Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath (4 page)

There were, too, other creatures and beings - such as Dagon, fish-god of the Philistines and Phoenicians, ruler over the Deep Ones, ally and servant to Cthulhu; the Tind’losi Hounds; Yibb-Tstll, Nyogtha, and Tsathoggua; Lloigor, Zhar, and Ithaqua; Shudde-M’ell, Glaaki, and Daoloth - many, many of them. Of some of these beings much was made in the mythos, and they were given ample space in the books. Others were more obscure, rarely mentioned, and then only in a vague and indecisive manner.

Basically the legend was this: that in an epoch so remote in the past as to make Crow’s ‘geologic infants’ statement perfectly acceptable, the Elder Gods had punished a rebellion of the Great Old Ones by banishing them to their various prisoning environs - Hastur to the Lake of Hali in Carcosa; Cthulhu to R’lyeh beneath the Pacific Ocean; Ithaqua to dwell above the ice-wastes of the Arctic; Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, and Yibb-Tstll to chaotic continua outside the geometric design of which the known infinite forms but one surface; Tsathoggua to cthonian Hyperborean burrows, and similarly Shudde-M’ell to other lost labyrinths beneath the earth - so that only Nyarlathotep the Messenger was left free and unprisoned. For in their infinite wisdom and mercy the Elder Gods had left Nyarlathotep alone that he might yet ply the currents between the spheres and carry, one to the other in the loneliness of their banishment, the words of all the evicted forces of evil.

Various magical sigils, signs, and barriers kept the Great Old Ones imprisoned, had done so since time immemorial (again an inadequate cliche), and the books, particularly the Necmnomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, warned against the removal of such signs and of possible attempts by deluded or ‘possessed’ mortals to reinstate the Great Old Ones as lords of their former domains. The legend in its entirety was a fascinating thing; but as with all the world’s other, greater primal fantasies, it could only be regarded as pure myth, with nothing in it to impress any but the most naive souls of the possible actuality of its surmises and suggestions. So I still thought, despite certain things Crow had told me in the past and others I had stumbled across myself.

All these thoughts passed in very short order through my head, but thanks to my ability to give many things my full, simultaneous concentration, I missed none of Titus Crow’s narrative regarding his dreams of over thirty years and their implications as applied to actual occurrences in the real, waking world. He had covered certain monstrous dreams of a time some years gone, when his nightmares had been paralleled in life by any number of disastrous losses of oceangoing gas- and oil-drilling rigs, and was now about to relate the details of yet more hideous nightmares he had known at a time only some few weeks ago.

‘But first we’ll go back to those dreams I skipped over earlier,’ he said, as I banished all other pictures from my mind. ‘The reason I did that was because I didn’t want to bore you with duplication. You see, they first came to me as long ago as August, 1933, and though they were not so detailed they were more or less the same as my most recent, recurrent nightmares. Yes, those dreams, until recently, have been coming nightly, and if I describe one of them, then I shall have described most of them. A few have been different!

‘To make it short, Henri, I have been dreaming of subterranean beings, octopus-things apparently without heads or eyes, creatures capable of organic tunnelling through the deepest buried rocks with as little effort as hot knives slicing butter! I don’t know for sure yet just what they are, these burrowers beneath; though I’m pretty certain they’re of an hitherto unguessed species as opposed to creatures of the so-called “supernatural”, survivors of a time before time rather than beings of occult dimensions. No, I can only guess, but my guess is that they represent an unholy horror! And if I’m correct, then, as I’ve already said, the whole world is in hellish danger!’

Crow closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and put his fingertips up to his furrowed forehead. Plainly he had said as much as he was going to without prompting. And yet I found myself no longer truly eager to question him.

This was, without a doubt, a much different Titus Crow from the man I had known previously. I full knew the extent of his probing into various strange matters, and that his research over the years in the more obscure corners of various sciences had been prodigious, but had his work finally proved too much for him?

I was still worriedly staring at him in sympathetic apprehension when he opened his eyes. Before I could hide it, he saw the expression on my face and smiled as I tried to cover my embarrassment.

‘I… I’m sorry, Titus, I -‘

‘What was it you said, de Marigny?’ He stopped me short. ‘Something about doubting a man before trying him? I told you it was going to be hard to swallow, but I don’t really blame you for whatever doubts you have. I do have proof, though, of sorts …’

‘Titus, please forgive me,’ I answered dejectedly. ‘It’s just that you look so, well, tired and washed out. But come on - proof, you said! What sort of proof do you mean?’

He opened his desk drawer again, this time to take out a folder of letters, a manuscript, and a square cardboard box. ‘First the letters,’ he said, handing me the slim folder, ‘then the manuscript. Read them, de Marigny, while I doze, and then you’ll be able to judge for yourself when I show you what’s in the box. Then, too, you’ll be better able to understand. Agreed?’

I nodded, took a long sip at my brandy, and began to read. The letters I managed pretty quickly; they drew few conclusions in themselves. Then came the manuscript.

Cement Surroundings

(Being the Manuscript of Paul Wendy-Smith)

1

It will never fail to amaze me how certain allegedly Christian people take a perverse delight in the misfortunes of others. Just how true this is was brought forcibly home to me by the totally unnecessary whispers and rumours which were put about following the disastrous decline of my closest living relative.

There were those who concluded that just as the moon is responsible for the tides, and in part the slow movement of the Earth’s upper crust, so was it also responsible for Sir Amery Wendy-Smith’s behaviour on his return from Africa. As proof they pointed out my uncle’s sudden fascination for seismography - the study of earthquakes -a subject which so took his fancy that he built his own instrument, a model which does not incorporate the conventional concrete base, to such an exactitude that it measures even the most minute of the deep tremors which are constantly shaking this world. It is that same instrument which sits before me now, rescued from the ruins of the cottage, at which I am given to casting, with increasing frequency, sharp and fearful glances.

Before his disappearance my uncle spent hours, seemingly without purpose, studying the fractional movements of the stylus over the graph.

For my own part I found it more than odd the way in which, while Sir Amery was staying in London after his

return, he shunned the underground and would pay extortive taxi fares rather than go down into what he termed ‘those black tunnels’. Odd, certainly, but I never considered it a sign of insanity.

Yet even his few really close friends seemed convinced of his madness, blaming it upon his living too close to those dead and nighted nigh-forgotten civilizations which so fascinated him. But how could it have been otherwise?

My uncle was both antiquarian and archaeologist. His strange wanderings to foreign lands were not the result of any longing for personal gain or acclaim.

Rather were they undertaken out of a love of the life; for any fame which resulted - as frequently occurred - was more often than not shrugged off on to the ever-willing personages of his colleagues.

They envied him, those so-called contemporaries of his, and would have emulated his successes had they possessed the foresight and inquisitiveness with which he was so singularly gifted - or, as I have now come to believe, with which he was cursed. My bitterness towards them is directed by the way in which they cut him after the dreadful culmination of that last, fatal expedition. In earlier years many of them had been ‘made by his discoveries, but on that last trip those hangers-on had been the uninvited, the ones out of favour, to whom he would not offer the opportunity of fresh, stolen glory. I believe that for the greater part their assurances of his insanity were nothing more than a spiteful means of belittling his genius.

Certainly that last safari was his physical end. He who before had been straight and strong, for a man his age, with jet hair and a constant smile, was now seen to walk with a pronounced stoop and had lost a lot of weight. His hair had greyed and his smile had become rare and

nervous while a distinct tic jerked the flesh at the corner of his mouth.

Before these awful deteriorations made it possible for his erstwhile ‘friends’

to ridicule him, before the expedition, Sir Amery had deciphered or translated (I know little of these things) a handful of decaying, centuried shards known in archaeological circles as the G’harne Fragments. Though he would never fully discuss his findings I knew it was that which he learned which sent him, ill-fated, into Africa.

He and a handful of personal friends, all equally learned gentlemen, ventured into the interior seeking a legendary city which Sir Amery believed had existed centuries before the foundations were cut for the pyramids. Indeed, according to his calculations, Man’s primal ancestors were not yet conceived when G’harne’s towering ramparts first reared their monolithic sculptings to predawn skies. Nor with regard to the age of the place, if it existed at all, could my uncle’s claims be disproved; new tests on the G’harne Fragments had shown them to be pre-Triassic, and their very existence, in any form other than centuried dust, was impossible to explain.

It was Sir Amery, alone and in a terrible condition, who staggered upon an encampment of savages five weeks after setting out from the native village where the expedition had last had contact with civilization. No doubt the ferocious men who found him would have done away with him there and then but for their superstitions. His wild appearance and the strange tongue in which he screamed, plus the fact that he had emerged from an area which was taboo in their tribal legends, stayed their hands. Eventually they nursed him back to a semblance of health and conveyed him to a more civilized region whence he was slowly able to make his way back to the outside world. Of the expedition’s other members nothing has since been

seen or heard. Only I know the story, having read it in the letter my uncle left me, but more of that later …

Following his lone return to England, Sir Amery developed those eccentricities already mentioned, and the merest hint or speculation on the part of outsiders with reference to the disappearance of his colleagues was sufficient to start him raving horribly of such inexplicable things as ‘a buried land where Shudde-M’ell broods and bubbles, plotting the destruction of the human race and the release from his watery prison of Great Cthulhu When he was asked officially to account for his missing companions, he said that they had died in an earthquake; and though, reputedly, he was asked to clarify his answer, he would say no more.

Thus, being uncertain as to how he would react to questions about his expedition, I was loath to ask him of it. However, on those rare occasions when he saw fit to talk of it without prompting, I listened avidly; for I, as much if not more so than others, was eager to have the mystery cleared up.

He had been back only a few months when he suddenly left London and invited me up to his cottage, isolated here on the Yorkshire Moors, to keep him company.

This invitation was a thing strange in itself, as he was one who had spent months in absolute solitude in various far-flung desolate places and liked to think of himself as something of a hermit. I accepted, for I saw the perfect chance to get a little of that peaceful quiet which I find particularly beneficial to my writing.

One day, shortly after I had settled in, Sir Amery showed me a pair of strangely beautiful pearly spheres. They measured about four inches in diameter, and, though he had been unable to positively identify the material from which they were made, he was able to say that it appeared to be some unknown combination of calcium, chrysolite, and diamond-dust. How the things had been made was, as he put it, ‘anybody’s guess’. The spheres, he told me, had been found at the site of the dead G’harne - the first intimation he had offered that he had actually found the place - buried beneath the earth in a lidless stone box which had borne upon its queerly angled sides certain utterly alien engravings. Sir Amery was anything but explicit with regard to those designs, merely stating that they were so loathsome in what they suggested that it would not do to describe them too closely. Finally, in answer to my probing questions, he told me that they depicted monstrous sacrifices to some unthinkable cthon-ian deity. More he refused to say but directed me, since I seemed ‘so damnably eager’, to the works of Commodus and the hag-ridden Caracalla.

He mentioned that also upon the box, along with the pictures, were many lines of sharply cut characters much similar to the cuneiform and dot-group etchings of the G’harne Fragments and, in certain aspects, having a disturbing likeness to the almost unfathomable Pnakotic Manuscript. Quite possibly, he went on, the container had been a toy-box of sorts and the spheres, in all probability, were once the baubles of a child of the ancient city; certainly children, or young ones, were mentioned in

what he had managed to decipher of the odd writing on the box.

It was during this stage of his narrative that I noticed Sir Amery’s eyes were beginning to glaze over and his speech was starting to falter, almost as though some strange psychic block were affecting his memory. Without warning, like a man suddenly gone into an hypnotic trance, he began muttering of Shudde-M’ell and Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth and Yibb-Tstll - ‘alien Gods defying description’ - and of mythological places with equally fantastic names: Sarnath and Hyperborea, R’lyeh and Ephiroth, and many more.