Titus Crow [1] The Burrowers Beneath Read Free

another tunnel joined the main one - but this one came down at an angle from above!
    There was a hole opening into the ceiling, with the edges rounded off and smoothed in some way I don’t understand, as if by heat like I said before.
    Well, I went dead slow from then on, but soon I came out of the tunnel into a big cave. At least, I took it to be a cave, but when I looked closer at the walls I saw that it wasn’t! It was simply a junction of a dozen or so of the tunnels. Pillars like stalagmites held up the ceiling. This was where I saw the carvings, those pictures of octopus-things etched in the walls, and I don’t think I need add how much that put the wind up me!
    I didn’t hang about there much longer (apart from anything else the stench was terrible), but long enough to check that the place was all of fifty feet across and that
    the walls were coated or smoothed over with that same sort of lava-stuff. The floor was flat enough but crumbly, almost earthy, and right in the middle of the place I found four great cave-pearls. At least, I think they’re cave-pearls. They’re about four inches across, these things, very hard, heavy, and glossy. Don’t ask me how they got down there, I don’t know, and I can’t see how they might have been formed naturally, like other cave-pearls I remember seeing when I was a kid. Anyway, I put them into a bag I carried and then went back the way I’d come to the terminal of the west-side workings. By then I’d been down there about an hour and a half.
    I didn’t get far into the actual coal-seams. The first half dozen were down.
    They had collapsed. But I soon enough found out what had brought them down! In and out of the old workings, lacing them like holes in Gorgonzola, those damned smooth-lined tunnels came and went, literally honeycombing the coal and rock alike! Then, in one of the few remaining old seams that still stood and where some poor-grade coal still remained, I came across yet another funny thing. A tunnel, one of the new ones, had been cut right along the original seam, and I noticed that here the walls weren’t of that lava substance but a pitchy, hard tar, exactly the kind of deposit you find bubbling out of hot coal in the coke-ovens, only set as hard as rock … !
    That was it. I’d had enough, and I set off back towards the main shaft and the lift-cage. It was then I thought I heard the chanting. Thought? - like hell I thought - I did hear it; and it was just as you wrote it down! It was distant, seeming to come from a very long way away, like listening to the sea in a shell or hearing a tune you remember in your head … But I knew I should never have been hearing things like that down there at all, and I took off for the lift-cage as fast as I could go.
    Well, I’ll keep the rest of it short, Mr Crow. I’ve probably said too much already as it is, and I just hope to God that you’re not one of those reporter fellows. Still, I wanted to get it off my chest, so what the hell care I?
    I finally arrived at the shaft bottom, by which time the chanting had died away, and I gave the lads on top a tinkle on the old handset to haul me up. At the top I made out my report, but not as fully as I’ve done here, and then I went home … I kept the cave-pearls, as mementos if you like, and said nothing about them in my report. I don’t see what good they’d be to anyone, anyway. Still, it does seem a bit like stealing. I mean, whatever the things really are - well, they’re not mine, are they? I might just send them off anonymously to the museum at Sunderland or Radcar. I suppose the museum people will know what they are …
    The next morning the reporters came around from the Daily Mail. They’d heard I had a bit of a story to tell and pumped me for all I was worth. I had the idea they were laughing at me, though, so I didn’t tell them a deal. They must have gone to see old Betteridge when finally they left me - and, well, you know the rest.
    And that’s it,