Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath (23 page)

27th March.

In support of a letter from Peaslee received over a month ago - regarding the strengthening of the African force in an attempt to track down and extirpate Shudde-M’ell himself in his as yet undiscovered stronghold (G’harne is now deserted) - comes the following item, copied direct from yesterday’s Daily Mail:

THE INNER-SPACE RACE!

Prior to the commencement of an Ethiopian ‘Mohole’ project, planned for a time some years in the future, the United States of America’s Miskatonic University has jumped the gun on the British-led team at present carrying out survey work from Addis Ababa. There, below the tremendously hostile Danakil Desert where temperatures have been known to exceed more than 138° Fahrenheit in the shade, the three greatest rifts or natural faults in the Earth’s crust meet, and it is there that the British scientists hope to bore a hole right through the crust to the never before pierced mantle.

This is not the first time that such a titanic feat has been attempted - the Americans have already known one failure in the Pacific Ocean near Hawaii in 1966. On that occasion the project was abandoned because of escalating costs.

Similarly the Russians were defeated in the Arctic Circle’s Koda Peninsula.

But quite apart from depleted funds both projects met, too, with immense technical difficulties.

Professor Norman Ward, however, head of the Geology Department of Medham University and chief adviser to the British project’s sponsoring authorities, seems unconcerned by the advent of the American group on the scene. ‘They are way out in their calculations,’ he says, ‘if they believe that they have found the ideal spot in or near the area where they are at present encamped. The Afar Depression,’ he goes on to explain, ‘is far more suitable as a site for the project, but for some reason the Americans have chosen a spot well out of the way; and from what I have seen of their equipment - unless they intend to use previously untried methods - then I give them little chance of success.

They are, though, a closemouthed lot, and I am given to suspicions that they have far more in mind than they let on.’

‘Far more in mind than they let on,’ indeed! Of course they have! They’re after one of the biggest horrors the world has ever known - an incalculable evil which only

Great Cthulhu himself might surpass. I wish them luck, but I’m surely glad I’m out of it.

10th April.

Crow has been round about a communication from the Wilmarth Foundation. The Ethiopian thing is well under way and the three Foundation telepaths out there believe that they’ve found what they were looking for - Shudde-M’ell himself!

They have, too, devised a ‘lure’ for that supreme burrower - a number of fresh-hatched and presumably very precious (ugh!) females - and with his awful tribe so depleted over this last year or so it’s believed the horror must make a bid for the release of these would-be nest-mothers. There is one well, a shaft three-quarters of a mile deep, and down this shaft in four days’ time the females will be lowered - along with an explosive device set to disseminate a mass of one of the most deadly radioactive materials known to science. Experiments at Miskatonic have already shown that materials of only one-tenth of the radioactive potency of the stuff will kill a normal (normal?) Cthonian. This could well mean the end of one of the greatest CCD.

15th April.

Disaster! Horror! The newspapers are full of it; but as of yet, no official word from Peaslee or the Foundation. Severe earthquake near Addis Ababa and tremors in the surrounding towns and villages - Miskatonic’s entire Ethiopian team, all bar one man who managed to get away in a blazing vehicle - wiped out! The man who got away (no particulars yet) is on the danger list in an Addis Ababa hospital. Severe burns and shock. The story of what really happened hinges on whether or not he survives.

Later.

I have read Professor Ward’s appraisal in the Mail; he appears to be of the amazed opinion that the Americans succeeded in their attempt to break through the Earth’s crust, and that in so doing they somehow released the lava-stream which so far has obstructed all attempts by observers to get into the immediate vicinity of the site. He says that from the air the site is now a great molten crater a mile across - a crater with a slightly raised rim through gaps in which a lot of lava has escaped. All ‘volcanic’ activity has now stopped, apparently, but the place is still too hot to approach on foot or by surface vehicle. There is not the slightest sign or trace of the men who inhabited the place only a few short hours ago, and of the machinery they used only a metal spar from the great derrick itself has been found - hundreds of yards outside the northern rim of the crater, where it was presumably thrown by the force of the short-lived ‘eruption’. Ward considers that he was correct in his initial theory - that the Americans were trying out new, quick-drilling methods - for this would seem the only satisfactory explanation for so rapid and disastrous a penetration of the Earth’s crust. My God, if he only knew the truth! I imagine Miskatonic will soon put out a cover story.

2nd Aug.

My collection and correlation, over the last quarter or so, of my own notes and some of Crow’s papers and documents into a record of sorts (as suggested by Peaslee some time ago) regarding our experiences with the burrowers beneath, has left me precious little time to spare; but I have managed to keep in-touch with Crow himself, and with the Wilmarth Foundation. The receipt of occasional communiques from America has helped to keep me fairly well up-to-date, despite the fact that I am no longer personally involved - or at best only partly involved, and then only in the now limited administrational duties of the organization’s British Chapter. I cannot help but wonder, though, how long this anonymity of mine can last. Crow is at present in Oklahoma, and his letters hint of suspected subterranean wonders the lure of which I cannot hope to resist for long. He talks about ‘embarking upon the greatest speleological expedition in history’, but as yet has not explained himself. Now what in heaven … ? Pot-holing - ?

In the meantime the members of Miskatonic’s august, inspired, and dedicated body abroad are making great strides in their concentrated efforts to track down and exterminate the remaining lesser agents and minions of the CCD. It seems generally recognized now that the greater of these horrors - such as the space-spawn of Cthulhu, Yibb-Tstll, Yog-Sothoth, Ithaqua, Hastur, and some half dozen others; notably the Lloigor, whose disembodied subterranean race-mind is still apparently exercised and felt most strongly in Wales - are here to stay; at least until our growing knowledge of them permits us a safe attempt at their expulsion. Their destruction, an actual end to them, now seems out of the question; if they were ever capable of being destroyed, then why were such merciful executions not undertaken by the Elder Gods themselves aeons ago? This, at any rate, is a question which Miskatonic’s theorists have now started to chew over.

13th Aug.

In relation to my last entry regarding the CCD: whether or not all the greater beings are immortal may never be known - but Shudde-M’ell, at least, has shown himself to be almost indestructible! This has come out following the recovery of Edward Ellis, the sole survivor of the Ethiopian horror.

Fortunately Ellis is - or was - a telepath, the most accomplished of the ill-fated trio sent out from America to Addis Ababa, and now that his extensive skin-graft operations and general therapy (mental as well as physical) are over and he is back on his feet, he has finally managed to tell what happened when the Prime Burrower went to the rescue of his doomed little females. He has confirmed beyond any reasonable doubt that those female creatures died in the incredibly destructive blast of hard radiation released by the present explosive device -but their lord … ?

Through the lull left by the instant shutting off of infant Cthonian thoughts, the telepath had picked up - had been almost blasted by - the most fearful waves of angered and agonized telepathic sendings as Shudde-M’ell reacted to the hard radiation. Wounded that great abomination may well have been, indeed Ellis’ continued evidence guarantees it, but at the last - as witness the complete destruction of the well-shaft trap and of the men who set and baited it - he was very much alive!

I say that Ellis has told what happened when Shudde-M’ell surfaced, but I realize now that I may have given the wrong impression. As a telepath Edward Ellis is finished (it is a wonder they managed to save his sanity, let alone his telepathic powers), but he gave up what he knew of the thing under the inducement of certain special drugs taken voluntarily.

I have listened to copies of tape recordings made while Ellis was under the influence of those drugs. He babbles pitifully of ‘a great grey thing a mile long chanting and exuding strange acids … charging through the depths of the earth at a fantastic speed, in a dreadful fury … melting basaltic rocks like butter under a blowtorch!’ He gibbers of the explosion which released what ought to

have been radiations ultimately inimical, indeed deadly to all known forms of life - particularly Cthonian life - and of the instantaneous blotting out of the mind-patterns of the young female creatures. He gabbles almost inarticulately of the injured, partly dissolved monstrosity which yet lived to bore its way to the surface, to turn its massive storehouse of heat and alien energy loose in a frenzy of molten destruction! Finally he sobs weakly of the honor’s retreat, of its crash dive straight down into the bowels of the earth, until it achieved that which man still has not accomplished. For Ellis’ mind was with Shudde-M’ell when, in blind agony and indescribable rage, the Prime Burrower broke through the crust of the Earth - broke through to swim away deeper yet, into the inner magma, against strange tides of molten-rock oceans, those oceans which hold these lily pads we call continents afloat!

There it was that Ellis lost the horror’s trail, and there too he lost consciousness, but not before he managed to throw himself from his careening, blazing vehicle into the lifesaving waters of an oasis pool.

24th Aug.

Crow is coming home again to England!

It will be good to see him again - it will be good to talk to him! He has written to me of things almost beyond imagination: subterranean horrors totally outside man’s sphere of knowledge, even beyond the combined ken of the Wilmarth Foundation, existing in the bowels of the earth beneath Oklahoma. His writing includes mention of the ‘blue-litten world of K’n-yan’, of the ‘Vaults of Zin’, of monstrous ruins of eldritch civilizations in a still deeper

‘red-litten world of Yoth’, and of undisclosed but apparently indisputable evidence in respect of his theories (and the Foundation’s) regarding the unbelievable antiquity of the Cthulhu, Yog, and Tsathogguan Cycles of myth, legend, and cult. Finally he has hinted awesomely of the deepest abyss of all,

‘Black N’kai, whose singular stone troughs and burrows are sufficient in their very ancientness to turn the minds of men away shrieking!’

I gather that no speleological expedition has actually been undertaken as was originally planned, and that all these allusions have their origin in telepathically inspired dreams; but knowing something of the workings of the telepathic mind I now find myself asking a terrifying question: if these places are so fearfully deep underground - through what mental eye have such visions been relayed to the surface… ?

But at any rate, the whole thing has been seen as far too dangerous for earnest investigation - certain Indian legends of unguessed lineage have come down through time; more recently, other serious investigators have met with strange disappearances and weird displacements of time and matter - and so massive charges of dynamite have been used to seal off these buried places for ever from our sane upper world. The horrors of K’n-yan, Yoth, N’kai, and kindred vaults are not truly of the magnitude of those we within the Foundation are pledged to fight - but they are still far too terrible to contemplate or correlate within a so-called rationally ordered universe.

29th Aug.

A letter from Peaslee: he asks if I would care to join him in co-leadership of an Australian ‘expedition’. There are, he says, certain things in the Great Sandy Desert in which he has a very special interest. I know that he once accompanied his father out there back in 1935, and I believe he later published a very limited edition regarding some odd discoveries; but in any case I have had to turn him down. My antique business demands I take a hand here in England, and I still have certain administrational duties in respect of the Foundation’s British Chapter.

3rd Sept.

Crow gets into London airport some time this evening. His last letter, received yesterday, is full of excitement; something to do with his discovery at Miskatonic University of a book containing fragments in an ancient glyph with corresponding paragraphs in Latin. He mentions his great old clock (that weird, four-handed, chronologically impossible monstrosity which once belonged to my father), relating the fantastic configurations on its dial to this latest ‘Rosetta Stone’ discovery of his. It’s plain he believes that he can now decipher the legend of the clock, perhaps even discover the thing’s purpose, for I’ve known for some time that he thinks the clock is in fact a space-time machine - a device come down from predawn days of extra-dimensional

‘magic’ - literally a toy of the Elder Gods themselves, or of others like them.

Crow’s excitement, his prescience in this matter, is hardly unfounded. I recall something he told me some years ago, or rather something at which he hinted, about a pair of burglars who broke into Blowne House one night - and who stayed! Apparently one of these gentlemen-of-the-night found a way to open the clock, something Crow had never managed to do on his own, but thereafter my friend’s story was vague indeed. I recall him saying something about frightening dimensions, ‘a gateway to hideous times and spaces’, and his mention of ‘a lake of elder horror, where nightmare entities splash by a cloud-wave shore as twin suns sink in distant mists …’ I must remember to have him relate the story in full. I’m sure he mentioned something about his