The Thing That Walked In The Rain Read Online Free PDF Page A

in a corner.
    “You stand guard over those guns, Pedro,” ordered Mabrey. “We’ll use our side arms if attacked, and make a dash for the other weapons, but we don’t want to appear hostile unnecessarily. It may provoke an attack.”
    We took seats and waited, tensely alert. The professor and I smoked our pipes. Pedro puffed at his inevitable cigarette.
    The splashing of footsteps sounded on the rain-soaked ground outside. The screen door opened. There was the tramp of feet on the porch. Then Bahna stalked into the room, his features as expressionless and inscrutable as before. Behind him walked five Indians. Two took positions on each side of the door. The other remained standing in the doorway with arms folded.
    The professor nodded pleasantly, as if such visits in the dead of night were of ordinary occurrence. He was an admirable actor.
    “Evening, Bahna,” he said. “Beautiful night after the rain. Won’t you sit down and have some coffee?” Bahna stared straight at the professor, his face expressionless as a moulded death mask.
    “I warned you,” he said, “of the wrath of Nayana Idra. You did not heed my warning. Had I not risked my own life to beseech him to leave, your lives would have been forfeit.”
    “And who,” asked the professor evenly, “is Nayana Idra? I saw no such person.”
    “If you saw him not, then are you blind indeed,” replied Bahna, “for he has carried one of your servants away with him, and another lies at the edge of the clearing, dead from fright. He looked upon the Divine One, and died.”
    “Perhaps you refer to the giant ambulatory hydra as Nayana Idra,” said the professor. “We saw that, to be sure. If you prevailed upon it to leave, we are much obliged, as it is a disagreeable beast. But I was of the opinion that it had left because the rainstorm had ceased. Couldn’t stay in the open air long, you know, unless the rain was falling. It would be dehydrated.”
    “I was about to warn you to leave, for the second and last time,” said Bahna, “but it seems that you have been prying into secrets that do not concern you. Under the circumstances, I can no longer permit you to go.”
    ‘‘Indeed!” The professor stood up. "Get this, Bahna. We'll come and go as we damn please.”
    “Fool!”
    The Indian suddenly whipped something from beneath his clothing. It looked like a glass ampulla. With his other hand he drew a handkerchief from his pocket, held it over his nostrils. Then he shattered the ampulla on the floor. Instantly the air was filled with an acrid odor. Through a dim haze I saw the other Indians holding cloths to their noses. I tried to reach for my forty-five, but couldn’t raise my arm. My senses whirled. The room, its figures distorted, seemed to revolve about me. Then I lost consciousness.
    WHEN I came to my senses once more I was in total darkness, lying, bound hand and foot, on a cold, damp stone floor. My head felt as big as a balloon. Every muscle of my body ached as if it had been pounded. And recurrent waves of nausea added to my general feeling of unpleasantness. Someone was speaking in the darkness quite near me. I recognized the voice of the professor.
    “Must have been a concentrated, highly volatile solution of some member of the hemp family in that ampulla,” he was saying. “Possibly cannabis indica the stuff your people call inirijuana, Pedro.”
    “Ees damn’ bad stoi'f, I tal you,” said Pedro. “I feel lak I been dronk for whole year and the wild horse, she's jom all over me.”
    Then I heard the voice of Anita.
    “Isn’t that something like hashish, Uncle Charley?” .she asked.
    “It is hashish, or bhantj, so called in the Orient.”
    Evidently I had been the last to recover from the torpor induced by the drug.
    “A clever chemist, that Bahna,” the professor was saving, when we were suddenly half blinded by an unexpected glare of light.
    A door had been silently opened by an Indian. Just behind it was a room flooded with