Page:Weird Tales Volume 8 Number 3 (1926-09).djvu/17

 such as our scientists have speculated on; and that perhaps, to protect their discovery in their traffic with other worlds, they fashioned an ether-ship to resemble a great bird. I listened for the hum of a motor, to account for the wonder to my Twentieth Century mind; and I was almost persuaded my ears caught such a sound, when suddenly a piercing eye flashed on me out of darkness—the eye of the living Bird!

"I did not solve the enigma in my dream. But I waked believing, believing that the Bird would come, be it cleverly camouflaged mechanism or—what he says it is. I must not go mad. I know that nothing of the sort will come.

"August 18. I have been too horrified, too sick at heart, too nearly mad with despair, to write in this book. It is a Doom's Day Book. I have asked the dreadful question, and received his answer. I have learned his reason for taking us to Furos.

"How horrible is the habit we of Earth have of living by eating the flesh of our friends! I mean of dumb animals, but animals who are our friends. What instinct, on that night of horrors on the train, made me see in my dreams the face of the little pet calf they killed, so long ago? What made that shape visit me in my nightmare? How can the subconscious mind grasp horrors that the conscious mind can not guess at, can not realize?

"On Furos there are two races of men: the rulers and the slaves. The rulers consider the slaves theirs, to do with as we do with our cattle: to drive to work in the fields, or in dismal underground machine shops, to kill for punishment, for a whim—for food! Yes, that is it, I have written it. They have discovered, the Wise Men of Furos, that the food best adapted of all foods for human consumption is human flesh and human blood. It is made, you see, of just the constituents which the human body requires. So the uncivilized cannibals of Earth may feel about it—but the men of Furos consider themselves civilized! Certainly they have a degree of knowledge that we identify as one of the conditions of civilization.

"Besides working the slaves, they set aside a number of them for their ghastly market. And on Furos they are running short of slaves. We prisoners from Earth are to serve by way of experiment. We are to be tried on the dark star, and if we thrive and are found pleasing—how can I write it!—they will bring others. Their ingenuity is so devilish, doubtless they will succeed.

"These slaves raised for market, to whose ranks we are to be added, they prey upon as the vampires of Earthly legend prey upon their victims. Only here is no superstitious tale, but a deadly fact. The lords of Furos are in no sense supernatural—but living beings; human beings! The market slaves are kept alive and bled, and the blood is marketed, as we on Earth market milk. They live so for years, and their lives are miserable beyond imagination. And in the end, they are killed and eaten.

"I will write no more of these horrors. I will spend the next two days trying to devise a means of bringing death to myself and the drugged sleepers in the other cavern. If he would leave his 'blowpipe' where I could get it, I would gladly use it to end our sorrows. But he will not do that. If he did, I could make an end of him, and we others would either find a way out and escape, or else starve decently here.

"August 19. Tomorrow is the 20th of August. For twenty-four hours I have been nearly mad. The things he told me were so horrible, so real, that they all but unseated my