuge, for those who can attain it. Even in Ysolde’s case, tragic as its Parisian episode had been, I couldn’t help suspecting that a calculated retreat into sweet enchantment in the mythical drowned land of Ys might not provide the release she hoped and expected. Her present condition was ominously reminiscent, in some respects, of a kind of fever—a delirium that could not last, and might yet prove a brief stay of execution.

Chapelain presumably thought so too—but he still had other things on his mind, in addition to his patient’s precarious well-being. “In Paris,” he said to Ysolde, trying to seem casual, “you said that you know where the residue of Levasseur’s treasure is. Is it in this house?”

A strangely sly expression stole across her previously-innocent face. “Some of it,” she said.

“You mean that some is not?” Chapelain promptly inferred.

She put her finger to her lips, suddenly seeming very child-like. “Oberon doesn’t know everything,” she said. “Levasseur was cleverer than he thought.”

“You mean that Levasseur told you where the treasure is?”

“Not exactly,” she said, in a hurried whisper. Again, she leaned close to my ear in order to continue, forcing Chapelain to lean over too. “I’d never been here when he used to tell me stories, and I didn’t realise what he meant at the time…I was only five years old. He liked me—although I didn’t like him, after he stole my medallion. I didn’t know, until much later, that he thought he was protecting me—poor fool—and it was later still that I worked out what he meant by telling me the story of the buried treasure. He was foolish to do that too…but then, he was never as clever as Angria or Oberon, even though he was cleverer than they thought. Oberon thinks that he recovered all the gold and jewels, but Levasseur set some aside, and gave me he clues that told me where it was without my realising what he was doing. He had to take the cross back, though—whatever is in the box, if anything still is, the cross isn’t. Perhaps nothing is—I never had a chance to dig. It’s possible that Oberon knew too, and took possession of it long ago…but I don’t think so.”

An inspiration suddenly struck me, which immediately bubbled over, as sudden surges of enlightenment are prone to do. “When Levasseur told the man to whom he consigned the medallion that it held the key to his fortune,” I said, “he didn’t mean that the inscription was a code to be deciphered. He meant that if the recipient could find the owner of the medallion—you, that is—you could tell him where the remnant of his share of the treasure was hidden. Saint-Germain—if it was, in some sense, the Saint-Germain I know—misunderstood him, and didn’t have an opportunity to correct his misconception. When he gave the medallion to me, hoping that Dupin might be able to decipher it with the aid of the encryption inscribed on your back, he was barking up entirely the wrong tree…but he obtained the right result by accident.”

By accident?
I wondered as I spoke the last words.
Has
any
of this been accidental?