Read Online Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath by Brian Lumley - Free Book Online

face a similar end. I know it, for no matter what I do the tremors haunt me. Or is it only in my mind? No, there is little wrong with my mind. My nerves may be gone but my mind is intact. I know too much! They have visited me in dreams, as I believe they must have visited my uncle, and what they have read in my mind has warned them of their danger. They dare not allow me further to investi-gate, for it is just such meddling which may one day fully reveal them to men
    - before they are ready!
    God! Why hasn’t that folklorist fool Wilmarth at Mis-katonic answered my telegrams? There must be a way out! Even now they dig - those dwellers in darkness …
    But no - this is no good! I must get a grip on myself and finish this narrative. I have not had time to tell the authorities the truth, but even if I had I know what the result would have been. ‘There’s something wrong with all the Wendy-Smith blood,’ they would say. But this manuscript will tell the story for me and will also stand as a warning to others. Perhaps when it is seen how my passing so closely parallels that of Sir Amery, people will be curious; with this manuscript to guide them perhaps men will seek out and destroy Earth’s elder madness before it destroys them …
    A few days after the collapse of the cottage on the moors, I settled here in this house on the outskirts of Marske to be close at hand if - though I could see little hope of it - my uncle should turn up again. But now some dread power keeps me here. I cannot flee … At first their power was not so strong, but now … I am no longer able even to leave this desk, and I know that the end must be coming fast. I am rooted to this chair as if grown here and it is as much as I can do to type!
    But I must … I must … And the ground movements are much stronger now.
    That hellish, damnable, mocking stylus - leaping so crazily over the paper!
    I had been here only two days when the police delivered to me a dirty, soil-stained envelope. It had been found in the ruins of the cottage - near the lip of that curious hole - and was addressed to me. It contained those notes I have already copied and a letter from Sir Amery which, if its awful ending is anything to go on, he must have just finished writing when the horror came for him. When I
    consider, it is not surprising that the envelope survived the collapse; they would not have known what it was, and so would have had no interest in it.
    Nothing in the cottage seems to have been deliberately damaged - nothing inanimate, that is - and so far as I have been able to discover the only missing items are those terrible spheres, or what remained of them!

    But I must hurry. I cannot escape and all the time the tremors are increasing in strength and frequency. No! I will not have time. No time to write all I intended to say. The shocks are too heavy … to o heav y. Int erfer in g with my t ypi ng. I will finis h this i n th e only way rem ain ing to me and staple S ir Amer y’s lett er to th is man use rip t no w.
    Dear Paul,
    In the event of this letter ever getting to you, there are certain things I must ask you to do for the safety and sanity of the world. It is absolutely necessary that these things be explored and dealt with - though how that may be done I am at a loss to say. It was my intention, for the sake of my own sanity, to forget what happened at G’harne. I was wrong to try to hide it. At this very moment there are men digging in strange, forbidden places, and who knows what they may unearth? Certainly all these horrors must be tracked down and rooted out - but not by bumbling amateurs. It must be done by men who are ready for the ultimate in. hideous, cosmic horror. Men with weapons. Perhaps flamethrowers would do the trick … Certainly a scientific knowledge of war would be a necessity … Devices could be made to track the enemy … I mean specialized seismological instruments. If I had the time I would prepare a dossier, detailed and