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

as I tried to cover my embarrassment.
    ‘I… I’m sorry, Titus, I -‘
    ‘What was it you said, de Marigny?’ He stopped me short. ‘Something about doubting a man before trying him? I told you it was going to be hard to swallow, but I don’t really blame you for whatever doubts you have. I do have proof, though, of sorts …’
    ‘Titus, please forgive me,’ I answered dejectedly. ‘It’s just that you look so, well, tired and washed out. But come on - proof, you said! What sort of proof do you mean?’
    He opened his desk drawer again, this time to take out a folder of letters, a manuscript, and a square cardboard box. ‘First the letters,’ he said, handing me the slim folder, ‘then the manuscript. Read them, de Marigny, while I doze, and then you’ll be able to judge for yourself when I show you what’s in the box. Then, too, you’ll be better able to understand. Agreed?’
    I nodded, took a long sip at my brandy, and began to read. The letters I managed pretty quickly; they drew few conclusions in themselves. Then came the manuscript.
    Cement Surroundings
    (Being the Manuscript of Paul Wendy-Smith)
    1
    It will never fail to amaze me how certain allegedly Christian people take a perverse delight in the misfortunes of others. Just how true this is was brought forcibly home to me by the totally unnecessary whispers and rumours which were put about following the disastrous decline of my closest living relative.
    There were those who concluded that just as the moon is responsible for the tides, and in part the slow movement of the Earth’s upper crust, so was it also responsible for Sir Amery Wendy-Smith’s behaviour on his return from Africa. As proof they pointed out my uncle’s sudden fascination for seismography - the study of earthquakes -a subject which so took his fancy that he built his own instrument, a model which does not incorporate the conventional concrete base, to such an exactitude that it measures even the most minute of the deep tremors which are constantly shaking this world. It is that same instrument which sits before me now, rescued from the ruins of the cottage, at which I am given to casting, with increasing frequency, sharp and fearful glances.
    Before his disappearance my uncle spent hours, seemingly without purpose, studying the fractional movements of the stylus over the graph.
    For my own part I found it more than odd the way in which, while Sir Amery was staying in London after his
    return, he shunned the underground and would pay extortive taxi fares rather than go down into what he termed ‘those black tunnels’. Odd, certainly, but I never considered it a sign of insanity.
    Yet even his few really close friends seemed convinced of his madness, blaming it upon his living too close to those dead and nighted nigh-forgotten civilizations which so fascinated him. But how could it have been otherwise?
    My uncle was both antiquarian and archaeologist. His strange wanderings to foreign lands were not the result of any longing for personal gain or acclaim.
    Rather were they undertaken out of a love of the life; for any fame which resulted - as frequently occurred - was more often than not shrugged off on to the ever-willing personages of his colleagues.
    They envied him, those so-called contemporaries of his, and would have emulated his successes had they possessed the foresight and inquisitiveness with which he was so singularly gifted - or, as I have now come to believe, with which he was cursed. My bitterness towards them is directed by the way in which they cut him after the dreadful culmination of that last, fatal expedition. In earlier years many of them had been ‘made by his discoveries, but on that last trip those hangers-on had been the uninvited, the ones out of favour, to whom he would not offer the opportunity of fresh, stolen glory. I believe that for the greater part their assurances of his insanity were nothing more than a spiteful means of belittling his