The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu
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Sax Rohmer >> The Return of Dr. Fu Manchu
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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 further 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 toward us, was a portly Chinaman
who wore a yellow, silken robe. His face, it was impossible to see;
but he was beating his fist 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 center of the ceiling gleamed upon the great,
dome-like brow, this tall man paced somberly 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 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
vise. 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 worshipers 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!"
Handling the lamp to Smith, I stooped and carefully raised the
trap-door. At which moment, a singular and dramatic thing happened.
A softly musical voice--the voice of my dreams!--spoke.
"Not that way! O 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 jeweled hand
resting upon Smith's arm, stood Karamaneh!
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 Karamaneh.
"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 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!
Karamaneh 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. Karamaneh 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 whirl of maelstrom 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 shadow, 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, the mighty Pharaoh who
lies in the Cairo Museum.
Down the passage came leaping and gamboling the doctor's marmoset.
Uttering its shrill, whistling cry, it leaped onto his shoulder,
clutched with its tiny fingers at the scanty, neutral-colored 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 labored 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 honor has been
conferred upon me, and, in the hour of this supreme honor, dishonor
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.
"O 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 honors, 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 honor--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.
"O god!" he screamed, frenziedly--"O 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 shall 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 honor?"
"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 honor--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 leaped up in bed with a great start.
My sleep was troubled often enough in these 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 dissolved; 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 gray 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 leaped
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 gray 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 onto 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 sunbaked as to have
changed constitutionally; nothing could ever eradicate that tan. But
to-night a fearful grayness was mingled with the brown, his lips were
purple . . . and there were marks of strangulation upon the lean
throat--ever darkening weals made by clutching fingers.
He began to breathe stentoriously and convulsively, inhalation being
accompanied by a significant gurgling in the throat. But now my calm
was restored in face of a situation which called for professional
attention.
I aided my friend's labored 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 movement 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. Further opening was impossible because of iron brackets
screwed firmly into the casements which prevented the windows being
raised or lowered further.
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, steaming 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 armory 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, then 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."
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