The Devil Doctor
by Sax Rohmer · English · Gutenberg #19142 · 443,643 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Devil Doctor
Author: Sax Rohmer
Release date: August 29, 2006 [eBook #19142]
Most recently updated: May 9, 2016
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19142
Credits: Produced by David Clarke, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DEVIL DOCTOR ***
Produced by David Clarke, Sankar Viswanathan, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
THE
DEVIL DOCTOR
HITHERTO UNPUBLISHED ADVENTURES IN
THE CAREER OF THE MYSTERIOUS
DR. FU-MANCHU
BY
SAX ROHMER
SIXTH EDITION
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
_First Published (Crown 8vo) March 2nd, 1916_
* * * * *
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I A MIDNIGHT SUMMONS
II ELTHAM VANISHES
III THE WIRE JACKET
IV THE CRY OF A NIGHTHAWK
V THE NET
VI UNDER THE ELMS
VII ENTER MR. ABEL SLATTIN
VIII DR. FU-MANCHU STRIKES
IX THE CLIMBER
X THE CLIMBER RETURNS
XI THE WHITE PEACOCK
XII DARK EYES LOOK INTO MINE
XIII THE SACRED ORDER
XIV THE COUGHING HORROR
XV BEWITCHMENT
XVI THE QUESTING HANDS
XVII ONE DAY IN RANGOON
XVIII THE SILVER BUDDHA
XIX DR. FU-MANCHU'S LABORATORY
XX THE CROSSBAR
XXI CRAGMIRE TOWER
XXII THE MULATTO
XXIII A CRY ON THE MOOR
XXIV STORY OF THE GABLES
XXV THE BELLS
XXVI THE FIERY HAND
XXVII THE NIGHT OF THE RAID
XXVIII THE SAMURAI'S SWORD
XXIX THE SIX GATES
XXX THE CALL OF THE EAST
XXXI "MY SHADOW LIES UPON YOU"
XXXII THE TRAGEDY
XXXIII THE MUMMY
* * * * *
THE DEVIL DOCTOR
CHAPTER I
A MIDNIGHT SUMMONS
"When did you last hear from Nayland Smith?" asked my visitor.
I paused, my hand on the siphon, reflecting for a moment.
"Two months ago," I said: "he's a poor correspondent and rather
soured, I fancy."
"What--a woman or something?"
"Some affair of that sort. He's such a reticent beggar, I really know
very little about it."
I placed a whisky and soda before the Rev. J. D. Eltham, also sliding
the tobacco jar nearer to his hand. The refined and sensitive face of
the clergyman offered no indication to the truculent character of the
man. His scanty fair hair, already grey over the temples, was silken
and soft-looking: in appearance he was indeed a typical English
churchman; but in China he had been known as "the fighting
missionary," and had fully deserved the title. In fact, this
peaceful-looking gentleman had directly brought about the Boxer
Risings!
"You know," he said in his clerical voice, but meanwhile stuffing
tobacco into an old pipe with fierce energy, "I have often wondered,
Petrie--I have never left off wondering--"
"What?"
"That accursed Chinaman! Since the cellar place beneath the site of
the burnt-out cottage in Dulwich Village--I have wondered more than
ever."
He lighted his pipe and walked to the hearth to throw the match in the
grate.
"You see," he continued, peering across at me in his oddly nervous
way--"one never knows, does one? If I thought that Dr. Fu-Manchu lived;
if I seriously suspected that that stupendous intellect, that wonderful
genius, Petrie, er"--he hesitated characteristically--"survived, I
should feel it my duty--"
"Well?" I said, leaning my elbows on the table and smiling slightly.
"If that Satanic genius were not indeed destroyed, then the peace of
the world might be threatened anew at any moment!"
He was becoming excited, shooting out his jaw in the truculent manner
I knew, and snapping his fingers to emphasize his words; a man
composed of the oddest complexities that ever dwelt beneath a clerical
frock.
"He may have got back to China, doctor!" he cried, and his eyes had
the fighting glint in them. "Could you rest in peace if you thought
that he lived? Should you not fear for your life every time that a
night-call took you out alone? Why, man alive, it is only two years
since he was here amongst us, since we were searching every shadow for
those awful green eyes! What became of his band of assassins--his
stranglers, his dacoits, his damnable poisons and insects and
what-not--the army of creatures--"
He paused, taking a drink.
"You"--he hesitated diffidently--"searched in Egypt with Nayland
Smith, did you not?"
I nodded.
"Contradict me if I am wrong," he continued; "but my impression is
that you were searching for the girl--the girl--Kâramanèh, I think
she was called?"
"Yes," I replied shortly; "but we could find no trace--no trace."
"You--er--were interested?"
"More than I knew," I replied, "until I realized that I had--lost
her."
"I never met Kâramanèh, but from your account, and from others, she
was quite unusually--"
"She was very beautiful," I said, and stood up, for I was anxious to
terminate that phase of the conversation.
Eltham regarded me sympathetically; he knew something of my search
with Nayland Smith for the dark-eyed Eastern girl who had brought
romance into my drab life; he knew that I treasured my memories of her
as I loathed and abhorred those of the fiendish, brilliant Chinese
doctor who had been her master.
Eltham began to pace up and down the rug, his pipe bubbling furiously;
and something in the way he carried his head reminded me momentarily
of Nayland Smith. Certainly, between this pink-faced clergyman, with
his deceptively mild appearance, and the gaunt, bronzed and
steely-eyed Burmese commissioner, there was externally little in
common; but it was some little nervous trick in his carriage that
conjured up through the smoke-haze one distant summer evening when
Smith had paced that very room as Eltham paced it now, when before my
startled eyes he had rung up the curtain upon the savage drama in
which, though I little suspected it then, Fate had cast me for a
leading rôle.
I wondered if Eltham's thoughts ran parallel with mine. My own were
centred upon the unforgettable figure of the murderous Chinaman. These
words, exactly as Smith had used them, seemed once again to sound in
my ears: "Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered,
with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven
skull and long magnetic eyes of the true cat green. Invest him with
all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race accumulated in one
giant intellect, with all the resources of science, past and present,
and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the 'Yellow Peril'
incarnate in one man."
This visit of Eltham's no doubt was responsible for my mood; for this
singular clergyman had played his part in the drama of two years ago.
"I should like to see Smith again," he said suddenly; "it seems a pity
that a man like that should be buried in Burma. Burma makes a mess of
the best of men, doctor. You said he was not married?"
"No," I replied shortly, "and is never likely to be, now."
"Ah, you hinted at something of the kind."
"I know very little of it. Nayland Smith is not the kind of man to
talk much."
"Quite so--quite so! And, you know, doctor, neither am I; but"--he was
growing painfully embarrassed--"it may be your due--I--er--I have a
correspondent, in the interior of China--"
"Well?" I said, watching him in sudden eagerness.
"Well, I would not desire to raise--vain hopes--nor to occasion, shall
I say, empty fears; but--er ... no, doctor!" He flushed like a girl.
"It was wrong of me to open this conversation. Perhaps, when I know
more--will you forget my words, for the time?"
The 'phone bell rang.
"Hullo!" cried Eltham--"hard luck, doctor!"--but I could see that he
welcomed the interruption. "Why!" he added, "it is one o'clock!"
I went to the telephone.
"Is that Dr. Petrie?" inquired a woman's voice.
"Yes; who is speaking?"
"Mrs. Hewett has been taken more seriously ill. Could you come at
once?"
"Certainly," I replied, for Mrs. Hewett was not only a profitable
patient but an estimable lady. "I shall be with you in a quarter of an
hour."
I hung up the receiver.
"Something urgent?" asked Eltham, emptying his pipe.
"Sounds like it. You had better turn in."
"I should much prefer to walk over with you, if it would not be
intruding. Our conversation has ill prepared me for sleep."
"Right!" I said, for I welcomed his company; and three minutes later
we were striding across the deserted common.
A sort of mist floated amongst the trees, seeming in the moonlight
like a veil draped from trunk to trunk, as in silence we passed the
Mound Pond, and struck out for the north side of the common.
I suppose the presence of Eltham and the irritating recollection of
his half-confidence were the responsible factors, but my mind
persistently dwelt upon the subject of Fu-Manchu and the atrocities
which he had committed during his sojourn in England. So actively was
my imagination at work that I felt again the menace which so long had
hung over me; I felt as though that murderous yellow cloud still cast
its shadow upon England. And I found myself longing for the company of
Nayland Smith. I cannot state what was the nature of Eltham's
reflections, but I can guess; for he was as silent as I.
It was with a conscious effort that I shook myself out of this
morbidly reflective mood, on finding that we had crossed the common
and were come to the abode of my patient.
"I shall take a little walk," announced Eltham; "for I gather that you
don't expect to be detained long? I shall never be out of sight of the
door, of course."
"Very well," I replied, and ran up the steps.
There were no lights to be seen in any of the windows, which
circumstance rather surprised me, as my patient occupied, or had
occupied when last I had visited her, a first-floor bedroom in the
front of the house. My knocking and ringing produced no response for
three or four minutes; then, as I persisted, a scantily clothed and
half-awake maid-servant unbarred the door and stared at me stupidly in
the moonlight.
"Mrs. Hewett requires me?" I asked abruptly.
The girl stared more stupidly than ever.
"No, sir," she said: "she don't, sir; she's fast asleep!"
"But some one 'phoned me!" I insisted, rather irritably, I fear.
"Not from here, sir," declared the now wide-eyed girl. "We haven't got
a telephone, sir."
For a few moments I stood there, staring as foolishly as she; then
abruptly I turned and descended the steps. At the gate I stood looking
up and down the road. The houses were all in darkness. What could be
the meaning of the mysterious summons? I had made no mistake
respecting the name of my patient; it had been twice repeated over the
telephone; yet that the call had not emanated from Mrs. Hewett's house
was now palpably evident. Days had been when I should have regarded
the episode as preluding some outrage, but to-night I felt more
disposed to ascribe it to a silly practical joke.
Eltham walked up briskly.
"You're in demand to-night, doctor," he said. "A young person called
for you almost directly you had left your house, and, learning where
you were gone, followed you."
"Indeed!" I said, a trifle incredulously. "There are plenty of other
doctors if the case is an urgent one."
"She may have thought it would save time as you were actually up and
dressed," explained Eltham; "and the house is quite near to here, I
understand."
I looked at him a little blankly. Was this another effort of the
unknown jester?
"I have been fooled once," I said. "That 'phone call was a hoax--"
"But I feel certain," declared Eltham earnestly, "that this is
genuine! The poor girl was dreadfully agitated; her master has broken
his leg and is lying helpless: number 280 Rectory Grove."
"Where is the girl?" I asked sharply.
"She ran back directly she had given me her message."
"Was she a servant?"
"I should imagine so: French, I think. But she was so wrapped up I had
little more than a glimpse of her. I am sorry to hear that some one
has played a silly joke on you, but believe me"--he was very
earnest--"this is no jest. The poor girl could scarcely speak for
sobs. She mistook me for you, of course."
"Oh!" said I grimly; "well, I suppose I must go. Broken leg, you
said?--and my surgical bag, splints and so forth, are at home!"
"My dear Petrie!" cried Eltham, in his enthusiastic way, "you no doubt
can do something to alleviate the poor man's suffering immediately. I
will run back to your rooms for the bag and rejoin you at 280 Rectory
Grove."
"It's awfully good of you, Eltham--"
He held up his hand.
"The call of suffering humanity, Petrie, is one which I may no more
refuse to hear than you."
I made no further protest after that, for his point of view was
evident and his determination adamantine, but told him where he would
find the bag and once more set out across the moon-bright common, he
pursuing a westerly direction and I going east.
Some three hundred yards I had gone, I suppose, and my brain had been
very active the while, when something occurred to me which placed a
new complexion upon this second summons. I thought of the falsity of
the first, of the improbability of even the most hardened practical
joker practising his wiles at one o'clock in the morning. I thought of
our recent conversation; above all I thought of the girl who had
delivered the message to Eltham, the girl whom he had described as a
French maid--whose personal charm had so completely enlisted his
sympathies. Now, to this train of thought came a new one, and, adding
it, my suspicion became almost a certainty.
I remembered (as, knowing the district, I should have remembered
before) that there was no number 280 Rectory Grove.
Pulling up sharply, I stood looking about me. Not a living soul was in
sight; not even a policeman. Where the lamps marked the main paths
across the common nothing moved; in the shadows about me nothing
stirred. But something stirred within me--a warning voice which for
long had lain dormant.
What was afoot?
A breeze caressed the leaves overhead, breaking the silence with
mysterious whisperings. Some portentous truth was seeking for
admittance to my brain. I strove to reassure myself, but the sense of
impending evil and of mystery became heavier. At last I could combat
my strange fears no longer. I turned and began to run towards the
south side of the common--towards my rooms--and after Eltham.
I had hoped to head him off, but came upon no sign of him. An
all-night tramcar passed at the moment that I reached the high-road,
and as I ran around behind it I saw that my windows were lighted and
that there was a light in the hall.
My key was yet in the lock when my housekeeper opened the door.
"There's a gentleman just come, doctor," she began.
I thrust past her and raced up the stairs to my study.
Standing by the writing-table was a tall thin man, his gaunt face
brown as a coffee-berry and his steely grey eyes fixed upon me. My
heart gave a great leap--and seemed to stand still.
It was Nayland Smith!
"Smith!" I cried. "Smith, old man, by God, I'm glad to see you!"
He wrung my hand hard, looking at me with his searching eyes; but
there was little enough of gladness in his face. He was altogether
greyer than when last I had seen him--greyer and sterner.
"Where is Eltham?" I asked.
Smith started back as though I had struck him.
"Eltham!" he whispered--"_Eltham_! is Eltham here?"
"I left him ten minutes ago on the common."
Smith dashed his right fist into the palm of his left hand, and his
eyes gleamed almost wildly.
"My God, Petrie!" he said, "am I fated _always_ to come too late?"
My dreadful fears in that instant were confirmed. I seemed to feel my
legs totter beneath me.
"Smith, you don't mean--"
"I do, Petrie!" His voice sounded very far away. "Fu-Manchu is here;
and Eltham, God help him ... is his first victim!"
CHAPTER II
ELTHAM VANISHES
Smith went racing down the stairs like a man possessed. Heavy with
such a foreboding of calamity as I had not known for two years, I
followed him--along the hall and out into the road. The very peace and
beauty of the night in some way increased my mental agitation. The sky
was lighted almost tropically with such a blaze of stars as I could
not recall to have seen since, my futile search concluded, I had left
Egypt. The glory of the moonlight yellowed the lamps speckled across
the expanse of the common. The night was as still as night can ever be
in London. The dimming pulse of a cab or car alone disturbed the
quietude.
With a quick glance to right and left, Smith ran across on to the
common, and, leaving the door wide open behind me, I followed. The
path which Eltham had pursued terminated almost opposite to my house.
One's gaze might follow it, white and empty, for several hundred yards
past the pond, and farther, until it became overshadowed and was lost
amid a clump of trees.
I came up with Smith, and side by side we ran on, whilst pantingly I
told my tale.
"It was a trick to get you away from him!" cried Smith. "They meant no
doubt to make some attempt at your house, but, as he came out with
you, an alternative plan--"
Abreast of the pond, my companion slowed down, and finally stopped.
"Where did you last see Eltham?" he asked, rapidly.
I took his arm, turning him slightly to the right, and pointed across
the moon-bathed common.
"You see that clump of bushes on the other side of the road?" I said.
"There's a path to the left of it. I took that path and he took this.
We parted at the point where they meet--"
Smith walked right down to the edge of the water and peered about over
the surface.
What he hoped to find there I could not imagine. Whatever it had been
he was disappointed, and he turned to me again, frowning perplexedly,
and tugging at the lobe of his left ear, an old trick which reminded
me of gruesome things we had lived through in the past.
"Come on," he jerked. "It may be amongst the trees."
From the tone of his voice I knew that he was tensed up nervously, and
his mood but added to the apprehension of my own.
"_What_ may be amongst the trees, Smith?" I asked.
He walked on.
"God knows, Petrie; but I fear--"
Behind us, along the high-road, a tramcar went rocking by, doubtless
bearing a few belated workers homeward. The stark incongruity of the
thing was appalling. How little those weary toilers, hemmed about with
the commonplace, suspected that almost within sight from the car
windows, amid prosy benches, iron railings, and unromantic, flickering
lamps, two fellow-men moved upon the border of a horror-land!
Beneath the trees a shadow carpet lay, its edges tropically sharp; and
fully ten yards from the first of the group, we two, hatless both, and
sharing a common dread, paused for a moment and listened.
The car had stopped at the farther extremity of the common, and now
with a moan that grew to a shriek was rolling on its way again. We
stood and listened until silence reclaimed the night. Not a footstep
could be heard. Then slowly we walked on. At the edge of the little
coppice we stopped again abruptly.
Smith turned and thrust his pistol into my hand. A white ray of light
pierced the shadows; my companion carried an electric torch. But no
trace of Eltham was discoverable.
There had been a heavy shower of rain during the evening, just before
sunset, and although the open paths were dry again, under the trees
the ground was still moist. Ten yards within the coppice we came upon
tracks--the tracks of one running, as the deep imprints of the toes
indicated.
Abruptly the tracks terminated; others, softer, joined them, two sets
converging from left and right. There was a confused patch, trailing
off to the west; then this became indistinct, and was finally lost,
upon the hard ground outside the group.
For perhaps a minute, or more, we ran about from tree to tree, and
from bush to bush, searching like hounds for a scent, and fearful of
what we might find. We found nothing; and fully in the moonlight we
stood facing one another. The night was profoundly still.
Nayland Smith stepped back into the shadows, and began slowly to turn
his head from left to right, taking in the entire visible expanse of
the common. Towards a point where the road bisected it he stared
intently. Then, with a bound, he set off!
"Come on, Petrie!" he cried. "There they are!"
Vaulting a railing he went away over a field like a madman. Recovering
from the shock of surprise, I followed him, but he was well ahead of
me, and making for some vaguely seen objects moving against the lights
of the roadway.
Another railing was vaulted, and the corner of a second, triangular
grass patch crossed at a hot sprint. We were twenty yards from the
road when the sound of a starting motor broke the silence. We gained
the gravelled footpath only to see the tail-light of the car dwindling
to the north!
Smith leant dizzily against a tree.
"Eltham is in that car!" he gasped. "Just God! are we to stand here
and see him taken away to--?"
He beat his fist upon the tree, in a sort of tragic despair. The
nearest cab-rank was no great distance away, but, excluding the
possibility of no cab being there, it might, for all practicable
purposes, as well have been a mile off.
The beat of the retreating motor was scarcely audible; the lights
might but just be distinguished. Then, coming in an opposite
direction, appeared the headlamp of another car, of a car that raced
nearer and nearer to us, so that, within a few seconds of its first
appearance, we found ourselves bathed in the beam of its headlights.
Smith bounded out into the road, and stood, a weird silhouette, with
upraised arms, fully in its course!
The brakes were applied hurriedly. It was a big limousine, and its
driver swerved perilously in avoiding Smith and nearly ran into me.
But, the breathless moment past, the car was pulled up, head on to the
railings; and a man in evening clothes was demanding excitedly what
had happened. Smith, a hatless, dishevelled figure, stepped up to the
door.
"My name is Nayland Smith," he said rapidly--"Burmese Commissioner."
He snatched a letter from his pocket and thrust it into the hands of
the bewildered man. "Read that. It is signed by another
Commissioner--the Commissioner of Police."
With amazement written all over him, the other obeyed.
"You see," continued my friend tersely, "it is _carte blanche_. I wish
to commandeer your car, sir, on a matter of life and death!"
The other returned the letter.
"Allow me to offer it!" he said, descending. "My man will take your
orders. I can finish my journey by cab. I am--"
But Smith did not wait to learn whom he might be.
"Quick!" he cried to the stupefied chauffeur. "You passed a car a
minute ago--yonder. Can you overtake it?"
"I can try, sir, if I don't lose her track."
Smith leapt in, pulling me after him.
"Do it!" he snapped. "There are no speed limits for me. Thanks! Good
night, sir!"
We were off! The car swung around and the chase commenced.
One last glimpse I had of the man we had dispossessed, standing alone
by the roadside, and at ever-increasing speed, we leapt away in the
track of Eltham's captors.
Smith was too highly excited for ordinary conversation, but he threw
out short, staccato remarks.
"I have followed Fu-Manchu from Hong-Kong," he jerked. "Lost him at
Suez. He got here a boat ahead of me. Eltham has been corresponding
with some mandarin up-country. Knew that. Came straight to you. Only
got in this evening. He--Fu-Manchu--has been sent here to get Eltham.
My God! and he has him! He will question him! The interior of China--a
seething pot, Petrie! They had to stop the leakage of information.
_He_ is here for that."
The car pulled up with a jerk that pitched me out of my seat, and the
chauffeur leapt to the road and ran ahead. Smith was out in a trice,
as the man, who had run up to a constable, came racing back.
"Jump in, sir--jump in!" he cried, his eyes bright with the lust of
the chase; "they are making for Battersea!"
And we were off again.
Through the empty streets we roared on. A place of gasometers and
desolate waste lots slipped behind and we were in a narrow way where
gates of yards and a few lowly houses faced upon a prospect of high
blank wall.
"Thames on our right," said Smith, peering ahead. "His rathole is by
the river as usual. _Hi_!"--he grabbed up the speaking-tube--"Stop!
Stop!"
The limousine swung into the narrow sidewalk, and pulled up close by a
yard gate. I, too, had seen our quarry--a long, low-bodied car,
showing no inside lights. It had turned the next corner, where a
street lamp shone greenly not a hundred yards ahead.
Smith leapt out, and I followed him.
"That must be a cul-de-sac," he said, and turned to the eager-eyed
chauffeur. "Run back to that last turning," he ordered, "and wait
there, out of sight. Bring the car up when you hear a police-whistle."
The man looked disappointed, but did not question the order. As he
began to back away, Smith grasped me by the arm and drew me forward.
"We must get to that corner," he said, "and see where the car stands,
without showing ourselves."
CHAPTER III
THE WIRE JACKET
I suppose we were not more than a dozen paces from the lamp when we
heard the thudding of the motor. The car was backing out!
It was a desperate moment, for it seemed that we could not fail to be
discovered. Nayland Smith began to look about him, feverishly, for a
hiding place, a quest which I seconded with equal anxiety. And Fate
was kind to us--doubly kind as after events revealed. A wooden gate
broke the expanse of wall hard by upon the right, and, as the result
of some recent accident, a ragged gap had been torn in the panels
close to the top.
The chain of the padlock hung loosely; and in a second Smith was up,
with his foot in this as in a stirrup. He threw his arm over the top
and drew himself upright. A second later he was astride the broken
gate.
"Up you come, Petrie!" he said, and reached down his hand to aid me.
I got my foot into the loop of chain, grasped at a projection in the
gate-post, and found myself up.
"There is a crossbar, on this side to stand on," said Smith.
He climbed over and vanished in the darkness. I was still astride the
broken gate when the car turned the corner, slowly, for there was
scanty room; but I was standing upon the bar on the inside and had my
head below the gap ere the driver could possibly have seen me.
"Stay where you are until he passes," hissed my companion, below.
"There is a row of kegs under you."
The sound of the motor passing outside grew loud--louder--then began
to die away. I felt about with my left foot, discerned the top of a
keg, and dropped, panting, beside Smith.
"Phew!" I said--"that was a close thing! Smith--how do we know--?"
"That we have followed the right car?" he interrupted. "Ask yourself
the question: what would any ordinary man be doing motoring in a place
like this at two o'clock in the morning?"
"You are right, Smith," I agreed. "Shall we get out again?"
"Not yet. I have an idea. Look yonder."
He grasped my arm, turning me in the desired direction.
Beyond a great expanse of unbroken darkness a ray of moonlight slanted
into the place wherein we stood, spilling its cold radiance upon rows
of kegs.
"That's another door," continued my friend. I now began dimly to
perceive him beside me. "If my calculations are not entirely wrong, it
opens on a wharf gate--"
A steam siren hooted dismally, apparently from quite close at hand.
"I'm right!" snapped Smith. "That turning leads down to the gate. Come
on, Petrie!"
He directed the light of the electric torch upon a narrow path through
the ranks of casks, and led the way to the farther door. A good two
feet of moonlight showed along the top. I heard Smith straining;
then--
"These kegs are all loaded with grease," he said, "and I want to
reconnoitre over that door."
"I am leaning on a crate which seems easy to move," I reported. "Yes,
it's empty. Lend a hand."
We grasped the empty crate, and, between us, set it up on a solid
pedestal of casks. Then Smith mounted to this observation platform and
I scrambled up beside him, and looked down upon the lane outside.
It terminated as Smith had foreseen at a wharf gate some six feet to
the right of our post. Piled up in the lane beneath us, against the
warehouse door, was a stack of empty casks. Beyond, over the way, was
a kind of ramshackle building that had possibly been a dwelling-house
at some time. Bills were stuck in the ground-floor windows indicating
that the three floors were to let as offices; so much was discernible
in that reflected moonlight.
I could hear the tide lapping upon the wharf, could feel the chill
from the near river and hear the vague noises which, night nor day,
never cease upon the great commercial waterway.
"Down!" whispered Smith. "Make no noise! I suspected it. They heard
the car following!"
I obeyed, clutching at him for support; for I was suddenly dizzy, and
my heart was leaping wildly--furiously.
"You saw her?" he whispered.
Saw her! Yes, I had seen her! And my poor dream-world was toppling
about me, its cities ashes and its fairness dust.
Peering from the window, her great eyes wondrous in the moonlight and
her red lips parted, hair gleaming like burnished foam and her anxious
gaze set upon the corner of the lane--was Kâramanèh ... Kâramanèh
whom once we had rescued from the house of this fiendish Chinese
doctor; Kâramanèh who had been our ally, in fruitless quest of
whom,--when, too late, I realized how empty my life was become--I had
wasted what little of the world's goods I possessed:--Kâramanèh!
"Poor old Petrie," murmured Smith. "I knew, but I hadn't the
heart--_He_ has her again--God knows by what chains he holds her. But
she's only a woman, old boy, and women are very much alike--very much
alike from Charing Cross to Pagoda Road."
He rested his hand on my shoulder for a moment; I am ashamed to
confess that I was trembling; then, clenching my teeth with that
mechanical physical effort which often accompanies a mental one, I
swallowed the bitter draught of Nayland Smith's philosophy. He was
raising himself, to peer, cautiously, over the top of the door. I did
likewise.
The window from which the girl had looked was nearly on a level with
our eyes, and as I raised my head above the woodwork, I quite
distinctly saw her go out of the room. The door, as she opened it,
admitted a dull light, against which her figure showed silhouetted for
a moment. Then the door was reclosed.
"We must risk the other windows," rapped Smith.
Before I had grasped the nature of his plan, he was over and had
dropped almost noiselessly upon the casks outside. Again I followed
his lead.
"You are not going to attempt anything, single-handed--against _him_?"
I asked.
"Petrie--Eltham is in that house. He has been brought here to be put
to the question, in the mediæval, and Chinese, sense! Is there time to
summon assistance?"
I shuddered. This had been in my mind, certainly, but so expressed it
was definitely horrible--revolting, yet stimulating.
"You have the pistol," added Smith; "follow closely, and quietly."
He walked across the tops of the casks and leapt down, pointing to
that nearest to the closed door of the house. I helped him place it
under the open window. A second we set beside it, and, not without
some noise, got a third on top.
Smith mounted.
His jaw muscles were very prominent and his eyes shone like steel; but
he was as cool as though he were about to enter a theatre and not the
den of the most stupendous genius who ever worked for evil. I would
forgive any man who, knowing Dr. Fu-Manchu, feared him; I feared him
myself--feared him as one fears a scorpion; but when Nayland Smith
hauled himself up on to the wooden ledge above the door and swung
thence into the darkened room, I followed and was in close upon his
heels. But I admired him, for he had every ampère of his
self-possession in hand; my own case was different.
He spoke close to my ear.
"Is your hand steady? We may have to shoot."
I thought of Kâramanèh, of lovely dark-eyed Kâramanèh, whom this
wonderful, evil product of secret China had stolen from me--for so I
now adjudged it.
"Rely upon me!" I said grimly. "I--"
The words ceased--frozen on my tongue.
There are things that one seeks to forget, but it is my lot often to
remember the sound which at that moment literally struck me rigid with
horror. Yet it was only a groan; but, merciful God! I pray that it may
never be my lot to listen to such a groan again.
Smith drew a sibilant breath.
"It's Eltham!" he whispered hoarsely, "they're torturing--"
"No, no!" screamed a woman's voice--a voice that thrilled me anew,
but with another emotion. "Not that, not--"
I distinctly heard the sound of a blow. Followed a sort of vague
scuffling. A door somewhere at the back of the house opened--and shut
again. Some one was coming along the passage towards us!
"Stand back!" Smith's voice was low, but perfectly steady. "Leave it
to me!"
Nearer came the footsteps and nearer. I could hear suppressed sobs.
The door opened, admitting again the faint light--and Kâramanèh came
in. The place was quite unfurnished, offering no possibility of
hiding; but to hide was unnecessary.
Her slim figure had not crossed the threshold ere Smith had his arm
about the girl's waist and one hand clapped to her mouth. A stifled
gasp she uttered, and he lifted her into the room.
"Shut the door, Petrie," he directed.
I stepped forward and closed the door. A faint perfume stole to my
nostrils--a vague, elusive breath of the East, reminiscent of strange
days that, now, seemed to belong to a remote past. Kâramanèh! that
faint, indefinable perfume was part of her dainty personality; it may
appear absurd--impossible--but many and many a time I had dreamt of
it.
"In my breast pocket," rapped Smith; "the light."
I bent over the girl as he held her. She was quite still, but I could
have wished that I had had more certain mastery of myself. I took the
torch from Smith's pocket and, mechanically, directed it upon the
captive.
She was dressed very plainly, wearing a simple blue skirt, and white
blouse. It was easy to divine that it was she whom Eltham had mistaken
for a French maid. A brooch set with a ruby was pinned at the point
where the blouse opened--gleaming fierily and harshly against the soft
skin. Her face was pale and her eyes wide with fear.
"There is some cord in my right-hand pocket," said Smith. "I came
provided. Tie her wrists."
I obeyed him, silently. The girl offered no resistance, but I think I
never essayed a less congenial task than that of binding her white
wrists. The jewelled fingers lay quite listlessly in my own.
"Make a good job of it!" rapped Smith significantly.
A flush rose to my cheeks, for I knew well enough what he meant.
"She is fastened," I said, and I turned the ray of the torch upon her
again.
Smith removed his hand from her mouth but did not relax his grip of
her. She looked up at me with eyes in which I could have sworn there
was no recognition. But a flush momentarily swept over her face, and
left it pale again.
"We shall have to--gag her--"
"Smith, I can't do it!"
The girl's eyes filled with tears and she looked up at my companion
pitifully.
"Please don't be cruel to me," she whispered, with that soft accent
which always played havoc with my composure. "Every one--every one--is
cruel to me. I will promise--indeed I will swear, to be quiet. Oh,
believe me, if you can save him I will do nothing to hinder you." Her
beautiful head drooped. "Have some pity for me as well."
"Kâramanèh," I said, "we would have believed you once. We cannot now."
She started violently.
"You know my name!" Her voice was barely audible. "Yet I have never
seen you in my life--"
"See if the door locks," interrupted Smith harshly.
Dazed by the apparent sincerity in the voice of our lovely
captive--vacant from wonder of it all--I opened the door, felt for,
and found, a key.
We left Kâramanèh crouching against the wall; her great eyes were
turned towards me fascinatedly. Smith locked the door with much care.
We began a tip-toed progress along the dimly-lighted passage.
From beneath a door on the left, and near the end, a brighter light
shone. Beyond that again was another door. A voice was speaking in the
lighted room; yet I could have sworn that Kâramanèh had come, not from
there but from the room beyond--from the far end of the passage.
But the voice!--who, having once heard it, could ever mistake that
singular voice, alternately guttural and sibilant.
Dr. Fu-Manchu was speaking!
"I have asked you," came with ever-increasing clearness (Smith had
begun to turn the knob), "to reveal to me the name of your
correspondent in Nan-Yang. I have suggested that he may be the
Mandarin Yen-Sun-Yat, but you have declined to confirm me. Yet I know"
(Smith had the door open a good three inches and was peering in) "that
some official, some high official, is a traitor. Am I to resort again
to _the question_ to learn his name?"
Ice seemed to enter my veins at the unseen inquisitor's intonation of
the words "_the question_." This was the twentieth century; yet there,
in that damnable room....
Smith threw the door open.
Through a sort of haze, born mostly of horror, but not entirely, I saw
Eltham, stripped to the waist and tied, with his arms upstretched, to
a rafter in the ancient ceiling. A Chinaman, who wore a slop-shop blue
suit and who held an open knife in his hand, stood beside him. Eltham
was ghastly white. The appearance of his chest puzzled me momentarily,
then I realized that a sort of _tourniquet_ of wire-netting was
screwed so tightly about him that the flesh swelled out in knobs
through the mesh. There was blood--
"God in heaven!" screamed Smith frenziedly, "_they have the
wire-jacket on him!_ Shoot down that damned Chinaman, Petrie! Shoot!
Shoot!"
Lithely as a cat the man with the knife leapt around--but I raised the
Browning, and deliberately--with a cool deliberation that came to me
suddenly--shot him through the head. I saw his oblique eyes turn up to
the whites; I saw the mark squarely between his brows; and with no word
nor cry he sank to his knees and toppled forward with one yellow hand
beneath him and one outstretched, clutching--clutching--convulsively.
His pigtail came unfastened and began to uncoil, slowly, like a snake.
I handed the pistol to Smith; I was perfectly cool, now; and I leapt
forward, took up the bloody knife from the floor and cut Eltham's
lashings. He sank into my arms.
"Praise God," he murmured weakly. "He is more merciful to me than
perhaps I deserve. Unscrew ... the jacket, Petrie ... I think ... I was
very near to ... weakening. Praise the good God, who ... gave me ...
fortitude...."
I got the screw of the accursed thing loosened, but the act of
removing the jacket was too agonizing for Eltham--man of iron though
he was. I laid him swooning on the floor.
"Where is Fu-Manchu?"
Nayland Smith, from just within the door, threw out the query in a
tone of stark amaze. I stood up--I could do nothing more for the poor
victim at the moment--and looked about me.
The room was innocent of furniture, save for heaps of rubbish on the
floor, and a tin oil-lamp hung on the wall. The dead Chinaman lay
close beside Smith. There was no second door, the one window was
barred and from this room we had heard the voice, the unmistakable,
unforgettable voice, of Fu-Manchu.
_But Dr. Fu-Manchu was not there!_
Neither of us could accept the fact for a moment; we stood there,
looking from the dead man to the tortured man who had only swooned,
in a state of helpless incredulity.
Then the explanation flashed upon us both, simultaneously, and with a
cry of baffled rage Smith leapt along the passage to the second door.
It was wide open. I stood at his elbow when he swept its emptiness
with the ray of his pocket-lamp.
There was a speaking-tube fixed between the two rooms!
Smith literally ground his teeth.
"Yet, Petrie," he said, "we have learnt something. Fu-Manchu had
evidently promised Eltham his life if he would divulge the name of his
correspondent. He meant to keep his word; it is a sidelight on his
character."
"How so?"
"Eltham has never seen Dr. Fu-Manchu, but Eltham knows certain parts
of China better than you know the Strand. Probably, if he saw
Fu-Manchu, he would recognize him for whom he really is, and this, it
seems, the Doctor is anxious to avoid."
We ran back to where we had left Kâramanèh.
The room was empty!
"Defeated, Petrie!" said Smith bitterly. "The Yellow Devil is loosed
on London again!"
He leant from the window and the skirl of a police whistle split the
stillness of the night.
CHAPTER IV
THE CRY OF A NIGHTHAWK
Such were the episodes that marked the coming of Dr. Fu-Manchu to
London, that awakened fears long dormant and reopened old wounds--nay,
poured poison into them. I strove desperately, by close attention to
my professional duties, to banish the very memory of Kâramanèh from my
mind; desperately, but how vainly! Peace was for me no more, joy was
gone from the world, and only mockery remained as my portion.
Poor Eltham we had placed in a nursing establishment, where his
indescribable hurts could be properly tended; and his uncomplaining
fortitude not infrequently made me thoroughly ashamed of myself.
Needless to say, Smith had made such other arrangements as were
necessary to safeguard the injured man, and these proved so successful
that the malignant being whose plans they thwarted abandoned his
designs upon the heroic clergyman and directed his attention
elsewhere, as I must now proceed to relate.
Dusk always brought with it a cloud of apprehension, for darkness must
ever be the ally of crime; and it was one night, long after the clocks
had struck the mystic hour, "when churchyards yawn," that the hand of
Dr. Fu-Manchu again stretched out to grasp a victim. I was dismissing
a chance patient.
"Good night, Dr. Petrie," he said.
"Good night, Mr. Forsyth," I replied; and having conducted my late
visitor to the door, I closed and bolted it, switched off the light,
and went upstairs.
My patient was chief officer of one of the P. and O. boats. He had cut
his hand rather badly on the homeward run, and signs of poisoning
having developed, had called to have the wound treated, apologizing
for troubling me at so late an hour, but explaining that he had only
just come from the docks. The hall clock announced the hour of one as
I ascended the stairs. I found myself wondering what there was in Mr.
Forsyth's appearance which excited some vague and elusive memory.
Coming to the top floor, I opened the door of a front bedroom and was
surprised to find the interior in darkness.
"Smith!" I called.
"Come here and watch!" was the terse response.
Nayland Smith was sitting in the dark at the open window and peering
out across the common. Even as I saw him, a dim silhouette, I could
detect that tensity in his attitude which told of high-strung nerves.
I joined him.
"What is it?" I asked curiously.
"I don't know. Watch that clump of elms."
His masterful voice had the dry tone in it betokening excitement. I
leaned on the ledge beside him and looked out. The blaze of stars
almost compensated for the absence of the moon, and the night had a
quality of stillness that made for awe. This was a tropical summer,
and the common, with its dancing lights dotted irregularly about it,
had an unfamiliar look to-night. The clump of nine elms showed as a
dense and irregular mass, lacking detail.
Such moods as that which now claimed my friend are magnetic. I had no
thought of the night's beauty, for it only served to remind me that
somewhere amid London's millions was lurking an uncanny being, whose
life was a mystery, whose very existence was a scientific miracle.
"Where's your patient?" rapped Smith.
His abrupt query diverted my thoughts into a new channel. No footstep
disturbed the silence of the high-road. Where _was_ my patient?
I craned from the window. Smith grabbed my arm.
"Don't lean out," he said.
I drew back, glancing at him surprisedly.
"For Heaven's sake, why not?"
"I'll tell you presently, Petrie. Did you see him?"
"I did, and I can't make out what he is doing. He seems to have
remained standing at the gate for some reason."
"He has seen it!" snapped Smith. "Watch those elms."
His hand remained upon my arm, gripping it nervously. Shall I say that
I was surprised? I can say it with truth. But I shall add that I was
thrilled, eerily; for this subdued excitement and alert watching of
Smith's could only mean one thing:
Fu-Manchu!
And that was enough to set me watching as keenly as he; to set me
listening, not only for sounds outside the house but for sounds
within. Doubts, suspicions, dreads heaped themselves up in my mind.
Why was Forsyth standing there at the gate? I had never seen him
before, to my knowledge, yet there was something oddly reminiscent
about the man. Could it be that his visit formed part of a plot? Yet
his wound had been genuine enough. Thus my mind worked, feverishly;
such was the effect of an unspoken thought--Fu-Manchu.
Nayland Smith's grip tightened on my arm.
"There it is again, Petrie!" he whispered. "Look, look!"
His words were wholly unnecessary. I, too, had seen it; a wonderful
and uncanny sight. Out of the darkness under the elms, low down upon
the ground, grew a vaporous blue light. It flared up, elfinish, then
began to ascend. Like an igneous phantom, a witch flame, it rose,
higher, higher, higher, to what I adjudged to be some twelve feet or
more from the ground. Then, high in the air, it died away again as it
had come!
"For God's sake, Smith, what was it?"
"Don't ask me, Petrie. I have seen it twice. We--"
He paused. Rapid footsteps sounded below. Over Smith's shoulder I saw
Forsyth cross the road, climb the low rail, and set out across the
common.
Smith sprang impetuously to his feet.
"We must stop him!" he said hoarsely; then, clapping a hand to my
mouth as I was about to call out--"Not a sound, Petrie!"
He ran out of the room and went blundering downstairs in the dark,
crying:
"Out through the garden--the side entrance!"
I overtook him as he threw wide the door of my dispensing room.
Through he ran and opened the door at the other end. I followed him
out, closing it behind me. The smell from some tobacco plants in a
neighbouring flower-bed was faintly perceptible; no breeze stirred;
and in the great silence I could hear Smith, in front of me, tugging
at the bolt of the gate.
Then he had it open, and I stepped out, close on his heels, and left
the door ajar.
"We must not appear to have come from your house," explained Smith
rapidly. "I will go along to the high-road and cross to the common a
hundred yards up, where there is a pathway, as though homeward bound
to the north side. Give me half a minute's start, then you proceed in
an opposite direction and cross from the corner of the next road.
Directly you are out of the light of the street lamps, get over the
rails and run for the elms!"
He thrust a pistol into my hand and was off.
While he had been with me, speaking in that incisive impetuous way of
his, his dark face close to mine, and his eyes gleaming like steel, I
had been at one with him in his feverish mood, but now, when I stood
alone in that staid and respectable by-way, holding a loaded pistol in
my hand, the whole thing became utterly unreal.
It was in an odd frame of mind that I walked to the next corner, as
directed, for I was thinking, not of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the great and evil
man who dreamed of Europe and America under Chinese rule, not of
Nayland Smith, who alone stood between the Chinaman and the
realization of his monstrous schemes, not even of Kâramanèh, the slave
girl, whose glorious beauty was a weapon of might in Fu-Manchu's
hand, but of what impression I must have made upon a patient had I
encountered one then.
Such were my ideas up to the moment that I crossed to the common and
vaulted into the field on my right. As I began to run toward the elms
I found myself wondering what it was all about, and for what we were
come. Fifty yards west of the trees it occurred to me that if Smith
had counted on cutting Forsyth off we were too late, for it appeared
to me that he must already be in the coppice.
I was right. Twenty paces more I ran, and ahead of me, from the elms,
came a sound. Clearly it came through the still air--the eerie hoot of
a nighthawk. I could not recall ever to have heard the cry of that
bird on the common before, but oddly enough I attached little
significance to it until, in the ensuing instant, a most dreadful
scream--a scream in which fear and loathing and anger were hideously
blended--thrilled me with horror.
After that I have no recollection of anything until I found myself
standing by the southernmost elm.
"Smith!" I cried breathlessly. "Smith! my God! where are you?"
As if in answer to my cry came an indescribable sound, a mingled
sobbing and choking. Out from the shadows staggered a ghastly
figure--that of a man whose face appeared to be _streaked_. His eyes
glared at me madly, and he moved the air with his hands like one blind
and insane with fear.
I started back; words died upon my tongue. The figure reeled, and the
man fell babbling and sobbing at my very feet.
Inert I stood, looking down at him. He writhed a moment--and was
still. The silence again became perfect. Then, from somewhere beyond
the elms, Nayland Smith appeared. I did not move. Even when he stood
beside me, I merely stared at him fatuously.
"I let him walk to his death, Petrie," I heard dimly. "God forgive
me--God forgive me!"
The words aroused me.
"Smith"--my voice came as a whisper--"for one awful moment I
thought--"
"So did some one else," he rapped. "Our poor sailor has met the end
designed for _me_, Petrie!"
At that I realized two things: I knew why Forsyth's face had struck me
as being familiar in some puzzling way, and I knew why Forsyth now lay
dead upon the grass. Save that he was a fair man and wore a slight
moustache, he was, in features and build, the double of Nayland Smith!
CHAPTER V
THE NET
We raised the poor victim and turned him over on his back. I dropped
upon my knees, and with unsteady fingers began to strike a match. A
slight breeze was arising and sighing gently through the elms, but,
screened by my hands, the flame of the match took life. It illuminated
wanly the sun-baked face of Nayland Smith, his eyes gleaming with
unnatural brightness. I bent forward, and the dying light of the match
touched that other face.
"Oh, God!" whispered Smith.
A faint puff of wind extinguished the match.
In all my surgical experience I had never met with anything quite so
horrible. Forsyth's livid face was streaked with tiny streams of
blood, which proceeded from a series of irregular wounds. One group of
these clustered upon his left temple, another beneath his right eye,
and others extended from the chin down to the throat. They were
black, almost like tattoo marks, and the entire injured surface was
bloated indescribably. His fists were clenched; he was quite rigid.
Smith's piercing eyes were set upon me eloquently as I knelt on the
path and made my examination--an examination which that first glimpse
when Forsyth came staggering out from the trees had rendered
useless--a mere matter of form.
"He's quite dead, Smith," I said huskily. "It's--unnatural--it--"
Smith began beating his fist into his left palm and taking little,
short, nervous strides up and down beside the dead man. I could hear a
car skirling along the high-road, but I remained there on my knees
staring dully at the disfigured bloody face which but a matter of
minutes since had been that of a clean-looking British seaman. I found
myself contrasting his neat, squarely trimmed moustache with the
bloated face above it, and counting the little drops of blood which
trembled upon its edge. There were footsteps approaching. I arose. The
footsteps quickened, and I turned as a constable ran up.
"What's this?" he demanded gruffly, and stood with his fists clenched,
looking from Smith to me and down at that which lay between us. Then
his hand flew to his breast; there was a silvern gleam and--
"Drop that whistle!" snapped Smith, and struck it from the man's hand.
"Where's your lantern? Don't ask questions!"
The constable started back and was evidently debating upon his chances
with the two of us, when my friend pulled a letter from his pocket and
thrust it under the man's nose.
"Read that!" he directed harshly, "and then listen to my orders."
There was something in his voice which changed the officer's opinion
of the situation. He directed the light of his lantern upon the open
letter, and seemed to be stricken with wonder.
"If you have any doubt," continued Smith--"you may not be familiar
with the Commissioner's signature--you have only to ring up Scotland
Yard from Dr. Petrie's house, to which we shall now return to disperse
it." He pointed to Forsyth. "Help us to carry him there. We must not
be seen; this must be hushed up. You understand? It must not get into
the Press--"
The man saluted respectfully, and the three of us addressed ourselves
to the mournful task. By slow stages we bore the dead man to the edge
of the common, carried him across the road and into my house, without
exciting attention even on the part of those vagrants who nightly
slept out in the neighbourhood.
We laid our burden upon the surgery table.
"You will want to make an examination, Petrie," said Smith in his
decisive way, "and the officer here might 'phone for the ambulance. I
have some investigations to make also. I must have the pocket lamp."
He raced upstairs to his room, and an instant later came running down
again. The front door banged.
"The telephone is in the hall," I said to the constable.
"Thank you, sir."
He went out of the surgery as I switched on the lamp over the table
and began to examine the marks upon Forsyth's skin. These, as I have
said, were in groups and nearly all in the form of elongated
punctures; a fairly deep incision with a pear-shaped and superficial
scratch beneath it. One of the tiny wounds had penetrated the right
eye.
The symptoms, or those which I had been enabled to observe as Forsyth
had first staggered into view from among the elms, were most puzzling.
Clearly enough the muscles of articulation and the respiratory
muscles had been affected; and now the livid face, dotted over with
tiny wounds (they were also on the throat), set me mentally groping
for a clue to the manner of his death.
No clue presented itself; and my detailed examination of the body
availed me nothing. The grey herald of dawn was come when the police
arrived with the ambulance and took Forsyth away.
I was just taking my cap from the rack when Nayland Smith returned.
"Smith!" I cried, "have you found anything?"
He stood there in the grey light of the hall-way tugging at the lobe
of his left ear.
The bronzed face looked very gaunt, I thought, and his eyes were
bright with that febrile glitter which once I had disliked, but which
I had learned from experience to be due to tremendous nervous
excitement. At such times he could act with icy coolness, and his
mental faculties seemed temporarily to acquire an abnormal keenness.
He made no direct reply, but--
"Have you any milk?" he jerked abruptly.
So wholly unexpected was the question that for a moment I failed to
grasp it. Then--
"Milk!" I began.
"Exactly, Petrie! If you can find me some milk, I shall be obliged."
I turned to descend to the kitchen, when--
"The remains of the turbot from dinner, Petrie, would also be welcome,
and I think I should like a trowel."
I stopped at the stairhead and faced him.
"I cannot suppose that you are joking, Smith," I said, "but--"
He laughed dryly.
"Forgive me, old man," he replied. "I was so preoccupied with my own
train of thought that it never occurred to me how absurd my request
must have sounded. I will explain my singular tastes later; at the
moment, hustle is the watchword."
Evidently he was in earnest, and I ran downstairs accordingly,
returning with a garden trowel, a plate of cold fish, and a glass of
milk.
"Thanks, Petrie," said Smith. "If you would put the milk in a jug--"
I was past wondering, so I simply went and fetched a jug, into which
he poured the milk. Then, with the trowel in his pocket, the plate of
cold turbot in one hand and the milk-jug in the other, he made for the
door. He had it open, when another idea evidently occurred to him.
"I'll trouble you for the pistol, Petrie."
I handed him the pistol without a word.
"Don't assume that I want to mystify you," he added, "but the presence
of any one else might jeopardize my plan. I don't expect to be long."
The cold light of dawn flooded the hall-way momentarily; then the door
closed again and I went upstairs to my study, watching Nayland Smith
as he strode across the common in the early morning mist. He was
making for the Nine Elms, but I lost sight of him before he reached
them.
I sat there for some time, watching for the first glow of sunrise. A
policeman tramped past the house, and, a while later, a belated
reveller in evening clothes. That sense of unreality assailed me
again. Out there in the grey mist a man who was vested with powers
which rendered him a law unto himself, who had the British Government
behind him in all that he might choose to do, who had been summoned
from Rangoon to London on singular and dangerous business, was
employing himself with a plate of cold turbot, a jug of milk, and a
trowel!
Away to the right, and just barely visible, a tramcar stopped by the
common, then proceeded on its way, coming in a westerly direction. Its
lights twinkled yellowly through the greyness, but I was less
concerned with the approaching car than with the solitary traveller
who had descended from it.
As the car went rocking by below me I strained my eyes in an endeavour
more clearly to discern the figure, which, leaving the high-road, had
struck-out across the common. It was that of a woman, who seemingly
carried a bulky bag or parcel.
One must be a gross materialist to doubt that there are latent powers
in man which man, in modern times, neglects or knows not how to
develop. I became suddenly conscious of a burning curiosity respecting
this lonely traveller who travelled at an hour so strange. With no
definite plan in mind, I went downstairs, took a cap from the rack and
walked briskly out of the house and across the common in a direction
which I thought would enable me to head off the woman.
I had slightly miscalculated the distance, as Fate would have it, and
with a patch of gorse effectually screening my approach, I came upon
her, kneeling on the damp grass and unfastening the bundle which had
attracted my attention. I stopped and watched her.
She was dressed in bedraggled fashion in rusty black, wore a common
black straw hat and a thick veil; but it seemed to me that the
dexterous hands at work untying the bundle were slim and white, and I
perceived a pair of hideous cotton gloves lying on the turf beside
her. As she threw open the wrappings and lifted out something that
looked like a small shrimping-net, I stepped around the bush, crossed
silently the intervening patch of grass and stood beside her.
A faint breath of perfume reached me--of a perfume which, like the
secret incense of Ancient Egypt, seemed to assail my soul. The glamour
of the Orient was in that subtle essence, and I only knew one woman
who used it. I bent over the kneeling figure.
"Good morning," I said; "can I assist you in any way?"
She came to her feet like a startled deer, and flung away from me with
the lithe movement of some Eastern dancing-girl.
Now came the sun, and its heralding rays struck sparks from the jewels
upon the white fingers of this woman who wore the garments of a
mendicant. My heart gave a great leap. It was with difficulty that I
controlled my voice.
"There is no cause for alarm," I added.
She stood watching me; even through the coarse veil I could see how
her eyes glittered. I stooped and picked up the net.
"Oh!" The whispered word was scarcely audible; but it was enough. I
doubted no longer.
"This is a net for bird-snaring," I said. "What strange bird are you
seeking, _Kâramanèh_?"
With a passionate gesture Kâramanèh snatched off the veil, and with it
the ugly black hat. The cloud of wonderful intractable hair came
rumpling about her face, and her glorious eyes blazed out upon me. How
beautiful they were, with the dark beauty of an Egyptian night; how
often had they looked into mine in dreams!
To labour against a ceaseless yearning for a woman whom one knows, upon
evidence that none but a fool might reject, to be worthless--evil; is
there any torture to which the soul of man is subject, more pitiless?
Yet this was my lot, for what past sins assigned to me I was unable to
conjecture; and this was the woman, this lovely slave of a monster, this
creature of Dr. Fu-Manchu.
"I suppose you will declare that you do not know me!" I said harshly.
Her lips trembled, but she made no reply.
"It is very convenient to forget, sometimes," I ran on bitterly, then
checked myself, for I knew that my words were prompted by a feckless
desire to hear her defence, by a fool's hope that it might be an
acceptable one. I looked again at the net contrivance in my hand; it
had a strong spring fitted to it and a line attached. Quite obviously
it was intended for snaring. "What were you about to do?" I demanded
sharply; but in my heart, poor fool that I was, I found admiration for
the exquisite arch of Kâramanèh's lips, and reproach because they were
so tremulous.
She spoke then.
"Dr. Petrie--"
"Well?"
"You seem to be--angry with me, not so much because--of what I do, as
because I do not remember you. Yet--"
"Kindly do not revert to the matter," I interrupted. "You have chosen,
very conveniently, to forget that once we were friends. Please
yourself; but answer my question."
She clasped her hands with a sort of wild abandon.
"Why do you treat me so?" she cried. She had the most fascinating
accent imaginable. "Throw me into prison, kill me if you like for what
I have done!" She stamped her foot. "For what I have done! But do not
torture me, try to drive me mad with your reproaches--that I forget
you! I tell you--again I tell you--that until you came one night, last
week, to rescue some one from"--(there was the old trick of hesitating
before the name of Fu-Manchu)--"from _him_, I had never, never seen
you!"
The dark eyes looked into mine, afire with a positive hunger for
belief--or so I was sorely tempted to suppose. But the facts were
against her.
"Such a declaration is worthless," I said, as coldly as I could. "You
are a traitress; you betray those who are mad enough to trust you--"
"I am no traitress!" she blazed at me. Her eyes were magnificent.
"This is mere nonsense. You think that it will pay you better to serve
Fu-Manchu than to remain true to your friends. Your 'slavery'--for I
take it you are posing as a slave again--is evidently not very harsh.
You serve Fu-Manchu, lure men to their destruction, and in return he
loads you with jewels, lavishes gifts--"
"Ah! so!"
She sprang forward, raising flaming eyes to mine; her lips were
slightly parted. With that wild abandon which betrayed the desert
blood in her veins, she wrenched open the neck of her bodice and
slipped a soft shoulder free of the garment. She twisted around, so
that the white skin was but inches removed from me.
"These are some of the gifts that he lavishes upon me!"
I clenched my teeth. Insane thoughts flooded my mind. For that creamy
skin was wealed with the marks of the lash!
She turned, quickly rearranging her dress, and watching me the while.
I could not trust myself to speak for a moment, then--
"If I am a stranger to you, as you claim, why do you give me your
confidence?" I asked.
"I have known you long enough to trust you!" she said simply, and
turned her head aside.
"Then why do you serve this inhuman monster?"
She snapped her fingers oddly, and looked up at me from under her
lashes. "Why do you question me if you think that everything I say is
a lie?"
It was a lesson in logic--from a woman! I changed the subject.
"Tell me what you came here to do," I demanded.
She pointed to the net in my hands.
"To catch birds; you have said so yourself."
"What bird?"
She shrugged her shoulders.
And now a memory was born within my brain: it was that of the cry of
the nighthawk which had harbingered the death of Forsyth! The net was
a large and strong one; could it be that some horrible fowl of the
air--some creature unknown to Western naturalists--had been released
upon the common last night? I thought of the marks upon Forsyth's face
and throat; I thought of the profound knowledge of obscure and
dreadful things possessed by the Chinaman.
The wrapping in which the net had been lay at my feet. I stooped and
took out from it a wicker basket. Kâramanèh stood watching me and
biting her lip, but she made no move to check me. I opened the basket.
It contained a large phial, the contents of which possessed a pungent
and peculiar smell.
I was utterly mystified.
"You will have to accompany me to my house," I said sternly.
Kâramanèh upturned her great eyes to mine. They were wide with fear.
She was on the point of speaking when I extended my hand to grasp her.
At that, the look of fear was gone and one of rebellion held its
place. Ere I had time to realize her purpose, she flung back from me
with that wild grace which I had met with in no other woman,
turned--and ran!
Fatuously, net and basket in hand, I stood looking after her. The idea
of pursuit came to me certainly; but I doubted if I could outrun her.
For Kâramanèh ran, not like a girl used to town or even country life,
but with the lightness and swiftness of a gazelle; ran like the
daughter of the desert that she was.
Some two hundred yards she went, stopped, and looked back. It would
seem that the sheer joy of physical effort had aroused the devil in
her, the devil that must lie latent in every woman with eyes like the
eyes of Kâramanèh.
In the ever-brightening sunlight I could see the lithe figure swaying;
no rags imaginable could mask its beauty. I could see the red lips and
gleaming teeth. Then--and it was music good to hear, despite its
taunt--she laughed defiantly, turned, and ran again!
I resigned myself to defeat; I blush to add, gladly! Some evidences of
a world awakening were perceptible about me now. Feathered choirs
hailed the new day joyously. Carrying the mysterious contrivance which
I had captured from the enemy, I set out in the direction of my house,
my mind very busy with conjectures respecting the link between this
bird-snare and the cry like that of a nighthawk which we had heard at
the moment of Forsyth's death.
The path that I had chosen led me around the border of the Mound
Pond--a small pool having an islet in the centre. Lying at the margin
of the pond I was amazed to see the plate and jug which Nayland Smith
had borrowed recently.
Dropping my burden, I walked down to the edge of the water. I was
filled with a sudden apprehension. Then, as I bent to pick up the now
empty jug, came a hail:
"All right, Petrie! Shall join you in a moment!"
I started up, looked to right and left; but, although the voice had
been that of Nayland Smith, no sign could I discern of his presence!
"Smith!" I cried. "Smith!"
"Coming!"
Seriously doubting my senses, I looked in the direction from which the
voice had seemed to proceed--and there was Nayland Smith.
He stood on the islet in the centre of the pond, and, as I perceived
him, he walked down into the shallow water and waded across to me!
"Good heavens!" I began.
One of his rare laughs interrupted me.
"You must think me mad this morning, Petrie!" he said. "But I have
made several discoveries. Do you know what that islet in the pond
really is?"
"Merely an islet, I suppose."
"Nothing of the kind; it is a burial mound, Petrie! It marks the site
of one of the Plague Pits where victims were buried during the Great
Plague of London. You will observe that although you have seen it
every morning for some years, it remains for a British Commissioner
lately resident in Burma to acquaint you with its history!
Hullo!"--the laughter was gone from his eyes, and they were steely
hard again--"what the blazes have we here?"
He picked up the net. "What! A bird-trap!"
"Exactly!" I said.
Smith turned his searching gaze upon me. "Where did you find it,
Petrie?"
"I did not exactly find it," I replied; and I related to him the
circumstances of my meeting with Kâramanèh.
He directed that cold stare upon me throughout the narrative, and
when, with some embarrassment, I had told him of the girl's escape--
"Petrie," he said succinctly, "you are an imbecile!"
I flushed with anger, for not even from Nayland Smith, whom I esteemed
above all other men, could I accept such words uttered as he had
uttered them. We glared at one another.
"Kâramanèh," he continued coldly, "is a beautiful toy, I grant you;
but so is a cobra. Neither is suitable for playful purposes."
"Smith!" I cried hotly, "drop that! Adopt another tone or I cannot
listen to you!"
"You _must_ listen," he said, squaring his lean jaw truculently. "You
are playing, not only with a pretty girl who is the favourite of a
Chinese Nero, but with _my life_! And I object, Petrie, on purely
personal grounds!"
I felt my anger oozing from me; for this was strictly just. I had
nothing to say and Smith continued:
"You _know_ that she is utterly false, yet a glance or two from those
dark eyes of hers can make a fool of you! A woman made a fool of me
once, but I learned my lesson; you have failed to learn yours. If you
are determined to go to pieces on the rock that broke up Adam, do so!
But don't involve me in the wreck, Petrie, for that might mean a
yellow emperor of the world, and you know it!"
"Your words are unnecessarily brutal, Smith," I said, feeling very
crestfallen, "but there--perhaps I fully deserve them all."
"You _do_!" he assured me, but he relaxed immediately. "A murderous
attempt is made upon my life, resulting in the death of a perfectly
innocent man in no way concerned. Along you come and let an
accomplice, perhaps a participant, escape, merely because she has a
red mouth, or black lashes, or whatever it is that fascinates you so
hopelessly!"
He opened the wicker basket, sniffing at the contents.
"Ah!" he snapped, "do you recognize this odour?"
"Certainly."
"Then you have some idea respecting Kâramanèh's quarry?"
"Nothing of the kind!"
Smith shrugged his shoulders.
"Come along, Petrie," he said, linking his arm in mine.
We proceeded. Many questions there were that I wanted to put to him,
but one above all.
"Smith," I said, "what, in Heaven's name, were you doing on the mound?
Digging something up?"
"No," he replied, smiling dryly, "burying something!"
CHAPTER VI
UNDER THE ELMS
Dusk found Nayland Smith and me at the top bedroom window. We knew,
now that poor Forsyth's body had been properly examined, that he had
died from poisoning. Smith, declaring that I did not deserve his
confidence, had refused to confide in me his theory of the origin of
the peculiar marks upon the body.
"On the soft ground under the trees," he said, "I found his tracks
right up to the point where--something happened. There were no other
fresh tracks for several yards around. He was attacked as he stood
close to the trunk of one of the elms. Six or seven feet away I found
some other tracks, very much like this."
He marked a series of dots upon the blotting-pad, for this
conversation took place during the afternoon.
"Claws!" I cried. "That eerie call! like the call of a nighthawk--is
it some unknown species of--flying thing?"
"We shall see, shortly; possibly to-night," was his reply. "Since,
probably owing to the absence of any moon, a mistake was made"--his
jaw hardened at the thought of poor Forsyth--"another attempt along
the same lines will almost certainly follow--you know Fu-Manchu's
system?"
So in the darkness, expectant, we sat watching the group of nine elms.
To-night the moon was come, raising her Aladdin's lamp up to the star
world and summoning magic shadows into being. By midnight the
high-road showed deserted, the common was a place of mystery; and save
for the periodical passage of an electric car, in blazing modernity,
this was a fit enough stage for an eerie drama.
No notice of the tragedy had appeared in print; Nayland Smith was
vested with powers to silence the Press. No detectives, no special
constables, were posted. My friend was of opinion that the publicity
which had been given to the deeds of Dr. Fu-Manchu in the past,
together with the sometimes clumsy co-operation of the police, had
contributed not a little to the Chinaman's success.
"There is only one thing to fear," he jerked suddenly; "he may not be
ready for another attempt to-night."
"Why?"
"Since he has only been in England for a short time, his menagerie of
venomous things may be a limited one at present."
Earlier in the evening there had been a brief but violent
thunderstorm, with a tropical downpour of rain, and now clouds were
scudding across the blue of the sky. Through a temporary rift in the
veiling the crescent of the moon looked down upon us. It had a
greenish tint, and it set me thinking of the filmed, green eyes of
Fu-Manchu.
The cloud passed and a lake of silver spread out to the edge of the
coppice; where it terminated at a shadow bank.
"There it is, Petrie!" hissed Nayland Smith.
A lambent light was born in the darkness; it rose slowly, unsteadily,
to a great height, and died.
"It's under the trees, Smith!"
But he was already making for the door. Over his shoulder:
"Bring the pistol, Petrie!" he cried; "I have another. Give me at
least twenty yards' start or no attempt may be made. But the instant
I'm under the trees, join me."
Out of the house we ran, and over on to the common, which latterly had
been a pageant-ground for phantom warring. The light did not appear
again; and as Smith plunged off toward the trees, I wondered if he
knew what uncanny thing was hidden there. I more than suspected that
he had solved the mystery.
His instructions to keep well in the rear I understood. Fu-Manchu, or
the creature of Fu-Manchu, would attempt nothing in the presence of a
witness. But we knew full well that the instrument of death which was
hidden in the elm coppice could do its ghastly work and leave no clue,
could slay and vanish. For had not Forsyth come to a dreadful end
while Smith and I were within twenty yards of him?
Not a breeze stirred, as Smith, ahead of me--for I had slowed my
pace--came up level with the first tree. The moon sailed clear of the
straggling cloud wisps which alone told of the recent storm; and I
noted that an irregular patch of light lay silvern on the moist ground
under the elms where otherwise lay shadow.
He passed on, slowly. I began to run again. Black against the silvern
patch, I saw him emerge--and look up.
"Be careful, Smith!" I cried--and I was racing under the trees to join
him.
Uttering a loud cry, he leaped--away from the pool of light.
"Stand back, Petrie!" he screamed. "Back! farther!"
He charged into me, shoulder lowered, and sent me reeling!
Mixed up with his excited cry I had heard a loud splintering and
sweeping of branches overhead; and now as we staggered into the
shadows it seemed that one of the elms was reaching down to touch us!
So, at least, the phenomenon presented itself to my mind in that
fleeting moment while Smith, uttering his warning cry, was hurling me
back.
Then the truth became apparent.
With an appalling crash, a huge bough fell from above. One piercing
awful shriek there was, a crackling of broken branches, and a choking
groan....
The crack of Smith's pistol close beside me completed my confusion of
mind.
"Missed!" he yelled. "Shoot it, Petrie! On your left! For God's sake
don't miss it!"
I turned. A lithe black shape was streaking past me. I
fired--once--twice. Another frightful cry made yet more hideous the
nocturne.
Nayland Smith was directing the ray of a pocket torch upon the fallen
bough.
"Have you killed it, Petrie?" he cried.
"Yes, yes!"
I stood beside him, looking down. From the tangle of leaves and twigs
an evil yellow face looked up at us. The features were contorted with
agony, but the malignant eyes, wherein light was dying, regarded us
with inflexible hatred. The man was pinned beneath the heavy bough;
his back was broken; and, as we watched, he expired, frothing slightly
at the mouth, and quitted his tenement of clay leaving those glassy
eyes set hideously upon us.
"The pagan gods fight upon our side," said Smith strangely. "Elms have
a dangerous habit of shedding boughs in still weather--particularly
after a storm. Pan, god of the woods, with this one has performed
Justice's work of retribution."
"I don't understand. Where was this man--?"
"Up the tree, lying along the bough which fell, Petrie! That is why he
left no footmarks. Last night no doubt he made his escape by swinging
from bough to bough, ape-fashion, and descending to the ground
somewhere at the other side of the coppice."
He glanced at me.
"You are wondering, perhaps," he suggested, "what caused the
mysterious light? I could have told you this morning, but I fear I was
in a bad temper, Petrie. It's very simple; a length of tape soaked in
spirit or something of the kind, and sheltered from the view of any
one watching from your windows, behind the trunk of the tree; then,
the end ignited, lowered, still behind the tree, to the ground. The
operator swinging it around, the flame ascended, of course. I found
the unburned fragment of the tape used last night, a few yards from
here."
I was peering down at Fu-Manchu's servant, the hideous yellow man who
lay dead in a bower of elm leaves.
"He has some kind of leather bag beside him," I began.
"Exactly!" rapped Smith. "In that he carried his dangerous instrument
of death; from that he released it!"
"Released what?"
"What your fascinating friend came to recapture this morning."
"Don't taunt me, Smith!" I said bitterly. "Is it some species of
bird?"
"You saw the marks on Forsyth's body, and I told you of those which I
had traced upon the ground here. They were caused by _claws_, Petrie!"
"Claws! I thought so! But _what_ claws?"
"The claws of a poisonous thing. I recaptured the one used last night,
killed it--against my will--and buried it on the mound. I was afraid
to throw it in the pond, lest some juvenile fisherman should pull it
out and sustain a scratch. I don't know how long the claws would
remain venomous."
"You are treating me like a child, Smith," I said, slowly. "No doubt I
am hopelessly obtuse, but perhaps you will tell me what this Chinaman
carried in a leather bag and released upon Forsyth. It was something
which you recaptured, apparently with the aid of a plate of cold
turbot and a jug of milk. It was something, also, which Kâramanèh had
been sent to recapture with the aid--"
I stopped.
"Go on," said Nayland Smith, turning the ray to the left; "what did
she have in the basket?"
"Valerian," I replied mechanically.
The ray rested upon the lithe creature that I had shot down.
It was a black cat!
"A cat will go through fire and water for valerian," said Smith; "but
I got first innings this morning with fish and milk! I had recognized
the imprints under the trees for those of a cat, and I knew that if a
cat had been released here it would still be hiding in the
neighbourhood, probably in the bushes. I finally located a cat, sure
enough, and came for bait! I laid my trap, for the animal was too
frightened to be approachable, and then shot it; I had to. That yellow
fiend used the light as a decoy. The branch which killed him jutted
out over the path at a spot where an opening in the foliage above
allowed some moon rays to penetrate. Directly the victim stood
beneath, the Chinaman uttered his bird-cry; the one below looked up,
and the cat, previously held silent and helpless in the leather sack,
was dropped accurately upon his head!"
"But--" I was growing confused.
Smith stooped lower.
"The cat's claws are sheathed now," he said; "but if you could examine
them you would find that they are coated with a shining black
substance. Only Fu-Manchu knows what that substance is, Petrie; but
you and I know what it can do!"
CHAPTER VII
ENTER MR. ABEL SLATTIN
"I don't blame you!" rapped Nayland Smith. "Suppose we say, then, a
thousand pounds if you show us the present hiding-place of Fu-Manchu,
the payment to be in no way subject to whether we profit by your
information or not?"
Abel Slattin shrugged his shoulders, racially, and returned to the
armchair which he had just quitted. He reseated himself, placing his
hat and cane upon my writing-table.
"A little agreement in black and white?" he suggested smoothly.
Smith raised himself up out of the white cane chair, and, bending
forward over a corner of the table, scribbled busily upon a sheet of
notepaper with my fountain-pen.
The while he did so, I covertly studied our visitor. He lay back in
the armchair, his heavy eyelids lowered deceptively. He was a thought
overdressed--a big man, dark-haired and well-groomed, who toyed with a
monocle most unsuitable to his type. During the preceding
conversation, I had been vaguely surprised to note Mr. Abel Slattin's
marked American accent.
Sometimes, when Slattin moved, a big diamond which he wore upon the
third finger of his right hand glittered magnificently. There was a
sort of bluish tint underlying the dusky skin, noticeable even in his
hands but proclaiming itself significantly in his puffy face and
especially under the eyes. I diagnosed a labouring valve somewhere in
the heart system.
Nayland Smith's pen scratched on. My glance strayed from our Semitic
caller to his cane, lying upon the red leather before me. It was of
most unusual workmanship, apparently Indian, being made of some kind
of dark brown, mottled wood, bearing a marked resemblance to a snake's
skin; and the top of the cane was carved in conformity, to represent
the head of what I took to be a puff-adder, fragments of stone, or
beads, being inserted to represent the eyes, and the whole thing being
finished with an artistic realism almost startling.
When Smith had tossed the written page to Slattin, and he, having read
it with an appearance of carelessness, had folded it neatly and placed
it in his pocket, I said:
"You have a curio here?"
Our visitor, whose dark eyes revealed all the satisfaction which, by
his manner, he sought to conceal, nodded and took up the cane in his
hand.
"It comes from Australia, doctor," he replied; "it's aboriginal work,
and was given to me by a client. You thought it was Indian? Everybody
does. It's my mascot."
"Really?"
"It is indeed. Its former owner ascribed magical powers to it! In
fact, I believe he thought that it was one of those staffs mentioned
in biblical history--"
"Aaron's rod?" suggested Smith, glancing at the cane.
"Something of the sort," said Slattin, standing up and again preparing
to depart.
"You will 'phone us, then?" asked my friend.
"You will hear from me to-morrow," was the reply.
Smith returned to the cane armchair, and Slattin, bowing to both of
us, made his way to the door as I rang for the girl to show him out.
"Considering the importance of his proposal," I began, as the door
closed, "you hardly received our visitor with cordiality."
"I hate to have any relations with him," answered my friend; "but we
must not be squeamish respecting our instruments in dealing with Dr.
Fu-Manchu. Slattin has a rotten reputation--even for a private inquiry
agent. He is little better than a blackmailer--"
"How do you know?"
"Because I called on our friend Weymouth at the Yard yesterday and
looked up the man's record."
"Whatever for?"
"I knew that he was concerning himself, for some reason, in the case.
Beyond doubt he has established some sort of communication with the
Chinese group; I am only wondering--"
"You don't mean--"
"Yes--I do, Petrie! I tell you he is unscrupulous enough to stoop even
to that."
No doubt Slattin knew that this gaunt, eager-eyed Burmese commissioner
was vested with ultimate authority in his quest of the mighty Chinaman
who represented things unutterable, whose potentialities for evil were
boundless as his genius, who personified a secret danger, the extent
and nature of which none of us truly understood. And, learning of
these things, with unerring Semitic instinct he had sought an opening
in this glittering Rialto. But there were _two_ bidders!
"You think he may have sunk so low as to become a creature of
Fu-Manchu?" I asked, aghast.
"Exactly! If it paid him well I do not doubt that he would serve that
master as readily as any other. His record is about as black as it
well could be. Slattin is, of course, an assumed name; he was known as
Lieutenant Pepley when he belonged to the New York Police, and he was
kicked out of the service for complicity in an unsavoury Chinatown
case."
"Chinatown!"
"Yes, Petrie, it made me wonder, too; and we must not forget that he
is undeniably a clever scoundrel."
"Shall you keep any appointment which he may suggest?"
"Undoubtedly. But I shall not wait until to-morrow."
"What!"
"I propose to pay a little informal visit to Mr. Abel Slattin
to-night."
"At his office?"
"No; at his private residence. If, as I more than suspect, his object
is to draw us into some trap, he will probably report his favourable
progress to his employer to-night!"
"Then we should have followed him!"
Nayland Smith stood up and divested himself of the old
shooting-jacket.
"He _has_ been followed, Petrie," he replied, with one of his rare
smiles. "Two C.I.D. men have been watching the house all night!"
This was entirely characteristic of my friend's farseeing methods.
"By the way," I said, "you saw Eltham this morning. He will soon be
convalescent. Where, in Heaven's name, can he--"
"Don't be alarmed on his behalf, Petrie," interrupted Smith. "His life
is no longer in danger."
I stared, stupidly.
"No longer in danger!"
"He received, some time yesterday, a letter, written in Chinese, upon
Chinese paper, and enclosed in an ordinary business envelope, having a
typewritten address and bearing a London postmark."
"Well?"
"As nearly as I can render the message in English it reads: 'Although,
because you are a brave man, you would not betray your correspondent in
China, he has been discovered. He was a mandarin, and as I cannot write
the name of a traitor, I may not name him. He was executed four days
ago. I salute you and pray for your speedy recovery.--FU-MANCHU.'"
"Fu-Manchu! But it is almost certainly a trap."
"On the contrary, Petrie, Fu-Manchu would not have written in Chinese
unless he were sincere; and, to clear all doubt, I received a cable
this morning reporting that the Mandarin Yen-Sun-Yat was assassinated
in his own garden, in Nan-Yang, one day last week."
CHAPTER VIII
DR. FU-MANCHU STRIKES
Together we marched down the slope of the quiet, suburban avenue; to
take pause before a small, detached house displaying the hatchet
boards of the estate agent. Here we found unkempt laurel bushes, and
acacias run riot, from which arboreal tangle protruded the notice: "To
be Let or Sold."
Smith, with an alert glance to right and left, pushed open the wooden
gate and drew me in upon the gravel path. Darkness mantled all; for
the nearest street lamp was fully twenty yards beyond.
From the miniature jungle bordering the path, a soft whistle sounded.
"Is that Carter?" called Smith sharply.
A shadowy figure uprose, and vaguely I made it out for that of a man
in the unobtrusive blue serge which is the undress uniform of the
Force.
"Well?" rapped my companion.
"Mr. Slattin returned ten minutes ago, sir," reported the constable.
"He came in a cab which he dismissed--"
"He has not left again?"
"A few minutes after his return," the man continued, "another cab came
up, and a lady alighted."
"A lady!"
"The same, sir, that has called upon him before."
"Smith!" I whispered, plucking at his arm--"is it--?"
He half turned, nodding his head; and my heart began to throb
foolishly. For now the manner of Slattin's campaign suddenly was
revealed to me. In our operations against the Chinese murder-group two
years before, we had had an ally in the enemy's camp--Kâramanèh, the
beautiful slave, whose presence in those happenings of the past had
coloured the sometimes sordid drama with the opulence of old Arabia;
who had seemed a fitting figure for the romances of Bagdad during the
Caliphate--Kâramanèh, whom I had thought sincere, whose inscrutable
Eastern soul I had presumed, fatuously, to have laid bare and
analysed.
Now once again she was plying her old trade of go-between; professing
to reveal the secrets of Dr. Fu-Manchu, and all the time--I could not
doubt it--inveigling men into the net of this awful fisher.
Yesterday, I had been her dupe; yesterday, I had rejoiced in my
captivity. To-day, I was not the favoured one; to-day I had not been
selected recipient of her confidences--confidences sweet, seductive,
deadly: but Abel Slattin, a plausible rogue, who, in justice, should
be immured in Sing Sing, was chosen out, was enslaved by those lovely
mysterious eyes, was taking to his soul the lies which fell from those
perfect lips, triumphant in a conquest that must end in his undoing;
deeming, poor fool, that for love of him this pearl of the Orient was
about to betray her master, to resign herself a prize to the victor!
Companioned by these bitter reflections, I had lost the remainder of
the conversation between Nayland Smith and the police officer; now,
casting off the succubus memory which threatened to obsess me, I put
forth a giant mental effort to purge my mind of this uncleanness, and
became again an active participant in the campaign against the
Master--the director of all things noxious.
Our plans being evidently complete, Smith seized my arm, and I found
myself again out upon the avenue. He led me across the road and into
the gate of a house almost opposite. From the fact that two upper
windows were illuminated, I adduced that the servants were retiring;
the other windows were in darkness, except for one on the ground floor
to the extreme left of the building, through the lowered venetian
blinds whereof streaks of light shone out.
"Slattin's study!" whispered Smith. "He does not anticipate
surveillance, and you will note that the window is wide open!"
With that my friend crossed the strip of lawn, and, careless of the
fact that his silhouette must have been visible to any one passing the
gate, climbed carefully up the artificial rockery intervening, and
crouched upon the window-ledge peering into the room.
A moment I hesitated, fearful that if I followed I should stumble or
dislodge some of the lava blocks of which the rockery was composed.
Then I heard that which summoned me to the attempt, whatever the cost.
Through the open window came the sound of a musical voice--a voice
possessing a haunting accent, possessing a quality which struck upon
my heart and set it quivering as though it were a gong hung in my
bosom.
Kâramanèh was speaking.
Upon hands and knees, heedless of damage to my garments, I crawled up
beside Smith. One of the laths was slightly displaced and over this my
friend was peering in. Crouching close beside him, I peered in also.
I saw the study of a business man, with its files, neatly arranged
works of reference, roll-top desk, and Milner safe. Before the desk,
in a revolving chair, sat Slattin. He sat half-turned towards the
window, leaning back and smiling; so that I could note the gold crown
which preserved the lower left molar. In an armchair by the window,
close, very close, and sitting with her back to me, was Kâramanèh!
She, who, in my dreams, I always saw, was ever seeing, in an Eastern
dress, with gold bands about her white ankles, with jewel-laden
fingers, with jewels in her hair, wore now a fashionable costume and a
hat that could only have been produced in Paris. Kâramanèh was the one
Oriental woman I had ever known who could wear European clothes; and
as I watched that exquisite profile, I thought that Delilah must have
been just such another as this; that, excepting the Empress Poppæ,
history has record of no woman who, looking so innocent, was yet so
utterly vile.
"Yes, my dear," Slattin was saying, and through his monocle ogling his
beautiful visitor, "I shall be ready for you to-morrow night."
I felt Smith start at the words.
"There will be a sufficient number of men?"
Kâramanèh put the question in a strangely listless way.
"My dear little girl," replied Slattin, rising and standing looking
down at her, with his gold tooth twinkling in the lamplight, "there
will be a whole division, if a whole division is necessary."
He sought to take her white gloved hand, which rested upon the chair
arm; but she evaded the attempt with seeming artlessness, and stood
up. Slattin fixed his bold gaze upon her.
"So now, give me my orders," he said.
"I am not prepared to do so, yet," replied the girl composedly; "but
now that I know you are ready, I can make my plans."
She glided past him to the door, avoiding his outstretched arm with an
artless art which made me writhe; for once I had been the willing
victim of all these wiles.
"But--" began Slattin.
"I will ring you up in less than half an hour," said Kâramanèh; and
without further ceremony, she opened the door.
I still had my eyes glued to the aperture in the blind, when Smith
began tugging at my arm.
"Down! you fool!" he hissed sharply; "if she sees us, all is lost!"
Realizing this, and none too soon, I turned, and rather clumsily
followed my friend. I dislodged a piece of granite in my descent; but,
fortunately Slattin had gone out into the hall and could not well have
heard it.
We were crouching around an angle of the house, when a flood of light
poured down the steps, and Kâramanèh rapidly descended. I had a
glimpse of a dark-faced man who evidently had opened the door for her;
then all my thoughts were centred upon that graceful figure receding
from me in the direction of the avenue. She wore a loose cloak, and I
saw this fluttering for a moment against the white gate-posts; then
she was gone.
Yet Smith did not move. Detaining me with his hand he crouched there
against a quick-set hedge; until, from a spot lower down the hill, we
heard the start of the cab, which had been waiting. Twenty seconds
elapsed, and from some other distant spot a second cab started.
"That's Weymouth!" snapped Smith. "With decent luck, we should know
Fu-Manchu's hiding-place before Slattin tells us!"
"But--"
"Oh! as it happens he's apparently playing the game." In the
half-light, Smith stared at me significantly. "Which makes it all the
more important," he concluded, "that we should not rely upon his aid!"
Those grim words were prophetic.
My companion made no attempt to communicate with the detective (or
detectives) who shared our vigil; we took up a position close under
the lighted study window and waited--waited.
Once, a taxi-cab laboured hideously up the steep gradient of the
avenue.... It was gone. The lights at the upper windows above us
became extinguished. A policeman tramped past the gateway, casually
flashing his lamp in at the opening. One by one the illuminated
windows in other houses visible to us became dull; then lived again as
mirrors for the pallid moon. In the silence, words spoken within the
study were clearly audible; and we heard some one--presumably the man
who had opened the door--inquire if his services would be wanted again
that night.
Smith inclined his head and hung over me in a tense attitude, in order
to catch Slattin's reply.
"Yes, Burke," it came, "I want you to sit up until I return; I shall
be going out shortly."
Evidently the man withdrew at that; for a complete silence followed
which prevailed for fully half an hour. I sought cautiously to move my
cramped limbs, unlike Smith, who seeming to have sinews of piano-wire,
crouched beside me immovable, untiringly. Then loud upon the
stillness, broke the strident note of the telephone bell.
I started, nervously, clutching at Smith's arm. It felt hard as iron
to my grip.
"Hullo!" I heard Slattin call, "who is speaking?... Yes, yes! This is
Mr. A. S.... I am to come at once?... I know where--yes!... You will
meet me there?... Good!--I shall be with you in half an hour....
Good-bye!"
Distinctly I heard the creak of the revolving office-chair as Slattin
rose; then Smith had me by the arm, and we were flying swiftly away
from the door to take up our former post around the angle of the
building. This gained--
"He's going to his death!" rapped Smith beside me; "but Carter has a
cab from the Yard waiting in the nearest rank. We shall follow to see
where he goes--for it is possible that Weymouth may have been thrown
off the scent; then, when we are sure of his destination, we can take
a hand in the game! We--"
The end of the sentence was lost to me--drowned in such a frightful
wave of sound as I despair to describe. It began with a high, thin
scream, which was choked off staccato fashion; upon it followed a loud
and dreadful cry uttered with all the strength of Slattin's lungs.
"Oh, God!" he cried, and again--"Oh, God!"
This in turn merged into a sort of hysterical sobbing.
I was on my feet now, and automatically making for the door. I had a
vague impression of Nayland Smith's face beside me, the eyes glassy
with a fearful apprehension. Then the door was flung open, and, in the
bright light of the hall-way, I saw Slattin standing--swaying and
seemingly fighting with the empty air.
"What is it? For God's sake, what has happened?" reached my ears
dimly--and the man Burke showed behind his master. White-faced I saw
him to be; for now Smith and I were racing up the steps.
Ere we could reach him, Slattin, uttering another choking cry, pitched
forward and lay half across the threshold.
We burst into the hall, where Burke stood with both his hands raised
dazedly to his head. I could hear the sound of running feet upon the
gravel, and knew that Carter was coming to join us.
Burke, a heavy man with a lowering, bull-dog type of face, collapsed
on to his knees beside Slattin, and began softly to laugh in little
rising peals.
"Drop that!" snapped Smith, and grasping him by the shoulders, he sent
him spinning along the hall-way, where he sank upon the bottom step of
the stairs, to sit with his outstretched fingers extended before his
face, and peering at us grotesquely through the crevices.
There were rustlings and subdued cries from the upper part of the
house. Carter came in out of the darkness, carefully stepping over the
recumbent figure; and the three of us stood there in the lighted hall
looking down at Slattin.
"Help me to move him back," directed Smith tensely; "far enough to
close the door."
Between us we accomplished this, and Carter fastened the door. We were
alone with the shadow of Fu-Manchu's vengeance; for as I knelt beside
the body on the floor, a look and a touch sufficed to tell me that
this was but clay from which the spirit had fled!
Smith met my glance as I raised my head, and his teeth came together
with a loud snap; the jaw muscles stood out prominently beneath the
dark skin; and his face was grimly set in that old, half-despairful
expression which I knew so well but which boded so ill for whomsoever
occasioned it.
"Dead, Petrie--already?"
"Lightning could have done the work no better. Can I turn him over?"
Smith nodded.
Together we stooped and rolled the heavy body on its back. A flood of
whispers came sibilantly from the stairway. Smith spun around rapidly,
and glared upon the group of half-dressed servants.
"Return to your rooms!" he rapped imperiously: "let no one come into
the hall without my orders."
The masterful voice had its usual result; there was a hurried retreat
to the upper landing. Burke, shaking like a man with an ague, sat on
the lower step, pathetically drumming his palms upon his uplifted
knees.
"I warned him, I warned him!" he mumbled monotonously, "I warned him,
oh, I warned him!"
"Stand up!" shouted Smith, "stand up and come here!"
The man, with his frightened eyes turning to right and left, and
seeming to search for something in the shadows about him, advanced
obediently.
"Have you a flask?" demanded Smith of Carter.
The detective silently administered to Burke a stiff restorative.
"Now," continued Smith, "you, Petrie, will want to examine him, I
suppose?" He pointed to the body. "And in the meantime I have some
questions to put to you, my man."
He clapped his hand upon Burke's shoulder.
"My God!" Burke broke out, "I was ten yards from him when it
happened!"
"No one is accusing you," said Smith less harshly; "but since you were
the only witness, it is by your aid that we hope to clear the matter
up."
Exerting a gigantic effort to regain control of himself, Burke nodded,
watching my friend with a childlike eagerness. During the ensuing
conversation, I examined Slattin for marks of violence; and of what I
found, more anon.
"In the first place," said Smith, "you say that you warned him. When
did you warn him, and of what?"
"I warned him, sir, that it would come to this--"
"That _what_ would come to this?"
"His dealings with the Chinamen!"
"He had dealings with Chinamen?"
"He accidentally met a Chinaman at an East End gaming-house, a man he
had known in 'Frisco--a man called Singapore Charlie--"
"What! Singapore Charlie!"
"Yes, sir, the same man that had a dope-shop, two years ago, down
Ratcliffe way--"
"There was a fire--"
"But Singapore Charlie escaped, sir."
"And he is one of the gang?"
"He is one of what we used to call, in New York, the Seven Group."
Smith began to tug at the lobe of his left ear, reflectively, as I saw
out of the corner of my eye.
"The Seven Group!" he mused. "That is significant. I always suspected
that Dr. Fu-Manchu and the notorious Seven Group were one and the
same. Go on, Burke."
"Well, sir," the man continued more calmly, "the lieutenant--"
"The lieutenant!" began Smith; then: "Oh! of course; Slattin used to
be a police lieutenant!"
"Well, sir, he--Mr. Slattin--had a sort of hold on this Singapore
Charlie, and two years ago, when he first met him, he thought that
with his aid he was going to pull off the biggest thing of his life--"
"Forestall _me_, in fact?"
"Yes, sir; but you got in first with the big raid--and spoiled it."
Smith nodded grimly, glancing at the Scotland Yard man, who returned
his nod with equal grimness.
"A couple of months ago," resumed Burke, "he met Charlie again down
East, and the Chinaman introduced him to a girl--some sort of an
Egyptian girl."
"Go on!" snapped Smith. "I know her."
"He saw her a good many times--and she came here once or twice. She
made out that she and Singapore Charlie were prepared to give away the
boss of the Yellow gang--"
"For a price, of course?"
"I suppose so," said Burke; "but I don't know. I only know that I
warned him."
"H'm!" muttered Smith. "And now, what took place to-night?"
"He had an appointment here with the girl," began Burke.
"I know all that," interrupted Smith. "I merely want to know what
took place after the telephone call."
"Well, he told me to wait up, and I was dozing in the next room to the
study--the dining-room--when the 'phone bell aroused me. I heard the
lieutenant--Mr. Slattin--coming out, and I ran out too, but only in
time to see him taking his hat from the rack--"
"But he wears no hat!"
"He never got it off the peg! Just as he reached up to take it, he
gave a most frightful scream, and turned around like lightning as
though some one had attacked him from behind!"
"There was no one else in the hall?"
"No one at all. I was standing down there outside the dining-room just
by the stairs, but he didn't turn in my direction, he turned and
looked right behind him--where there was no one--nothing. His cries
were frightful." Burke's voice broke, and he shuddered feverishly.
"Then he made a rush for the front door. It seemed as though he had
not seen me. He stood there screaming; but, before I could reach him,
he fell...."
Nayland Smith fixed a piercing gaze upon Burke.
"Is that all you know?" he demanded slowly.
"As God is my judge, sir, that's all I know, and all I saw. There was
no living thing near him when he met his death."
"We shall see," muttered Smith. He turned to me. "What killed him,
Petrie?" he asked shortly.
"Apparently something which occasioned a minute wound on the left
wrist," I replied, and, stooping, I raised the already cold hand in
mine.
A tiny, inflamed wound showed on the wrist; and a certain puffiness
was becoming observable in the injured hand and arm. Smith bent down
and drew a quick, sibilant breath.
"You know what this is, Petrie?" he cried.
"Certainly. It was too late to employ a ligature and useless to
inject ammonia. Death was practically instantaneous. His heart...."
There came a loud knocking and ringing.
"Carter!" cried Smith, turning to the detective, "open that door to no
one--no one. Explain who I am--"
"But if it is the inspector--?"
"I said, open the door to _no one_!" snapped Smith. "Burke, stand
exactly where you are! Carter, you can speak to whoever knocks through
the letter-box. Petrie, don't move for your life! It may be here, in
the hall way!..."
CHAPTER IX
THE CLIMBER
Our search of the house of Abel Slattin ceased only with the coming of
the dawn and yielded nothing but disappointment. Failure followed upon
failure; for, in the grey light of the morning, our own quest
concluded, Inspector Weymouth returned to report that the girl,
Kâramanèh, had thrown him off the scent.
Again he stood before me, the big, burly friend of old and dreadful
days: a little greyer above the temples, which I set down for a record
of former horrors; but deliberate, stoical, thorough, as ever. His
blue eyes melted in the old generous way as he saw me, and he gripped
my hand in greeting.
"Once again," he said, "your dark-eyed friend has been too clever for
me, doctor. But the track, as far as I could follow, leads to the old
spot. In fact"--he turned to Smith, who, grim-faced and haggard,
looked thoroughly ill in that grey light--"I believe Fu-Manchu's lair
is somewhere near the former opium-den of Shen-Yan--'Singapore
Charlie'!"
Smith nodded.
"We will turn our attention in that direction," he replied, "at a very
early date."
Inspector Weymouth looked down at the body of Abel Slattin.
"How was it done?" he asked softly.
"Clumsily for Fu-Manchu," I replied. "A snake was introduced into the
house by some means--"
"By Kâramanèh!" rapped Smith.
"Very possibly by Kâramanèh," I continued firmly. "The thing has
escaped us."
"My own idea," said Smith, "is that it was concealed about his
clothing. When he fell by the open door it glided out of the house. We
must have the garden searched thoroughly by daylight."
"_He_"--Weymouth glanced at that which lay upon the floor--"must be
moved; but otherwise we can leave the place untouched, clear out the
servants, and lock the house up!"
"I have already given orders to that effect," answered Smith. He spoke
wearily and with a note of conscious defeat in his voice. "Nothing has
been disturbed"--he swept his arm around comprehensively--"papers and
so forth you can examine at leisure."
Presently we quitted that house upon which the fateful Chinaman had
set his seal, as the suburb was awakening to a new day. The clank of
milk-cans was my final impression of the avenue to which a dreadful
minister of death had come at the bidding of the death lord. We left
Inspector Weymouth in charge and returned to my rooms, scarcely
exchanging a word upon the way.
Nayland Smith, ignoring my entreaties, composed himself for slumber in
the white cane chair in my study. About noon he retired to the
bath-room and, returning, made a pretence to breakfast; then resumed
his seat in the cane armchair. Carter reported in the afternoon, but
his report was merely formal. Returning from my round of professional
visits at half-past five, I found Nayland Smith in the same position;
and so the day waned into evening, and dusk fell uneventfully.
In the corner of the big room by the empty fireplace, Nayland Smith
lay, his long, lean frame extended in the white cane chair. A tumbler,
from which two straws protruded, stood by his right elbow, and a
perfect continent of tobacco smoke lay between us, wafted towards the
door by the draught from an open window. He had littered the hearth
with matches and tobacco ash, being the most untidy smoker I had ever
met; and save for his frequent rappings out of his pipe bowl and
perpetual striking of matches, he had shown no sign of activity for
the past hour. Collarless and wearing an old tweed jacket, he had
spent the evening, as he had spent the day, in the cane chair, only
quitting it for some ten minutes, or less, to toy with dinner.
My several attempts at conversation had elicited nothing but growls;
therefore, as dusk descended, having dismissed my few patients, I
busied myself collating my notes upon the renewed activity of the
Yellow Doctor, and was thus engaged when the 'phone bell disturbed me.
It was Smith who was wanted, however; and he went out eagerly, leaving
me to my task.
At the end of a lengthy conversation, he returned from the 'phone and
began, restlessly, to pace the room. I made a pretence of continuing
my labours, but covertly I was watching him. He was twitching at the
lobe of his left ear, and his face was a study in perplexity. Abruptly
he burst out:
"I shall throw the thing up, Petrie! Either I am growing too old to
cope with such an adversary as Fu-Manchu, or else my intellect has
become dull. I cannot seem to think clearly or consistently. For the
Doctor, this crime, this removal of Slattin, is clumsy--unfinished.
There are two explanations. Either he, too, is losing his old
cunning, or he has been interrupted!"
"Interrupted!"
"Take the facts, Petrie." Smith clapped his hands upon my table and
bent down, peering into my eyes. "Is it characteristic of Fu-Manchu to
kill a man by the direct agency of a snake and to implicate one of his
own damnable servants in this way?"
"But we have found no snake!"
"Kâramanèh introduced one in some way. Do you doubt it?"
"Certainly Kâramanèh visited him on the evening of his death, but you
must be perfectly well aware that even if she had been arrested, no
jury could convict her."
Smith resumed his restless pacings up and down.
"You are very useful to me, Petrie," he rapped; "as a counsel for the
defence you constantly rectify my errors of prejudice. Yet I am
convinced that our presence at Slattin's house last night prevented
Fu-Manchu from finishing off this little matter as he had designed to
do."
"What has given you this idea?"
"Weymouth is responsible. He has rung me up from the Yard. The
constable on duty at the house where the murder was committed, reports
that some one, less than an hour ago, attempted to break in."
"Break in!"
"Ah! you are interested? _I_ thought the circumstance illuminating,
also!"
"Did the officer see this person?"
"No; he only heard him. It was some one who endeavoured to enter by
the bath-room window, which, I am told, may be reached fairly easily
by an agile climber."
"The attempt did not succeed?"
"No; the constable interrupted, but failed to make a capture or even
to secure a glimpse of the man."
We were both silent for some moments; then--
"What do you propose to do?" I asked.
"We must not let Fu-Manchu's servants know," replied Smith, "but
to-night I shall conceal myself in Slattin's house and remain there
for a week or a day--it matters not how long--until that attempt is
repeated. Quite obviously, Petrie, we have overlooked something which
implicates the murderer with the murder! In short, either by accident,
by reason of our superior vigilance, or by the clumsiness of his
plans, Fu-Manchu for once in an otherwise blameless career has left a
_clue_!"
CHAPTER X
THE CLIMBER RETURNS
In utter darkness we groped our way through into the hall of Slattin's
house, having entered, stealthily, from the rear; for Smith had
selected the study as a suitable base of operations. We reached it
without mishap, and presently I found myself seated in the very chair
which Kâramanèh had occupied; my companion took up a post just within
the widely opened door.
So we commenced our ghostly business in the house of the murdered
man--a house from which, but a few hours since, his body had been
removed. This was such a vigil as I had endured once before, when,
with Nayland Smith and another, I had waited for the coming of one of
Fu-Manchu's death agents.
Of all the sounds which one by one now began to detach themselves from
the silence, there was a particular sound, homely enough at another
time, which spoke to me more dreadfully than the rest. It was the
ticking of the clock upon the mantelpiece; and I thought how this
sound must have been familiar to Abel Slattin, how it must have formed
part and parcel of his life, as it were, and how it went on
now--_tick_-_tick_-_tick_-_tick_--whilst he, for whom it had ticked,
lay unheeding--would never heed it more.
As I grew more accustomed to the gloom, I found myself staring at the
office chair; once I found myself expecting Abel Slattin to enter the
room and occupy it. There was a little China Buddha upon a bureau in
one corner, with a gilded cap upon its head, and as some reflection of
the moonlight sought out this little cap, my thoughts grotesquely
turned upon the murdered man's gold tooth.
Vague creakings from within the house, sounds as though of stealthy
footsteps upon the stairs, set my nerves tingling; but Nayland Smith gave
no sign, and I knew that my imagination was magnifying these ordinary night
sounds out of all proportion to their actual significance. Leaves rustled
faintly outside the window at my back: I construed their sibilant whispers
into the dreaded name--_Fu-Manchu_--_Fu-Manchu_--_Fu-Manchu_!
So wore on the night; and, when the ticking clock hollowly boomed the
hour of one, I almost leapt out of my chair, so highly strung were my
nerves, and so appallingly did the sudden clangour beat upon them.
Smith, like a man of stone, showed no sign. He was capable of so
subduing his constitutionally high-strung temperament, at times, that
temporarily he became immune from human dreads. On such occasion he
would be icily cool amid universal panic; but, his object
accomplished, I have seen him in such a state of collapse, that utter
nervous exhaustion is the only term by which I can describe it.
_Tick_-_tick_-_tick_-_tick_ went the clock, and, my heart still
thumping noisily in my breast, I began to count the tickings; _one_,
_two_, _three_, _four_, _five_, and so on to a hundred, and from one
hundred to many hundreds.
Then, out from the confusion of minor noises, a new, arresting sound
detached itself. I ceased my counting; no longer I noted the
_tick_-_tick_ of the clock, nor the vague creakings, rustlings and
whispers. I saw Smith, shadowly, raise his hand in warning--in
needless warning; for I was almost holding my breath in an effort of
acute listening.
From high up in the house this new sound came--from above the topmost
rooms, it seemed, up under the roof; a regular squeaking, oddly
familiar, yet elusive. Upon it followed a very soft and muffled thud;
then a metallic sound as of a rusty hinge in motion; then a new
silence, pregnant with a thousand possibilities more eerie than any
clamour.
My mind was rapidly at work. Lighting the topmost landing of the house
was a sort of glazed trap, evidently set in the floor of a loft-like
place extending over the entire building. Somewhere in the red-tiled
roof above, there presumably existed a corresponding skylight or
lantern.
So I argued; and, ere I had come to any proper decision, another
sound, more intimate, came to interrupt me.
This time I could be in no doubt; some one was lifting the trap above
the stairhead--slowly, cautiously, and all but silently. Yet to my
ears, attuned to trifling disturbances, the trap creaked and groaned
noisily.
Nayland Smith waved to me to take a stand on the other side of the
opened door--behind it, in fact, where I should be concealed from the
view of any one descending the stair.
I stood up and crossed the floor to my new post.
A dull thud told of the trap fully raised and resting upon some
supporting joist. A faint rustling (of discarded garments, I told
myself) spoke to my newly awakened, acute perceptions, of the visitor
preparing to lower himself to the landing. Followed a groan of
woodwork submitted to sudden strain--and the unmistakable pad of bare
feet upon the linoleum of the top corridor.
I knew now that one of Dr. Fu-Manchu's uncanny servants had gained the
roof of the house by some means, had broken through the skylight and
had descended by means of the trap beneath on to the landing.
In such a tensed-up state as I cannot describe, nor, at this hour
mentally reconstruct, I waited for the creaking of the stairs which
should tell of the creature's descent.
I was disappointed. Removed scarce a yard from me as he was, I could
hear Nayland Smith's soft, subdued breathing; but my eyes were all for
the darkened hall-way, for the smudgy outline of the stair-rail with
the faint patterning in the background, which, alone, indicated the
wall.
It was amid an utter silence, unheralded by even so slight a sound as
those which I had acquired the power of detecting--that I saw the
continuity of the smudgy line of stair-rail to be interrupted.
A dark patch showed upon it, just within my line of sight, invisible
to Smith on the other side of the doorway, and some ten or twelve
stairs up.
No sound reached me, but the dark patch vanished--and reappeared three
feet lower down.
Still I knew that this phantom approach must be unknown to my
companion--and I knew that it was impossible for me to advise him of
it unseen by the dreaded visitor.
A third time the dark patch--the hand of one who, ghostly, silent, was
creeping down into the hall-way--vanished and reappeared on a level
with my eyes. Then a vague shape became visible; no more than a blur
upon the dim design of the wall-paper ... and Nayland Smith got his
first sight of the stranger.
The clock on the mantelpiece boomed out the half-hour.
At that, such was my state (I blush to relate it), I uttered a faint
cry!
It ended all secrecy--that hysterical weakness of mine. It might have
frustrated our hopes; that it did not do so was in no measure due to
me. But in a sort of passionate whirl, the ensuing events moved
swiftly.
Smith hesitated not one instant. With a panther-like leap he hurled
himself into the hall.
"The lights, Petrie!" he cried, "the lights! The switch is near the
street door!"
I clenched my fists in a swift effort to regain control of my
treacherous nerves, and, bounding past Smith, and past the foot of the
stair, I reached out my hand to the switch, the situation of which,
fortunately, I knew.
Around I came, in response to a shrill cry from behind me--an inhuman
cry, less a cry than the shriek of some enraged animal....
With his left foot upon the first stair, Nayland Smith stood, his lean
body bent perilously backward, his arms rigidly thrust out, and his
sinewy fingers gripping the throat of an almost naked man--a man whose
brown body glistened unctuously, whose shaven head was apish low,
whose bloodshot eyes were the eyes of a mad dog! His teeth, upper and
lower, were bared; they glistened, they gnashed, and a froth was on
his lips. With both his hands, he clutched a heavy stick, and
once--twice, he brought it down upon Nayland Smith's head!
I leapt forward to my friend's aid; but as though the blows had been
those of a feather, he stood like some figure of archaic statuary, nor
for an instant relaxed the death-grip which he had upon his
adversary's throat.
Thrusting my way up the stairs, I wrenched the stick from the hand of
the dacoit--for in this glistening brown man I recognized one of that
deadly brotherhood who hailed Dr. Fu-Manchu their Lord and Master.
* * * * *
I cannot dwell upon the end of that encounter; I cannot hope to make
acceptable to my readers an account of how Nayland Smith, glassy-eyed,
and with consciousness ebbing from him instant by instant, stood
there, a realization of Leighton's "Athlete," his arms rigid as iron
bars even after Fu-Manchu's servant hung limply in that frightful
grip.
In his last moment of consciousness, with the blood from his wounded
head trickling down into his eyes, he pointed to the stick which I had
torn from the grip of the dacoit, and which I still held in my hand.
"Not Aaron's rod, Petrie!" he gasped hoarsely ... "the rod of
Moses!--Slattin's stick!"
Even in upon my anxiety for my friend, amazement intruded.
"But," I began--and turned to the rack in which Slattin's favourite
cane at that moment reposed--had reposed at the time of his death.
Yes! There stood Slattin's cane; we had not moved it; we had disturbed
nothing in that stricken house; there it stood, in company with an
umbrella and a malacca.
I glanced at the cane in my hand. Surely there could not be two such
in the world?
Smith collapsed on the floor at my feet.
"Examine the one in the rack, Petrie," he whispered, almost inaudibly,
"but do not touch it. It may not be yet...."
I propped him up against the foot of the stairs, and as the constable
began knocking violently at the street door, crossed to the rack and
lifted out the replica of the cane which I held in my hand.
A faint cry from Smith--and as if it had been a leprous thing, I
dropped the cane instantly.
"Merciful God!" I groaned.
Although, in every other particular, it corresponded with that which I
held--which I had taken from the dacoit--which he had come to
substitute for the cane now lying upon the floor--in one dreadful
particular it differed.
Up to the snake's head it was an accurate copy; _but the head lived_!
Either from pain, fear, or starvation, the thing confined in the
hollow tube of this awful duplicate was become torpid. Otherwise, no
power on earth could have saved me from the fate of Abel Slattin; for
the creature was an Australian death-adder.
CHAPTER XI
THE WHITE PEACOCK
Nayland Smith wasted no time in pursuing the plan of campaign which he
had mentioned to Inspector Weymouth. Less than forty-eight hours after
quitting the house of the murdered Slattin I found myself bound along
Whitechapel Road upon strange enough business.
A very fine rain was falling, which rendered it difficult to see
clearly from the windows; but the weather apparently had little effect
upon the commercial activities of the district. The cab was threading
a hazardous way through the cosmopolitan throng crowding the street.
On either side of me extended a row of stalls, seemingly established
in opposition to the more legitimate shops upon the inner side of the
pavement.
Jewish hawkers, many of them in their shirt-sleeves, acclaimed the
rarity of the bargains which they had to offer; and, allowing for the
difference of costume, these tireless Israelites, heedless of climatic
conditions, sweating at their mongery, might well have stood, not in
a squalid London thoroughfare, but in an equally squalid market-street
of the Orient.
They offered linen and fine raiment; from foot-gear to hair-oil their
wares ranged. They enlivened their auctioneering with conjuring tricks
and witty stories, selling watches by the aid of legerdemain, and
fancy vests by grace of a seasonable anecdote.
Poles, Russians, Serbs, Roumanians, Jews of Hungary, and Italians of
Whitechapel mingled in the throng. Near East and Far East rubbed
shoulders. Pidgin English contested with Yiddish for the ownership of
some tawdry article offered by an auctioneer whose nationality defied
conjecture, save that always some branch of his ancestry had drawn
nourishment from the soil of Eternal Judæa.
Some wearing men's caps, some with shawls thrown over their oily
locks, and some, more true to primitive instincts, defying,
bare-headed, the unkindly elements, bedraggled women--more often than
not burdened with muffled infants--crowded the pavements and the
roadway, thronged about the stalls like white ants about some choicer
carrion.
And the fine drizzling rain fell upon all alike, pattering upon the
hood of the taxi-cab; trickling down the front windows; glistening
upon the unctuous hair of those in the street who were hatless; dewing
the bare arms of the auctioneers, and dripping, melancholy, from the
tarpaulin coverings of the stalls. Heedless of the rain above and of
the mud beneath, North, South, East and West mingled their cries,
their bids, their blandishments, their raillery, mingled their persons
in that joyless throng.
Sometimes a yellow face showed close to one of the streaming windows;
sometimes a black-eyed, pallid face, but never a face wholly sane and
healthy. This was an underworld where squalor and vice went hand in
hand through the beautiless streets, a melting-pot of the world's
outcasts; this was the shadowland which last night had swallowed up
Nayland Smith.
Ceaselessly I peered to right and left, searching amid that
rain-soaked company for any face known to me. Whom I expected to find
there, I know not, but I should have counted it no matter for surprise
had I detected amid that ungracious ugliness the beautiful face of
Kâramanèh, the Eastern slave-girl, the leering yellow face of a
Burmese dacoit, the gaunt, bronze features of Nayland Smith; a hundred
times I almost believed that I had seen the ruddy countenance of
Inspector Weymouth, and once (at what instant my heart seemed to stand
still) I suffered from the singular delusion that the oblique green
eyes of Dr. Fu-Manchu peered out from the shadows between two stalls.
It was mere phantasy, of course, the sick imaginings of a mind
overwrought. I had not slept and had scarcely tasted food for more
than thirty hours; for, following up a faint clue supplied by Burke,
Slattin's man, and, like his master, an ex-officer of New York Police,
my friend, Nayland Smith, on the previous evening, had set out in
quest of some obscene den where the man called Shen-Yan--former keeper
of an opium shop--was now said to be in hiding. Shen-Yan we knew to be
a creature of the Chinese doctor, and only a most urgent call had
prevented me from joining Smith upon this promising, though hazardous
expedition.
At any rate, Fate willing it so, he had gone without me; and
now--although Inspector Weymouth, assisted by a number of C.I.D. men,
was sweeping the district about me--to the time of my departure
nothing whatever had been heard of Smith. The ordeal of waiting
finally had proved too great to be borne. With no definite idea of
what I proposed to do, I had thrown myself into the search, filled
with such dreadful apprehensions as I hope never again to experience.
I did not know the exact situation of the place to which Smith was
gone, for owing to the urgent case which I have mentioned, I had been
absent at the time of his departure; nor could Scotland Yard enlighten
me upon this point. Weymouth was in charge of the case--under Smith's
direction--and since the inspector had left the Yard, early that
morning, he had disappeared as completely as Smith, no report having
been received from him.
As my driver turned into the black mouth of a narrow, ill-lighted
street, and the glare and clamour of the greater thoroughfare died
behind me, I sank into the corner of the cab burdened with such a
sense of desolation as mercifully comes but rarely.
We were heading now for that strange settlement off the West India
Dock Road, which, bounded by Limehouse Causeway and Pennyfields, and
narrowly confined within four streets, composes an unique Chinatown, a
miniature of that at Liverpool, and of the greater one in San
Francisco. Inspired with an idea which promised hopefully, I raised
the speaking-tube:
"Take me first to the River Police Station," I directed; "along
Ratcliffe Highway."
The man turned and nodded comprehendingly, as I could see through the
wet pane.
Presently we swerved to the right and into an even narrower street.
This inclined in an easterly direction, and proved to communicate with
a wide thoroughfare along which passed brilliantly lighted electric
trams. I had lost all sense of direction, and when, swinging to the
left and to the right again, I looked through the window and perceived
that we were before the door of the Police Station, I was dully
surprised.
In quite mechanical fashion I entered the depôt. Inspector Ryman, our
associate in one of the darkest episodes of the campaign with the
Yellow Doctor two years before, received me in his office.
By a negative shake of the head, he answered my unspoken question.
"The ten o'clock boat is lying off the Stone Stairs, doctor," he said,
"and co-operating with some of the Scotland Yard men who are dragging
that district--"
I shuddered at the word "dragging"; Ryman had not used it literally, but
nevertheless it had conjured up a dread possibility--a possibility in
accordance with the methods of Dr. Fu-Manchu. All within space of an
instant I saw the tide of Limehouse Reach, the Thames lapping about the
green-coated timbers of a dock pier; and rising--falling--sometimes
disclosing to the pallid light a rigid hand, sometimes a horribly
bloated face--I saw the body of Nayland Smith at the mercy of those oily
waters. Ryman continued:
"There is a launch out, too, patrolling the riverside from here to
Tilbury. Another lies at the breakwater." He jerked his thumb over his
shoulder. "Should you care to take a run down and see for yourself?"
"No, thanks," I replied, shaking my head. "You are doing all that can
be done. Can you give me the address of the place to which Mr. Smith
went last night?"
"Certainly," said Ryman; "I thought you knew it. You remember
Shen-Yan's place--by Limehouse Basin? Well, farther east--east of the
Causeway, between Gill Street and Three Colt Street--is a block of
wooden buildings. You recall them?"
"Yes," I replied. "Is the man established there again, then?"
"It appears so, but although you have evidently not been informed of
the fact, Weymouth raided the establishment in the early hours of this
morning!"
"Well?" I cried.
"Unfortunately with no result," continued the inspector. "The
notorious Shen-Yan was missing, and although there is no real doubt
that the place is used as a gaming-house, not a particle of evidence
to that effect could be obtained. Also--there was no sign of Mr.
Nayland Smith, and no sign of the American Burke, who had led him to
the place."
"Is it certain that they went there?"
"Two C.I.D. men, who were shadowing, actually saw the pair of them
enter. A signal had been arranged, but it was never given; and at
about half-past four the place was raided."
"Surely some arrests were made?"
"But there was no evidence!" cried Ryman. "Every inch of the
rat-burrow was searched. The Chinese gentleman who posed as the
proprietor of what he claimed to be a respectable lodging-house,
offered every facility to the police. What could we do?"
"I take it that the place is being watched?"
"Certainly," said Ryman. "Both from the river and from the shore. Oh!
they are not there! God knows where they are, but they are not
_there_!"
I stood for a moment in silence, endeavouring to determine my course;
then, telling Ryman that I hoped to see him later, I walked out slowly
into the rain and mist, and nodding to the taxi-driver to proceed to
our original destination, I re-entered the cab.
As we moved off, the lights of the River Police depôt were swallowed
up in the humid murk, and again I found myself being carried through
the darkness of those narrow streets, which, like a maze, hold secret
within their Labyrinth mysteries great, and at least as foul, as that
of Parsiphaë.
The marketing centres I had left far behind me; to my right stretched
the broken range of riverside buildings, and beyond them flowed the
Thames, a stream heavily burdened with secrets as ever were Tiber or
Tigris. On my left, occasional flickering lights broke through the
mist, for the most part the lights of taverns; and saving these rents
in the veil, the darkness was punctuated with nothing but the faint
and yellow luminance of the street lamps.
Ahead was a black mouth, which promised to swallow me up as it had
swallowed up my friend.
In short, what with my lowered condition, and consequent frame of
mind, and what with the traditions, for me inseparable from that
gloomy quarter of London, I was in the grip of a shadowy menace which
at any moment might become tangible--I perceived, in the most
commonplace objects, the yellow hand of Dr. Fu-Manchu.
When the cab stopped in a place of utter darkness, I aroused myself
with an effort, opened the door, and stepped out into the mud of a
narrow lane. A high brick wall frowned upon me from one side, and,
dimly perceptible, there towered a smoke stack beyond. On my right
uprose the side of a wharf building, shadowly, and some distance
ahead, almost obscured by the drizzling rain, a solitary lamp
flickered.
I turned up the collar of my raincoat, shivering, as much at the
prospect as from physical chill.
"You will wait here," I said to the man; and, feeling in my
breast-pocket, I added: "If you hear the note of a whistle, drive on
and rejoin me."
He listened attentively and with a certain eagerness. I had selected
him that night for the reason that he had driven Smith and myself on
previous occasions and had proved himself a man of intelligence.
Transferring a Browning pistol from my hip-pocket to that of my
raincoat, I trudged on into the mist.
The headlights of the taxi were swallowed up behind me, and just
abreast of the street lamp I stood listening.
Save for the dismal sound of rain, and the trickling of water along
the gutters, all about me was silent. Sometimes this silence would be
broken by the distant, muffled note of a steam siren; and always,
forming a sort of background to the near stillness, was the remote din
of riverside activity.
I walked on to the corner just beyond the lamp. This was the street in
which the wooden buildings were situated. I had expected to detect
some evidences of surveillance, but if any were indeed being observed,
it was effectively masked. Not a living creature was visible, peer as
I would.
Plans I had none, and perceiving that the street was empty, and that
no lights showed in any of the windows, I passed on, only to find that
I had entered a cul-de-sac.
A rickety gate gave access to a descending flight of stone steps, the
bottom invisible in the denser shadows of an archway, beyond which, I
doubted not, lay the river.
Still uninspired by any definite design, I tried the gate and found
that it was unlocked. Like some wandering soul, as it has since seemed
to me, I descended. There was a lamp over the archway, but the glass
was broken, and the rain apparently had extinguished the light; as I
passed under it, I could hear the gas whistling from the burner.
Continuing my way, I found myself upon a narrow wharf with the Thames
flowing gloomily beneath me. A sort of fog hung over the river,
shutting me in. Then came an incident.
Suddenly, quite near, there arose a weird and mournful cry--a cry
indescribable, and inexpressibly uncanny!
I started back so violently that how I escaped falling into the river
I do not know to this day. That cry, so eerie and so wholly
unexpected, had unnerved me; and realizing the nature of my
surroundings, and the folly of my presence alone in such a place, I
began to edge back towards the foot of the steps, away from the thing
that cried; when--a great white shape uprose like a phantom before
me!...
There are few men, I suppose, whose lives have been crowded with so
many eerie happenings as mine, but this phantom thing which grew out
of the darkness, which seemed about to envelop me, takes rank in my
memory amongst the most fearsome apparitions which I have witnessed.
I know that I was frozen with a sort of supernatural terror. I stood
there, my hands clenched, staring--staring--at that white shape, which
seemed to float.
And as I stared, every nerve in my body thrilling, I distinguished the
outline of the phantom. With a subdued cry, I stepped forward. A new
sensation claimed me. In that one stride I passed from the horrible to
the bizarre.
I found myself confronted with something tangible certainly, but
something whose presence in that place was utterly extravagant--could
only be reconcilable in the dreams of an opium slave.
Was I awake? was I sane? Awake and sane beyond doubt, but surely
moving, not in the purlieus of Limehouse, but in the fantastic realms
of fairyland.
Swooping, with open arms, I rounded up in an angle against the
building and gathered in this screaming thing which had inspired in me
so keen a terror.
The great, ghostly fan was closed as I did so, and I stumbled back
towards the stair with my struggling captive tucked under my arm; I
mounted into one of London's darkest slums, carrying a beautiful white
peacock!
CHAPTER XII
DARK EYES LOOK INTO MINE
My adventure had done nothing to relieve the feeling of unreality
which held me enthralled. Grasping the struggling bird firmly by the
body, and having the long white tail fluttering a yard or so behind
me, I returned to where the taxi waited.
"Open the door!" I said to the man--who greeted me with such a stare
of amazement that I laughed outright, though my mirth was but hollow.
He jumped into the road and did as I directed. Making sure that both
windows were closed, I thrust the peacock into the cab and shut the
door upon it.
"For God's sake, sir--" began the driver.
"It has probably escaped from some collector's place on the
riverside," I explained, "but one never knows. See that it does not
escape again, and if at the end of an hour, as arranged, you do not
hear from me, take it back with you to the River Police Station."
"Right you are, sir," said the man, remounting his seat. "It's the
first time I ever saw a peacock in Limehouse!"
It was the first time _I_ had seen one, and the incident struck me as
being more than odd; it gave me an idea, and a new, faint hope. I
returned to the head of the steps, at the foot of which I had met with
this singular experience, and gazed up at the dark building beneath
which they led. Three windows were visible, but they were broken and
neglected. One, immediately above the arch, had been pasted up with
brown paper, and this was now peeling off in the rain, a little stream
of which trickled down from the detached corner to drop, drearily,
upon the stone stairs beneath.
Where were the detectives? I could only assume that they had directed
their attention elsewhere, for had the place not been utterly
deserted, surely I had been challenged.
In pursuit of my new idea, I again descended the steps. The persuasion
(shortly to be verified) that I was close upon the secret hold of the
Chinaman, grew stronger, unaccountably. I had descended some eight
steps, and was at the darkest part of the archway or tunnel, when
confirmation of my theories came to me.
A noose settled accurately upon my shoulders, was snatched tight about my
throat, and with a feeling of insupportable agony at the base of my skull,
and a sudden supreme knowledge that I was being strangled--hanged--I lost
consciousness!
How long I remained unconscious, I was unable to determine at the
time, but I learned later that it was for no more than half an hour;
at any rate, recovery was slow.
The first sensation to return to me was a sort of repetition of the
asphyxia. The blood seemed to be forcing itself into my eyes--I
choked--I felt that my end was come. And, raising my hands to my
throat, I found it to be swollen and inflamed. Then the floor upon
which I lay seemed to be rocking like the deck of a ship, and I glided
back again into a place of darkness and forgetfulness.
My second awakening was heralded by a returning sense of smell; for I
became conscious of a faint, exquisite perfume.
It brought me to my senses as nothing else could have done, and I sat
upright with a hoarse cry. I could have distinguished that perfume
amid a thousand others, could have marked it apart from the rest in a
scent bazaar. For me it had one meaning, and one meaning
only--Kâramanèh.
She was near to me, or had been near to me!
And in the first moments of my awakening I groped about in the
darkness blindly seeking her. Then my swollen throat and throbbing
head, together with my utter inability to move my neck even slightly,
reminded me of the facts as they were. I knew in that bitter moment
that Kâramanèh was no longer my friend; but, for all her beauty and
charm, was the most heartless, the most fiendish creature in the
service of Dr. Fu-Manchu. I groaned aloud in my despair and misery.
Something stirred near to me in the room, and set my nerves creeping
with a new apprehension. I became fully alive to the possibilities of
the darkness.
To my certain knowledge, Dr. Fu-Manchu at this time had been in
England for fully three months, which meant that by now he must be
equipped with all the instruments of destruction, animate and
inanimate, which dread experience had taught me to associate with him.
Now, as I crouched there in that dark apartment, listening for a
repetition of the sound, I scarcely dared to conjecture what might
have occasioned it, but my imagination peopled the place with reptiles
which writhed upon the floor, with tarantulas and other deadly insects
which crept upon the walls, which might drop upon me from the ceiling
at any moment.
Then, since nothing stirred about me, I ventured to move, turning my
shoulders, for I was unable to move my aching head; and I looked in
the direction from which a faint, very faint, light proceeded.
A regular tapping sound now began to attract my attention, and, having
turned about, I perceived that behind me was a broken window, in
places patched with brown paper; the corner of one sheet of paper was
detached, and the rain trickled down upon it with a rhythmical sound.
In a flash I realized that I lay in the room immediately above the
archway; and listening intently, I perceived above the other faint
sounds of the night, or thought that I perceived, the hissing of the
gas from the extinguished lamp-burner.
Unsteadily I rose to my feet, but found myself swaying like a drunken
man. I reached out for support, stumbling in the direction of the
wall. My foot came in contact with something that lay there, and I
pitched forward and fell....
I anticipated a crash which would put an end to my hopes of escape,
but my fall was comparatively noiseless--for I fell upon the body of a
man who lay bound up with rope close against the wall!
A moment I stayed as I fell, the chest of my fellow captive rising and
falling beneath me as he breathed. Knowing that my life depended upon
retaining a firm hold upon myself, I succeeded in overcoming the
dizziness and nausea which threatened to drown my senses, and, moving
back so that I knelt upon the floor, I fumbled in my pocket for the
electric lamp which I had placed there. My raincoat had been removed
whilst I was unconscious, and with it my pistol, but the lamp was
untouched.
I took it out, pressed the button, and directed the ray upon the face
of the man beside me.
It was Nayland Smith!
Trussed up and fastened to a ring in the wall he lay, having a cork
gag strapped so tightly between his teeth that I wondered how he had
escaped suffocation.
But although a greyish pallor showed through the tan of his skin, his
eyes were feverishly bright, and there, as I knelt beside him, I
thanked Heaven silently, but fervently.
Then, in furious haste, I set to work to remove the gag. It was most
ingeniously secured by means of leather straps buckled at the back of
his head, but I unfastened these without much difficulty, and he spat
out the gag, uttering an exclamation of disgust.
"Thank God, old man!" he said huskily. "Thank God that you are alive!
I saw them drag you in, and I thought...."
"I have been thinking the same about you for more than twenty-four
hours," I said reproachfully. "Why did you start without--?"
"I did not want you to come, Petrie," he replied. "I had a sort of
premonition. You see it was realized; and instead of being as helpless
as I, Fate has made you the instrument of my release. Quick! You have
a knife? Good!" The old, feverish energy was by no means extinguished
in him. "Cut the ropes about my wrists and ankles, but don't otherwise
disturb them."
I set to work eagerly.
"Now," Smith continued, "put that filthy gag in place again--but you
need not strap it so tightly! Directly they find that you are alive,
they will treat you the same--you understand? She has been here three
times--"
"Kâramanèh?..."
"_Ssh_!"
I heard a sound like the opening of a distant door.
"Quick! the straps of the gag!" whispered Smith, "and pretend to
recover consciousness just as they enter--"
Clumsily I followed his directions, for my fingers were none too
steady, replaced the lamp in my pocket, and threw myself upon the
floor.
Through half-shut eyes, I saw the door open and obtained a glimpse of
a desolate, empty passage beyond. On the threshold stood Kâramanèh.
She held in her hand a common tin oil lamp which smoked and flickered
with every movement, filling the already none too cleanly air with an
odour of burning paraffin.
She personified the _outré_; nothing so incongruous as her presence in
that place could well be imagined. She was dressed as I remembered
once to have seen her two years before, in the gauzy silks of the
harêm. There were pearls glittering like great tears amid the cloud of
her wonderful hair. She wore broad gold bangles upon her bare arms,
and her fingers were laden with jewellery. A heavy girdle swung from
her hips, defining the lines of her slim shape, and about one white
ankle was a gold band.
As she appeared in the doorway I almost entirely closed my eyes, but
my gaze rested fascinatedly upon the little red slippers which she
wore.
Again I detected the exquisite, elusive perfume which, like a breath
of musk, spoke of the Orient; and, as always, it played havoc with my
reason, seeming to intoxicate me as though it were the very essence of
her loveliness.
But I had a part to play, and throwing out one clenched hand so that
my fist struck upon the floor, I uttered a loud groan, and made as if
to rise upon my knees.
One quick glimpse I had of her wonderful eyes, widely opened and
turned upon me with such an enigmatical expression as set my heart
leaping wildly--then, stepping back, Kâramanèh placed the lamp upon
the boards of the passage and clapped her hands.
As I sank upon the floor in assumed exhaustion, a Chinaman with a
perfectly impassive face, and a Burman whose pock-marked, evil
countenance was set in an apparently habitual leer, came running into
the room past the girl.
With a hand which trembled violently, she held the lamp whilst the two
yellow ruffians tied me. I groaned and struggled feebly, fixing my
gaze upon the lamp bearer in a silent reproach which was by no means
without its effect.
She lowered her eyes and I could see her biting her lip, whilst the
colour gradually faded from her cheeks. Then, glancing up again
quickly, and still meeting that reproachful stare, she turned her head
aside altogether, and rested one hand upon the wall, swaying slightly
as she did so.
It was a singular ordeal for more than one of that incongruous group;
but in order that I may not be charged with hypocrisy or with seeking
to hide my own folly, I confess, here, that when again I found myself
in darkness, my heart was leaping not because of the success of my
strategy, but because of the success of that reproachful glance which
I had directed toward the lovely, dark-eyed Kâramanèh, toward the
faithless evil Kâramanèh! So much for myself.
The door had not been closed ten seconds, ere Smith again was spitting
out the gag, swearing under his breath, and stretching his cramped
limbs free from their binding. Within a minute from the time of my
trussing, I was a free man again; save that look where I would--to
right, to left, or inward, to my own conscience--two dark eyes met
mine, enigmatically.
"What now?" I whispered.
"Let me think," replied Smith. "A false move would destroy us."
"How long have you been here?"
"Since last night."
"Is Fu-Manchu--"
"Fu-Manchu is here!" replied Smith grimly, "and not only Fu-Manchu,
but--another."
"Another!"
"A higher than Fu-Manchu, apparently. I have an idea of the identity
of this person, but no more than an idea. Something unusual is going
on, Petrie; otherwise I should have been a dead man twenty four hours
ago. Something even more important than my death engages Fu-Manchu's
attention--and this can only be the presence of the mysterious
visitor. Your seductive friend, Kâramanèh, is arrayed in her very
becoming national costume in his honour, I presume." He stopped
abruptly; then added "I would give five hundred pounds for a glimpse
of that visitor's face!"
"Is Burke--?"
"God knows what has become of Burke, Petrie! We were both caught
napping in the establishment of the amiable Shen-Yan, where, amid a
very mixed company of poker players, we were losing our money like
gentlemen."
"But Weymouth--"
"Burke and I had both been neatly sand-bagged, my dear Petrie, and
removed elsewhere, some hours before Weymouth raided the gaming house.
Oh! I don't know how they smuggled us away with the police watching
the place; but my presence here is sufficient evidence of the fact.
Are you armed?"
"No; my pistol was in my raincoat, which is missing."
In the dim light from the broken window I could see Smith tugging
reflectively at the lobe of his left ear.
"I am without arms, too," he mused. "We might escape from the
window--"
"It's a long drop!"
"Ah! I imagined so. If only I had a pistol, or a revolver--"
"What should you do?"
"I should present myself before the important meeting, which, I am
assured, is being held somewhere in this building; and to-night would
see the end of my struggle with the Fu-Manchu group--the end of the
whole Yellow menace! For not only is Fu-Manchu here, Petrie, with all
his gang of assassins, but he whom I believe to be the real head of
the group--a certain mandarin--is here also!"
CHAPTER XIII
THE SACRED ORDER
Smith stepped quietly across the room and tried the door. It proved to
be unlocked, and an instant later we were both outside in the passage.
Coincident with our arrival there, arose a sudden outcry from some
place at the westward end. A high-pitched, grating voice, in which
guttural notes alternated with a serpent-like hissing, was raised in
anger.
"Dr. Fu-Manchu!" whispered Smith, grasping my arm.
Indeed it was the unmistakable voice of the Chinaman, raised
hysterically in one of those outbursts which in the past I had
diagnosed as symptomatic of dangerous mania.
The voice rose to a scream, the scream of some angry animal rather
than anything human. Then, chokingly, it ceased. Another short sharp
cry followed--but not in the voice of Fu-Manchu--a dull groan, and the
sound of a fall.
With Smith still grasping my wrist, I shrank back into the doorway, as
something that looked in the darkness like a great ball of fluff came
rapidly along the passage toward me. Just at my feet the thing
stopped, and I made it out for a small animal. The tiny, gleaming eyes
looked up at me, and, chattering wickedly, the creature bounded past
and was lost from view.
It was Dr. Fu-Manchu's marmoset.
Smith dragged me back into the room which we had just left. As he
partly reclosed the door, I heard the clapping of hands. In a
condition of most dreadful suspense, we waited; until a new, ominous
sound proclaimed itself. Some heavy body was being dragged into the
passage. I heard the opening of a trap. Exclamations in guttural
voices told of a heavy task in progress; there was a great straining
and creaking--whereupon the trap was softly reclosed.
Smith bent to my ear.
"Fu-Manchu has chastised one of his servants," he whispered. "There
will be food for the grappling-irons to-night!"
I shuddered violently, for, without Smith's words, I knew that a
bloody deed had been done in that house within a few yards of where we
stood.
In the new silence, I could hear the drip, drip, drip of the rain
outside the window; then a steam siren hooted dismally upon the river,
and I thought how the screw of that very vessel, even as we listened,
might be tearing the body of Fu-Manchu's servant!
"Have you some one waiting?" whispered Smith eagerly.
"How long was I insensible?"
"About half an hour."
"Then the cabman will be waiting."
"Have you a whistle with you?"
I felt in my coat pocket.
"Yes," I reported.
"Good! Then we will take a chance."
Again we slipped out into the passage and began a stealthy progress to
the west. Ten paces amid absolute darkness, and we found ourselves
abreast of a branch corridor. At the farther end, through a kind of
little window, a dim light shone.
"See if you can find the trap," whispered Smith; "light your lamp."
I directed the ray of the pocket lamp upon the floor, and there at my
feet was a square wooden trap. As I stooped to examine it, I glanced
back painfully, over my shoulder--and saw Nayland Smith tiptoeing away
from me along the passage toward the light!
Inwardly I cursed his folly, but the temptation to peep in at that
little window proved too strong for me, as it had proved too strong
for him.
Fearful that some board would creak beneath my tread, I followed; and
side by side we two crouched, looking into a small rectangular room.
It was a bare and cheerless apartment, with unpapered walls and
carpetless floor. A table and a chair constituted the sole furniture.
Seated in the chair, with his back towards us, was a portly Chinaman
who wore a yellow, silken robe. His face it was impossible to see; but
he was beating his fists upon the table, and pouring out a torrent of
words in a thin, piping voice. So much I perceived at a glance, then,
into view at the distant end of the room, paced a tall,
high-shouldered figure--a figure, unforgettable, at once imposing and
dreadful, stately and sinister.
With the long, bony hands behind him, fingers twining and intertwining
serpentinely about the handle of a little fan, and with the pointed
chin resting on the breast of the yellow robe, so that the light from
the lamp swinging in the centre of the ceiling gleamed upon the great,
dome-like brow, this tall man paced sombrely from left to right.
He cast a sidelong, venomous glance at the voluble speaker out of
half-shut eyes; in the act they seemed to light up as with an internal
luminance; momentarily, they sparkled like emeralds; then their
brilliance was filmed over as one sees in the eyes of a bird when the
membrane is lowered.
My blood seemed to chill, and my heart to double its pulsations;
beside me Smith was breathing more rapidly than usual. I knew now the
explanation of the feeling which had claimed me when first I had
descended the stone stairs. I knew what it was that hung like a miasma
over that house. It was the aura, the glamour, which radiated from
this wonderful and evil man as light radiates from radium. It was the
_vril_, the _force_, of Dr. Fu-Manchu.
I began to move away from the window. But Smith held my wrist as in a
vice. He was listening raptly to the torrential speech of the Chinaman
who sat in the chair; and I perceived in his eyes the light of a
sudden comprehension.
As the tall figure of the Chinese doctor came pacing into view again,
Smith, his head below the level of the window, pushed me gently along
the passage.
Regaining the site of the trap, he whispered to me:
"We owe our lives, Petrie, to the national childishness of the
Chinese! A race of ancestor worshippers is capable of anything, and
Dr. Fu-Manchu, the dreadful being who has rained terror upon Europe,
stands in imminent peril of disgrace for having lost a decoration."
"What do you mean, Smith?"
"I mean that this is no time for delay, Petrie! Here, unless I am
greatly mistaken, lies the rope by means of which you made your
entrance. It shall be the means of your exit. Open the trap!"
Handing the lamp to Smith, I stooped and carefully raised the
trap-door. At which moment, a singular and a dramatic thing happened.
A softly musical voice--the voice of my dreams!--spoke.
"Not that way! Oh, God, not that way!"
In my surprise and confusion I all but let the trap fall, but I
retained sufficient presence of mind to replace it gently. Standing
upright, I turned ... and there, with her little jewelled hand resting
upon Smith's arm, stood Kâramanèh!
In all my experience of him, I had never seen Nayland Smith so utterly
perplexed. Between anger, distrust and dismay, he wavered; and each
passing emotion was written legibly upon the lean bronzed features.
Rigid with surprise, he stared at the beautiful face of the girl. She,
although her hand still rested upon Smith's arm, had her dark eyes
turned upon me with that same enigmatical expression. Her lips were
slightly parted, and her breast heaved tumultuously.
This ten seconds of silence in which we three stood looking at one
another encompassed the whole gamut of human emotion. The silence was
broken by Kâramanèh.
"They will be coming back that way!" she whispered, bending eagerly
toward me. (How, in the most desperate moments, I loved to listen to
that odd, musical accent!) "Please, if you would save your life, and
spare mine, trust me!" She suddenly clasped her hands together and
looked up into my face, passionately. "Trust me--just for once--and I
will show you the way!"
Nayland Smith never removed his gaze from her for a moment, nor did he
stir.
"Oh!" she whispered tremulously, and stamped one little red slipper
upon the floor. "_Won't_ you heed me? _Come_, or it will be too late!"
I glanced anxiously at my friend; the voice of Dr. Fu-Manchu, now
raised again in anger, was audible above the piping tones of the other
Chinaman. And as I caught Smith's eye, in silent query--the trap at my
feet began slowly to lift!
Kâramanèh stifled a little sobbing cry; but the warning came too late.
A hideous yellow face, with oblique squinting eyes, appeared in the
aperture.
I found myself inert, useless; I could neither think nor act. Nayland
Smith, however, as if instinctively, delivered a pitiless kick at the
head protruding above the trap.
A sickening crushing sound, with a sort of muffled snap, spoke of a
broken jaw-bone; and with no word or cry, the Chinaman fell. As the
trap descended with a bang, I heard the thud of his body on the stone
stairs beneath.
But we were lost. Kâramanèh fled along one of the passages lightly as
a bird, and disappeared--as Dr. Fu-Manchu, his top lip drawn up above
his teeth in the manner of an angry jackal, appeared from the other.
"This way!" cried Smith, in a voice that rose almost to a
shriek--"this way!"--and he led toward the room overhanging the steps.
Off we dashed with panic swiftness, only to find that this retreat
also was cut off. Dimly visible in the darkness was a group of yellow
men, and despite the gloom, the curved blades of the knives which
they carried glittered menacingly. The passage was full of dacoits!
Smith and I turned, together. The trap was raised again, and the
Burman, who had helped to tie me, was just scrambling up beside Dr.
Fu-Manchu, who stood there watching us, a shadowy, sinister figure.
"The game's up, Petrie!" muttered Smith. "It has been a long fight,
but Fu-Manchu wins!"
"Not entirely!" I cried.
I whipped the police whistle from my pocket, and raised it to my lips;
but brief as the interval had been, the dacoits were upon me.
A sinewy brown arm shot over my shoulder, and the whistle was dashed
from my grasp. Then came a riot of maëlstrom fighting, with Smith and
myself ever sinking lower amid a whirlpool, as it seemed, of
blood-lustful eyes, yellow fangs, and gleaming blades.
I had some vague idea that the rasping voice of Fu-Manchu broke once
through the turmoil, and when, with my wrists tied behind me, I
emerged from the strife to find myself lying beside Smith in the
passage, I could only assume that the Chinaman had ordered his bloody
servants to take us alive; for saving numerous bruises and a few
superficial cuts, I was unwounded.
The place was utterly deserted again, and we two panting captives
found ourselves alone with Dr. Fu-Manchu. The scene was unforgettable:
that dimly-lighted passage, its extremities masked in shadows, and the
tall, yellow-robed figure of the Satanic Chinaman towering over us
where we lay.
He had recovered his habitual calm, and as I peered at him through the
gloom, I was impressed anew with the tremendous intellectual force of
the man. He had the brow of a genius, the features of a born ruler;
and even in that moment I could find time to search my memory, and to
discover that the face, saving the indescribable evil of its
expression, was identical with that of Seti I, the mighty Pharaoh who
lives in the Cairo Museum.
Down the passage came leaping and gambolling the Doctor's marmoset.
Uttering its shrill, whistling cry, it leapt on to his shoulder,
clutched with its tiny fingers at the scanty, neutral-coloured hair
upon his crown, and bent forward, peering grotesquely into that still,
dreadful face.
Dr. Fu-Manchu stroked the little creature and crooned to it, as a
mother to her infant. Only this crooning, and the laboured breathing
of Smith and myself, broke that impressive stillness.
Suddenly the guttural voice began:
"You come at an opportune time, Mr. Commissioner Nayland Smith and Dr.
Petrie; at a time when the greatest man in China flatters me with a
visit. In my absence from home, a tremendous honour has been conferred
upon me, and, in the hour of this supreme honour, dishonour and
calamity have befallen! For my services to China--the New China, the
China of the future--I have been admitted by the Sublime Prince to the
Sacred Order of the White Peacock."
Warming to his discourse, he threw wide his arms, hurling the
chattering marmoset fully five yards along the corridor.
"Oh, god of Cathay!" he cried sibilantly, "in what have I sinned that
this catastrophe has been visited upon my head! Learn, my two dear
friends, that the sacred white peacock, brought to these misty shores
for my undying glory has been lost to me! Death is the penalty of such
a sacrilege; death shall be my lot, since death I deserve."
Covertly Smith nudged me with his elbow. I knew what the nudge was
designed to convey; he would remind me of his words--anent the
childish trifles which sway the life of intellectual China.
Personally, I was amazed. That Fu-Manchu's anger, grief, sorrow and
resignation were real, no one watching him, and hearing his voice,
could doubt. He continued:
"By one deed, and one deed alone, may I win a lighter punishment. By
one deed, and the resignation of all my titles, all my lands, and all
my honours, may I merit to be spared to my work--which has only
begun."
I knew now that we were lost, indeed; these were confidences which our
graves should hold inviolate! He suddenly opened fully those blazing
green eyes and directed their baneful glare upon Nayland Smith.
"The Director of the universe," he continued softly, "has relented
toward me. To-night, you die! To-night, the arch-enemy of our caste
shall be no more. This is my offering--the price of redemption...."
My mind was working again, and actively. I managed to grasp the
stupendous truth--and the stupendous possibility.
Dr. Fu-Manchu was in the act of clapping his hands, when I spoke.
"Stop!" I cried.
He paused, and the weird film, which sometimes became visible in his
eyes, now obscured their greenness, and lent him the appearance of a
blind man.
"Dr. Petrie," he said softly, "I shall always listen to you with
respect."
"I have an offer to make," I continued, seeking to steady my voice.
"Give us our freedom, and I will restore your shattered honour--I will
restore the sacred peacock!"
Dr. Fu-Manchu bent forward until his face was so close to mine that I
could see the innumerable lines which, an intricate network, covered
his yellow skin.
"Speak!" he hissed. "You lift up my heart from a dark pit!"
"I can restore your white peacock," I said; "I, and I alone, know
where it is!"--and I strove not to shrink from the face so close to
mine.
Upright shot the tall figure; high above his head Fu-Manchu threw his
arms--and a light of exaltation gleamed in the now widely-opened,
catlike eyes.
"Oh, god!" he screamed frenziedly. "Oh, god of the Golden Age! like a
phoenix I arise from the ashes of myself!" He turned to me. "Quick!
Quick! make your bargain! End my suspense!"
Smith stared at me like a man dazed; but, ignoring him, I went on:
"You will release me, now, immediately. In another ten minutes it will
be too late; my friend will remain. One of your--servants--can
accompany me, and give the signal when I return with the peacock. Mr.
Nayland Smith and yourself, or another, will join me at the corner of
the street where the raid took place last night. We will then give you
ten minutes' grace, after which we shall take whatever steps we
choose."
"Agreed!" cried Fu-Manchu. "I ask but one thing from an Englishman;
your word of honour?"
"I give it."
"I, also," said Smith hoarsely.
* * * * *
Ten minutes later, Nayland Smith and I, standing beside the cab, whose
lights gleamed yellowly through the mist, exchanged a struggling,
frightened bird for our lives--capitulated with the enemy of the white
race.
With characteristic audacity--and characteristic trust in the British
sense of honour--Dr. Fu-Manchu came in person with Nayland Smith, in
response to the wailing signal of the dacoit who had accompanied me.
No word was spoken, save that the cabman suppressed a curse of
amazement; and the Chinaman, his sinister servant at his elbow, bowed
low--and left us, surely to the mocking laughter of the gods!
CHAPTER XIV
THE COUGHING HORROR
I leapt up in bed with a great start.
My sleep was troubled often enough in those days which immediately
followed our almost miraculous escape from the den of Fu-Manchu; and
now, as I crouched there, nerves aquiver--listening--listening--I
could not be sure if this dank panic which possessed me had its origin
in nightmare or in something else.
Surely a scream, a choking cry for help, had reached my ears; but now,
almost holding my breath in that sort of nervous tensity peculiar to
one aroused thus, I listened, and the silence seemed complete. Perhaps
I had been dreaming....
"Help! Petrie! _Help_!..."
It was Nayland Smith in the room above me!
My doubts were resolved; this was no trick of an imagination
disordered. Some dreadful menace threatened my friend. Not delaying
even to snatch my dressing-gown, I rushed out on to the landing, up
the stairs, bare-footed as I was, threw open the door of Smith's room
and literally hurled myself in.
Those cries had been the cries of one assailed, had been uttered, I
judged, in the brief interval of a life and death struggle; had been
choked off....
A certain amount of moonlight found access to the room, without
spreading so far as the bed in which my friend lay. But at the moment
of my headlong entrance, and before I had switched on the light, my
gaze automatically was directed to the pale moonbeam streaming through
the window and down on to one corner of the sheep skin rug beside the
bed.
There came a sound of faint and muffled coughing,
What with my recent awakening and the panic at my heart, I could not
claim that my vision was true; but across this moonbeam passed a sort
of grey streak, for all the world as though some long thin shape had
been withdrawn, snakelike, from the room, through the open window....
From somewhere outside the house, and below, I heard the cough again,
followed by a sharp cracking sound like the lashing of a whip.
I depressed the switch, flooding the room with light, and as I leapt
forward to the bed a word picture of what I had seen formed in my
mind; and I found that I was thinking of a grey feather boa.
"Smith!" I cried (my voice seemed to pitch itself, unwilled, in a very
high key), "Smith, old man!"
He made no reply, and a sudden, sorrowful fear clutched at my
heart-strings. He was lying half out of bed flat upon his back, his
head at a dreadful angle with his body. As I bent over him and seized
him by the shoulders, I could see the whites of his eyes. His arms
hung limply, and his fingers touched the carpet.
"My God!" I whispered, "what has happened?"
I heaved him back on to the pillow, and looked anxiously into his
face. Habitually gaunt, the flesh so refined away by the consuming
nervous energy of the man as to reveal the cheekbones in sharp
prominence, he now looked truly ghastly. His skin was so sun-baked as
to have changed constitutionally; nothing could ever eradicate that
tan. But to-night a fearful greyness was mingled with the brown, his
lips were purple ... and there were marks of strangulation upon the
lean throat--ever darkening weals of clutching fingers.
He began to breathe stertorously and convulsively, inhalation being
accompanied by a significant gurgle in the throat. But now my calm was
restored in face of a situation which called for professional
attention.
I aided my friend's laboured respirations by the usual means, setting
to work vigorously; so that presently he began to clutch at his
inflamed throat which that murderous pressure had threatened to close.
I could hear sounds of movements about the house, showing that not I
alone had been awakened by those hoarse screams.
"It's all right, old man," I said, bending over him: "brace up!"
He opened his eyes--they looked bleared and bloodshot--and gave me a
quick glance of recognition.
"It's all right, Smith!" I said--"no! don't sit up; lie there for a
moment."
I ran across to the dressing-table, whereon I perceived his flask to
lie, and mixed him a weak stimulant with which I returned to the bed.
As I bent over him again, my housekeeper appeared in the doorway, pale
and wide-eyed.
"There is no occasion for alarm," I said over my shoulder; "Mr.
Smith's nerves are overwrought and he was awakened by some disturbing
dream. You can return to bed, Mrs. Newsome."
Nayland Smith seemed to experience much difficulty in swallowing the
contents of the tumbler which I held to his lips; and, from the way in
which he fingered the swollen glands, I could see that his throat,
which I had vigorously massaged, was occasioning him great pain. But
the danger was past, and already that glassy look was disappearing
from his eyes, nor did they protrude so unnaturally.
"God, Petrie!" he whispered, "that was a near shave! I haven't the
strength of a kitten!"
"The weakness will pass off," I replied; "there will be no collapse,
now. A little more fresh air...."
I stood up, glancing at the windows, then back at Smith, who forced a
wry smile in answer to my look.
"Couldn't be done, Petrie," he said huskily.
His words referred to the state of the windows. Although the night was
oppressively hot, these were only opened some four inches at top and
bottom. Farther opening was impossible because of iron brackets
screwed firmly into the casements, which prevented the windows being
raised or lowered farther.
It was a precaution adopted after long experience of the servants of
Dr. Fu-Manchu.
Now, as I stood looking from the half-strangled man upon the bed to
those screwed-up windows, the fact came home to my mind that this
precaution had proved futile. I thought of the thing which I had
likened to a feather boa; and I looked at the swollen weals made by
clutching fingers upon the throat of Nayland Smith.
The bed stood fully four feet from the nearest window.
I suppose the question was written in my face; for, as I turned again
to Smith, who, having struggled upright, was still fingering his
injured throat ruefully--"God only knows, Petrie!" he said; "no human
arm could have reached me...."
For us, the night was ended so far as sleep was concerned. Arrayed in
his dressing-gown, Smith sat in the white cane chair in my study with
a glass of brandy and water beside him, and (despite my official
prohibition) with the cracked briar, which had sent up its incense in
many strange and dark places of the East and which yet survived to
perfume these prosy rooms in suburban London, between his teeth. I
stood with my elbow resting upon the mantelpiece looking down at him
where he sat.
"By God! Petrie," he said, yet again, with his fingers straying gently
over the surface of his throat, "that was a narrow shave--a damned
narrow shave!"
"Narrower than perhaps you appreciate, old man," I replied. "You were
a most unusual shade of blue when I found you...."
"I managed," said Smith evenly, "to tear those clutching fingers away
for a moment and to give a cry for help. It was only for a moment,
though. Petrie! they were fingers of steel--of steel!"
"The bed...." I began.
"I know that," rapped Smith. "I shouldn't have been sleeping in it,
had it been within reach of the window; but, knowing that the Doctor
avoids noisy methods, I had thought myself fairly safe so long as I
made it impossible for any one actually to enter the room...."
"I have always insisted, Smith," I cried, "that there was danger! What
of poisoned darts? What of the damnable reptiles and insects which
form part of the armoury of Fu-Manchu?"
"Familiarity breeds contempt, I suppose," he replied. "But as it
happened, none of those agents was employed. The very menace that I
sought to avoid reached me somehow. It would almost seem that Dr.
Fu-Manchu deliberately accepted the challenge of those screwed up
windows! Hang it all, Petrie! one cannot sleep in a room hermetically
sealed in weather like this! It's positively Burmese; and although I
can stand tropical heat, curiously enough the heat of London gets me
down almost immediately."
"The humidity; that's easily understood. But you'll have to put up
with it in the future. After nightfall our windows must be closed
entirely, Smith."
Nayland Smith knocked out his pipe upon the side of the fireplace. The
bowl sizzled furiously, but without delay he stuffed broad-cut mixture
into the hot pipe, dropping a liberal quantity upon the carpet during
the process. He raised his eyes to me, and his face was very grim.
"Petrie," he said, striking a match on the heel of his slipper, "the
resources of Dr. Fu-Manchu are by no means exhausted. Before we quit
this room it is up to us to come to a decision upon a certain point."
He got his pipe well alight. "What kind of thing, what unnatural,
distorted creature, laid hands upon my throat to-night? I owe my life,
primarily, to you, old man, but secondarily, to the fact that I was
awakened, just before the attack, by the creature's _coughing_--by its
vile, high pitched _coughing_...."
I glanced around at the books upon my shelves. Often enough, following
some outrage by the brilliant, Chinese doctor whose genius was
directed to the discovery of new and unique death agents, we had
obtained a clue in those works of a scientific nature which bulk
largely in the library of a medical man. There are creatures, there
are drugs, which, ordinarily innocuous, may be so employed as to
become inimical to human life; and in the distorting of nature, in the
disturbing of balances and the diverting of beneficent forces into
strange and dangerous channels, Dr. Fu-Manchu excelled. I had known
him to enlarge, by artificial culture, a minute species of fungus so
as to render it a powerful agent capable of attacking man; his
knowledge of venomous insects has probably never been paralleled in
the history of the world; whilst, in the sphere of pure toxicology, he
had, and has, no rival: the Borgias were children by comparison. But,
look where I would, think how I might, no adequate explanation of this
latest outrage seemed possible along normal lines.
"There's the clue," said Nayland Smith, pointing to a little ash-tray
upon the table near by. "Follow it if you can."
But I could not.
"As I have explained," continued my friend, "I was awakened by a sound
of coughing; then came a death grip on my throat, and instinctively my
hands shot out in search of my attacker. I could not reach him; my
hands came in contact with nothing palpable. Therefore I clutched at
the fingers which were dug into my windpipe, and found them to be
small--as the marks show--and _hairy_. I managed to give that first
cry for help, and with all my strength I tried to unfasten the grip
that was throttling the life out of me. At last I contrived to move
one of the hands, and I called out again, though not so loudly. Then
both the hands were back again; I was weakening; but I clawed like a
madman at the thin, hairy arms of the strangling thing, and with a
blood-red mist dancing before my eyes, I seemed to be whirling madly
round and round until all became a blank. Evidently I used my nails
pretty freely--and there's the trophy."
For the twentieth time, I should think, I raised the ash-tray in my
hand and held it immediately under the table lamp in order to examine
its contents. In the little brass bowl lay a blood-stained fragment of
greyish hair attached to a tatter of skin. This fragment of epidermis
had an odd bluish tinge, and the attached hair was much darker at the
roots than elsewhere. Saving its singular colour, it might have been
torn from the forearm of a very hirsute human; but although my
thoughts wandered, unfettered, north, south, east and west; although,
knowing the resources of Fu-Manchu, I considered all the recognized
Mongolian types, and, in quest of hirsute mankind, even roamed, far
north among the blubber-eating Esquimaux; although I glanced at
Australasia, at Central Africa, and passed in mental review the dark
places of the Congo, nowhere in the known world, nowhere in the
history of the human species, could I come upon a type of man
answering to the description suggested by our strange clue.
Nayland Smith was watching me curiously as I bent over the little
brass ash-tray.
"You are puzzled," he rapped in his short way. "So am I--utterly
puzzled. Fu-Manchu's gallery of monstrosities clearly has become
reinforced; for even if we identified the type, we should not be in
sight of our explanation."
"You mean--" I began.
"Fully four feet from the window, Petrie, and that window but a few
inches open! Look"--he bent forward, resting his chest against the
table, and stretched out his hand towards me--"you have a rule there;
just measure."
Setting down the ash-tray, I opened out the rule and measured the
distance from the farther edge of the table to the tips of Smith's
fingers.
"Twenty-eight inches--and _I_ have a long reach!" snapped Smith,
withdrawing his arm and striking a match to relight his pipe. "There's
one thing, Petrie, often proposed before, which now we must do without
delay. The ivy must be stripped from the walls at the back. It's a
pity, but we cannot afford to sacrifice our lives to our sense of the
æsthetic. What do you make of the sound like the cracking of a whip?"
"I make nothing of it, Smith," I replied wearily. "It might have been
a thick branch of ivy breaking beneath the weight of a climber."
"Did it sound like it?"
"I must confess that the explanation does not convince me, but I have
no better one."
Smith, permitting his pipe to go out, sat staring straightly before
him, and tugging at the lobe of his left ear.
"The old bewilderment is seizing me," I continued. "At first, when I
realized that Dr. Fu-Manchu was back in England, when I realized that
an elaborate murder-machine was set up somewhere in London, it seemed
unreal, fantastical. Then I met--Kâramanèh! She, whom we thought to be
his victim, showed herself again to be his slave. Now, with Weymouth
and Scotland Yard at work, the old secret evil is established again in
our midst, unaccountably--our lives are menaced--sleep is a
danger--every shadow threatens death ... oh! it is awful."
Smith remained silent; he did not seem to have heard my words. I knew
these moods and had learnt that it was useless to seek to interrupt
them. With his brows drawn down, and his deep-set eyes staring into
space, he sat there gripping his cold pipe so tightly that my own jaw
muscles ached sympathetically. No man was better equipped than this
gaunt British Commissioner to stand between society and the menace of
the Yellow Doctor; I respected his meditations, for, unlike my own,
they were informed by an intimate knowledge of the dark and secret
things of the East, of that mysterious East out of which Fu-Manchu
came, of that jungle of noxious things whose miasma had been wafted
Westward with the implacable Chinaman.
I walked quietly from the room, occupied with my own bitter
reflections.
CHAPTER XV
BEWITCHMENT
"You say you have two pieces of news for me?" said Nayland Smith,
looking across the breakfast table to where Inspector Weymouth sat
sipping coffee.
"There are two points--yes," replied the Scotland Yard man, whilst
Smith paused, egg-spoon in hand, and fixed his keen eyes upon the
speaker. "The first is this: the headquarters of the yellow group is
no longer in the East End."
"How can you be sure of that?"
"For two reasons. In the first place, that district must now be too
hot to hold Dr. Fu-Manchu; in the second place, we have just completed
a house-to-house inquiry which has scarcely overlooked a rathole or a
rat. That place where you say Fu-Manchu was visited by some Chinese
mandarin; where you, Mr. Smith, and"--glancing in my direction--"you,
doctor, were confined for a time--"
"Yes?" snapped Smith, attacking his egg.
"Well," continued the Inspector, "it is all deserted now. There is not
the slightest doubt that the Chinaman has fled to some other abode. I
am certain of it. My second piece of news will interest you very much,
I am sure. You were taken to the establishment of the Chinaman,
Shen-Yan, by a certain ex-officer of New York Police--Burke...."
"Good God!" cried Smith, looking up with a start; "I thought they had
him!"
"So did I," replied Weymouth grimly; "but they haven't! He got away in
the confusion following the raid, and has been hiding ever since with
a cousin--a nurseryman out Upminster way...."
"Hiding?" snapped Smith.
"Exactly--hiding. He has been afraid to stir ever since, and has
scarcely shown his nose outside the door. He says he is watched night
and day."
"Then how ...!"
"He realized that something must be done," continued the Inspector,
"and made a break this morning. He is so convinced of this constant
surveillance that he came away secretly, hidden under the boxes of a
market-wagon. He landed at Covent Garden in the early hours of this
morning and came straight away to the Yard."
"What is he afraid of exactly?"
Inspector Weymouth put down his coffee cup and bent forward slightly.
"He knows something," he said in a low voice, "and _they_ are aware
that he knows it!"
"And what is this he knows?"
Nayland Smith stared eagerly at the detective.
"Every man has his price," replied Weymouth, with a smile, "and Burke
seems to think that you are a more likely market than the police
authorities."
"I see," snapped Smith. "He wants to see _me_?"
"He wants you to go and see _him_," was the reply. "I think he
anticipates that you may make a capture of the person or persons
spying upon him."
"Did he give you any particulars?"
"Several. He spoke of a sort of gipsy girl with whom he had a short
conversation one day, over the fence which divides his cousin's flower
plantations from the lane adjoining."
"Gipsy girl!" I whispered, glancing rapidly at Smith.
"I think you are right, doctor," said Weymouth with his slow smile;
"it was Kâramanèh. She asked him the way to somewhere or other and got
him to write it upon a loose page of his notebook, so that she should
not forget it."
"You hear that, Petrie?" rapped Smith.
"I hear it," I replied, "but I don't see any special significance in
the fact."
"I do!" rapped Smith. "I didn't sit up the greater part of last night
thrashing my weary brains for nothing! But I am going to the British
Museum to-day, to confirm a certain suspicion." He turned to Weymouth.
"Did Burke go back?" he demanded abruptly.
"He returned hidden under the empty boxes," was the reply. "Oh! you
never saw a man in such a funk in all your life!"
"He may have good reasons," I said.
"He _has_ good reasons!" replied Nayland Smith grimly; "if that man
really possesses information inimical to the safety of Fu-Manchu, he
can only escape doom by means of a miracle similar to that which
hitherto has protected you and me."
"Burke insists," said Weymouth at this point, "that something comes
almost every night after dusk, slinking about the house--it's an old
farmhouse, I understand; and on two or three occasions he has been
awakened (fortunately for him he is a light sleeper) by sounds of
_coughing_ immediately outside his window. He is a man who sleeps with
a pistol under his pillow, and more than once, on running to the
window, he has had a vague glimpse of some creature leaping down from
the tiles of the roof, which slopes up to his room, into the flower
beds below...."
"Creature!" said Smith, his grey eyes ablaze now, "you said
_creature_!"
"I used the word deliberately," replied Weymouth, "because Burke seems
to have the idea that it goes on all fours."
There was a short and rather strained silence. Then:
"In descending a sloping roof," I suggested, "a human being would
probably employ his hands as well as his feet."
"Quite so," agreed the Inspector. "I am merely reporting the
impression of Burke."
"Has he heard no other sound?" rapped Smith; "one like the cracking of
dry branches, for instance?"
"He made no mention of it," replied Weymouth, staring.
"And what is the plan?"
"One of his cousin's vans," said Weymouth, with his slight smile, "has
remained behind at Covent Garden and will return late this afternoon.
I propose that you and I, Mr. Smith, imitate Burke and ride down to
Upminster under the empty boxes."
Nayland Smith stood up, leaving his breakfast half finished, and began
to wander up and down the room, reflectively tugging at his ear. Then
he began to fumble in the pockets of his dressing-gown and finally
produced the inevitable pipe, dilapidated pouch, and box of safety
matches. He began to load the much-charred agent of reflection.
"Do I understand that Burke is actually too afraid to go out openly
even in daylight?" he asked suddenly.
"He has not hitherto left his cousin's plantations at all," replied
Weymouth. "He seems to think that openly to communicate with the
authorities, or with you, would be to seal his death warrant."
"He's right," snapped Smith.
"Therefore he came and returned secretly," continued the inspector;
"and if we are to do any good, obviously we must adopt similar
precautions. The market wagon, loaded in such a way as to leave ample
space in the interior for us, will be drawn up outside the office of
Messrs. Pike and Pike, in Covent Garden, until about five o'clock this
afternoon. At say, half-past four, I propose that we meet there and
embark upon the journey."
The speaker glanced in my direction interrogatively.
"Include me in the programme," I said. "Will there be room in the
wagon?"
"Certainly," was the reply; "it is most commodious, but I cannot
guarantee its comfort."
Nayland Smith promenaded the room unceasingly, and presently he walked
out altogether, only to return ere the Inspector and I had had time to
exchange more than a glance of surprise, carrying a brass ash-tray. He
placed this on a corner of the breakfast table before Weymouth.
"Ever seen anything like that?" he inquired.
The Inspector examined the gruesome relic with obvious curiosity,
turning it over with the tip of his little finger and manifesting
considerable repugnance in touching it at all. Smith and I watched him
in silence, and, finally, placing the tray again upon the table, he
looked up in a puzzled way.
"It's something like the skin of a water-rat," he said.
Nayland Smith stared at him fixedly.
"A water-rat? Now that you come to mention it, I perceive a certain
resemblance--yes. But"--he had been wearing a silk scarf about his
throat and now he unwrapped it--"did you ever see a water-rat that
could make marks like these?"
Weymouth started to his feet with some muttered exclamation.
"What is this?" he cried. "When did it happen, and how?"
In his own terse fashion, Nayland Smith related the happenings of the
night. At the conclusion of the story:
"By heaven!" whispered Weymouth, "the thing on the roof--the coughing
thing that goes on all fours, seen by Burke...."
"My own idea exactly!" cried Smith.
"Fu-Manchu," I said excitedly, "has brought some new, some dreadful
creature, from Burma...."
"No, Petrie," snapped Smith, turning upon me suddenly. "Not from
Burma--from Abyssinia."
* * * * *
That day was destined to be an eventful one; a day never to be
forgotten by any of us concerned in those happenings which I have to
record. Early in the morning Nayland Smith set off for the British
Museum to pursue his mysterious investigations, and I, having
performed my brief professional round (for, as Nayland Smith had
remarked on one occasion, this was a beastly healthy district), I
found, having made the necessary arrangements, that, with over three
hours to spare, I had nothing to occupy my time until the appointment
in Covent Garden Market. My lonely lunch completed, a restless fit
seized me, and I felt unable to remain longer in the house. Inspired
by this restlessness, I attired myself for the adventure of the
evening, not neglecting to place a pistol in my pocket, and, walking
to the neighbouring Tube station, I booked to Charing Cross, and
presently found myself rambling aimlessly along the crowded streets.
Led on by what link of memory I know not, I presently drifted into New
Oxford Street, and looked up with a start--to learn that I stood
before the shop of a second-hand bookseller where once two years
before I had met Kâramanèh.
The thoughts conjured up at that moment were almost too bitter to be
borne, and without so much as glancing at the books displayed for
sale, I crossed the roadway, entered Museum Street, and, rather in
order to distract my mind than because I contemplated any purchase,
began to examine the Oriental pottery, Egyptian statuettes, Indian
armour, and other curios, displayed in the window of an antique
dealer.
But, strive as I would to concentrate my mind upon the objects in the
window, my memories persistently haunted me, and haunted me to the
exclusion even of the actualities. The crowds thronging the pavement,
the traffic in New Oxford Street, swept past unheeded; my eyes saw
nothing of pot nor statuette, but only met, in a misty imaginative
world, the glance of two other eyes--the dark and beautiful eyes of
Kâramanèh. In the exquisite tinting of a Chinese vase dimly
perceptible in the background of the shop, I perceived only the
blushing cheeks of Kâramanèh; her face rose up, a taunting phantom,
from out of the darkness between a hideous, gilded idol and an Indian
sandal-wood screen.
I strove to dispel this obsessing thought, resolutely fixing my
attention upon a tall Etruscan vase in the corner of the window, near
to the shop door. Was I losing my senses indeed? A doubt of my own
sanity momentarily possessed me. For, struggle as I would to dispel
the illusion--there, looking out at me over that ancient piece of
pottery, was the bewitching face of the slave-girl!
Probably I was glaring madly, and possibly I attracted the notice of
the passers-by; but of this I cannot be certain, for all my attention
was centred upon that phantasmal face, with the cloudy hair, slightly
parted red lips, and the brilliant dark eyes which looked into mine
out of the shadows of the shop.
It was bewildering--it was uncanny; for, delusion or verity, the
glamour prevailed. I exerted a great mental effort, stepped to the
door, turned the handle, and entered the shop with as great a show of
composure as I could muster.
A curtain draped in a little door at the back of one counter swayed
slightly, with no greater violence than may have been occasioned by
the draught. But I fixed my eyes upon this swaying curtain almost
fiercely ... as an impassive half-caste of some kind who appeared to
be a strange cross between a Græco-Hebrew and a Japanese, entered and
quite unemotionally faced me, with a slight bow.
So wholly unexpected was this apparition that I started back.
"Can I show you anything, sir?" inquired the new arrival, with a
second slight inclination of the head.
I looked at him for a moment in silence. Then:
"I thought I saw a lady of my acquaintance here a moment ago," I said.
"Was I mistaken?"
"Quite mistaken, sir," replied the shopman, raising his black eyebrows
ever so slightly; "a mistake possibly due to a reflection in the
window. Will you take a look around now that you are here?"
"Thank you," I replied, staring him hard in the face; "at some other
time."
I turned and quitted the shop abruptly. Either I was mad, or Kâramanèh
was concealed somewhere therein.
However, realizing my helplessness in the matter, I contented myself
with making a mental note of the name which appeared above the
establishment--J. Salaman--and walked on, my mind in a chaotic
condition and my heart beating with unusual rapidity.
CHAPTER XVI
THE QUESTING HANDS
Within my view, from the corner of the room where I sat in deepest
shadow, through the partly opened window (it was screwed, like our
own) were rows of glass-houses gleaming in the moonlight, and, beyond
them, orderly ranks of flower-beds extending into a blue haze of
distance. By reason of the moon's position, no light entered the room,
but my eyes, from long watching, were grown familiar with the
darkness, and I could see Burke quite clearly as he lay in the bed
between my post and the window. I seemed to be back again in those
days of the troubled past when first Nayland Smith and I had come to
grips with the servants of Dr. Fu-Manchu. A more peaceful scene than
this flower-planted corner of Essex it would be difficult to imagine;
but, either because of my knowledge that its peace was chimerical, or
because of that outflung consciousness of danger which actually, or in
my imagination, preceded the coming of the Chinaman's agents, to my
seeming the silence throbbed electrically and the night was laden with
stilly omens.
Already cramped by my journey in the market-cart, I found it difficult
to remain very long in any one position. What information had Burke to
sell? He had refused, for some reason, to discuss the matter that
evening, and now, enacting the part allotted him by Nayland Smith, he
feigned sleep consistently, although at intervals he would whisper to
me his doubts and fears.
All the chances were in our favour to-night; for whilst I could not
doubt that Dr. Fu-Manchu was set upon the removal of the ex-officer of
New York police, neither could I doubt that our presence in the farm
was unknown to the agents of the Chinaman. According to Burke,
constant attempts had been made to achieve Fu-Manchu's purpose, and
had only been frustrated by his (Burke's) wakefulness. There was every
probability that another attempt would be made to-night.
Any one who has been forced by circumstance to undertake such a vigil
as this will be familiar with the marked changes (corresponding with
phases of the earth's movement) which take place in the atmosphere, at
midnight, at two o'clock, and again at four o'clock. During those four
hours falls a period wherein all life is at its lowest ebb, and every
physician is aware that there is a greater likelihood of a patient's
passing between midnight and 4 a.m., than at any other period during
the cycle of the hours.
To-night I became specially aware of this lowering of vitality, and
now, with the night at that darkest phase which precedes the dawn, an
indescribable dread, such as I had known before in my dealings with
the Chinaman, assailed me, when I was least prepared to combat it. The
stillness was intense Then:
"_Here it is!_" whispered Burke from the bed.
The chill at the very centre of my being, which but corresponded with
the chill of all surrounding nature at that hour, became intensified,
keener, at the whispered words.
I rose stealthily out of my chair, and from my nest of shadows
watched--watched intently, the bright oblong of the window....
Without the slightest heralding sound--a black silhouette crept up
against the pane ... the silhouette of a small, malformed head, a
dog-like head, deep-set in square shoulders. Malignant eyes peered
intently in. Higher it rose--that wicked head--against the window,
then crouched down on the sill and became less sharply defined as the
creature stooped to the opening below. There was a faint sound of
sniffing.
Judging from the stark horror which I experienced myself, I doubted,
now, if Burke could sustain the rôle allotted him. In beneath the
slightly raised window came a hand, perceptible to me despite the
darkness of the room. It seemed to project from the black silhouette
outside the pane, to be thrust forward--and forward--and forward ...
that small hand with the outstretched fingers.
The unknown possesses unique terrors; and since I was unable to
conceive what manner of thing this could be, which, extending its
incredibly long arms, now sought the throat of the man upon the bed, I
tasted of that sort of terror which ordinarily one knows only in
dreams.
"Quick, sir--_quick_!" screamed Burke, starting up from the pillow.
The questing hands had reached his throat!
Choking down an urgent dread that I had of touching the thing which
had reached through the window to kill the sleeper, I sprang across
the room and grasped the rigid, hairy forearms.
Heavens! Never have I felt such muscles, such tendons
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