Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath (9 page)

‘Maliciously or inadvertently - by “persons in the power of the Great Old Ones” - these I can understand,’ I said, ‘but accidentally?

How do you mean, Titus?’

‘Why! There are all kinds of natural accidents, Henri. Landslips, floods, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes - natural quakes, I mean - and any single one of them, occurring in the right place, could conceivably carry away the star-stones keeping one or more of these diverse horrors prisoned. This all provided, of course, that in Shudde-M’ell’s case star-stones were the only prisoning devices!’

Listening to the occultist my mind suddenly whirled. For a moment I actually felt sick. ‘Titus, wait! It’s … too fast for me … too fast!’ I made a conscious effort to calm myself.

‘Look, Titus. My whole concept of things, everything, has turned upside down for me in one afternoon. I mean, I’ve always had this interest in the occult, the weird, the macabre, anything out of the ordinary, and at times it has been dangerous. Both of us, over the years, have experienced hideous dangers - but this! If I admit the existence of Shudde-M’ell - a lesser deity in a mythology which I believed could never exercise over me anything more than a passing interest - which now’ - I glanced in loathing fascination at the box on the desk - ‘it seems I must admit, then I must also believe in the existence of all the other related horrors! Titus, until today the Cthulhu Cycle of myth, granted that I’ve looked pretty deeply at it, was quite simply myth; fascinating and even, yes, dangerous -but only in the way that all occult studies are dangerous! Now-‘

‘Henri,’ Crow cut in. ‘Henri, if you feel that this is something you can’t accept, the door is open. You’re not involved yet, and there’s nothing to stop you from keeping out of it. If you do decide, however, that you want to be in on this thing, then you’re welcome - but you should know now that it may well be more dangerous than anything you ever came up against before!’

‘It’s not that I’m afraid, Titus; don’t misunderstand,’ I told him. it’s simply the size of the concept! I know that there are extramundane occurrences, and I’ve had my share of experiences that can only be described as “supernatural”, but they have always been the exception. You are asking me to believe that the Cthulhu Cycle of myth is nothing less than prehistoric fact -which means in effect that the very foundation of our entire sphere of existence is built on alien magic! If such is the case then “occult” is normal and Good grew out of Evil, as opposed to the doctrines of the Christian mythos!’

‘I refuse to be drawn into a theological argument, Henri,’ he answered. ‘But that is my basic concept of things, yes. However, let’s get one or two points quite clear, my friend. In the first place, for “Magic” read “Science”.!

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Brainwashing, Henri! The Elder Gods knew that they could never hope to imprison beings as powerful as the deities of the Cthulhu Cycle behind merely physical bars. They made their prisons the minds of the Great Old Ones themselves - perhaps even their bodies! They implanted mental and genetic blocks into the psyches and beings of the forces of evil and all their minions, that at the sight of - or upon sensing the presence of - certain symbols, or upon hearing those symbols reproduced as sound, those forces of evil are held back, impotent! This explains why comparatively simple devices such as the Mnaran star-stones are effective, and why, in the event of such stones being removed from their prisoning locations, certain chants or written symbols may still cause the escaped powers to retreat.’

For a moment this explanation mazed me even more than before, but then I suspiciously asked: ‘Titus, did you

know all of this earlier, or is it just something you’ve freshly dreamed up?’

‘The theory has been my own personal opinion for quite a long while, Henri, and it explains so many hitherto “inexplicable” things. I believe, too, that it is alluded to in a certain somewhat less than cryptic passage in the Cthaat Aquadingen. As you know, the book has a short chapter dedicated to “Contacting Cthulhu in Dreams”! Mercifully the actual devices required to perform this monstrously dangerous feat are given only in code - in practically impossible ciphers - and concern themselves in some unknown way with Nyarlathotep. Still, in the same chapter, the author makes a statement very relevant towards proving my own beliefs regarding the Elder Gods as scientists. I have a note here somewhere that I copied for easy reference.’ He searched atop his littered desk.

‘Ah! Here it is. It has quite definite parallels with much that’s rather better known in the Cthulhu Cycle, and certainly seems to lend itself well to the most recent Christian mythos. Anyway, listen:

“Ye Science as practised by a Majority of ye Prime Ones was & is & always will be that of ye Path of Light, infinitely recognized throughout Time, Space

& all ye Angels as beneficent to ye Great All’s Continuation. Certain of ye Gods, however, of a rebellious Nature, chose to disregard ye Dictums of ye Majority, & in ye constant Gloom of ye Dark Path renounced their immortal Freedom in Infinity & were banished to suitable Places in Space & Time. But even in Banishment ye Dark Gods railed against ye Prime Ones, so that those Followers of ye Light Path must needs shut them Outside of all Knowledge, imposing upon their Minds certain Strictures & ye Fear of ye Light Path’s Ways, & impressing into their Bodies a Stigma defying Generation; that ye Sins of ye Fathers might be carried down through Eternity & visited upon ye Children & ye Children’s children for ever; or until a Time should come as was once, when all Barriers crumble, & ye Stars & Dwellers therein, & ye Spaces between ye Stars & Dwellers therein, & all Time & Angels & Dwellers therein be falsely guided into ye ultimate Night of ye Dark Path - until ye Great All close in & become One. & Azathoth come in His golden Glory, & Infinity begin again …”’

Crow paused at the end of his reading before saying, ‘There’s quite a bit that’s obviously not relevant, of course, but in the main I believe - ‘

‘Why didn’t you tell me all this when I first arrived today?’ I cut him off.

‘You weren’t ready for it, my friend.’ He grinned mirthlessly. ‘You’re hardly ready now!’

I gave the matter some more thought. ‘Then what you’re really saying is that there is no such thing as the supernatural?’

‘Correct!’

‘But you’ve so often used the word, and recently, in its recognized context.’

‘Purely out of habit, Henri, and because your concept of existence still admits its use - will do for some time, as will my own - until we get used to the idea.’

I mulled the matter over. ‘The magic of the Elder Gods was a sort of psychiatric science,’ I mused. ‘You know, Titus, I can far easier face an alien concept than a supernatural one. Why! It all breaks down quite simply to this: that the combined forces of evil, the Great Old Ones, are nothing more than alien beings or forces against which it will be necessary to employ alien weapons.’

‘Well, yes, basically. We shall have to fight these things with the weapons left us by the Elder Gods. With chants and incantations - scientifically implanted mental and genetic blocks - with the power of the pentacle, but mainly with the knowledge that they are not supernatural but simply outside forces.’

‘But wait,’ I still countered. ‘What of the, well, “super-natural” occurrences, in all their various forms, which we’ve encountered in the past? Did they, too, spring from - ‘

‘Yes, Henri, I have to believe they did. All such occurrences have their roots in the olden science of the Elder Gods, in a time before time. Now, how do you say, de Marigny - are you with me or - ?’

‘Yes,’ I answered without further hesitation; and I stood up to firmly grasp his outstretched hand across his great desk.

Evil the Mind

(From de Marigny’s Notebooks)

I did not get away from Blowne House until very late that night, but at least I had an idea (for some reason still more than somewhat vague) of the task before me. Crow had not gone lightly on me, on the contrary, he had always been a hard taskmaster, but I knew that on this occasion he had taken by far the majority of the work upon his own shoulders. As it happened, I was never to commence work on that portion of the overall task appointed to me; it would be pointless therefore to set it down in detail.

This aside, then, we had worked out a system, apparently foolproof in its simplicity, whereby Shudde-M’ell (or whichever of his brood led the English nests) would be given more than a hard time, indeed an impossible time, retrieving the four Harden eggs. Crow had written three letters to trusted friends of his. One to an ancient and extremely eccentric recluse living in Stornoway in the Hebrides; another to an old American correspondent with whom over the years he had exchanged many letters on matters of folklore, myth, and similarly obscure anthropological subjects, a man his senior by a number of years, the extremely erudite Wingate Peaslee, until recently Professor of Psychology at Miskatonic University in Massachusetts; and finally the third to an old charlatan of a medium, known and endeared to him of old, one Mother Quarry of Marshfield near Bristol.

The plot was this: without waiting for answers to the letters, we would send the eggs first to Professor Peaslee in America. Peaslee would of course receive his airmail

letter fractionally earlier than the air-parcel containing the eggs. Titus had more than enough faith in his friend to be satisfied that his instructions would be followed to the letter. Those instructions were simply to send the eggs on within twenty-four hours to Rossiter McDonald in Stornoway. Similarly McDonald was instructed to send them on without too great a delay to Mother Quarry, and from that ‘talented’, lady they would eventually come back to me.

I say ‘back to me’, because I took the box with me, neatly parcelled and ready to be posted, when I left Blowne House. I was to be instrumental in forging the first link in the postal chain. I also posted the letters on my way home.

I had agreed completely with my knowledgeable friend that the eggs must be out of Blowne House that night -indeed I had insisted upon it - for they had been there long enough already, and Crow had obviously started to feel the strain of their presence. He had admitted to nervously starting at every slightest creak of the floorboards, and for the first time since moving into his singular and oddly-atmosphered bungalow dwelling he had started to jump at the groans of certain vociferous trees in his garden.

But knowing what he knew, and believing what he -no, what we - now believed, his nervousness was nothing if not natural. In fact, the presence of those eggs in his house above all else, quite apart from the fact that he had lately been grossly overworking, was responsible for the rapid deterioration of his general well-being since I last saw him. It would, I believed, not have taken very much more to start him on that same degenerative path taken by Sir Amery Wendy-Smith!

It may readily be understood why I hardly slept a wink that night, but lay in bed in my grey-stone house tossing and turning and chewing over in my mind the bulk of the

new concept I had been asked to accept. In fact I had accepted it, but its details still needed thinking on, if only to clarify the overall picture and remove any remaining fuzz from its edges. Truth to tell, though, my mind did seem more than slightly foggy, as if I were suffering from some sort of hangover. But of course there was another, more immediate reason for my insomnia - the box with the lustrous spheres lay on a small table beside my bed!

Restlessly pummelling my pillow (which I found myself doing every half hour or so), I turned things over in my mind a dozen times, looking for loopholes and finding none - neither in Crow’s immediate plot to stop the burrowers beneath from regaining possession of their eggs, nor in the premises of his incredible fears themselves - and yet I knew that there was something basically wrong! I knew it. The fault was there, submerged at the back of my mind, but would not rise to the surface.

If only this brain-fog would lift. My mood of crushing depression had vanished, true, but now I had this godawful mental smog to wade through!

Of course, I did not know Crow’s correspondents, his friends of old, personally; but he had tremendous faith in them, and especially in Peaslee. In his letter to the professor Crow had outlined his entire perception of the fantastic threat against Earth - hypothetically and yet strongly enough to hint of his personal involvement - and in my own opinion, putting myself in the position of a vastly intelligent man on receipt of such a letter, Crow had endangered his whole case. I had bluntly pointed out to him, after listening to a reading of the hastily scrawled letter, that Peaslee might see it as the ravings of a deranged mentality. As Crow himself had said: ‘I’m damned if I know whom I might confide in …’ But he had only chuckled at the suggestion, saying that he thought it unlikely, and that in any case, if only for past

friendship’s sake, Peaslee would comply with his requirements regarding the box of eggs.

He had reckoned on a maximum period of three weeks for the round trip of the eggs, but had taken the trouble to request in addition confirmatory letters with regard to their safe dispatch. I thought on this, and - There it was again!

Now what was this twinge I kept getting at the back of my mind whenever I thought of the journey the eggs would commence in the morning?

But no, whenever I tried to nail the thing down it faded away, back into the mists of my mind. I had known this frustrating sensation before, and recognized the unsatisfactory solution: simply to ignore it and let the thing resolve itself in its own time. It was, nevertheless, annoying - and more than worrying in the circumstances.

Then, turning in my bed, my eyes would light on the box with its enigmatic contents, and I could picture those contents in my mind’s eye, faintly luminous with that pearly sheen of theirs in the darkness of their cardboard coffin. That would set me off tangentially on yet another mental tack.

I had asked Crow about that other box, the ‘incubator’, discovered by Wendy-Smith at the site of dead G’harne. Why, I had wanted to know, had there been no similar receptacle in the tunnel-cave at Harden? But the tired occultist (should I call him ‘occultist’ or ‘scientist’?) had been almost equally at a loss. He had finally hazarded, after giving the matter some thought, that possibly conditions in that deep dark place had been more nearly perfect for the incubation of the eggs than in the shallow hatchery at G’harne.