The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu by Sax Rohmer (icecream ebook reader TXT) 📕

Dr. Fu-Manchu was speaking!

“I have asked you,” came with ever-increasing clearness (Smith had begun to turn the knob), “to reveal to me the name of your correspondent in Nan-Yang. I have suggested that he may be the Mandarin Yen-Sun-Yat, but you have declined to confirm me. Yet I know” (Smith had the door open a good three inches and was peering in) “that some official, some high official, is a traitor. Am I to resort again to the question to learn his name?”

Ice seemed to enter my veins at the unseen inquisitor’s intonation of the words “the question.” This was the Twentieth Century, yet there, in that damnable room...

Smith threw the door open.

Through a sort of haze, born mostly of horror, but not entirely, I saw Eltham, stripped to the waist and tied, with his arms upstretched, to a rafter in the ancient ceiling. A Chinaman who wore a slop-shop blue suit and who held an open knife in his hand, stood beside him. Eltham was ghastly white. The appearance of his chest puzzled me momentarily, then I realized that a sort of tourniquet of wire-netting was screwed so tightly about him that the flesh swelled out in knobs through the mesh. There was blood—

“God in heaven!” screamed Smith frenziedly—“they have the wire-jacket on him! Shoot down that damned Chinaman, Petrie! Shoot! Shoot!”

Lithely as a cat the man with the knife leaped around—but I raised the Browning, and deliberately—with a cool deliberation that came to me suddenly—shot him through the head. I saw his oblique eyes turn up to the whites; I saw the mark squarely between his brows; and with no word nor cry he sank to his knees and toppled forward with one yellow hand beneath him and one outstretched, clutching—clutching—convulsively. His pigtail came unfastened and began to uncoil, slowly, like a snake.

I handed the pistol to Smith; I was perfectly cool, now; and I leaped forward, took up the bloody knife from the floor and cut Eltham’s lashings. He sank into my arms.

“Praise God,” he murmured, weakly. “He is more merciful to me than perhaps I deserve. Unscrew... the jacket, Petrie... I think ... I was very near to.... weakening. Praise the good God, Who... gave me... fortitude...”

I got the screw of the accursed thing loosened, but the act of removing the jacket was too agonizing for Eltham—man of iron though he was. I laid him swooning on the floor.

“Where is Fu-Manchu?”

Nayland Smith, from just within the door, threw out the query in a tone of stark amaze. I stood up—I could do nothing more for the poor victim at the moment—and looked about me. The room was innocent of furniture, save for heaps of rubbish on the floor, and a tin oil-lamp hung, on the wall. The dead Chinaman lay close beside Smith. There was no second door, the one window was barred, and from this room we had heard the voice, the unmistakable, unforgettable voice, of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

But Dr. Fu-Manchu was not there!

Neither of us could accept the fact for a moment; we stood there, looking from the dead man to the tortured man who only swooned, in a state of helpless incredulity.

Then the explanation flashed upon us both, simultaneously, and with a cry of baffled rage Smith leaped along the passage to the second door. It was wide open. I stood at his elbow when he swept its emptiness with the ray of his pocket-lamp.

There was a speaking-tube fixed between the two rooms!

Smith literally ground his teeth.

“Yet, Petrie,” he said, “we have learnt something. Fu-Manchu had evidently promised Eltham his life if he would divulge the name of his correspondent. He meant to keep his word; it is a sidelight on his character.”

“How so?”

“Eltham has never seen Dr. Fu-Manchu, but Eltham knows certain parts of China better than you know the Strand. Probably, if he saw Fu-Manchu, he would recognize him for who he really is, and this, it seems, the Doctor is anxious to avoid.”

We ran back to where we had left Karamaneh.

The room was empty!

“Defeated, Petrie!” said Smith, bitterly. “The Yellow Devil is loosed on London again!”

He leaned from the window and the skirl of a police whistle split the stillness of the night.