by Sax Rohmer
In a chair piled high with dragon-covered cushions a man sat behind this table. The light from the swinging lamp fell fully upon one side of his face, as he leaned forward amid the jumble of weird objects, and left the other side in purplish shadow. From a plain brass bowl upon the corner of the huge table smoke writhed aloft and at times partially obscured that dreadful face.
From the moment that I looked toward the table and to the man who sat there, neither the incredible extent of the room, nor the nightmare fashion of its mural decorations, could reclaim my attention. I had eyes only for him.
For it was Dr. Fu-Manchu!
Something of the delirium which had seemed to fill my veins with fire, to people the walls with dragons, and to plunge me knee-deep in the carpet, left me. Those dreadful, filmed green eyes acted somewhat like a cold douche. I knew, without removing my gaze from the still face, that the walls no longer lived, but were merely draped in exquisite Chinese dragon tapestry. The rich carpet beneath my feet ceased to be as a jungle and became a normal carpet—extraordinarily rich, but merely a carpet. But the sense of vastness nevertheless remained, with the uncomfortable knowledge that the things upon the table and overflowing about it were all, or nearly all, of a fashion strange to me.
Then, and almost instantaneously, the comparative sanity which I had temporarily experienced began to slip from me again; for the smoke faintly pencilled through the air—from the burning perfume on the table—grew in volume, thickened, and wafted toward me in a cloud of grey horror. It enveloped me, clammily. Dimly, through its oily wreaths, I saw the immobile yellow face of Fu-Manchu. And my stupefied brain acclaimed him a sorcerer, against whom unavailingly we had pitted our poor human wits. The green eyes showed filmy through the fog. An intense pain shot through my lower limbs, and catching my breath, I looked down. As I did so, the points of the red slippers which I dreamed that I wore increased in length, curled sinuously upward, twined about my throat and choked the breath from my body!
Came an interval, and then a dawning like consciousness; but it was a false consciousness, since it brought with it the idea that my head lay softly pillowed and that a woman’s hand caressed my throbbing forehead. Confusedly, as though in the remote past, I recalled a kiss—and the recollection thrilled me strangely. Dreamily content I lay, and a voice stole to my ears:
“They are killing him! They are killing him! Oh! do you not understand?”
In my dazed condition, I thought that it was I who had died, and that this musical girl-voice was communicating to me the fact of my own dissolution.
But I was conscious of no interest in the matter.
For hours and hours, I thought, that soothing hand caressed me. I never once raised my heavy lids, until there came a resounding crash that seemed to set my very bones vibrating—a metallic, jangling crash, as the fall of heavy chains. I thought that, then, I half opened my eyes, and that in the dimness I had a fleeting glimpse of a figure clad in gossamer silk, with arms covered in barbaric bangles and slim ankles surrounded by gold bands. The girl was gone, even as I told myself that she was an houri, and that I, though a Christian, had been consigned by some error to the paradise of Mohammed.
Then—a complete blank.
My head throbbed madly; my brain seemed to be clogged—inert; and though my first, feeble movement was followed by the rattle of a chain, some moments more elapsed ere I realized that the chain was fastened to a steel collar—that the steel collar was clasped about my neck.
I moaned weakly.
“Smith!” I muttered, “where are you? Smith!”
On to my knees I struggled, and the pain on the top of my skull grew all but insupportable. It was coming back to me now: how Nayland Smith and I had started for the hotel to warn Graham Guthrie; how, as we passed up the steps from the Embankment and into Essex Street, we saw the big motor standing before the door of one of the offices. I could recall coming up level with the car—a modern limousine; but my mind retained no impression of our having passed it—only a vague memory of a rush of footsteps—a blow. Then, my vision of the hall of dragons, and now this real awakening to a worse reality.
Groping in the darkness, my hands touched a body that lay close beside me. My fingers sought and found the throat, sought and found the steel collar about it.
“Smith,” I groaned; and I shook the still form. “Smith, old man—speak to me! Smith!”
Could he be dead? Was this the end of his gallant fight with Dr. Fu-Manchu and the murder group? If so, what did the future hold for me—what had I to face?
He stirred beneath my trembling hands.
“Thank God!” I muttered, and I cannot deny that my joy was tainted with selfishness. For, waking in that impenetrable darkness, and yet obsessed with the dream I had dreamed, I had known what fear meant, at the realization that alone, chained, I must face the dreadful Chinese doctor in the flesh.
Smith began incoherent mutterings.
“Sand-bagged! ... Look out, Petrie! ... He has us at last! ... Oh, heavens! ... He struggled on to his knees, clutching at my hand.
“All right, old man,” I said. “We are both alive, so let’s be thankful.”
A moment’s silence, a groan, then:
“Petrie, I have dragged you into this. God forgive me—”
“Dry up, Smith,” I said slowly. “I’m not a child. There is no question of being dragged into the matter. I’m here; and if I can be of any use, I’m glad I am here!”
He grasped my hand.
“There were two Chinese, in European clothes—lord, how my head throbs!—in that office door. They sandbagged us, Petrie—think of it!—in broad daylight, within hail of the Strand! We were rushed into the car—and it was all over before—” His voice grew faint. “God! they gave me an awful knock!”
“Why have we been spared, Smith? Do you think he is saving us for—”
“Don’t, Petrie! If you had been in China, if you had seen what I have seen—”
Footsteps sounded on the flagged passage. A blade of light crept across the floor towards us. My brain was growing clearer. The place had a damp, earthen smell. It was slimy—some noisome cellar. A door was thrown open and a man entered, carrying a lantern. Its light showed my surmise to be accurate, showed the slime-coated walls of a dungeon some fifteen feet square—shone upon the long yellow robe of the man who stood watching us, upon the malignant, intellectual countenance.
It was Dr. Fu-Manchu.
At last they truly were face to face—the head of the great Yellow movement, and the man who fought on behalf of the entire white race. How can I paint the individual whom now I had leisure to study—perhaps the greatest genius of modern times? Of him it has been fitly said that he had a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan. Something serpentine, hypnotic, was in his very presence. Smith drew one sharp breath, and was silent.
Together, chained to the wall, two medieval captives, living mockeries of our boasted modern security, we crouched before Dr. Fu-Manchu.
He came forward with an indescribable gait, catlike yet awkward, carrying his high shoulders almost hunched. He placed the lantern in a niche in the wall, never turning away the reptilian gaze of those eyes which must haunt my dreams for ever. They possessed a viridescence which hitherto I had only supposed possible in the eye of the cat—and the film intermittently clouded their brightness—but I can speak of them no more.
I had never supposed, prior to meeting Dr. Fu-Manchu, that so intense a force of malignancy could radiate—from any human being. He spoke. His English was perfect, though at times his words were oddly chosen; his delivery alternately was guttural and sibilant.
“Mr. Smith and Dr. Petrie, your interference with my plans has gone too far. I have seriously turned my attention to you.”
He displayed his teeth, small and evenly separated, but discoloured in a way that was familiar to me. I studied his eyes with a new, professional interest, which even the extremity of our danger could not wholly banish. Their greennes
s seemed to be of the iris; the pupil was oddly contracted—a pin-point.
Smith leaned his back against the wall with assumed indifference.
“You have presumed,” continued Fu-Manchu, “to meddle with a world-change. Poor spiders—caught in the wheels of the inevitable! You have linked my name with the futility of the Young China movement—the name of Fu-Manchu! Mr. Smith, you are an incompetent meddler—I despise you! Dr. Petrie, you are a fool—I am sorry for you!”
He rested one bony hand on his hip, narrowing the long eyes as he looked down on us. The purposeful cruelty of the man was inherent; it was entirely untheatrical. Still Smith remained silent.
“So I am determined to remove you from the scene of your blunders!” added Fu-Manchu.
“Opium will very shortly do the same for you!” I rapped at him savagely.
Without emotion he turned the narrowed eyes upon me.
“That is a matter of opinion, Doctor,” he said. “You may have lacked the opportunities which have been mine for studying that subject—and in any event I shall not be privileged to enjoy your advice in the future.”
“You will not long outlive me,” I replied. “And our deaths will not profit you, incidentally; because—” Smith’s foot touched mine.
“Because?” enquired Fu-Manchu softly. “Ah! Mr. Smith is so prudent! He is thinking that I have files!” He pronounced the word in a way that made me shudder. “Mr. Smith has seen a wire jacket! Have you ever seen a wire jacket? As a surgeon, its functions would interest you!”
I stifled a cry that rose to my lips; for, with a shrill whistling sound, a small shape came bounding into the dimly lit vault, then shot upward. A marmoset landed on the shoulder of Dr. Fu-Manchu and peered grotesquely into the dreadful yellow face. The Doctor raised his bony hand and fondled the little creature, crooning to it.
“One of my pets, Mr. Smith,” he said, suddenly opening his eyes fully so that they blazed like green lamps. “I have others, equally useful. My scorpions—have you met my scorpions? No? My pythons and hamadryads? Then there are my fungi and my tiny allies, the bacilli. I have a collection in my laboratory quite unique. Have you ever visited Molokai, the leper island, Doctor? No? But Mr. Nayland Smith will be familiar with the asylum at Rangoon! And we most not forget my black spiders, with their diamond eyes—my spiders, that sit in the dark and watch—then leap!”
He raised his lean hands, so that the sleeve of the robe fell back to the elbow, and the ape dropped, chattering, to the floor and ran from the cellar.
“O God of Cathay!” he cried, “by what death shall these die—these miserable ones who would bind thine Empire, which is boundless!”
Like some priest of Tezcat he stood, his eyes upraised to the roof, his lean body quivering—a sight to shock the most unimpressionable mind.
“He is mad!” I whispered to Smith. “God help us, the man is a dangerous homicidal maniac!”
Nayland Smith’s face was very drawn, but he shook his head grimly.
“Dangerous, yes, I agree,” he muttered, “his existence is a danger to the entire white race which, now, we are powerless to avert.”
Dr. Fu-Manchu recovered himself, took up the lantern and, turning abruptly, walked to the door, with his awkward yet feline gait. At the threshold he looked back.
“You would have warned Mr. Graham Guthrie?” he said, in a soft voice. “Tonight, at half-past twelve, Mr. Graham Guthrie dies!”
Smith sat silent and motionless, his eyes fixed upon the speaker.
“You were in Rangoon in 1908?” continued Dr. Fu-Manchu. “You remember the Call?”
From somewhere above us—I could not determine the exact direction—came a low, wailing cry, an uncanny thing of falling cadences, which, in that dismal vault, with the sinister yellow-robed figure at the door, seemed to pour ice into my veins. Its effect upon Smith was truly extraordinary. His face showed greyly in the faint light, and I heard him draw a hissing breath through clenched teeth.
“It calls for you!” said Fu-Manchu. “At half-past twelve it calls for Graham Guthrie!”
The door closed, and darkness mantled us again.
“Smith,” I said, “what was that?” The horrors about us were playing havoc with my nerves.
“It was the Call of Siva!” replied Smith hoarsely.
“What is it? Who uttered it? What does it mean?”
“I don’t know what it is, Petrie, nor who utters it. But it means death!”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I AWAKEN—AND DREAM
There may be some who could have lain, chained in that noisome cell, and felt no fear—no dread of what the blackness might hold. I confess that I am not one of these. I knew that Nayland Smith and I stood in the path of the most stupendous genius who in the world’s history had devoted his intellect to crime. I knew that the enormous wealth of the political group backing Dr. Fu-Manchu rendered him a menace to Europe and to America greater than that of the plague. He was a scientist trained at a great university—an explorer of nature’s secrets, who had gone further into the unknown, I suppose, than any living man. His mission was to remove all obstacles—human obstacles—from the path of that secret movement which was progressing in the Far East. Smith and I were two such obstacles; and of all the horrible devices at his command, I wondered, and my tortured brain refused to leave the subject, by which of them we were doomed to be despatched.
Even at that very moment some venomous centipede might be wriggling towards us over the slime of the stones, some poisonous spider be preparing to drop from the roof! Fu-Manchu might have released a serpent in the cellar, or the air be alive with microbes of a loathsome disease!
“Smith,” I said, scarcely recognizing my own voice, “I can’t bear this suspense. He intends to kill us, that is certain, but—”
“Don’t worry,” came the reply: “he intends to learn our plans first.”
“You mean—?”
“You heard him speak of his files and of his wire jacket?”
“Oh, my God!” I groaned, “can this be England?”
Smith laughed dryly, and I heard him fumbling with the steel collar about his neck.
“I have one great hope,” he said, “since you share my captivity, but we must neglect no minor chance. Try with your pocket-knife if you can force the lock. I am trying to break this one.”
Truth to tell, the idea had not entered my half-dazed mind, but I immediately acted upon my friend’s suggestion, setting to work with the small blade of my knife. I was so engaged, and, having snapped one blade, was about to open another, when a sound arrested me. It came from beneath my feet.
“Smith”, I whispered, “listen!”
The scraping and clicking which told of Smith’s efforts ceased. Motionless, we sat in that humid darkness and listened.
Something was moving beneath the stones of the cellar. I held my breath; every nerve in my body was strung up.
A line of light showed a few feet from where we lay. It widened—became an oblong. A trap was lifted, and, within a yard of me, there rose a dimly seen head. Horror I had expected—and death, or worse. Instead, I saw a lovely face, crowned with a disordered mass of curling hair; I saw a white arm upholding the stone slab, a shapely arm clasped above the elbow by a broad gold bangle.
The girl climbed into the cellar and placed the lantern on the stone floor. In the dim light she was unreal—a figure from an opium vision, with her clinging silk draperies and garish jewellery, with her feet encased in little red slippers. In short, this was the houri of my vision, materialized. It was difficult to believe that we were in modern, up-to-date England; easy to dream that we were the captives of a caliph, in a dungeon in old Baghdad.
“My prayers are answered,” said Smith softly. “She has come to save you!”
“S-sh!” warned the girl, and her wonderful eyes opened widely, fearfully. “A sound and he will kill us all.”
She bent over me; a key jarred in the lock which had broken my penknife—a
nd the collar was off. As I rose to my feet the girl turned and released Smith. She raised the lantern above the trap, and signed to us to descend the wooden steps which its light revealed.
“Your knife,” she whispered to me. “Leave it on the floor. He will think you forced the locks. Down! Quickly!”
Nayland Smith, stepping gingerly, disappeared into the darkness. I followed rapidly. Last of all came our mysterious friend, a gold band about one of her ankles gleaming in the rays of the lantern which she carried. We stood in a low-arched passage.
“Tie your handkerchiefs over your eyes and do exactly as I tell you,” she ordered.
Neither of us hesitated to obey her. Blindfolded, I allowed her to lead me, and Smith rested his hand upon my shoulder. In that order we proceeded, and came to stone steps, which we ascended.
“Keep to the wall on the left,” came a whisper. “There is danger on the right.”
With my free hand I felt for and found the wall, and we pressed forward. The atmosphere of the place through which we were passing was steamy, and loaded with an odour like that of exotic plant life. But a faint animal scent crept to my nostrils, too, and there was a subdued stir about me infinitely suggestive—mysterious.
Now my feet sank in a soft carpet, and a curtain brushed my shoulder. A gong sounded. We stopped.
The din of distant drumming came to my ears.
“Where in heaven’s name are we?” hissed Smith in my ear, “that is a tom-tom!”
“S-sh! S-sh!”
The little hand grasping mine quivered nervously. We were near a door or a window, for a breath of perfume was wafted through the air; and it reminded me of my other meetings with the beautiful woman who was now leading us from the house of Fu-Manchu; who, with her own lips, had told me that she was his slave. Through the horrible phantasmagoria she flitted—a seductive vision, her piquant loveliness standing out richly in its black setting of murder and devilry. Not once, but a thousand times, I had tried to reason out the nature of the tie which bound her to the sinister Doctor.