by Sax Rohmer
The cabs and cars about us were actually beginning to move again, and there was nothing for it but a hasty retreat to the kerb. I could not pause to glance behind, but instinctively I knew that someone—someone who used that rare, fragrant essence—was leaning from the window of the car.
“Andaman—second!” floated a soft whisper.
We gained the pavement as the pent-up traffic roared upon its way. Smith had not noticed the perfume worn by the unseen occupant of the car, had not detected the whispered words. But I had no reason to doubt my senses, and I knew beyond question that Kârarnanèh had been within a yard of us, had recognized us, and had uttered those words for our guidance.
On regaining my rooms, we devoted a whole hour to considering what “Andaman—second” could possibly mean.
“Hang it all!” cried Smith, “it might mean anything—the result of a race, for instance.”
He burst into one of his rare laughs, and began to stuff broad-cut mixture into his briar. I could see that he had no intention of turning in.
“I can think of no one—no one of note—in London at present upon whom it is likely that Fu-Manchu would make an attempt,” he said, “I except ourselves.”
We began methodically to go through the long list of names which we had compiled and to review our elaborate notes. When, at last, I turned in, the night had given place to a new day. But sleep evaded me, and “Andaman—second” danced like a mocking phantom through my brain.
Then I heard the telephone bell. I heard Smith speaking.
A minute afterwards he was in my room, his face very grim.
“I knew as well as if I’d seen it with my own eyes that some black business was afoot last night,” he said. “And it was; within pistol-shot of us! Some one has got at Frank Norris West. Inspector Weymouth has just been on the phone.”
“Norris West!” I cried, “the American aviator—and inventor—”
“Of the West aero-torpedo—yes. He’s been offering it to the English War Office, and they have delayed too long.”
I got out of bed.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that its potentialities have attracted the attention of Dr. Fu-Manchu!”
Those words operated electrically. I do not know how long I was in dressing, how long a time elapsed ere the cab for which Smith had phoned arrived, how many precious minutes were lost upon the journey; but, in a nervous whirl, these things slipped into the past, like the telegraph poles seen from the window of an express, and still in that tensed state, we came upon the scene of this newest outrage.
Mr. Norris West, whose lean, stoic face had latterly figured so often in the daily Press, lay upon the floor in the little entrance hall of his chambers, flat upon his back, with the telephone receiver in his hand.
The outer door had been forced by the police. They had had to remove a piece of the panelling to get at the bolt. A medical man was leaning over the recumbent figure in the striped pyjama suit, and Inspector Weymouth stood watching him as Smith and I entered.
“He has been heavily drugged,” said the doctor, sniffing at West’s lips, “but I cannot say what drug has been used. It isn’t chloroform or anything of that nature. He can safely be left to sleep it off, I think.”
I agreed, after a brief examination.
“It’s most extraordinary,” said Weymouth. “He rang up the Yard about an hour ago and said his chambers had been invaded by Chinamen. Then the man at the phone plainly heard him fall. When we got here his front door was bolted, as you’ve seen, and the windows are three floors up. Nothing is disturbed.”
“The plans of the aero-torpedo?” rapped Smith.
“I take it they are in the safe in his bedroom,” replied the detective, “and that is locked all right. I think he must have taken an overdose of something and had illusions. But in case there was anything in what he mumbled (you could hardly understand him) I thought it as well to send for you.”
“Quite right,” said Smith rapidly. His eyes shone like steel. “Lay him on the bed, Inspector.”
It was done, and my friend walked into the bedroom.
Save that the bed was disordered, showing that West had been sleeping in it, there were no evidences of the extraordinary invasion mentioned by the drugged man. It was a small room—the chambers were of that kind which are let furnished—and very neat. A safe with a combination lock stood in a corner. The window was open about a foot at the top.
Smith tried the safe and found it fast. He stood for a moment clicking his teeth together, by which I knew him to be perplexed. He walked over to the window and threw it up. We both looked out.
“You see,” came Weymouth’s voice, “it is altogether too far from the court below for our cunning Chinese friends to have fixed a ladder with one of their bamboo-rod arrangements. And, even if they could get up there, it’s too far down from the roof—two more stories—for them to have fixed it from there.”
Smith nodded thoughtfully, at the same time trying the strength of an iron bar which ran from side to side of the window-sill. Suddenly he stooped, with a sharp exclamation. Bending over his shoulder I saw what it was that had attracted his attention.
Clearly imprinted upon the dust-coated grey stone of the sill was a confused series of marks—tracks—call them what you will.
Smith straightened himself and turned a wondering look upon me.
“What is it, Petrie?” he said amazedly. “Some kind of bird has been here, and recently.”
Inspector Weymouth in turn examined the marks.
“I never saw bird tracks like these, Mr. Smith,” he muttered.
Smith was tugging at the lobe of his ear.
“No,” he returned reflectively, “come to think of it, neither did I.”
He twisted around, looking at the man on the bed.
“Do you think it was all an illusion?” asked the detective.
“What about those marks on the window-sill?” jerked Smith.
He began restlessly pacing about the room, sometimes stopping before the locked safe and frequently glancing at Norris West.
Suddenly he walked out and briefly examined the other apartments, only to return again to the bedroom.
“Petrie,” he said, “we are losing valuable time. West must be aroused!”
Inspector Weymouth stared.
Smith turned to me impatiently. The doctor summoned by the police was gone. “Is there no means of arousing him, Petrie?” he said.
“Doubtless,” I replied, “he could be revived if one but knew what drug he had taken.”
My friend began his restless pacing again, and suddenly pounced upon a little phial of tablets which had been hidden behind some books on a shelf near the bed. He uttered a triumphant exclamation.
“See what we have here, Petrie!” he directed, handing the phial to me. “It bears no label.”
I crushed one of the tablets in my palm and applied my tongue to the powder.
“Some preparation of chloral hydrate,” I pronounced.
“A sleeping draught?” suggested Smith eagerly.
“We might try,” I said, and scribbled a formula upon a leaf of my note-book. I asked Weymouth to send the man who accompanied him to call up the nearest chemist and procure the antidote.
During the man’s absence Smith stood contemplating the unconscious inventor, a peculiar expression upon his bronzed face.
“Andaman—second,” he muttered. “Shall we find the key to the riddle here, I wonder?”
Inspector Weymouth, who had concluded, I think, that the mysterious telephone call was due to mental aberration on the part of Norris West, was gnawing at his moustache impatiently when his assistant returned. I administered the powerful restorative, and although, as later transpired, chloral was not responsible for West’s condition, the antidote operated successfully.
Norris West struggled into a sitting position, and looked about him with haggard eyes.
“The Chinamen! The Chinamen!” he mutt
ered.
He sprang to his feet, glaring wildly at Smith and I, reeled, and almost fell.
“It is all right,” I said, supporting him. “I’m a doctor. You have been unwell.”
“Have the police come?” he burst out. “The safe—try the safe!”
“It’s all right,” said Inspector Weymouth. “The safe is locked—unless some one else knows the combination, there’s nothing to worry about.”
“No one else knows it,” said West, and staggered unsteadily to the safe. Clearly his mind was in a dazed condition, but, setting his jaw with a curious expression of grim determination, he collected his thoughts and opened his safe.
He bent down, looking in.
In some way the knowledge came to me that the curtain was about to rise on a new and surprising act in the Fu-Manchu drama.
“God!” he whispered—we could scarcely hear him—“the plans are gone!”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
NORRIS WEST’S STORY
I have never seen a man quite so surprised as Inspector Weymouth.
“This is absolutely incredible!” he said. “There’s only one door to your chambers. We found it bolted from the inside.”
“Yes,” groaned West, pressing his hand to his forehead. “I bolted it myself at eleven o’clock, when I came in.”
“No human being could climb up or down to your windows. The plans of the aero-torpedo were inside the safe.”
“I put them there myself,” said West, “on returning from the War Office, and I had occasion to consult them after I had come in and bolted the door. I returned them to the safe and locked it. That it was still locked you saw for yourselves, and no one else in the world knows the combination.”
“But the plans have gone,” said Weymouth. “It’s magic! How was it done? What happened last night, sir? What did you mean when you rang us up?”
Smith during this colloquy was pacing rapidly up and down the room. He turned abruptly to the aviator.
“Every fact you can remember, Mr. West, please,” he said tersely, “and be as brief as you possibly can.”
“I came in, as I said,” explained West, “about eleven o’clock, and, having made some notes relating to an interview arranged for this morning, I locked the plans in the safe and turned in.”
“There was no one hidden anywhere in your chambers?” snapped Smith.
“There was not,” replied West. “I looked. I invariably do. Almost immediately, I went to sleep.”
“How many chloral tabloids did you take?” I interrupted.
Norris West turned to me with a slow smile.
“You’re acute, doctor,” he said. “I took two. It’s a bad habit, but I can’t sleep without. They are specially made up for me by a firm in Philadelphia.
“How long sleep lasted, when it became filled with uncanny dreams, and when those dreams merged into reality, I do not know—shall never know, I suppose. But out of the dreamless void a face came to me—closer—closer—and peered into mine.
“I was in that curious condition wherein one knows that one is dreaming and seeks to awaken—to escape. But a nightmare-like oppression held me. So I must lie and gaze into the seared yellow face that hung over me, for it would drop so close that I could trace the cicatrized scar running from the left ear to the corner of the mouth, and drawing up the lip like the lip of a snarling cur. I could look into the malignant, jaundiced eyes; I could hear the dim whispering of the distorted mouth—whispering that seemed to counsel something—something evil. That whispering intimacy was indescribably repulsive. Then the wicked yellow face would be withdrawn, and would recede until it became as a pin’s head in the darkness far above me—almost like a glutinous, liquid thing.
“Somehow I got upon my feet, or dreamed I did—God knows where dreaming ended and reality began. Gentlemen, maybe you’ll conclude I went mad last night, but as I stood holding on to the bedrail I heard the blood throbbing through my arteries with a noise like a screw-propeller. I started laughing. The laughter issued from my lips with a shrill whistling sound that pierced me with physical pain and seemed to wake the echoes of the whole block. I thought, myself, I was going mad, and I tried to command my will—to break the power of the choral—for I concluded that I had accidentally taken an overdose.
“Then the walls of my bedroom started to recede, till at last I stood holding on to a bed which had shrunk to the size of a doll’s cot, in the middle of a room like Trafalgar Square! That window yonder was such a long way off I could scarcely see it, but I could just detect a Chinaman—the owner of the evil yellow face—creeping through it. He was followed by another, who was enormously tall—so tall that, as they came towards me (and it seemed to take them something like half an hour to cross this incredible apartment in my dream), the second Chinaman seemed to tower over me like a cypress-tree.
“I looked up to his face—his wicked, hairless face. Mr. Smith, whatever age I live to, I’ll never forget that face I saw last night—or did I see it? God knows! The pointed chin, the great dome of a forehead, and the eyes—heavens above, the huge green eyes—!”
He shook like a sick man, and I glanced at Smith significantly. Inspector Weymouth was stroking his moustache, and his mingled expression of incredulity and curiosity was singular to behold.
“The pumping of my blood,” continued West, “seemed to be bursting my body; the room kept expanding and contracting. One time the ceiling would be pressing down on my head, and the Chinamen—sometimes I thought there were two of them, sometimes twenty—became dwarfs; the next instant it shot up like a roof of a cathedral.
“ ‘Can I be awake,’ I whispered, ‘or am I dreaming?’
“My whisper went sweeping in windy echoes about the walls, and was lost in the shadowy distances up under the invisible roof.
“ ‘You are dreaming—yes.’ It was the Chinaman with the green eyes who was addressing me, and the words that he uttered appeared to occupy an immeasurable time in the utterance. ‘But at will I can render the subjective objective.’ I don’t think I can have dreamed those singular words, gentlemen?
“And then he fixed the green eyes upon me—the blazing green eyes. I made no attempt to move. They seemed to be draining me of something vital—bleeding me of every drop of mental power. The whole nightmare room grew green, and I felt that I was being absorbed into its greenness.
“I can see what you think. And even in my delirium—if it was delirium—I thought the same. Now comes the climax of my experience—my vision—I don’t know what to call it. I saw some words issuing from my own mouth!”
Inspector Weymouth coughed discreetly. Smith whisked around upon him.
“This will be outside your experience, Inspector, I know,” he said, “but Mr. Norris West’s statement does not surprise me in the least. I know to what the experience was due.”
Weymouth stared incredulously, but a drawing perception of the truth was come to me, too.
“How I saw a sound I just won’t attempt to explain; I simply tell you I saw it. Somehow I knew I had betrayed myself—given something away.”
“You gave away the secret of the lock combination!” rapped Smith.
“Eh!” grunted Weymouth.
But West went on hoarsely:
“Just before the blank came a name flashed before my eyes. It was ‘Bayard Taylor’.”
At that I interrupted West.
“I understand!” I cried. “I understand! Another name has just occurred to me, Mr. West—that of the Frenchman, Moreau.”
“You have solved the mystery,” said Smith. “It was natural Mr. West should have thought of the American traveller, Bayard Taylor, though. Moreau’s book is purely scientific. He has probably never read it.”
“I fought with the stupor that was overcoming me,” continued West, “striving to associate that vaguely familiar name with the fantastic things through which I moved. It seemed to me that the room was empty again. I made for the hall, for the telephone. I could scarcely drag
my feet along. It seemed to take me half an hour to get there. I remember calling up Scotland Yard, and I remember no more.”
There was a short, tense interval.
In some respects I was nonplussed; but, frankly, I think Inspector Weymouth considered West insane. Smith, his hands locked behind his back, stared out of the window.
“Andaman—second,” he said suddenly. “Weymouth, when is the first train to Tilbury?”
“Five twenty-two from Fenchurch Street,” replied the Scotland Yard man promptly.
“Too late!” rapped my friend. “Jump in a taxi and pick up two good men to leave for China at once! Then go and charter a special to Tilbury to leave in twenty-five minutes. Order another cab to wait outside for me.”
Weymouth was palpably amazed, but Smith’s tone was imperative. The inspector departed hastily.
I stared at Smith, not comprehending what prompted this singular course.
“Now that you can think clearly, Mr. West,” he said, “of what does your experience remind you? The errors of perception regarding time; the idea of seeing a sound; the illusion that the room alternately increased and diminished in size; your fit of laughter, and the recollection of the name, Bayard Taylor. Since evidently you are familiar with that author’s work—The Land of the Saracen, is it not?—these symptoms of the attack should be familiar, I think.”
Norris West pressed his hands to his evidently aching head,
“Bayard Taylor’s book,” he said dully. “Yes! ... I know of what my brain sought to remind me—Taylor’s account of his experience under hashish. Mr. Smith, someone doped me with hashish!”
Smith nodded grimly.
“Cannabis indica,” I said—“Indian hemp. That is what you were drugged with. I have no doubt that now you experience a feeling of nausea and intense thirst, with aching in the muscles, particularly the deltoid? I think you must have taken at least fifteen grains.”
Smith stopped his perambulations immediately in front of West, looking into his dulled eyes.