The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu
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 gray 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 had
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 tabloids 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 tabloids 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
notebook. 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 mustache 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 muttered.
He sprang to his feet, glaring wildly at Smith and me, 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
someone 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 the 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 XIX
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 a 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 cute, 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 chloral--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 mustache, 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 the 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 round 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 dawning 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.