Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath (20 page)

‘No thanks, Pongo - I prefer brandy. We have a flask in the car.’

‘You, de Marigny?’ The big man’s voice, despite its roughness, was tense, nervous.

‘Thanks, yes.’ I took the flask from him. I hardly needed the drink really, but Jordan’s jumpiness was infectious. And little wonder, for there was something … wrong … somewhere. We could all sense it, a disturbing feeling of impending, well, something in the air. The lull before a storm.

Gordon Finch’s voice came louder now, clearer over the walkie-talkie, which Peaslee had turned up full volume for our benefit.

“The thing’s not quite fully aware yet, it’s still half asleep, but it knows something’s up. I’m going to go deeper into its mind, see what I can see.’

‘Careful, Finch,’ Peaslee said quickly into his handset. ‘Don’t alert the creature whatever you do. We can never be certain - we don’t know what it’s capable of.’ For perhaps half a minute there was an almost audible silence from the walkie-talkie. Then, simultaneous with Jordan’s reminder that there were only six minutes left to penetration, Finch’s voice, ethereal now as his mind entered deeper into the Cthonian’s miasmal mentality, sounded again from Peaslee’s handset:

‘It’s… strange! Strangest sensations I’ve ever known. There’s pressure, the weight of countless tons of … rock.’ The voice trailed off.

Peaslee waited a second, then snapped: ‘Finch, get a grip on yourself, man!

What’s wrong?’

‘Eh?’ I could almost see the telepath shaking himself. Now his voice was eager: ‘Nothing’s wrong, Professor, but I want to go deeper. I believe I can get right inside this one!’

‘I forbid it -‘ Peaslee railed.

‘Never forbid an Englishman anything.’ Finch’s voice hardened. ‘A few more minutes and the thing’ll be finished, gone for ever - and it’s millions of years old. I want… I want to know!’

Again the silence from the handset, while Peaslee grew more agitated by the second. Then -

‘Pressure …’ The voice was fainter, trancelike. ‘Tons and tons of crushing

… weight.’

‘Where is he down there?’ Crow asked sharply, never for a second taking the binoculars from his eyes.

‘In the control shack by the rig,’ Jordan answered, his camera starting to whir in his hands. “The others should be clearing out now, moving back — all bar the lads on the rig itself - and Finch should get out too. He’ll get drenched in muck when she goes through; and when they shoot off the bomb - ‘

He left his thoughts unspoken.

By ‘the bomb’ I knew he meant the explosive harpoon set in the head of the great drill. As soon as the bit went through into the softer stuff of the Cthonian, the bomb would automatically fire, shooting itself deep into the guts

of the monster before exploding. Finch was supposed to break contact with the creature’s thoughts before then.

‘Four minutes,’ Pongo said.

‘Trapped? came Finch’s voice again. “Trapped down … HERE! Nothing has changed - but why do I wake? I have only to flex the muscles of my body, arch my back to break out, to be free to go- as I went free so long ago - in search of the little creatures - to slake this great thirst with their red -

‘Ahhh! I can see the little ones in my mind as I remember them, when once before, following the great roaring and crushing and shifting of the earth, I went free! With their little arms, hairy bodies, and futile clubs. I remember their screams as I absorbed them into myself.

‘But I dare not, CANNOT, break free! Despite my strength, a greater power holds me, the mind-chains of THEM and their barriers - the Great Elder Gods who prisoned me so long, long ago - who returned to prison me again after but a brief freedom when the earth tore itself and their sigils were scattered.

7 am STILL prisoned, and more, there is … danger!’

‘Finch, come out of there!’ Peaslee yelled frantically into his handset. ‘Let the thing be, man, and get out!’

‘DANGER? Finch’s now alien voice continued, coarse and slurred. ‘I can sense.

. . little ones! Many of them. .. above me … and something approaches?

‘Just over two minutes!’ Jordan blurted, his voice cracking.

Now there was only a harsh gasping from the walkie-talkie, and above it Crow’s sudden, amazed exclamation: ‘Why, I can feel the thing, too! It’s sending out mind-feelers. It knows what we’re up to. It’s more intelligent than we thought, Peaslee, superior to any of the others we’ve so far done away with.’

He let his binoculars dangle and put his hands up to his ears, as if to shut out some

dreadful sound. His eyes closed and his face screwed up in pain. ‘The thing’s frightened - no, angry! My God!’

‘I am not defenceless, little ones? Finch’s horribly altered voice screamed from the handset. ‘Trapped, true, but NOT defenceless. You have learned much in the passage of time - but I, too, have powers! I can’t stop that which you send burrowing down towards me, but I have … powers?

Crow screamed harshly and fell to his knees, rocking to and fro and clutching madly at his head. At that moment I was very glad that my own psychic or telepathic talents were as yet undeveloped!

‘The sky!’ Peaslee gasped, turning my attention from the now prostrate Titus Crow. ‘Look at the sky!’

Black clouds boiled and tossed where only grey skies had opened scant moments before, and lightning played high in the cauldron of suddenly rushing air. In another second a great wind sprang up, whipping our coats about us and snatching at Jordan’s yellow bandanna. Down in the depression gorse bushes came loose from the sandy earth to swirl into the air as if at the mercy of a whole nest of dust devils.

‘Get down!’ Jordan yelled, his voice barely audible over the wild rush of wind, flying sand and bits of gorse, heather and bracken. ‘There’s little over a minute to go -down for your lives!’

We all fell to the ground immediately. Crow now lay there quite still. I grabbed at thick heather roots and flung an arm about my friend’s motionless body. The wind was icy now, seeming to rush up at us from the rig, and angry thunder boomed while flashes of lightning lit up the sky, etching in outlines of jet the rig’s distant structure upon the gaunt backdrop of moor and low bleak hills.

Screams had begun to echo up from the declivity, barely heard over the mad, pandemoniac roar of tortured air

and sky, causing me to reach through suddenly slashing rain for Crow’s binoculars. I freed them from his neck and held them to my face, drawing the structures in the declivity closer with quick, jerky movements of my trembling hands.

“The thing in the ground comes closer,’ screamed Finch’s voice (or was it Finch’s voice?) from Peaslee’s handset. ‘And I sense its nature. So be it! I die - but first feel the might of (… ?) and his wrath, and let my arms reach out for the surface that my mouths might drink one last time! Now know the LUST of (… ?), little ones, and his power over the very elements!

Remember and tremble when the stars are right and Great Lord Cthulhu comes again!’

I had finally managed to focus the binoculars on the rig and the small shacks surrounding it. In one of those buildings the telepath Finch sat, his mind still in contact with that of the great beast down in the bowels of the earth.

I shuddered uncontrollably as I pictured the man

down there.

Lorries and smaller vehicles were now moving away from the perimeter of the work area, and running figures, fighting the buffeting wind and squalling rain on foot. Then came horror!

Even as I watched, the lightning began to flash with more purpose, great bolts striking down accurately at the rig and its appurtenances. Running figures burst into electric flame and crumpled while lorries and Land Rovers, careening madly about, roared up in gouting fire and ruin. Girders melted and fell from the now blazing rig, and great patches of the scant vegetation surrounding that structure hissed and steamed before crackling into red and orange death.

‘Time’s up,’ yelled Jordan in my ear; ‘the bomb should fire any second now.

That ought to put a stop to the bastard’s game!’

Even as the Yorkshireman yelled the voice of the thing that had been Gordon Finch screamed from Peaslee’s handset:

‘I am STRICKEN! - Na-ngh … ngh … ngh-ya -Great Ubbo-sathla, your child dies - but give me now strength for a final drinking - let me stretch myself this one last time - DEFY the sigils of the Elder Gods - na-argh … ngh . .

. ngh! - Arghhh-k-k-k! - Hyuh, yuh, h-yuh-yuh!’

As these monstrous, utterly abhuman exhortations and syllables crackled in hideously distorted cacophony from the walkie-talkie, so I witnessed the final abomination.

Dimly I was aware of Peaslee’s incoherent cry as the very ground beneath us jounced and slipped; in the corner of my consciousness I knew that Jordan had attempted to get to his feet, only to be thrown down again by the dancing ground - but mainly my eyes and mind were riveted on the nightmare scene afforded me by Crow’s accursed binoculars, those glasses that my nerveless fingers could not put down!

For down in the valley depression great rifts had appeared in the earth - and from these seismic chasms terrible tendrils of grey, living matter spewed forth in awful animation!

Flailing spastically - like great, mortally wounded snakes across the battered, blistered terrain - the tendrils moved, and soon some of them encountered the fleeing men! Great crimson maws opened in grey tendril ends, and-

Finally I managed to hurl the binoculars away. I closed my eyes and pressed my face down into the wet grass and sand. In that same instant there came a tremendous crack of lightning, the incredible flickering brightness of which I could sense even with my eyes closed and covered, and immediately there followed such an explosion and a

rushing, reeking stench as to make my very senses temporarily depart…

I do not know how long it was before I felt Jordan’s hand upon my shoulder or heard his voice inquiring as to my condition, but when next I lifted my head the sky was clear once again and a freshening breeze blew over the blasted hill. Peaslee was sitting up, silently shaking his head from side to side and gazing down at the scene below. I followed his gaze.

Fires still raged down there, emitting columns of blue smoke among the shrivelled gorse bushes and brittle heather. The rig was a twisted mass of blackened metal, fallen on its side. One or two scorched trucks still moved, making their way tiredly towards our hill, and a handful of tattered figures stumbled dazedly about. Moans and cries for help drifted up to us. Grey, vile ichor steamed and bubbled in liquid catabolism, filling the newly opened cracks in the earth like pus in hellish sores.

‘We have to help them,’ Jordan said simply. I nodded and climbed weakly to my feet. Peaslee, too, stood up. Then, remembering, I got down on one knee and gently shook Titus Crow’s shoulder. He came to a moment later, but was incapable of aiding us in the work we now had to do; his mental encounter, though brief, had been too shattering.

As the three of us walked towards Jordan’s Rover, I picked up the walkie-talkie from where Peaslee had left it. In a moment of thoughtlessness I turned up the volume - and understood why the professor had left the handset behind. There were … noises: low, incoherent mou-things, snatches of childish song, giggles of imbecile laughter …

We lost six dead, five missing - and one, poor Finch, hopelessly insane. There were injuries, but in the main these were minor: burns, cuts, and bruises. The fact that another Cthonian - one of the ‘least harmful of all’ the subterrene species - was dead seemed hardly ample justification for such losses. Still, these were the first casualties the Foundation had suffered in the whole Great Britain Project to date.

The newspapers the next day were full of the earth tremors that had rocked the entire Northeast seaboard -to a lesser degree the titanic blast of ignited gases ‘inadvertently released from beneath the surface of the earth by members of a scientific drilling project’. Too, ground rumblings had been heard and felt in the Gotswolds, and Surtsey had flared briefly forth again to send up clouds of volcanic steam. Freak storms vied for space with these items in the press: hailstones as big as golf balls in the South; freak lightning over many parts of England, particularly Durham and Northumberland; lashing, incessant rain the whole afternoon in the West. Lunatic asylums had also been affected, alarmingly so, by the Wilmarth Foundation’s machineries that day. Reports of uprisings, mass rebellions, and escapes were legion. ‘Moon, tide, and weather cycles’, alienists and psychologists vaguely had it… .

Of the form, type and characteristics of the Cthonian we destroyed that day little yet is known. That it was ‘a child of Ubbo-sathla’ seems as much as we are ever likely to learn. Within hours of the final explosion of its body-gases (gases which must have been closely related to methane, and under pressure at that), its tendril-substances - indeed, so far as is known, its entire body -had rotted and disappeared. Subsequent soundings of the space it had occupied underground have shown that the

thing was almost a quarter of a mile long and a third that distance across!

We do not even positively know what the creature’s name was. We heard it spoken, certainly, by Finch in his telepathic trance, but such was its sound and the arrangements of its consonants that human vocal cords cannot emulate them. Only a man in actual mind-contact with such a being, as poor Gordon Finch was, might be able to approximate such intricacies. The nearest we can get to it in written English is: Cgfthgnm’o’th.

Regarding that forebear mentioned by the Cthonian in its death agonies: it would appear that Ubbo-sathla (Ubho-Shatla, Hboshat, Bothshash, etc.) was here even before Cthulhu and his spawn first seeped down from the stars; that (if we can take Finch’s mind-interpretations as a true translation), Ubbo-sathla was drawn into kinship with Cthulhu after the latter’s domination of pre-Earth. These conclusions, such as they are, seem borne out by the following fragment from the disturbing Book of Eibon:

… For Ubbo-sathla is the source and the end. Before the coining of Zhothaquah or Yok-Zothoth or Kthulhut from the stars, Ubbo-sathla dwelt in the steaming fens of the new-made Earth: a mass without head or members, spawning the grey, formless efts of the prime and the grisly prototypes of terrene life