The Burrowers Beneath by Brian Lumley

Author:Brian Lumley
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

VIII

Peaslee of Miskatonic

(From de Marigny’s Notebooks)

Never before in my life had I experienced a night of such revelation.

Peaslee had flown in from America as soon as he got Crow’s first letter, setting out from the university in Arkham even before the arrival of the eggs, which would now be put to certain as yet unspecified uses in America. Upon his arrival in London, he had tried to get in touch with Crow by telephone, eventually contacting the Reverend Harry Townley. But even then he had to present himself at the reverend’s residence, with such credentials as he had with him, before he could learn of Crow’s whereabouts. Our ecclesiastical doctor friend was not one to neglect a trust!

“Solid as a rock,” Crow said when he heard this. “Good old Harry!”

Once the reverend had cleared Peaslee, then he had told the professor of my own involvement in Crow’s “mysterious” activities. Though one of his prime objectives in journeying to England was to see Crow, he was not displeased at my presence or at my participation in my friend’s adventures. He had heard much of my father—the great New Orleans mystic, Etienne-Laurent de Marigny—and assumed correctly from the beginning that much of the paternal personality, particularly the love of obscure and macabre mysteries, had rubbed off on me.

He had come, he told us, among other things to welcome us into the membership of an organization, or rather, a “Foundation,” the Wilmarth Foundation. The direction of this unofficial institute was under Peaslee’s own control—his and that of an administrative board formed by certain of Miskatonic’s older, more experienced professors—and the Foundation’s formation proper had been initiated after the untimely death of the sage for whom it was named. Its prime aim was to carry out the work that old Wilmarth, before his death, had stated he wished to commence.

Peaslee recognized immediately and was amazed at Crow’s erudition regarding the Cthulhu Cycle of myth (mine to a lesser degree); and, once Titus had mentioned them in conversation, pressed him for details of his prophetic dreams. It appeared he knew of other men with Crow’s strange brand of “vision”; a somnambulant psyche, as it were! But the professor’s own revelations were by far the night’s most astounding, and his fascinating conversation was to carry us well into the early hours of the next day.

Before he would even begin to explain in detail, however, his unforeseeable arrival at the houseboat, seeing our obvious state of distress, he demanded to know all that had passed since the Harden eggs came into Crow’s hands. In the earlier occurrences of the night in particular, Peaslee was interested—not in any morbid sense or out of grotesque curiosity, but because this was a facet of the Cthonians of which he knew nothing: their ability to preserve the identity of their victim by prisoning the brain in living tissues of their own construction. He carefully made notes as we told him of our awful, pitiful visitor, and only when he knew the most minute of the horrific details was he satisfied.

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