The Bride of Fu-Manchu (9 page)

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 on to 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 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 be 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...

A slight 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 TWELVE

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.

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 if Nayland 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, heedless 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 on to 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 these 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 on to 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 on to the floor. My impression at the time was of falling—falling into dense, yellow banks of cloud, reeking of mimosa...

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“S
terling, 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. Cartier’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?”