Avon Fantasy Reader No. 13 — page 82: what you’re looking at

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

cursed designs of the Tcho-Tcho people of Burma, nor of anything ever written which suggests that there are strange hybrid men living under the snow and ice of Antarctica, that there exists today a lost kingdom of the sea, - accursed R'lyeh, where slumbering Cthulhu, deep in the earth beneath the sea, 1s waiting to rise and destroy the worl id. Nor have I ever heard of the shunned and forbidden Plateau of Leng, where the Ancient Ones once ruled. “Please do not think I exaggerate. [ have never heard of these things be- fore, yet Wentworth speaks as if he had been there, even hinting that these rhystenious people have fed him. Of Lhassa I have heard vague hints, and of course | do remember having once seen a cinema containing what the pro- ducer called ‘shots of Africa’s Vanishing Impi.’ But of the other things, I know nothing. And if I can assume anything from the shuddering horror in Went- worth’s semi-conscious voice as. he spoke of these sudden things, I do not want to know anything. “There was a constant reference, too, in Wentworth’s mutterings, to a Blackwood, by whom he evidently meant the writer, Algernon Blackwood, "a man who spent some time here in Canada, says Dr. Jamison. The doctor gave me one of this man’s books, pointing out to me several strange stories of air elementals, stories remarkably similar in character to the curious Still- water mystery, yet nothing so paradoxically definite and vague. I can refer you to these stories if you do not already know them. “The doctor also gave me several old magazines, in which are stories by an American, a certain H. P. Lovecraft, which have to do with Cthulhu, with the lost sea kingdom of R’lyeh and the forbidden Plateau of Leng. Perhaps these are the sources of Wentworth’s apparently authentic information, yet in none of these stories appears any of the horrific details of which Went- worth speaks so familiarly. “Wentworth died at 3:21 this afternoon. An hour before, he passed into a coma from which he did not emerge again. Dr. Jamison and the coroner seemed to think that the exposure to warmth had killed the two men, Jami- son telling me candidly that a year with the Wind-Walker had so inured the men to cold, that warmth like ours affected them as extreme cold would affect us normal men. “You must understand that Dr. Jamison was entirely serious. Yet, his medi- eal report read that the two men and the girl had died from exposure to the cold. In explanation he said, ‘I may think what I please, Norris, and I may believe what I please—but I dare not write it!’ Then, after a pause, he said, ‘And, if you are wise, you will withhold the names of these people from the general public because questions are certain to arise once they become known, and how are you people going to explain their coming to us from the sky, and where they spent the year since the Stillwater mystery? And finally, how are you going to react against the storm of criticism which will fall on you ence more when the Stillwater case is reopened with such strangely unbe-- lievable facts as we have gathered here from the lips of a dying man?’ “T think Dr. Jamfron is right. I have no opinion to offer, absolutely none, and I am making this report only because it is my duty as an officer to do so, and I am making it only to you. Perhaps it had better be destroyed, rather 80 COMnmicooo©