by Sax Rohmer
“I warned you,” Lao Tse-Mung pointed out in his quiet way, “that my house would be watched.”
“You did,” Nayland Smith agreed, bitterly. “But even so, how did the watcher discover the very room in which this manuscript lay? And, crowning mystery, how did the Cold Man get in to steal it?”
As he ceased speaking, the large room seemed to become eerily still. This stillness was broken by a sound which sent a chill through Tony’s nerves. Although a long way off, it was as clearly audible, penetrating, and horrifying as the wail of a banshee. A long minor cry, rising to a high final note on which it died away.
Even Lao Tse-Mung clutched the arms of his chair. Nayland Smith sprang up as if electrified.
“You heard it, McKay?”
“Of course I heard it. For God’s sake, what was it?”
“A sound I haven’t heard for years and never expected to hear in China. It was the warning cry of a dacoit. Fu-Manchu has always employed these Burmese robbers and assassins. Come on, McKay! I have a revolver in my pocket. Are you armed?”
“No.”
“You may have my gun,” Lao Tse-Mung volunteered, entirely restored to his normal calm. From under his robe he produced a small but serviceable automatic. “It is fully charged. What do you propose to do, Sir Denis?”
“To try to find the spot where that call came from.”
Nayland Smith was heading for the door when a faint bell-note detained him.
“Wait,” Lao Tse-Mung directed.
The old mandarin drew back the loose sleeve of his robe. Tony saw that he wore one of the phenomenal two-way radios on his wrist. He listened, spoke briefly, then disconnected.
“My chief mechanic reports, Sir Denis, that the cry we heard came from a point between the main gate and the drive-in to the garage. He is there now.”
“Come on, McKay,” Nayland Smith repeated, and ran out, followed by Tony.
They headed for the main gate, looking grotesque in their pajamas and robes. They slowed down as they reached the gate, stood still, and listened. The sound of voices reached them from somewhere ahead.
Tony found himself retracing that sloping path behind the high wall which led to the garage — the path along which Mai Cha had taken him on the memorable night he had escaped the Master.
The beam of a flashlight presently led them to Lao Tse-Mung’s chief mechanic. He had two other men with him. A tall ladder was propped against the wall, and another man could be seen on the top looking over. Sir Denis was expected, for Wong, the mechanic, saluted and reported. He spoke Chinese with a Szechuan dialect which seemed to puzzle Sir Denis but with which Tony’s travels in the area had made him fairly familiar. Fortunately, he also spoke quite good English.
He had been walking toward this point, scanning the parapet of the wall with his flashlight, when that awful cry broke the silence, and died away. “It came from about here,” Wong said. “I called out, and the nearest man in the search party ran to join me. My orders were not to open the gates and not to disconnect the wiring. The gardeners brought a ladder so that we could look into the road. It is set so that the rungs do not touch the wires. But the man up there can see nothing and I have ordered him to come down.”
“You have heard no other sound?” Tony asked him.
“Not a movement,” the man assured him. “Nothing stirred.”
The gardener descended from the long ladder and was about to remove it.
“One moment,” Nayland Smith snapped. “I want to take a look. This intrigues me.”
“Be careful of the wiring,” Wong warned. “It carries a high voltage and a slight touch is enough.”
“That wouldn’t interest you,” Tony called out as Nayland Smith started up the ladder.
“That’s just what does interest me!” Sir Denis called back.
He mounted right to the top of the ladder. He didn’t look out onto the road; he looked fixedly at the parapet where the wires were stretched. Then he came down. From a pocket of his gown he took his pipe and his pouch.
“There are two other things I must know, McKay. For one of them we have to wait for daylight. The other it’s just possible we might find tonight.” He turned to Wong. “Take the ladder away. I’m glad you brought it.”
He grasped Tony’s arm. “I have a flashlight in my pocket. Walk slowly back to the house, not by the route we came, but by the nearest way to the windows of your room and the office.”
As they started, Nayland Smith, pipe in mouth, kept flashing light into shadowy shrubberies which bordered the path.
“I don’t know what you’re looking for,” Tony declared.
“I may be wrong, McKay. It’s no more than what you call a hunch. But I do know what I’m looking for. It’s a hundred to one chance and if I’m wrong I’ll tell you. If I’m right, you’ll see for yourself.”
They walked slowly on. There was little breeze. Sometimes the flashlight brought about a queer rustling in the shrubberies as of some sleeping creatures disturbed or nocturnal things scuffling to shelter. In the light of a declining moon, bats could be seen swooping silently overhead.
His gruesome experience with a Cold Man vividly in mind, Tony found himself threatened, as they moved slowly along, by a shapeless terror. Partly, it was a creation of the dark and stillness, an upsurge of hereditary superstition. Things he couldn’t explain had happened. At any moment, he thought, icy fingers might clutch his throat again. Of human enemies he had no fear. But what were these Cold Men? Were they human, or were they, as some who had seen them believed, animated dead men, zombies?
Nayland Smith worked diligently, yard by yard.
He found nothing.
And Tony knew, by observing the furious way in which he puffed at his pipe, that he was disappointed.
They had reached the gate lodge, which was in darkness, and had turned left, instead of to the right which was the way they had come, before Sir Denis uttered a word.
Then he said rapidly, “Here’s our last chance.”
They were in a narrow, little-used path, overgrown by wild flowers. It led to the east wing of the house, but not to any entrance. It would, though, as Tony realized, lead them to a point directly below the window of his own room and that of the office.
Tirelessly, Nayland Smith explored every shadow with his flashlight, but found nothing until, in a clump of tangled undergrowth surrounding a tall tulip tree, he pulled up.
“I was right!”
The ray of the lamp lighted a grisly spectacle.
A man lay there, a man whose body was gray, whose only clothing consisted of a loin cloth, and this was gray, and a tightly knotted gray turban. He lay in a contorted attitude, his head twisted half under his body.
“This is what I was looking for,” Nayland Smith said. “Look. His neck’s broken.”
“Good God! Is this—”
“The Cold Man who attacked you? Yes. And you killed him.”
Tony stood, hands clenched, looking at the ghastly thing under the tulip tree. Suddenly in that warm night, he felt chilled…
“The first specimen,” Nayland Smith stated grimly, “to fall into my hands. Rumor hasn’t exaggerated. I can feel the chill even here.” He stepped forward.
“Careful, Sir Denis.”
Nayland Smith turned. “The poor devil’s harmless now, McKay. He’s out of the clutches of Dr. Fu-Manchu at last. Some day, I hope, we shall know how these horrors are created. His skin is an unnatural gray, but I recognize the features. The man is Burmese.” He stooped over the contorted body. “Hullo! Thank heaven, McKay, the hundred to one chance has come off.”
From the gray loincloth he dragged out a bundle of papers, shone the ray of the lamp on it, and sprang upright so excitedly that he dropped his pipe.
“Sun Shao-Tung’s notes and the Chinese manuscript. Our luck’s changed, McKay.” He picked up his pipe. “Let me show you something.” He stooped again, lighted the face of the Cold Man. “Contrary to official belief, dacoity, thought
to be extinct, is a religious cult. Look.”
He tore the gray turban from the dead man’s head. Tony drew nearer.
“What, Sir Denis?”
The flashlight was directed on the shaven head.
“The caste mark.”
Tony looked closely. Just above the line of the turban he saw a curious mark, either tattooed or burnt onto the skin.
“A dacoit,” Nayland Smith told him.
“Then it was he who gave that awful moaning cry?”
“No,” Sir Denis replied. “That was my hunch. It was another dacoit who gave the cry.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Three times Matsukata, the Japanese physician in charge of the neighboring clinic, had come into a small room attached to Dr. Fu-Manchu’s laboratory in which the doctor often rested and sometimes, when he had worked late, slept. It was very simply equipped, the chief item of furniture being a large, cushioned divan.
A green-shaded lamp stood on a table littered with papers and books, and its subdued light provided the sole illumination. The air was polluted with sickly fumes of opium.
Dr. Fu-Manchu lay on the divan entirely without movement. Even his breathing was not perceptible. A case of beautifully fashioned opium pipes rested on a small table beside him, with a spirit lamp, a jar of the purest chandu, and several silver bodkins. In spirit, Dr. Fu-Manchu was far from the world of ordinary men, and his body rested; perhaps the only real rest he ever knew.
Matsukata stood there, silent, watching, listening. Then, once more he withdrew.
Quite a few minutes had passed in the silent room when Fu-Manchu raised heavy lids and looked around. The green eyes were misty, the pupils mere pinpoints. But as he sat up, by some supreme command of his will, the mist cleared, the contracted pupils enlarged. He used opium as he used men, for his own purpose; but no man and no drug was his master.
It was his custom, in those periods of waiting for a fateful decision, which the average man spends in pacing the floor, checking each passing minute, to smoke a pipe of chandu and so enter that enchanted realm to which opium holds the key.
But now he was instantly alert, in complete command of all his faculties. He struck a small gong on the table beside him.
Matsukata came in before the vibration of the gong had ceased.
“Well?” Fu-Manchu demanded.
Matsukata bowed humbly. “I regret to report failure, Master.”
Fu-Manchu clenched his hands. “You mean that Singu failed?”
“Singu failed to return, Master.”
“But Singu was a Cold Man, a mere automaton under your direction,” Fu-Manchu spoke softly. “If anything failed, Matsukata, it was your direction.”
“That is not so, Master. Something unforeseen occurred. Where, I cannot tell. But when more than ten minutes past his allotted time had elapsed, Ok, who was watching from the point of entry, reported a man with a flashlight approaching. I ordered Ok to give the warning to which Singu should have replied. There was no reply. I ordered Ok to remove evidence of our mode of entry. It was just in time. A party of men was searching the grounds.”
Dr. Fu-Manchu stood up slowly. He folded his arms.
“Is that all your news?” he asked in a whisper. “The Si-Fan Register is lost?”
“That is all, Master.”
“You may go. Await other orders.”
Matsukata bowed deeply, and went out.
* * * *
In Lao Tse-Mung’s library, Nayland Smith was speaking. Gray, ghostly daylight peered in at the windows.
“Dacoits never work alone. During my official years in Burma I furnished reports to London which proved, conclusively, that dacoity was not dead. I also discovered that, like thuggee, it was not merely made up of individual gangs of hoodlums, but was a religious cult. Dr. Fu-Manchu, many years ago, obtained absolute control of the dacoits. He even has a bodyguard of dacoits. Probably the Cold Man, who lies dead out there, was formerly one of them.”
Lao Tse-Mung’s alert, wrinkle-framed eyes were fixed upon Sir Denis. Tony chainsmoked.
“Of the powers of these creatures, called, locally, Cold Men, we know nothing. But we do know, now, that they are — or were — normal human beings. By some hellish means they have been converted to this form. But certainly their powers are supernormal and the temperature of their bodies is phenomenal; they are cold as blocks of ice.”
Tony found himself shivering. His first encounter with a Cold Man had made an impression that would last forever.
“How you got onto the fact that he was lying somewhere on that path is beyond me,” he declared.
“It was a theory, McKay, based on experience. Whenever I have heard that call it has always been a warning to one dacoit who was operating, from another who was watching. Since it’s getting light now, I hope to find out shortly how the Cold Man got into the grounds.”
“But how did he get into the office?”
“That,” Nayland Smith answered, “is not so difficult. There is a tall tulip tree growing close to the house some twenty yards from the window. These Burmese experts often operate from the roof. Evidently, even when changed to Cold Men, they retain these acrobatic powers.
“It’s likely that he lowered himself from the roof to enter the room and returned to the roof to make his escape. But your lucky shot with the metal bowl registered.” He turned to Tony. “It would have killed a normal man. It only dazed the dacoit. He got back as far as the tall tulip tree, sprang to a high branch — and missed it.”
Sir Denis knocked ashes from his pipe and began to reload the charred bowl.
“Your analysis of the night’s events,” came Lao Tse-Mung’s mellow voice, “is entirely logical. But there’s one mystery which you have not cleared up. I refer to the fact that those who instructed this man must have known that the document in cipher was here.”
Nayland Smith paused in the act of pressing the tobacco into the bowl of his pipe.
“I don’t think they knew it,” he replied thoughtfully. “But since McKay was identified in Niu-fo-tu as the escaped prisoner, and the dying Skobolov was in the neighborhood at the same time, Fu-Manchu may have surmised that McKay had gotten possession of the document and brought it to me.”
* * * *
In the early morning, a party of frightened and shivering men under Nayland Smith’s direction carried a long, heavy wooden box out from the main gate and across the narrow road. In a cypress wood bordering the road they dug a deep grave, and buried the Cold Man.
The body remained supernaturally chilled.
Sir Denis, having dismissed the burial party, set off with Tony at a rapid pace in the direction of the main gate. Soon they reached the spot where the gardeners had placed the ladder that night. Nayland Smith quickly identified it by marks on the soil where it had rested. Then, foot by foot, he examined every inch of ground under the wall for several yards east and west of it.
At last he cried triumphantly, “Look!” and pointed down. “Just as I thought!”
Tony looked. He saw two narrow holes in the earth, which looked as if they’d been made by the penetration of a walking stick.
“What does this mean?”
“It means what I suspected, McKay. I have the key to the main gate. Here it is. Go out and walk back along the road. I’ll sing out to guide you. When you get to the spot where I’m standing, inside, look for similar marks, outside.”
Tony took the key and ran to the gate. He unlocked it and began to do as Nayland Smith had directed. When he reached a point which he judged was near where Sir Denis waited, he called out.
“Three paces more,” came the crisp reply.
He took three paces. “Here I am.”
“Search.”
Tony found the job no easy one. Coarse grass and weeds grew beside the road close up to the wall. But, persevering, he noticed a patch which seemed to have been trodden down. He stooped, parted the tangled undergrowth with his fingers, and at last found what he was looking for
: two identical holes in the earth.
“Found ’em?” Nayland Smith called from the other side of the wall.
“Yes, Sir Denis. They’re here!”
“Come back, and relock the gate.”
Tony obeyed, rejoined Nayland Smith. “What does all this mean?”
Sir Denis grinned impishly. “It means two light bamboo ladders, long enough to clear the wiring and meeting above it on top. It’s as simple as that.”
Tony gaped for a moment; then he began to laugh. “So much for Lao Tse-Mung’s fortress!”
“Quite so,” Nayland Smith spoke grimly. “It could be entered by an agile man using only one ladder. Now, to find the last piece of evidence on which my analysis of this business rests. I have examined the wall below the office window, and no one could reach the window from the ground. Therefore, it’s certain that he reached it from the roof as I suspected last night.”
They returned to the house, where Wong was waiting for them.
“The trap to the roof,” he reported, “is above the landing of the east wing. I have had a step ladder put there and have unbolted the trap.”
“Good.” Nayland Smith lighted his pipe. “Show the way.”
Wong ducked his head, stepped into the narrow, V-shaped closet, reached up, and opened a trap. A shaft of daylight appeared in the opening.
“Wait until I’m up, McKay,” Sir Denis directed. “Then follow on. Four eyes are better than two.”
He raised his arms, wedged his foot on a projection, and was gone. Tony followed and found himself lying at the base of the curved Chinese roof, and only prevented from falling off by the curl of the highly decorated edge. Nayland Smith, on all fours, was already crawling along the ledge. Tony glanced over the side and saw at a glance that they were no more than a few yards from the office and his own room below.
As this fact dawned upon him, Nayland Smith turned his head and looked back.
“I was right,” he cried. “Here’s what I was looking for.”
He held up a length of shiny, thin rope. One end apparently was fastened to an ornament on the curling lip of the roof.
Tony turned cautiously and crawled back. He saw, when Sir Denis joined him, that he carried the coil of rope. But it was not until they were in Tony’s room that he explained what, already, was fairly clear. He held up the thin line.
