by Sax Rohmer
“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 phœnix 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
Ileapt 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 t
he 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.
