Thrilling Tales Read online

  THRILLING TALES

  By the same author:

  Angry River

  A Little Night Music

  A Long Walk for Bina

  Hanuman to the Rescue

  Ghost Stories from the Raj

  Strange Men, Strange Places

  The India I Love

  Tales and Legends from India

  The Blue Umbrella

  Ruskin Bond's Children's Omnibus

  The Ruskin Bond Omnibus-I

  The Ruskin Bond Omnibus-II

  The Ruskin Bond Omnibus-Ill

  Rupa Book of Great Animal Stories

  The Rupa Book of True Tales of Mystery and Adventure

  The Rupa Book of Ruskin Bond's Himalayan Tales

  The Rupa Book of Great Suspense Stories

  The Rupa Laughter Omnibus

  The Rupa Book of Scary Stories

  The Rupa Book of Haunted Houses

  The Rupa Book of Travellers' Tales

  The Rupa Book of Great Crime Stories

  The Rupa Book of Nightmare Tales

  The Rupa Book of Shikar Stories

  The Rupa Book of Love Stories

  The Rupa Book of Wicked Stories

  The Rupa Book of Heartwarming Stories

  The Rupa Book of Thrills and Spills

  THRILLING TALES

  A Selection of Hair-Raising

  Adventures

  Edited by

  Ruskin Bond

  Typeset copyright © Rupa & Co. 2006

  Selection and Introduction Copyright © Ruskin Bond 2006

  First Published 2006

  This edition 2010

  Second Impression 2011

  Published by

  Rupa Publications India Pvt. Ltd.

  7/16, Ansari Road, Daryaganj,

  New Delhi 110 002

  Sales Centres:

  Allahabad Bengaluru Chennai

  Hyderabad Jaipur Kathmandu

  Kolkata Mumbai

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

  retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

  electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,

  without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Typeset in 13 pts. ElegantGaramond by

  Mindways Design

  1410 Chiranjiv Tower

  43 Nehru Place

  New Delhi 110 019

  Printed in India by

  Gopsons Papers Ltd.

  A-14 Sector 60

  Noida 201 301

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Rikki-Tikki-Tavi

  Rudyard Kipling

  Jeremy and the Runaways

  Hugh Walpole

  The Beast Tamer

  Nikolai S. Leskov

  Nightmare in New York

  Algernon Blackwood

  The Falcon and I

  Jean George

  Adventure Underground

  Sylvia Green

  The Eye of the Eagle

  Ruskin Bond

  Irongut and the Brown Mouse

  Gerald Kersh

  'So We'll Drink...'

  P.K. Kemp

  An Underground Episode

  Edmund Ware

  The Lights of Spencer Primmett's

  F. Anstey

  The Last Match

  Edward Fitz-Gerald Fripp

  The Most Dangerous Game

  Richard Connell

  INTRODUCTION

  hat is the test of a good story? Give it to a boy or girl of thirteen or fourteen to read, and if they don't get beyond page one, consider it a flop. An adult might plod on to the bitter end, but a young reader won't be so tolerant. The writer must catch his or her attention on page one—preferably para one—and hold it to the end.

  The stories in this collection have been chosen because they have this quality of seducing the reader and then carrying him or her along by means of a riveting tale which builds up to an exciting climax.

  Take 'The Last Match', a story by a relatively unknown writer, who tells a simple story built around a difficult, almost impossible situation. The background is authentic, the characters real. It's the epic struggle of a man—in this case a woman— against the elements. Will she survive the unequal struggle? The reader identifies with the protagonist, and almost wills her into making one last effort in the struggle against Nature's fury.

  Or take 'The Most Dangerous Game', an unusual tale about a hunter who is bored with hunting animals and decides that it will be more exciting to hunt a fellow human. He invites his guest to pit his wits against him in a duel for survival. The writer has created a unique situation of conflict and suspense. There is no escape for the protagonists. There is no escape for the reader.

  Conflict of another sort is the theme of 'Rikki-Tikki-Tavi', in which a great writer draws upon his knowledge of wild life—'nature red in tooth and claw'—to create a situation crammed with excitement. And in The Beast Tamer', we have a tragic but in the end uplifting situation arising out of the friendship that develops between man and beast.

  Human and animal relationships are also poignantly described in 'The Falcon and I' (a true story) and in Gerald Kersh's story about a hard-bitten soldier's vendetta with a mouse. Gerald Kersh was a short story writer who never failed to engage and hold the reader's interest.

  So what are the ingredients of a good short story?

  All our memorable experiences are stories. Story is only a form of enjoying experience, a means of living more widely or more richly than our own particular lives afford. The experience may be laughable or tragic, pathetic or thrilling. Its nature does not matter but it must be real to us. In other words, we must feel that what happens to someone in the story might possibly happen to ourselves—is, in some sense, happening to us as we read.

  'Short' story is only a convenient way of classifying length. Roughly, any story of 15,000 words or less is a short story. That is, provided it actually is a story, an experience that stands out, and provided it is real to us as we read it.

  Dozens of rules have been made as to what constitutes a short story. But for every such rule I have come across a story that breaks it. For the master of storytelling there are no rules. Kipling broke the rules. So did Algernon Blackwood. So did Gerald Kersh and F. Anstey. All very original writers, all masters of their craft.

  These stories have been selected with the young reader in mind. Twelve to sixteen is the ideal age for discovering what the short story has to offer. I don't think they will be disappointed with the stories in this book. And I hope they will go on to savour what other great writers have to offer.

  Ruskin Bond

  April 2006

  RIKKI-TIKKI-TAVI

  Rudyard Kipling

  At the hole where he went in

  Red-Eye called to Wrinkle-Skin,

  hear what little Red-Eye saith:

  Nag, come up and dance with death!

  Eye to eye and head to head,

  (Keep the measure, Nag.)

  This shall end when one is dead;

  (At the pleasure, Nag.)

  Turn for turn and twist for twist—

  (Run and hide thee, Nag.)

  Hah! The hooded Death has missed!

  (Woe betide thee, Nag!)

  his is the story of the great war that Rikki-tikki-tavi fought single-handed, through the bathrooms of the big bungalow in Segowlee cantonment. Darzee, the tailor-bird, helped him, and Chuchundra, the musk-rat, who never comes out into the middle of the floor, but always creeps round by the wall, gave him advice: but Rikki-tikki did the real fighting.

  He was a mongoose, rather like a little cat in his fur and his tail, but quite like a weasel in his he
ad and his habits. His eyes and the end of his restless nose were pink; he could scratch himself anywhere he pleased, with any leg, front or back, that he chose to use; he could fluff up his tail till it looked like a bottlebrush, and his war-cry as he scuttled through the long grass, was 'Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!'

  One day, a high summer flood washed him out of the burrow where he lived with his father and mother, and carried him, kicking and clucking down a roadside ditch. He found a little wisp of grass floating there, and clung to it till he lost his senses. When he revived, he was lying in the hot sun on the middle of a garden path, very draggled indeed, and a small boy was saying 'Here's a dead mongoose. Let's have a funeral'.

  'No,' said his mother; 'let's take him in and dry him. Perhaps he isn't really dead.' They took him into the house, and a big man picked him up between his finger and thumb and said he was not dead but half choked; so they wrapped him in cotton-wool, and warmed him, and he opened his eyes and sneezed.

  'Now,' said the big man (he was an Englishman who had just moved into the bungalow); 'don't: frighten him, and we'll see what he'll do.'

  It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose family is, 'Run and find out'; and Rikki-tikki was a true mongoose. He looked at the cottonwool, decided that it was not good to eat, ran all round the table, sat up and put his fur in order, scratched himself, and jumped on the small boy's shoulder.

  'Don't be frightened, Teddy,' said his father. 'That's his way of making friends.'

  'Ouch! He's tickling under my chin,' said Teddy.

  Rikki-tikki looked down between the boy's collar and neck, snuffed at his ear, and climbed down to the floor, where he sat rubbing his nose.

  'Good gracious,' said Teddy's mother, 'and that's a wild creature! I suppose he's so tame because we've been kind to him.'

  'All mongooses are like that,' said her husband. 'If Teddy doesn't pick him up by the tail, or try to put him in a cage, he'll run in and out of the house all day long. Let's give him something to eat.'

  They gave him a little piece of raw meat. Rikki-tikki liked it immensely, and when it was finished he went out into the veranda and sat in the sunshine and fluffed up his fur to make it dry to the roots. Then he felt better. 'There are more things to find out about in this house,' he said to himself, 'than all my family could find out in all their lives. I shall certainly stay and find out.'

  He spent all that day roaming over the house. He nearly drowned himself in the bath-tubs, put his nose into the ink on a writing-table, and burned it on the end of the big man's cigar, for he climbed up in the big man's lap to see how writing was done. At nightfall he ran into Teddy's nursery to watch how kerosene lamps were lighted, and when Teddy went to bed Rikki-tikki climbed up too; but he was a restless companion, because he had to get up and attend to every noise all through the night, and find out what made it. Teddy's mother and father came in, the last thing, to look at their boy, and Rikki-tikki was awake on the pillow.

  'I don't like that,' said Teddy's mother; 'he may bite the child.'

  'He'll do no such thing,' said the father. 'Teddy's safer with that little beast than if he had a bloodhound to watch him. If a snake came into the nursery now—' But Teddy's mother wouldn't think of anything so awful.

  Early in the morning Rikki-tikki came to early breakfast in the veranda riding on Teddy's shoulder, and they gave him banana and some boiled egg; and he sat on all their laps one after the other because a well-brought-up mongoose always hopes to be a house-mongoose some day and have rooms to run about in, and Rikki-tikki's mother (she used to live in the General's house at Segowlee) had carefully told Rikki what to do if ever he came across white men.

  Then Rikki-tikki went out into the garden to see what was to be seen. It was a large garden, only half cultivated, with bushes as big as summer-houses of Marshal Niel roses, lime and orange trees, clumps of bamboos, and thickets of high grass. Rikki-tikki licked his lips. 'This is a splendid hunting-ground,' he said, and his tail grew bottle-brushy at the thought of it, and he scuttled up and down the garden, snuffing here and there till he heard very sorrowful voices in a thorn-bush. It was Darzee, the tailor-bird, and his wife. They had made a beautiful nest by pulling two big leaves together and stitching up the edges with fibres; they had filled the hollow with cotton and downy fluff The nest swayed to and fro, as they sat on the rim and cried.

  'What is the matter?' asked Rikki-tikki.

  'We are very miserable,' said Darzee. 'One of our babies fell out of the nest yesterday and Nag ate him.'

  'H'm!' said Rikki-tikki, 'that is very sad—but I am a stranger here. Who is Nag?'

  Darzee and his wife only cowered down in the nest without answering, for from the thick grass at the foot of the bush there came a low hiss—a horrid cold sound that made Rikki-tikki jump back two clear feet. Then inch by inch out of the grass rose up the head and spread hood of Nag, the big black cobra, and he was five feet long from tongue to tail. When he had lifted one-third of himself clear off the ground, he stayed balancing to and fro exactly as a dandelion-tuft balances in the wind, and he looked at Rikki-tikki with the wicked snake's eyes that never change their expression, whatever the snake may be thinking of

  'Who is Nag?' he said. 'I am Nag. The great god Brahm put his mark upon all our people when the first cobra spread his hood to keep the sun off Brahm as he slept. Look, and be afraid!'

  He spread out his hood more than ever, and Rikki-tikki saw the spectacle-mark on the back of it that looks exactly like the eye part of a hook-and-eye fastening. He was afraid for a minute; but it is impossible for a mongoose to stay frightened for any length of time, and though Rikki-tikki had never met a live cobra before, his mother had fed him on dead ones, and he knew that it was a grown mongoose's business in life to fight and eat snakes. Nag knew that too, and at the bottom of his cold heart he was afraid.

  'Well,' said Rikki-tikki, and his tail began to fluff up again, 'marks or no marks, do you think it is right for you to eat fledglings out of a nest?'

  Nag was thinking to himself, and watching the least little movement in the grass behind Rikki-tikki. He knew that mongooses in the garden meant death sooner or later for him and his family; but he wanted to get Rikki-tikki off his guard. So he dropped his head a little, and put it on one side.

  'Let us talk,' he said. 'You eat eggs. Why should I not eat birds?'

  'Behind you! Look behind you!' sang Darzee. Rikki-tikki knew better than to waste time in staring. He jumped up in the air as high as he could go, and just under him whizzed by the head of Nagaina, Nag's wicked wife. She had crept up behind him as he was talking, to make an end of him; and he heard her savage hiss as the stroke missed. He came down almost across her back, and if he had been an old mongoose he would have known that then was the time to break her back with one bite; but he was afraid of the terrible lashing return-stroke of the cobra. He bit, indeed, but did not bite long enough, and he jumped clear of the whisking tail, leaving Nagaina torn and angry.

  'Wicked, wicked Darzee!' said Nag, lashing up as high as he could reach toward the nest in the thorn-bush; but Darzee had built it out of reach of snakes, and it only swayed to and fro.

  Rikki-tikki felt his eyes growing red and hot (when a mongoose's eyes grow red, he is angry), and he sat back on his tail and hind legs like a litde kangaroo, and looked all around him, and chattered with rage. But Nag and Nagaina had disappeared into the grass. When a snake misses its stroke, it never says anything or gives any sign of what it means to do next. Rikki-tikki did not care to follow them, for he did not feel sure that he could manage two snakes at once. So he trotted off to the gravel path near the house, and sat down to think. It was a serious matter for him.

  If you read the old books of natural history, you will find they say that when the mongoose fights the snake and happens to get bitten, he runs off and eats some herb that cures him. That is not true. The victory is only a matte
r of quickness of eye and quickness of foot—snake's blow against mongoose's jump—and as no eye can follow the motion of a snake's head when it strikes, that makes things much more wonderful than any magic herb. Rikki-tikki knew he was a young mongoose, and it made him all the more pleased to think that he had managed to escape a blow from behind. It gave him confidence in himself, and when Teddy came running down the path, Rikki-tikki was ready to be petted.

  But just as Teddy was stooping, something flinched a little in the dust, and a tiny voice said, 'Be careful. I am death!' It was Karait, the dusty brown snakeling that lies for choice on the dusty earth; and his bite is as dangerous as the cobra's. But he is so small that nobody thinks of him, and so he does the more harm to people.

  Rikki-tikki's eyes grew red again, and he danced up to Karait with the peculiar rocking, swaying motion that he had inherited from his family. It looks very funny, but it is so perfectly balanced a gait that you can fly off from it at any angle you please; and in dealing with snakes this is an advantage. If Rikki-tikki had only known, he was doing a much more dangerous thing than fighting Nag, for Karait is so small, and can turn so quickly, that unless Rikki bit him close to the back of the head, he would get the return-stroke in his eye or lip. But Rikki did not know: his eyes were all red, and he rocked back and forth, looking for a good place to hold. Karait struck out. Rikki jumped sideways and tried to run in, but the wicked little dusty grey head lashed within a fraction of his shoulder, and he had to jump over the body, and the head followed his heels close.

  Teddy shouted to the house, 'Oh, look here! Our mongoose is killing a snake'; and Rikki-tikki heard a scream from Teddy's mother. His father ran out with a stick, but by the time he came up, Karait had lunged out once too far, and Rikki-tikki had sprung, jumped on the snake's back, dropped his head far between his forelegs, bitten as high up the back as he could get hold, and rolled away. The bite paralyzed Karait, and Rikki-tikki was just going to eat him up from the tail, after the custom of his family at dinner, when he remembered that a full meal makes a slow mongoose, and if he wanted all his strength and quickness ready, he must keep himself thin.