The Burrowers Beneath

by Brian Lumley

  “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 rumor 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 pre-human entities. 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 unsuppressed sections of the British Museum’s photostat Pnakotic Manuscript, allegedly a fragmentary record of a lost “Great Race,” prehistoric even in prehistory; similarly reproduced pages from the R’lyeh Text, supposedly written 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 Necronomicon, and those uncoded sections of Titus Crow’s priceless copy of the Cthaat Aquadingen.

  I had learned, somewhat skeptically, 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.

  There were, too, other creatures and beings—such as Dagon, fish-god of the Philistines and Phoenicians, ruler over the Deep Ones, ally and servant to Cthulhu; the Tind’losi Hounds; Yibb-Tstll, Nyogtha, and Tsathoggua; Lloigor, Zhar, and Ithaqua; Shudde-M’ell—oh, and a great many of them. Of some of these beings much was made in the mythos, and they were given ample space in the books. Others were more obscure, rarely mentioned, and then only in a vague and indecisive manner.

  Basically the legend was this: that in an epoch so remote in the past as to make Crow’s “geologic infants” statement perfectly acceptable, the Elder Gods had punished a rebellion of the Great Old Ones by banishing them to their various prisoning environs—Hastur to the Lake of Hali in Carcosa; Cthulhu to R’lyeh beneath the Pacific Ocean; Ithaqua to dwell above the ice-wastes of the Arctic; Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, and Yibb-Tstll to chaotic continua outside the geometric design of which the known infinite forms but one surface; Tsathoggua to cthonian Hyperborean burrows, and similarly Shudde-M’ell to other lost labyrinths beneath the earth—so that only Nyarlathotep the Messenger was left free and imprisoned. For in their infinite wisdom and mercy the Elder Gods had left Nyarlathotep alone that he might yet ply the current between the spheres and carry, one to the other in the loneliness of their banishment, the words of all the evicted forces of evil.

  Various magical sigils, signs, and barriers kept the Great Old Ones imprisoned, had done so since time immemorial (again an inadequate cliche) and the books, particularly the Necronomicon of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, warned against the removal of such signs and of possible attempts by deluded or “possessed” mortals to reinstate the Great Old Ones as lords of their former domains. The legend in its entirety was a fascinating thing; but as with all the world’s other, greater primal fantasies, it could only be regarded as pure myth, with nothing in it to impress any but the most naive souls of the possible actuality of its surmises and suggestions. So I still thought, despite certain thing
s Crow had told me in the past and others I had stumbled across myself.

  All these thoughts passed in very short order through my head, but thanks to my ability to give many things my full, simultaneous concentration, I missed none of Titus Crow’s narrative regarding his dreams of over thirty years and their implications as applied to actual occurrences in the real, waking world. He had covered certain monstrous dreams of a time some years gone, when his nightmares had been paralleled in life by any number of disastrous losses of oceangoing gas-and oil-drilling rigs, and was now about to relate the details of yet more hideous nightmares he had known at a time only some few weeks ago.

  “But first, we’ll go back to those dreams I skipped over earlier,” he said, as I banished all other pictures from my mind. “The reason I did that was because I didn’t want to bore you with duplication. You see, they first came to me as long ago as August, 1933, and though they were not so detailed they were more or less the same as my most recent, recurrent nightmares. Yes, those same dreams, until recently, have been coming nightly, and if I describe one of them, then I shall have described most of them. A few have been different!

  “To make it short, Henri, I have been dreaming of subterranean beings, octopus-things apparently without heads or eyes, creatures capable of organic tunneling through the deepest buried rocks with as little effort as hot knives slicing butter! I don’t know for sure yet just what they are, these burrowers beneath; though I’m pretty certain they’re of an hitherto unguessed species as opposed to creatures of the so-called ‘supernatural,’ survivors of a time before time rather than beings of occult dimensions. No, I can only guess, but my guess is that they represent an unholy horror! And if I’m correct, then, as I’ve already said, the whole world is in hellish danger!”

  Crow closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and put his fingertips up to his forehead. Plainly he had said as much as he was going to without prompting. And yet I found myself no longer truly eager to question him. This was, without a doubt, a much different Titus Crow from the man I had known previously. I full knew the extent of his probing into strange matters, and that his research over the years in the more obscure corners of various sciences had been prodigious, but had his work finally proven too much for him?

  I was still worriedly staring at him in sympathetic apprehension when he opened his eyes. Before I could hide it, he saw the expression on my face and smiled as I tried to cover my embarrassment.

  “I … I’m sorry, Titus, I—”

  “What was it you said, de Marigny?” He stopped me short. “Something about doubting a man before trying him? I told you it was going to be hard to swallow, but I don’t really blame you for whatever doubts you have. I do have proof, though, of sorts … .”

  “Titus, please forgive me,” I answered dejectedly. “It’s just that you look so, well, tired and washed out. But come on—proof, you said! What sort of proof do you mean?”

  He opened his desk drawer again, this time to take out a folder of letters, a manuscript, and a square cardboard box. “First the letters,” he said, handing me the slim folder, “then the manuscript. Read them, de Marigny, while I doze, and you’ll be able to judge for yourself when I show you what’s in the box. Then, too, you’ll be better able to understand. Agreed?”

  I nodded, took a long sip at my brandy, and began to read. The letters I managed pretty quickly; they drew few conclusions in themselves. Then came the manuscript.

  III

  Cement Surroundings

  (Being the Manuscript of Paul Wendy-Smith)

  i

  It will never fail to amaze me how certain allegedly Christian people take a perverse delight in the misfortunes of others. Just how true this is was brought forcibly home to me by the totally unnecessary whispers and rumors which were put about following the disastrous decline of my closest living relative.

  There were those who concluded that just as the moon is responsible for the tides, and in part the slow movement of the Earth’s upper crust, so was it also responsible for Sir Amery Wendy-Smith’s behavior on his return from Africa. As proof they pointed out my uncle’s sudden fascination for seismography—the study of earthquakes—a subject which so took his fancy that he built his own instrument, a model which does not incorporate the conventional concrete base, to such an exactitude that it measures even the most minute of the deep tremors which are constantly shaking this world. It is that same instrument which sits before me now, rescued from the ruins of the cottage, at which I am given to casting, with increasing frequency, sharp and fearful glances.

  Before his disappearance my uncle spent hours, seemingly without purpose, studying the fractional movements of the stylus over the graph.

  For my own part I found it more than odd the way in which, while Sir Amery was staying in London after his return, he shunned the underground and would pay extortive taxi fares rather than go down into what he termed “those black tunnels.” Odd, certainly, but I never considered it a sign of insanity.

  Yet even his few really close friends seemed convinced of his madness, blaming it upon his living too close to those dead and nighted nigh-forgotten civilizations which so fascinated him. But how could it have been otherwise? My uncle was both antiquarian and archaeologist. His strange wanderings to foreign lands were not the result of any longing for personal gain or acclaim. Rather were they undertaken out of a love of the life; for any fame which resulted—as frequently occurred—was more often than not shrugged off onto the ever-willing personages of his colleagues.

  They envied him, those so-called contemporaries of his, and would have emulated his successes had they possessed the foresight and inquisitiveness with which he was so singularly gifted—or, as I have now come to believe, with which he was cursed. My bitterness toward them is directed by the way in which they cut him after the dreadful culmination of that last, fatal expedition. In earlier years many of them had been “made” by his discoveries, but on that last trip those hangers-on had been the uninvited, the ones out of favor, to whom he would not offer the opportunity of fresh, stolen glory. I believe that for the greater part their assurances of his insanity were nothing more than a spiteful means of belittling his genius.

  Certainly that last safari was his physical end. He who before had been straight and strong, for a man his age, with jet black hair and a constant smile, was now seen to walk with a pronounced stoop and had lost a lot of weight. His hair had grayed and his smile had become rare and nervous while a distinct tic jerked the flesh at the corner of his mouth.

  Before these awful deteriorations made it possible for his erstwhile “friends” to ridicule him, before the expedition, Sir Amery had deciphered or translated (I know little of these things) a handful of decaying, centuried shards known in archaeological circles as the G’harne Fragments. Though he would never fully discuss his findings I knew it was that which he learned which sent him, ill-fated, into Africa.

  He and a handful of personal friends, all equally learned gentlemen, ventured into the interior seeking a legendary city which Sir Amery believed had existed aeons before the foundations were cut for the pyramids. Indeed, according to his calculations, Man’s primal ancestors were not yet conceived when G’harne’s towering ramparts first reared their monolithic sculptings to predawn skies. Nor with regard to the age of the place, if it existed at all, could my uncle’s claims be disproved; new tests on the G’harne Fragments had shown them to be pre-Triassic, and their very existence, in any form other than centuried dust, was impossible to explain.

  It was Sir Amery, alone and in a terrible condition, who staggered upon an encampment of savages five weeks after setting out from the native village where the expedition had last had contact with civilization. No doubt the ferocious men who found him would have done away with him there and then but for their superstitions. His wild appearance and the strange tongue in which he screamed, plus the fact that he emerged from an area which was taboo in their tribal legends, stayed their hands. Even
tually they nursed him back to a semblance of health and conveyed him to a more civilized region whence he was slowly able to make his way back to the outside world. Of the expedition’s other members nothing has since been seen or heard. Only I know the story, having read it in the letter my uncle left for me, but more of that later … .

  Following his lone return to England, Sir Amery developed those eccentricities already mentioned, and the merest hint or speculation on the part of outsiders with reference to the disappearance of his colleagues was sufficient to start him raving horribly of such inexplicable things as “a buried land where Shudde-M’ell broods and bubbles, plotting the destruction of the human race and the release from his watery prison of Great Cthulhu … .” When he was asked officially to account for his missing companions, he said that they had died in an earthquake; and though, reputedly, he was asked to clarify his answer, he would say no more.

  Thus, being uncertain as to how he would react to questions about his expedition, I was loath to ask him of it. However, on those rare occasions when he saw fit to talk of it without prompting, I listened avidly; for I, as much if not more so than others, was eager to have the mystery cleared up.