The Burrowers Beneath Read online

  I didn’t get far into the actual coal-seams. The first half dozen were down. They had collapsed. But I soon enough found out what had brought them down! In and out of the old workings, lacing them like holes in Gorgonzola, those damned smooth-lined tunnels came and went, literally honey-combing the coal and rock alike! Then, in one of the few remaining old seams that still stood and where some poor-grade coal still remained, I came across yet another funny thing. A tunnel, one of the new ones, had been cut right along the original seam, and I noticed that here the walls weren’t of that lava substance but a pitchy, hard tar, exactly the kind of deposit you find bubbling out of hot coal in the coke-ovens, only set as hard as rock … !

  That was it. I’d had enough, and I set off back toward the main shaft and the lift-cage. It was then I thought I heard the chanting. Thought?—like hell I thought—I did hear it; and it was just as you wrote it down! It was distant, seeming to come from a very long way away, like listening to the sea in a shell or hearing a tune you remember in your head … . But I knew I should never have been hearing things like that down there at all, and I took off for the lift-cage as fast as I could go.

  Well, I’ll keep the rest of it short, Mr. Crow. I’ve probably said too much already as it is, and I just hope to God that you’re not one of those reporter fellows. Still, I wanted to get it off my chest, so what the hell care I?

  I finally arrived at the shaft bottom, by which time the chanting had died away, and I gave the lads on top a tinkle on the old handset to haul me up. At the top I made out my report, but not as fully as I’ve done here, and then I went home … . I kept the cave-pearls, as mementos if you like, and said nothing about them in my report. I don’t see what good they’d be to anyone, anyway. Still, it does seem a bit like stealing. I mean, whatever the things really are—well, they’re not mine, are they? I might just send them off anonymously to the museum at Sunderland or Radcar. I suppose the museum people will know what they are … .

  The next morning the reporters came around from the Daily Mail. They’d heard I had a bit of a story to tell and pumped me for all I was worth. I had the idea they were laughing at me, though, so I didn’t tell them a deal. They must have gone to see old Betteridge when finally they left me—and, well, you know the rest.

  And that’s it, Mr. Crow. If there’s something else you’d like to know just drop me another line. Myself, I’d be interested to learn how you come to know so much about it all, and why you want to know more … .

  Yrs. sincerely,

  R. Bentham

  P. S.

  Maybe you heard how they were planning to send two more inspectors down to do the job I’d “messed up”? Well, they couldn’t. Just a few days ago the whole lot fell in! The road between Harden and Blackhill sank ten feet in places, and a couple of brick barns were brought down at Castle-Ilden. There’s had to be work done on the walls of the Red Cow Inn in Harden, too, and there have been slight tremors all over the area since. Like I said, the mine was rotten with those tunnels down there. I’m only surprised (and thankful!) it held up so long. Oh, and one other thing. I think that the smell I mentioned must, after all, have been produced by a gas of some sort. Certainly my head’s been fuzzy ever since. Weak as a kitten, I’ve been, and damned if I don’t seem to keep hearing that awful, droning, chanting sound! All my imagination, of course, for you can take it from me that old Betteridge wasn’t even partly right in what he said about me … .

  R. B.

  Blowne House

  30th May

  To: Raymond Bentham, Esq.

  Dear Mr. Bentham,

  I thank you for your prompt reply to my queries of the 25th, and would be obliged if you would give similar keen attention to this further letter. I must of necessity make my note brief (I have many important things to do), but I beg you to have the utmost faith in my directions, strange as they may seem to you, and to carry them out without delay!

  You have seen, Mr. Bentham, how accurately I described the pictures on the walls of that great unnatural cave in the earth, and how I was able to duplicate on paper the weird chant you heard underground. My dearest wish now is that you remember these previous deductions of mine, and believe me when I tell you that you have placed yourself in extreme and hideous danger in removing the cave-pearls from the Harden tunnel-complex! In fact, it is my sincere belief that you are in a constantly increasing peril every moment you keep those things!

  I ask you to send them to me; I might know what to do with them. I repeat, Mr. Bentham, do not delay but send me the cave-pearls at once; or, should you decide against it, then for God’s sake at least remove them from your house and person! A good suggestion would be for you to drop them back into the shaft at the mine, if that is at all possible; but whichever method you choose in getting rid of them, do it with dispatch! They may rightly be regarded as being infinitely more dangerous than ten times their own weight in nitroglycerin!

  Yrs. v. truly,

  Titus Crow

  Blowne House

  5 P.M., 30th May

  To: Mr. Henri-Laurent de Marigny

  Dear Henri,

  I’ve tried to get you on the telephone twice today, only to discover at this late hour that you’re in Paris at a sale of antiques! Your housekeeper tells me she doesn’t know when you’ll be back. I hope it’s soon. I may very well need your help! This note will be waiting for you when you get back. Waste no time, de Marigny, but get round here as soon as you’re able!

  Titus.

  II

  Marvels Strange and Terrific

  (From the Notebooks of Henri-Laurent de Marigny)

  I had known this strange and inexplicable feeling for weeks—a deep-rooted mental apprehension, an uneasiness of psyche—and the cumulative effort of this near-indefinable atmosphere of hovering hysteria upon my system, the sheer tautness of my usually sound nerves, was horrible and soul-destroying. I could not for my life fathom whence these brooding fears of things unknown sprang, or even guess at the source of the hideous oppressiveness of air which seemed to hang in tangible heaviness over all my waking and sleeping moments alike, but the combination of the two had been more than sufficient to drive me from London to seek refuge on the Continent.

  Ostensibly I had gone to Paris to seek out certain Eastern antiques at the House du Fouche, but when I discovered that my flight to that ancestral city had gained me no respite from my sickening, doom-fraught mood of depression, then I was at a complete loss as to what to do with myself.

  In the end, after a stay of only four days, having made one or two small purchases—simply, I suppose, to justify my journey—I determined to return to England.

  From the moment my plane touched down in London I felt somehow that I had been drawn back from France, and I considered this peculiar prescience proven when, upon arriving at my home, I found Titus Crow’s summons waiting for me. His letter had lain on a table in my study, placed there by my housekeeper, for two days; and yet, cryptic as that note was, its message lifted my spirit instantly from the constant gloom it had known for so many weeks, and sent me flying to Blowne House.

  It was midafternoon when I reached Crow’s sprawling bungalow retreat on the outskirts of the city, and when the leonine occultist opened his door to me I was frankly astonished at the alterations which had taken place in his countenance over the three months since last I had seen him. He was more than tired, that was plain, and his face was drawn and gray. Lines of concentration and worry had etched themselves deep in his high forehead; his broad shoulders were slumped atop his tall, usually energetic frame; his whole aspect betrayed the extensive and sleepless studies to which he must needs have lent himself, making his first words almost unnecessary:

  “De Marigny, you got my note! Thank goodness for that! If ever a second head was needed it’s now. I’ve just about knocked myself out with the thing, driven myself to distraction. A clear mind, a fresh approach—By God, it’s good to see you!”

  Crow ushered me inside, led the
way to his study, and there indicated that I should take a seat. Instead I simply stood gazing unbelievingly about the room. My host poured me a customary welcoming glass of brandy before flopping wearily into a chair behind his great desk.

  Now, I have said that I gazed unbelievingly about the study: well, let it be understood that Titus Crow’s study (incorporating as it does his magnificent occult library), while yet being the apple of his eye, is more than often not the scene of at least a minimal activity, when may friend involves himself within those strange spheres of research which are his specialty; and let it be further understood that I was quite used to seeing the place in less than completely tidy order—but never before had I seen anything like the apparent chaos which reigned in that room on this occasion!

  Maps, charts, and atlases lay open and in places overlapping, littering the floor wall to shelved wall, so that I had to step on certain of them to reach a chair; various files, many of them fastened open at marked or paper-clipped places, stood at one end of the cluttered desk and also upon a small occasional table; numbered newspaper cuttings were everywhere, many of them discolored and plainly faded with age, others very recent; a great notebook, its pages covered top to bottom with careless or hurried scrawlings, lay open at my feet, and rare and commonplace tomes alike on various obscure or little known semimythological, anthropological, and archaeological themes were stacked helter-skelter in one corner of the room at the foot of Crow’s great four-handed grandfather clock. The whole was a scene of total disorder, and one that whetted my curiosity to a point where my first astonished outburst sprang as naturally to my lips as might any commonplace inquiry in less bizarre surroundings:

  “Titus! What on earth … ? You look as though you haven’t had a wink of sleep in a week—and the state of this place!” Again I stared about the room, at the apparent disruption of all previous normalcy.

  “Oh, I’ve been getting my sleep, de Marigny,” Crow answered unconvincingly, “though admittedly not so much as ordinarily. No, this tiredness of mine is as much a mental as a physical fatigue, I fear. But for heaven’s sake, what a puzzle, and one that must be solved!” He swirled his brandy in its glass, the tired action belying his momentarily energetic and forceful mode of expression.

  “You know,” I said, satisfied for the moment to let Crow enlighten me in his own time and way, “I rather fancied someone could use a bit of help, even before I got your note, I mean. I don’t know what’s been going on, I haven’t the faintest inkling what this ‘puzzle’ of yours is, but do you know? Why, this is the first time in weeks that I’ve felt at all like tackling anything! I’ve been under some sort of black cloud, a peculiar mood of despair and strange ennui, and then along came your note.”

  Crow looked at me with his head on one side and ruefully smiled. “Oh? Then I’m sorry, de Marigny, for unless I’m very much mistaken your ‘peculiar mood of despair’ is due to repeat itself in very short order!” His smile disappeared almost immediately. “But this is nothing frivolous I’ve got myself into, Henri, no indeed.”

  His knuckles whitened as he gripped the arms of his tall chair and leaned forward over the desk. “De Marigny, if I’m correct in what I suspect, then at this very moment the world is faced with an unthinkable, an unbelievable horror. But I believe in it … and there were others before me who believed!”

  “Were others, Titus?” I caught something of the extra weight he had placed on the word. “Are you alone, then, in this belief of yours?”

  “Yes, at least I think I am. Those others I mentioned are … no more! I’ll try to explain.”

  My gaunt-looking friend sat back then and visibly relaxed. He closed his eyes for a second and I knew that he pondered the best way to tell his story. After a few moments, in a quiet and controlled tone of voice, he commenced:

  “De Marigny, I’m glad we’re two of a kind; I’m damned if I know whom I might confide in if we weren’t so close. There are others who share this love of ours, this fascination for forbidden things, to be sure, but none I know so well as you, and no one with whom I’ve shared experiences such as we have known and trembled at together. There’s been this thread between us ever since you first arrived in London as a boy, straight off the boat from America. Why! We’re even tied together by that clock there, once owned by your father.” He indicated the weird, four-handed, strangely ticking monstrosity in the corner. “Yes, it’s as well we’re two of a kind, for how could I explain to a stranger the fantastic things I must somehow explain? And even if I could do so without finding myself put away in a padded cell, who would give the thing credit? Even you, my friend, may find it beyond belief.”

  “Oh, come now, Titus,” I felt obliged to cut in. “You couldn’t wish for any more inexplicable a thing than that case of the Viking’s Stone you dragged me in on! And how about the Mirror of Nitocris, which I’ve told you of before? What a threat and a horror there! No, it’s unfair to doubt a man’s loyalty in these things before you’ve first tried it, my friend.”

  “I don’t doubt your loyalty, Henri—on the contrary—but even so, this thing I’ve come up against is … fantastic! There’s more than simply the occult involved—if the occult is involved at all—there’s myth and legend, dream and fancy, hideous fear and terrifying, well, survivals!”

  “Survivals?”

  “Yes, I think so; but you’ll have to let me tell it in my own way. No more interruptions, now. You can question me all you want when I’m done. Agreed?”

  I grudgingly nodded my head.

  “Survivals, I said, yes,” he then continued. “Residua of dark and nameless epochs and uncounted cycles of time and existence. Look here; you see this fossil?” He reached into a drawer in his desk and held up an ammonite from the beaches of the Northeast.

  “The living creature that this once was dwelt in a warm sea side by side with man’s earliest forebears. It was here even before the most antediluvian Adam walked, or crawled, on dry land! But millions of years before that, possibly a forebear of this very fossil itself, Muensteroceras, an early ammonite, existed in the seas of the lower Carboniferous. Now to get back to survivals. Muensteroceras had a more mobile and much more highly developed contemporary in those predawn oceans, a fish called Coelacanthus—and yet a live Coelacanth, its species thought to have been extinct since early Triassic times, was netted off Madagascar in 1938! Then again, though I don’t refer specifically to these sort of things, we have the Loch Ness monster and the alleged giant saurians of Lake Tasek Bera in Malaya—though why such creatures shouldn’t exist in a world capable of supporting the very real Komodo dragons is beyond me, even if they are thought by many to be pure myth—and even the Yeti and the West German Wald-Schrecken. And there are lesser, absolutely genuine forms, too, plenty of them, come down the ages unaltered by evolution to the present day.

  “Now, such as these, real and unreal, are what you might call ‘survivals,’ de Marigny, and yet Coelacanthus, ‘Nessie,’ and all the others are geologic infants in comparison with the things I envisage!”

  Here Crow made a pause, getting up to wearily cross the book-and paper-littered floor to pour me another drink, before returning to his desk and continuing his narrative:

  “I became aware of these survivals, initially at least, through the medium of dreams; and now I consider that these dreams of mine have been given substance. I’ve known for a good many years that I’m a highly psychic man; you are of course aware of this as you yourself have similar, though lesser, powers.” (This, from Titus Crow, a statement of high praise!) “It’s only recently, however, that I’ve come to recognize the fact that these waking ‘senses’ of mine are still at work—more efficiently, in fact—when I’m asleep. Now, de Marigny, unlike that long-vanished friend of your late fathers, Randolph Carter, I have never been a great dreamer; and usually my dreams, irregular as they are, are very vague, fragmentary, and the result of late meals and even later hours. Some, though, have been … different!

  “Well, althou
gh this recognition of the extension of my psychic powers even into dreams has come late, I do have a good memory, and fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately, depending on how it works out—my memory is supplemented by the fact that as long as I can remember I have faithfully recorded all the dreams I’ve known of any unusual or vivid content; don’t ask me why! Recording things is a trait of occultists, I’m told. But whatever the reason I seem to have written down almost everything of any importance that ever happened to me. And dreams have always fascinated me.” He waved his hand, indicating the cluttered floor.

  “Beneath some of those maps there, you’ll find books by Freud, Schrach, Jung, and half a dozen others. Now, the thing that has lately impressed me is this: that all my more outré dreams, over a period of some thirty years or more, have occurred simultaneous in time with more serious and far-reaching happenings in the waking world!

  “Let me give you a some examples.” He sorted out an old, slim diary from a dozen or so at one end of his desktop, opening it to a well-turned page.

  “In November and December, 1935, I had a recurrent nightmare centering about any number of hideous things. There were winged, faceless bat-things that carried me nightly over fantastic needle-tipped peaks on unending trips toward some strange dimension which I never quite reached. There were weird, ethereal chantings which I’ve since recognized in the Cthaat Aquadingen and which I believe to be part of the Necronomicon; terribly deadly stuff, de Marigny! There was a hellish place beyond an alien jungle, a great scabrous circle of rotting earth, in the center of which a … a Thing turned endlessly in a bilious green cloak, a cloak alive with a monstrous life all its own. There was madness, utter insanity in the very air! I still haven’t deciphered many of the coded sections in the Cthaat Aquadingen—and by God I don’t intend to!—but those chants I heard in my dreams are delineated there, and heaven only knows what they might have been designed to call up!”