by Sax Rohmer
I watched eagerly for the dimple. But no dimple came. Instead, I saw a strange, faraway expression creep over the girl’s face. In some odd manner it transformed her; spiritually, she seemed to have withdrawn — to a great distance, to another land; almost, I thought, to another world. Her youth, her remarkable beauty, were transfigured as though by the occult brush of a dead master. Momentarily, I experienced again that insane desire to run away.
Then she spoke. Her phrases were commonplace enough, but her voice too was far away; her eyes seemed to be looking right through me, to be fixed upon some very distant object.
“You sound enterprising,” she said. “What is your name?”
“Alan Sterling,” I answered, with a start.
I had an uncanny feeling that the question had not come from the girl herself, although her lips framed the words.
“I suppose you live somewhere near here?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Alan Sterling,” she repeated; “isn’t that Scotch?”
“Yes, my father was a Scotsman — Dr. Andrew Sterling — but he settled in the Middle West of America, where I was born.”
The mahogany curls were shaken violently. It was, I thought, an act of rebellion against that fey mood which had claimed her. She rose to her knees, confronting me; her fingers played with the sand. The rebellion had succeeded. She seemed to have drawn near again, to have become human and adorable. Her next words confirmed my uncanny impression that in mind and spirit she had really been far away.
“Did you say you were American?” she asked.
Rather uncomfortably I answered:
“I was born in America. But I took my degree in Edinburgh, so that really I don’t quite know what I am.”
“Don’t you?”
She sank down upon the sand, looking like a lovely idol.
“And now please tell me your name,” I said; “I have told you mine.”
“Fleurette.”
“But Fleurette what?”
“Fleurette nothing. Just Fleurette.”
“But, Mahdi Bey—”
I suppose my thoughts were conveyed without further words, for:
“Mahdi Bey,” Fleurette replied, “is—”
And then she ceased abruptly. Her glance strayed away somewhere over my shoulder. I had a distinct impression that she was listening — listening intently for some distant sound.
“Mahdi Bey,” I prompted.
Fleurette glanced at me swiftly.
“Really, Mr. Sterling,” she said, “I must run. I mustn’t be caught talking to you.”
“Why?” I exclaimed. “I was hoping you would show me over Ste Claire.”
She shook her head almost angrily.
“As you came out of the sea, please go back again. You can’t come with me.”
“I don’t understand why—”
“Because it would be dangerous.”
Composedly she tucked a comb back into a bag which lay upon the sand beside her, picked up a bathing cap, and stood up.
“You don’t seem to bother about the possibility of my being drowned!”
“You have a motorboat just around the headland,” she replied, glancing at me over one golden shoulder. “I heard your engine.” This was a revelation.
“No wonder you weren’t frightened when I came ashore.”
“I am never frightened. In fact, I am rather inhuman, in all sorts of ways. Did you ever hear of Derceto?”
Her abrupt changes of topics, as of moods, were bewildering, but:
“Vaguely,” I answered. “Wasn’t she a sort of fish goddess?”
“Yes. Think of me, not as Fleurette, but as Derceto. Then you may understand.”
The words conveyed nothing at the time, although I was destined often to think about them, later. And what I should have said next I don’t know. But the whole of my thoughts, which were chaotic, became suddenly focused... upon a sound.
To this day I find myself unable to describe it, although, as will presently appear, before a very long time had elapsed I was called upon to do so. It more closely resembled the note of a bell than anything else — yet it was not the note of a bell. It was incredibly high. It seemed at once to come from everywhere and from nowhere. A tiny sound it was, but of almost unendurable sweetness: it might be likened to a fairy trumpet blown close beside one’s ear.
I started violently, looking all around me. And as I did so, Fleurette, giving me no parting word, no glance, darted away!
Amazed beyond words, I watched her slim brown figure bounding up a rocky path, until, at a bend high above, Fleurette became invisible. She never once looked back.
And then — the desire to get away, and as soon as possible, from the beach of Ste Claire de la Roche claimed me again, urgently...
CHAPTER TWO. A PURPLE CLOUD
When presently I climbed on board the motorboat and pushed off, I found myself to be in a state of nervous excitement. But as I headed back for the landing place below Petrie’s tiny villa, I grew more and more irritated by my memories.
Fleurette was not only the most delightful but also the most mysterious creature who had ever crossed my path; and the more I thought about her, reviewing that odd conversation, the nearer I drew to what seemed to be an unavoidable conclusion. Of course, she had been lying to me — acting the whole time. A beautiful girl in the household of a wealthy Egyptian — in what capacity was she there?
Common sense supplied the answer. It was one I hated to accept — but I could see no alternative. The queer sound which had terminated that stolen interview, I preferred not to think about. It didn’t seem to fit in...
As I secured the boat to the ring and started a long, hot climb up to the Villa Jasmin, I found myself wondering if I should ever see Fleurette again, and, more particularly, if she wanted to see me.
I supposed Mme Dubonnet had gone into the village to do her midday shopping, which included an aperitif with one of her cronies outside a certain little café. Petrie I knew would be hard at work in the laboratory at the bottom of the garden.
Mixing myself a cool drink, I sat down on the flower-draped verandah and allowed my glance to stray over the well-stocked little kitchen-garden. Beyond and below were more flower-covered walls and red roofs breaking through the green of palm and vine, and still beyond was a distant prospect of the jewel-like Mediterranean.
I reflected that this was a very pleasant spot in which to recuperate. And then I began to think about Fleurette...
No doubt my swim had overtired me, but stretched out there in a deck-chair, the hot sun making my skin tingle agreeably, I presently fell asleep. And almost immediately, as I suppose, I began to dream.
I dreamed that I lay in just such a deck-chair, under an equally hot sun, on a balcony or platform of an incredibly high building. I have since decided that it was the Empire State Building in New York. I was endowed with telescopic vision. Other great buildings there were, with mile after mile of straight avenues stretching away to the distant sea.
The sky was sapphire blue, and a heat haze danced over the great city which lay at my feet.
Then there came a curious, high sound. It reminded me of something I had heard before — but of something which in my dream I could not place. A cloud appeared, no larger than my hand, on the horizon, miles and miles away — over that blue ocean. It was a purple cloud; and it spread out, fan-wise, and the sections of the fan grew ever larger. So that, presently, half of the sky was shadowed.
And then a tiny glittering point, corresponding, I thought, to the spot where the hinge of this purple shadow-fan should have been, I saw a strange jewel. The fan continued to open, to obscure more and more the sky.
It was advancing towards me, this shadowy thing; and now the jewel took shape.
I saw that it was a dragon, or sea serpent, moving at incredible speed towards me. Upon its awful crested head a man rode. He wore a yellow robe which, in the light focused upon him, for the sun was away to my left as I dreame
d, became a golden robe.
His yellow face glittered also, like gold, and he wore a cap surmounted by some kind of gleaming bead. He was, I saw, a Chinaman.
And I thought that his face had the majesty of Satan — that this was the Emperor of the Underworld come to claim a doomed city.
So much I saw, and then I realized that the dragon carried a second rider: a woman, robed in queenly white and wearing a jewelled diadem. Her beauty dazzled me, seeming more than human. But I knew her...
It was Fleurette.
The purple shadow-fan obscured all the sky, and complete darkness came. The darkness reached me, and where there had been sunshine was shadow. I shuddered and opened my eyes, staring up, rather wildly, I suppose.
Dr. Petrie had just stepped on to the verandah. His shadow touched me where I lay.
“Hullo, Sterling,” he said briskly. “What’s wrong? Been overdoing it again?”
I struggled upright. Then, in a moment, I became fully awake. And as I looked up at Petrie, seated on the low wall beside a big wine jar which had been converted into a flower pot, I realized that this was a very sick man.
He wore no hat, and his dark hair, liberally streaked with grey, was untidy — which I knew to be unusual. He was smoking a cigarette and staring at me in that penetrating way which medical men cultivate. But his eyes were unnaturally bright, although deep shadows lay beneath them.
“Been for a swim,” I replied; “Fell asleep and dreamed horribly.”
Dr. Petrie shook his head and knocked ash from his cigarette into the soil in the wine jar.
“Blackwater fever plays hell even with a constitution like yours,” he replied gravely. “Really, Sterling, you mustn’t take liberties for a while.”
In pursuit of my profession, that of an orchid hunter, I had been knocked out by a severe attack of blackwater on the Upper Amazon. My native boys left me where I lay, and I owed my life to a German prospector who, guided by kindly Providence, found me and brought me down to Manaos.
“Liberties be damned, doctor,” I growled, standing up to mix him a drink. “If ever a man took liberties with his health, that man is yourself! You’re worked to death!”
“Listen,” he said, checking me. “Forget me and my health. I’m getting seriously worried.”
“Not another case?”
He nodded.
“Admitted early this morning.”
“Who is it this time?”
“Another open-air worker, Sterling, a jobbing gardener. He was working in a villa, leased by some Americans, as a matter of fact, on the slope just this side of Ste Claire de la Roche—”
“Ste Claire de la Roche?” I echoed.
“Yes — the place you are so keen to explore.”
“D’you think you can save him?”
He frowned doubtfully.
“Cartier and the other French doctors are getting in a perfect panic,” he replied. “If the truth leaks out, the Riviera will be deserted. And they know it! I’m rather pessimistic myself. I lost another patient today.”
“What!”
Petrie ran his fingers through his hair.
“You see,” he went on, “diagnosis is so tremendously difficult. I found trypanasomes in the blood of the first patient I examined here; and although I never saw a tsetse fly in France, I was forced to diagnose sleeping sickness. I risked Bayer’s 205” — he smiled modestly— “with one or two modifications of my own; and by some miracle the patient pulled through.”
“Why a miracle? It’s the accepted treatment, isn’t it?”
He stared at me, and I thought how haggard he looked.
“It’s one of ’em,” he replied, “for sleeping sickness. But this was not sleeping sickness!”
“What!”
“Hence the miracle. You see, I made cultures; and under the microscope they gave me a shock. I discovered that these parasites didn’t really conform to any species so far classified. They were members of the sleeping sickness family, but new members. Then — just before the death of another patient at the hospital — I made a great discovery, on which I have been working ever since—”
“Overworking!”
“Forget it.” He was carried away by his subject. “D’you know what I found, Sterling? I found bacillus pestis adhering to one of the parasites!”
“Bacillus pestis?”
“Plague!”
“Good God!”
“But — here’s the big point: the trypanasomes (the parasites which cause sleeping sickness) were a new variety, as I have mentioned. So was the plague bacillus. It presented obviously new features! Crowning wonder — although you may not appreciate it — parasite and bacillus affiliated and working in perfect harmony!”
“You’ve swamped me, doctor,” I confessed. “But I have a hazy idea that there’s something tremendous behind this.”
“Tremendous? There’s something awful. Nature is upsetting her own laws — as we know them.”
This, from Dr. Petrie, gave me something to think about.
My father had been invited to lecture at Edinburgh — his old university — during Petrie’s first year, and a close friendship had sprung up between the keen student and the visiting lecturer. They had corresponded ever since.
During my own Edinburgh days the doctor was established in practice in Cairo; but I spent part of one vacation as his guest in London. And another fast friendship resulted. He had returned from Egypt on that occasion to receive the medal of the Royal Society for his researches in tropical medicine. I remember how disappointed I had been to learn that his wife, of whose charm I had heard many rumours, was not accompanying him on this flying journey.
His present visit — also intended to be a brief one — had been prolonged at the urgent request of the French authorities. Petrie’s reputation had grown greater with the passage of years, and learning that he was in London, they had begged him to look into this strange epidemic which threatened southern France, placing the Villa Jasmin at his disposal...
Three weeks later I was invalided home from Brazil. Petrie, who had had the news from my father, met the ship at Lisbon and carried me off to the Villa Jasmin to recuperate under his own watchful eye.
I fear I had proved to be a refractory patient.
“You didn’t see the other case, did you?” Petrie asked suddenly.
“No.”
“Well.” He set down his glass. “I wish you would come along to the hospital with me. You must have met with some queer diseases on the Amazon, and you know the Uganda sleeping sickness. There’s this awful grin — proof of some sort of final paroxysm — and particularly what Cartier calls the black stigmata. Your bulb hunting has taken you into a few unwholesome places; have you ever come across anything like it?”
I began to fill my pipe. “Never, doctor,” I replied.
The sound of a distant gun boomed through the hot silence. A French battleship was entering Villefranche Harbour...
CHAPTER THREE. THE BLOODSTAINED LEAVES
“Good God! It’s ghastly! Cover him up again, doctor. I shall dream of that face.”
I found myself wondering why Providence, though apparently beneficent, should permit such horrors to visit poor humanity. The man in the little mortuary — he had been engaged in a local vineyard — had not yet reached middle age when this new and dreadful pestilence had cut him off.
“This,” said Petrie, “is the really singular feature.”
He touched the dead man’s forehead. It was of a dark purple colour from the scalp to the brows. The sun-browned face was set in a grin of dreadful malignancy and the eyes were rolled upward so that only their whites showed.
“What I have come to recognize as the characteristic sign,” Petrie added. “Subcutaneous haemorrhage; but strangely localized. It’s like a purple shadow, isn’t it? And when it reaches the eyes — finish.”
“What a ghastly face! I have seen nothing like it anywhere!”
We came out.
“Nor h
ave I!” Petrie confessed. “The earlier symptoms are closely allied with those of sleeping sickness but extraordinarily rapid in their stages. Glandular swellings always in the armpit. This final stage — the black stigmata, the purple shadow, which I have managed to avert in some of the other cases, is quite beyond my experience. That’s where plague comes in.
“But now for the most mysterious thing of all — in which I am hoping you can really help me...”
If anyone had invited me to name Dr. Petrie’s outstanding characteristic, I should have said “modesty.”
Having run the car into its garage, Petrie led the way down the steep rocky path to a shed a hundred yards from the villa, which he had fitted up as a laboratory.
We entered. The laboratory was really an enlarged gardener’s hut which the absent owner of Villa Jasmin had converted into a small studio. It had a glass window running along the whole of one side. A white-topped table now occupied a great part of the space before it, and there was a working bench in a corner opposite the door. In racks were rows of test tubes, each bearing a neatly written label, and there were files of specimen slides near the big microscope.
I noted the new pane of glass in a section of window which had been cut out one night less than a month ago when some strange burglar had broken in and explored the place. Since that time Petrie had had steel shop-blinds fitted to the interior of the windows, which could be closed and locked at night.
He had never secured any clue to the identity of the intruder or formed any reasonable theory as to what his object could have been.
At that moment, several of the windows were open, and sunlight streamed into the place. There was a constant humming of bees in the garden outside. Petrie took up a little sealed tube, removed the stopper, and shook out the contents of the tube into a glass tray. He turned to me, a strange expression upon his haggard brown face.
“Can you identify this, Sterling?” he asked. “It’s more in your line than in mine.”
I found it to consist of several bruised leaves, originally reddish purple in colour, attached to long stalks. I took up a lens and examined them carefully, the doctor watching me in silence. I saw, now, that there were pollen-like fragments adhering to a sticky substance exuded by the leaves.
