The Burrowers Beneath

by Brian Lumley

  Ce’haiie ep-ngh fl’hur G’harne fhtagn,

  Ce’haiie fhtagn ngh Shudde-M’ell.

  “Nowhere to turn,” Crow gasped, still reversing, “but if I can back her up far enough—”

  Shattering his hopes and the unspoken prayers of both of us, the mist, as if answering some hellish call (which I can readily believe it was), fell in opaque and undulating density all about us.

  “My God!” I gasped, as again Crow brought the car to a halt.

  “Can’t see a thing,” my friend shouted, his face gray now as the surrounding wall of ghostly gloom without. “You’ll have to get out, de Marigny, and quickly! The windows have misted over completely. Put your hand in the center of the rear window, and walk down the middle of the road until you find a spot where I can turn the car around. Can you do it?”

  “I’ll damned well try,” I croaked, my mouth dry with nameless fear.

  “You’ll need do more than try,” he grimly told me as I opened the door. “If not … we’re done for!”

  I slammed the door behind me, ran around to the back of the car, and pressed my right palm to the damp glass of the rear window. The engine roared and Crow’s shout came to me from his open window: “Good, Henri—now walk up the road, or better still sit on the trunk, and guide me by moving your hand left or right as the road bends. Good, that’s it, we’re off!”

  I continued as I had been instructed, sitting on the trunk and moving my hand behind me over the glass of the window, directing Crow as he reversed the big car carefully along the mist-shrouded, narrow road. On three or four separate occasions rocks tumbled down from above, dislodged from the unseen heights by continued subterranean tremblings; and all the while I could sense, at the back of my mind, Their awful, droning chanting!

  After what seemed like several ages the mist seemed to lift a little, the road widened, and there appeared a shallow, weed-choked reentry in the cliff-face just wide enough to accommodate the car. With a warning cry to Crow, I slid from the trunk, ran around to the front, and directed him as he began to swing the rear end of the Mercedes off the road and into the cleft.

  At this point I came very close to disaster. For suddenly, without any sort of warning, there came a low rumble from deep in the ground and the whole section of road where I stood jerked and shook violently. I was pitched backward, off balance, over the edge of the road and head-over-heels down the steep decline beyond. Fortunately I did not fall far, no more than twelve feet or so, but I landed jarringly on my shoulder. Dazedly I struggled to my feet. I was on a wide natural ledge, beyond which the ground fell away and down to the unseen valley below. Again the mist had thickened and now there was a perceptible and rapidly increasing aura of dread and hideous expectancy in the damp air.

  “Crow!” I yelled, trying vainly to scramble up the steep incline to the road. “Titus, where are you?”

  The next instant I was faced with something so monstrously terrifying that for a moment I thought my heart must stop. To my left, at a distance of no more than fifteen feet, the very limit of my vision in the mist, the face of the pebbly incline burst outward in a shower of stones and earth—and then—

  —Horror!

  I backed away, unashamedly babbling, screaming Crow’s name repeatedly as the—Thing—came after me. It was octopoid, this dweller in the earth … flowing tentacles and a pulpy gray-black, elongated sack of a body … rubbery … exuding a vilely stinking whitish slime … eyeless … headless, too … . Indeed, I could see no distinguishing features at all other than the reaching, groping tentacles. Or was there—yes!—a lump in the upper body of the thing … a container of sorts for the brain, or ganglia, or whichever diseased organ governed this horror’s loathsome life!

  But it was closer, this spawn of Shudde-M’ell, it was almost upon me! I felt somehow rooted to the spot—fixed immobile, as if my feet were stuck in mental molasses, a fly in the ointment of the Cthonian group-mind—hearing the dreadful droning chant, my eyes wide open and popping and my mouth slack, my hair standing straight up on my head … .

  My star-stone!

  Automatically, through all the shattering terror of my fear, I found myself reaching for that talisman of the Elder Gods—but my jacket, with the star-stone safe in the inside pocket, was still in the Mercedes where I had left it.

  I was conscious of the ground beneath the pulpy horror before me flowing like water, flowing and steaming in the heat that the hellish Cthonian generated, and of those areas of the creature’s body that touched the ground glowing and changing color constantly. My God! It was upon me! Tentacles reached …

  “De Marigny!” It was Crow’s voice, and even as I heard his cry through the hypnotic chanting and the high-pitched screaming (which I hardly recognized as my own), even as his shout came to me, a star-stone—my own or Crow’s, I didn’t care—fell from above directly in the path of the looming star-spawn … .

  The effect was immediate and definite. The huge, alien slug of a being before me reared back and almost toppled from the ledge; the mind-chants turned instantaneously to mental mewlings and gibberings with overtones of the utmost fear, and with incredible agility the thing finally turned in its slimy tracks to slither and flop away from me along the ledge. At what it must have taken to be a safe distance, with its tentacles whipping in a fearsome rage, the Cthonian turned in toward the cliff-face and moved forward, passing into the wall of earth and rock. For a few moments liquid earth and stone flowed like water from the hole the being left, then that part of the steep incline collapsed and I was left with only the abominable smell of the thing.

  It was then I realized that I was still down on my knees with my hands held out before me; I had frozen in that position when it seemed certain that the Cthonian must take me. At the same time, too, I heard Crow’s voice again, calling me from above. I glanced up. My friend was flat on the road, his face white and staring, his arms outstretched with my jacket dangling from his hands.

  “Quickly, Henri, for God’s sake! Quickly, before they have time to reorganize!”

  I got to my feet, snatched up the precious star-stone, and put it in my trouser pocket, then caught hold of the dangling jacket and scrambled frantically, with Crow’s assistance, to the tarmac surface of the road above. I saw that Crow had managed to get the car turned about, and breathed a sigh of relief as I slipped into the front passenger seat.

  The ground trembled again as Titus put the car into gear, but a second later we were away, tires screaming and lights cutting the curtain of mist like a knife. “A close one, de Marigny,” my friend offered.

  “Close! By God—I never want it any closer!” I told him.

  Half a mile later there was no trace of the mist, and wherever it had gone my headache had gone with it. Once more under control, I asked Crow what he had meant earlier when he mentioned the Foundation’s recent plague of accidents, suicides, and deaths.

  “Yes,” he answered. “Well, you remember how of late our telepaths have been having difficulty contacting the Cthonians; I think I can guess what those monsters have been up to. It dawned on me back there when first we realized something was wrong. I think that the burrowers have been concentrating their powers, massing their minds, overcoming the protective powers of the star-stones to a degree and getting through to Foundation members—just as today they got through to us. They’ve been dealing with us one at a time, which would explain our recent losses. It’s no coincidence, de Marigny, that those losses have been such as to defy any sort of accounting, and it’s this new ability of theirs to get through to us that’s deadened the Foundation’s awareness of what’s been going on! The sooner we let Peaslee and the others know, the better.” He put his foot down on the accelerator and the car sped us safely on our way.

  XIII

  The Very Worm That Gnaws

  (From de Marigny’s Notebooks)

  8th Oct.

  The threat posed by the Cthonian ability to get at us in mass mental-sendings is at an end; a special del
ivery of a great number of star-stones from the United States has seen to that. Also (and as our telepaths have suspected for some time), the remaining Cthonians are attempting a sort of exodus back to Africa; indeed, they have already commenced the move. It was a nest of them, on their way down- and cross-country to the coast, that waylaid Crow and me in that hill pass. They had obviously massed their minds against the two of us—per—haps helped by others of their shuddersome species, possibly even Shudde-M’ell himself, wherever he might be—and unbeknown to us, having overcome the shielding powers of our star-stones, they had thus learned of our plans to drive south to Dover. After that, it had only remained for them to make a special mental effort to lead us away from the route we had intended to take, and then intercept and ambush our car at a favorable spot. We had been meant to die in that initial avalanche of dislodged earth and boulders. The plan had gone astray and they had been forced to try other methods. Overcoming the power of the star-stones in a direct confrontation, however, had proved a far different kettle of fish to doing it en masse and at a distance; and there they failed, when, as has been seen, the sigil of the Elder Gods had the final say. They had doubtless been members of the same nest (the barest nucleus of a nest, thank God, and comparatively young ones at that) that Williams the telepath reported when first he quartered Scotland from his plane; the nest that subsequently seemed to disappear into thin air—or earth, as the case is. We have two telepaths tracking them even now as they burrow in the deep earth.

  10th Oct.

  Peaslee caught a man last night trying to break into his hotel room in London, where he has set up his HQ. He threatened the intruder with a pistol, whereupon the fellow started to froth at the mouth and threw himself over the balcony rail. Peaslee’s quarters are on the fifth floor! The professor escaped involvement in the subsequent police investigations.

  11th Oct.

  Jordan has quickly set up his wells in the now familiar pattern at a spot not far out of Nottingham. He hopes to catch that nest of nightmares Crow and I had dealings with in the hills up north. We are lucky in that the site is an old extensive army barracks complex—“Government Property”—and that the whole area for half a mile around is Out-of-Bounds to the general public, as it is being demolished. The place is scheduled for redevelopment; possibly the construction of a power-station. I have a feeling it’s just as well the place is coming down—particularly if what has happened at some of the other star-well sites should happen there.

  13th Oct.

  Regarding the exodus of the Cthonians: the British Isles are obviously too restricting for the horrors. What with Peaslee and the Wilmarth Foundation—why, the beings are no less prisoned now than were their prime forebears millennia ago in dead G’harne; for here they are being slowly but surely tracked down and destroyed! If those of them that remain—damn few now—can make it back to Africa they stand a good chance of losing themselves completely in that vast continent, later to begin the insidious threat elsewhere. Many of them have already made the crossing beneath the Channel, but that hardly means that they’ve escaped. The Frenchies are doing their bit. The Foundation has men in France, and Peaslee has very big friends in power over there. He gets a lot of confidential letters with the Bibliotheque Nationale postmark.

  There are still a number of the burrowers here in England, though, and during the last few days there have been tremors and minor subsidences all down the country, converging into three definite tracks toward Tenterden. Looking back I see that it was a week ago, on the sixth, that the Foundation trapped and exterminated no less than a dozen of the horrors on Salisbury Plain; and already, of the prisoned, “harmless” species, these islands have just about been cleansed.

  16th Oct.

  The last few weeks have seen a number of arrests by Foundation members of so-called “suspicious persons.” Usually these arrests have been made in areas directly occupied by the members concerned, often on actual star-well sites or in other planned locations. There was that one Peaslee got on the tenth, and two others were picked up in the barracks complex in Notts. Invariably persons thus arrested try to escape, but just as surely if they fail or if they are caught a second time they become instantly bereft of mind and will: the burrowers beneath have no time for failures! For these people are of course under the influence of the CCD—unsound men and women, usually of frail bodies and even frailer minds—but these last few days the number of such incidents has seen a sharp decline.

  20th Oct.

  The insidious, crawling inundation of the British Isles by Shudde-M’ ell’s kin is at an end. Jordan’s wells in their Nottinghamshire locations are being dismantled. That last nest must have got wind of our plans. It made no difference, however, and the end result was the same. They were picked up by a telepath as they made a panic-dash out from Bridlington under the North Sea. They could hardly have chosen a worse route from their own point of view. There is a deep rift, a fault in the submarine strata, fifteen miles out from Bridlington. Our guess was that the horrors would not be too deep in the rocks when they passed beneath the fault. With the Royal Navy’s assistance—ostensibly the command ship and its two submarine subordinates were on “maneuvers”—the place was quickly rigged with very powerful depth-charges; on this occasion there was no trouble from the Deep Ones in any form. At 3:30 this morning, on the instructions of Hank Silberhutte (one of the best of the American telepaths), the bombs were set off by a radio signal from a fishing vessel out of Hull. Silberhutte reports complete success! The Admiralty, as a cover against any leakage of the facts, will put out a press item tomorrow on the supposed discovery of a sunken German World War II warship and the destruction of its huge and dangerously explosive cargo by depth-charge. It would appear that the arms of the Wilmarth Foundation continue to be far-reaching!

  23rd Oct.

  So far as is now known not a single member of any of the diverse Cthonian species remains as a potential horror within Great Britain or her territorial waters. They have all been either destroyed or chased out. From the beginning there have been confused reports from a number of our telepaths on impressions they seemed to be getting from a certain area deep beneath the Yorkshire Moors; but these “reflections,” as the telepaths term such false impressions, have now been discounted. Certainly there is nothing down there of the Cthonians as we have come to know them.

  Here, however, a note of unique interest—“Nessie” is a plesiosaur! Scotland has the world’s last prehistoric monsters; five of them, in fact, two adults and three young ones. A final telepathic check of the entire landmass, from John o’Groats to Land’s End, brought this information to light. Nothing malignant in Loch Ness, on the contrary, but nevertheless the telepaths did pick up the weak, placidly watery thoughts of Earth’s last dinosaurs. God! What wouldn’t I give to be able to break the news to the press … ?

  28th Oct.

  Vive la France! I’m proud to be called de Marigny! Three underground atomic tests in the Algerian Desert in the last twenty-four hours! A few more of the damned horrors that won’t be making it home.

  30th Nov.

  Word has just come in from Peaslee, now back at Miskatonic, that those phases of the American Project which were carried out simultaneous with certain of the major operations in Great Britain were more than moderately successful. It must be admitted, though, that in the United States and South America the task is far greater and the horrors apparently far more diverse and not confined alone to subterranean planes of existence. Certain wooded and mountainous regions (chiefly the Catskills, the Adirondacks, and the Rockies), the Great Lakes and other, more remote or obscure stretches of water; vast areas in and about New England, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, and the Gulf of Mexico; and a dozen other places along the Andes in South America (there’ll be trouble there), are all scheduled for the most minute mental and physical investigation and eventual “pest control,” to put it in the professor’s own words.

  And yet Peaslee’s report is encouraging, for it appears t
hat the incidence of free, mobile agencies is less in proportion to what it was here in England. The Americas do have a big problem, though, in the numbers of humans (and in some cases, particularly in New England, semihumans) “in Their employ!” Again, as in 1928, special agents are infiltrating certain of the backwater seaports on the New England coast.

  6th Dec.

  Cthulhu strikes back! Angered beyond endurance (Peaslee has it), Cthulhu has finally lashed out, proving once and for all his definite continued existence and potency here and now on Earth. How the Foundation and its many worldwide departments have managed to cover it all up—what chains they’ve put on the free world’s presses—I don’t suppose I shall ever learn.

  Alerted by powerful, telepathic currents emanating from somewhere in the Pacific, five Foundation telepaths—receptive where others mercifully are not, it appears—tuned in on the fringe of the most terrifying mental wave band of all. Great Cthulhu, dreaming but not dead, has for the past six days been sending out the most hellish mental nightmares from his House in R’lyeh. He has turned his wrath on all and everything. The weather, even for this time of the year, has never been quite so freakish, the sudden virulent outbreaks of esoteric cult activities never more horrible, the troubles in the insane asylums the world over never more numerous, and the suicide rate never so high. Sunspot activity has for the last two days been so bad that radio and television reception is worse than useless; meteorologists and other scientists in general have no answer for it. Last night top vulcanists in four different countries issued warnings that at least seven volcanoes, four of them thought to have been long extinct and most of them many thousands of miles apart, are on the point of simultaneous eruption—“Krakatoa will have been as a firecracker,” they warn. I admit to being terrified.