A Blink of the Screen

Blaupunkt or whatever, people just rip ’em out and pitch them through the window.’
    According to Ruse and Sixbury (
Bulletin of the Arkham Ornithological Society
, vol. 17, pp. 124–32, 1968) birds may, under conditions of chronic stress, build nests of unusual size and complexity (Document D).
    This is not necessarily advanced as an explanation.
    Peck … peck … scratch.
    Scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch scratch.
    The collapse of a small section of carriageway near the verge in the summer of 1983 is not considered germane to this study. The tunnel underneath it was put down to gophers. Or foxes. Or some other burrowing animal. What were irresponsibly described as shoring timbers must simply have been, for example, bits of timber that accidentally got carried into the tunnel by floodwater, as it were, and wedged. Undoubtedly the same thing happened with the feathers.
    If Cluck were meant to fly, they’d have bigger (flap).
    Testimony of Officer Stasheff again:
    ‘This must have been around late August, 1984. This trucker told me, he was driving past, it would have been around mid-afternoon, when this thing comes flapping, he said flapping, out of the bushes and right across the freeway and he’s watching it, and it doesn’t lose height, and next thing he knows it bounces off his windshield and breaks up. He said he thought it was kids or something, so I went and had a look at the bushes, but no kids. Just a few of the chickens scratching about, and a load of junk, you know. You wouldn’t believe the kind of junk that ends up by the side of roads. I found what was left of the thing that’d hit him. It was like a sort of cage with these kind of big wings on, and all full of pulleys and more bits of cassette tapes and levers and stuff. What? Oh, yeah. And these chickens. All smashed up. I mean, who’d do something like that? One minute flying chickens, next minute McNuggets. I recall there were three of them. All cockerels, and brown.’
    It’s a (small scratch) for a cluck, a (giant flap) for Cluck.
    Testimony of Officer Stasheff again (19 July 1986):
    ‘Kids playing with fire. That’s my opinion. They get over the wall and make hideouts in the bushes. Like I said, they just grab one of the chickens. I don’t see why everyone’s so excited. So some kids fill an old trashcan with junk and fireworks and stuff and push a damn chicken in it and blow it up in the air … It’d have caused a hell of a lot of damage if it hadn’t hit one of the bridge supports on the far side. Bird inside got all smashed up. It’d got this cloth in there with strings all over. Maybe the kids thought the thing could use a parachute. Okay, so there’s a crater, what the hell, plant a bush in it. What? Sure it’d be hot, it’s where they were playing spacemen. Not that kind of hot? What kind of hot?’
    Peck (Neck Twist)-crow = gurgle/C 2
    Cluck?
    We do know that at about 2 a.m. on the morning of 3 May 1989, a purple glow was noticed by several drivers in the bushes around the middle of the verge. Some say it was a blue glow. From a crosschecking of the statements, it appeared to last for at least ten minutes.
    There was also a noise. We have a number of descriptions of this noise. It was ‘sort of weird’, ‘kind of a whooping sound’, and ‘rather like radio oscillation’. The only one we have been able to check is the description from Curtis V. J. McDonald, who said, ‘You know in that
Star Trek
episode when they meet the fish men from an alternate Earth? Well, the fish men’s matter transmitter made just the same noise.’
    We have viewed the episode in question. It is the one where Captain Kirk falls in love with the girl (Tape A).
    Cluck?
    (Foot twist)/peck]/Scratch 2* *oon (Gurgle)(Left-shoulder-preen) = (Right-shoulder-preen) …
    HmmMMmmMMmmMMmmMMmmMMmm.
    Cluck.
    We also know that the person calling himself Elrond X, an itinerant, entered the area around 2 a.m. When located subsequently, he said: ‘Yeah, well, maybe sometimes I used to take a chicken but there’s no law against it. Anyway, I stopped because it was getting very heavy, I mean, it was the way they were acting. The way they looked at you. Their beady eyes. But times are tough and I thought, okay, why not …
    ‘There’s no chickens there, man. Someone’s been through it, there’s no chickens!’
    When asked about the Assemblage, he said: ‘There was only this pile of junk in the middle of