by Sax Rohmer
“I find it useful as a means of communication with my associates, Sir Denis. I hope to perfect it. Do not waste your time trying to trace the mechanic who installed it. My purpose in speaking to you was this: You have recently learned the distressing details concerning the death of General Quinto. Probably you know that he complained of a sound of drums just before the end—a characteristic symptom…”
The uncanny speaker paused—bent forward—I lost consciousness of everything save of his eyes and of his voice.
“My drums, Sir Denis, will call to others before I shall have satisfied the fools in power today that I, Fu-Manchu, and I alone, hold the scales in my hand. I ask you to join me now—for my enemies are your enemies. Consider my words—consider them deeply.”
Smith did not stir, but I could hear his rapid breathing.
“You would not wish to see the purposeless slaughter in Spain, in China, carried into England? Think of that bloody farce called the Great War!” A vibrating guttural note had entered into the unforgettable voice. “I, who have had some opportunities of seeing you in action, Sir Denis, know that you understand the rules of boxing. Your objectives are the heart and the point of the jaw: you strike to paralyse brain and blood supply. That is how I fight. I strike at those who cause, at those who direct, at those who aid war—at the brain and at the heart, not at the arms, the shoulders—the deluded masses who suffer and die in order that arrogant fools may be gratified, that profiteers may grow fat. Consider my words…”
Dr. Fu-Manchu’s eyes now were opened widely. They beckoned, they called to me…
“Steady, Kerrigan.”
Darkness. The screen was blank.
A long time seemed to elapse before Nayland Smith spoke, before he stirred, then:
“I have seen that man being swept to the verge of Niagara Falls!” he said, speaking hoarsely out of the darkness. “I prayed that he had met a just fate. The body of his companion—a maddened slave of his will—was found.”
“But not Fu-Manchu! How could he have escaped?” Smith moved—switched up the light. I saw how the incident had affected him, and it gave me courage; for the magnetism of those eyes, of that voice, had made me feel a weakling.
“One day, Kerrigan, perhaps I shall know.”
He pressed a bell. Fey came in.
“This television apparatus is not to be used, not to be touched by anyone, Fey.”
Fey went out.
I took up my glass, which remained half filled.
“This has staggered me,” I confessed. “The man is more than human. But one thing I must know: what did he mean when he spoke of someone—I can guess to whom he referred—who died recently but who, since his death, has been at work in Fu-Manchu’s laboratories?”
Smith turned on his way to the buffet; his eyes glittered like steel.
“Were you ever in Haiti?”
“No.”
“Then possibly you have never come across the ghastly tradition of the zombie?”
“Never.”
“A human corpse, Kerrigan, taken from the grave and by means of sorcery set to work in the cane fields. Perhaps a Negro superstition, but Doctor Fu-Manchu has put it into practice.”
“What!”
“I have seen men long dead and buried labouring in his workshops!”
He squirted soda water into a tumbler.
“You were moved, naturally, by the words and by the manner of, intellectually, the greatest man alive. But forget his sophistry, forget his voice—above all, forget his eyes. Doctor Fu-Manchu is Satan incarnate.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“INSPECTOR GALLAHO REPORTS”
In the days that followed I thought many times about those words, and one night I dreamed of beating drums and woke in a nameless panic. The morning that followed was lowering and gloomy. A fine drizzling rain made London wretched.
When I stood up and looked out of the window across Hyde Park I found the prospect in keeping with my reflections. I had been working on the extraordinary facts in connection with the death of General Quinto and trying to make credible reading of the occurrence in Nayland Smith’s apartment later the same night. All that I had ever heard or imagined about Dr. Fu-Manchu had been brought into sharp focus. I had sometimes laughed at the Germanic idea of a superman; now I knew that such a demigod, and a demigod of evil, actually lived.
I read over what I had written. It appeared to me as a critic that I had laid undue stress upon the haunting figure of the girl with the amethyst eyes. But whenever my thoughts turned, and they turned often enough, to the episodes of that night those wonderful eyes somehow came to the front of the picture.
London and the Home Counties were being combed by the police for the mysterious broadcasting station controlled by Dr. Fu-Manchu. A post-mortem examination of the general’s body had added little to our knowledge of the cause of death. Inquiries had failed also to establish the identity of the general’s woman friend who had called upon him on the preceding day.
The figure of this unknown woman tortured my imagination. Could it be, could it possibly be the girl to whom I had spoken out in the square?
I ordered coffee and when it came I was too restless to sit down. I walked about the room carrying the cup in my hand. Then I heard the doorbell and heard Mrs Merton, my daily help, going down. Two minutes later Nayland Smith came in, his lean features wearing that expression of eagerness which characterised him when he was hot on a trail, his grey eyes very bright. He nodded, and before I could speak:
“Thanks! A cup of coffee would be just the thing,” he said. Peeling off his damp raincoat and dropping it on the floor, he threw his hat on top of it, stepped to my desk and began to read through my manuscript. Mrs Merton bringing another cup, I poured his coffee out and set it on the desk. He looked up.
“Perhaps a little undue emphasis on amethyst eyes,” he said slyly.
I felt myself flushing.
“You may be right, Smith,” I admitted. “In fact I thought the same myself. But you see, you haven’t met her—I have. I may as well be honest. Yes! She did make a deep impression upon me.”
“I am only joking, Kerrigan. I have even known the symptoms.” He spoke those words rather wistfully. “But this is very sudden!”
“I agree!” and I laughed. “I know what you think, but truly, there was some irresistible appeal about her.”
“If, as I suspect, she is a servant of Doctor Fu-Manchu, there would be. He rarely makes mistakes.”
I crossed to the window.
“Somehow I can’t believe it.”
“You mean you don’t want to?” As I turned he dropped the manuscript on the desk. “Well, Kerrigan, one thing life has taught me—never to interfere in such matters. You must deal with it in your own way.”
“Is there any news?”
He snapped his fingers irritably.
“None. The man who came to Sir Malcolm Locke’s house to adjust the telephone did not come from the post office, but unfortunately he can’t be traced. The fellow who came to my flat to fix the television set did not come from the firm who supplied it—but he also cannot be traced! And so, you see—”
He paused suddenly as my phone bell began to ring. I took up the receiver.
“Hello—yes?… He is here.” I turned to Smith. “Inspector Gallaho wants you.”
He stepped eagerly forward.
“Hello! Gallaho? Yes—I told Fey to tell you I was coming on here. What’s that!—What?” His voice rose on a high note of excitement. “Good God! What do you say? Yes—details when I see you. What time does the train leave? Good! Coming now.”
He replaced the receiver and turned. His face had grown very stern. Here was a sudden change of mood.
“What is it?”
“Fu-Manchu has struck again. We have just twenty minutes to catch the train. Come on!”
“But where are we going?”
“To a remote corner of the Essex marshes.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
<
br /> IN THE ESSEX MARSHES
A depressing drizzle was still falling, when amid semi-gloom I found myself stepping out of a train at a station on one of those branch lines which intersect the map of Essex. A densely wooded slope arose on the north. It seemed in some way to bear down oppressively on the little station, as though at any moment it might slip forward and crush it.
“Gallaho is a good man to have in charge,” said Nayland Smith. “A stoat on a scent and every whit as tenacious.”
The chief detective inspector was there awaiting us—a thick-set, clean-shaven man of florid colouring and truculent expression, buttoned up in a blue overcoat and having a rather wide-brimmed bowler hat, very wet, jammed tightly upon his head. With him was a uniformed officer who was introduced as Inspector Derbyshire of the Essex Constabulary. Greetings over:
“This is an ugly business,” said Gallaho, speaking through clenched teeth.
“So I gather,” said Nayland Smith rapidly. “We can talk on the way. I’m afraid you’ll have to ride in front with the driver, Kerrigan.”
Gallaho nodded and presently, in a police car which stood outside the station, we were on our way. It was a longish drive, mostly through narrow, muddy lanes. At last, on the outskirts of a village through which ran a little stream, we pulled up. A constable was standing outside a barnlike structure, separated by a small meadow, from the nearest cottage. He was a sinister-looking man who harmonised with his surroundings and whose jet-black eyebrows joined in the middle to form one continuous whole. He saluted as we stepped down, unlocked the barn door and led the way in. In spite of the disheartening weather a group of idlers hung about staring vacantly at the gloomy building.
“Not a pleasant sight, sir,” Inspector Derbyshire warned us as he removed a sheet from something which lay upon a trestle table.
It was the body of a man wearing a tweed jacket and open-neck shirt, flannel trousers and thick-soled shoes: the equipment, I thought, of a hiker. All his garments—from which water dripped—were horribly stained with blood, and his face was characterised by an unnatural pallor.
I checked an exclamation of horror when I realised that he had died of a wound which appeared nearly to have severed his head from his body!
“Right across the jugular,” Gallaho muttered, staring down savagely at the victim of this outrage.
He began to chew vigorously, although as I learned later he used no gum; it was merely an unusual ruminatory habit.
“Good God!” Nayland Smith whispered. “Good God! No doubt of the cause of death here! Thank you, Inspector. Cover the poor fellow up. The surgeon has seen him, of course?”
“Yes. He estimated that he had been dead for six or seven hours. But I left him just as we found him for you to see.”
“He was hauled out of the river, I’m told?”
“Yes—half a mile from here. The body was jammed in under the branches of an overhanging willow.”
“Who found it?”
“A gipsy called Barnett who was gathering rushes. He and his family are basket makers.”
“When was that?”
“Ten-thirty, sir,” Inspector Derbyshire replied. “I got straight through to Inspector Gallaho; he arrived an hour later. Doctor Bridges saw the body at eleven.”
“Why did you call Scotland Yard?”
“I recognised him at once. He had reported to me yesterday morning—”
“As I told you, sir,” Gallaho’s growling voice broke in, “he was a bit after your time at the Yard. But Detective Sergeant Hythe was one of my most promising juniors. He was working under me. He was down here looking for the secret radio station. B.B.C. engineers had noticed interference from time to time and they finally narrowed it down to this end of Essex.”
We came out of the barn and the constable locked the door behind us. Smith turned and stared at Gallaho.
“It looks,” Gallaho added, “as though poor Hythe had got too near to the heart of the mystery.”
“If you’ll just step across to the constable’s cottage, sir, I want you to see the few things that were found on the dead man,” said Inspector Derbyshire.
As we walked along the narrow village street to the modest police headquarters the group of locals detached themselves from the barn and followed us at a discreet distance. Nayland Smith glanced back over his shoulder.
“No one of interest there, Kerrigan!” he snapped.
Laid out upon a table in the sitting room I saw a Colt automatic, an electric flashlamp and a Yale key.
“There wasn’t another thing on him!” said Inspector Derbyshire. “Yet I know for a fact that he carried a knapsack and a stick. He was smoking a pipe, too; and he asked me for the name of a cottage where he could spend a night, quiet-like, in the neighbourhood.”
Smith was staring at the exhibits.
“This key,” he remarked, “is the most significant item.”
“I spotted that,” growled Gallaho. “It’s the key of an A.A. call box—and the nearest is at the crossroads by Woldham Forges, a mile or so from here.”
“Smart work,” snapped Smith. “What did this important discovery suggest to you?”
“It’s plain enough. He had been watching during the night (if the doctor’s right, he was murdered between four and five) and he’d found out something so important that he was making for the nearest phone to get assistance.”
“Anything else?”
“That the phone nearest to whatever he’d discovered was at Woldham Forges—and that he was working from some base where he must have left his other belongings.”
“What did you do?”
“We’ve made a house-to-house search, sir,” Inspector Derbyshire replied. “It isn’t very difficult about here. But we can’t find where he spent the night.”
Nayland Smith gazed out of the window. Several loiterers were hanging about, but the arrival of the constable now released from his duty as keeper of the morgue dispersed them.
“I shall want a big-scale map of the district,” said Smith.
“At your service, sir!”
We all turned and stared. The sinister-looking constable was the speaker. But he was sinister no more. His remarkable eyebrows were raised in what. I assumed to be an expression of enthusiasm. He was opening the drawer of a bureau.
“Constable Weldon,” explained Inspector Derbyshire, “is an authority on this area…”
CHAPTER NINE
THE HUT BY THE CREEK
Ten minutes later I set out along a road running south by east. Nayland Smith had split up the available searchers in such a way that, the police station as centre, our lines of inquiry formed a rough star.
Sergeant Hythe’s equipment certainly suggested that if he had come upon a clue and had decided to work from some point nearby while covering it, an uninhabited building, any old barn or hut, might prove to be the base selected.
Nayland Smith had some theory regarding the spot at which Hythe had been attacked and accordingly had set out for Woldham Forges.
My own instructions, based upon the encyclopaedic knowledge of the neighbourhood possessed by Constable Weldon, were simple enough. My first point was a timbered ruin, once the gatehouse of a considerable monastery long ago demolished. Half a mile beyond was an unoccupied cottage (“Haunted,” Constable Weldon had said) in some state of dilapidation, but entrance could be effected through one of the broken windows. Finally, crossing a wooden bridge and bearing straight on, there was an old barn.
We had lunched hastily upon bread and cheese and onions and uncommonly flat beer…
The drizzling rain had ceased, giving place to a sort of Dutch mist which was even more unpleasant. I could see no further than five paces. My orders were so explicit, however, that I anticipated no difficulty; furthermore, I was provided with a flashlamp.
In the reedy marshes about me, wild fowl gave their queer calls. I heard a variety of notes, some of them unfamiliar, which told me that this was a bird sanctuary undisturbed for gener
ations. Once a mallard flew croaking and flapping across my path and made me jump. The strange quality of some of those cries sounded eerily through the mist.
From a long way off, borne on a faint southerly breeze, came the sound of a steamer’s whistle. I met never a soul, nor heard a sound of human presence up to the time that the ruined gatehouse loomed up in the gloom.
It was a relic of those days when great forests had stretched almost unbroken from the coast up to the portals of London, enshrined now in a perfect wilderness of shrubbery. I had no difficulty in obtaining entrance—the place was wide open. Decaying timbers supported a skeleton roof: here was poor shelter; and a brief but careful examination convinced me that no one had recently occupied it.
I stood for a moment in the gathering darkness listening to the notes of wild fowl. Once I caught myself listening for something else: the beating of a drum…
Then again I set out. I followed a narrow lane for the best part of half a mile. Ruts, but not recent ruts, combined to turn its surface into a series of muddy streamlets. At length, just ahead, I saw the cottage of ghostly reputation.
Mist was growing unpleasantly like certifiable fog, but I found the broken window and scrambled in. There was no evidence that anyone had entered the building for a year or more. It was a depressing place as I saw it by the light of the flashlamp. Some biblical texts were decaying upon one wall and in another room, among a lot of litter, I found a headless doll.
I was glad to get out of that cottage.
Greater darkness had come by the time I had regained the lane, and I paused in the porch to relight my pipe, mentally reviewing the map and the sergeant’s instructions. Satisfied that the way was clear in my mind, I moved on.
Very soon I found myself upon a muddy path following the banks of a stream. I was unable to tell how much water the stream held, for it was thick with rushes and weeds. But presently as I tramped along I could see that it widened out into a series of reedy pools—and right ahead of me, as though the path had led to it, I saw a wooden hut.
