Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath (3 page)

‘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 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 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, Muenstero-ceras, an early ammonite, existed in the seas of the lower

Carboniferous. Now to get back to survivals, Muenstero-ceras 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 sorts 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 those 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 walking

“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 father’s, 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, although 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 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 clutter on the 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 outre 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 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 centring about any number of hideous things. There were winged, faceless bat-things that carried me nightly over fantastic needle-tipped peaks on unending trips towards 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 centre 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 knows what they might have been designed to call up!’

‘And in the waking world?’ I felt bound to ask it, even remembering that I was supposed to bide my time. ‘What was going on in the real world throughout this period of strange dreams?’

‘Well,’ he slowly answered, ‘it culminated in certain monstrous occurrences on New Year’s Eve at Oakdeene Sanatorium near Glasgow. In fact, five of the inmates died that night in their cells; and a male nurse, too, on a lonely road quite near the sanatorium. The latter was apparently attacked by a beast of some sort… torn and horribly chewed! Apart from these deaths, all of them quite inexplicable, one other nurse went mad; and, perhaps most amazing of all, yet five more inmates, previously “hopeless” cases, were later released as perfectly responsible citizens! You can read up on the case from my cuttings-file for that period if you wish …

‘Now, I’ll agree that from what I’ve told you these occurrences seem to have damn all to do with my dreams; nevertheless, after New Year’s Eve, I wasn’t bothered again by those dreams!

‘And that’s not all, for I’ve checked, and rumour has it that prior to the hellish happenings that night the worst inmates of Oakdeene gave themselves over to some form of mad chanting. And I think I can hazard a guess as to what that chanting was, if not what it was for.

‘Anyhow, let’s get on.

‘Over the next thirty years or so,’ Crow continued after closing the first book and taking up a more recent diary,

‘I had my share of lesser nightmares - no more than two dozen in all, all of them of course recorded - one of which especially stays in my mind; we’ll get on to it in detail in a minute. But in late 1963, commencing on the tenth of November, my sleep was once more savagely invaded, this time by dreams of a vast underwater fortress peopled by things the like of which I never want to see again, in or out of dreams!

‘Well, these creatures in their citadel at the bottom of the sea, they were - I don’t know - ropy horrors out of the most terrible myths of pre-antiquity, beings without parallel except in the Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth Cycle. Most of them were preoccupied with some obscure magical - or rather scientific -preparations, assisted in their submarine industry by indescribable blasphemies more heaps of mobile sludge than organic creatures … hideously reminiscent of the Shoggoths in the Necronomicon, again from the Cthulhu Cycle of myth.

‘These Shoggoth-things - I came to think of them as “Sea-Shoggoths” - were obviously subservient to their ropy masters, and yet a number of them stood guard over one certain member of the former beings. I had the mad impression that this … this Odd-Thing-Out, as it were -which was, even in its absolute alienage, obviously demented - consisted in fact of a human mind trapped in the body of one of these sea-dwellers!

‘Again, during the period through which I experienced these dreams, there were occurrences of peculiarly hideous aspect in the real, waking world. There were awful uprisings in lunatic asylums all over the country, cult gatherings in the Midlands and Northeast, terrible suicides among many members of the “arty set”, all coming to a head in the end when Surtsey rose from the sea off the Vestmann Islands on the Atlantic Ridge.

‘You know, of course, de Marigny, the basic theme of the Cthulhu Cycle of myth; that at a time yet to come Lord Cthulhu will rise from his slimy seat at Deep R’lyeh in the sea to reclaim his dry-land dominions? Well, the whole thing was horribly frightening, and for a long time I morbidly collected cuttings and articles dealing with Surtsey’s rising.

Nothing further occurred, however, and Surtsey eventually cooled from its volcanic state into a new island, barren of life but still strangely enigmatic. I have a feeling, Henri, that Surtsey was only the first step, that those ropy things of my dreams are in fact real and that they had planned to raise to the surface whole chains of islands and oddly-dimensioned cities -lands drowned back in the dim mists of Earth’s antiquity - in the commencement of a concerted attack on universal sanity … an attack led by loathly Lord Cthulhu, his “brothers”, and their minions, which once reigned here where men reign now.’

As my friend talked, from his very first mention of the Cthulhu Cycle of myth, I had put to use an odd ability of mine: the power of simultaneous concentration in many directions. One part of my mind I had turned to the absorption of all that Crow was telling me; another followed different tracks.

For I knew far more of the Cthulhu Cycle than my gaunt and work-weary friend suspected. Indeed, since suffering certain experiences when, for a brief time, I had owned the accursed Mirror of Queen Nitocris, I had spent much of my time in correlating the legends and pre-human myths surrounding Cthulhu and his contemporaries in the immemorially handed-down records.

Among such ‘forbidden’ books, I had read the unsup-pressed sections of the British Museum’s photostat Pna-kotic Manuscript, allegedly a fragmentary record of a lost ‘Great Race’, prehistoric even in prehistory; similarly reproduced pages from the R’lyeh Text, supposedly writ-ten by certain minions of Great Cthulhu himself; the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt and my own copy of Ludwig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, both in vastly expurgated editions; the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules and Feery’s often fanciful Notes on the Necron-omicon; the hideously revealing and yet disquietingly vague Revelations of Glaaki; and those uncoded sections of Titus Crow’s priceless copy of the Cthaat Aquadingen.

I had learned, somewhat sceptically, of the forces or deities of the unthinkably ancient mythology; of the benign Elder Gods, peacefully palaced in Orion but ever aware of the struggle between the races of Earth and the Forces of Evil; of those evil deities themselves, the Great Old Ones, ruled over by (created by, originating from?) the blind idiot god Azathoth, ‘the Bubbler at the Hub’, an amorphous blight of nethermost, nuclear confusion from which all infinity radiates; of Yog-Sothoth, ‘the all-in-one and one-in-all’, coexistent with all time and conterminous in all space; of Nyarlathotep the Messenger; of Great Cthulhu, ‘dweller in the Depths’ in his House at R’lyeh; of Hastur the Unspeakable, a prime elemental of interstellar space and air, half-brother to Cthulhu; and of Shub-Niggurath, ‘the black goat of the woods with a thousand young’, fertility symbol in the cycle.