The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu (21 page)

We looked upon a small, square room, the walls draped with
fantastic Chinese tapestry, the floor strewn with cushions; and
reclining in a corner, where the faint, blue light from a lamp,
placed upon a low table, painted grotesque shadows about the
cavernous face-was Dr. Fu-Manchu!

At sight of him my heart leaped-and seemed to suspend its
functions, so intense was the horror which this man's presence
inspired in me. My hand clutching the curtain, I stood watching
him. The lids veiled the malignant green eyes, but the thin lips
seemed to smile. Then Smith silently pointed to the hand which held
a little pipe. A sickly perfume assailed my nostrils, and the
explanation of the hushed silence, and the ease with which we had
thus far executed our plan, came to me. The cunning mind was
torpid-lost in a brutish world of dreams.

Fu-Manchu was in an opium sleep!

The dim light traced out a network of tiny lines, which covered
the yellow face from the pointed chin to the top of the great domed
brow, and formed deep shadow pools in the hollows beneath his eyes.
At last we had triumphed.

I could not determine the depth of his obscene trance; and
mastering some of my repugnance, and forgetful of Karamaneh's
warning, I was about to step forward into the room, loaded with its
nauseating opium fumes, when a soft breath fanned my cheek.

"Do not go in!" came Karamaneh's warning
voice-hushed-trembling.

Her little hand grasped my arm. She drew Smith and myself back
from the door.

"There is danger there!" she whispered.

"Do not enter that room! The police must reach him in some
way-and drag him out! Do not enter that room!"

The girl's voice quivered hysterically; her eyes blazed into
savage flame. The fierce resentment born of dreadful wrongs was
consuming her now; but fear of Fu-Manchu held her yet. Inspector
Weymouth came down the stairs and joined us.

"I have sent the boy to Ryman's room at the station," he said.
"The divisional surgeon will look after him until you arrive, Dr.
Petrie. All is ready now. The launch is just off the wharf and
every side of the place under observation. Where's our man?"

He drew a pair of handcuffs from his pocket and raised his
eyebrows interrogatively. The absence of sound-of any demonstration
from the uncanny Chinaman whom he was there to arrest-puzzled
him.

Nayland Smith jerked his thumb toward the curtain.

At that, and before we could utter a word, Weymouth stepped to
the draped door. He was a man who drove straight at his goal and
saved reflections for subsequent leisure. I think, moreover, that
the atmosphere of the place (stripped as it was it retained its
heavy, voluptuous perfume) had begun to get a hold upon him. He was
anxious to shake it off; to be up and doing.

He pulled the curtain aside and stepped into the room. Smith and
I perforce followed him. Just within the door the three of us stood
looking across at the limp thing which had spread terror throughout
the Eastern and Western world. Helpless as Fu-Manchu was, he
inspired terror now, though the giant intellect was
inert-stupefied.

In the dimly lit apartment we had quitted I heard Karamaneh
utter a stifled scream. But it came too late.

As though cast up by a volcano, the silken cushions, the inlaid
table with its blue-shaded lamp, the garish walls, the sprawling
figure with the ghastly light playing upon its features-quivered,
and shot upward!

So it seemed to me; though, in the ensuing instant I remembered,
too late, a previous experience of the floors of Fu-Manchu's
private apartments; I knew what had indeed befallen us. A trap had
been released beneath our feet.

I recall falling-but have no recollection of the end of my
fall-of the shock marking the drop. I only remember fighting for my
life against a stifling something which had me by the throat. I
knew that I was being suffocated, but my hands met only the deathly
emptiness.

Into a poisonous well of darkness I sank. I could not cry out. I
was helpless. Of the fate of my companions I knew nothing-could
surmise nothing. Then… all consciousness ended.

I was being carried along a dimly lighted, tunnel-like place,
slung, sackwise, across the shoulder of a Burman. He was not a big
man, but he supported my considerable weight with apparent ease. A
deadly nausea held me, but the rough handling had served to restore
me to consciousness. My hands and feet were closely lashed. I hung
limply as a wet towel: I felt that this spark of tortured life
which had flickered up in me must ere long finally become
extinguished.

A fancy possessed me, in these the first moments of my
restoration to the world of realities, that I had been smuggled
into China; and as I swung head downward I told myself that the
huge, puffy things which strewed the path were a species of giant
toadstool, unfamiliar to me and possibly peculiar to whatever
district of China I now was in.

The air was hot, steamy, and loaded with a smell as of rotting
vegetation. I wondered why my bearer so scrupulously avoided
touching any of the unwholesome-looking growths in passing through
what seemed a succession of cellars, but steered a tortuous course
among the bloated, unnatural shapes, lifting his bare brown feet
with a catlike delicacy.

He passed under a low arch, dropped me roughly to the ground and
ran back. Half stunned, I lay watching the agile brown body melt
into the distances of the cellars. Their walls and roof seemed to
emit a faint, phosphorescent light.

"Petrie!" came a weak voice from somewhere ahead… . "Is that
you, Petrie?"

It was Nayland Smith!

"Smith!" I said, and strove to sit up. But the intense nausea
overcame me, so that I all but swooned.

I heard his voice again, but could attach no meaning to the
words which he uttered. A sound of terrific blows reached my ears,
too. The Burman reappeared, bending under the heavy load which he
bore. For, as he picked his way through the bloated things which
grew upon the floors of the cellars, I realized that he was
carrying the inert body of Inspector Weymouth. And I found time to
compare the strength of the little brown man with that of a Nile
beetle, which can raise many times its own weight. Then, behind
him, appeared a second figure, which immediately claimed the whole
of my errant attention.

"Fu-Manchu!" hissed my friend, from the darkness which concealed
him.

It was indeed none other than Fu-Manchu-the Fu-Manchu whom we
had thought to be helpless. The deeps of the Chinaman's cunning-the
fine quality of his courage, were forced upon me as amazing
facts.

He had assumed the appearance of a drugged opium-smoker so well
as to dupe me-a medical man; so well as to dupe Karamaneh-whose
experience of the noxious habit probably was greater than my own.
And, with the gallows dangling before him, he had waited-played the
part of a lure-whilst a body of police actually surrounded the
place!

I have since thought that the room probably was one which he
actually used for opium debauches, and the device of the trap was
intended to protect him during the comatose period.

Now, holding a lantern above his head, the deviser of the trap
whereinto we, mouselike, had blindly entered, came through the
cellars, following the brown man who carried Weymouth. The faint
rays of the lantern (it apparently contained a candle) revealed a
veritable forest of the gigantic fungi-poisonously
colored-hideously swollen-climbing from the floor up the slimy
walls-climbing like horrid parasites to such part of the arched
roof as was visible to me.

Fu-Manchu picked his way through the fungi ranks as daintily as
though the distorted, tumid things had been viper-headed.

The resounding blows which I had noted before, and which had
never ceased, culminated in a splintering crash. Dr. Fu-Manchu and
his servant, who carried the apparently insensible detective,
passed in under the arch, Fu-Manchu glancing back once along the
passages. The lantern he extinguished, or concealed; and whilst I
waited, my mind dully surveying memories of all the threats which
this uncanny being had uttered, a distant clamor came to my
ears.

Then, abruptly, it ceased. Dr. Fu-Manchu had closed a heavy
door; and to my surprise I perceived that the greater part of it
was of glass. The will-o'-the-wisp glow which played around the
fungi rendered the vista of the cellars faintly luminous, and
visible to me from where I lay. Fu-Manchu spoke softly. His voice,
its guttural note alternating with a sibilance on certain words,
betrayed no traces of agitation. The man's unbroken calm had in it
something inhuman. For he had just perpetrated an act of daring
unparalleled in my experience, and, in the clamor now shut out by
the glass door I tardily recognized the entrance of the police into
some barricaded part of the house-the coming of those who would
save us-who would hold the Chinese doctor for the hangman!

"I have decided," he said deliberately, "that you are more
worthy of my attention than I had formerly supposed. A man who can
solve the secret of the Golden Elixir (I had not solved it; I had
merely stolen some) should be a valuable acquisition to my Council.
The extent of the plans of Mr. Commissioner Nayland Smith and of
the English Scotland Yard it is incumbent upon me to learn.
Therefore, gentlemen, you live-for the present!"

"And you'll swing," came Weymouth's hoarse voice, "in the near
future! You and all your yellow gang!"

"I trust not," was the placid reply. "Most of my people are
safe: some are shipped as lascars upon the liners; others have
departed by different means. Ah!"

That last word was the only one indicative of excitement which
had yet escaped him. A disk of light danced among the brilliant
poison hues of the passages-but no sound reached us; by which I
knew that the glass door must fit almost hermetically. It was much
cooler here than in the place through which we had passed, and the
nausea began to leave me, my brain to grow more clear. Had I known
what was to follow I should have cursed the lucidity of mind which
now came to me; I should have prayed for oblivion-to be spared the
sight of that which ensued.

"It's Logan!" cried Inspector Weymouth; and I could tell that he
was struggling to free himself of his bonds. From his voice it was
evident that he, too, was recovering from the effects of the
narcotic which had been administered to us all.

"Logan!" he cried. "Logan! This way-HELP!"

But the cry beat back upon us in that enclosed space and seemed
to carry no farther than the invisible walls of our prison.

"The door fits well," came Fu-Manchu's mocking voice. "It is
fortunate for us all that it is so. This is my observation window,
Dr. Petrie, and you are about to enjoy an unique opportunity of
studying fungology. I have already drawn your attention to the
anaesthetic properties of the lycoperdon, or common puff-ball. You
may have recognized the fumes? The chamber into which you rashly
precipitated yourselves was charged with them. By a process of my
own I have greatly enhanced the value of the puff-ball in this
respect. Your friend, Mr. Weymouth, proved the most obstinate
subject; but he succumbed in fifteen seconds."

"Logan! Help! HELP! This way, man!"

Something very like fear sounded in Weymouth's voice now.
Indeed, the situation was so uncanny that it almost seemed unreal.
A group of men had entered the farthermost cellars, led by one who
bore an electric pocket-lamp. The hard, white ray danced from
bloated gray fungi to others of nightmare shape, of dazzling,
venomous brilliance. The mocking, lecture-room voice continued:

"Note the snowy growth upon the roof, Doctor. Do not be deceived
by its size. It is a giant variety of my own culture and is of the
order empusa. You, in England, are familiar with the death of the
common house-fly-which is found attached to the window-pane by a
coating of white mold. I have developed the spores of this mold and
have produced a giant species. Observe the interesting effect of
the strong light upon my orange and blue amanita fungus!"

Hard beside me I heard Nayland Smith groan, Weymouth had become
suddenly silent. For my own part, I could have shrieked in pure
horror. FOR I KNEW WHAT WAS COMING. I realized in one agonized
instant the significance of the dim lantern, of the careful
progress through the subterranean fungi grove, of the care with
which Fu-Manchu and his servant had avoided touching any of the
growths. I knew, now, that Dr. Fu-Manchu was the greatest
fungologist the world had ever known; was a poisoner to whom the
Borgias were as children-and I knew that the detectives blindly
were walking into a valley of death.

Then it began-the unnatural scene-the saturnalia of murder.

Like so many bombs the brilliantly colored caps of the huge
toadstool-like things alluded to by the Chinaman exploded, as the
white ray sought them out in the darkness which alone preserved
their existence. A brownish cloud-I could not determine whether
liquid or powdery-arose in the cellar.

I tried to close my eyes-or to turn them away from the reeling
forms of the men who were trapped in that poison-hole. It was
useless:

I must look.

The bearer of the lamp had dropped it, but the dim, eerily
illuminated gloom endured scarce a second. A bright light sprang
up-doubtless at the touch of the fiendish being who now resumed
speech:

"Observe the symptoms of delirium, Doctor!" Out there, beyond
the glass door, the unhappy victims were laughing-tearing their
garments from their bodies-leaping-waving their arms-were become
MANIACS!

"We will now release the ripe spores of giant entpusa,"
continued the wicked voice. "The air of the second cellar being
super-charged with oxygen, they immediately germinate. Ah! it is a
triumph! That process is the scientific triumph of my life!"

Like powdered snow the white spores fell from the roof, frosting
the writhing shapes of the already poisoned men. Before my
horrified gaze, THE FUNGUS GREW; it spread from the head to the
feet of those it touched; it enveloped them as in glittering
shrouds… .

"They die like flies!" screamed Fu-Manchu, with a sudden febrile
excitement; and I felt assured of something I had long suspected:
that that magnificent, perverted brain was the brain of a homicidal
maniac-though Smith would never accept the theory.

"It is my fly-trap!" shrieked the Chinaman. "And I am the god of
destruction!"