Free Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath by Brian Lumley Page A

…’
    He put down the egg, neatly stacked the books and papers earlier picked up from the floor, and returned to his chair. From the centre drawer in his desk he took a certain surgical instrument. “This was lent to me by a neighbour friend of mine, that same friend who tried to radiograph the eggs for me. Care to eavesdrop, de Marigny?’
    ‘A stethoscope?’ I took the thing wonderingly from him. ‘You mean - ?’
    ‘This was something Sir Amery missed,’ Crow cut me off. ‘He had the right idea with his earthquake-detector -I’ve decided, by the way, to obtain a seismograph as soon as possible - but he might have tried listening for small things as well as big ones! But no, that’s being unfair, for of course he didn’t know until the end just what his pearly spheres were. In trying the stethoscope test I was really only following his lead, on a smaller scale.
    Well, go on,’ he demanded again as I hesitated. ‘Listen to them!’
    I fitted the receivers to my ears and gingerly touched the sensor to one of the eggs, then held it there more
    firmly. I imagine the rapid change in my expression was that which made Crow grin in that grim fashion of his. Certainly, in any situation less serious, I might have expected him to laugh. I was first astounded, then horrified!
    ‘My God!’ I said after a moment, a shudder hurrying down my spine. ‘There are
    -fumblings!’
    ‘Yes,’ he answered as I sat there, shaken to my roots, ‘there are. The first stirrings of life, Henri, a life undreamed-of - except, perhaps, by an unfortunate few -from beyond the dim mists of time and from behind millennia of myth. A race of creatures unparalleled in zoology or zoological literature, indeed entirely unknown, except in the most doubtful and obscure tomes. But they’re real, as real as this conversation of ours.’
    I felt an abrupt nausea and put the egg quickly back into its box, hurriedly wiping my hands on a kerchief from my pocket. Then I shakily passed the stethoscope back across the desk to my friend.
    ‘They have to be destroyed.’ My voice cracked a little as I spoke. ‘And without delay!’
    ‘Oh? And how do you think Shudde-M’ell, his brothers and sisters - if indeed they are bisexual - would react to that?’ Crow quietly asked.
    ‘What?’ I gasped, as the implications behind his words hit me. ‘You mean that already - ‘
    ‘Oh, yes.’ He anticipated my question. ‘The parent creatures know where their eggs are, all right. They have a system of communication better than anything we’ve got, Henri. Telepathy I imagine. That was how those other, earlier eggs were traced to Sir Amery’s cottage on the moors; that was how they were able to follow him home through something like four thousand miles of subterrene burrows! Think of it, de Marigny. What a task they set themselves - to regain possession of the stolen
    eggs - and by God, they almost carried it off, too! No, I daren’t destroy them. Sir Amery tried that, remember? And what happened to him?’
    After a slight pause, Crow continued: ‘But, having given Sir Amery’s portion of the Wendy-Smith papers a lot of thought, I’ve decided that he could only have been partly right in his calculations. Look at it this way: certainly, if as Wendy-Smith deduced the reproductive system of Shudde-M’ell and his kind is so long and tedious, the creatures couldn’t allow the loss of two future members of their race. But I’m sure there was more than merely that in their coming to England. Perhaps they’d had it planned for a long time - for centuries maybe, even aeons! The way I see it, the larceny of the eggs from G’harne finally prodded the burrowers into early activity. Now, we know they came out of Africa - to recover their eggs, for revenge, whatever - but we have no proof at all that they ever went back!’
    ‘Of course,’ I whispered, leaning forward to put my elbows on the desk, my eyes widening in dawning understanding. ‘In fact, at the