Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 — page 116: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“We tried every means to make that confounded parrot shut up. We cov- ered its cage with a cloth, which only seemed to drive it into new frenzies; and we tried lowering it in the hold on top of the cargo, but that had an even worse effect. It would not eat but occasionally would dip its beak in water. And nearly all the time, pulsing and rising and falling, the ship was wracked with screaming and the voices of those dead men. Mathews went below, half drunk and with a false bravado at last, and with his ears still stuffed up he managed to: fall asleep. With the coming of full morning and. the continued repetition of that parrot’s noise I recovered some of my nerve. “I drew some comfort from the fact that we were fully a hundred miles from ~ the spot where we had picked up the Robert Sutier, and whatever it was that had made her a crewless derelict, was far away. I went ’midships, shuddering, to listen to the bird with the same morbidness that draws you to the scene of - a murderer’s crime, and tried to count the different remarks it kept making. There were, as I ee said, only three in English but there were several in frenzied Spanish and one of the seamen who had been on German vessels: assured me there were at least a dozen words shouted in that tongue. I thought I caught snatches of French too, but I was not sure. 1 am speaking now only of those words obviously registered on the bird’s memory in that time of recent horror. “T got hold of a copy of the ship’s original articles and discovered that to judge from the names she must have carried a mixed crew all right, as most vessels do. There had. been a cook named José Alvarez, obviously Spanish. There had been two men with Teutonic names, and one with a French- sounding name. I judged the officers had been Americans and it seemed reasonable to suppose that each man, in the moment of stress, would have reverted to his native tongue. “The more I thought of the matter, under che comforting bright sun of day, the more I began to see the possibilities, and to grow curious. Somewhere in all that jargon the mad parrot kept giving forth there must be a clue, must be some word that would tell what it was that, had come aft. It was not unreasonable to suppose that while the men were running madly about the deck some one of them must have shouted out a word, a sentence or a fragment giving a hint as to its appearance. And if that were so such a sentence or fragment might have registered on the quivering parrot’s brain to be eventually spewed forth. I thought to myself: ‘If once we get that damned bird to Callao alive there'll be linguists to take down everything it’s shouting out. Then we might know!’ “You see, it really was intriguing, apart from all the terror and horror those racking words and screams provided—coming, as it were, out of nothing. We were on the track of a genuine mystery. We might have in our grasp the clue that would account for those other ships that had been found as we'd found the Robert Sutter. We might even be able to understand why ships had totally disappeared, without trace. We might catch a glimpse of Some- thing that should have died in the youth of the world. The parrot knew! Why had these men vanished? What was it that had come on them out of the calm sea, sending them into stark convulsive terror, causing one of them, 114 es | eomicvooks: com