Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 — page 81: what you’re looking at

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

which Dr. Jamison mentioned travelers on the Olassie trail as having seen.) “There was also some very incoherent mumbling about the thing itself, vague and horrible thoughts which seemed to obsess Wentworth, some- thing about the towering “height of the thing seen against the sky in the hellish glow of the nocturnal fires. ; “Exactly what happened, I hardly dare venture to guess at. Out of Went- worth’s incoherent and troubled speech, there came only one positive statement, the substance of which was simply, that the three of them, Wentworth, Macdonald, and the girl, dd flee the sacrificial fires and the village, and had been coat on the Olassie trail on the way to Nelson by the thing, which had picked them up and carried them along, _ “After this statement, Wentworth became steadily more and more incoher- ent: He babbled a horrible story of the thing that swooped down after them as they fled in terror along the Olassie trail, and he blurted out, too, some terrible details of the mystery at Stillwater. Fron’ what Ti can make out, the thing that walked on the wind must have avenged itself, on the villagers not only for their previous coldness toward it, but also because of the flight of Irene Masitte, who had been chosen for the sacrifice. At any rate, between hysterical wails and shuddering adulations of the thing, there emerged from Wentworth’s distorted speech a graphic and terrible picture of a giant moa- strosity that came into the village from the forest, sweeping the people into the sky, seeking them out, one by one. “T don’t know how much of this I should chronicle for you, since I can understand what your attitude must be. Could it have been some animal, do” you think? Some prehistoric animal which had lain hidden for years in the depths of the pine forest near Stillwater, that perhaps had been preserved alive by the cold and revived again by the warmth of the giant fires to become the god of the mad Stillwater people? This seems to me the only other logical explanation, but there still remain so many things not yet accounted for, that J think it would be much better to leave the Stillwater mystery among the unsolved cases. “Macdonald died this morning at 10:07. Wentworth had not spoken since dawn, but he resumed shortly after Macdonald’s death, repeating again the same vague sentences which we first heard from him. His incoherent mur- murings leave us no alternative in regard to where he spent the past year. He seems to believe that he was carried along by this wind thing, this air elemen- tal. Though it is fairly certain that neither of the missing men was anywhere reported throughout the past year, this story may be simply the product of an overburdened mind, a mind suffering from a great shock. And the seem- ingly vast knowledge of the hidden places of the earth, as well as the known, may have been derived from books. “I say may have been derived, because in view of W: entworth’s suggestive, almost convincing, murmurings, it becomes only a tentative possibility. I know of no book which chronicles the mystic rites at the Lamasery in Tibet, which tells of the secret ceremonies of the Lhassa monks. Nor do I know of -any book which reveals the hidden life of the African Impi, nor of any pamphlet or monograph even so much as hinting at the forbidden and ac- : 79 Cconmiclbooks.Cconn