The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer (ebook reader below 3000 .TXT) đź“•
"Good man!" he cried, wringing my hand in his impetuous way. "We start now."
"What, to-night?
"To-night! I had thought of turning in, I must admit. I have not dared to sleep for forty-eight hours, except in fifteen-minute stretches. But there is one move that must be made to-night and immediately. I must warn Sir Crichton Davey."
"Sir Crichton Davey--of the India--"
"Petrie, he is a doomed man! Unless he follows my instructions without question, without hesitation--before Heaven, nothing can save him! I do not know when the blow will fall, how it will fall, nor from whence, but I know that my first duty is to warn him. Let us walk down to the corner of the common and get a taxi."
How strangely does the adventurous intrude upon the humdrum; for, when it intrudes at all, more often than not its intrusion is sudden and unlooked for. To-day, we may seek for romance and fail to find it: unsought, it
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the drift of her words.
“You mean that if you speak, Fu-Manchu will find a way of killing you?”
“Of killing ME!” she flashed scornfully. “Do I seem one
to fear for myself?”
“Then what do you fear?” I asked, in surprise.
She looked at me oddly.
“When I was seized and sold for a slave,” she answered slowly,
“my sister was taken, too, and my brother—a child.”
She spoke the word with a tender intonation, and her slight accent
rendered it the more soft. “My sister died in the desert.
My brother lived. Better, far better, that he had died, too.”
Her words impressed me intensely.
“Of what are you speaking?” I questioned. “You speak of
slave-raids, of the desert. Where did these things take place?
Of what country are you?”
“Does it matter?” she questioned in turn. “Of what country am I?
A slave has no country, no name.”
“No name!” I cried.
“You may call me Karamaneh,” she said. “As Karamaneh I was
sold to Dr. Fu-Manchu, and my brother also he purchased.
We were cheap at the price he paid.” She laughed shortly, wildly.
“But he has spent a lot of money to educate me. My brother is all
that is left to me in the world to love, and he is in the power
of Dr. Fu-Manchu. You understand? It is upon him the blow will fall.
You ask me to fight against Fu-Manchu. You talk of protection.
Did your protection save Sir Crichton Davey?”
I shook my head sadly.
“You understand now why I cannot disobey my master’s orders—why, if I would,
I dare not betray him.”
I walked to the window and looked out. How could I answer her arguments?
What could I say? I heard the rustle of her ragged skirts, and she who called
herself Karamaneh stood beside me. She laid her hand upon my arm.
“Let me go,” she pleaded. “He will kill him! He will kill him!”
Her voice shook with emotion.
“He cannot revenge himself upon your brother when you are in no way to blame,”
I said angrily. “We arrested you; you are not here of your own free will.”
She drew her breath sharply, clutching at my arm, and in her eyes I
could read that she was forcing her mind to some arduous decision.
“Listen.” She was speaking rapidly, nervously. “If I help you
to take Dr. Fu-Manchu—tell you where he is to be found ALONE—
will you promise me, solemnly promise me, that you will immediately
go to the place where I shall guide you and release my brother;
that you will let us both go free?”
“I will,” I said, without hesitation. “You may rest assured of it.”
“But there is a condition,” she added.
“What is it?”
“When I have told you where to capture him you must release me.”
I hesitated. Smith often had accused me of weakness
where this girl was concerned. What now was my plain duty?
That she would utterly decline to speak under any circumstances
unless it suited her to do so I felt assured. If she spoke
the truth, in her proposed bargain there was no personal element;
her conduct I now viewed in a new light. Humanity, I thought,
dictated that I accept her proposal; policy also.
“I agree,” I said, and looked into her eyes, which were aflame
now with emotion, an excitement perhaps of anticipation,
perhaps of fear.
She laid her hands upon my shoulders.
“You will be careful?” she said pleadingly.
“For your sake,” I replied, “I shall.”
“Not for my sake.”
“Then for your brother’s.”
“No.” Her voice had sunk to a whisper. “For your own.”
A COOL breeze met us, blowing from the lower reaches of the Thames.
Far behind us twinkled the dim lights of Low’s Cottages,
the last regular habitations abutting upon the marshes.
Between us and the cottages stretched half-a-mile of lush land
through which at this season there were, however, numerous dry paths.
Before us the flats again, a dull, monotonous expanse beneath the moon,
with the promise of the cool breeze that the river flowed round
the bend ahead. It was very quiet. Only the sound of our footsteps,
as Nayland Smith and I tramped steadily towards our goal,
broke the stillness of that lonely place.
Not once but many times, within the last twenty minutes,
I had thought that we were ill-advised to adventure
alone upon the capture of the formidable Chinese doctor;
but we were following out our compact with Karamaneh;
and one of her stipulations had been that the police must
not be acquainted with her share in the matter.
A light came into view far ahead of us.
“That’s the light, Petrie,” said Smith. “If we keep that straight before us,
according to our information we shall strike the hulk.”
I grasped the revolver in my pocket, and the presence
of the little weapon was curiously reassuring.
I have endeavored, perhaps in extenuation of my own fears,
to explain how about Dr. Fu-Manchu there rested an atmosphere
of horror, peculiar, unique. He was not as other men.
The dread that he inspired in all with whom he came in contact,
the terrors which he controlled and hurled at whomsoever
cumbered his path, rendered him an object supremely sinister.
I despair of conveying to those who may read this account
any but the coldest conception of the man’s evil power.
Smith stopped suddenly and grasped my arm.
We stood listening. “What?” I asked.
“You heard nothing?”
I shook my head.
Smith was peering back over the marshes in his oddly alert way.
He turned to me, and his tanned face wore a peculiar expression.
“You don’t think it’s a trap?” he jerked. “We are trusting her blindly.”
Strange it may seem, but something within me rose in arms
against the innuendo.
“I don’t,” I said shortly.
He nodded. We pressed on.
Ten minutes’ steady tramping brought us within sight of the Thames.
Smith and I both had noticed how Fu-Manchu’s activities centered
always about the London river. Undoubtedly it was his highway,
his line of communication, along which he moved his mysterious forces.
The opium den off Shadwell Highway, the mansion upstream,
at that hour a smoldering shell; now the hulk lying off the marshes.
Always he made his headquarters upon the river. It was significant;
and even if tonight’s expedition should fail, this was a clew
for our future guidance.
“Bear to the right,” directed Smith. “We must reconnoiter
before making our attack.”
We took a path that led directly to the river bank.
Before us lay the gray expanse of water, and out upon it
moved the busy shipping of the great mercantile city.
But this life of the river seemed widely removed from us.
The lonely spot where we stood had no kinship with human activity.
Its dreariness illuminated by the brilliant moon, it looked
indeed a fit setting for an act in such a drama as that wherein
we played our parts. When I had lain in the East End opium den,
when upon such another night as this I had looked out upon
a peaceful Norfolk countryside, the same knowledge of aloofness,
of utter detachment from the world of living men, had come to me.
Silently Smith stared out at the distant moving lights.
“Karamaneh merely means a slave,” he said irrelevantly.
I made no comment.
“There’s the hulk,” he added.
The bank upon which we stood dipped in mud slopes to the level
of the running tide. Seaward it rose higher, and by a narrow inlet—
for we perceived that we were upon a kind of promontory—
a rough pier showed. Beneath it was a shadowy shape in the patch
of gloom which the moon threw far out upon the softly eddying water.
Only one dim light was visible amid this darkness.
“That will be the cabin,” said Smith.
Acting upon our prearranged plan, we turned and walked up on
to the staging above the hulk. A wooden ladder led out and down
to the deck below, and was loosely lashed to a ring on the pier.
With every motion of the tidal waters the ladder rose and fell,
its rings creaking harshly, against the crazy railing.
“How are we going to get down without being detected?” whispered Smith.
“We’ve got to risk it,” I said grimly.
Without further words my friend climbed around on to the ladder
and commenced to descend. I waited until his head disappeared
below the level, and, clumsily enough, prepared to follow him.
The hulk at that moment giving an unusually heavy heave,
I stumbled, and for one breathless moment looked down upon
the glittering surface streaking the darkness beneath me.
My foot had slipped, and but that I had a firm grip upon the top rung,
that instant, most probably, had marked the end of my share
in the fight with Fu-Manchu. As it was I had a narrow escape.
I felt something slip from my hip pocket, but the weird
creaking of the ladder, the groans of the laboring hulk,
and the lapping of the waves about the staging drowned the sound
of the splash as my revolver dropped into the river.
Rather, white-faced, I think, I joined Smith on the deck.
He had witnessed my accident, but—
“We must risk it,” he whispered in my ear. “We dare not turn back now.”
He plunged into the semi-darkness, making for the cabin,
I perforce following.
At the bottom of the ladder we came fully into the light streaming out
from the singular apartments at the entrance to which we found ourselves.
It was fitted up as a laboratory. A glimpse I had of shelves loaded
with jars and bottles, of a table strewn with scientific paraphernalia,
with retorts, with tubes of extraordinary shapes, holding living organisms,
and with instruments—some of them of a form unknown to my experience.
I saw too that books, papers and rolls of parchment littered the bare
wooden floor. Then Smith’s voice rose above the confused sounds
about me, incisive, commanding:
“I have you covered, Dr. Fu-Manchu!”
For Fu-Manchu sat at the table.
The picture that he presented at that moment is one which persistently
clings in my memory. In his long, yellow robe, his masklike,
intellectual face bent forward amongst the riot of singular objects upon
the table, his great, high brow gleaming in the light of the shaded
lamp above him, and with the abnormal eyes, filmed and green,
raised to us, he seemed a figure from the realms of delirium.
But, most amazing circumstance of all, he and his surroundings tallied,
almost identically, with the dream-picture which had come to me as I
lay chained in the cell!
Some of the large jars about the place held anatomy specimens.
A faint smell of opium hung in the air, and playing with the tassel
of one of the cushions upon which, as upon a divan, Fu-Manchu was seated,
leaped and chattered a little marmoset.
That was an electric moment. I was prepared for anything—
for anything except for what really happened.
The doctor’s wonderful, evil face betrayed no hint of emotion.
The lids flickered over the filmed eyes, and their greenness grew
momentarily brighter, and filmed over again.
“Put up your hands!” rapped Smith, “and attempt no tricks.”
His voice quivered with excitement. “The game’s up,
Fu-Manchu. Find something to tie him up with, Petrie.”
I moved forward to Smith’s side, and was about
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