by Sax Rohmer
In a small but perfectly equipped laboratory, a man wearing a long white coat was holding up a test tube to a lamp and inspecting its contents critically. He was quite bald, and his skull had a curious, shrivelled appearance.
But when, hearing us enter, he replaced the tube in a rack and turned, I recognized that this was indeed my father’s old friend, aged incredibly and with lines of suffering upon his gaunt face, but beyond any question Sir Frank Narcomb himself!
“Ah, doctor!” he exclaimed.
I saw an expression of something very like veneration spring into the tired eyes of this man who, in life, had acknowledged none his master in that sphere which he had made his own.
“The explanation eludes me,” he said. “Russia persistently remains immune!”
“Russia!”
I had never heard the word spoken as Dr. Fu-Manchu spoke it. Those hissing sibilants were venomous.
“Russia! It is preposterous that those half-starved slaves of Stalin’s should survive when stronger men succumb. Russia!”
With the third repetition of the name a sort of momentary frenzy possessed the speaker. During one fleeting instant I looked upon this companion of my dream as a stark maniac. The madman discarded the gown of the scientist and revealed himself in his dreadful, naked reality.
Then, swiftly as it had come, the mood passed. He laid a long yellow hand upon the shoulder of Sir Frank Narcomb.
“Yours is the most difficult task of all, Companion,” he said. “This I appreciate, and I am arranging that you shall have more suitable assistance.” He glanced in my direction, and I saw that queer film flicker across his brilliant eyes. “This is Mr. Alan Sterling, with whom, I am informed, you are already acquainted.”
Sir Frank stared hard. As I remembered him he had been endowed with a mass of bushy white hair; now he was a much changed man, but the shrewd, wrinkled face remained the same. Came a light of recognition.
“Alan!” he said, and stretched out his hand. “It’s good to meet you here. How is Andrew Sterling?”
Mechanically I shook the extended hand.
“My father was quite well, Sir Frank,” I replied in a toneless voice, “when I last heard from him.”
“Excellent! I wish he could join us.”
In the circumstances, I could think of nothing further to say, but:
“Follow!” came the guttural order.
And once more I followed.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THE HAIRLESS MAN
Our route led up a flight of stairs, rubber-covered like every other place I had visited with the exception of that strange study pervaded with opium fumes.
“The physiological research room,” Dr. Fu-Manchu said, “would not interest you. It is very small in this establishment, although Companion Yamamata, who is at present in charge, is engaged upon a highly important experiment in synthetic genesis.”
We entered a long, well-lighted corridor, with neat white doors right and left, each bearing a number like those in a hotel. These doors were perfectly plain and possessed neither handles nor keyholes.
“Some of the staff reside here,” my guide explained.
He pressed a button in the wall beside a door numbered eleven, and the door slid noiselessly open. I saw a very neat sitting room, with other rooms opening out of it.
“Temporarily...” the guttural voice continued.
There was a strange interruption.
A sort of quivering note sounded, a gong-like note, more a vibration of the atmosphere than an actual sound. But Dr. Fu-Manchu stood rigidly upright, and his extraordinary eyes glanced swiftly left along the corridor.
“Quick!” he said harshly, “inside! And close the door—there is a corresponding button in the wall. One pressure closes the door; two open it. Remain there until you are called, if you value your life.”
His harsh imperious manner had its effect. Some of the secret of this strange man’s power lay in the fact that he never questioned his own authority, or the obedience of those upon whom he laid his orders.
The force behind those orders was uncanny.
With no other glance in my direction he set off along the corridor, moving swiftly, yet with a sort of cat-like dignity.
With his withdrawal, some part of my real self began to clamour for recognition. I hesitated on the threshold of the little room, watching him as he went. And when the tall figure, with never a backward glance, disappeared where the corridor branched right, something like a cold wave of sanity came flooding back to my brain.
This was neither delirium nor death! It was mirage. This place was real enough—the long corridor and the white doors—but the rest was hypnotism; a trick played for what purpose I could not imagine, by a master of that dangerous art!
That the woman called Fah Lo Suee was an adept, Sir Denis had admitted. This was her father, and her master.
Those living-dead men were phantoms, conjured up by his brain and displayed before me as an illusionist displays the seemingly impossible. Those vast forcing houses, the big laboratory, the horrible insects in their glass cases! It was perhaps his method of achieving conquest of my personality, submerging me and then using me.
Very well! I was not conquered yet. I could still fight!
That curious throbbing, as of a muted gong, continued incessantly.
What did it mean? What was the explanation of Dr. Fu-Manchu’s sudden change of manner and his hurried departure?
“Close the door... and remain there until you are called, if you value your life!”
These had been his words. He had spoken with apparent sincerity.
And now, as I watched, I saw a strange thing. At the foot of the stairs which we had ascended, I saw a door dropping slowly from the roof. I could feel the slight vibration of the mechanism controlling it.
I glanced swiftly left, along the corridor.
A similar door was descending just where the passage branched off!
They were stone doors, or something very like them, such as are used in seagoing ships. Was this the meaning of that constant vibrating note which now was beginning to tell upon my nerves?
What had happened? Had fire broken out? If so, I might well be trapped between the two doors, for I knew of no other exit. Further reflection assured me that these devices could not be intended for use in such an emergency as fire. What then was their purpose, and what was it that Dr. Fu-Manchu had feared?
The answer came, even as the question flashed into my mind.
Heralded by a hoarse, roaring sound, a Thing, neither animal nor human, a huge, naked, misshapen creature resembling an animated statue by Epstein, burst into view at the end of the corridor!
It had a huge head set upon huge shoulders. The head was hairless, and the entire face, trunk, and limbs glistened moistly like the skin of an earthworm. The arms were equally massive; but I saw that the hands were misformed, the fingers webbed, and the thumbs scarcely present.
The legs were out of all proportion to that mighty trunk, being stumpy, dwarfed, and terminating in feet of a loathsome pink colour—feet much smaller than the great hands, but also webbed.
From the appalling, glistening, naked face, two tiny eyes set close together beside a flattened nose with distended nostrils, glared redly, murderously, in my direction.
Uttering a sound which might have proceeded from a wounded buffalo, the creature hurled itself towards me...
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
HALF-WORLD
I sprang back, looking wildly right and left for the button which controlled the door.
The worm-man was almost upon me, and transcending all fear of a violent death was the horror of contact with those moistly glistening limbs. The control button proved to be on the right. I pressed it.
And the door began to close rapidly and smoothly.
In the very instant of its closing, a loathsome, moist mass appeared at the narrowing opening.
My heart leapt and then seemed to stop. I thought that
one of those great pink arms was about to be thrust through. Judging the door to be a frail one, I looked in those few instances upon a fate more horrible than any which had befallen man since prehistoric times.
The door closed.
And now came a hollow booming, and a perceptible vibration of the floor upon which I stood.
That unnameable thing was endeavouring to batter a way in! I inhaled deeply, and knew such a sense of relief as I could not have believed possible under the roof of Dr. Fu-Manchu.
The door was of metal. Not even the unnatural strength of the monster could prevail against it.
All sounds were curiously muted here; but one harsh bellow of what I took to be frustrated rage reached me very dimly. Then silence fell.
I pressed my ear against the enamelled metal but could hear nothing save a vague murmuring, with which was mingled the rumble of those descending doors.
Thereupon I stood upright; and as I did so, a stifled exclamation brought me sharply about.
Fleurette was in the room just behind me!
She wore a blue-and-white pyjama suit and blue sandals. Her beautiful eyes registered the nearest approach to fear which I had seen in them. She had told me, I remembered, that nothing frightened her, but today—or tonight, for I had lost all count of time—something had definitely succeeded in doing so. Her face, which was so like a delicate flower, was pale.
“You!” she whispered. “What are you doing here?”
I swallowed, not without difficulty. I suffered from an intense thirst, and my throat remained very sore by reason of its maltreatment at the hands of the Dacoit.
My heart began jumping in quite a ridiculous way.
Yet I suppose the phenomenon was not so ridiculous, for Fleurette was more lovely than I had ever believed a woman could be. Oddly enough, her beauty swamped the last straw of reality upon which I had clutched in the corridor with its rows of white doors and which had remained with me up to the moment that the worm-man had appeared. I sank back again into a sea of doubt, from which, agonizingly, I had been fighting to escape.
Fleurette was dead! I was dead! This was a grim, a ghastly halfworld, horribly reminiscent of that state which Spiritualists present to us as the afterlife.
“I have joined you,” I replied.
My words carried no conviction even to myself.
“What?”
Her expression changed; she watched me with a new, keen interest.
“I have joined you.”
Fleurette moved towards me and laid one hand almost timidly upon my shoulder.
“Is that true?” she asked, in a low voice.
I had thought that her eyes were blue, but now I saw that they were violet. The life beyond, then, was a parody of that which we had lived on earth. I had seen travesties of my own studies in those monstrous houses; I had met with the fabulous Dr. Fu-Manchu; I had watched men still pursuing the secrets they had sought in life—amid surroundings which were a caricature of those they had known during their earthly incarnation.
Horror there was, in this strange borderland, but, as I looked into those violet eyes, I told myself that death had its recompenses.
“I am glad you are here,” said Fleurette.
“So am I.”
She glanced aside and went on rapidly:
“You see, I have been trained not to feel fear, but whenever I hear the alarm signal and know that the section doors are being closed—I feel something very like it! I don’t suppose you know about all this yet?” she added.
Already normal colour was returning to those rose-petal cheeks, and she dropped into a little armchair, forcing a smile.
“No,” I replied, watching her; “it’s unpleasantly strange.”
“It must be!” She nodded. “I have lived among this sort of thing on and off as long as I can remember.”
“Do you mean here?”
“No; I have never been here before. But at the old palace in Ho Nan the same system is in use, and I have been there many times.”
“You must travel a lot,” I said, studying her fascinatedly, and thinking that she had the most musical voice in the world.
“Yes, I do.”
“With Mahdi Bey?”
“He nearly always comes with me: he is my guardian, you see.”
“Your guardian?”
“Yes.” She looked up, a puzzled frown appearing upon her smooth forehead. “Mahdi Bey is an old Arab doctor, you know, who adopted me when I was quite tiny—long before I can remember. He is very, very clever; and no one in the world has ever been so kind to me.”
“But my dear Fleurette, how did you come to be adopted by an Arab doctor?”
She laughed: she had exquisite little teeth.
“Because,” she said, and at last that for which I had been waiting, the adorable dimple, appeared in her chin, “because I am half an Arab myself.”
“What!”
“Don’t I look like one? I am sunburned now, I know; but my skin is naturally not so many shades lighter.”
“But an Arab, with violet eyes and hair like... like an Egyptian sunset.”
“Egyptian, yes!” She laughed again. “Evidently you detect the East even in my hair!”
“But,” I said in amazement, “you have no trace of accent.”
“Why should I have?” She looked at me mockingly. “I am a most perfect little prig. I speak French also without any foreign accent; Italian, Spanish, German, Arabic, and Chinese.”
“You are pulling my leg.”
That maddening dimple reappeared, and she shook her head so that glittering curls danced and seemed to throw out sparks of light.
“I know such accomplishments are simply horrible for a girl—but I can’t help it. This learning has been thrust upon me. You see, I have been trained for a purpose.”
And as she spoke the words, dancing, vital youth dropped from her like a cloak. Those long-lashed eyes, which I had an insane desire to kiss, ceased to laugh. Again that rapt, mystical expression claimed her face. She was looking through me at some very distant object. I had ceased to exist.
“But, Fleurette,” I said desperately, “what purpose? There can be only one end to it. Sooner or later you will fall in love with— somebody or another. You will forget your accomplishments and everything. I mean—it’s a sort of law. What other purpose is there in life for a woman?”
In a faraway voice:
“There is no such thing as love,” Fleurette murmured. “A woman can only serve.”
“Whatever do you mean?”
“You are new to it all. You will know tomorrow or perhaps even tonight.”
I had taken a step in her direction when something arrested me— drew me up sharply.
Like a fairy trumpet it sounded, again, that unaccountable call which I had heard twice before—coming from nowhere; from everywhere; from inside my brain!
Fleurette stood up, giving me never another glance, and moved to that end of the room opposite to the door by which I had entered. She touched some control hidden in the wall. A section slid open. As she crossed the threshold, she turned: I could see a lighted corridor beyond.
“The danger is over now,” she said. “Goodbye.”
I stood staring stupidly at the blank expanse of wall where only a moment before Fleurette had been, when I heard a sound behind me. I turned sharply.
The white door was open! The woman whom Nayland Smith had called Fah Lo Suee stood there, looking at me.
With the opening of the door a faint vibration reached my ears. The “section doors” (so Fleurette had described them) were being raised.
Fah Lo Suee wore what I took to be a Chinese dress, by virtue of its style, only; for it was of a patternless, shimmering gold material. Her unveiled eyes were green as emeralds; their resemblance to those of the terrible doctor was unmistakable.
“Please come,” she said; “my father is waiting for you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE JADE PIPE
> As I followed that slim, languorous figure, mentally I put myself in the witness box. And this was the question to which I demanded an answer:
Am I alive or dead?
On the whole, I was disposed now to believe that I was alive. Therefore, I put this second question:
Am I sane?
To which query I could find no answer.
If the occurrences of the last few hours were real, then I had stepped into a world presumably under the aegis of Dr. Fu-Manchu, and presumably in China, where natural laws were flouted; their place taken by laws created by the Chinese physician.
At the foot of the stairs, Fah Lo Suee turned sharply left and opened one of the sliding doors which seemed to be common in the establishment. She beckoned me to follow, and I found myself in a carpeted, warmly lighted corridor. She bent across me to reclose the door.
“You must forget all that is past and all that is puzzling you,” she whispered urgently, speaking close to my ear. “My father knows that you and the little Rose-petal are acquainted. Don’t speak—listen. He will question you, and you will have to answer. When you go to Yamamata’s room, do not fear the injection. But all that you are told will happen when you have received the Blessing of the Celestial Vision, see that you carry out... Pretend—it is your only chance. Pretend! I will see you again as soon as possible. Now follow me.”
These strange words she had spoken with extraordinary rapidity, as she had bent over me, apparently fumbling with the button which controlled the door.
And now, with that slow, lithe, cat-like walk in which again I recognized her father, she moved ahead, leading me. My brain was working with feverish rapidity.
The little Rose-petal!
This must be the Chinese name of Fleurette. Our association, I gathered, did not meet with the approval of Dr. Fu-Manchu. And what was the Blessing of the Celestial Vision? This I had yet to learn.