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the mythical equivalent of Léonais as Lyonesse,” he said, ever the pedant, “and insists on confusing the forest of that name—which gave its name to the region—with the drowned city of Ys. But the confusion is probably Breton in origin. In parts of Britanny, the forest is more often called Broceliande.”
    Quibbles of that sort were of no interest to me.
    “Do you believe that the inscription on the woman’s back really is the Key of Solomon?” I asked him, point-blank.
    “No,” he said. “It’s far worse than that, alas. It’s the Cthulhu encryption. Her pronunciation of it was missing the final set of symbols, as Bougainville’s version and every other printed version is, but it did not have the abbreviated form of R’laiyeh and one or two of the other syllables differed from the form in which Bougainville recorded them. But this is Paris, not the Pacific wilderness, and Chapelain thinks that the woman was born in India to an English family. How did the inscription get into her flesh, and why was it inscribed there? I need to find out, if I can. Whether she can tell me, or even give me a clue, I don’t know—but I have to try. I must go upstairs now—you’re welcome to come with me, of course.”
    He evidently wanted me to go with him. “Then I will,” I said, assuming that we could continue the conversation upstairs.
    He nodded, as if to thank me. Before we left the room, however, he said: “I’ve warned Monsieur and Madame Bihan already, but I ought to warn you too—there might be danger, if Leuret’s orderlies are slack-mouthed, and anyone takes them seriously. You might want to put a revolver in your pocket…and be careful, if your reflexes get the better of you and you open the door yourself when someone rings.
    “Is Madame Lacuzon still here?” I asked.
    “For a little while longer, if you don’t mind,” Dupin said.
    “I don’t mind, if there’s danger. If the Devil himself comes to call, he’ll surely not want to argue with her .”
    Dupin smiled wryly. “She looks fearsome, but she has a heart of gold,” he said, not very convincingly.
    “I expect it has to be gold,” I said. “The acid in her veins would surely dissolve any vulgar metal.”
    As things turned out, though, we had no opportunity for further conversation. As soon as we opened the door to Dupin’s old room, Ysolde Leonys opened her eyes.
    She looked swiftly around, but did not seem to be in the least astonished to discover that she was not where she had been when she fell unconscious. She lifted the bedclothes briefly to look down at her own body, which was now respectably clad in one of Madame Bihan’s capacious nightshirts.
    “You kept your promise, Tristan,” she said, when she looked back at Dupin. “The angels said you would, but I dared not believe them.” She looked at me then, as if wishing that I was not there, so that she might talk to her imagined lover in private.
    I thought perhaps I ought to go, in order to allow Dupin to continue with his inquiry under optimum conditions, but he gestured to me to be still.
    “I came with a friend,” he said. “I could not have found you otherwise. Do you not recognize him?”
    In reality, she could not and did not recognize me—but she was far from reality jut now, and fantasy is flexible in so many ways.
    “Is it really you, Tom?” she said, after a moment’s hesitation. “Tom Linn, the Rhymer?”
    “Of course it is,” said Dupin, although I knew that he must be smiling inwardly at the notion that I might be a rhymer. As a young man, I had always relied on Poe to make up for my deficiencies in that arena. I would rather have been Huon of Bordeaux, but I suppose it added an extra item of information to our cabinet of curious facts to know that she was familiar with Scottish ballads as well as Breton folklore and romance.
    The identification seemed to add another drop to her cup of joy. I only hoped that she was not going to ask me to play or sing.