The Burrowers Beneath

by Brian Lumley

  Well, like I say, Borszowski’s letter was rambling and disjointed—and yet, despite my first conclusion, the Pole had written the thing in a rather convincing manner. Hardly what you’d expect from a real madman. He quoted references from the Bible, particularly Exodus 20:4, and again and again emphasized his belief that the star-shaped things were nothing more or less than prehistoric pentacles laid down by some great race of alien sorcerers many millions of years ago. He reminded me of the heavy, unusual mists we’d had and of the queer way the cod had gone for Nick Adams. He even brought up again the question of the shaky sea-phones and computer; making, in toto, an altogether disturbing assessment of Sea-Maid’s late history as applicable to his own odd fancies.

  In fact, I became so disturbed by that letter that I was still thinking about it later that evening, and about the man himself, the superstitious Pole.

  I did a little checking on Joe’s background, discovering that he’d traveled far in his early days to become something of a scholar in obscure mythological matters. Also, it had been noticed on occasion—whenever the mists were heavier than usual, particularly since the appearance of the first star-stone—that he crossed himself with a strange sign over his breast. A number of the lads had seen him do it. They all told the same tale about that sign; that it was pointed, one point straight up, two more down and wide, two still lower but closer together. Yes, the Pole’s sign was a five-pointed star! And again I read his letter.

  By then we’d shut down for the day and I was out on the main platform having a quiet pipeful—I can concentrate, you know, with a bit of ’baccy. Dusk was only a few minutes away when the … accident … happened.

  Robertson, the steel-rigger, was up aloft tightening a few loose bolts halfway up the rig. Don’t ask me where the mist came from, I don’t know, but suddenly it was there. It swam up from the sea, a thick gray blanket that cut visibility down to no more than a few feet. I’d just shouted up to Robertson, telling him that he’d better pack it in for the night, when I heard his yell and saw his lantern (he must have lit it as soon as the mist rolled in) come blazing down out of the grayness. The lantern disappeared through an open hatch, and a second later Robertson followed it. He went straight through the hatchway, missing the sides by inches, and then there came the splashes as first the lantern, then the man hit the sea. In two shakes of a dog’s tail Robertson was splashing about down there in the mist and yelling fit to ruin his lungs, proving to me and the others who’d rushed out from the mess at my call that his fall had done him little harm. We lowered a raft immediately, getting two of the men down to the water in less than two minutes, and no one gave it a second thought that Robertson wouldn’t be picked up. He was, after all, an excellent swimmer. In fact, the lads on the raft thought the whole episode was a big laugh … that is until Robertson started to scream!

  I mean, there are screams and there are screams, Johnny! Robertson wasn’t drowning—he wasn’t making noises like a drowning man!

  He wasn’t picked up, either. No less quickly than it had settled, the mist lifted, so that by the time the raft touched the water visibility was normal for a November evening … but there was no sign of the steel-rigger. There was something, though, something we’d all forgotten—for the whole surface of the sea was silver with fish!

  Fish! Big and little, almost every indigenous species you could imagine. The way they were acting, apparently trying to throw themselves aboard the raft, I had the lads haul themselves back up to the platform as soon as it became evident that Robertson was gone for good. Johnny—I swear I’ll never eat fish again.

  That night I didn’t sleep very well at all. Now, you know I’m not being callous. I mean, aboard an oceangoing rig after a hard day’s work, no matter what has happened during the day, a man usually manages to sleep. Yet that night I just couldn’t drop off. I kept going over in my mind all the … well, the things—the odd occurrences, the trouble with the instruments and the fish, Borszowski’s letter again, and finally, of course, the awful way we lost Robertson—until I thought my head must burst with the burden of wild notions and imaginings going around and around inside it.

  Next afternoon the chopper came in again (with Wes Atlee complaining about having had to make two runs in two days) and delivered all the booze and goodies for the party the next day. As you know, we always have a blast aboard when we strike it rich—and this time the geological samples had more or less assured us of a good one. We’d been out of beer a few days by that time—poor weather had stopped Wes from bringing in anything but mail—and so I was running pretty high and dry. Now you know me, Johnny. I got in the back of the mess with all that booze and cracked a few bottles. I could see the gear turning from the window, and, over the edge of the platform, the sea all gray and eerie-looking, and somehow the idea of getting a load of booze inside me seemed a damn good one.

  I’d been in there topping-up for over half an hour when Jeffries, my 2IC, got through to me on the telephone. He was in the instrument cabin and said he reckoned the drill would go through to “muck” within a few more minutes. He sounded worried, though, sort of shaky, and when I asked him why this was, he didn’t rightly seem able to answer—mumbled something about the instruments mapping those strange blips again, regular as ever but somehow stronger … closer.

  About that time I first noticed the mist swirling up from the sea, a real pea-souper, billowing in to smother the rig and turn the men on the platform to gray ghosts. It muffled the sound of the gear, too, altering the metallic clank and rattle of pulleys and chains to distant, dull noises such as I might have expected to hear from the rig if I’d been in a suit deep down under the sea.

  It was warm enough in the back room of the mess there, yet unaccountably I found myself shivering as I looked out over the rig and listened to the ghost sounds of machinery and men.

  That was when the wind came up. First the mist, then the wind—but I’d never before seen a mist that a good strong wind couldn’t blow away! Oh, I’ve seen freak storms before, Johnny, but believe me this storm was the freak! With a capital “F.”

  She came up out of nowhere—not breaking the blanket of gray but driving it around and around like a great mad ghost—blasting the already choppy sea against the Old Girl’s legs, flinging up spray to the platform’s guardrails, and generally creating havoc. I’d no sooner recovered from my initial amazement when the telephone rang again. I came away from the window, picked up the receiver to hear Jimmy Jeffries’ somewhat distorted yell of triumph coming over the wires.

  “We’re through, Pongo!” he yelled. “We’re through and there’s juice on the way up the bore right now!” Then his voice took the shakes again, going from wild excitement to terror in a second as the whole rig wobbled on its four great legs!

  “Holy heaven—!” His voice screamed in my ear. “What was that, Pongo? The rig … wait—” I heard the clatter as the telephone at the other end banged down, but a moment later Jimmy was back. “It’s not the rig,” he told me; “the legs are steady as rocks—it’s the whole seabed! Pongo, what’s going on? Holy heaven—”

  This time the telephone went completely dead as the rig moved again, jerking up and down three or four times in rapid succession, shaking everything loose inside the mess storeroom. I was just able to keep my feet. I still had the telephone in my hand, and just for a second or two it came back to life. Jimmy was screaming something incoherently into his end. I remember that I yelled for him to get into a life jacket, that there was something awfully wrong and we were in for big trouble, but I’ll never know if he heard me.

  The rig rocked yet again, throwing me down on the floorboards among a debris of bottles, crates, cans, and packets; and there, skidding wildly about the tilting floor, I collided with a life jacket. God only knows what the thing was doing there in the storeroom—there were normally two or three on the platform and others were kept in the equipment shed, only taken out following storm warnings, which it goes without saying we hadn’t had. B
ut somehow I managed to struggle into it and make my way into the mess proper before the next upheaval.

  By that time, over the roar of the wind and waves outside and the slap of wave-crests against the outer walls of the mess, I could hear a whipping of free-running pulleys and a high-pitched screaming of revving, uncontrolled gears—and there were other screams, too.

  I admit that I was in a blind panic, crashing my way through the tumble of chairs and tables in the mess toward the door leading out onto the platform, when the greatest shock so far tilted the floor to what must have been thirty degrees and saved me any further effort. In that moment—as I flew against the door, bursting it open, and floundering out into the storm—I knew for sure that the old Sea-Maid was going down. Before, it had been only a possibility, a mad, improbable possibility; but now I knew for sure. Half stunned from my collision with the door, I was thrown roughly against the platform rails, to cling there for dear life in the howling, tearing wind and chill, rushing mist and spray.

  And that was when I saw it!

  I saw it … and in my utter disbelief I relaxed my hold on the rails and slid under them into the throat of that banshee, demon storm that howled and tore at the trembling girders of the old Sea-Maid.

  Even as I fell a colossal wave smashed into the rig, breaking two of the legs as though they were nothing stronger than matchsticks. The next instant I was in the sea, picked up, and swept away on the crest of that same wave. Even in the dizzy, sickening rush as the great wave hurled me aloft, I tried to spot Sea-Maid in the maelstrom of wind, mist, and ocean. It was futile and I gave it up in order to save all my effort for my own battle for survival.

  I don’t remember much after that—at least, not until I was picked up, and even that’s not too clear. I do remember, though, while fighting the icy water, a dreadful fear of being eaten alive by fish; but so far as I know there were none about. I remember, too, being hauled aboard the lifeboat from a sea that was flat as a pancake and calm as a millpond.

  The next really lucid moment came when I woke up to find myself between clean sheets in a Bridlington hospital.

  But there, I’ve held off from telling the important part, and for the same reason Joe Borszowski held off: I don’t want to be thought a madman. Well, I’m not mad, Johnny, but I don’t suppose for a single moment that you’ll take my story seriously—nor, for that matter, will Seagasso suspend any of its North Sea commitments—but at least I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing that I tried to warn you.

  Now, remember if you will what Borszowski told me about great, alien beings lying asleep and imprisoned beneath the bed of the sea—evil “gods” capable of controlling the weather and the actions of lesser creatures—and then explain the sight I saw before I found myself floundering in that mad ocean as the old Sea-Maid went down.

  It was simply a gusher, Johnny, a gusher—but one such as I’d never seen before in my whole life and hope never to see again! For instead of reaching to the heavens in one solid black column, it pulsed upward, pumping up in short, strong jets at a rate of about one spurt in every five seconds—and it wasn’t oil, Johnny! Oh, God, it wasn’t oil! Booze or none, I swear I wasn’t drunk; not so drunk as to make me color-blind at any rate.

  For old Borszowski was right, there was one of those great god-things down there deep in the bed of the ocean, and our drill had chopped right into it!

  Whatever it was, it had blood pretty much like ours—good and thick and red—and a great heart strong enough to pump that blood up the bore-hole right to the surface! Think of it, that monstrous giant of a thing down there in the rocks beneath the sea! How could we possibly have known? How could we have guessed that right from the beginning our instruments had been working at maximum efficiency, that those odd, regular blips recorded on the seismograph had been nothing more than the beating of a great submarine heart?

  All of which explains, I hope, my resignation.

  Bernard “Pongo” Jordan

  Bridlington, Yorks.

  X

  The Third Visitor

  (From de Marigny’s Notebooks)

  The early morning was quite close, uncomfortable almost, so that by the time Titus Crow and I had finished with the astonishing Jordan document Peaslee had taken off his coat. He had adopted a very businesslike look, donning small-lensed spectacles, rolling up his shirt sleeves and busying himself with a number of files, notebooks, and various other papers from his briefcase. He was past his tired peak, he told us, and having slept on the plane coming over, he had also now just about managed to adjust his body-clock. He looked forward, though, to a short nap in the Mercedes on the way back to London and the British Museum; a nap en route, he assured us, should put him completely to rights.

  “London and the British Museum”; the normal world seemed light-years away. And yet, through the latticed windows, dawn was spreading her pale fingers over the distant capital in what seemed a very normal fashion, and the new day was well on its way. Crow and I were now very tired, but such were those feelings of general well-being engendered by the protective proximity of the star-stones, that neither of us minded the heaviness of our bodies—at least we were completely clear-headed; our minds were free of morbid Cthonian undertones.

  It was as I went into the galley to cook bacon and eggs for an early breakfast, as I passed down the short joining corridor between the bunkhouse and the galley proper, that I was thrown against the galley door when the houseboat suddenly rocked violently. From the bunk-room came the clattering of falling glasses, the thud of books, and Crow’s startled query: “What on earth … ?”

  I opened the galley window and looked out on deck and across the river. The sun’s edge was just showing above the horizon of trees and distant roofs. There was a very slight breeze up, but the river was white with mist.

  Mentally echoing Titus Crow, I wondered: “What on earth … ?” Had some lunatic gone up the river in a large motorboat at speed? But no, that could hardly be, I had heard no engine. In any case, it would have taken an ocean liner to create a wake like that! Even as these thoughts passed through my head Seafree keeled again, this time to an angle of about twenty degrees. Immediately, I found myself thinking of the Jordan document.

  “De Marigny!” Crow’s shout came from the open window even as I heard him skidding about on the momentarily sloping deck. “Henri.” His feet clattered. “Get that damned pistol of yours, quickly!” There was urgency in his voice, unnatural strain—and horror!

  “No, no!” came the professors shouted denial as the boat dipped and swayed. “That’s not the way, Crow. Silver bullets are no use against this thing!”

  What thing?

  I scrambled back through the galley door and down the corridor, across the bunkhouse floor, and up the three steps to the deck. There, clinging to the rail, their faces drawn and white, stood the two men. As the boat steadied itself, I joined them. “What is it, Titus? What’s wrong?”

  “There’s something out there, Henri, in the water. Something big! It just now made a rush at the boat—stopped about fifty feet short and sank down again into the water—a Sea-Shoggoth, I think, exactly like those dream-things I told you about.”

  “Yes, a Sea-Shoggoth,” Peaslee breathed. “One of the Deep Ones. All the way from Deep G’ll-ho to the north, I imagine. It can’t harm us—” He sounded sure enough of his facts, but nevertheless I noticed that his hushed voice trembled.

  The mist was thick on the river, its milky tendrils and eddies coming almost up to the deck of the houseboat, making it seem as though we stood aboard a mere raft. I could hear the chop as the disturbed waters slapped the hull, but I could see nothing. I felt my pulse start to race and the short hairs prickling at the back of my neck. “I’ll get my pistol,” I said, intending to go back down into the boat.

  As I turned from the rail Peaslee grabbed my arm. “Useless, de Marigny,” he snapped. “Pistols, no matter what kind of ammunition they take, are useless against this type of creature!”
/>   “But where is the thing?” I asked, peering again at the misted waters.

  As if in answer to my nervous question, indeed, as the last word left my lips, an iridescent, blackly shining column of what looked like mud or tar embedded with fragments of broken, multicolored glass rose up out of the swirling river mist. Eight feet wide and all of twenty feet tall, dripping water and bobbing like some great sentient cork, the thing towered above the water … and the sun glinted from its surface and from its myriad eyes!

  The creature—stank! There is simply no other way of expressing the nauseating stench that issued from it. Lines from Alhazred again leaped into my mind: “By their smell shall ye know them,” and I knew exactly what the so-called “mad” Arab had meant! It was the very smell of evil. Twice in a matter of hours my senses had been thus assaulted, and this time the worst! Thank the Lord that the houseboat was upwind, what little wind there was, of the horror; we received only a minimum, but even then too much of that miasmal, deep-sea effluvium.

  It had mouths, too, many of them, but I caught only a glimpse. As the thing made a frantic, nodding rush at the boat I threw myself down the steps after Kant’s pistol. No matter what Peaslee said, I refused to stand undefended against that! Any weapon seemed better than none at all. In my panic I had completely forgotten the fact that we were not at all weaponless, that in fact we had the best possible protection! In any case, I couldn’t find the pistol. Where had I put the thing?