Brian Lumley - Titus Crow 2 - The Transition of Titus Crow

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THE TRANSITION OF TITUS CROW BY TITUS CROW

LONDON OCCULTIST BACK FROM THE DEAD!

Mr Henri-Laurent de Marigny, son of the great New Orleans mystic

Etienne-Laurent de Marigny, is literally 'back from the dead', having been

pronounced missing or dead in 1976 along with his friend and colleague Mr

Titus Crow, late of Leonard's-Walk Heath. Speculation is now rife as to

whether Titus Crow may also still be alive following Mr de Marigny's amazing

reappearance after an absence of almost ten years, since the freak lightning

storm of 4 October 1969 that utterly destroyed Blowne House, Mr Crow's

residence. Until now it was also believed that the storm had killed the two

friends. An element of doubt has always existed with regard to their 'deaths',

for no bodies were ever found in the ruins of the house following the storm,

despite the fact that the occultists were believed to be in residence.

De Marigny's return yesterday morning was as dramatic as his disappearance. He

was fished out of the Thames at Purfleet more dead than alive, saved from

almost certain death by drowning by Mr Harold Simmons of Tilbury, who dragged

him aboard his barge from the precarious refuge of a buoy. Mr Simmons reports

how, despite de Marigny's battered and bruised condition and the fact that all

his limbs were broken, the occultist clung to the buoy like a limpet, even

making an exhausted, delirious attempt to fight his rescuer off. 'He looked

like he'd been hit by an express train,' Mr Simmons reports, 'but he certainly

wasn't ready to give in!' Mr de Marigny, identified initially through certain

documents he carried, is now recovering in hospital . . .

The Daily London News 5 September 1979

Prologue

At Miskatonic University, the morning of 20 March 1980, just six days before

the Fury, Professor Wingate Peaslee, then head of the Wilmarth Foundation,

called me into his office for a final briefing on Foundation affairs before he

left for Innsmouth, where he intended to supervise personally what was then

Project X, since known as Project Cthylla.

As vice-president of the Foundation (and in my capacity as Peaslee's

right-hand man and understudy) I was of course already very well informed in

all aspects of Foundation work; therefore my briefing was not protracted.

Wingate was uneasy. Though at that time our organization had already enlisted

the aid of many 'sciences' of previously dubious authenticity, we were only

beginning to investigate precognition; in this lay the source of the

professor's disquiet. Within the space of the last week he had received no

less than three separate warnings from psychically endowed persons within the

Foundation, all of them forecasting doom - forecasting, in fact, the Fury!

Could he afford to ignore them?

The question with prognostication is of course this: Will the foreseen event

come about as a direct result of external and uncontrollable influences, or

will it be brought about by internal forces attempting its avoidance? Would

Project X bring about a disaster, or would the disaster be brought about by

the abandonment of the project? Another problem is this: How does one avoid

what will be, what has been foreseen? There again, and perhaps on the brighter

side, there was always the chance

that those warning visions of doom had been deliberately planted by the CCD in

the minds of the three Foundation psychics in an attempt to hold up the

Innsmouth operations. These were some of the problems that worried Wingate

Peaslee; they were among the reasons for his deciding to supervise Project X

personally.

That same morning he had received by airmail a parcel from London containing a

number of notebooks, various documents and tape recordings. The parcel was

from a personal friend of the professor's and a former member of the

Foundation, Henri-Laurent de Marigny. Similarly that morning a communication

had arrived from the British chapter of the Foundation consisting of a brief

and cryptic note from the psychic Mother Eleanor Quarry. Peaslee showed me the

note. It said simply this: 'Titus Crow has been back. He is no longer here. I

believe that this time de Marigny has followed him. Wingate, I think we are in

for terrible trouble.'

Typical of the brilliant British psychic and cryptic as it was, nevertheless

the first three sentences of this note meant much to both Wingate Peaslee and

to myself; the last sentence was more obscure, unless it was yet another

warning of approaching doom.

Peaslee then told me how he would dearly love to explore the contents of the

parcel from de Marigny himself but simply had no time at present to do so. I

was given that task. Perhaps, in retrospect, it would have been better if

Peaslee had not gone to Innsmouth but had attended to the parcel instead. Who

can say?

First I read the notebooks, a task I completed on the morning of 24 March. I

began to listen to the tapes late on the night of the 25th, pressure of work

keeping me from them until then. I had barely started when, just after

midnight, there came the first subterranean rumblings,

the first grim warning that this was to be the day of the Fury!

Fortunately, before the Fury struck with its full force, I was able to place

manuscripts and tapes alike in my office safe. When I retrieved them from the

debris of Miskatonic four days later, the notebooks and documents were still

intact; the tapes had suffered somewhat.

So much for a prologue. As background material toward an understanding of the

forces behind the Fury, and as a personal account of his own involvement with

the CCD and with Titus Crow, Henri-Laurent de Marig-ny's work is required

reading. In it, as in the transcriptions from the tape recordings of Titus

Crow's narrative, which follow it - and as in de Marigny's recently reprinted

earlier account of the Wilmarth Foundation's work, The Burrowers Beneath - no

single word of the author's original text has been altered.

Arthur D. Meyer New Miskatonic, Rutland, Vermont

PART ONE 1

But What of Titus Crow?

(From de Marigny's notebooks)

My first thought on awakening, particularly on finding myself in a hospital

bed, was that it had all been a nightmare, a horrific dream perhaps engendered

of whichever drugs I had been given to assist in my recovery from-

My recovery from what?

Plainly I had suffered some terrible accident or attack of incredible

ferocity. My arms and legs seemed to be in splints; I was bandaged top to

bottom and barely able to move my head. There was a lot of pain, so much that

I could specify no single area of my body for its origin, it was everywhere. I

was patently lucky to be alive! Exactly what, then, had happened to me? I

could remember nothing. Or was there . . . something?

Yes, there was something. I could remember water pulling me down, and strange

hands tugging at me.

Then, turning my head as far as my various wrappings and bandages would allow,

I saw the vase of flowers by my bed, close enough for me to read the message

on the attached card:

To a dear and valued friend, long lost but found again -get well very soon,

W. Peaslee

Peaslee! Professor Wingate Peaslee, head of the Wil-marth Foundation!

Fragmentary visions of past events tumbled chaotically in my painfully fuzzy

mind as I read

the man's name. But at least I knew now that they had been no nightmares,

those horrible scenes reviewed subconsciously by my mind's eye immediately

prior to waking - no dreams but memories of my past experiences as a member of

the Wilmarth Foundation. My eyes, peering through slits in swathing bandages,

went again to the vase of flowers, finding propped against its base a curious

star-shaped stone like some fossil starfish from Silurian coral beds, a stone

that went far to calming my abruptly whirling mind and fluttering heart.

And suddenly I remembered. I remembered it all! And with the memory a name

sprang spontaneously to my lips.

'Crow!' I cried, 'Titus Crow! Where are you?1

His name, and my question, seemed to echo hollowly in the white room about me,

hanging in the air. Particularly the question.

Where indeed . . .?

I must have slept then, for when I opened my eyes next it was night, or rather

late evening. The shadows were long in my room and beyond the windows the

first tendrils of a gray mist were rising. There was the smell of the country

in the less than antiseptic air flowing into the room from a ventilator fan in

the opposite wall. The room was pleasantly cool. I guessed that I was not in

London, but wherever I was I knew that Peaslee was not far away, and that

therefore I was safe from . . . them!

Them - the burrowers beneath and all the other horrors of the Cthu'lhu Cycle -

I shuddered at the thought of them, then made a conscious effort to thrust

them out of my mind. First I must think about myself.

At least I was feeling much better. That is, my pains were noticeably less and

the bandages had been removed from my head and neck, allowing me at least

sufficient freedom of movement to peer about my room. Above my bed, on the

wall, I saw a button with the - from my

position - inverted legend RING. HOW I was supposed to comply, even if I had

wanted to, was quite beyond me. My arms were still in plaster. No matter, for

the moment I desired no company.

At least this time I seemed wide awake, capable of thinking clearly and

reasonably. And indeed I had a lot to think about. I cast a few cursory

glances about the room, sufficient to assure myself that I was definitely in a

hospital, probably a private institute, if the impeccably delicate decor and

my clinically immaculate immediate surroundings were anything to go by. Then I

settled down to the more serious business of getting my thoughts - my memories

of what had gone before, leading up to this present as yet unexplained

confinement - sorted out in my mind into some sort of recognizable order.

Those memories still had many nightmarish aspects. Indeed, they were

unbelievable to a point which might only suggest - to anybody mercifully less

well informed -an incredible degree of gullibility, even insanity in any

believer. And yet I knew that I believed, and that I was certainly not mad . .

No, I was alive, sane and safe - but what of Titus Crow?

The last time I'd seen him had been at Blowne House, his sprawling bungalow

retreat on Leonard's-Walk Heath; that had been on the 4th Oct. 1969, when

Ithaqua's elementals of the air had attacked us in all their massed might. We

had been trapped there, and no way out; we faced certain death; Crow's home

was being reduced to rubble around us! At the last we were left with no other

alternative but to put our faith in the grandfather clock: that old (how old?)

coffin-shaped device, yes, which had once belonged to my father, for which

Crow had named it 'De Marigny's Clock'.

But 'clock'? A misnomer that, if ever there was one. No timepiece at all but a

device come down from predawn days of extradimensional magic - literally a toy

of the Elder Gods themselves! As for its history:

First, tracing the clock's line as far back as possible in the light of my

limited knowledge, it had belonged to one Yogi Hiamaldi, a friend of the

ill-fated Carolina mystic Harley Warren. Hiamaldi had been a member, along

with Warren, of a psychic-phenomenalist group in Boston about 1916-18. He had

sworn that he alone of living men had been to Yian-Ho, that crumbling revenant

of aeon-shrouded Leng, and that he had borne away certain things from that

lost and leering necropolis. For a reason unknown, the Yogi had made a gift of

the clock to my father, though I am unable to recall ever seeing the thing as

a child before I was sent out of America. I can only suppose that my father

kept it at his New Orleans retreat, a place that had always fascinated me but

that my poor nervous mother had always done her best to keep me away from.

After my father died the clock was sold, along with many of his other

curiosities, to a French collector. Titus Crow had been unable to discover how

the thing had suddenly turned up so many years later at an auction of antique

furniture in England, but his subsequent attempts to trace the previous French

owner had failed miserably; it was as though he had simply vanished off the

face of the Earth!

I remembered, too, a curious affair involving an East Indian mystic, one Swami

Chandraputra, I believe he called himself, who had also allegedly

'disappeared' in strange circumstances connected somehow with the clock. At

the time, though, I was only a lad living largely away from my father. Crow

knew the story more fully, for he had researched all of these things. Even

with all his research my friend had been unable to discover where or

when or by whom the peculiarly ominous thing had been made, or even why.

Plainly its weirdly meandering hands moved in sequences completely alien to

any earthly chronological system, and at best its ungovernably aberrant

ticking must drive anyone of less than iron fortitude and unbending resolution

to distraction.

In Crow's case, however, it was this very lack of an easily discernible

purpose, and similarly the unfathomable mystery of its origin, which had

served to endear the clock to him; and he had spent many years in

intermittent, frustrated and invariably vain study of the thing. Then, as a

guest of Professor Peaslee at Miskatonic University, Crow had finally

recognized in one of the library's great old occult volumes a curious sequence

of odd glyphs which he had been delighted to note bore a striking resemblance

to the figures on the dial of his huge clock. Moreover, the book bore a

translation of its own hiero-glyphed passage in Latin!

Armed with this Rosetta Stone knowledge, my friend had returned to London

where he was soon at work again uncovering many of the strange machine's

previous mysteries. And he had been right, for it was indeed a vehicle - a

space-time machine of sorts with principles more alien than the center of a

star, whose like we can at least conjecture upon. Titus Crow, however, was

never a man to be denied anything once he set his mind after it. And so he had

persevered. Once he had written to me to say of his work on the clock: 'I am

in the position of a Neanderthal studying the operational handbook of a

passenger-carrying aircraft - except I have no handbook!' Though of course he

was exaggerating, the weird device's functions were certainly obscure enough

to baffle anyone.

And yet when the final choice presented itself -between the clock and those

hellish winds of darkness sent by Ithaqua to destroy us - full of trepidation

and

dread though we were, nevertheless we entered into the vehicle's strangely

huge, greenly illumined interior . . . and then everything seemed to turn

upside down and inside out! Amid the whirling, rushing, dizzying motion of

that experience I had yet been somehow aware of the final destruction of

Blowne House; while from the depths of a shrieking purple mist that rushed

ever faster into a gaping hole in the fabric of the universe itself, I heard

Titus Crow's distant, fading voice:

'Follow me, de Marigny - with your mind, man - with your mind!'

Then he was gone and a Stygian darkness closed about me, buffeting, crushing,

squeezing me like toothpaste from a tube out of that. . . that place . . .

where I had no right to be. And finally, after an eternity of torture and

tissue-rending pressures, there had been those sensations of falling, of water

and then of strange hands tugging at me ...

Then the white sheets of the hospital bed. And the flowers. And the comforting

star-stone, left no doubt by Wingate Peaslee to guard me from the anciently

malign horror of the CCD. Something about the professor's card bothered me,

however. What had he meant by 'long lost but found again'? Didn't that imply

the passing of a considerable amount of time? Well, I could always ask him

when I saw him.

Until then, while far from sound in body, I was at least sane . . . and safe.

But what of Titus Crow?

Of Dreams and Ten Years Lost

(From de Marigny's notebooks)

It must have been early morning before I managed to get to sleep, but even

then my slumbers were not peaceful. Everything that I had chewed over in my

mind before finally sleeping kept rising to the surface of my subconscious,

and the result could only be called nightmarish!

I dreamed - or nightmared - about the Cthonians, those monstrous subterraneans

alive even now and burrowing in the Earth's secret places, threatening the

very sanity of the world with a resurgence of hellish magic and mayhem and

plotting the release of worse horrors yet, such as loathsome Lord Cthulhu and

others of his Cycle.

I read again, or at least was allowed shuddering glimpses of, the books and

documents of an unthinkably ancient 'mythology': works such as the Pnakotic

Manuscripts, supposedly a fragmentary record of a race lost before history

began; and the R'lyeh Text, purporting to have been written by certain minions

of Great Cthulhu himself. And dreaming still, I averted my eyes from the pages

of such tomes as the Unaussprechlichen Kulten of Von Junzt, and Ludwig Prinn's

'cornerstone' De Vermis Mysteriis. All of these books, or copies of them, I

handled again as. I had in reality handled them: the Comte d'Erlette's Cultes

des Goules, Joachim Feery's Notes on the Necronomicon, even Titus Crow's own

priceless copy of the anonymous Cthaat Aquadingen . . .

In books such as these, under Crow's guidance, I had first studied the legend

of the Cthulhu Mythos: of Beings seeped down from the stars in Earth's youth,

and prisoned here by greater Beings yet for blasphemies of cosmic

enormity. The alien names of these forces rang again in my sleeping brain -

Cthulhu, Yog-Sothoth, Ithaqua, Shub-Niggurath - and I felt a fever's heat grip

me as if I had uttered some demoniac invocation to open the gates of hell!

Then for a moment I was back in Crow's study - in the reeling, tottering shell

of Blowne House - with that ancient, madly ticking clock standing there, its

door open, issuing a swirling, throbbing green and purple light - and my

friend's face wax as he held me by the shoulders and shouted some instruction

which was drowned in the tumult of winds!

'Titus!' I shouted back. 'For God's sake - Titus!' . . .

. . . But it was not Titus Crow's face, and it was not waxen. It was instead

Peaslee's face, worried and drawn; Peaslee's arms reaching down to me, his

veined old hands holding me firm; Peaslee's voice, calming, soothing me.

'Easy now, Henri! Easy! You're safe now. Nothing can harm you here. Easy, de

Marigny.'

'Wingate! Professor!' I was barely awake, drenched in sweat, my whole body

trembling and shuddering in reaction. Wildly, despite the restrictions of my

various dressings, I tore loose from his restraining hands to peer fearfully

about the room.

'It's all right, Henri,' he repeated. 'You're safe now.'

'Safe?' The nightmare was quickly fading; relief abruptly flooded my whole

being. I let my head fall back against the damp pillows. 'Peaslee, what

happened?' I stupidly asked.

The frown on his face turned to a wry, wrinkled grin. 'I was hoping you could

tell me that, de Marigny!' he replied. 'The last I heard of you was in Crow's

letter, retrieved from the rains of Blowne House. Of course, I've never given

up hope, but ten years is a long time, and-'

'What?' I cut him off. 'Did you say ten years?' I blinked the blurred edges of

sleep from my eyes and at last saw Peaslee clearly where he bent over my bed,

the smile fading again on his old face. And it was an old face, older by far

than I remembered it and by my reckoning certainly older than it ought to have

been.

'Yes, Henri, it's been ten long years since I last heard of you.' He frowned.

'But surely you know that? You must know it! Where have you been, Henri? And

where is Titus Crow?'

'Ten years!' I slowly repeated it, suddenly exhausted, utterly washed out. 'My

God! I remember . . . nothing. The last thing I recall is seeing - '

'Yes?'

'The clock, Crow's great clock. We went inside the thing, Crow and I, him

first, myself following immediately behind him. We were somehow separated

then. I remember Crow calling to me to follow him, and then . . . nothing. But

ten years! How could such a thing be?'

For the first time then, I saw that my visitor was holding someone back from

my bed. Finally this stranger exclaimed, 'Really, Professor, I must protest.

Mr de Marigny is your friend, I understand that, but he's also my patient!'

The voice was female, but so aloof as to be almost harsh; the face atop the

tall figure that finally pushed itself past Peaslee was hawklike and severe.

It came as a shock, then, to find that the hand whose fingers searched for my

pulse was surprisingly warm and gentle.

'Madam,' Peaslee replied, his New England accent barely showing, 'my friend is

here at my request, and I am paying for his treatment. You must understand

that his mind is the only key to certain very important problems - problems I

have waited ten years to solve.'

'All that is as it may be,' the matron answered, quite

unperturbed, 'but no amount of money or pressure overrules my authority here,

Professor. The only way you may do that is to take Mr de Marigny out of my

nursing home, which would not be in his best interests. In the meantime his

welfare is my concern, and until he is well, or until you decide to terminate

his stay here, I will care for him as I see best.' She paused, then acidly

added, 'You are not, I believe, a professor of medicine?'

'No, madam, I am not, but -'

'No "buts", Professor, I'm quite sure that Mr de Marigny has had enough

excitement for one day. You may see him again the day after tomorrow. Now I'm

afraid you must leave.'

'But -'

'No, no, noV she insisted.

Peaslee turned his seamed, angry face to me. His vastly intelligent eyes

flashed furiously for a moment, but then he grinned a moment later, his

natural good nature showing through all his impatience.

'Very well,' he finally agreed; and then to me: 'It will all have to wait

until later, Henri. But she's right, you'd better rest now. And try not to

worry. You'll be perfectly safe here.' He grinned again, wickedly casting a

quick glance at the matron where she stood now at the foot of my bed penciling

a line on a graph, before bending over me to whisper, 'I doubt if even Cthulhu

himself would dare to brave this place!'

After Peaslee had gone I slept again, this time peacefully enough, until about

midafternoon. When I awakened it was to find a young doctor at work removing

the splints and casts from my arms. Matron Emily, as she insisted I call her,

was assisting him, and she seemed genuinely delighted when at last my arms lay

bare over the sheets.

'You wouldn't believe it,' she told me, 'if you had seen how badly mangled

your arms were. But now . . .'

Now there were one or two minor scars, nothing much to show that my arms had

suffered anything but superficial cuts and abrasions. 'Your friend the

professor,' she continued, 'brought in the world's finest surgeons and

specialists.'

She allowed me to sit up then, making me comfortable with pillows for my back.

I was given a mirror, too, and allowed to shave myself. I soon learned not to

move my arms too quickly; the bones were still very sore. By the growth of

hair on my face I judged that it must have been all of a week since last I had

seen a razor. Matron Emily confirmed this, moreover informing me that she had

shaved me twice herself at similar intervals. I had been in her nursing home

for three weeks.

I asked for the day's newspapers then, but before I could settle to read them

a second doctor came in to see me. He was a bespectacled, bald little man with

a busy, bustling attitude. He gave me a thorough going over: chest, ears,

eyes, nose - everything. He harrumphed and grunted once or twice during his

examination, made copious notes in a little black book, had me clench my hands

and bend my elbows repeatedly, painfully, then harrumphed some more before

finally asking me my age.

'I'm forty-six,' I answered without thinking; then, remembering that ten years

had inexplicably elapsed since the world had last seen me, I corrected myself.

'No, better make that fifty-six.'

'Harrumph! Hmm, well, I prefer to believe your first statement, Mr de Marigny.

Despite your injuries you're in a remarkably good state of preservation. I

would have said forty-two, perhaps forty-three at the outside. Certainly not

fifty-six.'

'Doctor,' I eagerly cried, grasping at his arms (and at a

straw at the same time) as I sought his eyes with mine. 'Tell me - what year

is this?'

'Hmm?' He peered at me through the thick lenses of his glasses. 'Eh? The year?

Ah, yes, you're having some trouble with your memory; aren't you? Yes, Peaslee

mentioned that. Hmm, well, the year is 1979. Does that help any?'

'No, that doesn't help,' I slowly answered, dismayed to discover Peasiee's

statement with regard to my lost ten years corroborated, even though I had

known it would be. I shook my head glumly. 'It's strange, I know, but

somewhere I seem to have mislaid ten years. Only I'm pretty damned sure I

haven't aged ten years!'

He looked at me steadily for a moment, seriously, then grinned. 'Oh? Then you

must count yourself lucky, er, harrumph!' He started to pack his instruments

away. 'Years seem to hang like lumps of lead on me. Each one weighs that much

heavier and drags me down that much faster!'

I spent the rest of the afternoon vainly attempting to formulate some sort of

answer to this problem of the time lapse, giving it up in the end when I

remembered the daily newspapers. They lay on a low chair to the right of my

bed, within reach but out of sight, which was why I had forgotten them. But no

sooner had I picked up the first newspaper than the enigma presented itself

yet again - in the date at the top of the first page. Ten years . . .

Deliberately then, and with a genuine effort at concentration - something

which should have come far easier to me - I forced the recurring problem from

my mind and began to read. What I expected to find, what modern wonders had

been wrought in this 'future' world, I really do not know. And so it was with

a definite sense of relief

that I discovered very little to have changed. The Big Names of the day were

different, certainly, but they featured in the same old headlines.

Then I came upon an article about the Mars program in an illustrated

scientific journal of recent date, noting that space probes had already been

sent around Mars and recovered, and that they had been brought down under

their own power on dry land. Progress! The title, by no means purely

speculative, was 'The Exploration of Space - Men on Mars by '85.' But no

sooner had I come across this article than I remembered what the Foundation

had found on the moon: the secret that not even the American astronauts

themselves had known. Nevertheless, certain of their instruments had

transmitted back to Earth the fact that life did exist beneath that stark,

cruel surface, a life even more cruel and stark. The octopoid spawn of Cthulhu

was there, imprisoned on Earth by the Elder Gods before the moon had been

hurled into orbit from the Azoic Pacific, molten again following that terrific

battle which the forces of evil had lost. Little wonder that the full moon has

driven men to madness and caused dogs to howl down the centuries . . . And

then I wondered just what new horrors the first men might find on Mars . . .

Just how widespread throughout the universe were the prisons of the Elder

Gods, wherein they had chained the malignant powers of the CCD? The great

occult books had it that Hastur was imprisoned near Aldebaran in the Hyades,

and that the Elder Gods themselves were palaced in Orion. So very far away! I

was no mathematician, but I still knew the definition of a light-year, and

while no man could ever hope to visualize such a distance, nevertheless I

could at least conceive of thousands of such units. So very far ... What hope

then for little Mars, mere millions of miles away, in the selfsame star system

as the home planet of Man, a system which had actually formed part of the

inconceivably ancient battleground?

Puzzling just such disturbing questions as these, with that scientific journal

still in my hands, I eventually felt myself nodding. In fact it had been

growing dark in my room for some time. Matron Emily had looked in once or

twice but had steadfastly refused to put my light on, saying that it was best

I should get some sleep. Perhaps it was simply the added psychological effect

of her words, or it just could have been the result of too much eyestrain in

the steadily darkening room, but whichever way it was I soon succumbed to

sleep, and it seemed that I began to dream almost immediately.

Now I have never been what you might call a great dreamer. In fact those

dreams from which Peaslee had so mercifully rescued me were as strong and

stronger than any I had ever previously known. By this I mean to say that it

was extremely rare for me to dream so vividly; and yet no sooner had I closed

my eyes when, for the second time in one day, I found myself assailed by

strange nightmares and fantasies.

I floated in a region of weird forces outside yet forming a part of space and

time; and I saw the great, coffin-shaped clock hurtling toward me out of even

weirder nether regions while Crow's voice called out to me. But this time it

was no exhortation to follow him that I heard but more a cry for help - an

urgent request for assistance which I could not quite make out in its entirety

before the clock drove on along paths unknown in nature into the distance of

lost temporal wildernesses. And though the clock - or space-time ship, or

whatever the thing was -had gone, still there sounded in my ears the eerie

echo of Crow's lost cry for help, the tormented SOS of a soul in distress.

That, at least, is the way it seemed to me, and I

was later to learn that this interpretation of my friend's telepathic

communication was not far short of correct.

Again and again, recurrently, this vision of the clock driving through

hyperspace-time came to me; and over and over again I threw myself in its path

only to be flung aside, left to swim frantically in its wake, vainly

attempting to rescue my friend from whatever horrors threatened him. But who

may swim against the tides of time?

Finally I woke up, and it was night; the room was still and quiet; my

star-stone gleamed whitely against the flower vase in a stray beam of

moonlight.

For a long time I simply lay there, feeling the cool of the sheet against my

hot, naked arms, and the rapid beat of my heart within my chest. And in a

short while my thoughts turned again to wondering about the plight of my poor

friend, lost from men for ten long years. . . . And I admit that I despaired.

Of Peaslee and the Wilmarth Foundation

(From de Marigny's notebooks)

Two mornings later, bright and early and just as he had promised, Peaslee came

to see me. It seemed that I was no sooner awake and shaved, just starting in

on a very ample breakfast brought in by Matron Emily (my meals had been

growing progressively larger and more regular over the past two days) when he

opened the door to walk in unannounced.

'De Marigny, you look well!' He came and sat by my bed. 'God, man, do you

intend to eat all of that? Still, I suppose it's more substantial than all

that muck they've had to pump into you over these last weeks. How do you

feel?'

'Fine,' I mumbled around a mouthful of bacon and egg, 'and I'll feel even

better after they get my legs out of this concrete tomorrow. Listen, you talk

and I'll eat, then I'll talk. Not that you'll get much out of me, I'm afraid,

for I've nothing really to tell. But how about you? What of the Wilmarth

Foundation?'

'The Foundation?' Peaslee smiled broadly, deep wrinkles forming in his aged

face. 'All's well within the Foundation, Henri, in fact things could hardly be

better. We haven't got them all yet, the minions of the CCD, not by any means

- but their numbers decrease every year, and that's the important thing. Oh,

there are still certain problems, many of them in the USSR, but even the

Soviets are starting to come around to our way of thinking.'

'And the organization retains its cloak of secrecy?'

'Certainly. More people in high places know of the Foundation's work now, yes

- that was necessary for our expansion and continuation - but mundane mankind

strolls blindly by. It has to be that way. To let people know what has been

going on, what still goes on, would be to invite disaster. There are still . .

. beings . . . that could be called up. The last thing we want is an upsurge

of interest in such matters. The fear of large-scale panic is not so great

these days; there are too many wonders to see, too many marvels to behold. A

handful of ghosts and nightmares from a time already lost when the Cambrian

was the veriest baby of an age would no longer drive the world to madness, but

to have people alerted to these things, to have them seeking out and reading

the great old books again, and perhaps dabbling . . . Oh, no. We can't have

that, de Marigny. And so the Foundation remains secret, and its work carries

on as before.'

I nodded, then inclined my head toward the vase of flowers and the curiously

shaped stone at its base. 'For all your reassuring words,' I said, 'I see

you're not about to take any chances with my life!'

'Indeed we're not!' he declared. 'For we've already lost you once too often.

And you're honoured, de Marigny, for that's a very special stone. It is one of

the originals, excavated with a handful of others when the Foundation killed a

Cthonian recently, one of the biggest and worst yet. That was during a

supposed archeological expedition to the region of Sarnath the Doomed in what

was once the Land of Mnar, Saudi Arabia to you. That stone was manufactured by

the Elder Gods themselves, whoever or whatever they were.'

I leaned across to take the object of our conversation in my hand, peering at

it intently. There appeared to be fine lines drawn on its surface, whorls and

squiggles,

curious glyphs that seemed to defy my eye to follow their intricacies. 'There

are ... markings!'

'Do you recognize them?' the professor asked at once, vastly interested.

'Yes, I think I do,' I answered. 'They're very similar to the hieroglyphs on

Crow's clock, his space-time machine. Do you think there could be some

connection?'

'It would certainly seem that there is,' he answered wryly. 'I've kicked

myself a thousand times since I first saw that clock at Crow's place when I

stayed there. I knew then that it was a very important thing, but who could

have guessed just how important? I should have taken notes, photographs. Why,

Crow even told me he believed the thing to be -'

'A toy of the Elder Gods themselves?' I finished it for him.

'Yes, exactly. Of course, all is not quite lost: we have the books at

Miskatonic which supplied Crow with his first really important clue to, well,

how to drive the damned thing! But I dearly wish now that I had photographed

the clock itself. Every fragment of information is of value in the overall

picture, like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle, and this must surely be one of the

basic puzzles of the universe itself.'

'But what else of the Foundation?' I impatiently asked when he was done. 'How

far have you gone in ten years? What successes, what failures? What new

knowledge? Have you found R'lyeh in the Pacific? And Shudde-M'ell - what of

the Prime Burrower now? God, Peaslee, but I'm dying to know everything. Ten

years - I've lost ten years!'

'Whoa!' The professor held up his hands. 'Slow down. I'll tell you everything,

of course, but it's best if I start with what we have not done. For instance,

we have not found

R'lyeh, no, and that in turn leads us to believe that the Johansen Narrative

is at fault - not in its premise that a fantastic city of alien dimensions,

angles and proportions exists beneath the Pacific - but that the specific

island which rose up from the ocean floor in 1925 was R'lyeh, and that its

hellish denizen was Cthulhu. That it was one of the Cthulhu spawn seems a

certainty, but Great Cthulhu himself? We doubt it. You may research it for

yourself, Henri. The Foundation did long ago. Basically Johansen's story is

this:

'On March 23rd, 1925, at latitude 47°9' south, longitude 126°43', the Alert,

under Johansen's command and in those waters following a series of complicated

misadventures that had left her wildly off course, landed on a small island

where an island had never been sighted before. Now the sea in that area is two

thousand fathoms deep. It is on the very edge of the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge,

which falls away to three thousand fathoms and even deeper. The area is not

noticeably volcanic, and in any case a cataclysm of sufficient force to bring

even a small area of the ocean floor to the surface would without a shadow of

a doubt have been recorded. So it would seem we might throw out the fanciful

Johansen Narrative forthwith, except that the Foundation, like Charles Fort,

prefers to make its own decisions!

'The buckling of the Pacific floor, in places more a stretching, as Australia

tends northward in the continental drift, has been very pronounced in the area

of the Pacific-Antarctic Ridge since early Miocene times. The island that rose

in March, 1925, was in fact a phenomenon of this geologically prolonged

buckling, and its disappearance again shortly thereafter may be put down to

similar seismic forces.'

'I've read Fort too,' I remarked dryly, 'and I think he'd have taken exception

to what you just said, Wingate.'

'Eh? Oh, of course, so he would - if we hadn't sent

down bathyspheres at that precise point just three years ago, and if we hadn't

discovered what we did.'

'Go on,' I said, putting my plate aside at last. 'What did you find?'

'Our first bell was simply, well, a diving-bell, nothing more. A device

lowered into the sea to record with cameras whatever it saw. It hit bottom at

only two hundred fathoms, at the very peak of the submarine range, which is

now, incidentally, quickly sinking back into the deeps. But before we lost it

we were afforded fantastic glimpses the like of which - '

'Lost it?' I interrupted.

'Yes.' He nodded grimly. 'We lost it. Cables wrenched loose, bell smashed to

smithereens - and a structure capable of withstanding thousands of tons of

pressure at that! We recovered fragments later, fantastically dented, gnawed

and crushed. A sea-shoggoth, we're inclined to believe, perhaps a number of

them, about their immemorial task of protecting and worshiping their dreaming

masters, the spawn of Cthulhu.

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THETRANSITIONOFTITUSCROWBYTITUSCROWLONDONOCCULTISTBACKFROMTHEDEAD!MrHenri-LaurentdeMarigny,sonofthegreatNewOrleansmysticEtienne-LaurentdeMarigny,isliterally'backfromthedead',havingbeenpronouncedmissingordeadin1976alongwithhisfriendandcolleagueMrTitusCrow,lateofLeonard's-WalkHeath.Speculationisnowrif...

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