Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath (11 page)

‘Protection?’ My brief interest was already on the wane, $o that when I flopped down again in my easy chair I was hardly bothered whether he answered me or not. ‘Really, you do make a fuss, old man!’ (I had never before in my life called Titus Crow ‘old man’; I probably, never will again.) I felt my eyes closing, listening to my own voice almost abstractedly as it rambled slowly, falteringly on:

‘Look. I’ve had a bad night, got up too early. I’m very tired - very tired . .

.’

‘Yes, that’s right, you have yourself a nap, Henri,’ he told me in a soothing voice. ‘I can manage what needs to be done on my own.’

‘Manage?’ I mumbled. ‘Something needs to be done?’

Peering through half closed lids I saw that Crow had already started - but what was he doing? His eyes were wide, blazing fanatically as he stood in the centre of my

room with his arms and hands held open and up in a typically sorcerous stance.

This time, however, Titus Crow was not conjuring anything, but rather putting something down - or at least, holding something back, if only temporarily.

I have since recognized the alien syllables he used then, in Feery’s Notes on the Necronomicon (I still have not read any other copy of the work, in any form), where they appear as follows:

Ya na kadishtu nilgh’ri stell’bsna Nyogtha, K’yarnak phlegethor l’ebumna syha’h n’ghft, Ya hai kadishtu ep r’luh-eeh Nyogtha eeh, S’uhn-ngh athg li’hee orr’e syha’h.

When he had done with the Vach-Viraj Incantation, for his fantastic utterances had consisted of nothing less, Crow proceeded to take from his pocket a small vial of clear liquid which he sparingly splashed about the room. Still splashing, he went out into the other rooms to continue this cryptic occupation until my entire house had been cleansed; I knew, of course, that my friend’s activities were exorcismal.

Nor were his thaumaturgies pointless or to no effect, for, already feeling more my old self, I knew that Crow had been right - I had been under the influence of Shudde-M’ell, his brothers or minions.

As soon as he reentered my study Crow saw that I was back to normal and grinned in a self-satisfied if nervous manner. By that time, shaken though I naturally was, I was already packing books and papers into a large case. My mazed mind, as if vacuum-cleaned, had been emptied of all enfeebling thoughts and ideas by my friend’s ‘White Magic’; or rather, by the ‘Science’ of the Elder Gods!

It took me only the matter of a further half hour or so to complete my packing (I made certain to include a

favourite fetish of mine, a rather old and ornate pistol, once the property of the witch-hunting Baron Kant), lock the house up, and accompany Titus out to his Mercedes with my cases. Moments later we were on our way.

We made three stops on our way out to Henley, the first of which was to allow us to get off hurried telegrams to Mother Quarry, McDonald, and Professor Peaslee, warning them in no uncertain manner to send off the parcel of eggs as soon as it arrived without first opening it, and hinting strongly of grave dangers should they delay even in the slightest. This of course had been made necessary by the death of Bentham; an explanation may be in order and I will give it later. The second stop was for lunch at Beaconsfield, where we found a friendly pub and sat out in a small sunny garden to enjoy cold beer with chicken sandwiches. The third call was at an adequate library in Marlow, where Crow was obliged to become a member in order to borrow a number of anthropological works supplementary to those we already had with us.

By 3:30 p.m. we were aboard Seafree, my four-berth houseboat, and getting ourselves settled in. Where I had her moored, at a spot some distance out of Henley itself, the Thames is quite deep and Crow seemed satisfied that we were safe there for the moment from any physical manifestations of the burrowers.

After we had made the place immediately livable and packed our stuff away, we were ab}e to sit down and talk seriously of the fresh developments. The drive down to Henley, apart from our stops, had in the main been quiet; Crow dislikes being distracted while driving, and I had had time to sort out fresh points to raise and questions to ask during the journey.

Now I could learn the hows and whys of my friend’s earlier obscure exorcismal activities on my behalf at my

house. Crow told me of the Black-Letter Text Necron-omicon - notably the Kester Library copy in Salem, Massachusetts - which contains the following passage, incomplete in Feery’s notes but known to Titus Crow of old: Men know him as the Dweller in Darkness, that brother of the Old Ones called Nyogha, the Thing that should not be. He can be summoned to Earth’s surface through certain secret caverns and fissures, and sorcerers have seen him in Syria and below the Black Tower of Leng; from the Thang Grotto of Tartary he has come ravening to bring terror and destruction among the pavilions of the great Khan. Only by the Looped Cross, by the Vach-Viraj Incantation and by the Tikkoun Elixir may he be driven back to the nighted caverns of hidden foulness where he dwelleth.

Thus, as a protection against this Nyogtha, I could well understand the use of the Vach-Viraj Incantation - but against the burrowers …? Crow explained that he had used the chant at my house because he believed all the Cthulhu Cycle Earth deities to be related, either physically or mentally, and that any charm having definite power against any one of them must be capable of at least some influence over the others. Indeed, the immediate effect of his -occult? - remedies had been to clear my place (not to mention my mind) of the influences exerted through dreams of Shudde-M’ell or his deputies; which was more really than Crow had expected. However, he also explained that he believed the chant and elixir to have no lasting strength, except against Nyogtha - who or whatever he may be! - but he has never explained to me just what further ‘protections’ there are about Blowne House. I suspect, though, that these are far superior to any signs, sigils, runes, or cantrips of which I am ever likely to become aware.

The next four days passed quickly at Henley, and were taken up mainly in making Seafree more livable and in long think-tank sessions between Crow and myself on our various problems. Had I not been around at that time to supply the obvious words of exoneration, I believe Crow might well have started to blame himself for Bentham’s death. I pointed out that knowing as little of the burrow-ers as we knew, which had been even less at the time Crow last wrote to the Northerner, his advice to Bentham in the matter had been expert. In fact, looking back on it, I was now surprised at the amount of time it had taken the Cthonians (the name Crow eventually settled on for the subterranean spawn) to seek Bentham out and deal with him! Harden is not all that far from Alston.

Crow had insisted, however, that there had been a direct parallel - one which he had missed in what, according to him, had been tantamount to criminal neglect.

He referred of course to Paul Wendy-Smith’s disappearance - that vanishment which we now knew must be laid at the door, or burrow, of the Cthonians -following that of his uncle, and which had occurred after the discovery of their cigar-murdered infants by the Cthonians. It was all too apparent now that one did not need to be in actual possession of those crystal spheres to attract adults of the species. Having been in possession - even in close contact - seemed reason enough to provoke hideous retaliation; which explained, naturally, Crow’s haste in getting himself out of Blowne House and both of us out of London in the first place! Too (I had realized immediately), this had been the elusive something flickering at the back of my mind that night before the Cthonians first ‘invaded’ me; by token of which I knew that, if blame existed at all, I must hold myself equally to blame alongside Crow.

The simple fact that Paul Wendy-Smith had never actually possessed the eggs, but the Cthonians

had nevertheless taken him, should have made itself apparent to both of us sooner.

And yet, even in my houseboat on the Thames, which Crow had at first proclaimed safe, over the last few days my erudite friend had grown ever the more nervous and far from happy regarding our continued well-being. The Cthonians could still find us, or so he seemed to believe, through dreams. In this, as in so many things, Crow proved to be absolutely correct.

Because of the possibility of our eventual discovery, we had early decided that our first task would be to see if we could find any positive counterspells (Crow referred to them as ‘devices’ - I preferred to think in the old ‘magic’ terms) against an attack. We could not, after all, remain on the houseboat indefinitely; in fact we had already taken to relaxing for an hour or so each evening in the bar of a pub not one hundred yards away down the river bank, well within sprinting distance of Seafree! In the furtherance of this project I had given over most of my time to correlating all the written knowledge at my disposal on the pentacle, the five-pointed Star of Power, whose design had been originated by the Great Elder Gods in the construction of their evil-imprisoning star-stones.

Now, to my mind it is not surprising that much is made of the pentacle or pentagram in so-called ‘cabalistic’ works - the paperback junk which clutters so many modern bookstalls, supposedly culled from the great forbidden books -but quite apart from such references I found many disturbing tangential allusions in fairly contemporary verse, in literature, even in art.

Admittedly, such works as contained these oblique or obscure references were generally by persons deeply attracted to things mysterious or macabre -mystics, mages, and usually (broadly speaking) persons gifted with rare imaginations and paradoxically outre insight - but nevertheless the

‘pentacle theme’ seemed, at one time or another, to have captured the imaginations of an inordinately large number of these artistic people.

Gerhardt Schrach, the Westphalian philosopher, has said: ‘It fascinates me …

that such a perfect figure can be drawn with only five straight lines …

five triangles, joined at their bases, where they form a pentagon …

perfectly pentameral … powerful … and fascinating!’ It was Schrach, too, in his Thinkers Ancient and Modern, who pointed out for me the Hittite practice of spreading the fingers of one hand before the face of an enemy or evil person and saying: ‘The Star upon thee, Dark One!’

- which was recognized as a certain protection against the evil intentions of any person so confronted.

Other than Schrach and many other contemporary writers and philosophers, there were also a number of painters whose works, I knew, had from time to time featured the star motif: noticeably Chandler Davies in many of his designs for Grotesque before that magazine folded; particularly his full-page black and white ‘Stars and Faces’, so strangely disturbing and horrific that it was now in itself a valuable collector’s item. William Blake too, the painter, poet, and mystic, had not neglected the theme, and had used it strikingly in his

‘Portrait of a Flea’

- in which the central horror is actually prisoned by five-pointed stars! And while I knew the point could be argued, still, remembering Blake’s stars, I found them disturbingly akin to my own mental picture of the star-stones of ancient Mnar.

On the other hand, in Edmund Pickman Derby’s book of nightmare lyrics, Azathoth and Other Horrors, there was one clearly blatant reference to the five-pointed star as a weapon against ‘Greater Gods by far’, whatever gods he alluded to; and such were the other many references to be discovered that I soon found myself interested in

my task almost beyond the present requirement.

It was on the fourth night, while I was making notes of this sort and trying to find in them some sort of order or clue, that Titus dozed off. He had been working hard all that day - not physical work but intense mental concentration

- and had actually fallen asleep over his copy of the Cthaat Aquadingen. I noticed the fact and smiled. It was good that he should get some rest: I was already fatigued myself, both physically and mentally, and Crow had been familiar with the problem far longer than I.

Shortly before midnight I too must have dozed off, for the first thing I knew was that someone was shouting.

It was Crow.

I came awake immediately from monstrous dreams (mercifully unremembered considering what was soon to come), to find my friend still asleep but locked in the throes of nightmare.

He was sitting in his chair, his head forward on his folded arms where they rested on the open Cthaat Aquad-ingen atop the small table at which he had been working. His whole body was jerking and twitching spasmodically and he was shouting snatches of incomprehensible occult jargon. I hastened from my chair to waken him.

‘Eh? What?’ he gasped as I shook him. ‘Look out, de Marigny - they’re here!’

He jumped to his feet, shaking visibly, cold sweat glistening upon his face.

‘They … they’re … here?’

He sat down again, still trembling, and poured himself a glass of brandy. ‘My God! What a nightmare, Henri! They’ve managed to get through to me this time, all right - picked my brains clean, I imagine. They’ll know where we are now, for sure.’

‘The Cthonians? It was … them?’ I breathlessly asked.

‘Oh, yes! Definitely. And they made no pretext, didn’t bother to hide their identity. I had the impression they

were trying to tell me something - attempting to, well, bargain with me. Hah!

That would be like making a pact with all the devils of hell! And yet there were tones of desperation, too, in the messages I received. Damned if I know what they could be frightened of. I simply had the feeling that we’re not alone in all this, that reinforcements are being rushed up to the front, as it were! Damned peculiar.’

‘I don’t follow you, Titus,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘You’re being a bit vague, you know.’

‘Then I’d best tell you all my dream contained, Henri, and then we’ll see what you make of it,’ he replied.

‘First off, there were no pictures, no visual hallucinations - which, it could be argued, are what dreams are really made of - but merely … impressions!