by Sax Rohmer
“This is rather outside his province, isn’t it?” I suggested.
“You haven’t met him,” Petrie replied, labouring his words as it seemed. “But I think you will. Nayland Smith has one of the few first-class brains in Europe, and nothing is outside his—”
He ceased speaking, staggered and clutched at the table edge. I saw him shudder violently.
“Look here, doctor,” I cried, grasping his shoulders, “you are sickening for ’flu or something. You’re overdoing it. Give the thing a rest, and—”
He shook me off. His manner was wild. He groped his way to a cupboard, prepared a draught with unsteady hands, and drank it. Then from a drawer he took out a tube containing a small quantity of white powder.
“I have called it ‘654,’” he said, his eyes feverishly bright. “I haven’t the pluck to try it on a human patient. But even if Mother Nature has turned topsy-turvy, I believe this may puzzle her!”
Watching him anxiously:
“Strictly speaking, you ought to be in bed,” I said. “Your life is valuable.”
“Get out,” he replied, summoning up the ghost of a smile. “Get out, Sterling. My life’s my own, and while it lasts I have work to do...”
CHAPTER FOUR
SQUINTING EYES
I spent the latter part of the afternoon delving in works of reference which I had not consulted for many months, in an endeavour to identify more exactly the leaves so mysteriously found by Petrie.
To an accompaniment of clattering pans, old Mme Dubonnet was preparing our evening meal in the kitchen and humming some melancholy tune very cheerily.
Petrie was a source of great anxiety. I had considered ‘phoning for Dr. Cartier, but finally had dismissed the idea. That my friend was ill he had been unable to disguise: but he was a Doctor of Medicine and I was not. Furthermore, he was my host.
That he was worried about his wife in Cairo, I knew. Only the day before he had said, “I hope she doesn’t take it into her head to come over—much as I should like to see her.” Now, I shared that hope. His present appearance would shock the woman who loved him.
Fleurette—Fleurette of the dimpled chin—more than once intruded her image between me and the printed page. I tried to push these memories aside.
Fleurette was the mistress of a wealthy Egyptian. Despite her name, she was not French. She was, perhaps, an actress. Why had I not thought of that before? Her beautifully modulated voice—her composure. “Think of me as Derceto...”
“In Byblis gigantea, according to Zopf, insect-catching is merely incipient,” I read.
She could be no older than eighteen—indeed, she might be younger than that...
And so the afternoon wore on.
Faint buzzing of the Kohler engine, and a sudden shaft of light across the slopes below, first drew my attention to approaching dusk. Petrie had turned up the laboratory lamps.
I was deep in a German work which promised information, and now, mechanically, I switched on the table lamp. Hundreds of grasshoppers were chirping in the garden; I could hear the purr of a speedboat. Mme Dubonnet continued to sing. It was a typical Riviera evening.
The shadow of that great crag which almost overhung the Villa Jasmin lay across part of the kitchen-garden visible from my window, and soon would claim all our tiny domain. I continued my studies, jumping from reference to reference and constantly consulting the index. I believed I was at last on the right track.
How long a time elapsed between the moment when I saw the light turned up in the laboratory and the interruption, I found great difficulty in determining afterwards. But the interruption was uncanny.
Mme Dubonnet, working in the kitchen, French fashion, with windows hermetically sealed, noticed nothing.
Already, on this momentous day, I had heard a sound baffling description; and it was written—for the day was one never to be forgotten—that I should hear another.
As I paused to light a fresh cigarette, from somewhere outside—I thought from the Corniche road above—came a cry, very low, but penetrating.
It possessed a quality of fear which chilled me like a sudden menace. It was a sort of mournful wail on three minor notes. But a shot at close quarters could not have been more electrical in its effect.
I dropped my cigarette and jumped up.
What was it?
It was unlike anything I had ever heard. But there was danger in it, creeping peril. I leaned upon the table, staring from the window upward, in the direction from which the cry seemed to have come.
And as I did so, I saw something.
I have explained that a beam of light from the laboratory window cut across the shadow below. On the edge of this light something moved for a moment—for no more than a moment—but instantly drew my glance downward.
I looked...
A pair of sunken, squinting eyes, set in a yellow face so evilly hideous that I was tempted then, and for some time later, to doubt the evidence of my senses, watched me!
Of the body belonging to this head I could see nothing; it was enveloped in shadow. I saw just that evil mask watching me; then— it was gone!
As I stood staring from the window, stupid with a kind of horrified amazement, I heard footsteps racing down the path from the road which led to the door of Villa Jasmin. Turning, I ran out onto the verandah. I reached it at the same moment as the new arrival—a tall, lean man with iron-grey, crisply virile hair, and keen, eager eyes. He had the sort of skin which tells of years spent in the tropics. He wore no hat, but a heavy topcoat was thrown across his shoulders, cloakwise. Above all, he radiated a kind of vital energy which was intensely stimulating.
“Quick,” he said—his mode of address reminded me of a machine gun—“where is Dr. Petrie? My name is Nayland Smith.”
“I’m glad you have come, Sir Denis,” I replied; and indeed I spoke sincerely. “The doctor referred to you only today. My name is Alan Sterling.”
“I know it is,” he said, and shook hands briskly; then:
“Where is Petrie?” he repeated. “Is he with you?”
“He is in the laboratory, Sir Denis. I’ll show you the way.” Sir Denis nodded, and we stepped off the verandah. “Did you hear that awful cry?” I added. He stopped. We had just begun to descend the slope.
“You heard it?” he rapped in his staccato fashion.
“I did. I have never heard anything like it in my life!”
“I have! Let’s hurry.”
There was something very strange in his manner, something which I ascribed to that wailing sound which had electrified me. Definitely, Sir Denis Nayland Smith was not a man susceptible to panic, but some fearful urgency drove him tonight.
I was about to speak of that malignant yellow face when, as we came in sight of the lighted windows of the laboratory:
“How long has Petrie been in there?” Nayland Smith asked.
“All the afternoon. He’s up to his eyes in work on these mysterious cases—about which, perhaps, you know?”
“I do,” he replied. “Wait a moment.” He grasped my arm and pulled me up just at the edge of the patch of shadow. He stood still and I could tell that he was listening intently.
“Where’s the door?” he asked suddenly.
“At the farther end.”
“Right.”
He set off at a run, and I followed past the lighted window.
Petrie was not at the table nor at the bench. I was puzzled to account for this, and already vaguely fearful. A premonition gripped me, a premonition of something horrible. Then, I had my hand on the door and had thrown it open. I entered, Sir Denis close behind me.
“Good God! Petrie!... Petrie, old man...”
Nayland Smith had sprung in and was already on his knees beside the doctor.
Petrie lay in the shadow of his working bench, in fact, half under it, one outstretched hand still convulsively gripping its edge!
I saw that the apparently rigid fingers grasped a hypodermic syringe. Near to his upr
aised hand was a vessel containing a small quantity of some milky fluid; and the tube of white powder which he had shown to me lay splintered, broken by his fall, on the floor a foot away.
In those few fleeting seconds I saw Sir Denis Nayland Smith, for the first and last time in my knowledge of him, fighting to subdue his emotions. His head dropped into his upraised hands, his fingers clutched his hair.
Then he had conquered. He stood up.
“Lift him!” he said hoarsely. “Out here, into the light.”
I was half stunned. Horror and sorrow had me by the throat. But I helped to move Petrie farther into the middle of the floor, where a central light shone down upon him. One glance told me the truth—if I had ever doubted it.
A sort of cloud was creeping from his disordered hair, down over his brow.
“Heaven help him!” I whispered. “Look—look!... the purple shadow!”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE BLACK STIGMATA
The laboratory was very silent. Through the windows, which still remained open, I could hear the hum of the Kohler engine in its little shed at the bottom of the garden—the chirping of crickets, the clucking of hens.
There was a couch littered with books and chemical paraphernalia. Sir Denis and I cleared it and laid Petrie there.
I had telephoned Dr. Cartier from the villa.
That ghastly purple shadow was creeping farther down my poor friend’s brow.
“Shut the door, Sterling,” said Nayland Smith sharply.
I did so.
“Stand by,” he went on, and pointed.
Petrie, who wore a woollen pullover with long sleeves when he was working late, had evidently made an attempt to peel it off just before coma had claimed him.
“You see what he meant to do,” Nayland Smith went on. “God knows what the consequences will be, but it’s his only chance. He must have been fighting it off all day. The swelling in his armpit warned him that the crisis had come.”
He examined the milky liquid in a small glass measure.
“Have you any idea what this is?”
I indicated the broken tube and scattered white powder on the floor.
“A preparation of his own—to which I have heard him refer as ‘654.’ He believed it was a remedy, but he was afraid to risk it on a patient.”
“I wonder?” Sir Denis murmured. “I wonder—”
Stooping, I picked up a fragment of glass to which one of Petrie’s neatly written labels still adhered.
“Look here, Sir Denis!”
He read aloud:
“‘654.’ 1 grm. in 10 c.c. distilled water: intravenous.”
He stared at me hard, then:
“It’s kill or cure,” he rapped. “We have no choice.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for Dr. Cartier?”
“Wait!” His angry glare startled me. “With luck, he’ll be here in three-quarters of an hour. And life or death in this thing is a matter of minutes! No! Petrie must have his chance. I’m not an expert—but I can do my best...”
I experienced some difficulty in assisting at what followed; but Nayland Smith, his course set, made the injection as coolly as though he had been used to such work for half a lifetime. When it was done:
“If Petrie survives,” he said quietly, “his own skill will have saved him—not ours. Lay that rug over him. It strikes one as chilly in here.”
The man’s self-mastery was almost superhuman.
He crossed to close the windows—to hide his face from me. Even that iron control had its breaking point. And suddenly the dead silence which fell with the shutting of the windows was broken by the buzzing of an insect.
I couldn’t see the thing, which evidently Sir Denis had disturbed, but it was flying about the place with feverish activity. Something else seemed to have arrested Sir Denis’s attention: he was staring down at the table.
“H’m!” he muttered. “Very queer!”
Then the noise of the busy insect evidently reached his ears. He turned in a flash and his expression was remarkable.
“What’s that, Sterling?” he snapped. “Do you hear it?”
“Clearly. There’s a gadfly buzzing about.”
“Gadfly—nothing! I have recently spent many hours in the laboratory of the School of Tropical Medicine. That’s why I’m here! Listen. Did you ever hear a gadfly that made that noise?”
His manner was so strange that it chilled me. I stood still, listening. And presently, in the sound made by that invisible, restless insect, I detected a difference. It emitted a queer sawing note. I stared across at Nayland Smith.
“You’ve been to Uganda,” he said. “Did you never hear it?”
At which moment, and before I had time to reply, I caught a glimpse of the fly which caused this peculiar sound. It was smaller than I had supposed. Narrowly missing the speaker’s head, it swooped down onto the table behind him, and settled upon something which lay there—something which had already attracted Sir Denis’s attention.
“Don’t move,” I whispered. “It’s just behind you.”
“Get it,” he replied, in an equally low voice. “A book, a roll of paper—anything; but for God’s sake don’t miss it...”
I took up a copy of the Gazette de Monte Carlo. One of poor Petrie’s hobbies was a roulette system which he had never succeeded in perfecting. I rolled it and stepped quietly forward.
Nayland Smith stood quite still. Beside him, my improvised swatter raised, I saw the insect distinctly. It had long, narrow, brownish wings and a curiously hairy head. In the very moment that I dashed the roll of paper down, I recognized the object upon which it had settled.
It was a spray of that purple-leaved drosophyllum, identical except that it was freshly cut, with a fragment which I knew to be sealed in a tube somewhere in Petrie’s collection!
“Make sure,” said Sir Denis, turning.
I repeated the blow. Behind us, on the couch, Petrie lay motionless. Sir Denis bent over the dead insect.
“Don’t you know what this is, Sterling?” he demanded.
“No. Flies are a bit outside my province. But I can tell you something about the purple leaves.”
Taking the roll of paper from me, he moved the dead fly further forward upon the polished table-top where direct light fell upon it; then:
“Hullo!” he exclaimed.
He snatched up a lens which lay near by and bent over the insect, peering down absorbedly.
I turned and looked towards the couch were Petrie lay, and I studied his haggard features. I could detect no evidence of life. The purple shadow showed like a bruise on his forehead; but I thought that it had not increased.
Yet I believed he was doomed, already dying, and my thoughts jumped feverishly to that strange plant upon the table—and from the plant to the yellow face which so recently had leered at me out of the darkness.
Was it conceivable—could it be—that some human agency directed this pestilence?
I turned, looking beyond the bent, motionless figure of Nayland Smith, out into the dusk—and a desire to close the steel shutters suddenly possessed me.
This operation I completed without drawing a single comment from Sir Denis. But, as that menacing dusk was shut out, he stood upright and confronted me.
“Sterling,” he said—and there was something in his steady gaze which definitely startled me—“have you, as a botanist, ever come across a true genus-hybrid?”
“You mean a thing between a lily and a rose—or an oak growing apples?”
“Exactly.”
“In the natural state, never—although some curious hybrids have been reported from time to time. But many freaks of this kind can be cultivated, of course. The Japanese are experts.”
“Cultivated? I agree. But nature, in my experience, sticks to the common law. Now here, Sterling”—he indicated the table—“lies an insect which, from the sound it made when flying, I took to be a tsetse fly—”
“A tsetse? Good heavens! Here?”
He smiled grimly.
“Well outside its supposed area,” he admitted, “and above its usual elevation. I thought you might have recognized its note, as you have travelled in the flybelt. However, I was right—up to a point. It definitely possesses certain characteristics of glossina, the tsetse fly; notably the wings, which are typical. You see, I have been taking an intensive course on this subject! But can you imagine, Sterling, that it has the legs and head of an incredibly large sandfly? The thing is a nightmare, an anachronism; it’s a sort of giant flying flea!”
His words awakened a memory. What had Petrie said to me, earlier in the day?... that “even if Nature is turning topsy-turvy, I think I can puzzle her!...”
“Sir Denis,” I broke in, “I think you should know that Petrie found, in the blood of a patient, some similar freak—a sort of hybrid germ, which I lack the knowledge to describe to you. He found sleeping sickness and plague combined—”
“Good God!”
I thought that the lean, sun-baked face momentarily grew yet more angular.
“You know,” he interrupted, “that tsetse carries sleeping sickness? Sandfly is suspect in several directions. But the rat-flea (and this is more like a flea than a sandfly) is the proved cause of plague infection... Am I going mad?”
He suddenly crossed and bent over Petrie. He examined him carefully and in detail. The fact dawned upon me that Sir Denis Nayland Smith had more than a smattering of the medical art. I watched in silence while finally he took the temperature of the unconscious man.
“There’s no change,” he reported. “‘654’ seems already to have checked its progress. But this coma... Dare we hope?”
“I don’t know what to hope, or what to believe, Sir Denis!”
He nodded.
“Nor do I. The nature of my job has forced me to pick up some elements of medicine; but this is a specialist’s case. However, tell me about these leaves—the leaves which seemed to attract the fly...”
I told him briefly all that I knew of the insect-catching plant.
“The specimen which Petrie has preserved,” I concluded, “bears traces of human blood.”