The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu
A dreary voice from one of the bunks came:
"Give 'im a pipe, Charlie, curse yer! an' stop 'is palaver."
Yan performed a curious little shrug, rather of the back than of the
shoulders, and shuffled to the box which bore the smoky lamp. Holding
a needle in the flame, he dipped it, when red-hot, into an old cocoa
tin, and withdrew it with a bead of opium adhering to the end. Slowly
roasting this over the lamp, he dropped it into the bowl of the metal
pipe which he held ready, where it burned with a spirituous blue flame.
"Pass it over," said Smith huskily, and rose on his knees with the
assumed eagerness of a slave to the drug.
Yan handed him the pipe, which he promptly put to his lips, and
prepared another for me.
"Whatever you do, don't inhale any," came Smith's whispered injunction.
It was with a sense of nausea greater even than that occasioned by the
disgusting atmosphere of the den that I took the pipe and pretended to
smoke. Taking my cue from my friend, I allowed my head gradually to
sink lower and lower, until, within a few minutes, I sprawled sideways
on the floor, Smith lying close beside me.
"The ship's sinkin'," droned a voice from one of the bunks. "Look at
the rats."
Yan had noiselessly withdrawn, and I experienced a curious sense of
isolation from my fellows--from the whole of the Western world. My
throat was parched with the fumes, my head ached. The vicious
atmosphere seemed contaminating. I was as one dropped--
Somewhere East of Suez, where the best is like the worst, And there
ain't no Ten Commandments and a man can raise a thirst.
Smith began to whisper softly.
"We have carried it through successfully so far," he said. "I don't
know if you have observed it, but there is a stair just behind you,
half concealed by a ragged curtain. We are near that, and well in the
dark. I have seen nothing suspicious so far--or nothing much. But if
there was anything going forward it would no doubt be delayed until we
new arrivals were well doped. S-SH!"
He pressed my arm to emphasize the warning. Through my half-closed
eyes I perceived a shadowy form near the curtain to which he had
referred. I lay like a log, but my muscles were tensed nervously.
The shadow materialized as the figure moved forward into the room with
a curiously lithe movement.
The smoky lamp in the middle of the place afforded scant illumination,
serving only to indicate sprawling shapes--here an extended hand, brown
or yellow, there a sketchy, corpse-like face; whilst from all about
rose obscene sighings and murmurings in far-away voices--an uncanny,
animal chorus. It was like a glimpse of the Inferno seen by some
Chinese Dante. But so close to us stood the newcomer that I was able
to make out a ghastly parchment face, with small, oblique eyes, and a
misshapen head crowned with a coiled pigtail, surmounting a slight,
hunched body. There was something unnatural, inhuman, about that
masklike face, and something repulsive in the bent shape and the long,
yellow hands clasped one upon the other.
Fu-Manchu, from Smith's account, in no way resembled this crouching
apparition with the death's-head countenance and lithe movements; but
an instinct of some kind told me that we were on the right scent--that
this was one of the doctor's servants. How I came to that conclusion,
I cannot explain; but with no doubt in my mind that this was a member
of the formidable murder group, I saw the yellow man creep nearer,
nearer, silently, bent and peering.
He was watching us.
Of another circumstance I became aware, and a disquieting circumstance.
There were fewer murmurings and sighings from the surrounding bunks.
The presence of the crouching figure had created a sudden semi-silence
in the den, which could only mean that some of the supposed
opium-smokers had merely feigned coma and the approach of coma.
Nayland Smith lay like a dead man, and trusting to the darkness, I,
too, lay prone and still, but watched the evil face bending lower and
lower, until it came within a few inches of my own. I completely
closed my eyes.
Delicate fingers touched my right eyelid. Divining what was coming, I
rolled my eyes up, as the lid was adroitly lifted and lowered again.
The man moved away.
I had saved the situation! And noting anew the hush about me--a hush
in which I fancied many pairs of ears listened--I was glad. For just a
moment I realized fully how, with the place watched back and front, we
yet were cut off, were in the hands of Far Easterns, to some extent in
the power of members of that most inscrutably mysterious race, the
Chinese.
"Good," whispered Smith at my side. "I don't think I could have done
it. He took me on trust after that. My God! what an awful face.
Petrie, it's the hunchback of Cadby's notes. Ah, I thought so. Do you
see that?"
I turned my eyes round as far as was possible. A man had scrambled
down from one of the bunks and was following the bent figure across the
room.
They passed around us quietly, the little yellow man leading, with his
curious, lithe gait, and the other, an impassive Chinaman, following.
The curtain was raised, and I heard footsteps receding on the stairs.
"Don't stir," whispered Smith.
An intense excitement was clearly upon him, and he communicated it to
me. Who was the occupant of the room above?
Footsteps on the stair, and the Chinaman reappeared, recrossed the
floor, and went out. The little, bent man went over to another bunk,
this time leading up the stair one who looked like a lascar.
"Did you see his right hand?" whispered Smith. "A dacoit! They come
here to report and to take orders. Petrie, Dr. Fu-Manchu is up there."
"What shall we do?"--softly.
"Wait. Then we must try to rush the stairs. It would be futile to
bring in the police first. He is sure to have some other exit. I will
give the word while the little yellow devil is down here. You are
nearer and will have to go first, but if the hunchback follows, I can
then deal with him."
Our whispered colloquy was interrupted by the return of the dacoit, who
recrossed the room as the Chinaman had done, and immediately took his
departure. A third man, whom Smith identified as a Malay, ascended the
mysterious stairs, descended, and went out; and a fourth, whose
nationality it was impossible to determine, followed. Then, as the
softly moving usher crossed to a bunk on the right of the outer door--
"Up you go, Petrie," cried Smith, for further delay was dangerous and
further dissimulation useless.
I leaped to my feet. Snatching my revolver from the pocket of the
rough jacket I wore, I bounded to the stair and went blundering up in
complete darkness. A chorus of brutish cries clamored from behind,
with a muffled scream rising above them all. But Nayland Smith was
close behind as I raced along a covered gangway, in a purer air, and at
my heels when I crashed open a door at the end and almost fell into the
room beyond.
What I saw were merely a dirty table, with some odds and ends upon it
of which I was too excited to take note, an oil-lamp swung by a brass
chain above, and a man sitting behind the table. But from the moment
that my gaze rested upon the one who sat there, I think if the place
had been an Aladdin's palace I should have had no eyes for any of its
wonders.
He wore a plain yellow robe, of a hue almost identical with that of his
smooth, hairless countenance. His hands were large, long and bony, and
he held them knuckles upward, and rested his pointed chin upon their
thinness. He had a great, high brow, crowned with sparse,
neutral-colored hair.
Of his face, as it looked out at me over the dirty table, I despair of
writing convincingly. It was that of an archangel of evil, and it was
wholly dominated by the most uncanny eyes that ever reflected a human
soul, for they were narrow and long, very slightly oblique, and of a
brilliant green. But their unique horror lay in a certain filminess
(it made me think of the membrana nictitans in a bird) which, obscuring
them as I threw wide the door, seemed to lift as I actually passed the
threshold, revealing the eyes in all their brilliant iridescence.
I know that I stopped dead, one foot within the room, for the malignant
force of the man was something surpassing my experience. He was
surprised by this sudden intrusion--yes, but no trace of fear showed
upon that wonderful face, only a sort of pitying contempt. And, as I
paused, he rose slowly to his feet, never removing his gaze from mine.
"IT'S FU-MANCHU!" cried Smith over my shoulder, in a voice that was
almost a scream. "IT'S FU-MANCHU! Cover him! Shoot him dead if--"
The conclusion of that sentence I never heard.
Dr. Fu-Manchu reached down beside the table, and the floor slipped from
under me.
One last glimpse I had of the fixed green eyes, and with a scream I was
unable to repress I dropped, dropped, dropped, and plunged into icy
water, which closed over my head.
Vaguely I had seen a spurt of flame, had heard another cry following my
own, a booming sound (the trap), the flat note of a police whistle.
But when I rose to the surface impenetrable darkness enveloped me; I
was spitting filthy, oily liquid from my mouth, and fighting down the
black terror that had me by the throat--terror of the darkness about
me, of the unknown depths beneath me, of the pit into which I was cast
amid stifling stenches and the lapping of tidal water.
"Smith!" I cried. . . . "Help! Help!"
My voice seemed to beat back upon me, yet I was about to cry out again,
when, mustering all my presence of mind and all my failing courage, I
recognized that I had better employment of my energies, and began to
swim straight ahead, desperately determined to face all the horrors of
this place--to die hard if die I must.
A drop of liquid fire fell through the darkness and hissed into the
water beside me!
I felt that, despite my resolution, I was going mad.
Another fiery drop--and another!
I touched a rotting wooden post and slimy timbers. I had reached one
bound of my watery prison. More fire fell from above, and the scream
of hysteria quivered, unuttered, in my throat.
Keeping myself afloat with increasing difficulty in my heavy garments,
I threw my head back and raised my eyes.
No more drops fell, and no more drops would fall; but it was merely a
question of time for the floor to collapse. For it was beginning to
emit a dull, red glow.
The room above me was in flames!
It was drops of burning oil from the lamp, finding passage through the
cracks in the crazy flooring, which had fallen about me--for the death
trap had reclosed, I suppose, mechanically.
My saturated garments were dragging me down, and now I could hear the
flames hungrily eating into the ancient rottenness overhead. Shortly
that cauldron would be loosed upon my head. The glow of the flames
grew brighter . . . and showed me the half-rotten piles upholding the
building, showed me the tidal mark upon the slime-coated walls--showed
me that there was no escape!
By some subterranean duct the foul place was fed from the Thames. By
that duct, with the outgoing tide, my body would pass, in the wake of
Mason, Cadby, and many another victim!
Rusty iron rungs were affixed to one of the walls communicating with a
trap--but the bottom three were missing!
Brighter and brighter grew the awesome light--the light of what should
be my funeral pyre--reddening the oily water and adding a new dread to
the whispering, clammy horror of the pit. But something it showed
me . . . a projecting beam a few feet above the water . . . and directly
below the iron ladder!
"Merciful Heaven!" I breathed. "Have I the strength?"