by Sax Rohmer
Ramsa Lal removed his arm, saw that she could stand unsupported, and bent forward over the unconscious man. Following a rapid examination, he signed to her to leave the tent. They came out into the white blaze of the moonlight — and there at their feet lay the glittering loot of the haunted temple, a dazzlement of rainbow sparks.
“Only for such a thing as this,” said Ramsa Lal, “dare I go, but not one of us will see another dawn if we do not go.” He pointed to the heap of treasure. “Mem Sahib must come also.”
“But — my husband — —”
“He must remain,” he said. “It is of his own choosing.”
V
The temple stood in a kind of clearing. Grotesquely horrible figures guarded the time-worn entrance. Moreen drew a deep breath of relief on emerging from the jungle path by which, amid the rustle of retreating snakes, they had come, but shrank back affrighted from the blackness of the ruined doorway. Ramsa Lal stood the lantern upon the stump of a broken pillar, where its faint yellow light was paled by the moon-rays.
“It is you who must restore,” he said.
One by one he handed her the jewel-encrusted vessels and hung the ropes of rubies upon her arm.
She nodded, and as Ramsa Lal took up the lantern and began to descend the steps within followed him.
“No foot save his,” came back to her, “has trod these sacred steps for ages, for the secret of the jungle path is known only to the few....”
“How do you — know the way?”
Ramsa Lal did not reply.
They traversed a short tunnel; a heavy door was thrust open; and Moreen found herself standing in a small pillared hall. Through a window high in one wall, overgrown with tangled vegetation, crept a broken moonbeam. Directly before her was the carven figure of a grotesque deity. A long, heavily clamped chest stood before it like an altar step.
She staggered forward, deposited her priceless burden upon the floor, and mechanically began to raise the lid of the chest.
“Not that one, Mem Sahib!” The voice of Ramsa Lal rose shrilly— “not that one!...”
But he spoke too late. Moreen realised that there were three divisions in the chest, each having a separate lid. As she raised the one in the centre, a breath of fetid air greeted her nostrils, and she had a vague impression that this was no chest but the entrance to a deep pit. Then all these thoughts were swept away by the crowning horror which rose out of the subterranean darkness.
A great winged creature, clammily white, rose towards her, passed beneath her upraised hands and sailed into the darkness on the right. She heard it flapping its great bat wings against the wall — heard them beating upon a pillar — then saw it coming back towards her into the moonlight — and knew no more.
VI
“Mem Sahib!”
Moreen opened her eyes. She lay, propped against a saddle, at the camp beside the jungle. She shuddered icily.
“Ramsa Lal — how — —”
“I carried the Mem Sahib! the treasures of the temple I restored to their resting-place — —”
“And the — the other — —”
“The door that the Mem Sahib opened she opened by the decree of Fate. It was not for Ramsa Lal to close it. That is a passage — —”
“Yes?”
“ — To the tomb of the great one who is buried in the temple!”
“Oh! heavens! that white thing — —” She raised her hands to her face. “But — the camp — —”
“The camp is deserted! they all fled from — —”
Moreen sat up, rigidly.
“From what?”
“From something that came for what we forgot!”
“My husband — —”
“There was a ring upon his finger. I saw it, and knew where it came from, but forgot to remove it.”
Moreen stood up, and turned towards the nearer tent. Ramsa Lal gently detained her.
“Not that way, Mem Sahib.”
“But I must see him! I must, I must tell him that he wrongs me, cruelly, wickedly! You heard his words — Oh, God! can he have — —”
“It would be useless to tell him, Mem Sahib, — he could not hear you! But that what you would tell him is true I know well; for see — it is the dawn!”
“Ramsa Lal!...”
“The unjust cannot stay in this valley through a night and live to see the dawn, Mem Sahib!”
VII
At about that same hour, Deputy-Commissioner Jack Harringay opened his eyes and looked wonderingly at a grey-haired, white-aproned nurse who sat watching him.
“Don’t speak, Mr. Harringay,” she said soothingly. “You have been very ill, but you are on the high road to recovery now.”
“Nurse!...”
“Please don’t speak; I know what you would ask. There has been no scandal. The attack upon you was ascribed to robbers. You have been delirious, Mr. Harringay, and have told me — many things. I am old enough, or nearly old enough, to be your mother, so you will not mind my telling you that a love like yours deserves reward. God has spared your life; be sure it was with a purpose — —”
The Blue Monkey
I
A tropically hot day had been followed by a stuffy and oppressive evening. In the tiny sitting-room of our tiny cottage, my friend — who, for the purposes of this story, I shall call Mr. East — by the light of a vapour lamp was busily arranging a number of botanical specimens collected that morning. His briar fumed furiously between his teeth, and, his grim, tanned face lowered over his work, he brought to bear upon this self-imposed task all the intense nervous energy which was his.
I sat by the open window alternately watching my tireless companion and the wonderful and almost eerie effects of the moonlight on the heather. Then:
“We came here for quiet — and rest, East,” I said, smiling.
“Well!” snapped my friend. “Isn’t it quiet enough for you?”
“Undeniably. But I don’t remember to have seen you rest from the moment that we left London! I exclude your brief hours of slumber — during which, by the way, you toss about and mutter in a manner far from reposeful.”
“No wonder. My nerves are anything but settled yet, I grant you.”
Indeed, we had passed through a long and trying ordeal, the particulars whereof have no bearing upon the present matter, and in renting this tiny and remote cottage we had sought complete seclusion and forgetfulness of those evil activities of man which had so long engaged our attention. How ill we had chosen will now appear.
I had turned again to the open window, when my meditations were interrupted by a sound that seemed to come from somewhere away behind the cottage. Cigarette in hand, I leaned upon the sill, listening, then turned and glanced toward the littered table. East, his eyes steely bright in the lamplight, was watching me.
“You heard it?” I said.
“Clearly. A woman’s shriek!”
“Listen!”
Tense, expectant, we sat listening for some time, until I began to suspect that we had been deceived by the note of some unfamiliar denizen of the moors. Then, faintly, chokingly, the sound was repeated, seemingly from much nearer.
“Come on!” snapped East.
Hatless, we both hurried around to the rear of the cottage. As we came out upon the slope, a figure appeared on the brow of a mound some two hundred yards away and stood for a moment silhouetted against the moonlit sky. It was that of a woman. She raised her arms at sight of us — and staggered forward.
Just in the nick of time we reached her, for her strength was almost spent. East caught her in his arms.
“Good God!” he said, “it is Miss Baird!”
What could it mean? The girl, who was near to swooning and inarticulate with fatigue and emotion, was the daughter of Sir Jeffrey Baird, our neighbour, whose house, The Warrens, was visible from where we stood.
East half led, half carried her down the slope to the cottage; and there I gave her professional attention, whilst, with horror
-bright eyes and parted lips, she fought for mastery of herself. She was a rather pretty girl, but highly emotional, and her pathetically weak mouth was doubtless a maternal heritage, for her father, Sir Jeffrey, had the mouth and jaw of the old fighter that he was.
At last she achieved speech.
“My father!” she whispered brokenly; “oh, my poor father!”
“What!” I began ——
“At Black Gap!...”
“Black Gap!” I said; for the place was close upon half a mile away. “Have you come so far?”
“He is lying there! My poor father — dead!”
“What!” cried East, springing up— “Sir Jeffrey — dead? Not drowned?”
“No, no! he is lying on the path this side of the Gap! I ... almost stumbled over ... him. He has been ... murdered! Oh, God help me!...”
East and I stared at one another, speechless with the sudden horror of it. Sir Jeffrey murdered!
Suddenly the distracted girl turned to my friend, clutching frenziedly at his arm.
“Oh, Mr. East!” she cried, “what had my poor father done to merit such an end? What monster has struck him down? You will find him, will you not? I thank God that you are here — for although I know you as ‘Mr. East,’ my father confided the truth to me, and I am aware that you are really a Secret Service agent, and I even know some of the wonderful things you have done in the past....”
“Very indiscreet!” muttered East, and his jaws snapped together viciously. But— “My dear Miss Baird,” he added immediately, in the kindly way that was his own, “rely upon me. Myself and my fellow-worker, the doctor here, had sought to escape from the darker things of life, but it was willed otherwise. I esteemed Sir Jeffrey very highly” — his voice shook— “very highly indeed. I, too, thank God that I am here.”
II
Five minutes later, East and I set out across the moor, leaving Miss Baird at the cottage. By reason of the lonely situation, and the fact that the nearest house, The Warrens, was fully a mile and a half away, no other arrangement was possible, since delay could not be entertained.
East had managed to glean some few important facts. Sir Jeffrey, whose museum at The Warrens was justly celebrated, had been to London that day to attend an auction at Sotheby’s. His Greek secretary, Mr. Damopolon, and his daughter had accompanied him. Returning by train to Stanby, the nearest station, Miss Baird had called upon friends in the village (Mr. Damopolon had remained in London on business), and Sir Jeffrey had set out in the dusk to walk the two miles to The Warrens; for the car was undergoing repairs.
Pursuing the same path later in the evening, the girl had come upon the body of her father in the dramatically dreadful manner already related. He had no enemies, she declared, or none known to her. She did not believe that her father was carrying a large sum of money, nor — although she had scarcely trusted herself to look at him — did she believe that robbery had been the motive of the crime.
Sir Jeffrey had been carrying a large parcel containing one of his purchases, and I remembered, as we silently pursued our way to the scene of the murder, how East’s keen eyes had seemed to dance with excitement when Miss Baird, in reply to a question, had told us what this parcel contained. It was a large figure, in blue porcelain, of a sacred ape, and was of Burmese or Chinese origin; she was uncertain which.
Her father had apparently attached great importance to this strange purchase, and had elected to bear it home in person rather than to trust it to railway transport.
“Did you notice if this parcel was there,” East had inquired eagerly, “when you discovered him?”
Miss Baird had shaken her head in reply.
And now we were come to Black Gap, a weird feature in a weird landscape. This was a great hole in the moor, having high clay banks upon one side descending sheer to the tarn, and upon the other being flanked by low, marshy ground about a small coppice. The road from Stanby to The Warrens passed close by the coppice on the south-east.
Regarding this place opinions differed. By some it was supposed to be a natural formation, but it was locally believed to mark the site of an abandoned mine, possibly Roman. Its depth was unknown, and the legend of the coach which lay at the bottom, and which could be seen under certain favourable conditions, has found a place in all the guide-books to that picturesque and wild district.
Whatever its origin, Black Gap was a weird and gloomy spot as one approached and saw through the trees the gleam of the moonlight on its mystic waters. And here, passing a slight southerly bend in the track — for it was no more — we came upon Sir Jeffrey.
He lay huddled in a grotesque and unnatural attitude. His right hand was tightly clenched, whilst with his left he clutched a tuft of rank grass. Strangely enough, his soft hat was still upon his head. His tweed suit, soft collar and, tie all bore evidence of the fierce struggle which the old baronet had put up for his life. A quantity of torn brown paper lay scattered near the body.
I dropped on my knees and made a rapid examination, East directing the ray of a pocket-lamp upon the poor victim.
“Well?” rapped my friend.
“He was struck over the head by some heavy weapon,” I said slowly, “and perhaps partly stunned. His hat protected him to a degree, and he tackled his assailant. Death was actually due, I should say, to strangulation. His throat is very much bruised.”
East made no reply. Glancing up from my gruesome task, I observed that he was looking at a faint track, which, commencing amid the confused marks surrounding the body, led in the direction of the coppice. East’s steely eyes were widely opened.
“In heaven’s name, what have we here!” he said.
A kindred amazement to that which held East claimed me, as I studied more closely the mysterious tracks.
The spot where Sir Jeffrey had fallen was soft ground, whereon the lightest footstep must have left a clear impression. Indeed, around the recumbent figure the ground showed a mass of indistinguishable marks. But proceeding thence, as I have said, in the direction of the neighbouring coppice, was this faint trail.
“It looks,” I said, in a voice hushed with something very like awe, “it looks like the track of ... a child!”
“Look again!” snapped East.
I stooped over the first set of marks. Clearly indented, I perceived the impressions of two small, bare feet, and, eighteen or twenty inches ahead, those of two small hands. I experienced a sudden chill; my blood seemed momentarily to run coldly in my veins, and I longed to depart from the shadow of the trees, from the neighbourhood of the Black Gap, and from the neighbourhood of the man who had died there. For it seemed to me that a barefooted infant had recently crawled from the side of the dead man into the coppice overhanging the tarn.
Looking up, I found East’s steely eyes set upon me strangely.
“Well!” said he, “do you not miss something that you anticipated finding?”
I hesitated, fearfully. Then:
“Sir Jeffrey carries no cane,” I began ——
“Good! I had failed to note that. Good! But what else?”
Closely I surveyed the body, noting the disarranged garments, the discoloured face.
“What of this torn brown paper?” snapped my friend.
“Good heavens!” I cried; and like a flash my glance sought again those mysterious tracks — those tracks of something that had crawled away from the murdered man.
“Where,” inquired East deliberately, “is the Burmese porcelain ape of which we have heard? And, since there are no tracks approaching the body, where did the creature come from that made those retiring from it, and ... what manner of creature was it?”
III
At East’s request (for my friend was a man of very great influence) the police, beyond the unavoidable formalities, took no steps to apprehend the murderer of Sir Jeffrey. East had a long interview with the dead man’s daughter, and, shortly afterwards, went off to London, leaving me to my own devices.
The subject of the stra
nge death of the baronet naturally engrossed my attention to the exclusion of all else. Especially, my mind kept reverting to the tracks which we had discovered leading from the dead man’s body into the coppice. I scarcely dared to follow my ideas to what seemed to be their logical conclusion.
That the track was that, not of a child, but of an ape, I was now convinced. No such track approached where the victim had lain; no track of any kind, other than that of his own heavy footprints, led to the spot ... but the track of an ape receded from it; and the baronet had been carrying an ape (inanimate, certainly, according to all known natural laws), which was missing when his body was found!
“These are the reflections of a madman!” I said aloud. “Am I seriously considering the possibility of a blue porcelain monkey having come to life? If so, since no other footprints have been discovered, I shall be compelled, logically, to assume that the blue porcelain monkey strangled Sir Jeffrey!”
My friend, East, attached very great importance to the missing curio; this he had not disguised from me. But, beyond spending half an hour or so among the trees of the coppice and around the margin of the Black Gap, he had not to my knowledge essayed any quest for it.
Finding my thoughts at once unpleasant and unprofitable company, I suddenly determined to make a call at The Warrens, in order to inquire about the health of poor Miss Baird, and incidentally to learn if there were any new development.
Off I set, and failed to repress a shudder, despite the blazing sunlight, as I passed the gap and the spot where we had found the dead man. A tropical shower in the early morning had quite obliterated the mysterious tracks. Coming to The Warrens, I was shown into the fine old library. That air of hush, so awesome and so significant, prevailed throughout the house whose master lay dead above, and when presently Mr. Damopolon entered, attired in black, he seemed to complete a picture already sombre.
As East and I had several times remarked, he was a singularly handsome man, and moreover, a very charming companion, widely travelled and deeply versed in those subjects to which the late baronet had devoted so many years of his life. I had always liked Damopolon, though, as a rule, I am distrustful of his race; and now, seeing at a glance how hard the death of Sir Jeffrey had hit him, I offered no unnecessary word of condolence, but immediately turned the conversation upon Miss Baird.
