Continued from Part II of The Serpentine Mystery
I jumped when the doorbell rang. I glanced a look at my friends as I slowly got up before I headed towards the door. Obviously a snake wouldn’t go around ringing door bells before it enters homes. I had to literally pull myself up and I was walking slowly towards the front door. I had hardly any sleep the previous night and only snakes came in my dreams. All sorts of snake of various colors and sizes, crawling about, hissing, spitting. It was like Earth was a planet of snakes and the humans had come down for a visit. The door bell rang once again before I had to loudly announce that I was coming to open the door.
As I opened the door there was a man clad in forest green kakhis. I gathered that he was a forest ranger. It turned out that he was a apprentice to a forest ranger who was investigating the incident of the snake attack from the other night. He was sent to speak to me about what I had witnessed. I narrated to him the sights that I had seen, at the end of which I wished quite loudly that I hadn’t seen any of this. Soon the forest ranger too came down and told me that he did indeed believe whatever I had seen. He told me that this was most definitely a new species of a snake and he hadn’t seen or heard of anything like this. The only previous time that he had seen a snake being so vicious was when he had seen the movie ‘Anaconda’. He was also talking about the way the snake had attacked and bit the victims. The incident that I had witnessed was running through my mind again and again in a never ending loop. I was thinking about how calmly and steadily the snake kept moving, even though a grown up man was reigning blows on it with a large stick. The ranger said this was most probably a mutated snake and it was imperative that they find out where this snake was and how it had got mutated.
Once he was gone, I settled back with my friends and we got back to talking and socializing. The afternoon went by quite quickly and the sun was slowly heading back towards the horizon, and a chill wind was blowing outside. Some of the friends bid adieu and went on their ways while the rest of us cozied up around the TV or dozed off the quieter parts of the house. It was past midnight when the few of us still watching TV decided to call it quits and go to sleep. As we put off the TV and the lights, we got into our beds and listened into the silence. The sounds of the crickets filled the air. The wind was howling and I could hear it through the cracks in the window. There was the occasional sound of the rustling leaves among the bushes and trees outside. I always felt like something was moving outside, but then I knew that I was being unnecessarily jumpy and I managed to put myself to sleep.
A couple of days passed by without any untoward events. As usual we all used to hang around for long hours in my house. We were back to our usual self, talking loudly, cracking jokes, playing the fool and doing everything else that we usually used to do. Well, we were almost back to our usual self. That was until when we put on the TV to see the news.
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[...] Continued from Part III of The Serpentine Mystery [...]