Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath (21 page)

… And all earthy life, it is told, shall go back at last through the great cycle of time to Ubbo-sathla …

It took a fortnight to clear up the mess, physical and administrational, and to cover our tracks - not to mention another week of fast talking in high places by Peaslee and other senior American members - before the operations of the Wilmarth Foundation in the British Isles could continue. In the end, though, the long-laid plans went ahead.

12 Familiarity Breeds

(From de Marigny’s Notebooks)

On this occasion, some weeks gone, Crow and I were travelling in the Mercedes down from the Northwest. A few days earlier, in the Scottish Southern Uplands, the Wilmarth Foundation had forced a Cthonian - one of the last of the static or prisoned forms ‘indigenous’ to Great Britain and her waters - from its burrow deep beneath a mountain cleft. The being, a small one of its kind, had then been hosed down (literally hosed down to nothing!) with powerful jets of water. This had been at a place central in the Uplands; a sparse, very underpopulated area between Lanark and Dumfriesshire. The sight of the creature’s violent thrashing as it melted beneath the sustained jets of lethal water, until finally it lay inert, a pool of awful, semiorganic putrescence bubbling off in vile evaporation, was one which had seared itself upon the retina of my very being. I was in fact still seeing the awful thing in my mind’s eye as Crow drove the car south away from the scene of the ‘kill’.

Following this latest offensive, Peaslee had flown from Glasgow to London to meet friends and colleagues coming in from America. These Americans were bringing freshly devised seismological equipment with which they hoped to follow the tracks of Shudde-M’ell’s mobile Cthonian ‘hordes’ if the remainder of that species in Britain should make a dash for it, as certain of the Foundation’s telepaths seemed to suspect they might. Of late the latter subterrene group, nests and individual members alike, had apparently developed a means of shielding their minds (and therefore their presence or whereabouts) from all but the most powerful of the telepaths. Crow’s limited telepathic power, following the horror of the moor, had seemed to leave him.

He was, though, he had assured me privately, otherwise as ‘physically aware’

as ever.

It was about noon. We were, I remember, passing through a lonely region some miles to the east of Penrith. For quite some time Titus Crow had driven in what I had taken to be silent thoughtfulness. At the very edge of my consciousness, I had been taking in something of the terrain through which the big car passed. Automatically, as is sometimes its wont, my mind had partly separated its attentions - between monstrous memories of the dissolving horror in the hills and, as I have said, the country through which we passed - when suddenly, for no apparent reason, I found myself filled with an as yet obscure inner concern.

The area was bleak. A steep and rocky hillside tilted jaggedly to the right of the road, fell abruptly away to the left. The road itself was narrow and poorly surfaced, faintly misted in front and behind, and the mist was thickening as it rolled down off the hills marching away southward.

I had just noticed the peculiarly ominous aspect of the place when it dawned on me that I had a headache, something I had not known for months, since first Peaslee joined us from America. The recognition of this fact came hand in hand with the abrupt, shocking memory of the professor’s warning: ‘Always remember

- they never stop trying! You must carry these things wherever you go from now on, but even so you must try not to venture anywhere below the surrounding ground-level. I mean that you’re to keep out of valleys, gullies, quarries, mines, subways, and so on. They can get at you indirectly - a sudden earthquake, a fall of rock …’

‘Titus!’ I gasped out loud. ‘Titus, where the hell are you going? We’re not on the route we intended to take. We ought to have turned across country miles back, following the A-Sixty-Nine to the Northeast coast as we planned!’ I gazed fearfully out of my window at the steep declivity falling away, and on the other side of the car, the now almost vertical wall of rock reaching up into misty heights.

Crow had jumped nervously as I commenced my outburst, and now he applied the brakes and brought the car to a halt. He shook his head, dazedly rubbing at his eyes. ‘Of course we should have followed the A-Sixty-Nine,’ he eventually agreed, frowning in concern. Then: ‘What on earth … ?’ His eyes lit feverishly, strange understanding, horrible recognition showing in them.

‘De Marigny - I think I understand why the Foundation has recently been plagued with an inordinately high percentage of freak “accidents”, suicides, and deaths. I think I understand, and I think that we’re the next on the list!’

No sooner had he spoken when, with a suddenness that caused the hair of my head to stand up straight and the shorter hairs of my neck to bristle and prickle, the ground beneath our stationary vehicle trembled; the rumble was audible even over the noise of the idling engine!

The next instant, I admit it, I screamed aloud; but Crow was already in action, releasing the handbrake, revving the engine, throwing the car into reverse gear. Nor were his instantaneous reactions any too soon. Even as the car lurched backwards on spinning wheels a great boulder, followed by smaller rocks, pebbles, and tons of earth, smashed down from above on to the road where the Mercedes had been but a moment earlier. At the same time, too, we heard (with our minds if not actually

with our ears) the morbid, alien dronings of an all too recognizable chant: Ce’haiie ep-ngh fl’hur G’harne fhtagn, Ce’haiie fhtagn ngh Shudde-M’ell.

‘Nowhere to turn,’ Crow gasped, still reversing, ‘but if I can back her up far enough -‘

Shattering his hopes and the unspoken prayers of both of us, the mist, as if answering some hellish call (which I can readily believe it was), fell in opaque and undulating density all about us.

‘My God!’ I gasped, as again Crow brought the car to a halt.

‘Can’t see a thing,’ my friend shouted, his face grey now as the surrounding wall of ghostly gloom without. ‘You’ll have to get out, de Marigny, and quickly! The windows have misted over completely. Put your hand in the centre of the rear window, and walk down the middle of the road until you find a spot where I can turn the car around. Can you do it?’

‘I’ll damned well try,’ I croaked, my mouth dry with nameless fear.

‘You’ll need do more than try,’ he grimly told me as I opened the door. ‘If not… we’re done for!’

I slammed the door behind me, ran around to the back of the car, and pressed my right palm to the damp glass of the rear window. The engine roared and Crow’s shout came to me from his open window: ‘Good, Henri - now walk up the road, or better still sit on the boot, and guide me by moving your hand left or right as the road bends. Good, that’s it, we’re off!’

I continued as I had been instructed, sitting on the boot and moving my hand behind me over the glass of the window, directing Crow as he reversed the big car care-fully along the mist-shrouded, narrow road. On three or four separate occasions rocks tumbled down from above, dislodged from the unseen heights by continued subterranean tremblings; and all the while I could sense, at the back of my mind, Their awful, droning chanting!

After what seemed like several ages the mist seemed to lift a little, the road widened, and there appeared a shallow, weed-choked reentry in the cliff-face just wide enough to accommodate the car. With a warning cry to Crow, I slid from the boot, ran around to the front, and directed him as he began to swing the rear end of the Mercedes off the road and into the cleft.

At this point I came very close to disaster. For suddenly, without any sort of warning, there came a low rumble from deep in the ground and the whole section of road where I stood jerked and shook violently. I was pitched backwards, off balance, over the edge of the road and head-over-heels down the steep decline beyond. Fortunately I did not fall far, no more than twelve feet or so, but I landed jarringly on my shoulder. Dazedly I struggled to my feet. I was on a wide natural ledge, beyond which the ground fell away and down to the unseen valley below. Again the mist had thickened and now there was a perceptible and rapidly increasing aura of dread and hideous expectancy in the damp air.

‘Crow!’ I yelled, trying vainly to scramble up the steep incline to the road.

‘Titus, where are you?’

The next instant I was faced with something so monstrously terrifying that for a moment I thought my heart must stop. To my left, at a distance of no more than fifteen feet, the very limit of my vision in the mist, the face of the pebbly incline burst outward in a shower of stones and earth - and then -

- Horror!

I backed away, unashamedly babbling, screaming Crow’s name repeatedly as the - Thing - came after me. It was octopoid, this dweller in the earth … flowing tentacles and a pulpy grey-black, elongated sack of a body … rubbery … exuding a vilely stinking whitish slime . .

. eyeless … headless, too … Indeed, I could see no distinguishing features at all other than the reaching, groping tentacles. Or was there -yes! - a lump in the upper body of the thing … a container of sorts for the brain, or ganglia, or whichever diseased organ governed this horror’s loathsome life!

But it was closer, this spawn of Shudde-M’ell, it was almost upon me! I felt somehow rooted to the spot - fixed immobile, as if my feet were stuck in mental molasses, a fly in the ointment of the Cthonian group-mind - hearing the dreadful droning chant, my eyes wide open and popping and my mouth slack, my hair standing straight up on my head … My star-stone!

Automatically, through all the shattering terror of my fear, I found myself reaching for that talisman of the Elder Gods - but my jacket, with the star-stone safe in the inside pocket, was still in the Mercedes where I had left it. I was conscious of the ground beneath the pulpy horror before me flowing like water, flowing and steaming in the heat that the hellish Cthonian generated, and of those areas of the creature’s body that touched the ground glowing and changing colour constantly. My God! It was upon me! Tentacles reached …

‘De Marigny!’ It was Crow’s voice, and even as I heard his cry through the hypnotic chanting and the high-pitched screaming (which I hardly recognized as my own), even as his shout came to me, a star-stone - my own or Crow’s, I didn’t care - fell from above directly in the path of the looming star-spawn .

. . The effect was immediate and definite. The huge, alien slug of a being before me reared back and almost toppled from the ledge; the mind-chants turned instantaneously to mental mewlings and gibberings with overtones of the utmost fear, and with incredible agility the thing finally turned in its slimy tracks to slither and flop away from me along the ledge.

At what it must have taken to be a safe distance, with its tentacles whipping in a fearsome rage, the Cthonian turned in towards the cliff-face and moved forward, passing into the wall of earth and rock. For a few moments liquid earth and stone flowed like water from the hole the being left, then that part of the steep incline collapsed and I was left with only the abominable smell of the thing.

It was then I realized that I was still down on my knees with my hands held out before me; I had frozen in that position when it seemed certain that the Cthonian must take me. At the same time, too, I heard Crow’s voice again, calling me from above. I glanced up. My friend was flat on the road, his face white and staring, his arms outstretched with my jacket dangling from his hands.

‘Quickly, Henri, for God’s sake! Quickly, before they have time to reorganize!’

I got to my feet, snatched up the precious star-stone, and put it in my trouser pocket, then caught hold of the dangling jacket and scrambled frantically, with Crow’s assistance, to the tarmac surface of the road above.

I saw that Crow had managed to get the car turned about, and breathed a sigh of relief as I slipped into the front passenger seat.

The ground trembled again as Titus put the car into gear, but a second later we were away, tyres screaming and lights cutting the curtain of mist like a knife. ‘A close one, de Marigny,’ my friend offered.

‘Close! By God - I never want it any closer!’ I told him.

Half a mile later there was no trace of the mist, and wherever it had gone my headache had gone with it. Once more under control, I asked Crow what he had meant earlier when he mentioned the Foundation’s recent plague of accidents, suicides, and deaths

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Well, you remember how of late our telepaths have been having difficulty contacting the Cthonians; I think I can guess what those monsters have been up to. It dawned on me back there when first we realized something was wrong. I think that the burrowers have been concentrating their powers, massing their minds, overcoming the protective powers of the star-stones to a degree and getting through to Foundation members - just as today they got through to us. They’ve been dealing with us one at a time, which would explain our recent losses. It’s no coincidence, de Marigny, that those losses have been such as defy any sort of accounting, and it’s this new ability of theirs to get through to us that’s deadened the Foundation’s awareness of what’s been going on! The sooner we let Peaslee and the others know, the better.’ He put his foot down on the accelerator and the car sped us safely on our way.

13 The Very Worm That Gnaws

(From de Marigny’s Diary)

8th Oct.

The threat posed by the Cthonian ability to get at us in mass mental-sendings is at an end; a special delivery of a great number of star-stones from the United States has seen to that. Also (and as our telepaths have suspected for some time), the remaining Cthonians are attempting a sort of exodus back to Africa; indeed, they have already commenced the move. It was a nest of them, on their way down- and across-country to the coast, that waylaid Crow and me in that hill pass. They had obviously massed their minds against the two of us

- perhaps helped by others of their shuddersome species, possibly even Shudde-M’ell himself, wherever he might be - and unbeknown to us, having overcome the shielding powers of our star-stones, they had thus learned of our plans to drive south to Dover. After that, it had only remained for them to make a special mental effort to lead us away from the route we had intended to take, and then intercept and ambush our car at a favourable spot. We had been meant to die in that initial avalanche of dislodged earth and boulders. The plan had gone astray and they had been forced to try other methods. Overcoming the power of the star-stones in a direct confrontation, however, had proved a far different kettle of fish to doing it en masse and at a distance; and there they failed, when, as it has been seen, the sigil of the Elder Gods had the final say. They had doubtless been members of the same nest (the barest nucleus of a nest, thank God, and comparatively young ones at that) that Williams the telepath reported when