Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath (22 page)

first he quartered Scotland from his plane; the nest that subsequently seemed to disappear into thin air - or earth, as the case is. We have two telepaths tracking them even now as they burrow in the deep earth.

10th Oct.

Peaslee caught a man last night trying to break into his hotel room in London, where he has set up his HQ. He threatened the intruder with a pistol, whereupon the fellow started to froth at the mouth and threw himself over the balcony rail. Peaslee’s quarters are on the fifth floor! The professor escaped involvement in the subsequent police investigations.

11th Oct.

Jordan has quickly set up his wells in the now familiar pattern at a spot not far out of Nottingham. He hopes to catch the nest of nightmares Crow and I had dealings with in the hills up north. We are lucky in that the site is an old extensive army barracks complex - ‘Government Property’ - and that the whole area for half a mile around is Out-of-Bounds to the general public, as it is being demolished. The place is scheduled for redevelopment; possibly the construction of a power-station. I have a feeling it’s just as well the place is coming down -particularly if what has happened at some of the other star-well sites should happen there.

13th Oct.

Regarding the exodus of the Cthonians: the British Isles are obviously too restricting for the horrors. What with Peaslee and the Wilmarth Foundation -why, the beings are no less prisoned now than were their prime forebears millennia ago in Dead G’harne; for here they are being slowly but surely tracked down and destroyed! If those of

them that remain - damn few now - can make it back to Africa they stand a good chance of losing themselves completely in that vast continent, later to begin the insidious threat elsewhere. Many of them have already made the crossing beneath the Channel, but that hardly means that they’ve escaped. The Frenchies are doing their bit. The Foundation has men in France, and Peaslee has very big friends in power over there. He gets a lot of confidential letters with the Bibliotheque Nationale

postmark.

There are still a number of the burrowers here in England, though, and during the last few days there have been tremors and minor subsidences all down the country, converging into three definite tracks towards Tenterden. Looking back I see that it was a week ago, on the sixth, that the Foundation trapped and exterminated no less than a dozen of the horrors on Salisbury Plain; and already, of the prisoned, ‘harmless’ species, these islands have just about been cleansed.

16th Oct.

The last few weeks have seen a number of arrests by Foundation members of so-called ‘suspicious persons’. Usually these arrests have been made in areas directly occupied by the members concerned, often on actual star-well sites or in other planned locations. There was that one Peaslee got on the tenth, and two others were picked up in the barracks complex in Notts. Invariably persons thus arrested try to escape, but just as surely if they fail or if they are caught a second time they become instantly bereft of mind and will: the burrowers beneath have no time for failures! For these people are of course under the influence of the CCD - unsound men and women, usually of frail bodies and even frailer minds - but these last few days the numbers of such incidents have seen a sharp decline.

20th Oct.

The insidious, crawling inundation of the British Isles by Shudde-M’ell’s kin is at an end. Jordan’s wells in their Nottinghamshire locations are being dismantled. That last nest must have got wind of our plans. It made no difference, however, and the end result was the same. They were picked up by a telepath as they made a panic-dash out from Bridlington under the North-Sea.

They could hardly have chosen a worse route from their own point of view.

There is a deep rift, a fault in the submarine strata, fifteen miles out from Bridlington. Our guess was that the horrors would not be too deep in the rocks when they passed beneath the fault. With the Royal Navy’s assistance -ostensibly the command ship and its two submarine subordinates were on

‘manoeuvres’ - the place was quickly rigged with very powerful depth-charges; on this occasion there was no trouble from the Deep Ones in any form. At 3:30

this morning, on the instructions of Hank Silberhutte (one of the best of the American telepaths), the bombs were set off by radio signal from a fishing vessel out of Hull. Silberhutte reports complete success! The Admiralty, as a cover against any leakage of the facts, will put out a press item tomorrow on the supposed discovery of a sunken German World War II warship and the destruction of its huge and dangerously explosive cargo by depth-charge. It would appear that the arms of the Wilmarth Foundation continue to be far-reaching!

23rd Oct.

So far as is known not a single member of any of the diverse Cthonian species remains as a potential horror

within Great Britain or her territorial waters. They have all been either destroyed or chased out. From the beginning there have been confusion reports from a number of our telepaths on impressions they seemed to be getting from a certain area deep beneath the Yorkshire Moors; but these ‘reflections’, as the telepaths term such false impressions, have now been discounted. Certainly there is nothing down there of the Cthonians as we have come to know them.

Here, however, a note of unique interest - ‘Nessie’ is a plesiosaur! Scotland has the world’s last prehistoric monsters; five of them in fact, two adults and three young ones. A final telepathic check of the entire landmass, from John o’Groats to Land’s End, brought this information to light. Nothing malignant in Loch Ness, on the contrary, but nevertheless the telepaths did pick up the weak, placidly watery thoughts of Earth’s last dinosaurs. God!

What wouldn’t I give to be able to break the news to the press … ?

28th Oct.

Vive la France! I’m proud to be called de Marigny! Three underground atomic tests in the Algerian Desert in the last twenty-four hours! A few more of the damned horrors that won’t be making it home.

30th Nov.

Word has just come in from Peaslee, now back at Miska-tonic, that those phases of the American Project which were carried out simultaneous with certain of the major operations in Great Britain were more than moderately successful. It must be admitted, though, that in the United States and South America the task is far greater and the horrors apparently far more diverse and not confined alone to subterranean planes of existence. Certain wooded and mountainous regions (chiefly the Catskills, the Adirondacks, and the Rockies), the Great Lakes and other, more remote or obscure stretches of water; vast areas in and about New England, Wisconsin, Vermont, Oklahoma, and the Gulf of Mexico; and a dozen other places along the Andes in South America (there’ll be trouble there), are all scheduled for the most minute mental and physical investigation and eventual ‘pest control’, to put it in the professor’s own words.

And yet Peaslee’s report is encouraging, for it appears that the incidence of free, mobile agencies is less in proportion to what it was here in England.

The Americas do have a big problem, though, in the numbers of humans (and in some cases, particularly in New England, semi-humans) ‘in Their employ!’

Again, as in 1928, special agents are infiltrating certain of the backwater seaports on the New England coast.

6th Dec.

Cthulhu strikes back! Angered beyond endurance (Peas-lee has it), Cthulhu has finally lashed out, proving once and for all his definite continued existence and potency here and now on Earth. How the Foundation and its many worldwide departments have managed to cover it all up - what chains they’ve put on the free world’s presses - I don’t suppose I shall ever learn.

Alerted by powerful telepathic currents emanating from somewhere in the Pacific, five Foundation telepaths -receptive where others mercifully are not, it appears -tuned in on the fringe of the most terrifying mental waveband of all. Great Cthulhu, dreaming but not dead, has for the past six days been sending out the most hellish mental nightmares from his House in R’lyeh. He has turned his wrath on all and everything. The weather, even for this time of the year, has never been quite so freakish,

the sudden virulent outbreaks of esoteric cult activities never more horrible, the troubles in insane asylums the world over never more numerous, and the suicide rate never so high. Sunspot activity has for the last two days been so bad that radio and television reception is worse than useless; meteorologists and other scientists in general have no answer for it. Last night top vulcanologists in four different countries issued warnings that at least seven volcanoes, four of them thought to have been long extinct and most of them many thousands of miles apart, are on the point of simultaneous eruption -

‘Krakatoa will have been as a firecracker,’ they warn. I admit to being terrified.

7th Dec.

Amazingly, this morning - after a night of tossing and turning, monstrous dreams, and morbid fear for the whole world’s safety and sanity - all seems back to normal.

Later.

Crow has been around after receiving a trans-Atlantic telephone call from Peaslee explaining all. It was the buildup of Cthulhu’s fury that decided Miskatonic’s telepathic quintet - the same five which discovered the source of the trouble on its initiation a week ago - in their final course. Deliberately they set themselves against the Lord of R’lyeh, cutting in on his dream-sendings and matching their mental powers with his; and though (God-only-knows how) they seem to have done the trick, they’ve paid for their idiotic bravery in no uncertain fashion. They left a note for Peaslee, ‘In case anything should go wrong!’ Pityingly, but with no mean respect, the professor likens them to cabbages - alive, but only just, utterly mindless vegetable entities.

3rd Jan.

Following a lull in operations the Foundation seems to be back in full swing again. Crow and I have been offered status positions with Oil & Minerals International, an obscure but apparently well-financed mining and drilling concern - with headquarters in Arkham, Massachusetts! We have both declined these positions; Crow has his interests, I have my writing and my antique business to attend to; and besides, we know that Peaslee has many more irons in the fire, he in no way depends upon us. Specifically we were to have joined with other ‘executives’ of O & MI in Ankara, to organize what has been loosely termed ‘The Turkey Operation’. We have agreed, however, to head Great Britain’s Chapter of the Foundation here in England. Peaslee in turn has promised to keep us up-to-date on the state of things in Turkey. It should be most interesting; the frequency of severe Turkish earthquakes would seem to determine - quite apart from any dissertations on continuing continental drift or the widening of basic subterranean faults - that Turkey is literally crawling with Cthonians. In Titus Crow’s own words: ‘Well, it’s a very nice offer, de Marigny, but discretion tells me that for the time being at least, we have done enough.’

5th Jan.

The last of the present series of French and American underground atomic tests have now been carried out, with more than merely military success I’m sure.

2nd Feb.

Peaslee, in a recent letter from Denizli, Turkey, informs us of the loss of a Foundation plane, its pilot, two crew members, and Hank Silberhutte. They were last heard of ten days ago somewhere in the Mackenzie Mountains, only a hundred miles or so south of the Arctic Circle. Silberhutte, it seems, has had a ‘thing’ about Ithaqua (The Snow Thing’, ‘The Thing that Walks on the Wind’, The Wendigo’, etc.) of the Cthulhu Cycle, ever since a cousin of his vanished under mysterious circumstances in Manitoba some years back. In poor Wendy-Smith’s time, too (during his normal lifetime, I mean), as witness his document and other credible contemporary papers, Spencer of Quebec University produced ample evidence of human sacrifice to Ithaqua by degenerate worshippers in Manitoba. Silberhutte was working on a long-term personal project of his, with the Foundation’s blessing, to track this powerful air-elemental down. Peaslee believes that the telepath might have strayed - or been drawn -too far north, into the Wind Walker’s domain; for it was to the Arctic regions that Ithaqua was banished for his part in the uprising of the Great Old Ones against the Elder Gods. Personally, I thank the Lord that I myself am not ‘gifted’ with any extraordinary degree of telepathic power.

11th Feb.

Crow has an interesting theory, one that can’t be proved as yet but which certainly seems sound enough. Nyarlath-otep, the Great Messenger of the Old Ones, the only prime member of the CCD left unchained by the Elder Gods at the unthinkably distant time of the prisoning, is not a being or deity as such at all but more truly a ‘power’. Nyarlathotep is in fact Telepathy (Crow points out that the two words come quite close to being anagrammatical, but this must be purely coincidental), truly a ‘Great Messenger’, and certainly we know that the CCD do in fact communicate in this fashion. Of certain reported physical manifestations of Nyarlathotep, Crow says that he has little doubt that given the right type of mind to work upon the Great Old Ones could produce by tele-pathic means a very real tridimensional image - that such an image might even be in the form of a man!

15th Feb.

Following the initial success of the Turkey Project, Oil & Minerals International has secured contracts in Rhodesia and Botswana. Three of Pongo Jordan’s most trusted and highly skilled engineering lieutenants, along with two of Peaslee’s more experienced telepaths (in great demand now), are going out to Africa to organize the first stages of the operation.

28th Feb.

With the continuing success of the Apollo moon-shots comes disturbing news from Miskatonic. Along with all the other equipment deposited on the moon by America’s epic adventurers were certain seismological instruments -and it now appears that Miskatonic’s science laboratories had more than a small hand in the design of two-of them! Quite apart from what NASA has learned of the moon’s interior construction from such instruments, Miskatonic too has been

‘listening in’ - but for nothing so commonplace as moonquakes! The report has it that eventually it will be discovered that there is life in the moon; but by then (it is to be hoped) we will know just what that life is and how to deal with it. Could this be, I cannot help but conjecture, the source of those hellish radiations which, in their season, turn men’s minds to those hideously aberrant acts that we classify as lunacy?