The Dwellers Under the Tombs

"The Dwellers Under the Tombs" is a short story by Robert E. Howard that first appeared in 1976, three decades after Howard's death, in the anthology Lost Fantasies 4. It appears to be a sequel to Howard's Cthulhu Mythos story "The Children of the Night" first published in 1931, and continues Howard's Lovecraftian theme of a secret subterranean and degenerate race.
==Synopsis==
O'Donnel, staying at his friend Conrad's house in the Dagoth Hills, is awakened by a neighbor, Job Kiles, who reports that his twin brother Jonas, who died a week earlier, has come back as a vampire. The skeptical friends accompany Job to the Kiles family tomb, perched atop Smuggler's Point. Job goes in first, alone, and staggers out, fatally frightened. O'Donnel and Conrad explore the tomb, and find Jonas's lidless coffin empty--but discover a secret door that leads to an extensive series of underground chambers leading down into the hill. One chamber contains a room that had been used as a hideout by Jonas; they find his diary, which spells out a plan to fake his own death and scare his hated brother to death by pretending to be a vampire. The underground labyrinth, however, turns out to be inhabited by real monsters--a degenerate subterranean race forced underground by the Indians--who, it turns out, killed Jonas and then frightened Job to death in the tomb. Conrad and O'Donnel encounter them while exploring the tunnel complex, and barely escape with their lives.
==Characters==
The story features characters--or at least names--that first appeared in Howard's story "The Children of the Night", though their roles are quite different here. While Conrad in the earlier tale was a student of the occult with an extensive library on the supernatural, here he laughs at the idea of believing in "this vampire nonsense!" At the end of "The Children of the Night," O'Donnel is obsessed with killing a former friend because of his suspected descent from a degenerate subterranean race quite similar to the "Dwellers under the tomb" -- but he makes no connection between the creatures encountered in this story and those he calls his "ancient enemy" in the other.
Conrad is said here to be "iron-nerved in the presence of human enemies"--and less so when confronted with nonhuman horrors. O'Donnel carries a .45 pistol--which Conrad jokes is a sign of his "Texas raising."
Job Kiles is introduced as "a sour, miserly old man who lived on the small estate which adjoined that of Conrad." Jonas Kiles is a "spendthrift" who liked to "boast about his knowledge of secret cults and black magic." He spent years "wandering in the Orient," where he apparently learned the secret of entering "a self-induced state of catalepsy, such as is practiced by Hindu Fakirs."
The Kiles are descended from "old Captain Jacob Kiles," a 17th century "buccaneer and a smuggler." 
==Setting==
The story takes place in the Dagoth Hills, in an unspecified part of the United States. The "stunted range" is described as "low, rolling hills" with "sullen black outlines"--"barren-crowned, with long bush-clad slopes. They are on a seacoast, but are "practically uninhabited, as "the inner valleys were too shallow of soil, the hills themselves too rocky, for cultivation." The name comes from the local Indians, but is "not allied to any known Indian language." (It recalls Dagon's Cave, a British location that's similarly home to secret subterranean humanoids in Howard's "People of the Dark".)
==The Dwellers Under the Tomb ==
The title creatures of the story appear to be a New World version of the secret stunted people that appear in Howard stories like "People of the Dark," "Children of the Earth," "Worms of the Earth," and "The Little People." Jonas Kiles' diary notes that "a legend persisted among Indians of this vicinity that many centuries before the coming of the white men, their ancestors drove a strange alien race into the caverns of Dagoth Hills." He remarks on paintings within the underground passages that seem to record this event from the losers' point of view--whose depictions of themselves "resembled the Caucasian type rather than the Indian." As they were forced lower into the hills, they retreated along the evolutionary scale as well--until they were, as Conrad exclaims after he encounters them: "Crawling obscenities seething in the slime of the earth’s unguessed deeps–the ultimate horror of retrogression–the nadir of human degeneration–good God, their ancestors were men!"
One thing that distinguishes these creatures from their European counterparts is that their heads resemble those of dogs rather than snakes--one is called "a flaming-eyed dog-headed horror such as madmen see in black nightmares"--perhaps influenced by H. P. Lovecraft's ghouls. The Dagoth Hills creatures do, however, share with Howard's European throwbacks "an earthy, reptilian sort of smell."
==External Links==
*Review at R'lyeh Tribune
*Review at MPorcius Fiction Log
Category:Robert E. Howard works
Category:Lovecraft Circle Works