The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu, Sax Rohmer [knowledgeable books to read TXT] 📗

With my free hand I felt for and found the wall, and we pressed forward. The atmosphere of the place through which we were passing was steamy, and loaded with an odor like that of exotic plant life. But a faint animal scent crept to my nostrils, too, and there was a subdued stir about me, infinitely suggestive⁠—mysterious.

Now my feet sank in a soft carpet, and a curtain brushed my shoulder. A gong sounded. We stopped.

The din of distant drumming came to my ears.

“Where in Heaven’s name are we?” hissed Smith in my ear; “that is a tom-tom!”

“S-sh! S-sh!”

The little hand grasping mine quivered nervously. We were near a door or a window, for a breath of perfume was wafted through the air; and it reminded me of my other meetings with the beautiful woman who was now leading us from the house of Fu-Manchu; who, with her own lips, had told me that she was his slave. Through the horrible phantasmagoria she flitted⁠—a seductive vision, her piquant loveliness standing out richly in its black setting of murder and devilry. Not once, but a thousand times, I had tried to reason out the nature of the tie which bound her to the sinister Doctor.

Silence fell.

“Quick! This way!”

Down a thickly carpeted stair we went. Our guide opened a door, and led us along a passage. Another door was opened; and we were in the open air. But the girl never tarried, pulling me along a graveled path, with a fresh breeze blowing in my face, and along until, unmistakably, I stood upon the river bank. Now, planking creaked to our tread; and looking downward beneath the handkerchief, I saw the gleam of water beneath my feet.

“Be careful!” I was warned, and found myself stepping into a narrow boat⁠—a punt.

Nayland Smith followed, and the girl pushed the punt off and poled out into the stream.

“Don’t speak!” she directed.

My brain was fevered; I scarce knew if I dreamed and was waking, or if the reality ended with my imprisonment in the clammy cellar and this silent escape, blindfolded, upon the river with a girl for our guide who might have stepped out of the pages of the Arabian Nights were fantasy⁠—the mockery of sleep.

Indeed, I began seriously to doubt if this stream whereon we floated, whose waters plashed and tinkled about us, were the Thames, the Tigris, or the Styx.

The punt touched a bank.

“You will hear a clock strike in a few minutes,” said the girl, with her soft, charming accent, “but I rely upon your honor not to remove the handkerchiefs until then. You owe me this.”

“We do!” said Smith fervently.

I heard him scrambling to the bank, and a moment later a soft hand was placed in mine, and I, too, was guided on to terra firma. Arrived on the bank, I still held the girl’s hand, drawing her towards me.

“You must not go back,” I whispered. “We will take care of you. You must not return to that place.”

“Let me go!” she said. “When, once, I asked you to take me from him, you spoke of police protection; that was your answer, police protection! You would let them lock me up⁠—imprison me⁠—and make me betray him! For what? For what?” She wrenched herself free. “How little you understand me. Never mind. Perhaps one day you will know! Until the clock strikes!”

She was gone. I heard the creak of the punt, the drip of the water from the pole. Fainter it grew, and fainter.

“What is her secret?” muttered Smith, beside me. “Why does she cling to that monster?”

The distant sound died away entirely. A clock began to strike; it struck the half-hour. In an instant my handkerchief was off, and so was Smith’s. We stood upon a towing-path. Away to the left the moon shone upon the towers and battlements of an ancient fortress.

It was Windsor Castle.

“Half-past ten,” cried Smith. “Two hours to save Graham Guthrie!”

We had exactly fourteen minutes in which to catch the last train to Waterloo; and we caught it. But I sank into a corner of the compartment in a state bordering upon collapse. Neither of us, I think, could have managed another twenty yards. With a lesser stake than a human life at issue, I doubt if we should have attempted that dash to Windsor station.

“Due at Waterloo at eleven fifty-one,” panted Smith. “That gives us thirty-nine minutes to get to the other side of the river and reach his hotel.”

“Where in Heaven’s name is that house situated? Did we come up or down stream?”

“I couldn’t determine. But at any rate, it stands close to the riverside. It should be merely a question of time to identify it. I shall set Scotland Yard to work immediately; but I am hoping for nothing. Our escape will warn him.”

I said no more for a time, sitting wiping the perspiration from my forehead and watching my friend load his cracked briar with the broadcut Latakia mixture.

“Smith,” I said at last, “what was that horrible wailing we heard, and what did Fu-Manchu mean when he referred to Rangoon? I noticed how it affected you.”

My friend nodded and lighted his pipe.

“There was a ghastly business there in 1908 or early in 1909,” he replied: “an utterly mysterious epidemic. And this beastly wailing was associated with it.”

“In what way? And what do you mean by an epidemic?”

“It began, I believe, at the Palace Mansions Hotel, in the cantonments. A young American, whose name I cannot recall, was staying there on business connected with some new iron buildings. One night he went to his room, locked the door, and jumped out of the window into the courtyard. Broke his neck, of course.”

“Suicide?”

“Apparently. But there were singular features in the case. For instance, his revolver lay beside him, fully loaded!”

“In the courtyard?”

“In the courtyard!”

“Was it murder by any chance?”

Smith shrugged his shoulders.

“His door was found locked from the inside; had to be broken in.”

“But the wailing business?”

“That began later, or was only noticed later.