Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath Read Online Free PDF Page A

will rise from his slimy seat at Deep R’lyeh in the sea to reclaim his dry-land dominions? Well, the whole thing was horribly frightening, and for a long time I morbidly collected cuttings and articles dealing with Surtsey’s rising.
    Nothing further occurred, however, and Surtsey eventually cooled from its volcanic state into a new island, barren of life but still strangely enigmatic. I have a feeling, Henri, that Surtsey was only the first step, that those ropy things of my dreams are in fact real and that they had planned to raise to the surface whole chains of islands and oddly-dimensioned cities -lands drowned back in the dim mists of Earth’s antiquity - in the commencement of a concerted attack on universal sanity … an attack led by loathly Lord Cthulhu, his “brothers”, and their minions, which once reigned here where men reign now.’
    As my friend talked, from his very first mention of the Cthulhu Cycle of myth, I had put to use an odd ability of mine: the power of simultaneous concentration in many directions. One part of my mind I had turned to the absorption of all that Crow was telling me; another followed different tracks.
    For I knew far more of the Cthulhu Cycle than my gaunt and work-weary friend suspected. Indeed, since suffering certain experiences when, for a brief time, I had owned the accursed Mirror of Queen Nitocris, I had spent much of my time in correlating the legends and pre-human myths surrounding Cthulhu and his contemporaries in the immemorially handed-down records.
    Among such ‘forbidden’ books, I had read the unsup-pressed sections of the British Museum’s photostat Pna-kotic Manuscript, allegedly a fragmentary record of a lost ‘Great Race’, prehistoric even in prehistory; similarly reproduced pages from the R’lyeh Text, supposedly writ-ten by certain minions of Great Cthulhu himself; the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt and my own copy of Ludwig Prinn’s De Vermis Mysteriis, both in vastly expurgated editions; the Comte d’Erlette’s Cultes des Goules and Feery’s often fanciful Notes on the Necron-omicon; the hideously revealing and yet disquietingly vague Revelations of Glaaki; and those uncoded sections of Titus Crow’s priceless copy of the Cthaat Aquadingen.
    I had learned, somewhat sceptically, of the forces or deities of the unthinkably ancient mythology; of the benign Elder Gods, peacefully palaced in Orion but ever aware of the struggle between the races of Earth and the Forces of Evil; of those evil deities themselves, the Great Old Ones, ruled over by (created by, originating from?) the blind idiot god Azathoth, ‘the Bubbler at the Hub’, an amorphous blight of nethermost, nuclear confusion from which all infinity radiates; of Yog-Sothoth, ‘the all-in-one and one-in-all’, coexistent with all time and conterminous in all space; of Nyarlathotep the Messenger; of Great Cthulhu, ‘dweller in the Depths’ in his House at R’lyeh; of Hastur the Unspeakable, a prime elemental of interstellar space and air, half-brother to Cthulhu; and of Shub-Niggurath, ‘the black goat of the woods with a thousand young’, fertility symbol in the cycle.
    There were, too, other creatures and beings - such as Dagon, fish-god of the Philistines and Phoenicians, ruler over the Deep Ones, ally and servant to Cthulhu; the Tind’losi Hounds; Yibb-Tstll, Nyogtha, and Tsathoggua; Lloigor, Zhar, and Ithaqua; Shudde-M’ell, Glaaki, and Daoloth - many, many of them. Of some of these beings much was made in the mythos, and they were given ample space in the books. Others were more obscure, rarely mentioned, and then only in a vague and indecisive manner.
    Basically the legend was this: that in an epoch so remote in the past as to make Crow’s ‘geologic infants’ statement perfectly acceptable, the Elder Gods had punished a rebellion of the Great Old Ones by banishing them to their various prisoning environs - Hastur to the Lake of Hali in Carcosa; Cthulhu to R’lyeh