Free The Cthulhu Encryption by Brian Stableford

My cello-playing days were behind me forever.
    “That was a terrible place you found me in,” she said. “But you came regardless, like Orpheus in search of Eurydice—except that this story has a happier ending, or at least a merciful delay. Will Merlin return too? His spells are not as powerful as they once were, but the herbs are soothing.”
    In the versions of the popular legends with which I was familiar, Merlin had been imprisoned in a tree, Tristan had died and Thomas the Rhymer had returned to his own world only to find that so much time had lapsed during his brief sojourn in fairyland that everyone he had known before was dead. I wasn’t entirely sure that her self-induced hallucination was as pleasant as it seemed, even if one set aside the suggestion that something more sinister was concealed beneath it. Where are you now that we need you, King Arthur? I wondered. I wish you were here, instead of this mysterious Oberon—who sounds to me more like Huon’s enigmatic accursed dwarf than Shakespeare’s counterpart to lovely Titania.
    I had to collect myself, and tell myself not to be silly—but the world of legend is so seductive of thought. How could it be otherwise, since that was the purpose for which it was designed?
    Ysolde Leonys’ face clouded over suddenly, and she said: “But I do not deserve your succor, Tristan, for I have been wicked and faithless. My punishment has been just.”
    “No such punishment as yours is just,” Dupin assured her—honestly enough, I felt sure. “We must not waste what time we have in dwelling on such thoughts. Let us summon happier memories. Let us talk about your childhood. You were born in India, were you not?”
    “My happiest times,” she said, “were in the Underworld—with you, Tristan. Ought we not to talk of those?”
    “Later,” he said, a trifle abruptly—and could not being himself to soften the word with any endearment. “You were happy in India, were you not?”
    “Sometimes,” she said. “I went to Poona once, in the hills, when my father was there—but I was never happy in Callaba, or in Karla. Karla was a dark place…darker than our Underworld, my love.”
    I had just enough knowledge of India to know that Karla was a cave-system in which a subterranean temple had been constructed, perhaps to some Hindu god or the Buddha.”
    “What was your surname, Ysolde, before it was changed to Leonys?” Dupin asked.
    She seemed uncomfortable, and I wondered whether Dupin was in danger of doing, without wanting to, exactly what Leuret had tried and failed to do: to bring her back to painful reality. She offered no answer to the question.
    “Have you ever heard of Olivier Levasseur, Ysolde?” Dupin asked.
    “He was a pirate.” She knew more than I did, then—but it was a titbit of information that anyone might have known.
    “Have you ever heard of a pirate named John Taylor,” Dupin persisted.
    Again she looked deeply uncomfortable, and I was sure that she would not answer. Abruptly, however, she said: “Jack Taylor was a bad man .”
    “Was your father a descendant of John Taylor the pirate?” Dupin asked, doggedly.
    She seemed puzzled by that question. “Jack Taylor was a bad man ,” she repeated—as if it were a phrase that she had heard someone else say, and which had stuck in her mind for some reason.
    “Is your father still in India?” Dupin continued.
    “He sailed for the South Seas…salt in his blood…darkness in his heart…to raise the Devil…for protection….”
    Her voice was fading; I was sure that she was about to fall unconscious again. So was Dupin, for he consented to change the subject.
    “Our Underworld was brighter than Karla,” he said, tempting a return to kinder fantasy.
    “Oh yes,” she said, smiling—hideously, alas, for the syphilitic sores about her mouth quite spoiled the normal effect. “I was queen there, for a year and a day, and radiant. Even the angels loved me. I should not have run