The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu by Sax Rohmer (ebook reader below 3000 .TXT) 📕
"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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He was dragging Karamaneh by the wrists. He seated himself
on the cushions near to us, pulling the girl down beside him.
Now, I could see her face—and the expression in her beautiful
eyes made me writhe.
Fu-Manchu was watching us, his discolored teeth faintly visible
in the dim light, to which my eyes were becoming accustomed.
“Dr. Petrie,” he said, “you shall be my honored guest at my home in China.
You shall assist me to revolutionize chemistry. Mr. Smith, I fear
you know more of my plans than I had deemed it possible for you
to have learned, and I am anxious to know if you have a confidant.
Where your memory fails you, and my files and wire jackets prove ineffectual,
Inspector Weymouth’s recollections may prove more accurate.”
He turned to the cowering girl—who shrank away from him
in pitiful, abject terror.
“In my hands, Doctor,” he continued, “I hold a needle charged
with a rare culture. It is the link between the bacilli
and the fungi. You have seemed to display an undue interest
in the peach and pearl which render my Karamaneh so delightful,
In the supple grace of her movements and the sparkle of her eyes.
You can never devote your whole mind to those studies which I
have planned for you whilst such distractions exist.
A touch of this keen point, and the laughing Karamaneh becomes
the shrieking hag—the maniacal, mowing—”
Then, with an ox-like rush, Weymouth was upon him!
Karamaneh, wrought upon past endurance, with a sobbing cry, sank to the deck—
and lay still. I managed to writhe into a half-sitting posture, and Smith
rolled aside as the detective and the Chinaman crashed down together.
Weymouth had one big hand at the Doctor’s yellow throat;
with his left he grasped the Chinaman’s right.
It held the needle.
Now, I could look along, the length of the little craft, and, so far
as it was possible to make out in the fog, only one other was aboard—
the half-clad brown man who navigated her—and who had carried us through
the cellars. The murk had grown denser and now shut us in like a box.
The throb of the motor—the hissing breath of the two who fought—
with so much at issue—these sounds and the wash of the water alone
broke the eerie stillness.
By slow degrees, and with a reptilian agility horrible to watch,
Fu-Manchu was neutralizing the advantage gained by Weymouth.
His clawish fingers were fast in the big man’s throat; the right hand
with its deadly needle was forcing down the left of his opponent.
He had been underneath, but now he was gaining the upper place.
His powers of physical endurance must have been truly marvelous.
His breath was whistling through his nostrils significantly,
but Weymouth was palpably tiring.
The latter suddenly changed his tactics. By a supreme effort,
to which he was spurred, I think, by the growing proximity
of the needle, he raised Fu-Manchu—by the throat and arm—
and pitched him sideways.
The Chinaman’s grip did not relax, and the two wrestlers dropped,
a writhing mass, upon the port cushions. The launch heeled over,
and my cry of horror was crushed back into my throat by the bandage.
For, as Fu-Manchu sought to extricate himself, he overbalanced—
fell back—and, bearing Weymouth with him—slid into the river!
The mist swallowed them up.
There are moments of which no man can recall his mental impressions,
moments so acutely horrible that, mercifully, our memory retains
nothing of the emotions they occasioned. This was one of them.
A chaos ruled in my mind. I had a vague belief that the Burman,
forward, glanced back. Then the course of the launch was changed.
How long intervened between the tragic end of that Gargantuan struggle
and the time when a black wall leaped suddenly up before us I cannot
pretend to state.
With a sickening jerk we ran aground. A loud explosion ensued,
and I clearly remember seeing the brown man leap out into the fog—
which was the last I saw of him.
Water began to wash aboard.
Fully alive to our imminent peril, I fought with the cords
that bound me; but I lacked poor Weymouth’s strength of wrist,
and I began to accept as a horrible and imminent possibility,
a death from drowning, within six feet of the bank.
Beside me, Nayland Smith was straining and twisting. I think
his object was to touch Karamaneh, in the hope of arousing her.
Where he failed in his project, the inflowing water succeeded.
A silent prayer of thankfulness came from my very soul when I
saw her stir—when I saw her raise her hands to her head—
and saw the big, horror-bright eyes gleam through the mist veil.
WE quitted the wrecked launch but a few seconds before her
stern settled down into the river. Where the mud-bank upon
which we found ourselves was situated we had no idea.
But at least it was terra firma and we were free from Dr. Fu-Manchu.
Smith stood looking out towards the river.
“My God!” he groaned. “My God!”
He was thinking, as I was, of Weymouth.
And when, an hour later, the police boat located us (on the mud-flats
below Greenwich) and we heard that the toll of the poison cellars
was eight men, we also heard news of our brave companion.
“Back there in the fog, sir,” reported Inspector Ryman, who was in charge,
and his voice was under poor command, “there was an uncanny howling,
and peals of laughter that I’m going to dream about for weeks—”
Karamaneh, who nestled beside me like a frightened child, shivered; and I
knew that the needle had done its work, despite Weymouth’s giant strength.
Smith swallowed noisily.
“Pray God the river has that yellow Satan,” he said.
“I would sacrifice a year of my life to see his rat’s body
on the end of a grappling-iron!”
We were a sad party that steamed through the fog homeward that night.
It seemed almost like deserting a staunch comrade to leave the spot—so nearly
as we could locate it—where Weymouth had put up that last gallant fight.
Our helplessness was pathetic, and although, had the night been clear
as crystal, I doubt if we could have acted otherwise, it came to me that this
stinking murk was a new enemy which drove us back in coward retreat.
But so many were the calls upon our activity, and so numerous
the stimulants to our initiative in those times, that soon we
had matter to relieve our minds from this stress of sorrow.
There was Karamaneh to be considered—Karamaneh and her brother.
A brief counsel was held, whereat it was decided that for the present
they should be lodged at a hotel.
“I shall arrange,” Smith whispered to me, for the girl was watching us,
“to have the place patrolled night and day.”
“You cannot suppose—”
“Petrie! I cannot and dare not suppose Fu-Manchu dead until with my own
eyes I have seen him so!”
Accordingly we conveyed the beautiful Oriental girl and her
brother away from that luxurious abode in its sordid setting.
I will not dwell upon the final scene in the poison cellars
lest I be accused of accumulating horror for horror’s sake.
Members of the fire brigade, helmed against contagion, brought out
the bodies of the victims wrapped in their living shrouds… .
From Karamaneh we learned much of Fu-Manchu, little of herself.
“What am I? Does my poor history matter—to anyone?”
was her answer to questions respecting herself.
And she would droop her lashes over her dark eyes.
The dacoits whom the Chinaman had brought to England originally
numbered seven, we learned. As you, having followed me thus far,
will be aware, we had thinned the ranks of the Burmans.
Probably only one now remained in England. They had
lived in a camp in the grounds of the house near Windsor
(which, as we had learned at the time of its destruction,
the Doctor had bought outright). The Thames had been his highway.
Other members of the group had occupied quarters in various parts
of the East End, where sailormen of all nationalities congregate.
Shen-Yan’s had been the East End headquarters. He had employed the hulk
from the time of his arrival, as a laboratory for a certain class
of experiments undesirable in proximity to a place of residence.
Nayland Smith asked the girl on one occasion if the Chinaman had had
a private sea-going vessel, and she replied in the affirmative.
She had never been on board, however, had never even set eyes upon it,
and could give us no information respecting its character.
It had sailed for China.
“You are sure,” asked Smith keenly, “that it has actually left?”
“I understood so, and that we were to follow by another route.”
“It would have been difficult for Fu-Manchu to travel by a passenger boat?”
“I cannot say what were his plans.”
In a state of singular uncertainty, then, readily to be understood,
we passed the days following the tragedy which had deprived us
of our fellow-worker.
Vividly I recall the scene at poor Weymouth’s home, on the day that we
visited it. I then made the acquaintance of the Inspector’s brother.
Nayland Smith gave him a detailed account of the last scene.
“Out there in the mist,” he concluded wearily, “it all seemed very unreal.”
“I wish to God it had been!”
“Amen to that, Mr. Weymouth. But your brother made a gallant finish.
If ridding the world of Fu-Manchu were the only good deed to his credit,
his life had been well spent.”
James Weymouth smoked awhile in thoughtful silence.
Though but four and a half miles S.S.E. of St. Paul’s the quaint
little cottage, with its rustic garden, shadowed by the tall trees
which had so lined the village street before motor ‘buses were,
was a spot as peaceful and secluded as any in broad England.
But another shadow lay upon it to-day—chilling, fearful.
An incarnate evil had come out of the dim East and in its dying
malevolence had touched this home.
“There are two things I don’t understand about it, sir,” continued Weymouth.
“What was the meaning of the horrible laughter which the river police heard
in the fog? And where are the bodies?”
Karamaneh, seated beside me, shuddered at the words.
Smith, whose restless spirit granted him little repose,
paused in his aimless wanderings about the room and looked at her.
In these latter days of his Augean labors to purge England
of the unclean thing which had fastened upon her, my friend
was more lean and nervous-looking than I had ever known him.
His long residence in Burma had rendered him spare
and had burned his naturally dark skin to a coppery hue;
but now his gray eyes had grown feverishly bright and his
face so lean as at times to appear positively emaciated.
But I knew that he was as fit as ever.
“This lady may be able to answer your first question,” he said.
“She and her brother were for some time in the household of
Dr. Fu-Manchu. In fact, Mr. Weymouth, Karamaneh, as her name implies,
was a slave.”
Weymouth glanced at the beautiful, troubled face with scarcely
veiled distrust. “You don’t look as though you had come
from China, miss,” he said, with a sort of unwilling admiration.
“I do not come from China,” replied Karamaneh. “My father
was a pure Bedawee. But my history does not matter.”
(At times there was something imperious in her manner; and to this
her musical
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