by Brian Lumley
Crow and I, both equally baffled by this new phase of the professor’s revelations, looked at one another in consternation. “No,” I eventually answered. “I don’t think we do see.”
“Let me explain,” Peaslee offered. “We have men with the big companies; with Seagasso, Lescoil, the NCB, ICI, Norgas, even in governmental circles. Now a few of these men are Americans, trained at Miskatonic and slotted in over here when opportunities presented themselves, but most are of course natives of Great Britain contacted and recruited over the years through the machinery of the Wilmarth Foundation. We have, too, interested parties in certain ministries: such as the Ministry of Land and Development, Agriculture and Fisheries, National Resources, etc.
“The ‘Great Britain Operation,’ as we call it, has been planned for some years now, but when this opportunity came along—that is, the opportunity to do a bit of incidental, valuable recruiting, as well as to intervene in what might well have turned out to be a very nasty affair—well, it seemed to me that this was the perfect time to put the plan into operation.
“I will in fact supervise and coordinate the project in its entirety. You two gentlemen will no doubt be able to help me tremendously in this, and learn a lot about the Foundation’s workings at the same time. For instance, though these may seem relatively minor points to you, I don’t like the idea of driving on the left, I’m not at all sure of your British road signs, and I’m damned if I’ll be driven around for the next few months in a cab! The latter’s out of the question, anyway, for we’ll be seeing some pretty strange things before we’re through, and the presence of a cabdriver is just not acceptable. Obviously, the public must be kept in the dark about all this. We’ll need a large automobile—”
“I have a Mercedes garaged at Henley,” Crow hastily put in.
“And of course I’ll need someone with a good knowledge of British geography, topography, and so on. All of which is where you gentlemen should come in very nicely,” Peaslee finished.
“But wait,” I dazedly protested, one part of my mind following the conversation, another groping at what had gone before. “You were talking about drilling?”
“Ah, yes! So I was. I’m often guilty of a little mental wandering when I’m a bit weary. You’ll excuse me, de Marigny, but I’ve a lot on my mind and these details are just routine to me. Drilling, yes—well, the plan is this: once we’ve ascertained where the nests are, we’ll choose two or three centrally situated drilling sites as far out of the way of the general public as we can manage, and then we’ll commence the drilling of our star-wells—”
“Star-wells?” This, again, was from me.
“Yes, that’s what we call them. Deep shafts to accommodate star-stones. We drill five equally spaced star-wells in a great circle some hundreds of yards across, and one central hole to take the eggs. The idea is that once we let the eggs down the central shaft—until which time, incidentally, they’ll be kept ‘prisoned’ by the proximity of star-stones so that local adults will not know of their whereabouts—we can expect the adults to come burrowing to the rescue. Of course, their rescue attempt will fail! As soon as our telepaths and instruments tell us of the arrival of a sufficiently large number of the adult creatures … then we’ll let down the star-stones into the perimeter wells. All the Cthonians within the circle will be trapped.”
“But these creatures can move in three dimensions, you know, Wingate,” Crow pointed out. “Surely your star-stones will be lying on a strictly two-dimensional plane? What’s to stop the adult Cthonians from simply burrowing straight down—or worse still—up?”
“No, the circle ought to be sufficient, Titus. We’ve experimented, as I’ve said—you remember what I told you of the egg we hatched?—and we’re pretty sure that our plan is sound. What we might do, if we’re lucky enough to be able to get our hands on them at the right time, is this: instead of using eggs we’ll use young female creatures! They’ll provide a sure draw. And then, even if the adults do try to make an escape after we lower the star-stones, it will be far too late!”
Crow held up his hands and shook his head. “Hold on a minute, Peaslee! First off, where will you get your young females; and secondly, why will any attracted adults be ‘too late’ to get away?” Doubt was showing on my friend’s face again.
“As to your first question,” the professor answered, “we have a regular hatchery at Miskatonic. We took two dozen eggs from G’harne, and we’ve collected others since then. That’s where your four eggs are destined for, by the way. Your second question? Well, as soon as the adults appear on the scene and after we’ve set the star-stones in place—then we flood the whole underground area by pumping water down the shafts under high pressure!”
For a moment there was silence, then Crow said: “And you say there’ll be a number of these sites?”
“Yes, and the timings for the operations will of course be perfectly synchronized—simply to ensure that if the Cthonians do manage to get ‘distress signals’ out past the star-stones, well, at least we’ll have cleaned out a large number of them at one swipe. In that event, it would mean searching for a new plan of attack for later projects, but …” Peaslee frowned thoughtfully for a moment, then added: “But anyway, after we’ve had this initial bash at the burrowers—then we’ll be able to turn our attentions to the other British CCD.”
“Others?” I exploded. “What others?” I noticed that Crow seemed less surprised.
“Well, we know that there are a number of different types of these beings, Henri, these dwellers in the deep earth,” the professor patiently explained. “And therefore it’s a fair bet that Great Britain has her share. Some, though, are apparently far more vulnerable to orthodox weapons. One of our men—an Englishman, by the way—has had a certain amount of personal experience with just such a being. This same chap is a drilling expert; a fellow known as ‘Pongo’ Jordan, who used to be with Seagasso’s oceangoing rigs. Now he’s a member of the Foundation—but it took a lot of persuasion. Ostensibly, he works for Land Development. He’ll be supervising the positioning of the star-wells once David Winters’ report is in.”
“Jordan … ?” Crow mused, then looked startled. He frowned. “Not that same Jordan who … And your telepath, David Winters! Well, I’ll be—”
“Go on,” Peaslee said. “Do you know Jordan and Winters?”
“I know that the Cthonians fear them desperately, as they fear you,” Crow answered. Then my friend proceeded to tell the professor of his dreams during the period when the seagoing rigs were stricken with that series of puzzling disasters, following this up with his latest nightmare wherein the Cthonians had tried to “buy him off.”
When Crow had done, Peaslee excitedly dug into his great briefcase. “You know, you two,” he said, “when I first decided to fly over here, I had no idea it would be so easy to convert you to the Foundation’s cause. Because of my uncertainty I gathered together certain testimonials which I hoped would help to convince you. One of these is a letter Jordan wrote to one of his superiors shortly after he lost his rig, Sea-Maid. Ah! Here it is. I’m sure you’ll be interested to read it.”
IX
The Night Sea-Maid Went Down
(From the Files of the Wilmarth Foundation)
Queen of the Wolds Inn
Cliffside
Bridlington, E. Yorks.
29th Nov.
J. H. Grier (Director)
Grier & Anderson
Seagasso
Sunderland, Co. Durham
Dear Johnny,
By now I suppose you’ll have read my “official” report, sent off to you from this address on the fourteenth of the month, three days after the old Sea-Maid went down. How I managed that report I’ll never know—but anyway, I’ve been laid up ever since, so if you’ve been worried about me or wondering why I haven’t let on further about my whereabouts till now, well, it hasn’t really been my fault. I just haven’t been up to doing much writing since the … disaster. Haven’t been up to
much of anything for that matter. God, but I hate the idea of facing a Board of Inquiry!
Anyhow, as you’ll have seen from my report, I’ve made up my mind to quit, and I suppose it’s only right I give you what I can of an explanation for my decision. After all, you’ve been paying me good money to manage your rigs these last four years, and no complaints there. In fact, I’ve no complaints period, nothing Seagasso could sort out at any rate, but I’m damned if I’ll sink sea-wells again. In fact, I’m finished with all prospecting! Sea, land … it makes no real difference now. Why, when I think of what might have happened at any time during the last four years! And now it has happened.
But there I go, stalling again. I’ll admit right now that I’ve torn up three versions of this letter, pondering the results of them reaching you; but now, having thought it all out, frankly, I don’t give a damn what you do with what I’m going to tell you. You can send an army of headshrinkers after me if you like. One thing I’m sure of, though, and that’s this—whatever I say won’t make you suspend the North Sea operations. “The Country’s Economy,” and all that.
At least my story ought to give old Anderson a laugh; the hard, stoic, unimaginative old bastard! And no doubt about it, the story I have to tell is fantastic enough. I suppose it could be argued that I was “in my cups” that night (and it’s true enough, I’d had a few), but I can hold my drink, as you well know. Still, the facts—as I know them—drunk or sober, remain simply fantastic.
Now, you’ll remember that right from the start there was something funny about the site off Hunterby Head. The divers had trouble; the geologists, too, with their instruments; it was the very devil of a job to float Sea-Maid down from Sunderland and get her anchored there; and all that was only the start of the trouble. Nevertheless, the preliminaries were all completed by early in October.
We hadn’t drilled more than six hundred feet into the seabed when we brought up that first star-shaped thing. Now, Johnny, you know something? I wouldn’t have given two damns for the thing, except I’d seen one before. Old Chalky Gray (who used to be with the Lescoil rig, Ocean-Gem, out of Liverpool) had sent me one only a few weeks before his platform and all the crew, including Chalky himself, went down twelve miles out from Withnersea. Somehow, when I saw what came up in the big core—that same star-shape—I couldn’t help but think of Chalky and see some sort of nasty parallel. The one he’d sent me came up in a core too, you see? The Ocean-Gem wasn’t the only rig lost last year in so-called “freak storms”!
Now regarding those star-shaped stones, something more: I wasn’t the only one to escape with my life the night Sea-Maid went down. No, that’s not strictly true, I was the only one to live through that night—but there was a certain member of the team who saw what was coming and got out before it happened. And it was because of the star-thing that he went!
Joe Borszowski was the man—superstitious as hell, panicky, spooked at the sight of a mist on the sea—and when he saw the star-thing … !
It happened like this:
We’d drilled a difficult bore through some very hard stuff when, as I’ve said, a core-sample produced the first of those stars. Now, Chalky had reckoned the one he sent me to be a fossilized starfish of sorts, from a time when the North Sea used to be warm; a very ancient thing. And I must admit that with its five-pointed shape, and being the size of a small starfish, I believed him to be correct. Anyway, when I showed this second star to old Borszowski he nearly went crackers! He swore we were in for trouble, demanded we all stop drilling right away and head for land, insisted that our location was “accursed,” and generally carried on like a mad thing without explaining why.
Well, I couldn’t just leave it at that; if one of the lads was around the twist, you know (meaning Borszowski), he could well affect the whole operation, jeopardize the whole thing; especially if his madness took him at an important time. My immediate reaction was to want him off the rig, but the radio had been giving us a bit of bother so that I couldn’t call in Wes Atlee, the chopper pilot. Yes, I’d seriously thought of having the Pole lifted off by chopper. The gangs can be damned superstitious, as you well know, and I didn’t want Joe infecting the other lads with his wild fancies. As it turned out, that sort of action wasn’t necessary, for in no time at all old Borszowski was around apologizing for his outburst and trying to show how sorry he was about all the fuss he’d made. Something told me, though, that he’d been quite serious about his fears—whatever they were.
And so, to put the Pole’s mind at rest (if I possibly could), I decided to have the rig’s geologist, Carson, take the star to bits, have a closer look at it, and then let me know what the thing actually was. Of course, he’d tell me it was simply a fossilized starfish; I’d report the fact to Borszowski; things would be back to normal. So naturally, when Carson told me that it wasn’t a fossil, that he didn’t know exactly what it was—well, I kept that bit of information to myself and told Carson to do the same. I was sure that whatever the trouble was with Borszowski, well, it wouldn’t be helped any by telling him that the star-thing was not a perfectly ordinary, completely explicable object.
The drilling brought up two or three more of the stars down to about a thousand feet, but nothing after that, so for a period I forgot all about them. As it happened, I should have listened a bit more willingly to the Pole—and I would have, too, if I’d followed my intuition.
You see, I’ve got to admit that I’d been spooky myself right from the start. The mists were too heavy, the sea too quiet … things were altogether too queer all the way down the line. Of course, I didn’t experience any of the troubles the divers or geologists had known—I didn’t join the rig until she was in position, ready to chew—but I was certainly in on it from then on. It had really started with the sea-phones, even before the advent of the stars.
Now, you know I’m not knocking your phones, Johnny; they’ve been a damn good thing ever since Seagasso developed them, giving readings right down to the inch, almost, so’s we could tell just exactly when the drill was going through into gas or oil. And they didn’t let us down this time, either … we simply failed to recognize or heed their warnings, that’s all.
In fact, there were lots of warnings, but, as I’ve said, it started with the sea-phones. We’d put a phone down inside each leg of the rig, right onto the seabed where they sat “listening” to the drill as it cut its way through the rocks, picking up the echoes as the steel worked its way down and the sounds of the cutting rebounded from the strata below. And, of course, everything they “heard” was duplicated electronically and fed out to us through our computer. Which was why we believed initially that either the computer was on the blink or one of the phones was shaky. You see, even when we weren’t drilling—when we were changing bits or lining the hole—we were still getting readings from the computer!
Oh, the trouble was there all right, whatever it was, but it was showing up so regularly that we were fooled into believing the fault to be mechanical. On the seismograph, it showed as a regular blip in an otherwise perfectly normal line; a blip that came up bang on time every five seconds or so—blip … blip … blip—very odd! But, seeing that in every other respect the information coming out of the computer was spot on, no one worried overmuch about this inexplicable deviation. The blips were there right to the end, and it was only then that I found a reason for them, but in between there came other difficulties—not the least of them being the trouble with the fish.
Now, if that sounds a bit funny, well, it was a funny business. The lads had rigged up a small platform, slung twenty feet or so below the main platform and about the same height above the water, and in their off-duty hours when they weren’t resting or knocking back a pint in the mess, you could usually see one or two of them down there fishing.
First time we found anything odd in the habits of the fish around the rig was one morning when Nick Adams hooked a beauty. All of three feet long, the fish was, wriggling and yellow in the cold November sunlight.
Nick just about had the fish docked when the hook came out of its mouth so that it fell back among some support-girders down near where leg number four was being washed by a slight swell. It just lay there, flopping about a bit, in the girders. Nick scrambled down after it with a rope around his waist while his brother Dave hung onto the other end. And what do you think? When he got down to it, damned if the fish didn’t go for him! It actually made to bite him, flopping after him on the girders, and snapping its jaws until he had to yell for Dave to haul him up.
Later he told us about it; how the damned thing hadn’t even tried to get back into the sea, seeming more interested in setting its teeth in him than preserving its own life! Now, you’d expect that sort of reaction from a great eel, Johnny, wouldn’t you? But hardly from a cod—not from a North Sea cod!
From then on, Spellman, the diver, couldn’t go down—not wouldn’t, mind you, couldn’t—the fish simply wouldn’t let him. They’d chew on his suit, his air-hose … he got to be so frightened of them that he became quite useless to us. I can’t see as I blame him, though, especially when I think of what later happened to Robertson.
But of course, before Robertson’s accident, there was that further trouble with Borszowski. It was in the sixth week, when we were expecting to break through at any time, that Joe failed to come back off shore leave. Instead, he sent me a long, rambling explanatory letter; and to be truthful, when first I read it, I figured we were better off without him. The man had quite obviously been cracking up for a long time. He went on about monsters, sleeping in great caverns underground and especially under the seas, waiting for a chance to take over the surface world. He said that those star-shaped stones were seals to keep these monster beings (“gods,” he called them) imprisoned; that the gods could control the weather to a degree; that they were capable of influencing the actions of lesser creatures—such as fish, or, occasionally, men—and that he believed one of them must be lying there, locked in the ground beneath the sea, pretty close to where we were drilling. He was frightened we were going to set it loose! The only thing that had stopped him from pressing the matter earlier was that then, as now, he’d believed we’d all think he was mad! Finally, though, he’d had to “warn” me, knowing that if anything did happen, he’d never be able to forgive himself if he hadn’t at least tried.
