The Thing That Walked In The Rain Page 4

  “You are one slave I will not find it necessary to bind, little dove,” he said, “although I shall probably have to cage you.”

  He replaced the dagger in the sheath, took both her little hands in one of his, and with the other chafed her wrists.

  “You will not find me an ungentle master,” he said. “When you have learned obedience.”

  Anila suddenly withdrew her hands, held one to her eyes, and swayed slightly, about to fall. Bahna quickly caught her in his arms.

  “Let me go!” she cried weakly. “Let me go! I can stand!”

  He released her, his mask-like features as inscrutable as ever.

  “Very well,” he replied. “You are coming with me now, willingly or unwillingly, as I decreed. I hope it will not be necessary for me to use force.”

  “It will not be necessary,” she replied, "if you will first permit me to bid my good friends farewell.”

  “Do so,” he said, “and quickly.”

  She came and stood before me, looked up into my eyes and put her arms around me.

  “Good-bye, Jimmie,” she said. "You have been a good and true friend.”

  “And you have been a brave and wonderful little pal,” I replied, feeling, at the same time, something cold and sharp against my wrists. A slash, and they were free.

  “Stand thus for a minute,” she whispered. Aloud she said: “I’m glad, so glad to have known you, Jimmie, and to have been a wonderful pal. I’ll always remember. Adios!”

  “Adios!” I replied, still holding my hands behind me. I saw that during her apparent fainting spell she had secured Bahna’s keen dagger and slipped it up her sleeve.

  The High Priest evidently did not suspect her.

  She went to Mabrey next, repeated her farewells, and with her arms around his lanky form, cut his bonds.

  Then she stepped before Pedro.

  "What!” said Bahna, losing his inscrutability for a moment, “Do you embrace a servant ?”

  “A faithful servant, yes.”

  It was then that he suspected, missed his dagger, and saw through the trick. With a snarl like that of an enraged animal, he leaped toward her. Whereupon I sprang in front of him to bar his progress.

  “Fool!” he mouthed, and clapped his hands. But this action left his jaw exposed, and I swung in a right hook with all my weight behind it.

  It floored him, but he was up in an instant, and I found him no mean antagonist. He was not only a boxer, but was evidently familiar with wrestling and jiu jutsu as well. Before I had any intimation of what he was about he had seized my wrist, dragged it across his shoulder, and heaved me over his head with all his enraged strength.

  As I thudded to the floor, he leaped toward me. At the same time four Indians brandishing machetes rushed into the room.

  “Surrender, fools,” called Bahna.

  Anita had just cut Pedro’s bonds. He had the dagger. It flashed outward from his hand, and the foremost machete wielder went down, coughing bloody bubbles— his throat transfixed.

  With a single bound the professor secured the machete of the fallen man. And Pedro, at his heels, retrived the dagger. I leaped to my feet, but was met by Bahna. His strong, wiry fingers seized my throat, pressed down on my windpipe. Black specks danced before my eyes. I tried to shake myself free, lashing out blindly with short rights and lefts to the body of my foe.

  But the fingers dosed relentlessly. I felt my senses leaving me.

  CHAPTER VI The Last Sacrifice

  IT was the voice of Anita that recalled me to my senses. Otherwise I would have gone down beneath the choking, vise-like fingers of Bahna, never to rise again. My short-arm body blows, it seemed, had begun to take effect. I felt my opponent weakening— his fingers slipping from my throat.

  Shaking myself free, I mechanically applied a hold, which had always been one of my favorites in wrestling —the crotch and half-nelson. With the tremendous leverage which it gave me, I easily swung the High Priest aloft, then crashed him to the floor, falling upon him in order that the breath might be knocked from his body.

  Still able to see only my antagonist, and without heed to my surroundings, I was surprised when, as we struck the floor together and I slid forward, my head encountered the body of another man. Bahna went limp, and I lay there panting for breath, waiting for my vision to clear.

  My sight came back to me presently, and I was able to breathe without rattling my palate against the roof of my mouth. Then I saw that Bahna had fallen upon the outstretched arm of the Indian whose throat had been transfixed by Pedro’s dagger. Anita was bending over me, pulling ineffectually at my shoulders in an effort to help me up.

  “Come,” she said, “his back is broken. Bahna is dead.”

  And so there passed the brilliant mind of the High Priest into the knowledge of that eternity of which he and his kind professed to teach, his back broken by the outstretched arm of his fallen servant.

  I stood up, swaying like a drunken man, while Anita steadied me, her arm around my waist. Pedro and the professor, their machetcs dripping, were reconnoitering at the door through which the doctor had been taken. The three remaining Indians lay on the floor in pools of their own blood. A machete is a messy weapon.

  “Can you walk, Jimmie?” asked Anita. “We want to look for Dad.”

  “Sure can. Give me one of those meat axes.”

  She pressed a blood-stained machete into my hand. We were all armed, now, Pedro, in addition to a machete, carrying the dagger with which he could do such deadly execution.

  With Mabrey leading the way, we crept off down the unexplored passageway along which Dr. de Orellana had been taken. Upon rounding a bend, we came suddenly upon an Indian guard. The professor leaped forward to attack, but Pedro’s dagger flashed, its deadly work completed before the guard could even cry out or draw his weapon.

  He slumped in front of a doorway before which he was evidently doing sentinel duty. We entered, and found ourselves in an immense, splendidly equipped laboratory. Chained to a table before which he was working with test tubes and retort, was the doctor. And near him, machete in hand,, stood the other guard.

  The doctor and Indian both saw us coming at the same time. The guard opened his mouth, about to cry out, when the little man at the table hurled the contents of his test tube into it. Strangling and coughing, the Indian raised his weapon to put an end to his prisoner, but before it descended, the professor's blade split his head open and he fell to the floor, dead.

  We found the keys to the doctor’s chains in his pocket and quickly released him. In turn the doctor embraced his daughter and his friend. Then Pedro and I were presented.

  The doctor greeted us cordially, with all the courtly dignity of the Spanish gentleman. Then his leisurely manner vanished.

  “We ’ave moch work to do, amigos,” he said. “Two things there are, which must be accomplished. Thees monster must be keeled, and then we must escape the superstitious natives who are assembling to see the sacrifice. Weeth the help of my frien’, Charlee, eet can be accomplished, but I must be in command.

  “You, Jeemie, weel take Anita up to the observation room where you weel see the last sacrifice. Charlee and Pedro weel be my assistants.”

  I took Anita up to the room from which we had watched the last ceremony, after the doctor had insisted that I would only be in his way, and that it would be necessary to do some things which it would not be pleasant or seemly for Anita to witness.

  As the sun reached the zenith there was a repetition of the ceremony we had witnessed the day before. The waving green arms of the hydra appeared again, amid the din of conches and the shouting for Nayana Idra. Then the noise ceased, and I was startled to see, standing in the thinning smoke screen where Bahna had stood the day before, someone of his precise height and build, garbed and masked in his ceremonial accoutrements. This time, instead of leading a native girl, the High Priest appeared to be half dragging, half carrying the body of a white man, dressed in the clothing of the professor
and wearing the black hood over his head.

  It was only because I knew that Bahna was dead, that I was able to discern that the professor was dragging the body of the High Priest. Make-up and acting were so clever, however, that Anita was deceived into thinking that Bahna had come to life. With a cry of horror she clutched my arm.

  “Quick! We must save him!”

  I reassured her, whereupon she relaxed in the hollow of my arm, and, in the pleasure of her sudden nearness, I almost forgot to watch the ceremony.

  Exactly duplicating the exhibition of the day before, the professor hurled the limp body to the monster that waited to receive it in the water below. For a moment he watched it disappear in the pellucid depths—then dived exactly as the priest had dived. A short time later he reappeared in a puff of smoke, dry-clad, on the rock below us, spoke a few words to the multitude, and dismissed them. Then the smoke arose around him once more, and when it floated away he had disappeared.

  Anita and I hurried through the throne room into the laboratory. There we found the professor, the doctor, and Pedro.

  “How did you do it, professor?” I asked.

  “My part was easy,” replied Mabrey. “After we had prepared the body and dressed it in my clothing, I put on the make-up and stood with it in the revolving door—the one that looks like a carved slab cut into the crater wall. A puff of smoke, a quick turn, and I stood outside at the correct moment. After feeding the hydra, I waited for it to sink out of sight, then dived and swam back through the opening which leads back under the altar and into the laboratory. Here I made a quick change, putting on dry raiment that duplicated what I was wearing, and once more reappeared. I spoke a few words and made a few passes that the doctor had taught me then disappeared by means of the smoke and the revolving door.

  “You may be surprised to know that the monster was not called by the conches nor the yowling of the priests, but by tapping two stones together under water in the underground stream that communicated with the lake from the laboratory. It had been trained to respond to this signal by using it each time it was fed.

  “But it was the doctor who was the brains of the whole thing and who made everything possible. He can explain the facts of our coup better than I.”

  “Knowing what I know it was ver’ simple,” said the doctor. “First I tal you about thees Bahna. He ees well educated and ees really a descendant of an ancient race of priests—a cult that existed all over the world in olden times. In India it worshiped Narayana, the divine one, creator of all things. Narayana is pictured as a seven-headed serpent.

  “In Greece it worshiped the Hydra. Nayana Idra is evidently a corrupted combination of the two words, Narayana and Hydra, used on this continent by the old adepts whose game was stopped at this place by the advent of the Spaniards, Bahna is a contraction of Bab Narayana, or the gate, or door to Narayana—in other words, the way to God.

  “Thees Bahna was perhaps the only one in the world who knew the inner secrets of the old cult. How he learned them, I know not. Perhaps he succeeded in doing what I tried to do—deciphering the old rock inscriptions, so cleverly conceived and executed that they have one set of meanings for a neophite, a second more secret meaning for an acolyte, and a more secret symbolical meaning for an adept—a man of the inner circle.

  “They were clever biologists and chemists, those old adepts, although weeth the cleverness was meexed a certain amount of superstition.

  “They learned, somehow, that eef a certain ambulatory hydra were immersed in a solution of ipecacuanha and other herbs in just the right proportion, and later removed to pure water and well fed, its growth limitations would be removed, that ees, it would continue to grow as long as it continued to live and feed, like a reptile. Of course many of the hydras immersed in the solution died, but they believed that when one survived and began to grow, the soul of Nayana had entered into it, and that the great god was thus assuming physical shape.

  “I was learning these things by experimenting with the hydras from the reservoir, and by deciphering the inscriptions. Bahna discovered this, and as I knew too much for his safety, captured my servant and me one evening, as he was putting my meal on the table, by putting us to sleep with a glass bomb. My servant was fed to the hydra, but because of my scientific knowledge I was kept a prisoner to help the adept in his work.”

  “How did the solution remove the growth limitations of the hydras, doctor?” I asked.

  “It seems to ’ave operated by atrophying the gonads, which are situated in the ectoderm, either destroying or modifying their hormones. This type of hydra is hermaphrodite and does not bud or multiply by fission, so naturally its reproductive functions are stopped by this treatment. Reproduction begins when the limit of growth has been nearly attained in the normal creature, but by destroying the normal functions of the gonads, reproduction is eliminated, and growth continued indefinitely.

  “Having found a way to construct so awful a god, it was necessary for the adepts to find a way to destroy it when it had sufficiently terrified and subdued the populace to give the priests undisputed power. This was done, I found, by filling the body of a victim with a solution of aconite, which was deadly to the monster. Bahna, however, was a modern scientist, and obtained, I found, a large quantity of refined pseud-aconitine, the most deadly poison known to science. It was this poison which he intended to use in one of his victims after the people in this neighborhood had been properly subdued and he was ready to destroy the monster. Weeth the help of Charlee and Pedro, I injected it into the hydra's veins after draining them of blood. My friend Charlee dismissed the people so they would not discover that their terrible god had been killed, or that any deception had been practiced on them, thus paving the way for our escape. Let us go and see if the poison has worked.”

  We went hack to the observation room and looked out. The crater was entirely emptied of human beings. And floating on the surface of the water, moving limply up and down with the waves that rippled across the lake, was an enormous green tangle—the limbs that had once walked in the rain, terrorizing the countryside. Thousands of fish, of many sizes and varieties, were tearing at them with such voracity that it was evident they would soon disappear.

  “Mahna ees dead,” said the doctor, “and his man-made god died weeth him. So ends the chapter. But you, Jeemie, who are so full of questions, permit me to ask you one. Why ees it that you and Anita stay so closely together, your arms around each others ?”

  I’m sure my face turned three shades redder than was its normal wont. But Anita snuggled closer, reassuringly.

  “You are so good at deciphering mysteries, doctor,” I said. “Why not figure this one out?”

  Whereupon, reading the consent in her starry eyes, upturned to mine, I kissed her full upon the lips.

  “Por Dios! exclaimed the doctor, his arms around us both, “I geeve up! The man who can explain the mystery of love has not yet been born!”

  The End.