Free The Cthulhu Encryption by Brian Stableford Page A

away…but what would have happened to me had I stayed, when the year and a day was over? What would have become of me?”
    I had always thought of Underworlds as gloomy places, but I was not about to protest against her judgment. It was her hallucination, after all.
    “Remind me,” Dupin said, curiously, “how it was that Oberon came to choose you for his bride.”
    “Oberon did not choose,” she said, in a slightly reproachful one. “Oberon never had a choice . Marriages are made in Heaven.” She said no more, and it was probably my own imagination, acing alone, but I could not help silently adding: … or Hell .
    “Of course,” Dupin was quick to agree. “But I chose you, did I not?”
    “Did you really?” she answered. “I never knew that. Were some of us free, then? Were we not all driven? But would that not make it our fault that things went so badly awry? We have been punished for it, after all…did you say that you had been punished too, my love?”
    I couldn’t quite remember whether he had or hadn’t, but I didn’t suppose that it mattered overmuch. Dream logic was firmly in charge here.
    “We have been unlucky, Ysolde,” Dupin said. “Direly unlucky. Do you know where the manuscripts are?”
    “Manuscripts?” she queried, her voice alarmed this time, becoming shrill. “What manuscripts?”
    I thought for a moment that he might give her a long lecture on John Dee’s importance as a bibliophile and educator of navigators, but he was too impatient for that.
    “The pirate’s manuscripts,” he said. “The manuscripts that your ancestor took from Our Lady of the Cape .”
    That was probably more reality than she could stand, at present.
    “Jack Taylor was a bad man ,” she whispered—and fell asleep.
    Dupin was furious. I thought for a moment that he was about to shake her, to make her wake up, but he was only fluttering his hands because he was furious at himself, for mishandling the interrogation. “What a fool I am!” he muttered. “Too clever to play the simpleton, too much the logician to feign affection! It’s not as if I had never….” He stopped suddenly and looked at me. “Well,” he said, resignedly, “we have one piece of valuable information.”
    “That Jack Taylor was a bad man ?” I suggested. “But which one? Her father, or the pirate?”
    “One of them, at least,” he said, pensively, “seems to have sailed for the South Seas…perhaps to raise the Devil…or perhaps as an explorer.”
    The last conjecture, I supposed, was his inference, for I had heard nothing in what the woman had said to support it. “An explorer?” I queried. “Looking for what?”
    “R’laiyeh,” was his terse reply.
    “Did he find it, do you think?”
    “I hope not,” he retorted. “My God, I hope not.” Then he stood up. “Food,” he said, succinctly. “I need food—and strong coffee.”
    “I shall have to send the Bihans out in search of supplies,” I said. “After all, the sage of Bicêtre is coming to dinner tonight, and we must put on a show. Do you have any conception, Dupin, of how drastically you have upset the pattern of my life?”
    He pulled a face—which was quite uncharacteristic of him. “Yes, I have,” he said, “and I’m truly sorry.”
    “But it was a matter of dire necessity,” I added, on his behalf.
    “And is,” he said. “I wish I knew how dire the necessity might become.”
    “We have faced Nyarlathotep the Crawling Chaos and the Dwellers of the Threshold,” I reminded him, “not to mention the Egregore of Parthenope. Will this be very much worse?”
    “I don’t know,” he replied. “I have no idea how Ysolde came to have the Cthulhu encryption engraved into her very flesh, or for what purpose—and I have no idea who or what might come to search for her, once the word spreads that it is manifest. No one in that ward but me could possibly have recognized what she said, of course—but there’s enough detail in the story to attract