The Burrowers Beneath

by Brian Lumley

  The houseboat rocked again, yet more violently, and I scrambled back up the steps to the deck empty-handed. Fighting to keep his balance while hanging onto the rail with one hand, Peaslee was holding up a star-stone and shouting at the horror in the water. The thing was already rushing back in yet another monstrous, bobbing charge. My concentration divided itself equally between the professor and the creature bearing down upon the boat. Peaslee was rapidly chanting: “Away, slime of the sea, back to your dark and pressured seat. With the authority of the Elder Gods themselves I command you. Away and leave us in peace!” The tremor had left his voice and his old, slim frame seemed somehow tall and powerful against the backdrop of iridescent horror sprouting beyond him from the river mist.

  Before Peaslee’s chanting and his showing of the star-stone there had been no sound from the Deep One other than the natural noise of the water rushing past its nightmare shape as it charged. Now—

  It was screaming, apparently in rage and frustration, certainly in a manner suggesting some sort of alien mental agony. Its—voice?—had been just too far up the sonic scale before; there had been a high, almost inaudible whine in the air. Now, though, the professor’s chanted words, repeated over and over again, were almost drowned out and I had to grit my teeth and slam my hands to my ears as the creature lowered its hideous cries. Never before in my life had I heard so unbelievable a cacophony of incredible sounds all in one, and it was my fervent prayer that I never hear such sounds again!

  The screaming was still in the main high-pitched, like a steam engine’s whistle, but there were grunted undertones, throbbing gasps or emissions such as the reptiles and great frogs make, impossible to put down on paper. Two more bobbing, water-spraying, abortive attempts it made to breach the invisible barrier between its awful body and the houseboat—and then it turned, sank, and finally left a thrashing, thinning wake in the rapidly clearing mist as it headed for London and the open sea beyond.

  For a long time there was an awkward hush, wherein only the subsiding slap of wavelets against the hull, our erratic and harsh breathing, and the outraged cheeping of momentarily quieted birds disturbed the silence. Peaslee’s voice, a little less steady now that it was all over, finally got through to me after a second asking of his question:

  “How about breakfast, Henri? Won’t it be spoiling?”

  Crow laughed harshly as I explained that I had not yet managed to get breakfast started. He said: “Breakfast? By God, Peaslee, but you won’t catch me eating on this boat! I won’t be here long enough—not now!”

  “Perhaps you’re right,” the professor hurriedly agreed. “Yes, the sooner we get on our way, the better. We were perfectly safe, I assure you, but such things are always unnerving.”

  “Unnerving!” Ye Gods!

  It took us half an hour to get packed up; by 9:45 we were on our way in Crow’s Mercedes.

  We breakfasted at 10:30 in a pub on the approaches to the city proper. Guinness and ham sandwiches. We all were very hungry. As we finished off a second bottle each (Peaslee’s surprise at the black brew’s pick-me-up quality was apparent) we also saw an end to our conversation regarding the morning’s monstrous visitor.

  Miskatonic and the Wilmarth Foundation, the professor declared, had long suspected a deep-sea citadel north of the British Isles, peopled by such creatures as only the Cthulhu Cycle of myth might spawn. They had good reasons for such suspicions; apparently G’ll-ho was given mention in a fair number of the great works of named and anonymous occult authors. (“Occult” is a natural part of my vocabulary; I doubt if I shall ever learn how to leave it out of my life or thoughts, written or spoken.) Abdul Alhazred, in the Necronomicon, had named the place as “Sunken G’lohee, in the Isles of Mist,” and he had hinted that its denizens were the spawn of Cthulhu himself! More recently, Gordon Walmsley of Goole had recorded similar allusions in his alleged “spoof” death-notes. Titus Crow, too, considering his dreams of a vast underwater fortress somewhere off the Vestmann Islands, where Surtsey belched forth in the agony of volcanic birth in 1963, concurred with the possibility of just such a submarine seat of suppurating evil.

  Assuredly, the professor had it, the creature we had seen that morning had originated in G’ll-ho. It had been sent, no doubt, on the telepathic instructions of Shudde-M’ell or his kind, to deliver the death-blow to two dangerous men. If Peaslee had not presented himself when he did … it did not bear thinking about.

  While the professor’s explanation regarding our visitor’s origin seemed reasonably satisfactory to me, Crow was far from easy about it. Why then, he wanted to know, had similar beasts not been sent to deal with Sea-Maid when that rig had been drilling its inadvertently destructive bore off Hunterby Head? Again Peaslee had the answer to hand. Some of these horrors, he reminded us, were in direct opposition to one another—such as Cthulhu and Hastur. The type of creature as called up those cyclonic forces which sent Sea-Maid to the bottom, while it was not necessarily an enemy of the Lord of R’lyeh, was certainly inferior in the mythos; it was simply too low for Cthulhu, or any other of the greater powers of the CCD to bother with. True, it had had the capacity to partly control the elements, and lesser creatures such as fishes, but the experience of the Wilmarth Foundation (which had dealt with such things before) was that these were the least harmful of all the inmates of the Elder Gods’ prisons.

  The theory was, in fact, that such creatures were nothing more than low-order minions of the Great Ones proper, but that they had been imprisoned separately because of their huge size—in much the same way as large animals are kept in separate cages in zoos while smaller creatures are housed together. Certainly Shudde-M’ell had not been prisoned alone, as witness the G’harne eggs and the monstrous spread of the Cthonians throughout the world. Peaslee quite expected, before we were through with the Great Britain Project, that we should see an end put to any number of such beings. (Eventually, we were, in fact, witness to many such “kills,” and one which sticks in my mind quite vividly still, though I have at times tried to forget it. But I must keep that horror for later.)

  The Deep Ones, though, quite apart from these appalling subterrene giants, came in a number of sorts and sizes. Their name, in fact, was a group heading, under which fell all manner of fishlike, protoplasmic, batrachian, and semihuman beings, united together in the worship of Dagon and the anticipated resurrection of Great Cthulhu. Neither Crow nor I was totally ignorant of these Deep Ones; we had both heard, over a period of time and from diverse sources, mad whispers echoing down the years of frightful occurrences at Innsmouth, a decaying seaport on the New England coast of America. Indeed, such was the macabre nature of the stories that leaked out of Innsmouth in the late twenties that certain of them, almost a decade later, were fictionalized in a number of popular fantastic magazines. The theme of these rumors (no longer rumors, for Peaslee assured us of their established fact; he positively asserted that Federal files were extant, copies of which had long been “acquired” by the Wilmarth Foundation, which detailed the almost unbelievable occurrences of 1928) was that in the early 1800s certain traders of the old East Indian and Pacific routes had had unsavory dealings with degenerate Polynesian islanders. These natives had had their own “gods,” namely Cthulhu and Dagon (the latter having seen earlier worship by the Philistines and Phoenicians), and worshipped them in disgusting and barbaric ways. Eventually the New England sailors were inveigled into taking part in just such practices, apparently against the better judgment of many of them, and yet it seemed that the ways of the heathen Kanakas were not without their own doubtful rewards!

  Innsmouth prospered, grew fat and rich as trade picked up, and soon strange gold changed hands in the streets of that doomed town. Esoteric churches opened—or rather temples—for purposes of even darker worship (the many seafarers had brought back strangely ichthyic Polynesian brides), and who could say how far things might have gone if, in 1927, the Federal Government had not been alerted to the growing menace?

  In t
he winter of 1927—28, Federal agents moved in, and the end result was that half Innsmouth’s inhabitants were banished (Peaslee had it that they had been sent off to scattered naval and military prisons and out-of-the-way asylums) and depth-charges were dropped off Devil’s Reef in the Atlantic coast. There, in the untold depths of a natural rift, existed a weed-shrouded city of alien proportions and dimensions—Y’ ha-nthlei—peopled by the Deep Ones, into which “select” order many of the New England traders and their hideously blasphemous offspring had been admitted since contact was first established with the Polynesians a century earlier. For those islanders of one hundred years gone had known far more than a close liaison with the Deep Ones of Polynesia—and therefore so eventually did the New Englanders.

  The seafaring traders paid dearly for their adoption of the Kanaka “faith”—and for less mentionable things—for by the time the Federal agents took control of Innsmouth hardly a single family existed in the town untainted by the shocking disfigurations of a stigma known locally as “the Innsmouth Look.”

  The Innsmouth Look! Frightful degenerations of mind and tissue … scaly skin, webbed fingers and toes … bulging fishlike eyes … gills!

  And it was the Innsmouth Look that heralded the change from land-dweller to amphibian, from human to Deep One! Many of the town’s inhabitants who escaped the horrified government agents did so by swimming out to Devil’s Reef and diving down to Y’ha-nthlei, there to dwell with the Deep Ones proper, “in wonder and glory forever.”

  These, then, were members of that seething submarine sect—but there were others.

  There were others, more truly alien (Crow’s “survivors”), leftovers from an abyss of time aeons before their aquatic phase, when the Earth knew the semiprotoplasmic tread of them and their masters and none other. It was one of these latter beings that had attempted the attack upon the Seafree—which only Peaslee’s star-stones and chantings had held at bay.

  With all talk over, our meal done, and feeling the better for it, we left the pub and continued on our way. The journey was uneventful and quiet, with Crow driving while I relaxed in the back of the car. Beside me, Peaslee nodded and drowsed, no doubt making final subconscious adjustments to his body-clock.

  That night, after the professor had paid a long, lone afternoon call to the British Museum, we all three congregated to sleep at Blowne House. For the first time in what seemed like years I slept peacefully, dreamlessly; so that not even a certain vociferous tree in the garden, creaking through the dark hours, could disturb my slumbers in any other than a tiny degree.

  XI

  Horrors of Earth

  (From de Marigny’s Notebooks)

  Many & multiform are ye dim horrors of Earth, infesting her ways from ye very prime. They sleep beneath ye unturned stone; they rise with ye tree from its root; they move beneath ye sea, & in subterranean places they dwell in ye inmost adyta. Some there are long known to man, & others as yet unknown, abiding ye terrible latter days of their revealing. Those which are ye most dreadful & ye loathliest of all are haply still to be declared.

  Abdul Alhazred: Feery’s

  Notes on the Necronomicon

  Some months have passed; they seem like years. Certainly I have aged years. Many of the things I have seen have proved almost too much to believe—too fantastic even to retain—and, indeed, I actually find the pictures fading from my memory. As the days go by, I have more and more trouble focusing my mind upon any set instance, any individual incident; and yet, paradoxically, it is undeniable that certain things have left livid scars upon the surface of my mind.

  Perhaps this reluctance of mine to remember is simply a healing process, and who can say but that when I have “healed” completely the entire episode might well have vanished forever from my memory?

  It is because of this—because there is a very real chance of my “forgetting” all that has gone since the advent of Professor Wingate Peaslee of Miskatonic—that now, without any conscious attempt to stress the horror in any way, in an earnest effort to get the thing down as unemotionally as possible, I make the following entries in my notebook.

  Possibly my rejection began even before Peaslee and the subsequent horrors, for I find that those monstrous occurrences aboard Seafree before his coming are also dimming in my mind’s eye, and to recall them in any sort of detail I find it necessary to resort to a reading of my earlier notebooks. Yet this, surely, is a mercy. Who was it said that the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents? And yet, if only to retain the following as an account as opposed to a memory, I find that I must now correlate at least certain occurrences … .

  It was late August. The three of us, myself, Crow, and Peaslee, were looking down from a low bramble- and gorse-girt hill across an area of wild and open moorland. Of course, it is not my intention to divulge our exact whereabouts as they were, but we were well “out-of-the-way.” Three weed-grown and neglect-obscured tracks led out of the area, and each of them, from a distance some four miles out from the hub of the operation, carried warning notices such as: Danger, Unexploded Bombs, and Government Property, Keep Out, or Tank Range, Firing in Progress! Such notices had had Crow somewhat perturbed for a time, until Peaslee reminded him of the Wilmarth Foundation’s influence in high places—even in certain governmental circles! To reinforce the posted warnings a number of Foundation men with guard dogs prowled the perimeter of the area. It would be disastrous to allow the leak of any untoward tales into the mundane world outside.

  No more than a mile away, and in a central, strangely barren area, the superstructure of a great drilling-rig towered up to clear but gray skies. Beneath that threatening pylon of girders and gears, fourteen hundred feet down in the bedrock, one of those monsters met before by Pongo Jordan and his ill-fated rig Sea-Maid slumbered in its ancient prison. That the Cthonian was in fact prisoned had long been ascertained; the telepath who first tracked the thing down had recognized well-known mind-patterns and had picked up mental impressions implying great size. It was indeed one of those outsize, low-order minions of the Old Ones which, in Peaslee’s own words, “were the least harmful of all the inmates of the Elder Gods’ prisons.”

  Despite a warm sun the afternoon breeze, seeming to spring from somewhere down in the direction of the drilling-rig, was surprisingly chill. We had the collars of our coats turned up against it. Peaslee was in walkie-talkie contact with a British telepath, Gordon Finch, whose mental images—relayed to us as he received them and as the climax drew to a close—came over the air loud and clear. The huge Cthonian (possibly undisturbed for millennia) had started to emerge from its comalike slumbers some hours before and was now becoming more alert, its monstrous mind forming rather clearer pictures for Finch to “tune in” on. Crow, powerful binoculars about his neck, peered intently into lenses sighted on the matchstick people and Dinky-Toy vehicles moving about down in the distant spiderweb of paths and tracks cut through the grayly withered gorse and heather.

  A Land Rover, churning sand and browned gorse flowers, issued blue exhaust smoke as it powered through dry, scanty foliage at the foot of our hill. The bright yellow bandanna of the driver identified him as Bernard “Pongo” Jordan himself. He was on his way up to our vantage point, from which he hoped to photograph the kill. This in no way reflected a morbid “thing” of Pongo’s, on the contrary, for any and all information on the CCD was of the utmost importance to the Wilmarth Foundation. After death most of the Cthonians rotted so fast that identification of their matter was literally impossible—and very few of the various species had anything even remotely approaching similarities of makeup! Even the count of the heartbeat—or the beat of whatever organ the creature possessed which might stand for a heart—would prove of value; and it was that chiefly, the gory spurt of alien juices, that Pongo intended to film.

  In a matter of minutes the Rover had bumped its way up to the crest upon which we stood. Pongo slewed the vehicle about and parked it none t
oo carefully beside Crow’s big black Mercedes. Before the motor coughed itself out the huge Yorkshireman had joined us. He pulled a hip-flask from the pocket of his denim jacket and took a deep draft before offering the whiskey to Crow, who declined with a smile.

  “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 of 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!”