COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2012 by Brian Stableford
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For the mysterious Tom Dean,
with thanks for his assiduousness in maintaining my public image.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Although this story is complete in itself, frequent reference is made to earlier stories in the series to which it belongs, whose substance has inevitably come to account for a gradually increasingly part of the characters’ personal histories and relationships. The earlier stories, in order of the series’ internal chronology, are: The Legacy of Erich Zann (first published in the Perilous Press volume The Womb of Time, reprinted in the Borgo Press collection The Legacy of Erich Zann and other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos); Valdemar’s Daughter and The Mad Trist (published as complementary halves of a Borgo Press Double); The Quintessence of August; The Cthulhu Encryption; and Journey to the Core Of Creation (issued as Borgo Press novels).
OPENING QUOTATION
“All which I bid you remember (for I will have no such Reader as I can teach) is, that the Pythagorean doctrine doth not only carry one soul from man to man, nor man to beast, but indifferently to plants also, and therefore you must not grudge to find the same soul in an Emperor, in a Post-horse, and in a mushroom.... And therefore though this soul could not move when it was a Melon, yet it may remember, and now tell me, at what lascivious banquet it was serv’d. And though it could not speak, when it was a spider, yet it can remember, and now tell me, who used it for poison to attain dignity. However the bodies have dull’d her other faculties, her memory hath ever been her own, which makes me so seriously deliver you by her relation all her passages from her first making when she was that apple which Eve eat, to this time when she is he, whose life you shall find in the end of this book.
—John Donne, “Epistle” to Metempsychosis
(dated 16 August 1601 by the author)
“The parasitism of the infinitely small is the cause of nine-tenths of our diseases. It is against this cause, more especially, that our new method of treatment is directed, and, we are happy to add, with the most perfect success.”
—François-Vincent Raspail,
Histoire naturelle de la santé et de la maladie (1845)
Oberon the Fay. A humpty dwarf only three feet high, but of angelic face, lord and king of Mommur. He told Sir Huon his pedigree, which certainly is very romantic. The lady of the Hidden Isle (Cephalonia) married Neptanebus, King of Egypt, by whom she had a son called Alexander the Great. Seven hundred years later, Julius Caesar, on his way to Thessaly, stopped in Cephalonia, and the same lady, falling in love with him, had in time another son, and that son was Oberon. At his birth the fairies bestowed their gifts—one was insight into men’s thoughts, and another was the power of transporting himself to any place instantaneously. He became a friend to Huon, whom he made his successor in the kingdom of Mommur. In the fullness of time, falling asleep in death, legions of angels carried his soul to Paradise. (Huon de Bordeaux, a romance.)
—E. Cobham Brewer,
The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
(Revised and Updated Edition, 1890)
CHAPTER ONE
ROBERT LE DIABLE
I had been to the “new” Salle Favart several times before the evening of the thirty-first of October 1847, when I went there to see the première of the latest revival of Robert le Diable. Indeed, I had gone to see Hector Berlioz’s Damnation de Faust there the previous year, whose relative failure had been one of the factors determining the Opéra-Comique’s recent policy of favoring known crowd-pleasers rather than risking too many new productions. Anxiety about the political situation played a part in that too; in turbulent times, esthetes often develop an exaggerated nostalgia for relatively recent pasts that have taken on a golden edge in retrospect.
I must admit that I felt a trifle embarrassed settling into one of the three seats in the box on my own, and could not help feeling a trifle resentful of Auguste Dupin, who had insisted on my reserving the three seats while leaving one of them unfilled, and had then sent me a note on the very afternoon of the performance, saying that he had been “unavoidably delayed,” but that he hoped to get to the theater by the interval—which was scheduled to take place after the second act.
I felt even less comfortable when, on glancing around the auditorium, I saw Pierre Chapelain sitting in the middle seat of the similar box directly opposite. Dupin and I had not seen much of Chapelain of late, but I would certainly have invited him to take the third seat in our box had Dupin not forbidden me to do so. It was not much consolation to observe that there was an empty seat in his box too, to the physician’s left. Strangely enough, the seat to his right was occupied by a woman wearing a domino, complete with half-mask.
It was by no means unknown for Parisiennes to wear dominoes as fashion accessories on other occasions than masked balls, in the days before the 1848 Revolution, although I associated the habit more with spring than autumn, because Shrove Tuesday and Mid-Lent were the peak times for such indulgences. I wondered momentarily whether the woman might possibly be an American, for All Hallows’ Eve tends to be a more important occasion there than the following day—Toussaint, in France—because of the customs imported by poor Irish and Scottish immigrants. Having been taken up by the general populace and Americanized in its social democracy, its celebration was now often associated with costuming and the wearing of masks.
There was no way to know who the woman was, however, although I took note that the lower part of her face, as seen by means of a rapid peep through my opera-glasses, suggested that she must be in her forties: much the same age as Chapelain. That, coupled with their appearance together in a box at the Opéra-Comique, always a popular exhibition-hall for relationships on the brink of formality, inevitably led me to wonder whether the physician might be thinking of marrying again, perhaps to some prosperous widow. If that were so, it would have helped to explain his recent neglect of the company of Dupin and myself, which had been such an important aspect of his social life a year before. On the other hand, it still left the empty seat to Chapelain’s left unexplained.
Chapelain saw me too, of course, and we exchanged polite nods of the head, although his expression seemed to me to be a trifle distracted, almost bordering on the sullen.
There was still some ten minutes to go before the curtain was due to go up when the door of my box suddenly opened, and someone came in. I turned my head gratefully, expecting to see Dupin, his unavoidable delay happily terminated, but it was the so-called Comte de Saint-Germain.
He did not sit down in either of the vacant chairs. Indeed, he plastered himself against the far partition of the box, seemingly concealing himself behind the curtain—which had not been drawn back to ensure maximum visibility to a hypothetical observer sitting in the right-hand chair, because there was no one in the chair in question—at least until he moved it slightly across to give him better cover.
“What the devil do you think you’re doing, Saint-Germain?” I said. “This is a private box.”
He did not even look at me, being too busy peering surreptitiously out into the auditorium. “I know,” he said, “but we’re friends, are we not? What is more natural than friends dropping into one another’s boxes before a performance to say bonjour? Except that Chapelain is all the way over the far side of the hall—why is that?”
“No,” I said, coldly, deciding to focus on his first question. “I don’t believe that we are friends.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “It’s only a matter of months since I saved your life—that’s a bond that lasts a lifetime. Pass me those opera-glasses, would you?”
So ingrained are habits of politeness that I actually reached across to hand him my opera-glasses,