by Sax Rohmer
Incoming messages indicated a feverish change of plan in regard to the New York area. The names of Nayland Smith and Captain Hepburn figured frequently. These two apparently were in charge of counter-operations. Reports from agents in the South, identifiable only by their numbers, spoke of the triumphant progress of the man Salvaletti. Occasional reports from far up in Alaska indicated that the movement there was proceeding smoothly. The only discordant note came from the Middle West, where Abbot Donegal, a mere name to the Memory Man, seemed to be a focus of interest for many agents.
It all meant less than nothing to the prisoner who had memorized every message received since the first hour of his captivity. Sometimes, in the misery of this slavery which had been imposed upon him, he remembered happier days in Germany, remembered how at his club he had been challenged to read a page of the Berlin Tageblatt, and then to recite its contents from memory; how, without difficulty, he had succeeded and won his wager. But those were the days before his exile. He knew now how happy they had been. In the interval he had died. He was a living dead man… Busily, with delicate fingers, he modeled the clay. His faith in a just God remained unshaken.
Without warning the door by which he gained access to his private quarters opened. Wearing a dark coat with an astrakhan collar, an astrakhan cap upon his head, a tall man came in. The sculptor ceased to toil and sat motionless — staring at the living face of Dr. Fu-Manchu, which so long he had sought to reproduce in clay!
“Good morning, Professor Morgenstahl.”
Dr. Fu-Manchu spoke in German. Except that he overstretched the gutturals, he spoke that language perfectly. Professor Morgenstahl, the mathematical genius who had upset every previous conviction respecting the relative distances of the planets, who had mapped space, who had proved that lunar eclipses were not produced by the shadow of the earth, and who now was subjugated to the dreadful task of a one-man telephone exchange, did not stir. His great brain was a file, the only file, of all messages received at that secret headquarters from the whole of the United States. Motionless, he continued to stare at the man who wore the astrakhan cap.
That hour of which he had dreamed had come at last! He was face to face with his oppressor…
The muscles of his powerful body responded to the urge of his brain. At whatever cost to himself, he was determined to kill this man who stood before him.
Vividly before his eyes those last scenes arose: his expulsion from Germany almost penniless, for his great intellect which had won world-wide recognition had earned him little money; the journey to the United States, where no man had identified him as the famous author of Interstellar Cycles, nor had he sought to make himself known. He could even remember his own death — for certainly he had been dead — in a cheap lodging in Brooklyn; his reawakening in the room below (with this man, this devil incarnate, standing over him!); his enslavement, his misery.
Yes, living or dead — for sometimes he thought that he was a discarnate spirit — he must at least perform this one good deed: the dreadful Chinaman must die.
“No doubt you weary of your duties, Professor,” the guttural voice continued. “But better things are to come. A change of plan is necessitated. Other quarters have been found for you, with similar facilities.”
Professor Morgenstahl, sitting behind the heavy table with its complicated mechanism, recognized that he must temporize.
“My books,” he said, “my apparatus—”
“Have been removed. Your new quarters are prepared for you. Be good enough to follow me.”
Slowly, Professor Morgenstahl stood up, watched by unflinching green eyes. He moved around the corner of the table, where the nearly completed model stood. He was estimating the weight of that tall, gaunt figure; and to ounces, his estimate was correct. But in the moment when, clear of the heavy table, he was preparing to strangle with his bare hands this yellow-faced horror who had rescued him from the grave, only to plunge him into a living hell, the watching eyes seemed to grow larger; inch by inch they increased — they merged — they became a green lake; he forgot his murderous intent. He lost identity…
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO. BELOW WU KING’S
“Lay off there,” shouted Inspector Finney.
The roar of the oxy-acetylene blowpipe ceased. They were working on the third door below Wu King’s premises, from a tunneled staircase of the existence of which Wu King blandly denied all knowledge. Turning upwards:
“What’s new?” Finney shouted.
“We’ve got the street door open!”
Leaving the men with the blowpipe, Finney ran up. The air was stifling, laden with acrid fumes. An immensely heavy door, an iron framework to the outer side of which the appearance of a wall had been given by cementing half-bricks into the hollow of the frame, stood open. A group of men sweating from their toils examined it. Outside, on the street, two policemen were moving on the curious sightseers.
“So that was the game,” Finney murmured.
“No wonder we couldn’t find it,” said one of the men, throwing back a clammy lock of hair from his damp forehead. “It looks like a brick wall and it sounds like a brick wall!”
“It would,” Finney commented dryly: “it is a brick wall, except it opens. Easy to guess now how they got it fixed. They did their building from the other end, wherever the other end is. Now just where do we stand?”
He stepped out on to the street, looking right and left. The masked door occupied the back of a recess between one end of Wu King’s premises and the beginning of a Chinese cigar merchant’s. Its ostensible reason was to accommodate a manhole in the sidewalk. The manhole was authentic: it communicated with an electric main — Inspector Finney knew the spot well enough. Tilting back his hard black hat, he stared with a strange expression at the gaping opening where he had been accustomed for many years to see a brick wall.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” he muttered.
“This lets Wu out, I guess,” said one of the men. “If we didn’t know the darned thing was here, he can claim he didn’t.”
“He’ll do it,” Finney replied. “And he’ll probably get by with it… There must be a bell some place: we traced the cable.”
“We found it. Forced it out blowing through the iron. The brickwork’s made to look kind of old, and there were posters stuck to it. I guess the push was under the posters; that’s how it looks.”
Inspector Finney went inside again, first glancing sharply right and left at the expressionless faces of a number of Chinamen who, from a respectful distance, were watching operations. There was an elaborate lock to this ingenious door, electrically controlled — but where from, remained to be discovered…
Ten minutes later the third door was forced, and Inspector Finney found himself in a rectangular saloon curiously appointed but showing evidence of long neglect. The place, now, smelled like an iron foundry.
“This looks like an old dope joint to me,” said one of the party, “but it’s plain it hasn’t been used for a long while.”
“Strip all the walls,” Finney ordered; “we’re not through yet.”
A scene of whole-hearted wrecking followed upon which the Fire Department could not have improved. Nevertheless, nearly an hour had elapsed before a cunningly hidden fourth door was discovered.
“Go to work, boys,” said Finney.
The sweating workers got busy, bringing down the blowpipe and rigging it for further operations. Finney stared speculatively at a patch of scarred wall. He did not know, indeed never learned, that beyond that very piece of wall upon which his gaze was fixed a spiral staircase led from a point below to the top floor of Wu King’s building; Since only by measurements and never by sounding could the shaft in which it ran be discovered, it was not unnatural that Inspector Finney should concentrate the whole of his attention upon the fourth iron door recently discovered.
These iron doors made him savage. At the present moment he was recalling a recent conversation with the government agent, Hepburn; he remembered bo
asting that no such door could be fitted in the Chinatown area without his becoming aware of the fact. It was a bitter pill, for here were four!
He reflected with satisfaction, however, that no man knows everything. At least he could congratulate himself upon the finding of this secret staircase. Between the eastern end of Wu-King’s premises and the western end of that adjoining, measurements had shown a space unaccounted for. Operating from inside Wu King’s, floor boards had been torn up and a thick party wall brought to light. Through this Finney had caused a way to be broken; and they had found themselves on the first stair below street level.
That was good work! He resettled his hard hat upon his hard head and lighted a cigarette…
Nevertheless, from the time that operations had commenced in early morning, up to the moment when the fourth door succumbed, many weary hours of toil had been spent by the party under Inspector Finney. He was up on the street wondering what all this secret subterranean building really meant when:
“We’re through!” came a cry, hollow, from the acrid depths.
A minute later he stood on the lowest step, directing the ray of his torch upon oily, dirty-looking water.
“I guess that’s tidal level,” a voice said, “but sometime these steps went deeper.”
Inspector Finney flashed his light across the unwholesome-looking waters of the well. At the further end he saw a square opening two to three feet above the surface.
“There is or was another iron door,” he growled, “but it’s open. I wonder what’s on the other side.”
He was short and stocky himself. He turned to one of the men who had been working on the forcing of the doors.
“What’s your height, Ruskin?” he asked.
“Six one-and-a-quarter, Inspector.”
“You swim well, don’t you?”
“Not so bad.”
“If the stone steps carry on down below water level,” Finney explained, “you won’t have to swim. I figure you could keep your feet, hold a torch above your head and see what’s beyond there. What do you say?”
“I’ll try it.”
Ruskin partly stripped for the endeavor and then, a torch held in his right hand, he began, feeling his way with care, to descend the stone steps. The group on the landing watched in silence. The water, on top of which all sorts of fragments floated, was just up to Ruskin’s shoulders when he announced:
“I’m on the level now.”
“Go easy,” Finney warned. “If you lose foothold strike up to the surface and swim back.”
Ruskin did not reply: he walked on, the torch held above his head. He passed under the square opening and stood there for a moment, then:
“Good God!” he screamed.
His torch disappeared — he had dropped it. There was a wild splashing and churning. Finney cast hat and coat aside and went plunging down the steps, another man behind him.
“Show those lights!” he shouted to the men who still remained upon the landing.
In the rays of the torches Ruskin’s face showed above the surface. Finney grabbed him, and presently he was hauled up the steps. He lay there pointing down, shaken and gasping…
“There’s a great wide space of water back there,” he panted— “and there’s some awful thing lives in it — a monster! I saw its eyes shining!”
The temple of the seven-eyed goddess had been flooded by Sam Pak, but the head of its presiding diety remained just above the surface…
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE. THE BALCONY
Mr. Schmidt, representing the Stratton Estates, stepped out of the elevator on the top floor of the Stratton Budding. Two men followed. One, wearing overalls and having a leather bag carried on a strap across his left shoulder, represented Midtown Electric. Mr. Schmidt recognized him as one of the pair who had been on the job before. The other, a tall, lean man wearing glasses and a brusque military moustache, came from the Falcon Imperial Insurance Corporation, which carried the fire risk of the Stratton Building.
A man in the uniform of the Fire Department, who was seated on a chair before a green baize-covered door, stood up as the party came out of the elevator.
“It was really unnecessary, Mr. Englebert,” said Schmidt, addressing the gray-moustached man, “to notify the Fire Department; The door which you see was formerly boarded up so that no door showed. The Fire Department has stripped it, in accordance, I suppose, with your instructions, and has seen fit to post a guard over it throughout the whole of the day. Quite unnecessary!”
Mr. Englebert nodded.
“My directors carry a heavy responsibility on this building, Mr. Schmidt,” he replied, “and in view of the phenomenal electric storms recently experienced in the Midwest, we must assure ourselves of the efficiency of the lightning conductors.”
“That’s all agreed, Mr. Englebert. I have the keys of the staircase to the flagstaff, but you must have put us to quite some trouble.”
Few of the hundreds of windows in the great building showed any light. The office workers engaged by firms occupying premises in the Stratton Building had departed for home. Only a few late toilers remained at their desks. In the three streets which embayed the tall structure, there was nothing to indicate that a cordon had been thrown around the building. Mr. Schmidt himself, who, indeed; was perfectly innocent of any complicity apart from the duties which he owed to the League of Good Americans, remained to this moment unaware of the fact that an office opening on the top floor, the staff of which had left at six o’clock, was now packed with police.
“All clear, sir,” said the fireman.
Mr. Schmidt produced a bunch of keys, fumbled for a while, finally selected one, and not without difficulty opened the baize-covered door. He turned.
“I may say here and now,” he remarked, “that I have never been in the dome: I have never known it to be opened during the time I have acted for the Stratton Estates. There are rooms up there, I know, which were formerly occupied by the late Mr. Jerome Stratton…” He shrugged his shoulders. “Of course, he was very eccentric. As there was no proper means of escape in the event of fire, they were closed some years ago. I’ll lead the way. I have a torch. There are no lights.”
He went in, shining the ray of his torch ahead. The man from Midtown Electric followed. Mr. Englebert paused at the threshold; and to the fireman:
“You have your orders,” he snapped.
“Sure.”
Nayland Smith, his facial disguise that which he employed for the Salvation Army officer, his dress that of a business man, followed Mark Hepburn — representing Midtown Electric — into the darkness illuminated only by Mr. Schmidt’s torch. Hepburn supplemented it by the light of another.
They were in a curious, octagonal room in which, facing south, were three windows. There were indications that furniture at some time had stood against the walls. Now the room was bare.
“I guess we’ll push right on to the top,” said Hepburn.
Mr. Schmidt studied a rough plan which he carried.
“The door is on this side, I think,” he said vaguely. “One of the late Mr. Stratton’s eccentricities.”
He walked to a point directly opposite the central window, stood fumbling there awhile, and then inserted a key in a lock and opened the hitherto invisible door.
“This way.”
They went up an uncarpeted staircase at the top of which another door was opened. They entered a second octagonal room appreciably smaller than that which they had just quitted, but also destitute of any scrap of furniture; there was an empty alcove on one side.
“You see,” said Schmidt, flashing his light about, “there’s a balcony to this room, outside the french windows there…”
“I see,” muttered Nayland Smith, staring keenly about him.
“From that gallery,” said Mark Hepburn in his monotonous voice, “it is possible I could see the cable to the flagstaff.”
“The window,” Schmidt replied, “appears to be bolted only. I think you can get out
there without any difficulty.”
Nayland Smith turned suddenly to the speaker.
“There is still another floor above?”
Mark Hepburn had shot back a bolt and opened one of the heavy windows.
“Yes, so I understand. A small domed room immediately under the flagstaff. The door, I believe” — he hesitated— “is directly facing the windows, again. Let us see if I can open it.”
He crossed as Hepburn stepped out on to the gallery — that gallery which Professor Morgenstahl had paced so often in the misery of his captivity…
“Here we are!” Schmidt cried triumphantly.
“I see,” said Nayland Smith, regarding the newly opened door. “I should be obliged, while we complete our inspection, if you would step down and tell the fireman on duty that he is not to leave without my orders.”
“Certainly, Mr. Englebert; then I’ll come right back.”
Mr. Schmidt crossed and might be heard descending the stair.
As he disappeared:
“Hepburn!” Nayland Smith called urgently.
Hepburn came in from the balcony.
“This place has been hurriedly stripped — and only a matter of hours ago! But, all the same, our last hope is the top floor.”
He led the way, shining light ahead. It was a short stair — and the door above was open. Hepburn at his heels, he burst into the room. Small, domed, and surrounded by curious amber-paned Gothic windows which did not appear to communicate with the outer air, it was stripped — empty!
“We are right under the flagstaff,” said Hepburn quite tonelessly. “He’s been too clever for us. I was marked on my first visit.”
Nayland Smith’s hands fell so that the ray from his torch shone down upon the floor at his feet.
“He wins again!” he said slowly. “That baize door has been covered all day. There’s another way in — and another way out: the cunning, cunning devil.” And now, his diction changed as that dauntless spirit recovered from the check: “Come on, Hepburn, downstairs again!” he snapped energetically.