The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu, Sax Rohmer [free novels .txt] 📗

I drew a quick breath and gripped Platts’ shoulder harshly. His assistant began fingering the instrument with irritation.

“Lost it again!” he muttered.

“This message,” I began...

But again the pencil was traveling over the paper:—lies upon you all... end of message.

The operator stood up and unclasped the receivers from his ears. There, high above the sleeping ship’s company, with the carpet of the blue Mediterranean stretched indefinitely about us, we three stood looking at one another. By virtue of a miracle of modern science, some one, divided from me by mile upon mile of boundless ocean, had spoken—and had been heard.

“Is there no means of learning,” I said, “from whence this message emanated?”

Platts shook his head, perplexedly.

“They gave no code word,” he said. “God knows who they were. It’s a strange business and a strange message. Have you any sort of idea, Dr. Petrie, respecting the identity of the sender?”

I stared him hard in the face; an idea had mechanically entered my mind, but one of which I did not choose to speak, since it was opposed to human possibility.

But, had I not seen with my own eyes the bloody streak across his forehead as the shot fired by Karamaneh entered his high skull, had I not known, so certainly as it is given to man to know, that the giant intellect was no more, the mighty will impotent, I should have replied:

“The message is from Dr. Fu-Manchu!”

My reflections were rudely terminated and my sinister thoughts given new stimulus, by a loud though muffled cry which reached me from somewhere in the ship, below. Both my companions started as violently as I, whereby I knew that the mystery of the wireless message had not been without its effect upon their minds also. But whereas they paused in doubt, I leaped from the room and almost threw myself down the ladder.

It was Karamaneh who had uttered that cry of fear and horror!

Although I could perceive no connection betwixt the strange message and the cry in the night, intuitively I linked them, intuitively I knew that my fears had been well-grounded; that the shadow of Fu-Manchu still lay upon us.

Karamaneh occupied a large stateroom aft on the main deck; so that I had to descend from the upper deck on which my own room was situated to the promenade deck, again to the main deck and thence proceed nearly the whole length of the alleyway.

Karamaneh and her brother, Aziz, who occupied a neighboring room, met me, near the library. Karamaneh’s eyes were wide with fear; her peerless coloring had fled, and she was white to the lips. Aziz, who wore a dressing-gown thrown hastily over his night attire, had his arm protectively about the girl’s shoulders.

“The mummy!” she whispered tremulously—“the mummy!”

There came a sound of opening doors, and several passengers, whom Karamaneh cries had alarmed, appeared in various stages of undress. A stewardess came running from the far end of the alleyway, and I found time to wonder at my own speed; for, starting from the distant Marconi deck, yet I had been the first to arrive upon the scene.

Stacey, the ship’s doctor, was quartered at no great distance from the spot, and he now joined the group. Anticipating the question which trembled upon the lips of several of those about me:

“Come to Dr. Stacey’s room,” I said, taking Karamaneh arm; “we will give you something to enable you to sleep.” I turned to the group. “My patient has had severe nerve trouble,” I explained, “and has developed somnambulistic tendencies.”

I declined the stewardess’ offer of assistance, with a slight shake of the head, and shortly the four of us entered the doctor’s cabin, on the deck above. Stacey carefully closed the door. He was an old fellow student of mine, and already he knew much of the history of the beautiful Eastern girl and her brother Aziz.

“I fear there’s mischief afoot, Petrie,” he said.

“Thanks to your presence of mind, the ship’s gossips need know nothing of it.”

I glanced at Karamaneh who, since the moment of my arrival had never once removed her gaze from me; she remained in that state of passive fear in which I had found her, the lovely face pallid; and she stared at me fixedly in a childish, expressionless way which made me fear that the shock to which she had been subjected, whatever its nature, had caused a relapse into that strange condition of forgetfulness from which a previous shock had aroused her. I could see that Stacey shared my view, for:

“Something has frightened you,” he said gently, seating himself on the arm of Karamaneh’s chair and patting her hand as if to reassure her. “Tell us all about it.”

For the first time since our meeting that night, the girl turned her eyes from me and glanced up at Stacey, a sudden warm blush stealing over her face and throat and as quickly departing, to leave her even more pale than before. She grasped Stacey’s hand in both her own—and looked again at me.

“Send for Mr. Nayland Smith without delay!” she said, and her sweet voice was slightly tremulous. “He must be put on his guard!”

I started up.

“Why?” I said. “For God’s sake tell us what has happened!”

Aziz who evidently was as anxious as myself for information, and who now knelt at his sister’s feet looking at her with that strange love, which was almost adoration, in his eyes, glanced back at me and nodded his head rapidly.

“Something”—Karamaneh paused, shuddering violently—“some dreadful thing, like a mummy escaped from its tomb, came into my room to-night through the porthole...”

“Through the porthole?” echoed Stacey, amazedly.

“Yes, yes, through the porthole! A creature tall and very, very thin. He wore wrappings—yellow wrappings—swathed about his head, so that only his eyes, his evil gleaming eyes, were visible.... From waist to knees he was covered, also, but his body, his feet, and his legs were bare...”

“Was he—?” I began...

“He was a brown man, yes,”—Karamaneh divining my question, nodded, and the shimmering cloud of her wonderful hair, hastily confined, burst free and rippled about her shoulders. “A gaunt, fleshless brown man, who bent, and writhed bony fingers—so!”

“A thug!” I cried.

“He—it—the mummy thing—would have strangled me if I had slept, for he crouched over the berth—seeking—seeking...”

I clenched my teeth convulsively.

“But I was sitting up—”

“With the light on?” interrupted Stacey in surprise.

“No,” added