Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath (2 page)

It’s hard for me to explain on paper like this, but - oh, I don’t know - I had this feeling that - it was as if - well, did you ever play hide-and-seek as a child and go into a room where someone was hiding? You can’t see him, it’s dark, and he’s quiet as a mouse, but you know he’s in there all the same!

That’s what it was like down there in that deserted mine. And yet it was truly deserted - at that time anyway …

Well, I shook this feeling off and went on until I reached the west-side network. This is almost two horizontal miles from the main shaft. Along the way I had seen evidence of deterioration in the timbers, but not enough to explain away the subsidences on the surface. So far as I could see, there had been no actual cave-ins. The place did stink, though, like nothing I’d ever smelled before, but it wasn’t any sort of gas to affect the budgie or me. Just a very unpleasant smell. Right at the end of the connecting-shaft, at a spot almost directly under Blackhill, I came across the first of the new tunnels.

It entered into the shaft from the side away from the sea, and frankly it stopped me dead! I mean, what would you have made of it?

It was a hole, horizontal and with hard, regular walls, but it was cut through solid rock and not coal! Now, I like to keep slap-up-to-date on mining methods, but I was pretty sure right from the start that this tunnel wasn’t dug using any system or machinery I knew of. And yet it seemed I must have missed something somewhere. The thing wasn’t shown on my map, though, so in the end I told myself that some new machinery must have been tested down there before they’d closed the mine. I was

damned annoyed, I’ll tell you - nobody had told me to expect this!

The mouth of the tunnel was about eight feet in diameter, and although the roof wasn’t propped up or timbered in any way the bore looked safe-as-houses, solid somehow. I decided to go on down it to see how far it went. It was all of half a mile long, that shaft, Mr Crow; none of it timbered, straight as a die, and the neatest bit of tunnelling work I’ve seen underground in twenty-five years. Every two hundred yards or so similar tunnels would come in from the sides at right angles, and at three of these junctions there had been heavy falls of rock. This warned me to be careful. Obviously these holes weren’t as solid as they looked!

I don’t know where the thought came from, but suddenly I found myself thinking of giant moles! I once saw one of these sensational film things about just such animals. Possibly that’s where the idea sprang from in my mind. Anyway, I’d no sooner had this thought than I came to a spot where yet another tunnel joined the main one - but this one came down at an angle from above!

There was a hole opening into the ceiling, with the edges rounded off and smoothed in some way I don’t understand, as if by heat like I said before.

Well, I went dead slow from then on, but soon I came out of the tunnel into a big cave. At least, I took it to be a cave, but when I looked closer at the walls I saw that it wasn’t! It was simply a junction of a dozen or so of the tunnels. Pillars like stalagmites held up the ceiling. This was where I saw the carvings, those pictures of octopus-things etched in the walls, and I don’t think I need add how much that put the wind up me!

I didn’t hang about there much longer (apart from anything else the stench was terrible), but long enough to check that the place was all of fifty feet across and that

the walls were coated or smoothed over with that same sort of lava-stuff. The floor was flat enough but crumbly, almost earthy, and right in the middle of the place I found four great cave-pearls. At least, I think they’re cave-pearls. They’re about four inches across, these things, very hard, heavy, and glossy. Don’t ask me how they got down there, I don’t know, and I can’t see how they might have been formed naturally, like other cave-pearls I remember seeing when I was a kid. Anyway, I put them into a bag I carried and then went back the way I’d come to the terminal of the west-side workings. By then I’d been down there about an hour and a half.

I didn’t get far into the actual coal-seams. The first half dozen were down.

They had collapsed. But I soon enough found out what had brought them down! In and out of the old workings, lacing them like holes in Gorgonzola, those damned smooth-lined tunnels came and went, literally honeycombing the coal and rock alike! Then, in one of the few remaining old seams that still stood and where some poor-grade coal still remained, I came across yet another funny thing. A tunnel, one of the new ones, had been cut right along the original seam, and I noticed that here the walls weren’t of that lava substance but a pitchy, hard tar, exactly the kind of deposit you find bubbling out of hot coal in the coke-ovens, only set as hard as rock … !

That was it. I’d had enough, and I set off back towards the main shaft and the lift-cage. It was then I thought I heard the chanting. Thought? - like hell I thought - I did hear it; and it was just as you wrote it down! It was distant, seeming to come from a very long way away, like listening to the sea in a shell or hearing a tune you remember in your head … But I knew I should never have been hearing things like that down there at all, and I took off for the lift-cage as fast as I could go.

Well, I’ll keep the rest of it short, Mr Crow. I’ve probably said too much already as it is, and I just hope to God that you’re not one of those reporter fellows. Still, I wanted to get it off my chest, so what the hell care I?

I finally arrived at the shaft bottom, by which time the chanting had died away, and I gave the lads on top a tinkle on the old handset to haul me up. At the top I made out my report, but not as fully as I’ve done here, and then I went home … I kept the cave-pearls, as mementos if you like, and said nothing about them in my report. I don’t see what good they’d be to anyone, anyway. Still, it does seem a bit like stealing. I mean, whatever the things really are - well, they’re not mine, are they? I might just send them off anonymously to the museum at Sunderland or Radcar. I suppose the museum people will know what they are …

The next morning the reporters came around from the Daily Mail. They’d heard I had a bit of a story to tell and pumped me for all I was worth. I had the idea they were laughing at me, though, so I didn’t tell them a deal. They must have gone to see old Betteridge when finally they left me - and, well, you know the rest.

And that’s it, Mr Crow. If there’s something else you’d like to know just drop me another line. Myself, I’d be interested to learn how you come to know so much about it all, and why you want to know more …

Yrs sincerely, R. Bentham

PS

Maybe you heard how they were planning to send two more inspectors down to do the job I’d ‘messed up’? Well, they couldn’t. Just a few days ago the whole lot fell in! The road between Harden and Blackhill sank ten feet in places, and a couple of brick barns were brought down

at Castle-Ilden. There’s had to be work done on the walls of the Red Cow Inn in Harden, too, and there have been slight tremors all over the area ever since. Like I said, the mine was rotten with those tunnels down there. I’m only surprised (and thankful!) it held up so long. Oh, and one other thing. I think that the smell I mentioned must, after all, have been produced by a gas of some sort. Certainly my head’s been fuzzy ever since. Weak as a kitten, I’ve been, and damned if I don’t keep hearing that awful, droning, chanting sound! All my imagination, of course, for you can take it from me that old Betteridge wasn’t even partly right in what he said about me …

R.B.

Blowne House 30th May

To: Raymond Bentham, Esq.

Dear Mr Bentham,

I thank you for your prompt reply to my queries of the 25th, and would be obliged if you would give similar keen attention to this further letter. I must of necessity make my note brief (I have many important things to do), but I beg you to have the utmost faith in my directions, strange as they may seem to you, and to carry them out without delay!

You have seen, Mr Bentham, how accurately I described the pictures on the walls of that great unnatural cave in the earth, and how I was able to duplicate on paper the weird chant you heard underground. My dearest wish now is that you remember these previous deductions of mine, and believe me when I tell you that you have placed yourself in extreme and hideous danger in removing the cave-pearls from the Harden tunnel-complex!

In fact, it is my sincere belief that you are constantly increasing the peril every moment you keep those things! I ask you to send them to me; I might know what to do with them. I repeat, Mr Bentham, do not delay but send me the cave-pearls at once; or, should you decide against it, then for God’s sake at least remove them from your house and person! A good suggestion would be for you to drop them back into the shaft at the mine, if that is at all possible; but whichever method you choose in getting rid of them, do it with dispatch!

They may rightly be regarded as being infinitely more dangerous than ten times their own weight in nitroglycerin!

Yrs v. truly, Titus Crow

To: Mr Henri-Laurent de Marigny

Blowne House 5 p.m., 30th May

Dear Henri,

I’ve tried to get you on the telephone twice today, only to discover at this late hour that you’re in Paris at a sale of antiques! Your housekeeper tells me she doesn’t know when you’ll be back. I hope it’s soon. I may very well need your help! This note will be waiting for you when you get back. Waste no time, de Marigny, but get round here as soon as you’re able!

Titus

Marvels Strange and Terrific

(From the Notebooks of Henri-Laurent de Marigny)

I had known this strange and inexplicable feeling for weeks - a deep-rooted mental apprehension, an uneasiness of psyche - and the cumulative effect of this near-indefinable atmosphere of hovering hysteria upon my system, the sheer tautness of my usually sound nerves, was horrible and soul-destroying. I could not for my life fathom whence these brooding fears of things unknown sprang, or even guess at the source of the hideous oppressiveness of air which seemed to hang in tangible heaviness over all my waking and sleeping moments alike, but the combination of the two had been more than sufficient to drive me from London to seek refuge on the Continent.

Ostensibly I had gone to Paris to seek out certain Eastern antiques at the House du Fouche, but when I discovered that my flight to that ancestral city had gained me no respite from my sickening, doom-fraught mood of depression, then I was at a complete loss as to what to do with myself.

In the end, after a stay of only four days, having made one or two small purchases - simply, I suppose, to justify my journey - I determined to return to England.

From the moment my plane touched down in London I felt somehow that I had been drawn back from France, and I considered this peculiar prescience proven when, upon arriving at my home, I found Titus Crow’s summons waiting for me. His letter had lain on a table in my study, placed there by my housekeeper, for two days; and yet, cryptic as that note was, its message lifted my spirit instantly from the constant gloom it had known for so many weeks, and sent me flying to Blowne House.

It was midafternoon when I reached Crow’s sprawling bungalow retreat on the outskirts of the city, and when the leonine occultist opened his door to me I was frankly astonished at the alterations which had taken place in his countenance over the three months since last I had seen him. He was more than tired, that was plain, and his face was drawn and grey. Lines of concentration and worry had etched themselves deep in his high forehead; his broad shoulders were slumped atop his tall, usually energetic frame; his whole aspect betrayed the extensive and sleepless studies to which he must needs have lent himself, making his first words almost unnecessary:

‘De Marigny, you got my note! Thank goodness for that! If ever a second head was needed it’s now. I’ve just about knocked myself out with the thing, driven myself to distraction. A clear mind, a fresh approach - By God, it’s good to see you!’

Crow ushered me inside, led the way to his study, and there indicated that I should take a seat. Instead I simply stood gazing unbelievingly about the room. My host poured me a customary welcoming glass of brandy before flopping wearily into a chair behind his great desk.

Now, I have said that I gazed unbelievingly about the study: well, let it be understood that Titus Crow’s study (incorporating as it does his magnificent occult library), while yet being the apple of his eye, is more often than not the scene of at least a minimal activity, when my friend involves himself within those strange spheres of research which are his speciality; and let it be further understood that I was quite used to seeing the place in less than completely tidy order - but never before had I seen anything like the apparent chaos which reigned in that room on this occasion!

Maps, charts, and atlases lay open and in places overlapping, littering the floor wall to shelved wall, so that I had to step on certain of them to reach a chair; various files, many of them fastened open at marked or paper-clipped places, stood at one end of the cluttered desk and also upon a small occasional table; numbered newspaper cuttings were everywhere, many of them discoloured and plainly faded with age, others very recent; a great notebook, its pages covered top to bottom with careless or hurried scrawlings, lay open at my feet, and rare and commonplace tomes alike on various obscure or little known semi-mythological, anthropological, and archaeological themes were stacked willy-nilly in one corner of the room at the foot of Crow’s great four-handed grandfather clock. The whole was a scene of total disorder, and one that whetted my curiosity to a point where my first astonished outburst sprang as naturally to my lips as might any commonplace inquiry in less bizarre surroundings:

‘Titus! What on earth … ? You look as though you haven’t had a wink of sleep in a week - and the state of this place!’ Again I stared about the room, at the apparent disruption of all previous normality.

‘Oh, I’ve been getting my sleep, de Marigny,’ Crow answered unconvincingly,