Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 51: what you’re looking at

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

and pterodactyls. Ach! This memory of ours is a terrible thing—for the sub- conscious is filled with sounds. There is stored the bellow of the mammoth and the sound made by the slime dripping from the scaly legs of the plesio- saurus|! “Now, years after, I can hear those sounds of that vault when the world is quiet. I will always hear them. They are in my flesh, in my bones, in my blood. They are a fear-poison that has got into my body through my ears. “T wished to run, but [ could not. My legs had lost their power. They were boneless, and I was afraid that I would fall to the floor. The noise had swung a little to the left of us, and for that I was glad. You bet I was. If it had swept over us, | would have died from fear. “The old man, the girl and the Russian did what I did—turned their heads to follow the sound. It was now surging between two great pillars of the vault, surging through them like a cataract of clamor! “Te was then that the girl cried out. She shrieked and pointed. Pointed at nothing that we could see, but something that was plain to her. Something or somebody. Somebody, I think. /a, I am sure that she saw some one, at that instant. “She shrieked again, and sprang forward; but that Russian was not going to let her get into that racket of noise. He grabbed hold of her waist and tried to hold her. He was strong, as I have told you; but she wished to touch some- thing in the stream of noise. She was slippery like a snake. Her sarong was almost torn from her body as she wrestled; then as she leaped forward again, she and the Russian were in that frightening river of noise. They were in it! We knew! “That Russian was six feet and a little bit. He weighed two hundred pounds, and he had muscles of steel. But his size and his weight did not mat- ter much then. They were nothing to the forces that were around him. Noth- ing at all. Something picked him up. For an instant he was held horizontally at about three feet from the floor; then he was jerked head high and thrown across the vault, thrown across with such force that he struck the wall some twenty feet away. Struck it and dropped to the floor. “That noise stopped then. Stopped with a suddenness that made me think I had become deaf. We did not move till we heard the s/ap-slap of the toads as they moved away from the walls and the pillars. It was comforting to hear those jerboa toads moving about. “T went over to the Russian. He was quite dead. His head had struck the wall, and his skull was fractured. I remembered his face for a long time. There was fear on it. A great fear. | have often wondered if he saw what it was that picked him up and tossed him across the vault. ... “Ja, there was an inquiry. The Dutch were angry about that business. They sent a magistrate from Djokja, and police came from Soerakarta. J told what I had seen and heard, and those police grinned. They were stupid fellows who could not believe anything unless they saw it with their litde piggy eyes. And the fat magistrate from Djokja was so stuffed with rysteefel that there was no room for imagination. “The girl would not speak. She was a little frightening. That fat magistrate 4 comiclsooks.com