Works of Sax Rohmer

by Sax Rohmer

  “But I am so lonely, Shan. Your name is sweet to me, because it is like my own Chinese. Sometimes I know I am only a woman, and that all I see before me ends in nothing if it brings me only power and no love.”

  Now I was alone.

  This was a superwoman into whose hands I had fallen! And what blindness had been upon me during our earlier if brief association to close my eyes to the fact that she had conceived a sudden, characteristically Oriental infatuation?

  Perhaps a natural modesty. I had never been a woman’s man and counted myself negligible when female favors were being distributed. Or, possibly, my preoccupation with Rima. Certainly, from the first moment I had met her, I had not so much as noticed any other woman’s existence or bothered myself to wonder if any other woman had noticed mine.

  Yet, as I recalled again and again, Madame Ingomar had chosen me to show her over the excavation and had sought me out many times. Yes, I had been blind…

  Now, too late, I saw.

  Beyond any dispute, she sprang from generations of autocrats; power was in her blood. She had selected me, for no reason that I could imagine; and I had read in those strange green eyes, as clearly as though she had spoken, that if I rejected her I must die!

  I knew, also, intuitively, that she had experienced love. Judged by Western standards, she was young. But judged by any standards she was old in knowledge. However I chose, my triumph would be a short one.

  So musing, and as weak as a half-drowned cat, I lay staring around my gold and green prison.

  The door behind me opened and the Chinese doctor came in.

  “Good morning, Mr. Greville.”

  I glanced at the heavy curtains. No trace of light showed through them.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  My voice was stronger. The Chinaman went through the ritual of taking pulse and temperature; then:

  “A great improvement,” he announced. “You have an admirable constitution.”

  “But what has been the matter with me?”

  He moved his hands in a slight, deprecatory gesture.

  “Nothing, in itself, serious: a small injection. But it was necessary to renew it… However, I am going to get you on your feet, Mr. Greville.”

  He clapped his hands sharply, and the silent man entered.

  Together, and skillfully, they raised me from the divan and carried me into a beautifully equipped bathroom which adjoined the green and gold apartment.

  “You must not object to our assistance in your toilet,” said the doctor. “Because, although unknown to you, we have so assisted before!”

  I submitted to the ordeal of being groomed. I had never been seriously ill, and the business was new to me and utterly detestable. Then I was carried back to bed.

  “A lightly boiled egg, and toast,” the Chinaman declared, “will not be too severe. Tea — one cup — very weak…”

  Presently this was brought and set upon the table beside me. Propped by cushions, I now found it possible to sit up.

  With some trace of returning appetite I disposed of this light breakfast. The tray was removed by the dumb man and I lay waiting. Watching the doors alternately, I waited… for her. And I waited in a steadily mounting horror. In some way which I had never hitherto experienced, this woman, for all her exotic beauty, terrified me.

  The door opened… the dumb man came in with a number of books, a box of cigarettes, and other small comforts.

  There was no clock in the room and my wrist watch had been removed…

  I saw no one but this silent Asiatic all day, of the progress of which I could judge only by the appearance of regular meals.

  Several times, but more faintly than on the first occasion, I could have sworn I heard river noises, and once what strangely resembled a motor horn.

  The Chinese surgeon attended me after I had dealt with a dinner excellently prepared, and “groomed” me for the night. When he had gone, I lay smoking a final cigarette and wondering if…

  “Turn out the light when you are tired,” had been his final injunction.

  Lying there in silence and darkness, I almost touched rock bottom. Despair drew desperately near. I was utterly at the mercy of this woman. Whatever had happened to me had left me weaker than a child. And that damnable mystery, the true nature of my illness, was not the least of my troubles.

  I suffered no physical pain, except for a throbbing head; I could recall no blow… what had been done to me?

  Sleep was out of the question; but I had tried to find relief from the inexorable amber fight. Why, I wondered wearily, had I imagined riverside and street sounds and now imagined them no longer?

  And, whilst I turned this problem over in my mind, came a sound which was not imaginary.

  It was muffled. But I had learned that all sounds reached the green and gold room in that way. Nevertheless, dim though it was, I knew it… an eerie minor cry — the cry I had heard in Petrie’s courtyard in Cairo…

  The call of a Dacoit!

  Good God! Had this she-fiend been mocking me! Was I to be strangled as I lay there helpless?

  My hand reached out for the switch. I was trembling wildly. Weakness had destroyed my nerve. I grasped it — a pendant — pressed the button…

  No fight came!

  At which I nearly lost myself. I suppose, for the first time in my life, I was delirious, or hysterical.

  “Smith!” I cried. “Weymouth! Help!…”

  My voice was a husky whisper. Weakness and terror had imposed on me that crowning torture of nightmare — inability to summon aid in an emergency.

  But this was the peak of my sudden, childish frenzy. The fit passed. Nothing further happened. And I grew cool enough to realize that perhaps my enforced silence had been a blessing in disguise. Smith! Weymouth!… Heaven only knew where my poor friends were at that hour.

  The door behind my couch opened.

  I lay still — resigned, now, to the inevitable. I did not even attempt to look around, but stayed with half-closed eyes prepared for death.

  A dim light appeared.

  Watching, I lost faith in myself. I was altogether too exhausted, in my low state, to experience further fear; but I determined that my brain was not so completely to be relied upon as I had supposed. Actually, I was not awake; I hovered between two states in a borderland of hideous fancy.

  An outré figure carrying a lantern came into the room.

  The light of the lantern cast a huge, misshapen image of its bearer on the golden wall.

  This was a hunchbacked dwarf — epicene, revolting. His head was of more than normal size; his gray-black bloated features were a parody of humanity; his eyes bulged, demoniac, from a vast skull. He wore indoor Arab dress, a huge tarboosh crowning his repulsive ugliness.

  Never so much as glancing in my direction, he crossed to the door on the other side of the room and went out.

  Both doors remained open. Sounds reached me.

  First among these I detected voices — subdued but keyed to excitement.

  They were voices of delirium, I decided. They spoke a language which conveyed nothing to me.

  A man wearing an ill-fitting serge suit and a dark blue turban raced through the room in the wake of the dwarf. He carried an electric torch. Its reflection, diffused from the golden walls, exhibited a yellow, tigerish face, lips curled back and fanglike teeth bared in a sadistic grin…

  The Dacoit who had followed me to Cairo!

  It was a procession of images created by a disordered brain. Yet I was unconscious of any other symptoms of fever.

  Two kinds of sounds came to me now: the excited voices, growing louder, and a more distant, continuous disturbance difficult to identify. Then came a third.

  A pausing shriek quivered through the house… and died into wordless gurgling.

  The Dacoit reappeared. He carried a short, curved knife, its blade red to the hilt… His squinting, bloodshot eyes fixed themselves upon me. He drew nearer and nearer to the divan upon which
I lay helpless.

  Out of the babel of voices, one voice detached itself; a harsh, metallic voice. It cried three words.

  The Dacoit passed me — and returned by the way he had originally entered.

  A sustained, harsh note… a flat, surely unmistakable note — that of a police whistle!

  I smiled in the darkness.

  Clearly, high fever had claimed me. But this ghastly delirium must soon end in unconsciousness. I touched my forehead. It was wet, but cold.

  The indistinguishable voices grew faint — and died away.

  But that queer, remote booming continued.

  And now I determined that it came not from the door behind me — that by which the Dacoit had gone out — but from that which faced the foot of the divan… the door through which the hunchback had fled.

  A dim crash sent ghostly echo messengers through the building.

  Shouts followed. But now I could pick out certain words…

  “Easy at the landing, sir! Wait for me…”

  A sound of clattering footsteps, apparently on a staircase…

  “You take that door — I’ll take this!”

  Surely I knew that great, deep voice.

  More ghostly crashing.

  “Nothing here!”

  “Next floor!”

  A background of excited conversation; then:

  “Nayland Smith!” came the great voice— “are you there, sir? Shan Greville! Are you there?”

  I did know that voice!

  “Silence!” it commanded. “Listen!”

  In the interval of stillness which followed, I tried to reply. My heart was beating like a racing engine. My brain had become a circus. And the answering cry died in my throat.

  “Carry on!”

  Clattering of footsteps was renewed. They were somewhere outside the green-gold room, when:

  “God’s mercy!”

  They had found the hunchback. Sudden silence fell.

  Subdued voices broke it, until, above them:

  “There’s another room!” came a cry.

  Holding an electric lamp, the speaker burst through the doorway…

  Delirium was ended: this was reality!

  “Greville!”

  “Weymouth!” I said faintly and stretched out a shaking hand.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  SWZI PASHA ARRIVES

  Perhaps the presence of blue-uniformed and helmeted constables in a measure prepared me. But, looking back, I realize that this anomalous intrusion upon the oasis did not register a hundred per cent of its true force at the time.

  I was weak in a degree which I simply couldn’t believe or accept. The idea of mirage remained. When they carried me through a queer room adjoining that in which I had suffered — a room where something lay covered by a piece of ornate tapestry torn from the wall — I was still no more than half alive to facts.

  That the house of the Sheikh Ismail had been raided in the nick of time was clear enough. What had become of Petrie I failed to imagine, nor could I account for the presence of London policemen. Also, I was dreadfully concerned about Nayland Smith.

  Weymouth’s appearance — he wore dinner kit — also intrigued me. But I remembered that at least two days had elapsed; and in some way, I supposed wearily, this hiatus must explain these seeming discrepancies.

  Then we reached the outside of the house. A big gray car stood before the door. There was a crowd. I saw several constables.

  I saw the street…

  I saw a long, neglected wall. From a doorway in this wall I had been carried out to the car. Adjoining was a row of drab, two-storied houses. Similar houses faced them from across the narrow way. Some of the doors were open, and in the dim light shining out groups were gathered.

  They were Chinese — some of them. Others were non-descript. The crowd about the car, kept in check by two constables, was made up of typical East End London elements!

  I was placed comfortably on the cushions. A man whom I suddenly recognized as Fletcher seated himself in front with the chauffeur. Weymouth got in beside me. The car moved off.

  “You’re all at sea!” he said, and rested his hand reassuringly on my arm. “Don’t think too much about it yet. I’m going to take you to Dr. Petrie’s hotel. He’ll get you on your feet again.”

  “But… where am I?”

  “You’re in Limehouse at the moment.”

  “What!”

  “Keep cool! You didn’t know? Well, it is so.”

  “But, two days back, I was in Egypt!”

  As the car swung into a wide, populous thoroughfare — West India Dock Road, I learned later — Weymouth turned to me. His expression, blank at first, gradually changed, and then:

  “Good heavens, Greville,” he said, “I’m just beginning to understand!”

  “I wish I could!”

  “Brace yourself up — because it’s going to be a shock; although the facts must have prepared you for it. You said, which you can see now is impossible, that you were in Egypt two days back… Can you stand the truth? You left Egypt a month ago!

  A week elapsed. Petrie’s treatment worked wonders. And a day came when, looking down from a hotel sitting room on the busy life of Piccadilly, I realized that the raw edges of the thing had worn off.

  I had lost a month out of my life. I had been translated in the manner of the old Arabian tales from the Oasis of Khârga to some place in Limehouse. The smooth channel of my ways had been diverted; and the shock of recognizing this had staggered me. But now, as I say, I was reconciled. Also, better equipped to cope with it: indeed, nearly fit again.

  “My extraordinary experience with Sir Lionel,” said Petrie, who stood just behind me, “was of enormous assistance in your own case, Greville.”

  “You mean the success of the new treatment suggested by Sir Brian Hawkins?”

  “Yes… at least, so I believed.”

  I turned away from the window and stared at Petrie curiously. His expression puzzled me.

  “I don’t understand, Doctor. You sent a telegram from Luxor to Sir Brian in London, giving him full details about the chief. He cabled back saying that he had communicated these particulars to a Dr. Amber — a former assistant — who was fortunately then in Cairo and who would ring you up.”

  “Quite so, Greville. And this Dr. Amber did ring up, discussed the case with me, said he agreed with Sir Brian’s suggestion and despatched, express, a small box. It contained a third of a fluid drachm of some preparation, labeled ‘One minim per day subcutaneously until normal.’ After four injections, Sir Lionel fully recovered — except that he had no recollection of what had taken place from the time of the attack to that when he opened his eyes in his room at the Luxor hotel.”

  “That’s plain sailing enough, Petrie, and a big success for Sir Brian Hawkins. You came to the conclusion that I was suffering from the effects of overdoses of the same drug—”

  “And so I tried the same cure — with equally marvellous results.”

  He paused, staring me hard in the face; then:

  “When we got down to Cairo,” he went on— “as you know, I postponed sailing — Dr. Amber had left his hotel. And when we reached London, Sir Brian Hawkins was abroad. He came home this morning.”

  “Well?” I said, for he had paused again, staring at me in that peculiar manner.

  “Sir Brian Hawkins never received my telegram.”

  “What!”

  “He was unacquainted with anyone called Dr. Amber — and the preparation, a specimen of which I had taken with me, was totally unknown to him!”

  “Good God!”

  “Don’t let it worry you, Greville. We’ve been the victims of a cunning plot. But the unknown plotter has saved two valuable lives — and defeated Fah Lo Suee! Excuse me if I run away now. Please stay here and make yourself at home. My wife wants to do some shopping, and I never allow her out alone, even in London. You know why,” he added significantly.

  I nodded, as:

 
“Rima and Sir Lionel are due tomorrow,” he said, “and I know how you’re counting the hours.”

  So whilst it was true that to Petrie and to Weymouth I owed the fact that I now stood staring down again on the busy life of Piccadilly, I owed even more to… someone else! I was all but fit. I had taken a stroll in the Park, and with decent precautions for a week or two was competent to reenter the battle of life. But — who was Dr. Amber?

  Almost a deeper mystery than that of the hiatus, to me represented by a blank in my existence; and this, heaven knows, was strange enough!

  The house of the Sheikh Ismail had been raided by a party under the mudîr of Khârga. This official, it seems, was already suspicious of the strange visitors to the town.

  They found not a soul on the premises!

  El-Khârga was combed carefully. No trace. The mudîr got in touch with Esna, and all roads were watched. Nothing resulted. The dreadful Seven had dispersed — into thin air! Nayland Smith was missing, I was missing; and Said had disappeared with the car…

  Weymouth set the official wires humming. Too late, it had occurred to him that Fah Lo Suee might have retired not upon Esna but upon Asyût. Later, this theory was proved to be the correct one.

  A dead man, a piece of baggage, I had been carried across the desert to Asyût, entrained for Port Said, and shipped to England, as cargo is shipped! Three days too late to hold her in the Egyptian port, Weymouth, inspecting the books of the Suez Canal Company, discovered that a Clyde-built steamer chartered by a Chinese firm for some private enterprise had passed through the Canal and cleared Port Said at a date which corresponded with his suspicions. Radio was set humming all over the Mediterranean; and the suspected craft was finally boarded off Cherbourg by the French police.

  Her papers were in order; but consignments of goods and a number of her people had already been despatched overland.

  This was the state of affairs when the party reached England. Weymouth, of course, had secured leave of absence in the circumstances; and acting upon the policy adopted by poor Nayland Smith in earlier days, had succeeded with the backing of Scotland Yard in keeping all publicity out of the press.

  It was the efficiency of Detective-Inspector Yale and of K Division which led to my rescue. For some time they had been watching certain premises in the Limehouse area. Apart from consignments of suspicious goods and of the presence, particularly at night, of Asiatics of a character not usual in that district, a smartly dressed woman had visited the place.