The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu
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Sax Rohmer >> The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu
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His voice trailed off into silence, and he stood looking across the
room with unseeing eyes, meditating deeply. It was quite dark now
outside, as I could see through the uncurtained window, which opened
upon the dreary expanse stretching out to haunted Sedgemoor. Two
candles were burning upon the dressing table; they were but recently
lighted, and so intense was the stillness that I could distinctly hear
the spluttering of one of the wicks, which was damp. Without giving
the slightest warning of his intention, Smith suddenly made two
strides forward, stretched out his long arms, and snuffed the pair of
candles in a twinkling.
The room became plunged in impenetrable darkness.
"Not a word, Petrie!" whispered my companion.
I moved cautiously to join him, but as I did so, perceived that he was
moving too. Vaguely, against the window I perceived him silhouetted.
He was looking out across the moor, and:
"See! see!" he hissed.
With my heart thumping furiously in my breast, I bent over him; and
for the second time since our coming to Cragmire Tower, my thoughts
flew to "The Fenman."
There are shades in the fen; ghosts of women and men
Who have sinned and have died, but are living again.
O'er the waters they tread, with their lanterns of dread,
And they peer in the pools--in the pools of the dead . . .
A light was dancing out upon the moor, a witchlight that came and went
unaccountably, up and down, in and out, now clearly visible, now
masked in the darkness!
"Lock the door!" snapped my companion--"if there's a key."
I crept across the room and fumbled for a moment; then:
"There is no key," I reported.
"Then wedge the chair under the knob and let no one enter until I
return!" he said, amazingly.
With that he opened the window to its fullest extent, threw his leg
over the sill, and went creeping along a wide concrete ledge, in which
ran a leaded gutter, in the direction of the tower on the right!
Not pausing to follow his instructions respecting the chair, I craned
out of the window, watching his progress, and wondering with what
sudden madness he was bitten. Indeed, I could not credit my senses,
could not believe that I heard and saw aright. Yet there out in the
darkness on the moor moved the will-o'-the-wisp, and ten yards along
the gutter crept my friend, like a great gaunt cat. Unknown to me he
must have prospected the route by daylight, for now I saw his design.
The ledge terminated only where it met the ancient wall of the tower,
and it was possible for an agile climber to step from it to the edge
of the unglazed window some four feet below, and to scramble from that
point to the stone fence and thence on to the path by which we had
come from Saul.
This difficult operation Nayland Smith successfully performed, and, to
my unbounded amazement, went racing into the darkness toward the
dancing light, headlong, like a madman! The night swallowed him up,
and between my wonder and my fear my hands trembled so violently that
I could scarce support myself where I rested, with my full weight upon
the sill.
I seemed now to be moving through the fevered phases of a nightmare.
Around and below me Cragmire Tower was profoundly silent, but a faint
odor of cookery was now perceptible. Outside, from the night, came a
faint whispering as of the distant sea, but no moon and no stars
relieved the impenetrable blackness. Only out over the moor the
mysterious light still danced and moved.
One--two--three--four--five minutes passed. The light vanished and did
not appear again. Five more age-long minutes elapsed in absolute
silence, whilst I peered into the darkness of the night and listened,
every nerve in my body tense, for the return of Nayland Smith. Yet two
more minutes, which embraced an agony of suspense, passed in the same
fashion; then a shadowy form grew, phantomesque, out of the gloom; a
moment more, and I distinctly heard the heavy breathing of a man
nearly spent, and saw my friend scrambling up toward the black
embrasure in the tower. His voice came huskily, pantingly:
"Creep along and lend me a hand, Petrie! I am nearly winded."
I crept through the window, steadied my quivering nerves by an effort
of the will, and reached the end of the ledge in time to take Smith's
extended hand and to draw him up beside me against the wall of the
tower. He was shaking with his exertions, and must have fallen, I
think, without my assistance. Inside the room again:
"Quick! light the candles!" he breathed hoarsely.
"Did any one come?"
"No one--nothing."
Having expended several matches in vain, for my fingers twitched
nervously, I ultimately succeeded in relighting the candles.
"Get along to your room!" directed Smith. "Your apprehensions are
unfounded at the moment, but you may as well leave both doors wide
open!"
I looked into his face--it was very drawn and grim, and his brow was
wet with perspiration, but his eyes had the fighting glint, and I knew
that we were upon the eve of strange happenings.
CHAPTER XXIII
A CRY ON THE MOOR
Of the events intervening between this moment and that when death
called to us out of the night, I have the haziest recollections. An
excellent dinner was served in the bleak and gloomy dining-room by the
mulatto, and the crippled author was carried to the head of the table
by this same Herculean attendant, as lightly as though he had but the
weight of a child.
Van Roon talked continuously, revealing a deep knowledge of all sorts
of obscure matters; and in the brief intervals, Nayland Smith talked
also, with almost feverish rapidity. Plans for the future were
discussed. I can recall no one of them.
I could not stifle my queer sentiments in regard to the mulatto, and
every time I found him behind my chair I was hard put to repress a
shudder. In this fashion the strange evening passed; and to the
accompaniment of distant, muttering thunder, we two guests retired to
our chambers in Cragmire Tower. Smith had contrived to give me my
instructions in a whisper, and five minutes after entering my own
room, I had snuffed the candles, slipped a wedge, which he had given
me, under the door, crept out through the window onto the guttered
ledge, and joined Smith in his room. He, too, had extinguished his
candles, and the place was in darkness. As I climbed in, he grasped my
wrist to silence me, and turned me forcibly toward the window.
"Listen!" he said.
I turned and looked out upon a prospect which had been a fit setting
for the witch scene in Macbeth. Thunder clouds hung low over the moor,
but through them ran a sort of chasm, or rift, allowing a bar of lurid
light to stretch across the drear, from east to west--a sort of lane
walled by darkness. There came a remote murmuring, as of a troubled
sea--a hushed and distant chorus; and sometimes in upon it broke the
drums of heaven. In the west lightning flickered, though but faintly,
intermittently.
Then came the call.
Out of the blackness of the moor it came, wild and distant--"Help!
help!"
"Smith!" I whispered--"what is it? What. . ."
"Mr. Smith!" came the agonized cry . . . "Nayland Smith, help! for
God's sake. . . ."
"Quick, Smith!" I cried, "quick, man! It's Van Roon--he's been dragged
out . . . they are murdering him . . ."
Nayland Smith held me in a vise-like grip, silent, unmoved!
Louder and more agonized came the cry for aid, and I became more than
ever certain that it was poor Van Roon who uttered it.
"Mr. Smith! Dr. Petrie! for God's sake come . . . or . . . it will be
. . . too . . . late . . ."
"Smith!" I said, turning furiously upon my friend, "if you are going
to remain here whilst murder is done, I am not!"
My blood boiled now with hot resentment. It was incredible, inhuman,
that we should remain there inert whilst a fellow man, and our host to
boot, was being done to death out there in the darkness. I exerted all
my strength to break away; but although my efforts told upon him, as
his loud breathing revealed, Nayland Smith clung to me tenaciously.
Had my hands been free, in my fury, I could have struck him, for the
pitiable cries, growing fainter, now, told their own tale. Then Smith
spoke shortly and angrily--breathing hard between the words.
"Be quiet, you fool!" he snapped; "it's little less than an insult,
Petrie, to think me capable of refusing help where help is needed!"
Like a cold douche his words acted; in that instant I knew myself a
fool.
"You remember the Call of Siva?" he said, thrusting me away irritably,
"--two years ago, and what it meant to those who obeyed it?"
"You might have told me . . ."
"Told you! You would have been through the window before I had uttered
two words!"
I realized the truth of his assertion, and the justness of his anger.
"Forgive me, old man," I said, very crestfallen, "but my impulse was a
natural one, you'll admit. You must remember that I have been trained
never to refuse aid when aid is asked."
"Shut up, Petrie!" he growled; "forget it."
The cries had ceased now, entirely, and a peal of thunder, louder than
any yet, echoed over distant Sedgemoor. The chasm of light splitting
the heavens closed in, leaving the night wholly black.
"Don't talk!" rapped Smith; "act! You wedged your door?"
"Yes."
"Good. Get into that cupboard, have your Browning ready, and keep the
door very slightly ajar."
He was in that mood of repressed fever which I knew and which always
communicated itself to me. I spoke no further word, but stepped into
the wardrobe indicated and drew the door nearly shut. The recess just
accommodated me, and through the aperture I could see the bed,
vaguely, the open window, and part of the opposite wall. I saw Smith
cross the floor, as a mighty clap of thunder boomed over the house.
A gleam of lightning flickered through the gloom.
I saw the bed for a moment, distinctly, and it appeared to me that
Smith lay therein, with the sheets pulled up over his head. The light
was gone, and I could hear big drops of rain pattering upon the leaden
gutter below the open window.
My mood was strange, detached, and characterized by vagueness. That
Van Roon lay dead upon the moor I was convinced; and--although I
recognized that it must be a sufficient one--I could not even dimly
divine the reason why we had refrained from lending him aid. To have
failed to save him, knowing his peril, would have been bad enough; to
have refused, I thought was shameful. Better to have shared his
fate--yet . . .
The downpour was increasing, and beating now a regular tattoo upon the
gutterway. Then, splitting the oblong of greater blackness which
marked the casement, quivered dazzlingly another flash of lightning in
which I saw the bed again, with that impression of Smith curled up in
it. The blinding light died out; came the crash of thunder, harsh and
fearsome, more imminently above the tower than ever. The building
seemed to shake.
Coming as they did, horror and the wrath of heaven together, suddenly,
crashingly, black and angry after the fairness of the day, these
happenings and their setting must have terrorized the stoutest heart;
but somehow I seemed detached, as I have said, and set apart from the
whirl of events; a spectator. Even when a vague yellow light crept
across the room from the direction of the door, and flickered
unsteadily on the bed, I remained unmoved to a certain degree,
although passively alive to the significance of the incident. I
realized that the ultimate issue was at hand, but either because I was
emotionally exhausted, or from some other cause, the pending climax
failed to disturb me.
Going on tiptoe, in stockinged feet, across my field of vision, passed
Kegan Van Roon! He was in his shirt-sleeves and held a lighted candle
in one hand whilst with the other he shaded it against the draught
from the window. He was a cripple no longer, and the smoked glasses
were discarded; most of the light, at the moment when first I saw him,
shone upon his thin, olive face, and at sight of his eyes much of the
mystery of Cragmire Tower was resolved. For they were oblique, very
slightly, but nevertheless unmistakably oblique. Though highly
educated, and possibly an American citizen, Van Roon was a Chinaman!
Upon the picture of his face as I saw it then, I do not care to dwell.
It lacked the unique horror of Dr. Fu-Manchu's unforgettable
countenance, but possessed a sort of animal malignancy which the
latter lacked . . . He approached within three or four feet of the
bed, peering--peering. Then, with a timidity which spoke well for
Nayland Smith's reputation, paused and beckoned to some one who
evidently stood in the doorway behind him. As he did so I noted that
the legs of his trousers were caked with greenish brown mud nearly up
to the knees.
The huge mulatto, silent-footed, crossed to the bed in three strides.
He was stripped to the waist, and, excepting some few professional
athletes, I had never seen a torso to compare with that which, brown
and glistening, now bent over Nayland Smith. The muscular development
was simply enormous; the man had a neck like a column, and the thews
around his back and shoulders were like ivy tentacles wreathing some
gnarled oak.
Whilst Van Roon, his evil gaze upon the bed, held the candle aloft,
the mulatto, with a curious preparatory writhing movement of the
mighty shoulders, lowered his outstretched fingers to the disordered
bed linen . . .
I pushed open the cupboard door and thrust out the Browning. As I did
so a dramatic thing happened. A tall, gaunt figure shot suddenly
upright from beyond the bed. It was Nayland Smith!
Upraised in his hand he held a heavy walking cane. I knew the handle
to be leaded, and I could judge of the force with which he wielded it
by the fact that it cut the air with a keen swishing sound. It
descended upon the back of the mulatto's skull with a sickening thud,
and the great brown body dropped inert upon the padded bed--in which
not Smith, but his grip, reposed. There was no word, no cry. Then:
"Shoot, Petrie! Shoot the fiend! Shoot . . ."
Van Roon, dropping the candle, in the falling gleam of which I saw the
whites of the oblique eyes turned and leaped from the room with the
agility of a wild cat. The ensuing darkness was split by a streak of
lightning . . . and there was Nayland Smith scrambling around the foot
of the bed and making for the door in hot pursuit.
We gained it almost together. Smith had dropped the cane, and now held
his pistol in his hand. Together we fired into the chasm of the
corridor, and in the flash, saw Van Roon hurling himself down the
stairs. He went silently in his stockinged feet, and our own clatter
was drowned by the awful booming of the thunder which now burst over
us again.
Crack!--crack!--crack! Three times our pistols spat venomously after
the flying figure . . . then we had crossed the hall below and were in
the wilderness of the night with the rain descending upon us in
sheets. Vaguely I saw the white shirt-sleeves of the fugitive near the
corner of the stone fence. A moment he hesitated, then darted away
inland, not toward Saul, but toward the moor and the cup of the inland
bay.
"Steady, Petrie! steady!" cried Nayland Smith. He ran, panting, beside
me. "It is the path to the mire." He breathed sibilantly between every
few words. "It was out there . . . that he hoped to lure us . . . with
the cry for help."
A great blaze of lightning illuminated the landscape as far as the eye
could see. Ahead of us a flying shape, hair lank and glistening in the
downpour, followed a faint path skirting that green tongue of morass
which we had noted from the upland. It was Kegan Van Roon. He glanced
over his shoulder, showing a yellow, terror-stricken face. We were
gaining upon him. Darkness fell, and the thunder cracked and boomed as
though the very moor were splitting about us.
"Another fifty yards, Petrie," breathed Nayland Smith, "and after that
it's unchartered ground."
On we went through the rain and the darkness; then:
"Slow up! slow up!" cried Smith. "It feels soft!"
Indeed, already I had made one false step--and the hungry mire had
fastened upon my foot, almost tripping me.
"Lost the path!"
We stopped dead. The falling rain walled us in. I dared not move, for
I knew that the mire, the devouring mire, stretched, eager, close
about my feet. We were both waiting for the next flash of lightning, I
think, but, before it came, out of the darkness ahead of us rose a cry
that sometimes rings in my ears to this hour. Yet it was no more than
a repetition of that which had called to us, deathfully, awhile
before.
"Help! help! for God's sake help! Quick! I am sinking . . ."
Nayland Smith grasped my arm furiously.
"We dare not move, Petrie--we dare not move!" he breathed. "It's God's
justice--visible for once."
Then came the lightning; and--ignoring a splitting crash behind us--we
both looked ahead, over the mire.
Just on the edge of the venomous green path, not thirty yards away, I
saw the head and shoulders and upstretched, appealing arms of Van
Roon. Even as the lightning flickered and we saw him, he was gone;
with one last, long, drawn-out cry, horribly like the mournful wail of
a sea gull, he was gone!
That eerie light died, and in the instant before the sound of the
thunder came shatteringly, we turned about . . . in time to see
Cragmire Tower, a blacker silhouette against the night, topple and
fall! A red glow began to be perceptible above the building. The
thunder came booming through the caverns of space. Nayland Smith
lowered his wet face close to mine and shouted in my ear:
"Kegan Van Roon never returned from China. It was a trap. Those were
two creatures of Dr. Fu-Manchu . . ."
The thunder died away, hollowly, echoing over the distant sea . . .
"That light on the moor to-night?"
"You have not learned the Morse Code, Petrie. It was a signal, and it
read:--S M I T H . . . SOS."
"Well?"
"I took the chance, as you know. And it was Karamaneh! She knew of the
plot to bury us in the mire. She had followed from London, but could
do nothing until dusk. God forgive me if I've misjudged her--for we
owe her our lives to-night."
Flames were bursting up from the building beside the ruin of the
ancient tower which had faced the storms of countless ages only to
succumb at last. The lightning literally had cloven it in twain.
"The mulatto? . . ."
Again the lightning flashed, and we saw the path and began to retrace
our steps. Nayland Smith turned to me; his face was very grim in that
unearthly light, and his eyes shone like steel.
"I killed him, Petrie . . . as I meant to do."
From out over Sedgemoor it came, cracking and rolling and booming
toward us, swelling in volume to a stupendous climax, that awful
laughter of Jove the destroyer of Cragmire Tower.
CHAPTER XXIV
STORY OF THE GABLES
In looking over my notes dealing with the second phase of Dr.
Fu-Manchu's activities in England, I find that one of the worst hours
of my life was associated with the singular and seemingly inconsequent
adventure of the fiery hand. I shall deal with it in this place,
begging you to bear with me if I seem to digress.
Inspector Weymouth called one morning, shortly after the Van Roon
episode, and entered upon a surprising account of a visit to a house
at Hampstead which enjoyed the sinister reputation of being
uninhabitable.
"But in what way does the case enter into your province?" inquired
Nayland Smith, idly tapping out his pipe on a bar of the grate.
We had not long finished breakfast, but from an early hour Smith had
been at his eternal smoking, which only the advent of the meal had
interrupted.
"Well," replied the inspector, who occupied a big armchair near the
window, "I was sent to look into it, I suppose, because I had nothing
better to do at the moment."
"Ah!" jerked Smith, glancing over his shoulder.
The ejaculation had a veiled significance; for our quest of Dr.
Fu-Manchu had come to an abrupt termination by reason of the fact that
all trace of that malignant genius, and of the group surrounding him,
had vanished with the destruction of Cragmire Tower.
"The house is called the Gables," continued the Scotland Yard man,
"and I knew I was on a wild goose chase from the first--"
"Why?" snapped Smith.
"Because I was there before, six months ago or so--just before your
present return to England--and I knew what to expect."
Smith looked up with some faint dawning of interest perceptible in his
manner.
"I was unaware," he said with a slight smile, "that the cleaning-up of
haunted houses came within the jurisdiction of Scotland Yard. I am
learning something."
"In the ordinary way," replied the big man good-humoredly, "it
doesn't. But a sudden death always excites suspicion, and--"
"A sudden death?" I said, glancing up; "you didn't explain that the
ghost had killed any one!"
"I'm afraid I'm a poor hand at yarn-spinning, Doctor," said Weymouth,
turning his blue, twinkling eyes in my direction. "Two people have
died at the Gables within the last six months."
"You begin to interest me," declared Smith, and there came something
of the old, eager look into his gaunt face, as, having lighted his
pipe, he tossed the match-end into the hearth.
"I had hoped for some little excitement, myself," confessed the
inspector. "This dead-end, with not a ghost of a clue to the
whereabouts of the yellow fiend, has been getting on my nerves--"
Nayland Smith grunted sympathetically.
"Although Dr. Fu-Manchu has been in England for some months, now,"
continued Weymouth, "I have never set eyes upon him; the house we
raided in Museum Street proved to be empty; in a word, I am wasting my
time. So that I volunteered to run up to Hampstead and look into the
matter of the Gables, principally as a distraction. It's a queer
business, but more in the Psychical Research Society's line than mine,
I'm afraid. Still, if there were no Dr. Fu-Manchu it might be of
interest to you--and to you, Dr. Petrie, because it illustrates the
fact, that, given the right sort of subject, death can be brought
about without any elaborate mechanism--such as our Chinese friends
employ."
"You interest me more and more," declared Smith, stretching himself in
the long, white cane rest-chair.
"Two men, both fairly sound, except that the first one had an
asthmatic heart, have died at the Gables without any one laying a
little finger upon them. Oh! there was no jugglery! They weren't
poisoned, or bitten by venomous insects, or suffocated, or anything
like that. They just died of fear--stark fear."
With my elbows resting upon the table cover, and my chin in my hands,
I was listening attentively, now, and Nayland Smith, a big cushion
behind his head, was watching the speaker with a keen and speculative
look in those steely eyes of his.
"You imply that Dr. Fu-Manchu has something to learn from the Gables?"
he jerked.
Weymouth nodded stolidly.
"I can't work up anything like amazement in these days," continued the
latter; "every other case seems stale and hackneyed alongside the
case. But I must confess that when the Gables came on the books of the
Yard the second time, I began to wonder. I thought there might be some
tangible clue, some link connecting the two victims; perhaps some
evidence of robbery or of revenge--of some sort of motive. In short, I
hoped to find evidence of human agency at work, but, as before, I was
disappointed."
"It's a legitimate case of a haunted house, then?" said Smith.
"Yes; we find them occasionally, these uninhabitable places, where
there is something, something malignant and harmful to human life, but
something that you cannot arrest, that you cannot hope to bring into
court."
"Ah," replied Smith slowly; "I suppose you are right. There are
historic instances, of course: Glamys Castle and Spedlins Tower in
Scotland, Peel Castle, Isle of Man, with its Maudhe Dhug, the gray
lady of Rainham Hall, the headless horses of Caistor, the Wesley ghost
of Epworth Rectory, and others. But I have never come in personal
contact with such a case, and if I did I should feel very humiliated
to have to confess that there was any agency which could produce a
physical result--death--but which was immune from physical
retaliation."
Weymouth nodded his head again.
"I might feel a bit sour about it, too," he replied, "if it were not
that I haven't much pride left in these days, considering the show of
physical retaliation I have made against Dr. Fu-Manchu."
"A home thrust, Weymouth!" snapped Nayland Smith, with one of those
rare, boyish laughs of his. "We're children to that Chinese doctor,
Inspector, to that weird product of a weird people who are as old in
evil as the pyramids are old in mystery. But about the Gables?"
"Well, it's an uncanny place. You mentioned Glamys Castle a moment
ago, and it's possible to understand an old stronghold like that being
haunted, but the Gables was only built about 1870; it's quite a modern
house. It was built for a wealthy Quaker family, and they occupied it,
uninterruptedly and apparently without anything unusual occurring, for
over forty years. Then it was sold to a Mr. Maddison--and Mr. Maddison
died there six months ago."
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