Cavern World

[aeon]

http://chiseler.org/post/181840553021/r ... underworld

Good summary.

http://www.shavertron.com/bonesteel.html

https://issuu.com/raw-vision/docs/rv84

Gods of the Cavern World


http://pweb.netcom.com/~mthorn/mkalien1.htm

http://pweb.netcom.com/~mthorn/mkalien2.htm




He Remembers Lemuria.
The Herald Covert Letters. A Paranormal Romance; part 3

G Allen
Dec 2, 2016

Editor’s note.
This is part of an email I received in the late 1990s from a man calling himself “Herald H Covert.” I’ve gotten a number of similar stories from Herald and present them here for whatever entertainment value they may have.

“None of this is true…..probably.”

Arkansas, October 1975

I was here to track down a nagging problem for the last 40 years or so. Nagging, at least, for people in my business. Only a few recall that in the early 1940s the sagging Science Fiction pulp magazine Amazing Stories did something very odd.

In what some said was a desperate attempt to boost sales, the editor published a story called “I Remember Lemuria,” about a secret underground civilization which directs the actions of mankind. Trouble is the inhabitants of this underground world were quite mad: this is the main reason that wars, disease and famine are a constant part of human existence. A wonderful yarn — except that the author claimed it was not fiction. The beings known as “Teros” and “Deros” were real, and he wrote about them not to entertain, but as a warning to mankind.

The story might have been dismissed as a clever hoax or the ravings of a paranoid schizophrenic. Except people believed— lots of people. In fact the sales of Amazing took off, and hundreds wrote in from all over the US, claiming that they too had been contacted by the Deros and the Teros. More tales of the underground civilization were published in Amazing, and the series known as the Shaver Mystery became a national sensation. The stories are notable, if for no other reason, for inventing novel ideas like laser beams, alien abductions and flying saucers.

Here in the rural town of North Lake, Arkansas, I hoped to find my quarry, the author of the Shaver Mystery, Richard S. Shaver. My search led me to an old house at the end of a long dusty road. This account is from memory. I’ve found by experience, when I deal with such things. Pens mysteriously run out of ink. Recorders get nothing but static. It’s better this way.

A woman waved at me from kitchen window and pointed to the back porch. I found an old man was sitting in a rocking chair, seemingly asleep.

“You came about the welder?” he asked without opening his eyes.

“Mr. Shaver?” I began. “My name is — “

“I don’t care what your name is,” the man snapped. “Names are touchy things, and you wouldn’t be telling me yer’ real name anyway. “

“THEY sent you, didn’t they?”

This startled me. Naturally, I never use my real name, and “they” did send me. I was hoping that this old man did not know who “they” were.

“The Deros?” I said. I wanted to get him talking about himself, and avoid — for the moment — going into what I was really here for.

“See? They’re still at it. All this time and I have been trying to forget but they sent you to make me remember! It was a small thing at first. I was a welder until the voices started in the machines! I had to write down what the voices said. Eventually came all the rest of it.”

He waved a hand at the junk which cluttered the porch. We were surrounded by shelves, laden with moldering paintings, a large rock collection, and stacks of old books printed on now-yellowed paper. As I looked around the old man began to tell me his story.

“It was a letter I sent to Ray Palmer back in ’43. He was editing Amazing Stories — a third-rate fantasy pulp.” The old man chuckled. “I sent him something juicier than big-bosomed girls and ray guns. I made up this alphabet — from a dead civilization.”

“Hold it,” I said. “According to what Palmer wrote, you said it was a real alphabet.”

“Yes, yes, well… it was later, when my welder began talking to me, that I discovered the truth. The Vhujunka, a race of subterranean dwellers, spoke to me out of machines: my welder at first, but other machines too. A radio sometimes, an electric typewriter. The Vhujunka are machines themselves, you know; they inhabit deep places within the Earth.

“They’re all that remains of a once-great civilization, a race of titans who had to flee the surface to escape the radiation of the sun. Humans are the pale shadows of this once-great people. I called them Detrimental Robots, or Deros for short.

“Moving underground didn’t pan out too well, though. They all died… after a few thousand years…” He trailed off and fell silent.

“If they died,” I asked, “how was it that you spoke to them?”

He sat mutely, and I thought he hadn’t heard me. But after a moment he continued.

“They died… but the machines they built lived on. Think about it! A race which could build machines that make our supercomputers seem like Tinkertoys! They found a way to place a personality into a machine, create a sort of immortality as long as the machines continued to function.”

There was a fire in his eyes now. “But it was a trap! This was a vibrant, expansive race, full of art and music. To be stuck inside box for thousands of years, able to interact only indirectly with the physical world, it drove them over the edge.”

“And what does all of this have to do with us humans?” I asked.

“They want out! They want to become alive again. Feel the air and water against flesh. They’re in a living hell and they can’t stand it. Burning alive would be paradise compared to this. They have machines that are able to do things for them — kidnap people and take them underground for God knows what. They influence our politics and our technology. Look how far we’ve come in the last few hundred years! You think we went from wooden sailing ships to spacecraft in such a short time because we’re smart?

“Why, soon we’ll be able to make a computer the size of a refrigerator — or even smaller! And there’s more. Look at this!”

He tossed me a dense-looking journal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, dated May 1974. Paper-clipped open was an article entitled A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection, by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn.

I’d seen the article when it came out the year before; it was a way of identifying data within a shared computer network. This of little use to anyone except a few academics and scientists. But the old man seemed to think it was pretty important.

“Don’t you understand?” he said. “This can be expanded; everyone could have a computer, on a tremendous world network! That’s what they want.”

“Who?”

“The Deros! They’d have influence on our machines; on us, on everything! Once this happens our technology will really take off — but we won’t control it.

“You really think people will have computers in their homes?” I said. “Anyway, if the Deros wanted to control people through technology, why not use what’s already in every home in America — television?”

“You think they don’t? Look at that Star Trek program! Remember those baddies who would kidnap people, take ’em to an underground lair and show ’em holograms of family picnics to keep ’em under control? Star Trek called ’em Talosians — Deros, Talosians, same thing!”

The old man was racked with a coughing spasm at this point. I went inside to fetch him some water. The woman in the home just smiled knowingly at me and winked whilst proffering a glass. When I returned, the old man seemed subdued, like a run-down toy.

Wearily, he continued his story. “They are infusing themselves in our society through our entertainment. That’s why they had me write those stories! I was their avatar, to get the word out. Not just through the stories — also through the paintings of the images embedded in rocks.”

He must have noticed my expression. “I know you don’t believe me,” he said. “I don’t blame you. I know it sounds crazy… sometimes even I think I’m crazy.” He took another swallow of water. “Then I hear the voices again.

“I’m dying, y’know — the docs give me only a few months. Heart, lungs, can’t stand the stress anymore.”

He seemed out of breath for a moment. “You have a cigarette?” he asked quietly.

I mumbled that I didn’t smoke, and this seemed to make him angry. “You think you know everything, seen everything. Well, it’s a much bigger world out there than you think! Go ahead — go out to the garage.”

He pointed to a tumbledown building nearby. “In the back corner’s my old welder, the one that started it all. I kept it all these years, though God knows why. Switch it on and listen — but don’t listen too long! They get their hooks into you that way. You’ll be doing their bidding, and you won’t even know it! It knows things.

THEY know things. You’ll see!”

I went back to his dusty garage. There, squatting in a far corner, was the machine at the heart of this strange story: an old arc welder, caked in the grime of decades, a loathsome artifact of a time long past. A dangerous-looking power cord was plugged into an over-sized 220 volt outlet.

When I turned the machine on I heard a thump as the spring-loaded switch slammed home. The old machine made a soft buzzing sound like a far-away beehive, or the drone of a bagpipe. It seemed to breathe slowly, I could see dust spiral around in the disturbed air.

Other than that, nothing. I listened for a few minutes, and was about to turn it off when, in the background hum I began to hear — something. Could it be — a voice?!

It was like a bad dream, a high pitched, whispery voice, that seemed to be repeating the same thing over and over again.

“Hedwig,” it said. “The eternity — the eternity. You — help us breach the eternity!”

This spooked me — very few people, not even my employers knew my real name.

I yanked the cord out of the wall and let it fall in a heap on the dirt floor. The machine fell silent after a moment; the voice, if it was a voice faded in reality, but not my memory.

The old man was sitting in his rocking chair, asleep — or so it seemed.

“Told you,” he said without opening his eyes. “I won’t listen to it any more. It doesn’t belong to our time, our world. It’s not from here —

— or maybe it’s been here longer than we know.”

Postscript — November 1987

I never saw the man I believed to be Richard Shaver again. About a month later one of my clipping services sent me his death notice. Shortly thereafter, I received a letter at one of my PO boxes. This one was from an estate legal service representing one Richard Shaver, deceased. It seemed he had added a clause his will which read, “I bequeath a Hobart welder, SN 234432, to ‘Harold Covert’ in hopes that he finds more use of it than I.”

I had the thing shipped to a storage facility, where I have a couple of other items. It sits there to this day, along with an Apple 1, one of the early Altair computers and a few more exotic things.

As for me, I try not to have much to do with computers. I’ll stick with my trusty Remington Compact, as long as I can still find parts for it.

I have heard the voice once or twice again. I’m not sure why it tries to talk to me; I’m not in a good position to help it move into the daylight. What I really fear is that it also speaks to others — and that they are paying closer attention. They are carrying out its instructions.

Cerf and Kahn’s packet-switching network continues to grow, most recently into something they call ARPANET. I saw a young Congressman from Tennessee on C-SPAN waxing poetic about “highways of information stretching across the planet.”

I hope it doesn’t come to much, for all our sakes…

— Herald Covert.

A word on Herald Covert.

I started getting Herald Covert letters several years ago. They were sent via a number of anonymous re-mailers and never the same one twice. I’ve replied to a couple and gotten responses, but always using a new mail system.

According to his story; Herald is associated with a shadowy organisation — private or governmental I have no idea. This “agency” (according to Herald) sends him to various parts of the world to discover the truth about physical and social “anomalies.” Criptozoology, paranormal phenomena, UFOs and sinister oozings for all I know. Most of his material is of questionable value and sounds like fiction to me.

He claims it’s not.