Tunneler Below

The Tunnelers Below, or just Tunnelers, AKA "Dark Crawlers", are from Fritz Leiber's “The Terror from the Depths”.

Description

They were worms about as long as a man and as thick as a man’s thigh, cylindrical and untapering. From end to end, as many as a centipede’s legs, were pairs of tiny wings, translucent like a fly’s, which vibrated unceasingly, producing an unforgettably sinister low-pitched hum. They had no eyes — their heads were one circular mouth lined with rows of triangular teeth each like a shark's.
— Fritz Leiber, “The Terror from the Depths”

Strange, flying, eyeless, centipede-like entities, about as long as a man is tall and as thick as a man's leg with ever-vibrating and humming wings in place of a centipede's legs, and mouths lined with sharp teeth capable of gnawing through solid stone, giving the creatures their name, and allowing them to dig complicated networks of subterranean tunnels between powerful sources of mystical and mythos energy past, present, and future, even beneath ocean-beds and deep into the Hollow Earth, creating a virtual global, underground mythos super-highway system, swarming with potentially millions of buzzing Tunnelers.

The Tunnelers are intelligent, after a thoroughly-inhuman fashion, and the Tunnelers are powerfully psychic, sharing a collective state of waking dream-consciousness, allowing their swarm's waking thoughts to merge into the dreams of nearby sleepers as a sort of shared experience and intellect; the Tunnelers can also absorb the intellects and personalities - the spirits - of their victims, granting the victims a strange sort of immortality within the bodies and shared intellect of the Tunnelers. The Tunnelers emit a sort of constant "background noise" of psychic impressions of words and images connected to Mythos concepts, creatures, places, artifacts, and events, which can be detected by sensitive people as a strange, buzzing voice or weird, distorted images which impart an almost constant source of fresh, sanity-shaking, alien Cthulhu Mythos knowledge to those who can detect and comprehend it, with sensitives receiving the psychic background broadcasts more or less clearly depending on their distance from the Tunnelers' underground passages, and particularly resistant listeners of low psychic Power often detecting little more than an unsettling humming of indefinite origin in the "back of their head" when separated by a shell of mere fractions of an inch of stone between the listeners and the Tunnelers.

For sensitives, these psychic impressions of voices or sights or sounds connected to the Mythos are particularly vivid, loud and clear in dreams, and can subconsciously affect the receive, resulting in sleep-walking and sleep-talking, and even strange compulsions while awake, which are aligned to the goals and interests of the Tunnelers, such as building strange wonders, buildings, artifacts, artworks, or Mythos cult-based civilizations on the sites where the Tunnelers detect future Mythos energy to appear, tunneling down to meet the Tunnelers halfway, or uncovering and restoring long-buried and inactive Mythos artifacts and sites, or gathering cults to communicate with the Tunnelers below through visions: in this way the Tunnelers effectively recruit new Mythos cultists and found new Mythos cults on the surface world from the darkness of their tunnels below.

Heresies and Controversies

• The Tunnelers tunnel through more than mere stone - they also tunnel through time and space, and reality itself. In effect, the tunnels may connect distant places on earth to each other with unnaturally short tunnels that can allow travelers in those tunnels to walk across continents and oceans in a day. And, a tunnel may connect locations in the distant past on one end of the tunnel with locations in the distant future on the other - all time and space might thus be connected to the tunnels at different points, and the tunnels even border at points on parallel dimensions or locations such as the Dreamlands or other worldss. (YSDC)

Associated Mythos Elements

• race: Human Cultists
• location: Hollow Earth

Theoretically, the Tunnelers might transmit information about virtually any Mythos entity, place, artifact, or tome which the Tunnelers have seen first-hand, or have accessed memories of from the victims they have consumed.

The Tunnelers might theoretically also absorb the stray dreams or thoughts of any Mythos cults near their tunnels, and influence the thoughts and dreams of the cultists in turn, linking the Tunnelers potentially to every Mythos Cult as messengers or as a sort of collective cult leader.

References

• fiction: Fritz Leiber, “The Terror from the Depths”
• Sourcebook: Malleus Monstrorum