by Sax Rohmer
For this clammily white face, those staring eyes, that wordless gibbering, and the shaking, shaking, shaking of the bed in the clutch of the nameless visitant—prevailed, refused to disperse like the evil dream I had hoped it all to be; manifested itself, indubitably, as something tangible—objective....
Outraged reason deprived me of coherent speech. Past the clammy white face I could see the sitting-room illuminated by a faint light; I could even see the Tûlun-Nûr box upon the table immediately opposite the door.
The thing which shook the bed was actual, existent—to be counted with!
Further and further I drew myself away from it, until I crouched close up against the head of the bed. Then, as the thing reeled aside, and—merciful Heaven!—made as if to come around and approach me yet closer, I uttered a hoarse cry and hurled myself out upon the floor and on the side remote from that pallid horror which I thought was pursuing me.
I heard a dull thud ... and the thing disappeared from my view, yet—and remembering the supreme terror of that visitation I am not ashamed to confess it—I dared not move from the spot upon which I stood, I dared not make to pass that which lay between me and the door.
“Smith!” I cried, but my voice was little more than a hoarse whisper—“Smith! Weymouth!”
The words became clearer and louder as I proceeded, so that the last—“Weymouth!”—was uttered in a sort of falsetto scream.
A door burst open upon the other side of the corridor. A key was inserted in the lock of the door. Into the dimly lighted arch which divided the bedroom from the sitting-room, sprang the figure of Nayland Smith!
“Petrie! Petrie!” he called—and I saw him standing there looking from left to right.
Then, ere I could reply, he turned, and his gaze fell upon whatever lay upon the floor at the foot of the bed.
“My God!” he whispered—and sprang into the room.
“Smith! Smith!” I cried, “what is it? what is it?”
He turned in a flash, as Weymouth entered at his heels, saw me, and fell back a step; then looked again down at the floor.
“God’s mercy!” he whispered, “I thought it was you—I thought it was you!”
Trembling violently, my mind a feverish chaos, I moved to the foot of the bed and looked down at what lay there.
“Turn up the light!” snapped Smith.
Weymouth reached for the switch, and the room became illuminated suddenly.
Prone upon the carpet, hands outstretched and nails dug deeply into the pile of the fabric, lay a dark-haired man having his head twisted sideways so that the face showed a ghastly pallid profile against the rich colorings upon which it rested. He wore no coat, but a sort of dark gray shirt and black trousers. To add to the incongruity of his attire, his feet were clad in drab-colored shoes, rubber-soled.
I stood, one hand raised to my head, looking down upon him, and gradually regaining control of myself. Weymouth, perceiving something of my condition, silently passed his flask to me; and I gladly availed myself of this.
“How in Heaven’s name did he get in?” I whispered.
“How, indeed!” said Weymouth, staring about him with wondering eyes.
Both he and Smith had discarded their disguises; and, a bewildered trio, we stood looking down upon the man at our feet. Suddenly Smith dropped to his knees and turned him flat upon his back. Composure was nearly restored to me, and I knelt upon the other side of the white-faced creature whose presence there seemed so utterly outside the realm of possibility, and examined him with a consuming and fearful interest; for it was palpable that, if not already dead, he was dying rapidly.
He was a slightly built man, and the first discovery that I made was a curious one. What I had mistaken for dark hair was a wig! The short black mustache which he wore was also factitious.
“Look at this!” I cried.
“I am looking,” snapped Smith.
He suddenly stood up, and entering the room beyond, turned on the light there. I saw him staring at the Tûlun-Nûr box, and I knew what had been in his mind. But the box, undisturbed, stood upon the table as we had left it. I saw Smith tugging irritably at the lobe of his ear, and staring from the box towards the man beside whom I knelt.
“For God’s sake, what does it mean?” said Inspector Weymouth in a voice hushed with wonder. “How did he get in? What did he come for?—and what has happened to him?”
“As to what has happened to him,” I replied, “unfortunately I cannot tell you. I only know that unless something can be done his end is not far off.”
“Shall we lay him on the bed?”
I nodded, and together we raised the slight figure and placed it upon the bed where so recently I had lain.
As we did so, the man suddenly opened his eyes, which were glazed with delirium. He tore himself from our grip, sat bolt upright, and holding his hands, fingers outstretched, before his face, stared at them frenziedly.
“The golden pomegranates!” he shrieked, and a slight froth appeared on his blanched lips. “The golden pomegranates!”
He laughed madly, and fell back inert.
“He’s dead!” whispered Weymouth; “he’s dead!”
Hard upon his words came a cry from Smith:
“Quick! Petrie!—Weymouth!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE ROOM BELOW
I ran into the sitting-room, to discover Nayland Smith craning out of the now widely opened window. The blind had been drawn up, I did not know by whom; and, leaning out beside my friend, I was in time to perceive some bright object moving down the gray stone wall. Almost instantly it disappeared from sight in the yellow banks below.
Smith leapt around in a whirl of excitement.
“Come in, Petrie!” he cried, seizing my arm. “You remain here, Weymouth; don’t leave these rooms whatever happens!”
We ran out into the corridor. For my own part I had not the vaguest idea what we were about. My mind was not yet fully recovered from the frightful shock which it had sustained; and the strange words of the dying man—“the golden pomegranates”—had increased my mental confusion. Smith apparently had not heard them, for he remained grimly silent, as side by side we raced down the marble stairs to the corridor immediately below our own.
Although, amid the hideous turmoil to which I had awakened, I had noted nothing of the hour, evidently the night was far advanced. Not a soul was to be seen from end to end of the vast corridor in which we stood ... until on the right-hand side and about halfway along, a door opened and a woman came out hurriedly, carrying a small handbag.
She wore a veil, so that her features were but vaguely distinguished, but her every movement was agitated; and this agitation perceptibly increased when, turning, she perceived the two of us bearing down upon her.
Nayland Smith, who had been audibly counting the doors along the corridor as we passed them, seized the woman’s arm without ceremony, and pulled her into the apartment she had been on the point of quitting, closing the door behind us as we entered.
“Smith!” I began, “for Heaven’s sake what are you about?”
“You shall see, Petrie!” he snapped.
He released the woman’s arm, and pointing to an armchair nearby—
“Be seated,” he said sternly.
Speechless with amazement, I stood, with my back to the door, watching this singular scene. Our captive, who wore a smart walking costume and whose appearance was indicative of elegance and culture, so far had uttered no word of protest, no cry.
Now, whilst Smith stood rigidly pointing to the chair, she seated herself with something very like composure and placed the leather bag upon the floor beside her. The room in which I found myself was one of a suite almost identical with our own, but from what I had gathered in a hasty glance around, it bore no signs of recent tenancy. The window was widely opened, and upon the floor lay a strange-looking contrivance apparently made of aluminum. A large grip, open, stood beside it, and from this some portions of a black
coat and other garments protruded.
“Now, madame,” said Nayland Smith, “will you be good enough to raise your veil?”
Silently, unprotestingly, the woman obeyed him, raising her gloved hands and lifting the veil from her face.
The features revealed were handsome in a hard fashion, but heavily made-up. Our captive was younger than I had hitherto supposed; a blonde; her hair artificially reduced to the so-called Titian tint. But, despite her youth, her eyes, with the blackened lashes, were full of a world weariness. Now she smiled cynically.
“Are you satisfied,” she said, speaking unemotionally, “or,” holding up her wrists, “would you like to handcuff me?”
Nayland Smith, glancing from the open grip and the appliance beside it to the face of the speaker, began clicking his teeth together, whereby I knew him to be perplexed. Then he stared across at me.
“You appear bemused, Petrie,” he said, with a certain irritation. “Is this what mystifies you?”
Stooping, he picked up the metal contrivance, and almost savagely jerked open the top section. It was a telescopic ladder, and more ingeniously designed than anything of the kind I had seen before. There was a sort of clamp attached to the base, and two sharply pointed hooks at the top.
“For reaching windows on an upper floor,” snapped my friend, dropping the thing with a clatter upon the carpet. “An American device which forms part of the equipment of the modern hotel thief!”
He seemed to be disappointed—fiercely disappointed; and I found his attitude inexplicable. He turned to the woman—who sat regarding him with that fixed cynical smile.
“Who are you?” he demanded; “and what business have you with the Si-Fan?”
The woman’s eyes opened more widely, and the smile disappeared from her face.
“The Si-Fan!” she repeated slowly. “I don’t know what you mean, Inspector.”
“I am not an inspector,” snapped Smith, “and you know it well enough. You have one chance—your last. To whom were you to deliver the box? When and where?”
But the blue eyes remained upraised to the grim tanned face with a look of wonder in them, which, if assumed, marked the woman a consummate actress.
“Who are you?” she asked in a low voice, “and what are you talking about?”
Inactive, I stood by the door watching my friend, and his face was a fruitful study in perplexity. He seemed upon the point of an angry outburst, then, staring intently into the questioning eyes upraised to his, he checked the words he would have uttered and began to click his teeth together again.
“You are some servant of Dr. Fu-Manchu!” he said.
The girl frowned with a bewilderment which I could have sworn was not assumed. Then—
“You said I had one chance a moment ago,” she replied. “But if you referred to my answering any of your questions, it is no chance at all. We have gone under, and I know it. I am not complaining; it’s all in the game. There’s a clear enough case against us, and I am sorry”—suddenly, unexpectedly, her eyes became filled with tears, which coursed down her cheeks, leaving little wakes of blackness from the make-up upon her lashes. Her lips trembled, and her voice shook. “I am sorry I let him do it. He’d never done anything—not anything big like this—before, and he never would have done if he had not met me....”
The look of perplexity upon Smith’s face was increasing with every word that the girl uttered.
“You don’t seem to know me,” she continued, her emotion growing momentarily greater, “and I don’t know you; but they will know me at Bow Street. I urged him to do it, when he told me about the box today at lunch. He said that if it contained half as much as the Kûren treasure-chest, we could sail for America and be on the straight all the rest of our lives.”
And now something which had hitherto been puzzling me became suddenly evident. I had not removed the wig worn by the dead man, but I knew that he had fair hair, and when in his last moments he had opened his eyes, there had been in the contorted face something faintly familiar.
“Smith!” I cried excitedly, “it is Lewison, Meyerstein’s clerk! Don’t you understand? Don’t you understand?”
Smith brought his teeth together with a snap and stared me hard in the face.
“I do, Petrie. I have been following a false scent. I do!”
The girl in the chair was now sobbing convulsively.
“He was tempted by the possibility of the box containing treasure,” I ran on, “and his acquaintance with this—lady—who is evidently no stranger to felonious operations, led him to make the attempt with her assistance. But”—I found myself confronted by a new problem—“what caused his death?”
“His ... death!”
As a wild, hysterical shriek the words smote upon my ears. I turned, to see the girl rise, tottering, from her seat. She began groping in front of her, blindly, as though a darkness had descended.
“You did not say he was dead?” she whispered, “not dead!—not ...”
The words were lost in a wild peal of laughter. Clutching at her throat she swayed and would have fallen had I not caught her in my arms. As I laid her insensible upon the settee I met Smith’s glance.
“I think I know that, too, Petrie,” he said gravely.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE GOLDEN POMEGRANATES
“What was it that he cried out?” demanded Nayland Smith abruptly. “I was in the sitting-room and it sounded to me like ‘pomegranates’!”
We were bending over Lewison; for now, the wig removed, Lewison it proved unmistakably to be, despite the puffy and pallid face.
“He said ‘the golden pomegranates,’” I replied, and laughed harshly. “They were words of delirium and cannot possibly have any bearing upon the manner of his death.”
“I disagree.”
He strode out into the sitting-room.
Weymouth was below, supervising the removal of the unhappy prisoner, and together Smith and I stood looking down at the brass box. Suddenly—
“I propose to attempt to open it,” said my friend.
His words came as a complete surprise.
“For what reason?—and why have you so suddenly changed your mind?”
“For a reason which I hope will presently become evident,” he said; “and as to my change of mind, unless I am greatly mistaken, the wily old Chinaman from whom I wrested this treasure was infinitely more clever than I gave him credit for being!”
Through the open window came faintly to my ears the chiming of Big Ben. The hour was a quarter to two. London’s pulse was dimmed now, and around about us that great city slept as soundly as it ever sleeps. Other sounds came vaguely through the fog, and beside Nayland Smith I sat and watched him at work upon the Tûlun-Nûr box.
Every knob of the intricate design he pushed, pulled and twisted; but without result. The night wore on, and just before three o’clock Inspector Weymouth knocked upon the door. I admitted him, and side by side the two of us stood watching Smith patiently pursuing his task.
All conversation had ceased, when, just as the muted booming of London’s clocks reached my ears again and Weymouth pulled out his watch, there came a faint click ... and I saw that Smith had raised the lid of the coffer!
Weymouth and I sprang forward with one accord, and over Smith’s shoulders peered into the interior. There was a second lid of some dull, black wood, apparently of great age, and fastened to it so as to form knobs or handles was an exquisitely carved pair of golden pomegranates!
“They are to raise the wooden lid, Mr. Smith!” cried Weymouth eagerly.
“Look! there is a hollow in each to accommodate the fingers!”
“Aren’t you going to open it?” I demanded excitedly—“aren’t you going to open it?”
“Might I invite you to accompany me into the bedroom yonder for a moment?” he replied in a tome of studied reserve. “You also, Weymouth?”
Smith leading, we entered the room where the dead man lay stretched upon the bed.
“Note the appearance of his fingers,” directed Nayland Smith.
I examined the peculiarity to which Smith had drawn my attention. The dead man’s fingers were swollen extraordinarily, the index finger of either hand especially being oddly discolored, as though bruised from the nail upward. I looked again at the ghastly face, then, repressing a shudder, for the sight was one not good to look upon, I turned to Smith, who was watching me expectantly with his keen, steely eyes.
From his pocket the took out a knife containing a number of implements, amongst them a hook-like contrivance.
“Have you a button-hook, Petrie,” he asked, “or anything of that nature?”
“How will this do?” said the inspector, and he produced a pair of handcuffs. “They were not wanted,” he added significantly.
“Better still,” declared Smith.
Reclosing his knife, he took the handcuffs from Weymouth, and, returning to the sitting-room, opened them widely and inserted two steel points in the hollows of the golden pomegranates. He pulled. There was a faint sound of moving mechanism and the wooden lid lifted, revealing the interior of the coffer. It contained three long bars of lead—and nothing else!
Supporting the lid with the handcuffs—
“Just pull the light over here, Petrie,” said Smith.
I did as he directed.
“Look into these two cavities where one is expected to thrust one’s fingers!”
Weymouth and I craned forward so that our heads came into contact.
“My God!” whispered the inspector, “we know now what killed him!”
Visible, in either little cavity against the edge of the steel handcuff, was the point of a needle, which evidently worked in an exquisitely made socket through which the action of raising the lid caused it to protrude. Underneath the lid, midway between the two pomegranates, as I saw by slowly moving the lamp, was a little receptacle of metal communicating with the base of the hollow needles.
The action of lifting the lid not only protruded the points but also operated the hypodermic syringe!
