The Bride of Fu Manchu

Fu Manchu’s Bride

by Sax Rohmer

chapter first

FLEURETTE

all the way around the rugged headland, and beyond, as I sat at the wheel of the easy-running craft, I found myself worrying about Petrie. He was supposed to be looking after me. I thought that somebody should be looking after him. He took his responsibilities with a deadly seriousness; and this strange epidemic which had led the French authorities to call upon his expert knowledge was taxing him to the limit. At luncheon I thought he had looked positively ill; but he had insisted upon returning to his laboratory.

He seemed to imagine that the reputation of the Royal Society was in his keeping....

I had hoped that the rockbound cove which I had noted would afford harbourage for the motorboat. Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised when I found that it did.

The little craft made safe, I waded in and began to swim through nearly still water around that smaller promontory beyond which lay the bay and beach of Ste Claire de la Roche. Probably a desire to test my fitness underlay the job; if I could not explore Ste Claire from the land side, I was determined to invade it, nevertheless.

The water was quite warm, and it had that queer odour of stagnation peculiar to this all but tideless sea. I swam around the point, and twenty yards out from the beach my feet touched bottom.

At the same moment I saw her....

She was seated on the smooth sand, her back towards me, and she was combing her hair. As I stumbled, groped, and began to make my way inland, I told myself that this sole inhabitant of Ste Claire was probably one of those fabulous creatures, a mermaid—or, should I say, a siren.

I halted, wading ashore, and watched her.

Her arms, her shoulders, and her back were beautiful. Riviera salt and sun had tanned her to a most delectable shade of brown. Her wavy hair was of a rich red mahogany colour. This was all I could see of the mermaid from my position in the sea.

I made the shore without disturbing her.

It became apparent, then, that she was not a mermaid; a pair of straight, strong, and very shapely brown legs discredited the mermaid theory. She was a human girl with a perfect figure and glorious hair, wearing one of those bathing suits fashionable in Cannes....

What it was, at this moment, which swamped admiration and brought fear—which urged me to go back—to go back—I could not imagine. I fought against this singular revulsion, reminding myself that I was newly convalescent from a dangerous illness. This alone, I argued, accounted for the sudden weird chill which had touched me.

Why, otherwise, should I be afraid of a pretty girl?

I moved forward.

And as I began to walk up the gently sloping beach she heard me and turned.

I found myself staring, almost in a frightened way, at the most perfect face I thought I had ever seen. Those arms and shoulders were so daintily modelled that I had been prepared for disillusionment: instead, I found glamour.

She was bronzed by the sun, and, at the moment, innocent of make-up. She had most exquisitely chiselled features. Her lips were slightly parted showing the whitest little teeth. Big, darkly fringed eyes—and they were blue as the Mediterranean—were opened widely, as if my sudden appearance had alarmed her.

I may have dreamed, as some men do, of flawless beauty, but I had never expected to meet it; when:

“How did you get here?” the vision asked and rolled over onto one elbow, looking up at me.

Her voice had a melodious resonance which suggested training, and her cool acceptance of my appearance helped to put me more at ease.

“I just swam ashore,” I replied. “I hope I didn’t frighten you?”

“Nothing frightens me,” she answered in that cool, low tone, her unflinching eyes—the eyes of a child, but of a very clever and very inquisitive child—fixed upon me. “I was certainly surprised.”

“I’m sorry. I suppose I should have warned you.”

Her steady regard never wavered; it was becoming disconcerting. She was quite young, as the undisguised contours of her body revealed, but about her very beauty there hovered some aura of mysteriousness which her typically nonchalant manner could not dispel. Then, suddenly, I saw, and it greatly relieved me to see, a tiny dimple appear in her firm round chin. She smiled—and her smile made me her slave.

“Please explain,” she said; “this isn’t an accident is it?”

“No,” I confessed; “it’s a plot.”

She shifted to a more easy position, resting both elbows on the sand and cupping her chin in two hands.

“What do you mean ‘a plot’?” she asked, suddenly serious again.

I sat down, peculiarly conscious of my angular ugliness.

“I wanted to have a look at Ste Claire,” I replied. “It used to be open to inspection and it’s a spot of some historical interest. I found the road barred. And I was told that a certain Mahdi Bey had bought the place and had seen fit to close it to the public. I heard that the enclosed property ran down to the sea, so I explored and saw this little bay.”

“And what were you going to do?” she asked, looking me over in a manner which struck me as almost supercilious.

“Well...” I hesitated, hoping for another smile. “I had planned to climb up to Ste Claire, and if I should be discovered, explain that I had been carried away by the current which works around the headland and been compelled to swim ashore.”

I watched eagerly for the dimple. But no dimple came. Instead, I saw a strange, far-away expression creep over the girl’s face. In some odd manner it transformed her; spiritually, she seemed to have withdrawn—to a great distance, to another land; almost, I thought, to another world. Her youth, her remarkable beauty, were transfigured as though by the occult brush of a dead master. Momentarily, I experienced again that insane desire to run away.

Then she spoke. Her phrases were commonplace enough, but her voice too was far away; her eyes seemed to be looking right through me, to be fixed upon some very distant object.

“You sound enterprising,” she said. “What is your name?”

“Alan Sterling,” I answered, with a start.

I had an uncanny feeling that the question had not come from the girl herself, although her lips framed the words.

“I suppose you live somewhere near here?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Alan Sterling,” she repeated; “isn’t that Scotch?”

“Yes, my father was a Scotsman—Dr. Andrew Sterling—but he settled in the Middle West of America, where I was born.”

The mahogany curls were shaken violently. It was, I thought, an act of rebellion against that fey mood which had claimed her. She rose to her knees, confronting me; her fingers played with the sand. The rebellion had succeeded. She seemed to have drawn near again, to have become human and adorable. Her next words confirmed my uncanny impression that in mind and spirit she had really been far away,

“Did you say you were American?” she asked.

Rather uncomfortably I answered:

“I was born in America. But I took my degree in Edinburgh, so that really I don’t quite know what I am.”

“Don’t you?”

She sank down upon the sand, looking like a lovely idol.

“And now please tell me your name,” I said; “I have told you mine.”

“Fleurette.”

“But Fleurette what?”

“Fleurette nothing. Just Fleurette.”

“But, Mahdi Bey——”

I suppose my thoughts were conveyed without further words, for:

“Mahdi Bey,” Fleurette replied, “is——”

And then she ceased abruptly. Her glance strayed away somewhere over my shoulder. I had a distinct impression that she was listening—listening intently for some distant sound.

“Mahdi Bey,” I prompted.

Fleurette glanced at me swiftly.

“Really, Mr. Sterling,” she said, “I must run. I mustn’t be caught talking to you.”

“Why?” I exclaimed. “I was hoping you would show me over Ste Claire.”

She shook her head almost angrily.

“As you came out of the sea, please go back again. You can’t come with me.”

“I don’t understand why-

“Because it would be dangerous.”

Composedly she tucked a comb back into a bag which lay upon the sand beside her, picked up a bathing cap, and stood up.

“You don’t seem to bother about the possibility of my being drowned!”

“You have a motorboat just around the headland,” she replied, glancing at me over one golden shoulder. “I heard your engine.”

This was a revelation.

“No wonder you weren’t frightened when I came ashore.”

“I am never frightened. In fact, I am rather inhuman, in all sorts of ways. Did you ever hear of Derceto?”

Her abrupt changes of topics, as of moods, were bewildering, but:

“Vaguely,” I answered. “Wasn’t she a sort of fish goddess?”

“Yes. Think of me, not as Fleurette, but as Derceto. Then you may understand.”

The words conveyed nothing at the time, although I was destined often to think about them, later. And what I should have said next I don’t know. But the whole of my thoughts, which were chaotic, became suddenly focused...upon a sound.

To this day I find myself unable to describe it, although, as will presently appear, before a very long time had elapsed I was called upon to do so. It more closely resembled the note of a bell than anything else—yet it was not the note of a bell. It was incredibly high. It seemed at once to come from everywhere and from nowhere. A tiny sound it was, but of almost unendurable sweetness: it might be likened to a fairy trumpet blown close beside one’s ear.

I started violently, looking all around me. And as I did so, Fleurette, giving me no parting word, no glance, darted away!

Amazed beyond words, I watched her slim brown figure bounding up a rocky path, until, at a bend high above, Fleurette became invisible. She never once looked back.

And then—the desire to get away, and as soon as possible, from the beach of Ste Claire de la Roche claimed me again, urgently....

chapter second

A PURPLE CLOUD

when presently I climbed on board the motorboat and pushed off, I found myself to be in a state of nervous excitement. But as I headed back for the landing place below Petrie’s tiny villa, I grew more and more irritated by my memories.

Fleurette was not only the most delightful but also the most mysterious creature who had ever crossed my path; and the more I thought about her, reviewing that odd conversation, the nearer I drew to what seemed to be an unavoidable conclusion. Of course, she had been lying to me—acting the whole time. A beautiful girl in the household of a wealthy Egyptian—in what capacity was she there?

Common sense supplied the answer. It was one I hated to accept—but I could see no alternative. The queer sound which had terminated that stolen interview, I preferred not to think about. It didn’t seem to fit in....

As I secured the boat to the ring and started a long, hot climb up to the Villa Jasmin, I found myself wondering if I should ever see Fleurette again, and, more particularly, if she wanted to see me.

I supposed Mme Dubonnet had gone into the village to do her midday shopping, which included an aperitif with one of her cronies outside a certain little cafe. Petrie I knew would be hard at work in the laboratory at the bottom of the garden.

Mixing myself a cool drink, I sat down on the flower-draped verandah and allowed my glance to stray over the well stocked little kitchen garden. Beyond and below were more flower-covered walls and red roofs breaking through the green of palm and vine, and still beyond was a distant prospect of the jewel-like Mediterranean.

I reflected that this was a very pleasant spot in which to recuperate. And then I began to think about Fleurette....

No doubt my swim had overtired me, but stretched out there in a deck-chair, the hot sun making my skin tingle agreeably, I presently fell asleep. And almost immediately, as I suppose, I began to dream.

I dreamed that I lay in just such a deck chair, under an equally hot sun, on a balcony or platform of an incredibly high building. I have since decided that it was the Empire State Building in New York. I was endowed with telescopic vision. Other great buildings there were, with mile after mile of straight avenues stretching away to the distant sea.

The sky was sapphire blue, and a heat haze danced over the great city which lay at my feet.

Then there came a curious, high sound. It reminded me of something I had heard before—but of something which in my dream I could not place. A cloud appeared, no larger than my hand, on the horizon, miles and miles away—over that- blue ocean. It was a purple cloud; and it spread out, fan-wise, and the sections of the fan grew ever larger. So that presently half of the sky was shadowed.

And then a tiny glittering point, corresponding, I thought, to the spot where the hinge of this purple shadow-fan should have been, I saw a strange jewel. The fan continued to open, to obscure more and more the sky.

It was advancing towards me, this shadowy thing; and now the jewel took shape.

I saw that it was a dragon, or sea serpent, moving at incredible speed towards me. Upon its awful crested head a man rode. He wore a yellow robe which, in the light focused upon him, for the sun was away to my left as I dreamed, became a golden robe.

His yellow face glittered also, like gold, and he wore a cap surmounted by some kind of gleaming bead. He was, I saw a Chinaman.

And I thought that his face had the majesty of Satan—that this was the Emperor of the Underworld come to claim a doomed city.

So much I saw, and then I realized that the dragon carried a second rider: a woman, robed in queenly white and wearing a jewelled diadem. Her beauty dazzled me, seeming more than human. But I knew her....

It was Fleurette.

The purple shadow-fan obscured all the sky, and complete darkness came. The darkness reached me, and where there had been sunshine was shadow, t shuddered and opened my eyes, staring up, rather wildly, I suppose.

Dr. Petrie had just stepped onto the verandah. His shadow touched me where I lay.

“Hullo, Sterling,” he said briskly “What’s wrong? been overdoing it again?”

I struggled upright. Then, in a moment, I became fully awake. And as I looked up at Petrie, seated on the low wall beside a big wine jar which had been converted into a flower pot, I realized that this was a very sick man.

He wore no hat, and his dark hair, liberally streaked with grey, was untidy—which I knew to be unusual. He was smoking a cigarette and staring at me in that penetrating way which medical men cultivate. But his eyes were unnaturally bright, although deep shadows lay beneath them.

“Been for a swim,” I replied; fell asleep and dreamed horribly.”

Dr. Petrie shook his head and knocked ash from his cigarette into the soil in the wine jar.

“Blackwater fever plays hell even with a constitution like yours,” he replied gravely. “Really, Sterling, you mustn’t take liberties for a while.”

In pursuit of my profession, that of an orchid hunter, I had been knocked out by a severe attack of blackwater on the Upper Amazon. My native boys left me where I lay, and I owed my life to a German prospector who, guided by kindly Providence, found me and brought me down to Manaos.

“Liberties be damned, doctor,” I growled, standing up to mix him a drink. “If ever a man took liberties with his health, that man is yourself! You’re worked to death!”

“Listen,” he said, checking me. “Forget me and my health. I’m getting seriously worried.”

“Not another case?”

He nodded.

“Admitted early this morning.”

“Who is it this time?”

“Another open-air worker. Sterling, a jobbing gardener. He was working in a villa, leased by some Americans, as a matter of fact, on the slope just this side of Ste Claire de la Roche——”

“Ste Claire de la Roche?” I echoed.

“Yes—the place you are so keen to explore.”

“D’you think you can save him?”

He frowned doubtfully.

“Cartier and the other French doctors are getting in a perfect panic,” he replied. “If the truth leaks out, the Riviera will be deserted. And they know it! I’m rather pessimistic myself. I lost another patient to-day.”

“What!”

Petrie ran his fingers through his hair.

“You see,” he went on, “diagnosis is so tremendously difficult. I found trypanasomes in the blood of the first patient I examined here; and although I never saw a tsetse fly in France, I was forced to diagnose sleeping sickness. I risked Bayer’s 205—” he smiled modestly—”with one or two modifications of my own; and by some miracle the patient pulled through.”

“Why a miracle? It’s the accepted treatment, isn’t it?”

He stared at me, and I thought how haggard he looked.

“It’s one of ‘em,” he replied—”for sleeping sickness. But this was not sleeping sickness!”

“What!

“Hence the miracle. You see, I made cultures; and under the microscope they gave me a shock. I discovered that these parasites didn’t really conform to any species so far classified. They were members of the sleeping sickness family, but new members. Then—just before the death of another patient at the hospital—I made a great discovery, on which I have been working ever since—”

“Overworking!”

“Forget it.” He was carried away by his subject. “D’you know what I found, Sterling? I found bacillus pestis adhering to one of the parasites!”

“Bacillus pestis?”

“Plague!”

“Good God!”

“But—here’s the big point: the trypanasomes (the parasites which cause sleeping sickness) were a new variety, as I have mentioned. So was the plague bacillus. It presented obviously new features! Crowning wonder—although you may not appreciate it—parasite and bacillus affiliated and working in perfect harmony!” /

“You’ve swamped me, doctor,” I confessed. “But I have a hazy idea that there’s something tremendous behind this.”

“Tremendous? There’s something awful. Nature is upsetting her own laws—as we know them.”

This, from Dr. Petrie, gave me something to think about.

My father had been invited to lecture at Edinburgh—his old university—during Petrie’s first year, and a close friendship had sprung up between the keen student and the visit-—ing lecturer. They had corresponded ever since.

During my own Edinburgh days the doctor was established in practice in Cairo; but I spent part of one vacation as his guest in London. And another fast friendship resulted. He had returned from Egypt on that occasion to receive the medal of the Royal Society for his researches in tropical medicine. I remember how disappointed I had been to leam that his wife, of whose charm I had heard many rumours, was not accompanying him on this flying journey.

His present visit—also intended to be a brief one—had been prolonged at the urgent request of the French authorities. Petrie’s reputation had grown greater with the passage of years, and learning that he was in London, they had begged him to look into this strange epidemic which threatened southern France, placing the Villa Jasmin at his disposal....

Three weeks later I was invalided home from Brazil. Petrie, who had had the news from my father, met the ship at Lisbon and carried me off to the Villa Jasmin to recuperate under his own watchful eye.

I fear I had proved to be a refractory patient.

“You didn’t see the other case, did you?” Petrie asked suddenly.

“No.”

“Well.” He set down his glass. “I wish you would come along to the hospital with me. You must have met with some queer diseases on the Amazon, and you know the Uganda sleeping sickness. There’s this awful grin—proof of some sort of final paroxysm—and particularly what Cartier calls the Hack stigmata.’ Your bulb hunting has taken you into a few unwholesome places; have you ever come across anything like it?”

I began to fill by pipe. “Never, doctor,” I replied.

The sound of a distant gun boomed through the hot silence. A French battleship was entering Villefranche Harbour....

chapter third

THE BLOODSTAINED LEAVES

“Good God! it’s ghastly! Cover him up again, doctor. I shall dream of that face.”

I found myself wondering why Providence, though apparently beneficent, should permit such horrors to visit poor humanity. The man in the little mortuary—he had been engaged in a local vineyard—had not yet reached middle age when this new and dreadful pestilence had cut him off.

“This,” said Petrie, “is the really singular feature.”

He touched the dead man’s forehead. It was of a dark purple colour from the scalp to the brows. The sun-browned face was set in a grin of dreadful malignancy and the eyes were rolled upward so that only their whites showed.

“What I have come to recognize as the characteristic sign,” Petrie added. “Subcutaneous haemorrhage but strangely localised. It’s like a purple shadow, isn’t it? And when it reaches the eyes—finish.”

“What a ghastly face! I have seen nothing like it anywhere!”

We came out.

“Nor have I!” Petrie confessed. “The earlier symptoms are closely allied with those of sleeping sickness but extraordinarily rapid in their stages. Glandular swellings always in the armpit. This final stage—the black stigmata, the purple shadow, which I have managed to avert in some of the other cases, is quite beyond my experience. That’s where plague comes in.

“But now for the most mysterious thing of all—in which I am hoping you can really help me....”

If anyone had invited me to name Dr. Petrie’s outstanding characteristic, I should have said “modesty.”

Having run the car into its garage, Petrie led the way down the steep rocky path to a shed a hundred yards from the villa, which he had fitted up as a laboratory.

We entered. The laboratory was really an enlarged gardener’s hut which the absent owner of Villa Jasmin had converted into a small studio. It had a glass window running along the whole of one side. A white-topped table now occupied a great part of the space before it, and there was a working bench in a corner opposite the door. In racks were rows of test tubes, each bearing a neatly written label, and there were files of specimen slides near the big microscope.

I noted the new pane of glass in a section of window which had been cut out one night less than a month ago when some strange burglar had broken in and explored the place. Since that time Petrie had had steel shop-blinds fitted to the interior of the windows, which could be closed and locked at night.

He had never secured any clue to the identity of the intruder or formed any reasonable theory as to what his object could have been.

At the moment, several of the windows were open, and sunlight streamed into the place. There was a constant humming of bees in the garden outside. Petrie took up a little sealed tube, removed the stopper, and shook out the contents of the tube into a glass tray. He turned to me, a strange expression upon his haggard brown face.

“Can you identify this. Sterling?” he asked. “It’s more in your line than in mine.”

I found it to consist of several bruised leaves, originally reddish purple in colour, attached to long stalks. I took up a lens and examined them carefully, the doctor watching me in silence. I saw, now, that there were pollen-like fragments adhering to a sticky substance exuded by the leaves.

There were some curious brown blotches, too, which at first I took to be part of the colouring, but which closer examination showed to be due to a stain.

“It’s drosophyllum” I murmured—”one of the fly catching varieties, but a tropical species I have not come across before.”

Petrie did not interrupt me, and:

“There are stains of what looks like dark brown mud,” I went on, “and minute shiny fragments of what might be pollen—”

“It isn’t pollen,” Petrie broke in. “It’s bits of the wing and body of some very hairy insect. But what I’m anxious to know, Sterling, is this—”

I put down the lens and turned to the speaker curiously. His expression was grimly serious.

“Should you expect to find that plant in Europe?”

“No, it isn’t a European variety. It could not possibly grow even as far South as this.”

“Good. That point is settled.”

“How do you account for the stains?”

“I don’t know how to account for them,” Petrie replied slowly, “but I have found out what they are.”

“What are they?”

“Blood!—and what’s more, human blood.”

“Human blood!”

I stopped, at a loss for words.

“I can see I am puzzling you, Sterling. Let me try to explain.”

Petrie replaced the fragments in the tube and sealed it down tightly.

“It occurred to me this morning,” he went on, “after you had gone, to investigate the spot where our latest patient had been at work. I thought there might be some peculiar local condition there which would give me a new clue. When I arrived, I found it was a piece of steeply terraced kitchen gar-^ den—not unlike our own, here. It ended in a low wall beyond which was a clear drop into the gorge which connects Ste Claire with the sea.

“He had been at work up to sunset last evening about halfway down, near a water tank. He was taken ill during the night, and this morning developed characteristic symptoms....

“I stood there—it was perfectly still; the people to whom the villa is leased are staying in Monte Carlo at present—and I listened for insects. I had gone prepared to capture any that appeared.”

He pointed to an equipment which lay upon a small table.

“I got several healthy mosquitoes, and other odds and ends. (Later examination showed no trace of parasite in any of them.) I was just coming away when, lying in a little trench where the man had apparently been at work up to the time that he knocked off—I happened to notice that...“

He pointed to the tube containing the purple leaves.

“It was bruised and crushed partly into the soil.”

He paused, then:

“Except for the fragments I have pointed out,” he added, “there was nothing on the leaves. Possibly a passing lizard had licked them...I spent the following hour searching the neighbourhood for the plant on which they grew. I drew blank.”

We were silent for some time.

“Do you think there is some connection,” I asked slowly, “between this plant and the epidemic?”

Petrie nodded.

“Of course,” I admitted, “it’s certainly strange. If I could credit the idea—which I can’t —that such a species could grow wild in Europe, I should be the first to agree with you. Your theory is that the thing possesses the properties of a carrier, or host, of these strange germs; so that anyone plucking a piece and smelling it, for instance, immediately becomes infected?”

“That was not my theory,” Petrie replied, thoughtfully. “It isn’t a bad one, nevertheless. But it doesn’t explain the bloodstains.”

He hesitated.

“I had a very queer letter from Nayland Smith to-day,” he added. “I have been thinking about it ever since.”

Sir Denis Nayland Smith, ex-Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, was one ofPetrie’s oldest friends, I knew, but:

“This is rather outside his province, isn’t it?” I suggested.

“You haven’t met him,” Petrie replied, labouring his words as it seemed. “But I think you will. Nayland Smith has one of the few first-class brains in Europe, and nothing is outside his——”

He ceased speaking, staggered and clutched at the table edge. I saw him shudder violently.

“Look here, doctor,” I cried, grasping his shoulders, “you are sickening for ‘flu or something. You’re overdoing it. Give the thing a rest, and—-” \

He shook me off. His manner was wild. He groped his way to a cupboard, prepared a draught with unsteady hands, and drank it. Then from a drawer he took out a tube containing a small quantity of white powder.

“I have called it 654,” he said, his eyes feverishly bright. “I haven’t the pluck to try it on a human patient. But even if Mother^Nature has turned topsy-turvy, I believe this may puzzle her!”

Watching him anxiously:

“Strictly speaking, you ought to be in bed,” I said. “Your life is valuable.”

“Get out,” he replied, summoning up the ghost of a smile. “Get out. Sterling. My life’s my own, and while it lasts I have work to do....”

chapter fourth

SQUINTING EYES

I spent the latter part of the afternoon delving in works of reference which I had not consulted for many months, in an endeavour to identify more exactly the leaves so mysteriously found by Petrie.

To an accompaniment of clattering pans, old Mme Dubonnet was preparing our evening meal in the kitchen and humming some melancholy tune very cheerily.

Petrie was a source of great anxiety. I had considered ‘phoning for Dr. Cartier, but finally had dismissed the idea. That my friend was ill he had been unable to disguise; but he was a Doctor of Medicine, and I was not. Furthermore, he was my host.

That he was worried about his wife in Cairo, I knew. Only the day before he had said, “I hope she doesn’t take it into her head to come over—much as I should like to see her.” Now, I shared that hope. His present appearance would shock the woman who loved him.

Fleurette—Fleurette of the dimpled chin—more than once intruded her image between me and the printed page. I tried to push these memories aside.

Fleurette was the mistress of a wealthy Egyptian. Despite her name, she was not French. She was, perhaps, an actress. Why had I not thought of that before? Her beautifully modulated voice—her composure. “Think of me as Derceto....”

“In Byblis gigantea, according to Zopf, insect-catching is merely incipient,” I read....

She could be no older than eighteen—indeed, she might be younger than that....

And so the afternoon wore on.

Faint buzzing of the Kohler engine, and a sudden shaft of light across the slopes below, first drew my attention to approaching dusk. Petrie had turned up the laboratory lamps.

I was deep in a German work which promised information, and now, mechanically, I switched on the table lamp. Hundreds of grasshoppers were chirping in the garden; I could hear the purr of a speedboat. Mme Dubonnet continued to sing. It was a typical Riviera evening.

The-shadow of that great crag which almost overhung the Villa Jasmin lay across part of the kitchen garden visible from my window, and soon would claim all our tiny domain. I continued my studies, jumping from reference to reference and constantly consulting the index. I believed I was at last on the right track.

How long a time elapsed between the moment when I saw light turned up in the laboratory and the interruption, I found great difficulty in determining afterwards. But the interruption was uncanny.

Mme Dubonnet, working in the kitchen, French fashion, with windows hermetically sealed, noticed nothing.

Already, on this momentous day, I had heard a sound baffling description; and it was written—for the day was one never to be forgotten—that I should hear another.

As I paused to light a fresh cigarette, from somewhere out-, side—I thought from the Comiche road above—came a cry, very low, but penetrating....

It possessed a quality of fear which chilled me like a sudden menace. It was a sort of mournful wail on three minor notes. But a shot at close quarters could not have been more electrical in its effect.

I dropped my cigarette and jumped up.

What was it?

It was unlike anything I had ever heard. But there was danger in it, creeping peril. I leaned upon the table, staring from the window upward, in the direction from which the cry seemed to have come.

And as I did so, I saw something.

I have explained that a beam of light from the laboratory window cut across the shadow below. On the edge of this light something moved for a moment—for no more than a moment—but instantly drew my glance downward.

I looked....

A pair of sunken, squinting eyes, set in a yellow face so evilly hideous that I was tempted then, and for sometime later, to doubt the evidence of my senses, watched me!

Of the body belonging to this head I could see nothing; it was enveloped in shadow. I saw just that evil mask watching me; then—it was gone!

As I stood staring from the window, stupid with a kind of horrified amazement, I heard footsteps racing down the path from the road which led to the door of Villa Jasmin. Turning, I ran out onto the verandah. I reached it at the same moment as the new arrival—a tall, lean man with iron-grey, crisply virile hair, and keen, eager eyes. He had the sort of skin which tells of years spent in the tropics. He wore no hat, but a heavy topcoat was thrown across his shoulders, clockwise. Above all, he radiated a kind of vital energy which was intensely stimulating.

“Quick,” he said—his mode of address reminded me of a machine gun—”where is Dr. Petrie? My name is Nayland Smith.”

“I’m glad you have come. Sir Denis,” I replied; and indeed I spoke sincerely. “The doctor referred to you only to-day. My name is Alan Sterling.”

“I know it is,” he said, and shook hands briskly; then:

“Where is Petrie?” he repeated. “Is he with you?” “He is in the laboratory, Sir Denis. I’ll show you the way.” Sir Denis nodded, and we stepped off the verandah. “Did you hear that awful cry?” I added. He stopped. We had just begun to descend the slope. “You heard it?” he rapped in his staccato fashion. “I did. I have never heard anything like it in my life!” “I have! Let’s hurry.”

There was something very strange in his manner, something which I ascribed to that wailing sound which had electrified me. Definitely, Sir Denis Nayland Smith was not a man susceptible to panic, but some fearful urgency drove him to-night.

I was about to speak of that malignant yellow face when, as we came in sight of the lighted windows of the laboratory:

“How long has Petrie been in there?” Nayland Smith asked. “All the afternoon. He’s up to his eyes in work on these mysterious cases—about which, perhaps, you know?” “I do,” he replied. “Wait a moment....” He grasped my arm and pulled me up just at the edge of the patch of shadow. He stood still, and I could tell that he was listening intently.

“Where’s the door?” he asked suddenly.

“At the farther end.”

“Right.”

He set off at a run, and I followed past the lighted window. Petrie was not at the table nor at the bench. I was puzzled to account for this, and already vaguely fearful. A premonition gripped me, a premonition of something horrible. Then, I had my hand on the door and had thrown it open. I entered. Sir Denis close behind me.

“Good God! Petrie!...Petrie, old man...”

Nayland Smith had sprung in and was already on his knees beside the doctor.

Petrie lay in the shadow of his working bench, in fact, half under it, one outstretched hand still convulsively gripping its edge!

I saw that the apparently rigid fingers grasped a hypodermic syringe. Near to his upraised hand was a vessel containing a small quantity of some milky fluid; and the tube of white powder which he had shown to me lay splintered, broken by his fall, on the floor a foot away.

In those few fleeting seconds I saw Sir Denis Nayland Smith, for the first and last time in my knowledge of him, fighting to subdue his emotions. His head dropped into his upraised hands, his fingers clutched his hair.

Then he had conquered. He stood up.

“Lift him!” he said hoarsely—”out here, into the light.”

I was half stunned. Horror and sorrow had me by the throat. But I helped to move Petrie farther into the middle of the floor, where a central light shone down upon him. One glance told me the truth—if I had ever doubted it.

A sort of cloud was creeping from his disordered hair, down over his brow.

“Heaven help him!” I whispered. “Look—look!...the purple shadow!”

chapter fifth

THE BLACK STIGMATA

the laboratory was very silent. Through the windows, which still remained open, I could hear the hum of the Kohler engine in its little shed at the bottom of the garden—the chirping of crickets, the clucking of hens.

There was a couch littered with books and chemical paraphernalia. Sir Denis and I cleared it and laid Petrie there.

I had telephoned Dr. Cartier from the villa.

That ghastly purple shadow was creeping farther down my poor friend’s brow.

“Shut the door. Sterling,” said Nayland Smith sharply.

I did so.

“Stand by,” he went on, and pointed.

Petrie, who wore a woollen pullover with long sleeves when he was working late, had evidently made an attempt to peel it off just before coma had claimed him.

“You see what he meant to do,” Nayland Smith went on. “God knows what the consequences will be, but it’s his only chance. He must have been fighting it off all day. The swelling in his armpit warned him that the crisis had come.”

He examined the milky liquid in a small glass measure.

“Have you any idea what this is?”

I indicated the broken tube and scattered white powder on the floor.

“A preparation of his own—to which I have heard him refer as ‘654.’ He believed it was a remedy, but he was afraid to risk it on a patient.”

“I wonder?” Sir Denis murmured. “I wonder——”

Stooping, I picked up a fragment of glass to which one of Petrie’s neatly written labels still adhered.

“Look here, Sir Denis!”

He read aloud:

“‘654.’ 1 grm. in 10 c.c. distilled water: intravenous.”

He stared at me hard, then:

“It’s kill or cure,” he rapped. “We have no choice....”

“Shouldn’t we wait for Dr. Cartier?”

“Wait!” His angry glare startled me. “With luck, hell be here in three quarters of an hour. And life or death in this thing is a matter of minutes’. No! Petrie must have his chance. I’m not an expert—but I can do my best....”

I experienced some difficulty in assisting at what followed;

but Nayland Smith, his course set, made the injection as coolly as though he had been used to such work for half a lifetime. When it was done:

“If Petrie survives,” he said quietly, “his own skill will have saved him—not ours. Lay that rug over him. It strikes one as chilly in here.”

The man’s self-mastery was almost superhuman.

He crossed to close the windows—to hide his face from me. Even that iron control had its breaking point. And suddenly the dead silence which fell with the shutting of the windows was broken by the buzzing of an insect.

I couldn’t see the thing, which evidently Sir Denis had disturbed, but it was flying about the place with feverish activity. Something else seemed to have arrested Sir Denis’s attention: he was staring down at the table.

“H’m!” he muttered. “Very queer!”

Then the noise of the busy insect evidently reached his ears. He turned in a flash and his expression was remarkable.

“What’s that, Sterling?” he snapped. “Do you hear it?”

“Clearly. There’s a gadfly buzzing about.”

“Gadfly—nothing! I have recently spent many hours in the laboratory of the School of Tropical Medicine. That’s why I’m here! Listen. Did you ever hear a gadfly that made that noise?”

His manner was so strange that it chilled me. I stood still, listening. And presently, in the sound made by that invisible, restless insect, I detected a difference. It emitted a queer sawing note. I stared across at Nayland Smith.

“You’ve been to Uganda,” he said. “Did you never hear it?”

At which moment, and before I had time to reply, I caught a glimpse of the fly which caused this peculiar sound. It was smaller than I had supposed. Narrowly missing the speaker’s head, it swooped down onto the table behind him, and settled upon something which lay there—something which had already attracted Sir Denis’s attention.

“Don’t move,” I whispered. “It’s just behind you.”

“Get it,” he replied, in an equally low voice; “a book, a roll of paper—anything; but for God’s sake don’t miss it....”

I took up a copy of the Gazette de Monte Carlo. One of poor Petrie’s hobbies was a roulette system which he had never succeeded in perfecting. I rolled it and stepped quietly forward.

Nayland Smith stood quite still. Beside him, my improvised swatter raised, I saw the insect distinctly. It had long, narrow, brownish wings and a curiously hairy head. In the very moment that I dashed the roll of paper down, I recognized the object upon which it had settled.

It was a spray of that purple-leaved drosophyllum, identi-cal except that it was freshly cut, with a fragment which I knew to be sealed in a tube somewhere in Petrie’s collection!

“Make sure,” said Sir Denis, turning.

I repeated the blow. Behind us, on the couch Petrie lay motionless. Sir Denis bent over the dead insect.

“Don’t you know what this is. Sterling?” he demanded.

“No. Flies are a bit outside my province. But I can tell you something about the purple leaves....”

Taking the roll of paper from me, he moved the dead fly further forward upon the polished table-top where direct light fall upon it; then:

“Hullo!” he exclaimed.

He snatched up a lens which lay near by and bent over the insect, peering down absorbedly.

I turned and looked towards the couch were Petrie lay, and I studied his haggard features. I could detect no evidence of life. The purple shadow showed like a bruise on his forehead;

but I thought that it had not increased.

Yet I believed he was doomed, already dying, and my thoughts jumped feverishly to that strange plant upon the table—and from the plant to the yellow face which so recently had leered at me out of the darkness.

Was it conceivable—could it be—that some human agency directed this pestilence?

I turned, looking beyond the bent, motionless figure of Nayland Smith, out into the dusk—and a desire to close the steel shutters suddenly possessed me.

This operation I completed without drawing a single comment from Sir Denis. But, as that menacing dusk was shut out, he stood upright and confronted me.

“Sterling,” he said, and there was something in his steady gaze which definitely startled me—”have you, as a botanist, ever come across a true genus-hybrid?”

“You mean a thing between a lily and a rose—or an oak growing apples?”

“Exactly.”

> “In the natural state, never—although some curious hybrids have been reported from time to time. But many freaks of this kind can be cultivated, of course. The Japanese are experts.”

“Cultivated? I agree. But nature, in my experience, sticks to the common law. Now here. Sterling—” he indicated the table—”lies an insect which, from the sound it made when flying, I took to be a tsetse fly——”

“A tsetse! Good heavens! Here?”

He smiled grimly.

“Well outside its supposed area,” he admitted, “and above its usual elevation. I thought you might have recognized its note, as you have travelled in the flybelt. However, I was right—up to a point. It definitely possesses certain characteristics ofglossina, the tsetse fly; notably the wings, which are typical. You see, I have been taking an intensive course on this subject! But can you imagine, Sterling, that it has the legs and head of an incredibly large sand-fly? The thing is a nightmare, an anachronism; it’s a sort of giant flying flea\”

His words awakened a memory. What had Petrie said to me, earlier in the evening?...that “even if Nature is turning topsy-turvy, I think I can puzzle her!...”

“Sir Denis,” I broke in, “I think you should know that Petrie found, in the blood of a patient, some similar freak—a sort of hybrid germ, which I lack the knowledge to describe to you. He found sleeping sickness and plague combined——”

“Good God!”

I thought that the lean, sun-baked face momentarily grew yet more angular.

“You know,” he interrupted, “that tsetse carries sleeping sickness? Sand-fly is suspect in several directions. But the rat-flea (and this is more like a flea than a sand-fly) is the proved cause of plague infection....Am I going mad?”

He suddenly crossed and bent over Petrie. He examined him carefully and in detail. The fact dawned upon me that Sir Denis Nayland Smith had more than a smattering of the medical art. I watched in silence while finally he took the temperature of the unconscious man.

“There’s no change,” he reported. “‘654’ seems already to have checked its progress. But this coma....Dare we hope?”

“I don’t know what to hope, or what to believe. Sir Denis!”

He nodded.

“Nor do I. The nature of my job has forced me to pick up some elements of medicine; but this is a specialist’s case....However, tell me about these leaves—the leaves which seemed to attract the fly....”

I told him briefly all that I knew of the insect-catching plant.

“The specimen which Petrie has preserved,” I concluded, “bears traces of human blood.”

Sir Denis suddenly grabbed the lens again and bent over the purple leaves on the table-top. A moment he looked, then turned.

“So does this!” he declared. “Fresh blood.”

I was dumb for a matter of seconds; then:

“The insect which I partly crushed?” I suggested.

He shook his head irritably.

“Quantity too great. These leaves have been sprayed with blood!”

“How, in heaven’s name, did they get here? And how did that damnable fly get here?”

He suddenly clapped his hands upon my shoulders arid stared at me fixedly.

“You’re a man of strong nerve. Sterling,” he said, “and so I can tell you. They were brought here. And—” he pointed to the still body on the couch—”for that purpose.”

“But——”

“There are no *buts.’ I left the car in which I had been driven over from Cannes some distance back on the road tonight, and walked ahead to look for this villa, the exact location of which my driver didn’t know. I had nearly reached the way in when I heard a sound.”

“I heard it too.”

“I know you did. But to you it meant nothing—except that it was horrible; to me, it meant a lot. You see, I had heard it before.”

“What was it? I shall never forget it!”

“It was the signal used by certain Burmans, loosely known as dacoits, to give warning to one another. If poor old Petrie shad come across this new species of tsetse fly—he would have begun to think. If he had heard that cry...he would have known!”

“He would have known what?” I asked, aware of a growing excitement communicated to me by the speaker.

“He would have known what he was up against.” He raised his fists in a gesture almost of despair. “We are children!” he said vehemently, momentarily taken out of himself. “What do you know of botany, and what does Petrie know of medicine beside Dr. Fu Manchu?”

“Dr. Fu Manchu?” I echoed.

“A synonym for Satan—evil immutable; apparently eternal.”

“Sir Denis——” I began.

But he turned aside abruptly, bending again over the motionless body of his old friend.

“Poor Karamaneh!” he murmured.

He was silent a while, then, without looking around:

“Do you know his wife, Sterling?” he asked.

“No, Sir Denis; we have never met.”

“She is still young, as we count tears to-day. She was a child when Petrie married her—and she is the most beautiful woman I have ever known....”

As he spoke I seemed to hear a soft voice saying, “Think of me as Derceto”...Fleurette! Fleurette was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen....

“She was chosen by a master—who rarely makes mistakes.”

His manner and his words were so strange that I may be forgiven for misunderstanding.

“A master? Do you mean a painter?”

At that, he turned and smiled. His smile was the most boyish and disarming I had ever met with in a grown man.

“Yes, Sterling, a painter! His canvas, the world; his colours, the human races....”

This was mystery capping mystery, and certainly I should never have left the matter there; but at this moment we were interrupted by a series of short staccato shrieks.

I ran to the door. I had recognized the voice.

“Who is it?” Sir Denis snapped.

“Mme Dubonnet.”

“Housekeeper?”

“Yes.”

“Keep her out.”

I threw the door open—and the terrified woman tottered into my arms.

“M. Sterling,” she panted, hysterically—”something terrible has happened! I know—I know—something terrible has happened!”

“Don’t worry, Mme Dubonnet,” I said, and endeavoured to lead her away. “Dr. Petrie——”

“But I must tell the doctor—it concerns him. As I look up fi-om my casserole dish I see at the window just above me—a face—a dreadful yellow face with cross eyes....”

“Rather a quandary, Sterling,” Sir Denis cut in, standing squarely between the excited woman and the insensible man on the couch. “One of those murderous devils is hanging about the place....”

Dimly I heard the sound of an insistent motor horn on the Comiche road above, nearing the head of that narrow byway which debouched from the Comiche and led down to the Villa Jasmin.

“The ambulance from the hospital!” Sir Denis exclaimed in relief.

chapter sixth

“654”

mme dubonnet, still shaking nervously, was escorted back to her quarters. Petrie, we told her, was down with a severe attack of influenza and must be moved immediately. The appearance of the yellow face at the window, mendacity had failed to explain; and the old lady announced that she should lock herself into the kitchen until such time as someone could take her home.

She was left lamenting, “Oh, the poor, dear kind doctor!...”

Cartier had come in person, with two orderlies and a driver. The bearded, round-faced little man exhibited such perfect consternation on beholding Dr. Petrie that it must have been fanny had it not been tragic. He dropped to his knees, bending over the insensible man.

“The black stigmata!” he muttered, touching the purple-shadowed brow. “I am too late! The coma. Soon—in an hour, or less, the final convulsions...the end! God! it is terrible. He is a dead man!”

“I’m not so sure,” Sir Denis interrupted. “Forgive me, doctor; my name is Nayland Smith. I have ventured to give an injection——”

Dr. Cartier stood up excitedly.

“What injection?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” Sir Denis replied calmly.

“What is this?”

“I don’t know. I used a preparation of Petrie’s which he called ‘654.’“

“654!”

Dr. Carter dropped upon his knees again beside the insensible man.

“How long,” he demanded, “since the shadow appeared?”

“Difficult to say, doctor,” I replied. “He was alone here. But it hasn’t increased.”

“How long since the injection?”

Nayland Smith shot out a lean brown wrist and glanced at a gun-metal watch in a leather strap.

“Forty-three minutes,” he reported.

Cartier sprang to his feet again.

“Dr. Smith!” he cried excitedly—and I saw Sir Denis suppress a smile—”this is triumph! From the time that the ecchy-mosis appears, it never ceases to creep down and down to the eyes! It has remained static for forty-three minutes, you tell me? This is triumph!”

“Let us dare to hope so,” said Sir Denis gravely.

When all arrangements had been completed and the good Dr. Cartier had grasped the astounding fact that Nayland Smith was not a confrere but a super-policeman:

“It’s very important,” Sir Denis whispered to me,, “that this place should be watched to-night. We have to take into consideration—” he gripped my arm—”the possibility that they fail to save Petrie. The formula for ‘654’ must be somewhere here!”

But we had searched for it in vain; nor was it on his person.

The driver of the car in which Sir Denis had come, agreed, on terms, to mount guard over the laboratory. He remained in ignorance of the nature of Petrie’s illness; but Dr. Cartier assured us there was no danger of direct infection at this stage.

And so, poor Petrie having been rushed to the isolation ward, Nayland Smith going with the ambulance, I drove Mme Dubonnet home, leaving the chauffeur from Cannes on guard. Returning, I gave the man freedom of the dinner which Fate had decreed that Petrie and I were not to eat, lent him a repeater, and set out in turn for the hospital.

This secret war against the strange plague which threatened to strip the Blue Coast of visitors and prosperity had aroused the enthusiasm of the whole of that small hospital staff.

Petrie, with other sufferers from the new pestilence, was lodged in an outbuilding separated from the hospital proper by a stretch of waste land. A porter, after some delay, led me through this miniature wilderness to the door of the isolation ward. The low building was dominated by a clump of pines.

A nursing sister admitted me, conducting me in silence along a narrow passage to Petrie’s room.

As I entered, and the sister withdrew, I saw at a glance the cause of a suppressed feverish excitement which I had detect-^deven in the bearing of the lodge porter.

Dr. Cartier was in tears. He was taking the pulse of the unconscious man. Nayland Smith, standing beside him, nodded to me reassuringly as I came in.

The purple shadow on Petrie’s brow had encroached no further—indeed, as I thought, was already dispersing!

Dr. Cartier replaced his watch and raised clasped hands.

“He is doing well,” said Sir Denis. “‘654’ is the remedy...but what, exactly is ‘654’?”

“We must know!” cried Dr. Cartier emotionally. “Thanks to the good God, he will revive from the coma and tell us. We must know! There is no more that I or any man can do now. But Sister Therese is a treasure among nurses, and if there should be a development, she will call me immediately. I shall be here in three minutes. But tomorrow? What can we do? We must know!”

“I agree,” said Sir Denis quietly. “Don’t worry any more about it. I think you are about to win a great victory. I hope, as I have told you, to recover a copy of the formula for ‘654’— and as Dr. Petrie’s safety is of such vital importance, you have no objections to offer to my plan?”

“But none!” Cartier replied. “Except that this seems unnecessary.”

“I never take needless risks,” said Sir Denis drily.

But when Cartier was gone:

“I am going into Nice,” Sir Denis said, “now, to put a phone call through to London.”

“What!”

“There’s a definite connection. Sterling, between the appearance in Petrie’s laboratory of a new species of tropical fly at the same time as an unfamiliar tropical plant—the latter bloodstained!”

“So much is obvious.”

“The connecting link is the Burmese dacoit whom I heard and you and Mme Dubonnet saw. He was the servant of a dreadful master.”

A question burned on my tongue, but:

“Sister Therese is all that Carter claims for her—I have interviewed the sister. She will attend to the patient from time to time. But I’m going to ask you to do something, Sterling, for me and for Petrie.”

“Anything you like. Just say the word.”

“You see. Sterling, since Petrie left London and came here, he had kept in close touch with Sir Manston Rorke, of the School of Tropical Medicine—one of the three big names, although I doubt if he knows more than Petrie. Some days ago. Sir Manston called me up. He had formed a remarkable opinion.”

“What about?”

“About the French epidemic. Two cases, showing identical symptoms, occurred in the London dock area, and he had had news of several in New York and of one in Sydney, Australia. Having personally examined the London cases (both of which terminated fatally) he had come to the conclusion that this disease was not an ordinary plague. Briefly, he believed that it was being induced artificially!”

“Good heavens, Sir Denis! I begin to believe he was right.”

Nayland Smith nodded.

“I invited him to suggest a motive, and he wavered between a mad scientist and a Red plot to decimate unfriendly nations! In my opinion, he wasn’t far short of the truth; but here’s the big point: I have reason to believe that Petrie submitted to Sir Manston the formula for ‘654’—and I’m going to Nice to call him up.”

“God grant he has it,” I said, glancing at the bed where the sick man lay.

“Amen to that. But in the meantime. Sterling—I may be away two hours or more—it’s vitally important that Petrie should not be alone for one moment.”

“I quite follow.”

“So I want you to stand by here until I get back. What I mean is this—I want you to sit tight beside his bed.”

“I understand. You may count on me.”

He stared at me fixedly. There was something almost hypnotic in that penetrating look.

“Sterling,” he said, “you are dealing with an enemy more cunning and more brilliant than any man you have ever met East or West. Until I return you are not to allow a soul to touch Petrie—except Sister Therese or Cartier.”

I was startled by his vehemence.

“It may be difficult,” I suggested.

“I agree that it may be difficult; but it has to be done. Can I rely upon you?”

“Absolutely”

“I’m going to dash away now, to put a call through to Manston Rorke. I only pray that he is in London and that I can locate him.”

He raised his hand in a sort of salute to the insensible man, turned, and went out.

chapter seventh

IVORY FINGERS

I thought of many things during the long vigil that followed. The isolation ward harboured six patients, but Petrie had been given accommodation in a tiny private room at one end. The corresponding room at the other end was the sanctum of Sister Therese.

It was a lonely spot, and very silent. I heard the sister moving about in the adjoining ward, and presently she entered quietly, a fragile little woman, her pale face looking childishly small framed in the stiff white headdress of her order. Deftly and all but noiselessly she went about her duties; and, watching her, I wondered, as I had often wondered before, from whence came the unquestioning faith which upheld such as Sister Therese and in which they found adequate reward for a life of service.

“You are not afraid of infection, M. Sterling?” she asked, her voice very low and gentle.

“Not at all, Sister. In my job I have to risk it.”

“What do you do?”

“Hunt for new species of plants for the Botanical Society— and orchids for the market.”

“But how fascinating! As a matter of fact, there is no danger of infection at this stage.”

“So I am told by Dr. Cartier.”

“It is new to us, this disease. But it is tragic that Dr. Petrie should fall a victim. However, as you see——”

She pointed.

“The stigmata?”

Sister Therese shuddered.

“It is so irreligious! But Dr. Cartier, I know, calls this mark the black stigmata. Yes—it does not increase. Dr. Petrie may conquer. He is a wonderful man. You will moisten his poor lips from time to time? I am praying that he may be spared to us. Good-night, M. Sterling. Ring for me if he moves.”

She withdrew in her gentle, silent way, leaving me to my thoughts. And by some queer mental alchemy these became transmuted into thoughts of Fleurette. I found myself contemplating in a sort of cold horror the idea of Fleurette infected with this foul plague—her delicate beauty marred, her strong young body contorted by the work of some loathsome, unclassified bacillus.

And then I fell to thinking about those who had contracted this thing, and to considering what Nayland Smith had told me. What association was there to explain a common enmity between London dock labourers and Dr. Petrie?

I stared at him as the thought crossed my mind. One of the strangest symptoms of this horror which threatened France was the period of complete coma preceding the end. Petrie looked like a dead man.

A searching wind, coming down from the Alps, had begun to blow at sunset. The pines, some of which almost overhung the lonely building, hushed and whispered insidiously. I construed their whispering into a repetition of the words “Fleurette—Derceto....”

If dear old Petrie survived the crisis, I told myself, tomorrow should find me once more on the beach ofSte Claire de la Roche. I might have misjudged Fleurette. But even if she were the mistress of Mahdi Bey, she was very young and so not past praying for.

I had just formed this resolution when a new sound intruded upon the silence of the sickroom.

There was only one window—high in the wall which marked the end of the place. As I sat near the foot of Petrie’s bed, this window was above on my left.

And the sound, a faint scraping, seemed to come from there.

I listened to the hushing of the pines, thinking that the wind had grown higher and that some outstretched branch must be touching the wall. But the wind seemed to have decreased, and the whisper, “Fleurette—Derceto,” had become a scarcely audible sigh.

Raising my head, I looked up....

A yellow hand, the fingers crooked in a clutching movement—a threat it seemed—showed for a moment, then disappeared, outside the window!

Springing to my feet, I stared wildly. How long had I been sitting there, dreaming, since Sister Therese had gone? I had no idea. My imagination pictured such an evil, mask-like face as I had seen at the Villa Jasmin—peering in at that high window.

One of the dacoits (the name was vaguely familiar, although I had never been in Burma) referred to by Nayland Smith must be watching the place!

Was this what he had feared? Was this why I had been left on guard?

What did it mean?

I could not believe that Dr. Petrie had ever wronged any man. Who, then, was hounding him to death, and what was his motive?

Literally holding my breath, I listened. But there was no repetition of the scraping sound. The climber—the window was twelve feet above ground level—had dropped silently at the moment that I sprang from my chair.

To rush out and search was obviously not in orders. My job was to sit tight. I was pledged to it.

But the incident had painted a new complexion on my duties.

I watched that high window keenly and for a long time. Then, as I was on the point of sitting down, a slight sound brought me upright at a bound. I realised that my nerves were badly overtimed.

The door opened, and Sister Therese came in, in her unobtrusive, almost apologetic way.

“A lady has called to see Dr. Petrie,” she said. “To see Dr. Petrie!”

“How could I refuse her, M. Sterling?” Sister Therese asked gently. “She is his wife!” The little sister glanced wistfully at the unconscious man. “And she is such a beautiful woman.”

“Great heavens!” I groaned—”this is going to be almost unendurable. Is she very—disturbed, Sister?”

Sister Therese shook her head, smiling sadly.

“Not at all. She has great courage.”

Just as poor Petrie had feared—his wife had come from Cairo—to find him...a doomed man.

“I suppose she must come in. But his appearance will be a frightful shock to her....”

Anticipating a tragic interview, I presently turned to meet Mrs. Petrie, as Sister Therese showed her into the room. She was, I saw, tall and slender, having an indolent grace of bearing totally different from affectation. She was draped in a long wrap of some dark fur beneath which showed the edge of a green dress. Bare, ivory ankles peeped below its fringe and she wore high-heeled green sandals with gold straps.

She had features of almost classic chiselling and perfectly moulded lips. But her eyes were truly remarkable. They were incredibly long, of the true almond shape, and brilliant as jewels. By reason of the fact that Mrs. Petrie wore a little green beret-like hat set on one side of her glossy head, from which depended a figured gold veil, I could not determine the exact colour of those strange eyes: the veil just covered them.

Her complete self-possession reassured me. She glanced at Petrie, and then, as Sister Therese silently retired:

“It is very good of you, Mr. Sterling,” she said—and her voice had an indolent, soothing quality in keeping with her personality—”to allow me to make this visit.”

She seated herself in a chair which I placed for her beside Petrie’s bed.

So this was “Karamaneh”? I had not forgotten that strange name murmured by Nayland Smith as he had bent over Petrie. The most beautiful woman I have ever known....”

And that Mrs. Petrie was beautiful none could deny; yet for some reason her appearance surprised me. I had not been prepared for a woman of this type. Truth to tell, although I didn’t recognize the fact then, I had subconsciously given Mrs. Petrie the attributes ofFleurette—a flower-like tender loveliness wholly removed from the patrician yet exotic elegance of this woman who sat looking at the unconscious man.

Having heard of her passionate love for the doctor, I was surprised, too, by her studied self-possession. It was admirable, but, in a devoted wife, almost uncanny...

“I could do no less, Mrs. Petrie,” I replied. “It is very brave of you to come.”

She was bending forward, watching the sick man.

“Is there—any hope?” she asked.

“There is every hope, Mrs Petrie. In other cases which the doctors have met with, the appearance of the purple shadow has meant the end.”

“But in this case?”

She looked at me, her wonderful eyes so bright that I thought she was suppressing tears.

“In Petrie’s case, the progress of the disease has been checked—temporarily, at any rate.”

“How wonderful,” she whispered—”and how strange.”

She bent over him again. Her movements were feline in their indolent grace. One slender ivory hand held the cloak in place; the long nails were varnished to a jewel-like brightness. I wondered how these two had met, and how such markedly different types had ever become lovers.

Mrs. Petrie raised her eyes to me again.

“Is Dr. Cartier following some different treatment in—my husband’s case?”

The nearly imperceptible pause had not escaped me. I supposed that a wave of emotion had threatened to overcome her when she found that name upon her lips and realised that the man himself tottered on the brink of the Valley.

“Yes, Mrs Petrie; a treatment of your husband’s known as ‘654.’“

“Prepared, I suppose, by Dr. Cartier?”

“No—prepared by Petrie himself just before he was seized with illness.”

“But Dr. Cartier, of course, knows the formula?”

That caressing voice possessed some odd quality of finality;

it was like listening to Fate speaking. Not to reply to any question so put to one would have been a task akin to closing one’s ears to the song of the Sirens. And the darkly fringed eyes, which, now, owing to some accident of reflected light, I thought were golden, emphasized the soft command.

Indeed, I was on the point of answering truthfully that no one but Petrie knew the formula when an instinct of compassion gave me strength to defy that powerful urge. Why should I admit so cruel a truth?

“I cannot say,” I replied, and knew that I spoke the words unnaturally.

“But of course it will be somewhere in my husband’s possession? No doubt in his laboratory?”

Her^mxiety—although there was no trace of tremor in her velvety tones—was nevertheless unmistakable.

“No doubt, Mrs Petrie,” I said reassuringly—and spoke now with greater conviction, since I really believed that the formula must be somewhere among Petrie’s papers.

She murmured something in a low voice—and, standing up, moved to the head of the bed.

Whereupon, my difficulties began. For, as Mrs. Petrie bent over the pillow, I remembered the charge which had been put upon me, remembered Nayland Smith’s words: “You are not to allow a soul to touch him——”

I got up swiftly, stepped around the foot of the bed, and joined Mrs. Petrie where she stood.

“Whatever you do,” I said, “don’t touch him!”

Slowly she stood upright; infinitely slowly and gracefully. She turned and looked into my eyes.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because—” I hesitated: what could I say?—”because of the possibility of infection.”

“Please don’t worry about that, Mr. Sterling. There is no possibility of infection at this stage. Sister Therese told me so.”

“But she may be wrong,” I urged. “Really, I can’t allow you to take the risk.”

Perhaps my principles ride me to death; I have been told that they do. But I had pledged my word that no one should touch Petrie, and I meant to stick to it. Logically, I could think of no reason why this woman who loved him should not stroke his hair, as I thought she had been about to do. It was almost inhuman to forbid it. Yet, by virtue of Sir Denis’s trust in me, forbid it I must.

“It may be difficult,” I remembered saying to him. How difficult it was to be, I had not foreseen!

“Surely,” she said, and her soft voice held no note of anger, “the risk is mine?”

Mrs. Petrie bent again over the pillow. She was on the point of resting those slender, indolent hands on Petrie’s shoulders.

She intended, I surmised, to kiss his parched lips....

chapter eighth

“BEWARE...”

As those languorous ivory hands almost rested on Petrie’s shoulders, and the full red lips were but inches removed from the parched blue lips of the unconscious man, I threw my arms around Mrs. Petrie and dragged her away!

She was light and resilient as a professional dancer. I had been forced to exert considerable strength because of her nearness to the doctor. She was swept back, lying against my left arm and looking up at me in a startled yet imperious way, which prepared me to expect an uncomfortable sequel.

During one long moment she remained motionless, our glances meeting. Her cloak had slipped, exposing a bare arm and shoulder. I was partly supporting her and trying fren-ziedly to find words to excuse my apparent violence, when, still looking up at me, she turned slightly.

“Why did you do that?” she asked. “Was it...to save me from contagion?”

The cue was a welcome one; I seized it gladly.

“Of course!” I replied, but knew that my assurance rang false. “I warned you that I should not allow you to touch him.”

She continued to watch me, resting in the crook of my arm;

and I had never experienced such vile impulses as those which goaded me during those few seconds. The most singular promptings were dancing in my brain. I thought she was offering me her lips, or, rather, challenging me to reject the offer. With a movement so slight that it might have been accidental, she seemed to invite me to caress her.

Yes, most utterly damnable thing, I, in whose blood there runs a marked streak of Puritanism, I, with poor Petrie lying there in the grip of a dread disease, suddenly wanted to crush this woman—his wife—in my arms!

It was only a matter of hours since I had met Fleurette on the beach of Ste Claire de la Roche and had become so infatuated with her beauty and charm that I had been thinking about her almost continuously ever since. Yet here I stood fighting against a sudden lawless desire for the wife of my best friend—a desire so wild that it threatened to swamp everything—friendship, tradition, honour!

Perhaps I might have conquered—unaided. I am not prepared to say. But aid came to me, and came in the form of what I thought at the time to be a miracle. As I looked down into those enigmatical, mocking eyes, in a silence broken only by the hushing of the pines outside the window—a voice—a groaning, hollow voice, a voice that might have issued from a tomb—spoke.

“Beware...of her,” it said.

Mrs. Petrie sprang back. A fleeting glimpse I had of stark horror in the long, narrow eyes. My heart, which had been beating madly, seemed to stop for a moment.

I twisted my head aside, staring down at Petrie.

Was it imagination—or did I detect a faint quivering of those swollen eyelids? Could it be he who had spoken? That slight movement, if it had ever been, had ceased. He lay still as the dead.

“Who was it?” Mrs Petrie whispered, her patrician calm ruffled at last. “Whose voice was that?”

I stared at her. The spell was broken. The glamour of those bewitched moments had faded—dismissed by that sepulchral voice. Mrs. Petrie’s eyelashes now almost veiled her long, brilliant eyes. One hand was clenched, the other hidden beneath her cloak. My ideas performed a complete about-turn. Some sudden, inexplicable madness had possessed me, from the consequences of which I had been saved by an act of God!

“I don’t know,” I said hoarsely. “I don’t know...”

chapter ninth

FAH LO

SUEE

the end of that interview is hazy in my memory. Concerning one detail, however, I have no doubt: Mrs. Petrie did not again approach the sick man’s bed. Despite her wonderful self-discipline, she could not entirely hide her apprehension. I detected her casting swift glances at Petrie and—once—upwards towards the solitary window.

That awful warning, so mysteriously spoken— could have related only to her....

I rang for Sister Therese and arranged that the night concierge should conduct the visitor to her car. I suspected that the neighbourhood was none too safe.

Mrs. Petrie gave me the address of a hotel in Cannes, asking that she be kept in touch. She would return, she said, unless summoned earlier, at eight in the morning. She had fully regained her graceful composure by this time, and I found myself wondering what her true nationality could be. Her languid calm was hard to reconcile with wifely devotion:

indeed, I had expected her to insist upon remaining.

And when, with a final glance at Petrie and an enigmatical smile to me, she went out with Sister Therese, I turned and stared at the doctor. I could detect no change whatever, except that it seemed to me that the purple shadow on his brow was not so dark.

Could it be he who had spoken?

His face was dreadfully haggard, looking almost emaciated, and his lips dry and cracked, were slightly parted so as to expose his teeth. In that unnatural smile I thought I saw the beginning of the death grin which characterized this ghastly pestilence.

He did not move, nor could I detect him breathing. I glanced at the window, high above my head, where not so long before I had seen those crooked yellow fingers. But it showed as a black patch in the dull white mass of the wall.

The pines began whispering softly again: “Fleurette— Derceto....”

If Petrie had not spoken—and I found it hard to believe that he had—whose was the voice which had uttered the words, “Beware...of her?”

I had ample time to consider the problem and many others as well which had arisen in the course of that eventful day. Dr. Cartier looked in about eleven o’clock, and Sister Therese made regular visits.

There was no change to be noted in Petrie’s condition.

It was a dreary vigil; in fact, an eerie one. For company I had an apparently dead man, and some of the most horrible memories which one could very well conjure up as a background for that whispering silence.

At some time shortly after midnight I hard swift footsteps coming along the passage which led to Petrie’s room. The door opened, and Nayland Smith walked in.

One glance warned me that something was amiss.

He crossed and stared down at Petrie in silence, then turning to Sister Therese, who had entered behind him:

“I wonder, Sister,” he said rapidly, “if I might ask you to remain here until Dr. Cartier arrives, and allow Mr. Sterling and myself the use of your room?”

“But of course, with the greatest pleasure,” she replied, and smiled in her sweet, patient way.

Together we went along the narrow corridor and presently came to that little room used by the nurse on duty. It was very simple and very characteristic.

There was a glass-fronted cabinet containing medicines, dressings, and surgical appliances. Beside a little white table was placed a very hard white enamelled chair. An open book lay on the table; and the only decoration was a crucifix on the distempered wall.

Sir Denis did not speak for a moment, but paced restlessly to and fro in that confined space twitching at the lobe of his ear—a habit which I later came to recognize as indicative of deep thought.

Suddenly he turned and faced me.

“Sir Mansion Rorke died early yesterday morning,” he said, “from an overdose of heroin or something of that kind!”

“What!”

I had been seated on the edge of the little table, but at that I sprang up. Sir Denis nodded grimly.

“But was he—addicted to drugs?”

“Apparently. He was a widower who lived alone in a flat in Curzon Street. There was only one resident servant—a man who had been with him for many years.”

“It’s Fate,” I groaned. “What a ghastly coincidence!”

“Coincidence!” Sir Denis snapped. “There’s no coincidence! Sir Mansion’s consulting rooms in Wimpole Street, where he kept all his records and pursued his studies, were burgled during the night. I assume that they found what they had come for. A large volume containing prescriptions is missing.”

“But, if they found what they came for——”

“That was good enough,” he interrupted. “Hence my assumption that they did. Sir Manston had a remarkable memory. Having destroyed the prescription book, the next thing was to destroy...that inconvenient memory!”

“You mean—he was murdered?”

“I have little doubt on that point,” Sir Denis replied harshly. “The butler has been detained—but there’s small hope of learning anything from him, even if he knows. But I gather, Sterling—” he fixed a penetrating stare upon me—”that a similar attempt was made here to-night.”

“Here? Whatever do you mean, Sir Denis?”

But even as I spoke the words I thought I knew, and:

“Why, of course!” I cried—”the dacoit!”

“Dacoit,” he rapped. “What dacoit?”

“You don’t know? But, on second thoughts, how could you know! It was shortly after you left. Someone looked in at the window of Petrie’s room——”

“Looked in?” He glanced up at the corresponding window of Sister Therese’s room. “It’s twelve feet above ground level.”

“I know. Nevertheless, someone looked in. I heard a faint scuffling—and I was just in time to catch a glimpse of a yellow hand as the man dropped back.”

“Yellow hand?” Sir Denis laughed shortly. “Our cross-eyed friend from the Villa Jasmin, Sterling! He was spying out the land. Shortly after this, I suggest, the lady arrived?”

I stared at him in surprise.

“You are quite right. I suppose Sister Therese told you?

Mrs. Petrie came a few minutes afterwards.”

“Describe her,” he directed tersely.

Startled by his maritaer, I did my best to comply, when:

“She has green eyes,” he broke in.

“I couldn’t swear to it. Her veil obscured her eyes.”

“They are green,” he affirmed confidently. “Her skin is the colour of ivory, and she has slender, indolent hands. She is as graceful as a leopardess, of the purring which treacherous creature her voice surely reminded you?”

Sir Denis’s sardonic humour completed my bewilderment. Recalling the almost tender way in which he had spoken the words, “Poor Karamaneh,” I found it impossible to reconcile those tones with the savagery of his present manner.

“I’m afraid you puzzle me,” I confessed. “I quite understood that you held Mrs. Petrie in the highest esteem.”

“So I do,” he snapped. “But we are not talking about Mrs. Petrie!”

“Not talking about Mrs. Petrie! But——”

“The lady who favoured you with a visit to-night. Sterling, is known as Fah Lo Suee (I don’t know why). She is the daughter of the most dangerous man living to-day. East or West—Dr. Fu Manchu!”

“But, Sir Denis!”

He suddenly grasped my shoulders, staring into my eyes.

“No one can blame you if you have been duped. Sterling. You thought you were dealing with Petrie’s wife: it was a stroke of daring genius on the part of the enemy——”

He paused; but his look asked the question.

“I refused to permit her to touch him, nevertheless,” I said.

Sir Denis’s expression changed. His brown eager face lighted up.

“Good man!” he said in a low voice, and squeezed my shoulders, then dropped his hands. “Good man.”

It was mild enough, as appreciation goes, yet somehow I valued those words more highly than a decoration.

“Did she mention my name?”

“No.”

“Did you?”

I thought a while, and then:

“No,” I replied. “I am positive on the point.”

“Good!” he muttered, and began to pace up and down again. “There’s just a chance—just a chance he has overlooked me. Tell me, omitting no detail that you recall, exactly what took place.”

To the best of my ability, I did as he directed.

He interrupted me once only: when I spoke of that sepulchral warning—

“Where was the woman when you heard it?” he rapped.

“Practically in my arms. I had just dragged her back.”

“The voice was impossible to identify?”

“Quite.”

“And you could not swear to the fact that Petrie’s lips moved?”

“No. It was a fleeting impression, no more.”

“It was after this episode that she subjected you to her hypnotic tricks?”

“Hypnotic tricks!”

“Yes—you have narrowly escaped. Sterling.”

“You refer,” I said with some embarrassment for I had been perfectly frank—”to my strange impulses?”

He nodded.

“No. It was the voice which broke the spell.”

He twitched his ear for some moments, then:

“Go on!” he rapped.

And when I had come to the end:

“You got off lightly,” he said. “She is as dangerous as a poised cobra! And now, I have another job for you.”

“I’m ready.”

“Hurry back to Villa Jasmin—and call me up here if all’s well there. Have you a gun?”

“No. I lent mine to the chauffeur.”

Take this.” He drew an automatic from his topcoat pocket.

“Drive like hell and shoot if necessary. You are a marked man.

»

As I hurried out. Dr. Carter hurried in. “Ah!” Nayland Smith exclaimed. “I regret troubling you, doctor; but I want you to examine Petrie very carefully.” “What! there is some change?” “I don’t know. That’s what I want you to find out.”

chapter tenth

GREEN EYES

the two-seater which had been placed at Petrie’s disposal was no beauty, but the engine was fairly reliable, and I set out along the Comiche about as fast as it is safe to travel upon such a tortuous road.

I suppose it had taken me a ridiculously long time to grasp the crowning horror which lay behind this black business. As I swung around the dangerous curves of that route, the parapet broken in many places and the mirror of the Mediterranean lying far below on the right, my brain grew very active.

The discovery of a fly-catching plane near the place where a man had been seized by this frightful infection, coupled with our finding later a similar specimen in Petrie’s laboratory, had suggested pretty pointedly that human agency was at work. Yet, somehow, in spite of the apparition of that grinning yellow face in the kitchen garden of the villa, I had not been able to realize, or not been able to believe, that human agency was actually directing the pestilence.

Sir Denis Nayland Smith had adjusted my perspective. Someone, apparently a shadowy being known as Fu Manchu, was responsible for these outbreaks!

And the woman who had posed as Petrie’s wife, the woman who had tried, and all but succeeded in her attempt to bewitch me, was of the flesh and blood of this fiend. She was Chinese; and her mission had been—what?

To poison Petrie—as Sir Mansion Rorke had been poisoned?

As I swung into the lighted tunnel cut through the rock, I laughed aloud when that seeming absurdity presented itself to my mind.

Anew disease had appeared in the world. Yes; of this, I had had painful evidence. It was possibly due, according to Sir Denis, to the presence in France of an unfamiliar fly—what he had called a genus-hybrid.

So much I was prepared to admit.

But how could any man be responsible for the appearance of such an insect, anywhere and at any time; much less in such widely separated places as those which had been visited by the epidemic?

The Purple Shadow...

I had nearly reached the end of the rock cutting. There was a dangerous comer just ahead; and I had allowed my thoughts to wander rather wide of the job in hand. A big car, a Rolls-Royce, appeared suddenly. The driver—some kind of African, as I saw—was taking so much of the road on the bend that no room was left for me.

Jamming on the brakes, I pulled close in against the wall of the tunnel...and I acted only just in time.

The driver of the Rolls checked slightly and swept right— missing me by six inches or less!

I had a clear, momentary view of the occupants of the car which had so nearly terminated my immediate interest in affairs....

How long I stayed there after the beautiful black-and-silver thing had purred away into the darkness, I don’t know. But I remember turning round and staring over the folded, dusty hood in a vain attempt to read the number.

The car had two occupants.

In regard to one of those occupants I wondered if the wild driving of the Negro chauffeur and my preoccupation with the other had led me to form a false impression. Because, when the Rolls had swept on its lordly way, I realised that my memory retained an image of something not entirely human.

A yellow face buried in the wings of an upturned fur collar I had certainly seen: a keen wind from the Alps made the night bitingly cold. The man wore a fur cap pulled down nearly to his brows, creating a curious mediaeval effect. But this face had a placid, almost godlike immobility, gaunt, dreadful, yet sealed with power like the features of a dead Pharoah.

Some chance trick of the lighting might have produced the illusion (its reality I could not admit); but about the second traveller I had no doubts whatever.

Her charming head framed—as that other skull-like head was framed—in the upturned collar of a fur coat...I saw Fleurette!

And I thought of a moss-rose....

I turned to the wheel again.

Fleurette!

She had not seen me, had not suspected that I was there. Probably, I reflected, it would not have interested her to know.

But her companion? I tested the starter, wondering if it would function after the shock. I was relieved to find that it did. The Rolls was miles away, now, unless the furious driving of the African chauffeur had led to disaster....That yellow face and those glittering green eyes—I asked myself the question: Could this be Mahdi Bey?

Somehow I could not believe the man with Fleurette to be an Egyptian. Yet, I reflected, driving on, there had been that about him which had conjured an image to my mind...the image of Seti the First—that King of Egypt whose majesty had survived three thousand years....

chapter eleventh

AT THE VILLA JASMIN

the car in which Nayland Smith had come from Cannes was standing just where the steep descent to the little garage made a hairpin bend. I supposed that the man had decided to park there for the night. But I was compelled to pull in behind, as it was impossible to pass.

I walked on beyond the bend to the back of the bungalow. A path to the left led around the building to the little verandah;

one to the right fell away in stepped terraces, skirting the garden and terminating at the laboratory.

My mind, from the time of that near crash with the Rolls up to this present moment, had been preoccupied. The mystery of Fleurette had usurped my thoughts. Fleurette—her charming little bronzed face enveloped in fur; a wave of her hair gleaming like polished mahogany. Now, as I started down the slope, a warning instinct spoke to me. I found myself snatched back to dangerous reality.

I pulled up, listening; but I could not detect the Kohler engine.

Some nocturnal flying thing hovered near me; I could hear the humming of its wings. Vividly, horribly, I visualised that hairy insect with its glossy back, and almost involuntarily, victim of a swift, overmastering and sickly terror, I began striking out right and left in the darkness....

Self-contempt came to my aid. I stood still again.

The insect, probably some sort of small beetle, was no longer audible. I thought of the fly-haunted swamps I had known, and grew hot with embarrassment. The Purple Shadow was a ghastly death; but Petrie had faced it unflinchingly....

Natural courage returned. A too vivid imagination had betrayed me.

I reached the laboratory and found it dark and silent. This was not unexpected. I supposed that the man had turned in on the couch. He was a tough type who had served in the French mercantile marine; I doubted if he were ever troubled by imagination. He had been given to understand, since this was the story we had told to Mme Dubonnet, that Petrie was suffering from influenza. He had accepted without demur Dr. Cartier’s assurance that there was no danger of infection.

Walking around to the door I rapped sharply.

There was no reply.

Far below I could see red roofs peeping out of purplish shadow, and, beyond, the sea gleaming under the moon; but by reason of its position the laboratory lay in darkness.

Having rapped several times without result, I began to wish that I had brought a torch, for I thought that then I could have looked in at the window. But even as the idea crossed my mind I remembered that the iron shutters were drawn.

Thus far, stupidly, I had taken it for granted that the door was locked. But failing to get a response from the man inside, I now tried the handle and found, to my great surprise, that the door was unlocked.

I opened it. The laboratory was pitch black and reeked of the smell of mimosa.

“Hullo, there!” I cried. “Are you asleep?”

There was no reply, but I detected a sound of heavy breathing as I groped for the switch. When I found it, the lamps came up very brightly, dipped, and then settled down.

“My God!” I groaned. The man from Cannes lay face downward on the couch!

I ran across, and tried to move him. He was a big, heavy fellow, and one limply down-stretched arm, the fingers touching the floor, told me that this was no natural repose. Indeed, the state of the place had prepared me for this.

It was not merely in disorder—it had been stripped. Petrie’s specimen slides and all the documents which were kept in the laboratory had been removed!

The smell of mimosa was everywhere; it was getting me by the throat.

I rolled the man over on his back. My first impression, that he had been drinking heavily, was immediately dispelled. He was insensible but breathing stertorously. I shouted and shook him, but without avail. My Colt automatic, which I had lent him, lay upon the floor some distance away.

“Good heavens!” I whispered, and stood there, listening.

Except for the hum of the engine in its shed near by, and the thick breathing of the man on the couch, I could hear nothing. I stared at the chauffeur’s flushed features.

Was it...the Purple Shadow?

My medical knowledge was not great enough to tell me. The man might have been stunned by a blow or be suffering from the effects of an anaesthetic. Certainly, I could find no evidence of injury.

It was only reasonable to suppose that whatever the marauders had come to look for, they had found. I decided to raise the metal shutters and open a window. That stifling perfume, for which I was wholly at a loss to account, threatened to overpower me. I wondered if the searchers had upset a jar of some queer preparation of Petrie’s.

How little I appreciated at that moment the monumental horror which lay behind these opening episodes in a drama destined to divert the whole course of my life!

I came out of the laboratory. Some kind of human contact— sympathy—assistance was what I most desired. Leaving the lights on and the door and window open, I began to make my way up the steep path bordering the kitchen garden, towards the villa. I had slipped my own automatic into my pocket and so was now doubly armed.

In my own defence I think I may say that blackwater fever leaves one very low, and, as Petrie had warned me, I had been rather overdoing it for a convalescent. This is my apologia for the fact that as I climbed up that narrow path to the Villa Jasmin I was conscious of the darkest apprehension. I became convinced, suddenly but quite definitely, that I was being watched.

I had just stepped onto the verandah and was fumbling with the door key when I heard a sound which confirmed my intuition....

From somewhere behind me, near the laboratory which I had just left, came the call, soft but unmistakable, on three minor notes, of a dacoit!

I flung the door open and turned up the light in the small, square lobby. Then I reclosed the door. What to do was the problem. I thought of the man lying down there helpless—at the mercy of unguessed dangers. But he was too heavy to carry, and at all costs I must get to the phone—which was here in the villa.

I threw open the sitting-room door and entered the room in which, that evening, I had quested through the works in several languages for a clue to the strange plant discovered by Petrie. I switched on the lamps.

What I saw brought me up sharply with a muttered exclamation.

The room had been turned upside down!

Two cabinets and the drawers of a writing table had been emptied of their contents. The floor was littered with papers. Even the bookshelves had not escaped scrutiny. A glance showed me that every book had been taken from its place. They were not in their right order.

Something, I assumed, had disturbed the searchers....

What?

Upon this point there was very little room for doubt. That cry in the garden had given warning of my approach. To whom?

To someone who must actually be in the villa now!

My hand on the butt of an automatic, I stood still, listening. I was unlikely ever to forget the face I had glimpsed at the end of the kitchen garden. It was possible that such a horror was stealthily creeping upon me at the present moment. But I could hear no sound.

I thought of Petrie—and the thought made me icily and murderously cool. Petrie—struck down by the dread disease he had risked his life to conquer; a victim, not of Fate, but of a man—

A man? A fiend! a devil incarnate he must be who had conceived a thing so loathsome.

Dr. Fu Manchu!

Who was this Dr. Fu Manchu of whom even Nayland Smith seemed to stand in awe? A demon—or a myth? Indeed, at the opening stage of my encounter with the most evil and the most wonderful man who, I firmly believe, has ever been incarnated, I sometimes toyed with the idea that the Chinese doctor had no existence outside the imagination of Sir Denis.

All these reflections, more or less as I have recorded them, flashed through my mind as I stood there listening for evidence of another presence in the villa.

And although I heard not the faintest sound, I knew, now, that someone was there—someone who was searching for the formula of”654,” and, therefore, not a Burmese bodyguard or other underling, but one cultured enough to recognize the formula if it should be found!

Possibly...Dr. Fu Manchu!

I stepped up to the writing desk, upon which the telephone stood—and in doing so noticed that the shutters outside the window had been closed. First and foremost, I must establish contact with Sir Denis. I thought I should by justified in reporting that the enemy had not yet found the formula.

The automatic in my right hand, I took up the receiver in the left. Because of the position of the instrument, I was compelled to turn half away from the open door.

I could get no reply. I depressed the lever; there was no answering ring....

Alight sound, and a change in the illumination of the room, brought me about in a flash.

The door was closed.

And the telephone line was dead—cut....

I leapt to the door, grasped the handle, and turned it fiercely. I remained perfectly cool—which is my way of seeing red. The door was locked.

At which moment the lights went out.

chapter twelfth

MIMOSA

I listened intently, not knowing what to expect. That this was a prelude to an attack on my life, I did not doubt.

The room was now in complete darkness, for, as I had already noted, the outside shutters had been closed. There were two points from which this attack was to be apprehended: the door or the window. There was no chimney, heat being provided by a stove the pipe of which was carried out through an aperture in the wall high up near the ceiling.

At first I could not hear a sound.

Very cautiously I bent and pressed my ear to the thin panelling of the door. Now, I detected movement—and, furthermore, sibilant whispering. I could hear my own heart beating, too.

After a lapse of fully a minute, I became certain that someone else was standing on the other side of the door, listening, as I was listening.

A murderous rage possessed me.

It was unnecessary to recall Sir Denis’s instructions: “Don’t hesitate to shoot.” I did not intend to hesitate...I was anxious for an opportunity. Petrie’s haggard face was always before my mind’s eye. And ifNayland Smith were correct, Sir Manston Rorke also had been foully done to death by this callous, foul group surrounding the creature called Fu Manchu.

A very slight movement upon the woodwork now enabled me to locate the exact position of the one who listened.

I hesitated no longer.

Standing upright, I clapped the nose of my automatic against the panel at a point about waist high and fired through the door....

The report in that tiny enclosed space was deafening, but the accuracy of my judgment was immediately confirmed. A smothered, choking cry and a groan followed by the sound of a heavy fall immediately outside told me that my shot had not gone astray.

Braced tensely, I stood awaiting what would follow. I anticipated an attempt to rush the room, and I meant to give an account of myself.

What actually happened was utterly unexpected.

Someone was opening the outer door of the villa; then I heard a low voice—and it was a woman’s voice!

I had stepped aside, anticipating that my own method might be imitated, but now headless of risk, I bent and listened again. A faint smell of burning was perceptible where I had fired through the woodwork.

That low, musical voice was speaking rapidly—but not in English, nor in any language with which I was familiar. It was some tongue containing strange gutturals. But even these could not disguise the haunting music of the speaker’s tone.

The woman called Fah Lo Suee was outside in the lobby....

Then I heard a man’s voice, a snarling, hideous voice, replying to her; and, I thought, a second. But of this I could not be sure....

They were dragging a heavy body out onto the verandah. There came a choking cough. Such was my mood that I could have cheered aloud. One of the skulking rats had had his medicine!

As those movements proceeded in accordance with rapidly spoken orders in that unforgettable voice, I turned to considerations of my own safety. Tiptoeing across the room and endeavouring to avoid those obstacles the position of which I could remember, I mounted on to the writing table.

Slipping the automatic into my pocket I felt for the catch of the window, found it, and threw the window open: the shutters, I knew, I could burst with a blow, for they were old, and the fastener was insecure.

I moved farther forward, resting upon one knee, and raised my hands.

As I did so, a ghastly thing happened—a thing unforeseen. I was faced by a weapon against which I had no defence.

Pouring down through the slats of the shutters came a cloud of vapour. I was drenched, saturated, blinded by mimosa! A faint hissing sound accompanied the discharge;

and as I threw one arm across my face in a vain attempt to shield myself from the deadly vapour, this hissing sound was repeated.

I fell onto both knees, rolled sideways, and tried to throw myself back.

But the impalpable abomination seemed to follow me. I was enveloped in a cloud of it. I tried to cry out—I couldn’t breathe—I was choking.

A third time I heard the hissing sound, and then I think I must have rolled from the table onto the floor. My impression at the time was of falling—falling into dense yellow banks of idoud, reeking of mimosa....

chapter thirteenth

THE FORMULA

“sterling, Sterling! wake up, man! You’re all right now.”

I opened my eyes as directed, and apart from a feeling of pressure on the temples, I experienced no discomfort.

I was in my own bed at the Villa Jasmin!

Nayland Smith was standing beside me, and a bespectacled, bearded young man whom I recognized as one of Dr. Carrier’s juniors was bending down and watching me anxiously.

Without any of that mental chaos which usually follows unconsciousness, I remembered instantly all that had happened, up to the moment that I had rolled from the table.

“They drugged me. Sir Denis,” I said, “but I can tell you all that happened.”

“The details. Sterling. I have already reconstructed the outline.” He turned to the doctor. “You see, this drug apparently has no after effects.”

The medical man felt my pulse, then turned in amazement to Sir Denis.

“It is truly astounding,” he admitted. “I know of no property in any species of mimosa which could explain this.”

“Nevertheless,” rapped Sir Denis, “the smell of mimosa is still perceptible in the sitting room.”

The French doctor nodded in grave agreement. Then as I sat up—for I felt as well as I had ever felt in my life——

“No, please,” he insisted, and laid his hand upon my shoulder: “I should prefer that you lie quiet for the present.”

“Yes, take it easy. Sterling,” said Nayland Smith. There was another victim here last night.”

“The man in the laboratory?”

“Yes; but he’s none the worse for it. He dozed off on the couch, he tells me, and they operated in his case, I have discovered, by inserting a tube through the ventilator in the wall above. He sprang up at the first whiff, but never succeeded in getting to his feet.”

“Please tell me,” I interrupted excitedly, “is there any blood in the lobby?”

Sir Denis shook his head grimly.

“I take it that you are responsible for the shot-hole through the door?”

“Yes, and I scored a bull!”

“The lobby is tiled. They probably took the trouble to remove any stains. Apart from several objects and documents which they have taken away, they have left everything in perfect order. And now, Sterling—the details.”

Sir Denis looked very tired; his manner was unusually grave; and:

“Before I begin,” he said rapidly—”Petrie? Is there any change?”

The Frenchman shook his head.

“I am very sorry to have to tell you, Mr. Sterling,” he replied, “that Dr. Petrie is sinking rapidly.”

“No? Good God! Don’t say so!”

“It’s true!” snapped Nayland Smith. “But tell me what I want to know—I haven’t a minute to waste.”

Filled with a helpless anger, and with such a venomous hatred growing in my heart for the cruel, cunning devil directing these horrors, I outlined very rapidly the events of the night.

“Even now,” said Nayland Smith savagely, “we don’t know if they have it.”

“The formula for ‘654’?”

He nodded.

“It may have been in Rorke’s study in Wimpole Street, or it may not; and it may have been here. In the meantime, Petrie’s case is getting desperate, and no one knows what treatment to pursue. Fah Lo Suee’s kindness towards yourself, following a murderous assault upon one of her servants, suggests success. But it’s merely a surmise. I must be off!”

“But where are you going. Sir Denis?” I asked, for he had already started towards the door. “What are my orders?”

He turned.

“Your orders,” he replied, “are to stay in bed until Dr. Bnsson gives you permission to get up. I am going to Berlin “ “To Berlin?” He nodded impatiently.

“I spent some time with the late Sir Manston Rorke,” he went on rapidly, “at the School of Tropical Medicine, as I have already told you. And I formed the impression that Rorke’s big reputation was largely based upon his friendship with Professor Emil Krus, of Berlin, the greatest living authority upon Tropical Medicine.

“I suspected that Rorke almost invariably submitted proposed treatments to the celebrated German, and I hope—I only hope—that Petrie’s formula ‘654’ may have been sent on to the Professor for his comments. I have already been in touch by telephone with Berlin, but Dr. Emil Krus proved to be inaccessible.

“The French authorities have placed a fast plane and an experienced pilot at my service, and I leave in twenty minutes for the Templehof aerodrome.”

I was astounded—I could think of no words; but:

“It is Dr. Petrie’s only chance,” the Frenchman interrupted. “His condition is growing hourly worse, and we have no idea what to do. It is possible that the great Krus”—there was professional as well as national jealousy in his pronunciation of the name—”may be able to help us. Otherwise——”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“You see. Sterling?” said Nayland Smith. “Take care of yourself.”

He ran out.

I looked up helplessly into the bespectacled face of Dr. Brisson. Dawn was breaking, and I realized that I must have been insensible for many hours.

“Such friendship is a wonderful thing, doctor,” I said.

“Yes. Sir Denis Nayland Smith is a staunch friend.” Brisson replied; “but in this—there is more than friendship. The south of France, the whole of France, Europe, perhaps the world, is threatened by a plague for which we know of no remedy. The English doctor Petrie has found means to check it. If we knew what treatment should follow the injection of his preparation ‘654’ we could save his life yet.”

“Is it, then, desperate?”

“It is desperate. But as surely you can appreciate, we could also save other lives. If a widespread epidemic should threaten to develop, we could inoculate. I do not understand, but it seems that there is someone who opposes science and favours the plague. This is beyond my comprehension, but one thing is clear to me: only Dr. Petrie, who is dying, and Professor Krus—perhaps—know how to fight this thing. You see? It may be that the fate of the world is at stake.”

Indeed I saw, and all too plainly.

“Have the police been informed of the outrages here last night?” I asked.

The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders, and his bearded face registered despair.

“In this matter I am distracted,” he declared, “and I have ceased even to think about it. Sir Denis Nayland Smith, it seems, has powers from Paris which override the authorities of Nice. The Department is in his hands.”

“You mean that no inquiry will be made?”

“Nothing—as I understand. But as I confessed to you, I do not understand—at all.”

I sprang up in bed—my brain was superactive.

“This is awful!” I exclaimed—”I must do something—I must do something!”

Dr. Brisson rested his hands upon my shoulders.

“Mr Sterling,” he said, and his eyes, magnified by the powerful lenses of his spectacles, were kindly yet compelling, “what you should do—if you care to take my advice, is this:

you should rest.”

“How can I rest?”

I sank back on the pillows, while he continued to watch me.

“It is difficult, I know,” he went on. “But what I tell you. Dr. Cartier would tell you, and your friend Dr. Petrie, also. You are a very strong man, full of vigour, but you have recently recovered from some severe illness. This I can see. The Germans are very clever—but we in France are not without knowledge. For at least four hours, you should sleep.”

“How can I sleep?”

“There is nothing you can do to help your friend. All that experience has taught us, we are doing. I offer you my advice. An orderly from the hospital is in the lobby and will remain there until he is relieved. Your housekeeper, Mme Dubonnet, will be here at eight o’clock. Please take a small cachet which I have in my bag, and resign yourself to sleep.”

I don’t know to what extent the doctor’s kindly and deliberate purpose influenced me, but as he spoke I recognized how weary I was.

The hiatus induced by that damnable mimosa drug had rested me not at all: my brain was active as from the moment that I had succumbed to it. My body was equally weary.

“I agree with you, doctor,” I said, and grasped his hand. “I don’t think I need your cachet. I am dead tired. I can sleep without any assistance.”

He nodded, and smiled.

“Better still,” he declared. “Nature is always right. I shall close the shutters and leave you. Ring for your coffee when you awake. By then, if Sir Denis’s instructions have been carried out, the telephone will have been repaired, and you can leam the latest news about Dr. Petrie.”

I remember seeing him close the shutters and walk quietly out of the room. I must have been very tired...for I remember no more.

chapter fourteenth

IN MONTE CARLO

I woke late in the afternoon.

Body, brain, and nerves had been thoroughly exhausted;

but now I realized that my long sleep had restored me.

Mme Dubonnet was in the kitchen, looking very unhappy. The telephone had been repaired that morning, she told me, but it was all so mysterious. The house had been disturbed, and there were many things missing. And the poor dear doctor! They had told her, only two hours before, that there was no change in his condition.

I turned on the bath taps and then went to the telephone. Dr. Brisson was at the hospital. In answer to my anxious inquiry, he said in a strained, tired voice that there was nothing to report. He could not conceal his anxiety, however.

Something told me that dear old Petrie’s hours were numbered. Sir Denis Nayland Smith had not been in touch.

“I trust that he arrived safely,” he concluded, “and succeeded in finding Dr. Emil Krus.”

“I shall be along in about an hour.”

“Nothing of the kind, my dear Mr. Sterling, I beg of you. It would only add to our embarrassment. You can do nothing. If you would consent to take my advice again, it would be this:

drive out somewhere to dinner. Try to forget this shadow, which unfortunately you can do nothing to dispel. Tell the housekeeper where you intend to go, so that we can trace you. should there be news—good or bad.”

“It’s impossible,” I replied; “I feel I must stand by.” But the tired, soothing voice at the other end of the line persisted. A man would relieve Mme Dubonnet at the villa just before dusk; “And,” Brisson concluded, “it is far better that you should seek a change of scene, if only for a few hours. Dr. Petrie would wish it. In a sense, you know, you are his patient.”

In my bath, I considered his words. Yes, I suppose he was right. Petrie had been insistent that I should not overdo things—mentally or physically. I would dine in Monte Carlo, amid the stimulating gaiety of the strangest capital in the world.

I wanted to be at my best in this battle with an invisible army. I owed it to Petrie—and I owed it to Nayland Smith.

In spite of my determination, it was late before I started out. The orderly from the hospital had arrived. He had nothing to report. Sir Denis was of opinion, I learned, that there was just a possibility of a further raid upon the Villa Jasmin being attempted, and the man showed me that he was armed.

He seemed to welcome this strange break in his normal duties. I told him that I proposed to dine at Quinto’s Restaurant. I was known there, and he could get in touch, or leave a message, at any time.

Then, heavy-hearted, but glad in a way to escape, if only for a few hours, from the spot where Petrie had been stricken down by his remorseless, hidden enemy, I set out for Monaco.

Some new and strange elements had crashed into my life. It was good to get away to a place dissociated from these things and endeavour to see them in their true perspective.

The route was pathetically familiar.

It had been Petrie’s custom on two or three evenings in the week to drive into Monte Carlo, dine and spend an hour or so in the Casino. He was no gambler—nor am I—but he was a very keen mathematician, and he got quite a kick out of pitting his wits against the invulnerable bank.

I could never follow the principle of his system. But while, admittedly, we had never lost anything, on the other hand, we had not gained.

My somewhat morbid reflections seemed to curtail the journey. I observed little of the route, until I found myself on the long curve above Monte Carlo. Dusk had fallen, and that theatrical illumination which is a feature of the place had sprung into life.

I pulled up for a moment, looking down at the unique spectacle—wonderful, for all its theatricality. The blazing colour of the flower beds, floodlighted from palm tops; the emerald green of terraced lawns, falling away to that ornate frontage of the great Casino.

It is Monte Carlo’s one and only “view”, but in its garish way it is unforgettable.

I pushed on down the sharp descent to the town, presently halting before the little terrace of an unpretentious restaurant. Tables were laid under the awning, and already there were many diners.

This was Quinto’s, where, without running up a ruinous bill, one may enjoy a perfect dinner and the really choice wines of France.

The genial maitre d’h6tel met me at the top of the steps, extending that cosmopolitan welcome which lends a good meal an additional savour. Your true restaurateur is not only an epicure; he is also a polished man of the world.

Yes, there was a small table in the corner. But I was alone to-night! Was Dr. Petrie busy?

I shook my head.

“I am afraid he is very ill,” I replied cautiously.

Hitherto the authorities had succeeded in suppressing the truth of this ghastly outbreak so near to two great pleasure resorts. I had to guard my tongue, for an indiscreet word might undo all their plans of secrecy.

“Something serious?” he asked, with what I thought was real concern: everybody loved Petrie.

“A serious chill. The doctors are afraid of pneumonia.”

Quinto raised his hands in an eloquent Southern gesture.

“Oh, these chilly nights!” he exclaimed. “They will ruin us! So many people forget to wrap themselves up warmly in the Riviera evenings. And then—” he shrugged—”they say it is a treacherous climate!”

He conducted me to a table in an angle of the wall, and pointed out, as was his custom, notabilities present that evening.

These included an ex-Crown Prince, Fritz Kreisler, and an internationally popular English novelist residing on the Cote d’Azur.

The question of what I should eat and what I should drink was discussed as between artists; for the hallmark of a great maitre d’h6tel is the insidious compliment which he conveys to his patron in conceding the latter’s opinions to be worthy of the master’s consideration.

When the matter was arranged and the wine-waiter had brought me a cocktail, I settled down to survey my fellow

guests.

My survey stopped short at a table in the opposite comer. A man who evidently distrusted the chill of the Southern evenings sat there, his back towards me. He wore a heavy coat, having an astrakhan collar; and, what was more peculiar at dinner, he wore an astrakhan cap. From my present point of view he resembled pictures I had seen of Russian nobleman of the old regime.

Facing him across the small square table was Fleurette! Over one astrakhan-covered shoulder other companion our glances met. Dim light may have created the illusion, but I thought that that flower-like face turned pale, that the blue eyes opened very wide for a moment.

I was about to stand up, when a slight, almost imperceptible movement of Fleurette’s head warned me unmistakably not to claim the acquaintance.

chapter fifteenth

FAIRY TRUMPET

I asked myself the question: had the gesture been real, or had I merely imagined it?

Fleurette wore a light wrap over a vary plain black evening frock. Her hair smouldered under the shaded lights so that it seemed to contain sparks of fire. She had instantly glanced aside. I could not be wrong.

At first I had experienced intense humiliation, but now my courage returned. True, she had not conveyed the message:

“Don’t speak to me.” But it had been in the nature of a warning, an admission of a mutual secret understanding, and in no sense a snub.

She was not, than, inaccessible. She was hedged around, guarded, by the jealous suspicions of her Oriental master.

I could doubt no longer.

The man seated with his back to me was the same I had seen in the car driven by the Negro chauffeur. Despite his nonconformity to type, this was Mahdi Bey. And Fleurette, for all her glorious, virgin-like beauty, must be his mistress.

She deliberately avoided looking in my direction again.

Her companion never moved: his immobility was extraordinary. And presently, through the leaves of the shrubs growing in wooden boxes, I saw the black-and-silver Rolls, almost directly opposite the restaurant.

My glance moved upward to the parapet guarding a higher road which here dips down and forms a hairpin bend.

A man stood there watching.

Difficult though it was from where I sat to form a clear impression of his appearance, I became convinced, nevertheless, that he was one of the tribe of the dacoits...either the same, or an opposite number, of the yellow-faced horror I had seen in the garden of the Villa Jasmin!

And at that moment, as my waiter approached, changing the plates in readiness for the first course, I found myself swept back mentally into the ghastly business I had come there to forget. I experienced a sudden chill of foreboding.

If, as I strongly suspected, one of the murderous Burmans were watching the restaurant—did this mean that I had been followed there? If so, with what purpose? I no longer stood between Petrie’s enemies and their objective...but:

I had wounded, probably killed, one of their number. I had heard much of the implacable blood feuds of the Indian thugs;

it was no more than reasonable to suppose that something of the same might prevail among the dacoits of Burma.

I glanced furtively upward again. And there was the motionless figure leaning against the parapet.

In dress there was nothing to distinguish the man from an ordinary Monaco workman, but my present survey confirmed my first impression.

This was one of the yellow men attached to the service of Dr. Fu Manchu.

I cast my memory back over the route I had so recently traversed. Had any car followed me? I could not recollect that it was so. But, on the other hand, I had been much abstracted, driving mechanically....Dusk had fallen before I had reached Monaco. If an attempt were contemplated, why had it not taken place upon the road?

The problem was beyond me....But there stood the watcher, motionless, by the parapet.

And at this very moment, and just as the wine-waiter placed a decanter of my favourite Pommard before me, I had a remarkable experience—an experience so disturbing that I sat quite still for several seconds, my outstretched hand poised in the act of taking up the decanter.

Close beside my ear—as it seemed, out of space, out of nowhere—that same high, indescribable note became audible; that sound which I believe I have already attempted to describe as the call of a fairy trumpet....

Once before, and once only, I had heard it—on the beach of Ste Claire de la Roche.

Some eerie quality in the sound affected me now, as it had affected me then. It was profoundly mysterious; but one thing was certain. Unless the sound were purely a product of my own imagination, or the result of some trouble of the inner ear— possibly an aftermath of illness—it could not be coincidence that on the two occasions that I had heard it Fleurette had been present.

My hand dropped down to the convert—and I looked across at her.

Her eyes were fixed on the face other companion, who sat with his back to me, in that dreamy, far-away regard which I remembered.

Then her delicate lips moved, and I thought, although I could not hear her words, that she was replying to some question which he had addressed to her.

And, as I looked and realised that she was speaking, that strange sound ceased as abruptly as it had commenced.

I saw Fleurette glance aside; her expression changed swiftly. But her eyes never once turned in my direction. I stared beyond her, up through the leaves of the shrubs and towards the parapet on the other side of the street.

The Burman had disappeared....

chapter sixteenth

THE DACOIT

“You are wanted on the telephone, Mr. Sterling.”

I started as wildly as a man suddenly aroused from sleep. A dreadful premonition gripped me icily. I stood up.

“Do you know who it is?”

“I believe the name was Dr. Cartier, sir.”

In that moment Fleurette and her mysterious companion were forgotten; the lurking yellow man faded from my mind as completely as he had faded from my view. This was news of Petrie; and something told me it could only be bad news.

I hurried through the restaurant to the telephone booth, and snatched up the receiver.

“Hullo, hullo!” I called. “Alan Sterling here. Is that Dr. Cartier?”

Brisson’s voice answered me: his tone prepared me for what was to come.

“I mentioned Dr. Cartier’s name in case you should not be familiar with my own, Mr. Sterling. I would not have disturbed you—for you can scarcely have begun your dinner yet—had I not promised to report any news at once.”

“What is it?” I asked eagerly

“Prepare yourself to know that it is bad.”

“Not...?”

“Alas—yes!”

“My God!”

“There was no final convulsion—no change. ‘654’ might have saved him—if we had known what treatment to pursue after the first injection. But the coma passed slowly into...death.”

As I listened to those words, a change came over my entire outlook on the future. A cold rage, and what I knew to be an abiding rage, took possession of me. The merciless fiends, for no reason that I could possibly hope to imagine, had ended an honourable and supremely useful life; that kindly personality which had lived only to serve had been snatched away, remorselessly.

Very well....It was murder, calculated, callous murder. This was a game that two could play. What I had done once, I could do again, and again—and every time that I got within reach of any of the foul gang!

Dr. Fu Manchu!

If such a person existed, I asked only to be set face to face with him. That moment, I vowed, should be his last—little knowing the stupendous task to which I vowed myself.

Fah Lo Suee—a woman; but one of them. The French had not hesitated to shoot female spies during the World War. Nor should I, now.

I had reached the head of the steps when Victor Quinton touched my shoulder. Details were indefinite, but my immediate objective was plain. One of the Burmans was covering my movements. I planned to find that Burman; and—taking every possible precaution to insure my own getaway—I planned to kill him....

“You have had bad news, M. Sterling?”

“Dr. Petrie is dead,” I said, and ran down the steps.

I suppose many curious glances followed; perhaps Fleurette had seen me. I didn’t care. I crossed the street and walked up the opposite slope. A man was lounging there, smoking a cigarette—a typical working-class Frenchman; and I remembered that he had stood there for part of the time during which the dacoit had watched the restaurant.

“Excuse me.” I said.

The man started and turned.

“Did you chance to see an Oriental who stood near you here a few minutes ago?”

“But yes, m’sieur. Someone I suppose off one of those foreign yachts in the harbour? He had gone only this last two minutes.”

“Which way?”

He pointed downward.

“Toward the Jardin des Suicides,” he replied smiling.

“Suitable spot, if I catch him there,” I muttered; then, aloud: “Drink my health,” I said, thrusting a note into his hand. “I shall need your kind wishes.”

“Thank you, m’sieur—and good night....”

I remember starting the car and driving slowly down the slope to the comer by the Caf6 de Paris. I had no glimpse of the Burman. Here, viewing the activity which surges around the Casino, seeing familiar figures at the more sheltered caf6 tables, noticing a gendarme in an Offenbach uniform, a hotel bus—I pulled up.

My determination remained adamant as ever; but I suddenly recognized the hopelessness of this present quest. I must cast my hook wisely; useless to pursue one furtive shark. My place was beside Cartier, beside dear old Petrie— in the centre of the murderous school....

I set out. I had not dined; nor had I tasted my wine. But I was animated by a vigorous purpose more stimulating than meat and drink.

That purpose, as I view it now, was vengeance. Some part of me, the Highland, had seen the Fiery Cross. I was out for blood. I had consecrated myself to a holy cause: the utter destruction of Dr. Fu Manchu and of all he stood for.

Petrie dead!

It was all but impossible to accept the fact—yet. I dreaded my next meeting with Sir Denis: his hurt would be deeper even than my own. And throughout the time that these bitter reflections occupied my mind, I was driving on, headlong, my steering controlled by a guiding Providence.

Without having noted one landmark on the way, I found myself high up on the Comiche road. Beyond a piece of broken parapet outlining a sharp bend I could see twinkling lights far ahead, and below were, I thought, the lights of Ste Claire de la Roche. I slowed up to light my pipe.

The night was very still. No sound of traffic reached my ears.

I remembered having stuck a spare box of matches in a fold of the canvas hood. I turned to get it...

A malignant yellow race, the eyes close-set and slightly oblique, stared into mine!

The dacoit was perched on the baggage rack!

What that hideous expression meant—in what degree it was compounded of animosity and of fear caused by sudden discovery—I didn’t pause to consider. But that my own cold purpose was to be read in my face the Burman’s next move clearly indicated.

Springing to the ground, he began to run....

He ran back: I had no chance to turn the car. But I was out and after him in less time than it takes me to record the fact. This was a murder game: no quarter given or expected!

The man ran like Mercury, He was already twenty yards away. I put up a tremendous sprint and slightly decreased his lead. He glanced back. I saw the moonlight on his snarling teeth.

Pulling up, I took careful aim with the automatic—and fired. He ran on. I fired again.

Still he ran. I set out in pursuit; but the dacoit had thirty yards’ start. If he had ever doubted, he knew, now, that he ran for his life.

In a hundred yards I had gained nothing. My wind was not good for more than another hundred yards at that speed. Then—and if I had had enough breath I should have cheered—he stumbled, tottered, and fell forward onto hands and knees!

I bore down upon him with grim determination. I was not ten feet off when he turned, swung his arm, and something went humming past my bent head!

A knife!

I checked and fired again at close range.

The Burman threw his hands up, and fell prone in the road.

“Another one for Petrie!” I said breathlessly.

Stooping, I was about to turn him over, when an amazing thing happened.

The man whipped around with a movement which reminded me horribly of a snake. He threw his legs around my thighs and buried fingers like steel hooks in my throat!

Dragging me down—down—remorselessly down—he grinned like a savage animal cornered but unconquerable.....The world began to swim about me; there was a murmur in my ears like that of the sea.

I thought a car approached in the distance....I saw bloody foam dripping from the dacoit’s clenched teeth....

chapter seventeenth

THE ROOM OF GLASS

when I opened my eyes my first impression was that the dacoit had killed me—that I was dead—and that the Beyond was even more strange and inconsequential than the wildest flight of Spiritualism had depicted.

I lay on a couch, my head on a pillow. The cushions of the couch were of a sort of neutral grey colour; so was the pillow. They were composed, I saw, of some kind of soft rubber and were inflated. I experienced considerable difficulty in swallowing, and raising a hand to my throat found it to be swollen and painful.

Perhaps, after all, I was not dead; but if alive, where in the known world could I be?

The couch upon which I lay—and I noted now that I was dressed in white overalls and wore rubber-soled shoes!—was at one end of an enormously large room. The entire floor, or that part of it which I could see, was covered with this same neutral grey substance which may have been rubber. The ceiling looked like opaque glass, and so did the walls.

Quite near to me was a complicated piece of apparatus, not unlike, I thought, a large cinematograph camera, and mounted on a movable platform. It displayed a number of huge lenses, and there were tiny lamps here and there in the amazing mechanism, some of them lighted.

A most intricate switchboard was not the least curious feature of this baffling machine. Farther beyond, suspended from the glass ceiling, hung what I took to be the largest arc lamp I had ever seen in my life. But although it was alight, it suffused only a dim purple glow, contributing little to the general illumination.

Half hidden from my point of view stood a long glass table (or a table composed of the same material as the ceiling and the walls) upon which was grouped the most singular collection of instruments and appliances I had ever seen, or even imagined.

Huge glass vessels containing fluids of diverse colours, masses of twisted tubing, little points of fire, and a thing like an Egyptian harp, the strings of which seemed to be composed of streaks of light which wavered and constantly changed colour, emitting a ceaseless crackling sound....

I closed my eyes for a moment. My head was aching furiously, and my mouth so parched that it caused me constantly to cough, every cough producing excruciating pain.

Then I opened my eyes again. But the insane apartment remained. I sat up and swung my feet to the floor.

The covering had the feeling of rubber, as its appearance indicated. My new viewpoint brought other objects within focus. In a white metal rack was ranged a series of vessels resembling test tubes. The smallest was perhaps a foot high, and from this the others graduated like the pipes of an organ, creating an impression in my mind of something seen through a powerful lens.

Each tube was about half filled with some sort of thick fluid, and this, from vessel to vessel, passed through shades from deepest ruby to delicate rose pink.

I stood up.

And now I could see the whole of that fabulous room. I perceived that it was a kind of laboratory—containing not one instrument nor one system of lighting with which I was acquainted!

Other items of its equipment now became visible, and I realised that a continuous throbbing characterised the whole place. Some powerful plant was at work. This throbbing, which was more felt than heard, and the crackling of those changing rays, alone disturbed the silence.

Still doubting if I really lived, if I had been rescued from the thug, I asked myself—assuming it to be so—who was my rescuer, and to what strange sanctuary had he brought me?

No human figure was visible.

And now I observed a minor but a curious point: the rubber couch upon which I had been lying was placed in a comer. And upon the floor-covering were two black lines forming a right angle. Its ends, touching the walls, made a perfect square—in which I stood.

I looked about that cavernous place, pervaded by a sort of violent light, and I realized that certain pieces of apparatus, and certain tables, were surrounded by similar black marks upon the floor.

Apparently there was no door, nor could I find anything resembling a bell. If this were not mirage—or death—what was this place in which I found myself; and why was I there alone?

I set out to explore.

One step forward I made, and had essayed a second, when I recall uttering a loud cry.

As my foot crossed the black mark on the floor, a shock ran through my body which numbed my muscles! I dropped to my knees, looking about me—perhaps, had there been any to see, as caged animals glare from their cages....

What did it mean? That some impassable barrier hedged me in!

The shock had served a double purpose: it had frightened me intensely—this I confess without hesitation; but as I got to my feet again I knew that also it had revived that cold, murderous rage which had governed my mind up to the moment that the dacoit had buried his fingers in my throat.

“Where the devil am I?” I said aloud; “and what am I doing here?”

I sprang forward...and fell back as though a cunning opponent had struck me a straight blow over the heart!

Collapsed on the rubber-covered floor I lay quivering—temporarily stunned. I experienced, now, not so much fear as awe:

I was a prisoner of the invisible.

But, looking about at the nameless things which surrounded me, I knew that the invisible must be controlled by an intelligence. If this were not death—I had fallen into a trap.

I rose up again, shaken, but master of myself. Then I sat down on the couch. I felt in the pocket of my overalls—and found my cigarette case! A box of Monaco matches (which rarely light) was there also. I lighted a cigarette. My hands were fairly steady.

Some ghostly image of the truth—a mocking reply to those doubts which I had held hitherto—jazzed spectrally before me. I stared around, looking up at the dull, glassy roof, and at unimaginable instruments and paraphernalia which lent this place the appearance of a Martian factory, devoted to experiments of another age—another planet.

Then I sprang up.

A panel in one of the glass walls slid open. A man came in. The panel closed behind him. He stood, looking in my direction.

chapter

EIGHTEENTH

DR. FU MANCHU

he wore a plain yellow robe and walked in silent, thick-soled slippers. Upon his head was set a little black cap surmounted by a coral bead. His hands concealed in the loose sleeves of his robe, he stood there, watching me.

And I knew that this man had the most wonderful face that I had ever looked upon.

It was aged, yet ageless. I thought that ifBenvenuto Cellini had conceived the idea of executing a death-mask of Satan in gold, it must have resembled very closely this living-dead face upon which my gaze was riveted.

He was fully six feet in height and appeared even taller by reason of the thickly padded slippers which he wore. For the little cap (which I recognized from descriptions I had read to be that of a mandarin of high rank) I substituted mentally the astrakhan cap of the traveller glimpsed in the big car on the Corniche road; for the yellow robe, the fur-collared coat.

I knew at the instant that he entered that I had seen him twice before; the second time, at Quinto’s.

One memory provoked another.

Although in the restaurant he had sat with his back towards me, I remembered now, and must have noted it subconsciously at the time, that tortoiseshell loops had surrounded his yellow pointed ears. He had been wearing spectacles.

Then, as he moved slowly and noiselessly in my direction, I captured the most elusive memory of all——

I had seen this man in a dream—riding a purple cloud which swept down upon a doomed city!

The veil was torn—no possibility of misunderstanding remained. Those brilliant green eyes, fixed upon me in an unflinching regard, conveyed as though upon astral rays a sense of force unlike anything I had known....

This was Dr. Fu Manchu!

My Gothic surroundings, the man’s awesome personality, my attempt to cross the black line surrounding an invisible prison, these things had temporarily put me out of action. But now, as this definite conviction seized upon my mind, my hand plunged to my pocket.

Flesh and blood might fail to pass that mysterious zone;

perhaps a bullet would succeed.

The man in the yellow robe now stood no more than ten feet away from me. And as I jerked my hand down, a sort of film passed instantaneously over those green eyes, conveying a momentary—but no more than momentary—impression of blindness. This phenomenon disappeared in the very instant that I came to my senses—in the very instant that I remembered I was wearing strange garments....

How mad of me to look for a charged automatic in the pocket of these white overalls!

I set my foot upon the smouldering cigarette which I had dropped, and with clenched fists faced my jailer; for I could no longer blink the facts of the situation.

“Ah! Mr. Sterling.” he said, and approached me so closely that he stood but a pace beyond the black line. “Your attempt to explore the radio research room caused a signal to appear in my study, and I knew that you had revived.”

His voice had a guttural quality, the sibilants being very stressed. He spoke deliberately, giving every syllable its full value. I suppose, in a way, he spoke perfect English, yet many words so treated sounded wholly unfamiliar so that I knew I had never heard them pronounced in that manner before.

I could think of nothing to say. I was helpless, and this man had come to mock me.

“You seem to have a disregard for the sanctity of human life,” he continued, “unusual in Englishmen. You killed one of my servants at the Villa Jasmin—a small matter. But your zeal for murder did not end there. Fortunately, I was less than half a mile behind at the time, and I had you carried to a place of safety before some passing motorist should be attracted by the spectacle of two bodies in the Comiche road. You mortally wounded Gana Ghat, head of my Burmese bodyguard.”

“I am glad to hear it,” I replied.

Those green eyes watched me immutably.

“Rejoice not unduly,” he said softly. “I wished you no harm, but you have thrust yourself upon me. As a result, you find yourself in China—”

“In China!”

I heard the note of horror in my own voice. My glance strayed swiftly around that incredible room, and returned again to the tall, impassive, yellow-robed figure.

Good heavens! it was a shattering idea—yet not wholly impossible. I had no means of knowing how long I had been unconscious. The dreadful theory flashed through my mind that this brilliant madman—for I could not account him sane—had, by means of drugs, kept me in a comatose condition, and had had me transported in some private vessel from France to China.

I tried to challenge those glittering green eyes—but the task was one beyond my powers.

“You left me no choice,” Dr. Fu Manchu went on. “I can permit no stranger to intrude upon my experiments. It was a matter of deciding between your death—which would not have profited me—and your services, which may do so.”

He turned slowly and walked in the direction of the hidden glass door. He glanced at me over his shoulder.

“Follow,” he directed.

Since at the moment I could see no alternative to obedience, I stepped cautiously forward.

There was no shock when I passed the black line, but I continued to move warily across that silent floor, in the direction of the opening in which the Chinaman stood, glancing back at me.

The idea of springing upon him the moment I found myself within reach crossed my mind. But —China! If I should actually be in China, what fate awaited me in the event of my attack being successful?

I knew something of the Chinese, having met and employed many of them. I had found them industrious, kindly, and simple. My knowledge of the punishments inflicted by autocratic officials in the interior was confined entirely to hearsay. Certain stories came back to me, now, counselling prudence. If Nayland Smith were correct, it would be a good deed to rid the world of this Chinese physician—even at the price of a horrible martyrdom.

But I might fail...and pay the price nevertheless.

These were my thoughts as I drew nearer and nearer to the glass door. I had almost reached it when Fu Manchu spoke again.

“Dismiss any idea of personal attack,” he said in a soft voice, the sibilants more than usually pronounced. “Accept my assurance that it could not possibly succeed. Follow!”

He moved on, and I crossed the threshold into a small room furnished as a library. Many of the volumes burdening the shelves were in strange bindings, and their lettering in characters even less familiar. There was a commodious table upon which a number of books lay open. Also, there was a smell in the room which I thought I identified as that of burning opium; and a little jade pipe lying in a bronze tray served to confirm my suspicion.

The library was lighted by one silk-shaded lantern suspended from the ceiling, and by a queer globular lamp set in an ebony pedestal on a comer of the table.

So much I observed as I crossed this queer apartment, richly carpeted, and came by means of a second doorway into the largest glasshouse I had seen outside Kew Gardens. Its floor was covered with that same rubber-like material used in the “radio research room.”

The roof was impressively lofty, and the vast conservatory softly lighted by means of some system of hidden lamps. Tropical heat prevailed, and a damp, miasmatic smell. There were palms there, and flowering creepers, rare shrubs in perfect condition, and banks of strange orchids embedded amid steaming moss.

chapter nineteenth

THE SECRET JUNGLE

the place was a bulb-hunter’s paradise, a dream jungle, in parts almost impenetrable by reason of the fact that luxurious growths had overrun the sometimes narrow paths.

I discovered as we proceeded that it was divided into sections, and that the temperature, in what was really a series of isolated forcing houses, varied from tropical to subtropical. The doors were very ingenious. There was a space between them large enough to accommodate several persons, and a gauge set beside a thermometer which could be adjusted as one door was closed before the next was opened.

Let me confess that I myself had ceased to exist. I was submerged in the flowers, in the jungle, in the vital, intense personality of my guide. This was phantasy—yet it was not phantasy. It was a mad reality: the dream of a super-scientist, a genius whose brilliance transcended anything normally recognized, expressed in rare foliage, in unique blooms.

Dr. Fu Manchu consented to enlighten me from point to point.

At an early stage he drew my attention to species which I had sought in vain in the forests of Brazil; to orchids which Borneo, during one long expedition, had failed to reveal to me:

Indian varieties and specimens from the Burmese swamps.

“This is mango-apple, a fruit which first appeared here two months ago....Notice near its roots the beautiful flowers which occasion the heavy perfume—Cypripedium-Cycaste; a hybrid cultivated in these houses successfully for the first time...the very large blooms are rose-peonies—scentless, of course, but interesting....”

At one point in a very narrow path, overhung by a most peculiar type of hibiscus in full bloom, he paused and pointed.

I saw pitcher plants of many species, and not far away drosophyllum—of that kind of which I had already met with two specimens.

These insectivorous varieties,” said Dr. Fu Manchu, “have proved useful in certain experiments. I have outlined several inquiries, upon which I shall request you to commence work shortly, relating to this interesting subject. We come now to the botanical research room...”

He opened a door, and with one long-nailed yellow hand beckoned me imperiously to follow.

I obeyed.

He closed the door and adjusted the gauge, continuing to speak as he did so.

“You will work under the direction of Companion Herman Trenck——”

“What!” His words aroused me from a sort of stupor. “Dr. Trenck? Trenck died five years ago in Sumatra!”

Dr. Fu Manchu opened the second door, and I saw a beautifully equipped laboratory, but much smaller than that in which I had first found myself.

A Chinaman wearing white overalls resembling my own, bowed to my guide and stood aside as we entered.

Bending over a microscope was a grey-haired, bearded man. I had met him once; twice heard him lecture. He stood upright and confronted us.

No possibility of doubt remained. It was Herman Trenck...who had been dead for five years!

Dr. Fu Manchu glanced aside at me.

“It will be your privilege, Mr. Sterling,” he said, “to meet under my roof many distinguished dead men.”

He turned to the famous Dutch botanist.

“Companion Trenck,” he continued, “allow me to introduce to you your new assistant. Companion Alan Sterling, of whose work I know you have heard.”

“Indeed, yes,” said the Dutchman cordially, and advanced with outstretched hand. “It is a great pleasure to meet you, Mr. Sterling, and a great privilege to enjoy such assistance. Your recent work in Brazil for the Botanical Society is well known to me.”

I shook hands. I was a man in a dream. This was a dream meeting.

Of the bona fides of Dr. Trenck in life there could never have been any question. His was one of the great names in botany. But now, I thought, I had entered a spirit world, under the guidance of a master magician.

“If you will pardon me,” said Trenck, “there is something here to which I must draw the doctor’s attention.”

I made no reply. I stood stricken silent, now most horribly convinced that my first impression had been the true one— that definitely I was dead. And I watched, as that tall, gaunt figure in the yellow robe bent over the microscope. Herman Trenck studied his every movement with intense anxiety; and presently:

“Not yet,” said the Chinaman, standing upright. “But you are very near.”

“I agree,” said the Dutch botanist earnestly.

“That I am still wrong?”

“It is more probable, doctor, that I am wrong....”

And it was at this moment, while I firmly believed that I had stepped into the other world, that a phrase flashed through my mind, spoken in a low, musical voice: “Think of me as Derceto....”

Fleurette!

This thought was powerful enough to drag me away from that phantasmal laboratory—powerful enough to make me forget, for a moment. Dr. Fu Manchu, and the dead Dutch botanist who talked with him so earnestly.

Was Fleurette also a phantom?

Did Fleurette belong to the life of which until recently I had believed myself to form a unit, or was she one of the living-dead? In either case, she belonged to Dr. Fu Manchu; and every idea which I had formed respecting her was scrapped, swept away by this inexorable tidal wave which had carried me into a ghost world....

A new thought: Perhaps this was insanity!

In the course of my struggle with the dacoit I might have received a blow upon the skull, and all this be but a dream within a dream: delirium, feverish fancy...

Through all these chaotic speculations a guttural voice issued a command:

“Follow.”

And dumbly, blindly I followed.

chapter twentieth

DREAM CREATURES

I pound myself in a long, gloomily lighted corridor.

My frame of mind by this time was one which I cannot hope to convey in words. In a setting fantastic, chimerical, I had found myself face to face with that eerie monster whose existence I had seriously doubted—Dr. Fu Manchu. I had been made helpless by means of some electrical device outside my experience. I had seen botanical monstrosities which challenged sanity...and I had shaken the hand of a dead man!

Now, as I followed my tall, yellow-clad guide:

The radio research room,” he said, “in which you recently found yourself, is in charge of Companion Henrik Ericksen.”

This was too much; it broke through the cloud of apathy which had been descending upon me.

“Ericksen!” I exclaimed—”inventor of the Ericksen Ray? He died during the World War—or soon after!”

“The most brilliant European brain in the sphere of what is loosely termed radio. Van Rembold, the mining engineer, also is with us. He ‘died,’ as you term it, a few months before Ericksen. His work in the radium mines of Ho Nan has proved to be valuable.”

Yet another door was opened, and I entered into half light to find myself surrounded by glass cases, their windows set flush with the walls and illuminated from within.

“My mosquitoes and other winged insects,” said Dr Fu Manchu. “I am the first student to have succeeded in producing true hybrids. The subject is one which possibly does not interest you, Mr. Sterling, but one or two of my specimens possess characteristics which must appeal even to the lay mind.”

Yes; this was delirium. I recognized now that connecting link, which, if sought for, can usually be found between the most fantastic dream and some fact previously observed, seemingly forgotten, but stored in that queer cupboard which we call the subconscious.

The ghastly fly which had invaded Petrie’s laboratory—this was the link!

I proceeded, now, as a man in a dream, convinced that ere long I should wake up.

“My principal collection,” the guttural voice went on, “is elsewhere. But here, for instance, are some specimens which have spectacular interest.”

He halted before the window of a small case and, resting one long, yellow hand upon the glass, tapped with talon-like nails.

Two gigantic wasps, their wasted bodies fully three inches long, their wingspan extraordinary, buzzed angrily against the glass pane. I saw that there was a big nest of some clay-like material built in one comer of the case.

“An interesting hybrid,” said my guide, “possessing saw-fly characteristics, as an expert would observe, but with the pugnacity of the wasp unimpaired, and its stinging qualities greatly increased. Merely an ornamental experiment and comparatively useless.”

He moved on. I thought that such visions as these must mean that I was in high fever, for I ceased to believe in their reality.

“I have greatly improved the sand-fly,” Dr. Fu Manchu continued; “a certain Sudanese variety had proved to be most amenable to treatment.”

He paused before another case, the floor thickly sanded, and I saw flea-like, winged creatures nearly a large as common houseflies....

“The spiders may interest you....”

He had moved on a few steps. I closed my eyes, overcome by sudden nausea.

The dream, as is the way with such dreams, was becoming horrible, appalling. A black spider, having a body a large as a big grapefruit, and spiny legs which must have had a span of twenty-four inches, sat amidst a putrid-looking litter in which I observed several small bones, watching us with eyes which gleamed in the subdued light like diamonds.

It moved slightly forward as we approached. Unmistakably, it was watching us; it had intelligence!

No horror I had ever imagined could have approximated to this frightful, gorged insect, this travesty of natural laws.

“The creature,” said Dr. Fu Manchu, “has a definitely developed brain. It is capable of elementary reasoning. In regard to this I am at present engaged upon a number of experiments. I find that certain types of ant respond also to suitable suggestion. But the subject is in its infancy, and I fear I bore you. We will just glance at the bacteria, and you might care to meet Companion Frank Narcomb, who is in charge of that department.”

I made no comment—I was not even shocked.

Sir Frank Narcomb—for some time physician to the English royal family, and one of the greatest bacteriologists in Europe, had been a friend of my father’s!

I had been at Edinburgh at the time of his death, and had actually attended his funeral in London!

A door set between two cases slid open as my guide approached it. In one of these cases I saw an ant-hill inhabited by glittering black ants, and in the other, a number of red centipedes moving over the leaves of a species of cactus, which evidently grew in the case....

In a small but perfectly equipped laboratory a man wearing a long white coat was holding up a test tube to a lamp and inspecting its contents critically. He was quite bald, and his skull had a curious, shrivelled appearance.

But when, hearing us enter, he replaced the tube in a rack and turned, I recognized that this was indeed my father’s old friend, aged incredibly and with lines of suffering upon his gaunt face, but beyond any question Sir Frank Narcomb himself!

“Ah, doctor!” he exclaimed.

I saw an expression of something very like veneration spring into the tired eyes of this man who, in life, had acknowledged none his master in that sphere which he had made his own.

“The explanation eludes me,” he said. “Russia persistently remains immune!”

“Russia!”

I had never heard the word spoken as Dr. Fu Manchu spoke it. Those hissing sibilants were venomous.

“Russia! It is preposterous that those half-staved slaves of Stalin’s should survive when stronger men succumb. Russia!”

With the third repetition of the name a sort of momentary frenzy possessed the speaker. During one fleeting instant I looked upon this companion of my dream as a stark maniac. The madman discarded the gown of the scientist and revealed himself in his dreadful, naked reality.

Then, swiftly as it had come, the mood passed. He laid a long yellow hand upon the shoulder of Sir Frank Narcomb.

“Yours is the most difficult task of all, companion,” he said. “This I appreciate, and I am arranging that you shall have more suitable assistance.” He glanced in my direction, and I saw that queer film flicker across his brilliant eyes. “This is Mr. Alan Sterling, with whom, I am informed, you are already acquainted.”

Sir Frank stared hard. As I remembered him he had been endowed with a mass of bushy white hair; now he was a much changed man, but the shrewd, wrinkled face remained the same. Came a light of recognition.

“Alan!” he said, and stretched out his hand. “It’s good to meet you here. How is Andrew Sterling?”

Mechanically I shook the extended hand.

“My father was quite well, Sir Frank,” I replied in a toneless voice, “when I last heard from him.”

“Excellent! I wish he could join us.”

In the circumstances, I could think of nothing further to say, but:

“Follow!” came the guttural order.

And once more I followed.

chapter twenty-first

THE HAIRLESS

MAN

our route led up a flight of stairs, rubber-covered like every other place I had visited, with the exception of that strange study pervaded with opium fumes.

“The physiological research room,” Dr. Fu Manchu said, “would not interest you. It is very small in this establishment, although Companion Yamamata, who is at present in charge, is engaged upon a highly important experiment in synthetic genesis.”

We entered a long, well lighted corridor, with neat white doors right and left, each bearing a number like those in a hotel. These doors were perfectly plain and possessed neither handles nor keyholes.

“Some of the staff reside here,” my guide explained.

He pressed a button in the wall beside a door numbered eleven, and the door slid noiselessly open. I saw a very neat sitting room, with other rooms opening out of it.

“Temporarily...” the guttural voice continued.

There was a strange interruption.

A sort of quivering note sounded, a gong-like note, more a vibration of the atmosphere than an actual sound. But Dr. Fu Manchu stood rigidly upright, and his extraordinary eyes glanced swiftly left along the corridor.

“Quick!” he said harshly, “inside! And close the door—there is a corresponding button in the wall. One pressure closes the door; two open it. Remain there until you are called, if you value your life....”

His harsh imperious manner had its effect. Some of the secret of this strange man’s power lay in the fact that he never questioned his own authority, or the obedience of those upon whom he laid his orders.

The force behind those orders was uncanny.

With no other glance in my direction he set off along the corridor, moving swiftly, yet with a sort of cat-like dignity.

With his withdrawal, some part of my real self began to clamour for recognition. I hesitated on the threshold of the little room, watching him as he went. And when the tall figure, with never a backward glance, disappeared where the corridor branched right, something like a cold wave of sanity came flooding back to my brain.

This was neither delirium nor death! It was mirage. This place was real enough—the long corridor and the white doors—but the rest was hypnotism; a trick played for what purpose I could not imagine, by a master of that dangerous art!

That the woman called Fah Lo Suee was an adept. Sir Denis had admitted. This was her father, and her master.

Those living-dead men were phantoms, conjured up by his brain and displayed before me as an illusionist displays the seemingly impossible. Those vast forcing houses, the big laboratory, the horrible insects in their glass cases! It was perhaps his method of achieving conquest of my personality, submerging me and then using me.

Very well! I was not conquered yet. I could still fight!

That curious throbbing, as of a muted gong, continued incessantly.

What did it mean? What was the explanation of Dr. Fu Manchu’s sudden change of manner and his hurried departure?

“Close the door...and remain there until you are called, if you value your life!”

These had been his words. He had spoken with apparent sincerity.

And now, as I watched, I saw a strange thing. At the foot of the stairs which we had ascended, I saw a door dropping slowly from the roof. I could feel the slight vibration of the mechanism controlling it.

I glanced swiftly left, along the corridor.

A similar door was descending just where the passage branched off!

They were stone doors, or something very like them, such as are used in seagoing ships. Was this the meaning of that constant vibrating note which now was beginning to tell upon my nerves?

What had happened? Had fire broken out? If so, I might well be trapped between the two doors, for I knew of no other exit. Further reflection assured me that these devices could not be intended for use in such an emergency as fire. What then was their purpose, and what was it that Dr. Fu Manchu had feared?

The answer came, even as the question flashed into my mind.

Heralded by a hoarse, roaring sound, a Thing, neither animal nor human, a huge, naked, misshapen creature resembling an animated statue by Epstein, burst into view at the end of the corridor!

It had a huge head set upon huge shoulders. The head was hairless, and the entire face, trunk, and limbs glistened moistly like the skin of an earthworm. The arms were equally massive; but I saw that the hands were misformed, the fingers webbed, and the thumbs scarcely present.

The legs were out of all proportion to that mighty trunk, being stumpy, dwarfed, and terminating in feet of a loathsome pink colour—feet much smaller than the great hands, but also webbed.

From the appalling glistening, naked face, two tiny eyes set close together beside a flattened nose with distended nostrils, glared redly, murderously in my direction.

Uttering a sound which might have proceeded from a wounded buffalo, the creature hurled itself towards me....

chapter twenty-second

HALF-WORLD

I sprang back, looking wildly right and left for the button which controlled the door.

The worm-man was almost upon me, and transcending all fear of a violent death was the horror of contact with those moistly glistening limbs. The control button proved to be on the right. I pressed it.

And the door began to close rapidly and smoothly.

In the very instant of its closing, a loathsome moist mass appeared at the narrowing opening.

My heart leapt and then seemed to stop. I thought that one of those great pink arms was about to be thrust through. Judging the door to be a frail one, I looked in those few instances upon a fate more horrible than any which had befallen man since prehistoric times.

The door closed.

And now came a hollow booming, and a perceptible vibration of the floor upon which I stood.

That unnameable thing was endeavouring to batter a way in! I inhaled deeply, and knew such a sense of relief as I could not have believed possible under the roof of Dr. Fu Manchu.

The door was of metal. Not even the unnatural strength of the monster could prevail against it.

All sounds were curiously muted here; but one harsh bellow of what I took to be frustrated rage reached me very dimly. Then silence fell.

I pressed my ear against the enamelled metal but could hear nothing save a vague murmuring, with which was mingled the rumble of those descending doors.

Thereupon I stood upright; and as I did no, a stifled exclamation brought me sharply about.

Fleurette was in the room just behind me!

She wore a blue-and-white pyjama suit and blue sandals. Her beautiful eyes registered the nearest approach to fear which I had seen in them. She had told me, I remembered, that nothing frightened her, but to-day—or to-night, for I had lost all count of time—something had definitely succeeded in doing so. Her face, which was so like a delicate flower, was pale.

“You!” she whispered, “what are you doing here?”

I swallowed, not without difficulty. I suffered from an intense thirst, and my throat remained very sore by reason of its maltreatment at the hands of the dacoit.

My heart began jumping in quite a ridiculous way.

Yet I suppose the phenomenon was not so ridiculous, for Fleurette was more lovely than I had ever believed a woman could be. Oddly enough, her beauty swamped the last straw of reality upon which I had clutched in the corridor with its rows of white doors and which had remained with me up to the moment that the worm-man had appeared. I sank back again into a sea of doubt, from which, agonisingly, I had been fighting to escape.

Fleurette was dead! I was dead! This was a grim, a ghastly half-world, horribly reminiscent of that state which Spirit-ualists present to us as the afterlife.

“I have joined you,” I replied.

My words carried no conviction even to myself.

“What?”

Her expression changed; she watched me with a new, keen interest.

“I have joined you.”

Fleurette moved towards me and laid one hand almost timidly upon my shoulder.

“Is that true?” she asked, in a low voice.

I had thought that her eyes were blue, but now I saw that they were violet. The life beyond, then was a parody of that which we had lived on earth. I had seen travesties of my own studies in those monstrous houses; I had met with the fabulous Dr. Fu Manchu; I had watched men still pursuing the secrets they had sought in life—amid surroundings which were a caricature of those they had known during their earthly incarnation.

Horror there was, in this strange borderland, but, as I looked into those violet eyes, I told myself that death had its recompenses.

“I am glad you are here,” said Fleurette.

“So am I.”

She glanced aside and went on rapidly:

“You see, I have been trained not to feel fear, but whenever I hear the alarm signal and know that the section doors are being closed—I feel something very like it! I don’t suppose you know about all this yet?” she added.

Already normal colour was returning to those rose-petal cheeks, and she dropped into a little armchair, forcing a smile.

“No,” I replied, watching her; “it’s unpleasantly strange.”

“It must be!” She nodded. “I have lived among this sort of thing on and off as long as I can remember.

“Do you mean here?”

“No; I have never been here before. But at the old place in Ho Nan the same system is in use, and I have been there many times.”

“You must travel a lot,” I said, studying her fascinatedly, and thinking that she had the most musical voice in the world.

“Yes I do.”

“With Mahdi Bey?”

“He nearly always comes with me: he is my guardian, you see.”

“Your guardian?”

“Yes.” She looked up, a puzzled frown appearing upon her smooth forehead. “Mahdi Bey is an old Arab doctor, you know, who adopted me when I was quite tiny—long before I can remember. He is very, very clever; and no one in the world has ever been so kind to me.”

“But, my dear Fleurette, how did you come to be adopted by an Arab doctor?”

She laughed: she had exquisite little teeth.

“Because,” she said, and at last that for which I had been waiting, the adorable dimple, appeared in her chin, “because I am half an Arab myself.”

“What!”

“Don’t I look like one? I am sunburned now, I know; but my skin is naturally not so many shades lighter.”

“But an Arab, with violet eyes and hair like...like an Egyptian sunset.”

“Egyptian, yes!” She laughed again. “Evidently you detect the East even in my hair!”

“But,” I said in amazement, “You have no trace of accent.”

“Why should I have?” She looked at me mockingly. “I am a most perfect little prig. I speak French also without any foreign accent; Italian, Spanish, German, Arabic, and Chinese.”

“You are pulling my leg.”

That maddening dimple reappeared, and she shook her head so that glittering curls danced and seemed to throw out sparks of light.

“I know such accomplishments are simply horrible for a girl—but I can’t help it. This learning has been thrust upon me. You see, I have been trained for a purpose.”

And as she spoke the words, dancing, vital youth dropped from her like a cloak. Those long-lashed eyes, which I had an insane desire to kiss, ceased to laugh. Again that rapt, mystical expression claimed her face. She was looking through me at some very distant object. I had ceased to exist.

“But, Fleurette,” I said desperately, “what purpose? There can be only one end to it. Sooner or later you will fall in love with—somebody or another. You will forget your accomplishments and everything. I mean—it’s a sort of law. What other purpose is there in life for a woman?”

In a faraway voice:

“There is no such thing as love,” Fleurette murmured. “A woman can only serve.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“You are new to it all. You will know tomorrow or perhaps even to-night.”

I had taken a step in her direction when something arrested me—drew me up sharply.

Like a fairy trumpet it sounded, again, that unaccountable call which I had heard twice before—coming from nowhere;

from everywhere; from inside my brain!

Fleurette stood up, giving me never another glance, and moved to that end of the room opposite to the door by which I had entered. She touched some control hidden in the wall. A section slid open. As she crossed the threshold, she turned: I could see a lighted corridor beyond.

“The danger is over now,” she said. “Goodbye.”

I stood staring stupidly at the blank expanse of wall where only a moment before Fleurette had been, when I heard a sound behind me. I turned sharply.

The white door was open! The woman whom Nayland Smith had called Fah Lo Suee stood there, looking at me.

With the opening of the door a faint vibration reached my ears. The “section doors” (so Fleurette had described them) were being raised. Fah Lo Suee wore what I took to be a Chinese dress, by virtue of its style, only; for it was of a pat-temless, shimmering gold material. Her unveiled eyes were green as emeralds; their resemblance to those of the terrible doctor was unmistakable.

“Please come,” she said; “my father is waiting for you.”

chapter twenty-third

THE JADE PIPE

As I followed that slim, languorous figure, mentally I put myself in the witness box. And this was the question to which I demanded an answer:

Am I alive or dead?

On the whole, I was disposed now to believe that I was alive. Therefore, I put this second question:

Am I sane?

To which query I could find no answer.

If the occurrences of the last few hours were real, then I had stepped into a world presumably under the aegis of Dr. Fu Manchu, and presumably in China, where natural laws were flouted; their place taken by laws created by the Chinese physician.

At the foot of the stairs, Fah Lo Suee turned sharply left and opened one of the sliding doors which seemed to be common in the establishment. She beckoned me to follow, and I found myself in a carpeted, warmly lighted corridor. She bent across me to reclose the door.

“You must forget all that is past and all that is puzzling you,” she whispered urgently, speaking close to my ear. “My father knows that you and the little Rose-petal are acquainted. Don’t speak—listen. He will question you, and you will have to answer. When you go to Yamamata’s room, do not fear the injection. But all that you are told will happen when you have received the Blessing of the Celestial Vision, see that you carry out....Pretend—it is your only chance. Pretend! I will see you again as soon as possible. Now follow me.”

These strange words she had spoken with extraordinary rapidity, as she had bent over me, apparently fumbling with the button which controlled the door.

And now, with that slow, lithe, cat-like walk in which again I recognized her father, she moved ahead, leading me. My brain was working with feverish rapidity.

The little Rose-petal!

This must be the Chinese name of Fleurette. Our association, I gathered, did not meet with the approval of Dr. Fu Manchu. And what was the Blessing of the Celestial Vision? This I had yet to leam.

At the end of the corridor I saw a small green lamp burning before an arched opening. Here Fah Lo Suee paused, signalling me to be silent.

“Remember,” she whispered.

The green light in the little lamp flickered, and a heavy door of panelled mahogany slid aside noiselessly.

“Go in,” said Fah Lo Suee.

I obeyed. The door closed behind me, and a whiff of air laden with fumes of opium told me that I was in that queer study which, presumably, was the sanctum of Dr. Fu Manchu.

One glance was enough. He was seated at the big table, his awful but majestic face resting upon one upraised palm. The long nails of his fingers touched his lips. His brilliant eyes fixed me so that I experienced almost a physical shock as I met their gaze.

“Sit down,” he directed.

I discovered that a Chinese stool was set close beside me. I sat down.

Dr. Fu Manchu continued to watch me. I tried to turn my eyes aside, but failed. The steel-grey eyes of Sir Denis Nayland Smith were hard to evade, but I had never experienced such a thralldom as that cast upon me by the long, narrow, green eyes of Dr. Fu Manchu.

All my life I had doubted the reality of hypnotism. Sir Denis’s assurance that Fah Lo Suee had nearly succeeded in hypnotising me at the hospital had not fully registered; I had questioned it. But now, in that small, opiated room, the reality of the art was thrust upon me.

This man’s eyes held a power potent as any drug. When he spoke, his voice reached me through a sort of mist, against which something deep within—my spirit, I suppose—was fighting madly.

“I have learned that you are acquainted with the little flower whose destiny is set upon the peak of a high mountain. Of this, I shall ask you more later. She is nature’s rarest jewel: a perfect woman....You have, unwittingly as I believe, thrust yourself into the cogs of the most delicate machine ever set in motion.”

I closed my eyes. It was a definite physical effort, but I achieved it.

“Now, when you are about to devote your services to the triumph of the Si-Fan, consider the state of the world. The imprint of my hand is upon the nations. Mussolini so far has eluded me; but President Hoover, who stood in my path, makes way for Franklin Roosevelt. Mustapha Pasha is a regrettable nuisance, but my organization in Anatolia neutralises his influence. Von Hindenburg! the old marshal is a granite monument buried in weeds...!”

Persistently I kept my eyes closed. This dangerous madman was thinking aloud, communicating his insane ideas to a member of the outer world, and at the same time pronouncing my doom—as I realized: for the silence of the father confessor is taken for granted....

“Rumania, the oboe of the Balkan orchestra...I have tried to forget King Carol—but negligible quantities can upset the nicest equation by refusing to disappear. A man ruled by women is always dangerous—unless his women are under my orders....Women are the lever for which Archimedes was searching, but they are a lever which a word can bend. You may have heard, Alan Sterling, that I have failed in my projects. But consider my partial successes. I have disturbed the currencies of the world....”

That strange, guttural voice died away, and I ventured to open my eyes and to look at Dr. Fu Manchu.

He had lighted a little spirit lamp which formed one of the items upon the littered table, and above the flame, on the end of a needle, he was twirling a bead of opium. He glanced up at me through half-closed eyes.

“Something upon which Science has not improved,” he said softly. “Yes, I could hasten the crisis which I have brought about, if I wished to do so.”

He dropped the bead into the jade bowl of a pipe which lay in a tray beside him.

“Here is a small brochure,” he went on, and took a book from a table rack, thrusting it in my direction. “Apologia Alchymiae—a restatement of alchemy. It is the work of a London physician—Mr. Watson Councell, whose recent death I regret, since otherwise I should have solicited his services. There are five hundred copies of this small handbook in circulation. Singular to reflect, Alan Sterling, that no one has attempted the primitive method of manufacturing synthetic gold, as practised by the alchemists and clearly indicated in these few pages. For fable is at least as true as fact. Gold....” He placed the stem of the pipe between his yellow teeth...“I could drown the human race in gold!”

“But Russia is starving, and the United States undernourished. The world is a cheese, consuming itself....Even China—my China...”

He fell silent—and I watched him until he replaced the little pipe in its tray and struck a gong which stood near to his left hand.

A pair of Chinamen, identical in appearance, and wearing identical white robes, entered behind me—I suddenly found one at either elbow. Their faces resembled masks carved in old ivory and mellowed by the smoke of incense.

Dr. Fu Manchu spoke a few rapid words in Chinese—then:

“Companion Yamamata will see you,” he said, his voice now very drowsy, and that queer film creeping over his brilliant eyes; “he will admit you to the Blessing of the Celestial Vision, by which time I shall be ready to discuss with you certain points in regard to the future and to instruct you in your immediate duties.”

One of the Chinese servants touched me upon the shoulder and pointed to the open doorway. I turned and walked out.

chapter twenty-fourth

COMPANION

YAMAMATA

I presently found myself in a typical reception room of a consulting surgeon. I was placed in a chair around which were grouped powerful lights for examination purposes. Companion Yamamata, who was scrutinizing some notes, immediately stood up and introduced himself, peremptorily dismissing the Chinamen.

He was young and good-looking in the intellectual Japanese manner; wore a long white coat having the sleeves rolled up; and as he rose from the table where he had been reading the notes, he laid down a pair oftortoiseshell-rimmed glasses and looked at me with humorous, penetrating eyes. He spoke perfect English.

“I am glad that you are becoming a Companion, Mr. Sterling,” he said. Tour province of science is not mine, but I am given to understand by Trenck that you are a botanist of distinction. Your medical history—” he tapped the pages before him—”is good, except for malarial trouble.”

I stared at him perhaps somewhat stupidly. His manner was utterly disarming.

“How do you know that I have had malaria?” I asked. “I don’t think I display any symptoms at the moment.”

“No, no, not at all,” he assured me. “But, you see, I have your history before me. And this malaria has to be taken into account, especially since it culminated in blackwater fever so recently as three months ago. Blackwater, you know, is the devil!”

“I do know,” said I grimly.

“However,” he displayed gleaming teeth in a really charming smile, “I am accustomed to these small complications, and I have prepared the dose accordingly. Will you please strip down to the waist. I always prefer to make the injection in the shoulder.”

He stepped to a side table and took up a hypodermic syringe, glancing back at me as he did so.

“Suppose I object?” I suggested.

“Object?” He wrinkled his brow comically. “Object to enthusiasm?—object to be admitted to knowledge conserved for hundreds of centuries?—to salvation physical as well as intellectual? Ha, ha! that is funny.”

He went on with his preparations.

I reviewed the words of the woman Fah Lo Suee.

To what extent could I rely upon them? Did they mean that for some reason of her own she was daring to cross the formidable mandarin, her father? If so, what was her reason? And supposing that she had lied or had failed, what was this Blessing of the Celestial Vision to which I should be admitted?

I suspected that it was the administration of some drug which would reduce me to a condition of abject mental slavery.

That there was vast knowledge conserved in this place, that experiments ages ahead of any being carried out in the great cultural centres of the world were progressing here, I could not doubt; I had had the evidence of my own eyes. But to what end were these experiments directed?

Something of my thoughts must have been reflected upon my face, for:

“My dear Mr. Sterling,” said the Japanese doctor, “it is so useless to challenge the why and demand the wherefore. And you are about to be admitted to the Company of the Si-Fan. A new world which trembles in the throes of birth will be your orange, of which you shall have your share.”

I made to stand up—to confront him. I could not move! And Dr. Yamamata laughed in the most good-humoured manner.

“Many jib at the last fence,” he assured me, “but what is to be, will be, you know. Allow me to assist you, Mr. Sterling.”

He stepped behind me, and with the adroit movement of a master of jiu-jitsu, peeled my overalls down over my shoulders, pinioning my arms. He unbuttoned my shirt collar.

“Injections are always beastly,” he admitted. “For myself, they induce a feeling of nausea; but sometimes they are necessary.”

I experienced a sharp stab in the shoulder and knew that the needle point of the syringe had been thrust into my flesh. I clenched my teeth; but I was helpless....

He was cleaning the syringe at a wash-basin on the other side of the room. His manner was that of a dental surgeon who has deftly made a difficult extraction.

“A pleasant glow pervades your body, no doubt?” he suggested. “You see, I am accustomed to these small operations. It will be succeeded, I assure you, by a consciousness of new power. No task which may be set—and the tasks set by the doctor are not simple ones—will prove too difficult.”

He replaced the parts of the syringe upon a glass rack and began to wash his hands.

“When you are rested I shall prescribe a whisky-and-soda, which I know is your national beverage, and then you will be ready for your second interview with the doctor.”

He glanced back at me smilingly.

“Is my diagnosis correct?”

“Perfectly.” I replied, conscious of the fact that no change whatever had taken place in my condition, and mindful of the words of that strange, evil woman.

I had a part to play. Not only my own life, but other lives— thousands, perhaps millions—depended upon my playing it successfully!

“Ah!” he beamed delightedly, and began to dry his hands. “Sometimes novitiates shout with joy—but blackwater has somewhat lowered your normal vitality.”

“Nevertheless,” I replied, grinning artificially, “I feel that I want to shout.”

“Then, shout!” he cried, revealing those gleaming teeth in a happy smile. “Shout! the chair is disconnected. Jump about! Let yourself go! Life is just beginning!”

I moved. It was true...I could stand up.

“Ah!” I cried, and stretched my hands above my head.

It was a cry and a gesture of relief. Fah Lo Suee had tricked the Japanese doctor! And I was free—free in mind and body...but in China, and under the roof of Dr. Fu Manchu!

“Splendid!” Yamamata exclaimed, his small, bright eyes registering pure happiness. “My congratulations, Companion Sterling. We will drink to the Master who perfected this super-drug—which makes men giants with the hearts of lions.”

He took up a decanter and poured out two liberal pegs of whisky.

“There was a slight faux-pas earlier this evening,” he went on. “A nearly perfected homonculus—not in your province, Companion, but I am an enthusiast in my own—escaped from the incubator. The formula is, of course, the doctor’s. I had contributed some small items to its perfection, and the specimen who disturbed the household had points of great interest.”

He added soda to the whisky and handed a glass to me. I resigned myself to this gruesome conversation and merely nodded. Yamamata raised his glass.

“Comrade Alan Sterling—we drink to the Mandarin Fu Manchu, master of the world!”

It was a badly needed drink, and I did not challenge his toast; then:

“The specimen had enormous physical strength,” he went on, “and that blind elemental fury which characterises these products—a fact recognized even by Paracelsus. The section doors had to be closed. And I felt dreadfully guilty.”

I drank down half the contents of my tumbler; and:

“What became of...the thing?” I asked.

“Most regretfully,” Yamamata replied, shaking his head, “the vital spark expired. You see, the temperature of the corridors was unsuitable.”

I stopped short.

That clear, indefinable sound or vibration which I had first heard upon the beach of Ste Claire de la Roche came to me again. I saw Yamamata raise one hand and press it against his ear. The sound ceased.

“Dr. Fu Manchu is waiting for you,” he said.

He extended both hands cordially, and I grasped them.

For a moment I had all but forgotten my part; in the horror of the story of that life which was not human, which had been bred, I gathered, in an incubator....

But now, in time—I remembered.

“I am going to kneel at his feet,” I said, endeavouring to impart a quality of exaltation into my voice.

And as I spoke, the smile vanished from the face of Dr. Yamamata as writing sponged from a slate.

“We all kneel at his feet,” he said solemnly.

chapter twenty-fifth

THE LIFE PRINCIPLE

drenched in the opium fumes of that stygian room, I stood again before Dr. Fu Manchu. His eyes were brilliant as emeralds, the pupils mere pin-points, and he lay back in a padded chair, watching me. I had thought out the words which I would speak, and I spoke them now.

“I salute the Master of the World,” I said, and bowed deeply before him.

That the Blessing of the Celestial Vision produced some kind of mental exaltation was clear to me. This I must enact; but it was a mighty task which rested upon my shoulders. That cold hatred which had possessed me at the moment that the news of Petrie’s death had come, now again held absolute sway. I knew that Sir Denis Nayland Smith had not romanced when he had said that this man was Satan’s own—apparently eternal.

At whatever cost—my life was nothing in such a contest!— I would help to throw him down. I would be the feeble instrument which should prove that the was not eternal.

He was monstrous—titanic—dreadful—hell’s chosen emissary. But if I could live, if I could hope to trick this gigantic evil brain, I would find means to crush him; to stamp him out;

to eradicate this super-enemy of all that was clean and wholesome.

I could not forget the dead men in his workshops. This monster clearly possessed knowledge transcending natural laws. He laughed at God. No matter! he was still human—or so I must continue to believe.

The price of doubt was insanity....

He watched me a while in silence and then:

“In two hours. Companion Sterling,” he said, “you will be called for duty. This is your private telephone.”

He handed to me what looked like a signet ring, made of some dull white metal. I had to clench my teeth at the moment of contact with those long, talon-like nails; but I took the ring and stared at it curiously.

“It is adjustable,” Dr. Fu Manchu continued. “Place it upon that finger which you consider most suitable. It is an adaptation—much simplified by Ericksen—of the portable radio now in use among the French police. It does not convey the spoken word. Morse code is used. You know it?”

“I regret to say that I do not.”