Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath (13 page)

I pictured the image his words conjured in my mind -then snapped my fingers.

‘Why! A symbol with five extremities, a crude representation of the Elder Sign, the prisoning star of the Cthulhu Cycle of myth!’

‘Indeed, and the looped Tau Cross in Olden Khem was also a symbol of power -and a great symbol of generation! It was the Ankh, Henri! The very word means

“soul” or “life” - a protection of life and soul. Oh, yes, I should certainly believe that the Crux Ansata has power.’ He grinned wanly, i rather think, though, from your ques-tion, that your powers of observation can’t be all that they used to be.’ ‘Eh? How do you mean?’ I asked suspiciously, a trifle daunted.

‘Why, if you look, you’ll see!’ he replied. ‘On our first day here I nailed a tiny silver Crux Ansata to the door!’

For a moment, despite our situation and the seriousness of our conversation, I believed Crow was having me on. I had noticed no such thing. I got up quickly and crossed to the cabin door, opening it to peer at its contours in the glow of the deck- and cabin-lights. Sure enough, Crow’s Looped Cross was there, at the very top of the door.

I had just turned back into the cabin, an exclamation of admiration on my lips, when the smell hit me. I say ‘hit’ me, and in all truth the cliche is quite void of exaggeration, for a positively vile stench was issuing from somewhere behind me on the midnight-black bank of the river. There came footfalls …

Crow must have smelled it, too, and perhaps he heard the soft sounds from the quiet river bank. I saw him out of the corner of my eye as he jerked to his feet, his face pale in the flaring light, and then I concentrated on the darkness outside. I crouched there in the door, peering with bulging, fearful eyes into the shadows beyond the

railed gangway.

Something moved there, a shape; and a low, clotted cough sounded - which was followed by a guttural, barely

human voice!

‘Ah, I see you’re not … glug … expecting me, my friend! Didn’t you get my message, then?’

I fell back as this reeking, awfully shadowed figure swayed up the gangplank.

‘Please turn down the light, sir,’ the clotted voice continued, ‘and for God’s sake … glug … have no fear of me. All will be explained.’

‘Who - ?’ I gulped, my voice barely audible. ‘What - ?’

‘Sir Amery Wendy-Smith - or at least his mind - at your service, sir. And would you be Titus Crow, or are you … glug … Henri-Laurent de Marigny?’

I fell back even more as the man-shaped, stinking black shadow stepped slowly closer; and then Crow’s arm swept me aside and back into the cabin as he took my place at the door. In his hand he held my pistol, which had once belonged to Baron Kant.

‘Stop right there!’ he called out harshly, brokenly, to the black figure, now more than halfway up the gangplank. ‘You can’t be Wendy-Smith - he’s dead!’

‘My body, sir - the body I used to have - is dead, yes … glug … but my mind lives on; at least for a little while longer! I sense that you are Titus Crow. Now, please turn down the deck-light … glug … and the lamp in the cabin, and let me talk to you.’

‘This gun,’ Crow countered, his voice shaking, ‘fires silver bullets. I don’t know what you are, but I believe I can destroy you!’

‘My dear … glug … sir, I have prayed for destruction!’ The figure took another lurching step forward. ‘But before you … glug … attempt to grant me any such merciful release, at least let me tell you what I was sent to tell - let me deliver Their warning! And in any case, neither your gun, nor the Crux Ansata there on the door, not even your elixirs or … glug …

chants can immobilize this body. It is the stuff of which Cthulhu himself is made, or very close to it! Now …’ The clotted, almost slopping voice grew more articulate, speeding up in some sort of hideous hysteria: ‘For God’s sake, will you let me deliver the message I was sent to deliver?’

‘Crow,’ I nervously blurted, my hand trembling on his shoulder, ‘what is it?

What in hell is it?’

Instead of answering me, he leaned out of the door to turn down the wick of the lamp we had hung near the head of the gangplank. He left the very smallest flame glowing there in the dark. The shadow became an inky namelessness swaying almost rhythmically on the gangplank. ‘Titus!’ I gasped, almost rigid with dread. ‘By all that’s holy - are you trying to get us Trilled?’

‘Not a bit of it, Henri,’ he whispered, his shaky voice belying its message,

‘but I want to hear what this - thing - has to say. Do as you’re bid. Turn down the lamp!’

‘What?’ I backed away from his figure framed in the doorway, almost willing to believe that the strain of the last few days had been too much for him.

‘Please!’ the guttural voice of the vile-smelling thing on the gangplank came again as its owner took another lurching step forward. ‘Please, there is little enough time as it is. They won’t let … glug … this body hold together much longer!’

At that Crow turned, thrusting me aside and hurrying to the paraffin-lamp to dim its hissing glare. This done, he placed a chair near the door and stepped back as the stars in the night sky were blotted out by the bulk of the nameless speaker when it appeared in the doorway. Stumblingly it half sat, half fell into the chair. There was a quite audible squelching sound as its contours moulded to the wooden frame.

By this time I had backed up to the bunks. Crow had perched himself on the small desk, feet firmly on the floor. He looked very brave in the dim, flickering light, but I preferred to believe he sat there because his legs were no longer capable of holding him up! Not a bad idea. I sat down abruptly on a lower bunk.

‘Here,’ my friend whispered, ‘you’d better have this if you’re so nervous. But don’t use it - not unless you have to!’ He tossed Kant’s pistol over to me.

‘Please listen.’ The nodding blackness on the chair spoke again, its stench wafting all about the cabin in thick gusts, blown by the warm breeze from the open door. ‘I have been sent by Them, by the horrors beneath, to deliver a message … glug … and to let you see what hell is like! They have sent me to - ‘

‘Do you mean Shudde-M’ell?’ Crow cut in, his voice a trifle stronger.

‘Indeed.’ The horror nodded. ‘At least, by his brothers, his children.’

‘What are you?’ I found myself asking, hypnotized. ‘You’re not a … man!’

‘I was a man.’ The shape in the chair seemed to sob, its lumpy outline moving in the flickering shadows. ‘I was Sir Amery Wendy-Smith. Now I am only his mind, his brain. But you must listenl It is only Their power that holds me together - and even They … glug … cannot keep this shape solid much longer!’

‘Go on,’ Crow said quietly, and I was astonished to discover a strange -compassion? - in his voice.

“This, then, is Their message. I am Their messenger and I bear witness to the truth of what They have to say. It is this: If you leave well enough alone, as of now, They will let you go in peace. They will bother you no more, neither in dreams nor in your waking moments. They will lift all … enchantments . .

. glug … from your minds. If you persist - then in the end They will take you, and will do with you what They have done with me!’

‘And what was that?’ I asked in awed tones, still trembling violently, peering at the horror in the chair.

For while the voice of - Wendy-Smith? - had been speaking, I had allowed myself the luxury of simultaneous concentration, taking in all that was said but thinking equally clearly on other matters, and now I found myself straining to see the thing in the chair more clearly.

It looked as though our visitor was clad in a large black overcoat, turned up about his neck, and it looked, too, as if he must have something covering his head - which perhaps accounted for the clotted, distorted quality of his voice

- for I had caught not a glimpse of any whiteness to suggest a face there atop the oddly lumpy body. My mind, I discovered, allowed freely to ponder other things, had trembled on the verge of a mental chasm; the mad observations of Abdul Alhazred in his Necronomicon as reported by Joachim Feery: ‘… Till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of Earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it…’ I hastily brought my wandering mind back under

control.

The thing in the chair - which had allegedly been a man - was answering my question, telling what it was that the Cthonians had done to him, what they would do to Crow and me if we refused to do as they ordered.

‘They … glug …’ the clotted voice gobbled, ‘They destroyed my body -but kept my brain alive! They housed my mind in a living envelope of Their manufacture; a shapeless, immobile mass of filth; but with veins and …

glug … capillaries, and a heart of sorts - with all the machinery needed to keep a human mind alive! Don’t ask me how They … glug-glug … did it. But They’ve had practice, over the centuries.’

‘Go on,’ Crow prompted when the horror that housed Wendy-Smith’s mind paused.

‘Why did they keep your

brain alive?’

‘So that They could … glug … milk it, drain off its knowledge bit by bit. I was known as a learned man, gentlemen. I… glug-glug … had knowledge of all sorts of things. Knowledge which They wanted. And my knowledge was immediately to hand. They didn’t have to … glug … employ dreams to get what They wanted.’

‘Knowledge?’ I prompted, steadier now. ‘What sort of knowledge? What did they want to know?’

‘… Glug … locations. The locations of mines -especially inoperative mines - like those at Harden and Greetham. Drilling operations, like the Yorkshire Moors Project and the North-Sea search for gas and oil. Details of city and town populations … glug … of scientific progress in atomics, and - ‘

‘Atomics?’ Crow again cut in. ‘Why atomics? And another thing - Harden has only become inoperative since your … transition. And in your day there was no North-Sea search in progress; nor was there a Yorkshire Moors Project.

You’re lying!’

‘No, no … glug … I mention these things because they are the modern counterparts of details They wanted at that time. I have only learned of these later developments through Their minds. They are in constant contact. Even now

…’

‘And atomics?’ Crow repeated, apparently satisfied for the moment with the initial answer.

‘I can’t answer that. I only … glug … know what They are interested in, not why. Over the years They have drained it all from my mind. All I know, everything. Now I have nothing … glug … that They are interested in

… glug … and this is the end. I thank God!’ The horror in the chair paused. Its swaying and nodding became wilder in the flickering light.

‘Now I must be … going.’

‘Going? But where?’ I babbled. ‘Back to - Them?’

‘No … glug, glug, glug … not back to Them. That is all … glug …

over. I feel it. And They are angry. I have said too much. A few minutes more and I’ll be … glug … free!’ The pitiful horror climbed slowly to its feet, sloping somehow to one side, stumbling and barely managing to keep its balance.

Titus Crow, too, started to his feet. ‘Wait, you can help us! You must know what they fear. We need to know. We need weapons against them!’

‘Glug, glug, glug - no time - They have released Their control over this …

glug … body! The protoplasm is

. . . glug, glug, ggglug … falling apart! I’m sorry, Crow

. . . gluggg, aghhh … I’m sorry.’

Now the thing was collapsing in upon itself and waves of monstrous, venomous fetor were issuing from it. It was swaying from side to side and stumbling to and fro, visibly spreading at its base and thinning at its top, melting like an icicle beneath the blast of a blowtorch.

‘Atomics, yes! Glugggg, urghhh, achhh-achhh! You may be … gluggg …

right! Ludwig Prinn, on … gluggg-ughhh … on Azathoth!’

The stench was now intolerable. Fumes of black vapour were actually pouring from the staggering, melting figure by the open door. I followed Crow’s lead, hastily cramming a handkerchief to my nose and mouth. The horror’s last words

- a gurgled shriek - before it collapsed in upon itself and sloped across the planking of the floor, were these:

‘Yes, Crow … glarghhh, arghhh, urghhh … look to Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis!’

In a matter of seconds then, there was merely a spreading stain on the floor -but, God help me, within the pattern of that stain was a hideously suggestive lump!

A human brain in an alien, protoplasmic body!

I was paralysed, I don’t mind admitting it, but Crow had leaped into action.

Already the paraffin-lamp was back to full power, filling the cabin with light, and suddenly my friend’s commands were echoing in my ears:

‘Out, de Marigny. Out on to the gangplank. The stench is positively poisonous!’ He half pushed me, half dragged me out through the door and into the clean night air. I sat

down on the gangplank and was sick, horribly sick, into the obscenely chuckling river.

Crow, though, however affected he was or had been by the occurrences of the last half hour, had quickly regained control of himself. I heard the latticed cabin windows being thrown open, heard Crow’s strangled coughing as he moved about in the noisome interior, heard his footsteps and laboured breathing as he came out on deck and crossed to the other side to fling something -something which splashed loudly - into the flowing river.

Too, as my sickness abated, I heard him drawing water and the sounds of his swilling down the cabin floor. I thanked my lucky stars I had not, as had once been my intention, had the cabin carpeted! A fresh breeze had sprung up to assist greatly in removing from the Seafree the poisonous taint of our visitor, and by the time I was able to get back on my feet it was plain that the houseboat would soon be back to normal.

It was then, just before midnight, as Crow came back on deck in his shirt sleeves, that a taxi pulled up on the river path level with the gangplank.

Crow and I watched as the passenger alighted with a large briefcase and as, in the glow from the rear lights, a suitcase was taken from the boot. Plainly I heard the newcomer’s voice as he paid his fare:

‘I thank you very much. They’re in, I see, so there’ll be no need to wait.’