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

of the country should receive more than its usual quota of earth tremors. Eventually 1 concluded that the machine was either totally at fault or simply far too sensitive - perhaps the brass screw needed adjustment - and so finally I went to sleep assuring myself that the strong shock we had felt had been merely coincidental to my uncle’s condition. Still, I noticed before I dozed off that the very air itself seemed charged with a strange tension, and that the slight breeze which had wafted the late leaves during the day had gone completely, leaving in its passing an absolute quiet in which, during my slumbers, I fancied all night that the ground trembled beneath my bed …
    The next morning I was up early. I was short of writing materials and had decided to catch the lone morning bus into Radcar. I left the cottage before Sir Amery was awake, and during the journey I thought back on the events of the previous day and decided to do a little research while I was in town. In Radcar I had a bite to eat before calling at the offices of the Radcar Mirror where a Mr McKinnen, a sub-editor, was particularly helpful. He spent some time on the office telephones making extensive inquiries on my behalf.
    Eventually I was told that for the better part of a year there had been no tremors of any importance in England, a point I must obviously have challenged had not further information been forthcoming. I learned that there had been some minor shocks and that these had occurred at places as close as Goole, a few miles away (that one within the last forty-eight hours), and as far as Tenterden near Dover. There had also been a very minor tremor at Ramsey in Huntingdonshire. I thanked Mr McKinnen profusely for his help and would have left then but, as an afterthought, he asked me if I would be interested in checking through the paper’s international files. I gratefully accepted and was left on my own to study a great pile of interesting translations. Of course, as I expected, most of the information was useless to me, but it did not take me long to sort out what I was after.
    At first I had difficulty in believing the evidence of my own eyes. I read that in August there had been quakes in Aisne of such severity that one or two houses had collapsed and a number of people had been injured. These shocks had been likened to those of a few weeks earlier at Agen in that they seemed to be caused more by some settling of the ground than by actual tremors. In early July there had also been shocks in Calahorra, Chinchon, and Ronda in Spain.
    The trail went as straight as the flight of an arrow and lay across - or rather under -the straits of Gibraltar to Xauen in Spanish Morocco, where an entire neighbourhood of houses had collapsed. Farther yet, to … But I had had enough; I dared look no more; I did not wish to know - not even remotely
    -the whereabouts of dead G’harne …
    Oh! I had seen more than sufficient to make me forget about my original errand. My book could wait, for now there were more important things to do. My next port of “call was the town library, where I took down Nicheljohn’s World Atlas and turned to that page with a large, folding map of the British Isles. My geography and knowledge of England’s counties are passable, and I had noticed what I considered to be an oddity in the seemingly unconnected places where England had suffered those ‘minor quakes’. I was not mistaken. Using a second book as a straight edge I lined up Goole in Yorkshire and Tenterden on the south coast and saw, with a tingle of monstrous foreboding, that the line passed very close to, if not directly through, Ramsey in Huntingdonshire. With dread curiosity I followed the line north and, through suddenly fevered eyes, saw that it passed within only a mile or so of the cottage on the moors!
    With unfeeling, rubbery fingers I turned more pages, until I found the leaf showing France. For a long moment I paused - then I fumblingly found Spain and