The Island of Fu-Manchu (29 page)

“My purpose in bringing you here,” he continued in the manner of a professor addressing a class, “was to relieve your mind regarding certain recent occurrences. Follow.”

I obeyed, and the Burmese bodyguard was a pace behind me.

“This—is the Vortland infra-azure lamp.”

And standing on a long, narrow, glass-topped table, I saw just such a lamp as that which I had seen in the Thames-side workshop!

“Johann Vortland died before he completed the lamp—a martyr to Science. Sir William Crooks was pursuing almost parallel inquiries. I acquired all his material and began a series of experiments which I carried out uninterruptedly for three years. You may recall that I was at work on this subject in London. Many other martyrs (I narrowly escaped canonization myself) went the way of the inventor. Vortland, the physicist, had triumphed: I, the chemist, failed. The lamp did its appointed work, but he who used it either died or suffered serious injury. You may remember some characteristic specimens I had collected, and the unusual appearance of the late Dr. Ostler.”

An added sibilance on the last four words chilled me uncomfortably.

“Hassan, the Nubian who came to me with Ardatha, in many respects advanced my inquiries. Exposure to the lamp had no deleterious effects. He was born blind. But complete
leucodermia
supervened. From coal black he became snow white. The texture and glands of the skin remained normal. There was no organic reaction. From this point I began to make headway.”

My blood seemed to be turning cold. This monster, this Satanic genius, spoke of human suffering as a bacteriologist speaks of germs.

“If,” he continued, “during any of my visits to the Regal Athenian in New York, a trained observer had been present, he could not well have failed to notice a small, lucent object, no larger than a grain of mustard seed, moving at a uniform height above the floor.”

As he spoke he was enveloping his gaunt body in just such a green garment as that which he had worn in the room beside the Thames. Gloves and a mask were added. He presented a terrifying appearance. Muffled, his strident tones came through the mask.

“I will now ignite the infra-azure lamp.”

He bent and touched a switch. Again that strange amethyst light appeared.

“You will observe that above the lamp there is a smaller lamp, and above that a third, smaller still. I shall now ignite the smaller lamp.”

He did so… and the larger one disappeared!

“Finally, the third—”

The entire apparatus vanished!

“Look closely,” the imperious voice directed. “The top of the third lamp remains faintly visible, you see it?”

“Yes—I see it.”

“The reflector is adjusted in a particular manner: the lamp can be attached to the headdress—in this way.”

Raising the lamp, he fitted it to the top of the mask… and disappeared!

My heart leapt madly. This man was not a scientist; he was a wizard.

“I have not become transparent,” his voice said out of space; “the effect is on the vision of the beholder. Movement is constrained of course. I was clumsy when I came to recover Peko in Colon. Observe.”

A green-gloved hand appeared—and disappeared.

This it was that Barton had seen in Colon—that I had seen on Morne la Selle!

“One must remain wholly within focus. By the use of this lamp I obtained a view of Christophe’s chart during that meeting in New York—and took appropriate steps…”

I found myself in half light surrounded by glass cases the fronts of which were flush with the wall. These cases had interior illumination as in an aquarium.

“A good collection,” said Dr. Fu-Manchu, “was destroyed in France some years ago but in certain respects this is better.”

He paused before one of the glass windows. The case had a thick floor of moist sand and over it ran some kind of spiny weed. Silent, he stood there looking in. The Burman remained a pace away. I looked also—and presently I saw one of the inhabitants. It was a monstrous centipede, a thing incredibly swift in its movements; and its colour was brilliant red.

“Owing to a number of mysterious deaths along a certain caravan route in Burma,” the harsh voice explained, “I personally visited the neighbourhood. It was then that Police Commissioner Nayland Smith (now Sir Denis) first crossed my path. The incidence was particularly marked in the
zayats
, or rest houses, along this route. It was near one of them that I found my first specimen. These were the creatures responsible.”

He moved on.

I knew, as I followed the high-shouldered figure, and his yellow guard followed
me
, that I was in the company of a scientist greater than any whose fame fills whole pages of encyclopedias. He had the intellect of a Shakespeare and the soul of Satan. When he paused again I grew physically sick. He scratched with his long nails upon the front of a case littered with birds’ feathers and fragments of limbs and claws.

From a sort of clay nest there sprang out the most gigantic black spider I had ever seen: Indeed, I had not supposed such a spider to exist. Its hairy legs were as thick as a man’s finger; its body was at large as an orange. I could see the
eyes
of this horror—watching me.

“The Soldier Spider, found in Sumatra. He instantly attacks any intruder; and his bite is fatal in thirty-five seconds. There is a female in the nest. I have succeeded in isolating the neurotoxin which distinguishes this insect’s venom: it is new to science.”

He turned from the glass cases and walked to a low wall which surrounded a pit in the centre of the place. In obedience to a guttural command, the Burman switched on a group of suspended lights. I became aware of a miasmatic smell, and I looked down into a miniature swamp. The interior wails were smoothly polished. I saw unfamiliar aquatic plants and a surface of green slime.

“Particularly note the fern-like grass growing on the margins. Some of this was introduced among the roses which decorated Colonel Kennard Wood’s apartment at the Prado in New York.
Hoemadipsa zeylanica
has an affinity for this grass, from which it is not readily distinguishable. Before feeding, this creature resembles a fragment of string or a bristle from a brush. These examples actually come from a swampy area south of Port au Prince and are much larger, more active and voracious than any, I have examined.”

He gave an abrupt order. From a sort of cupboard the Burman took out the body of a newly-slain kid and attached it to the hook of a tackle fitted over the pit. He lowered the kid to a point some six feet above the scum and marginal plants, when it began to spin slowly.

“Hoemadipsa
works in the dark,” muttered Dr. Fu-Manchu. All the lights went out. “Listen!”

Scarcely had he hissed the word when I heard again that evil thing—The Snapping Fingers!

“Now watch, and you will see them.”

Lights sprang up; and I saw a strange, a revolting sight. One has seen caterpillars arch their bodies in moving forward: now, I saw a number of pale, slender things some two inches in length arching their threadlike bodies all over the suspended carcase. But in this case the movement served a different purpose. One by one they sprang back to the long feather grass, each spring creating a sound almost exactly like that of snapping fingers!

“They shun light. Even when feeding, they drop off if light disturbs the feast. The largest land-leech known to me, Mr. Kerrigan. When sated, they can, nevertheless, compress themselves in such a way that they can pass through very narrow apertures—such as between the slats of a shutter…”

He proceeded to details so nauseating that once more I became fighting mad and turned on him, fists clenched. I met a glance from full-opened green eyes which checked me like a blow.

“Anticipating a further display of Celtic
berserker
, I ordered a guard to attend me. One more attempted assault, and I shall order him to throw you into the pit, and to extinguish the lights.”

I
looked along a stone passage, or tunnel, which was patchily illuminated: I mean that the effect was of a badly-lighted arcade. An insidious acceptance of fatality, of the hopelessness of this fight, was beginning to prevail. Smith had told me many things about the power behind Dr. Fu-Manchu, of the resources of the Si-Fan; but I had not properly appreciated his words. Here, in this veritable town concealed behind the sisal factory, I grasped some part of their significance.

“You may wonder—indeed, you
are
wondering—why I take you so closely into my confidence,” said Dr. Fu-Manchu. “This will be made clear, later. No doubt you have appreciated the fact that my daughter, known as Koreâni, a second time, under certain influence, has presumed to challenge me. Her part, as the Queen Mamaloi, she has successfully played for nearly two years, and has enslaved the Voodoo elements of the Republic. She has, naturally, access to the higher secrets of the creed and therefore control of its devotees. Follow.”

But I had followed no more than three paces, when I paused.

The luminous patches which I have mentioned were due to the presence of a series of crystal coffins (I cannot otherwise describe them) each having a shaded light directed upon it. In these, bolt upright, their glassy eyes staring dreadfully before them, I saw men and women—some of whom I remembered to have seen “smelt out” by the Sword Bearer at the Voodoo temple!

“Follow,” Fu-Manchu rasped.

I had been standing astounded before the figure of the handsome Negro who had passed Smith and myself on the maintain road. Unashamed, in statuesque nakedness he glared out at me from his glass sarcophagus.

“They are all—dead.”

“On the contrary, Mr. Kerrigan, they are all alive.”

Before one sarcophagus containing the rigid form of a mulatto, a young man with a fine head and intellectual brow, Dr. Fu-Manchu raised his claw-like hands and shook them frenziedly before the glass. He poured out a torrent of vituperation in the Haitian dialect, his voice rising shrilly, demoniacally, as once I had heard it raised before. These outbursts from one normally more imperturbable than any man I had known, inclined me to believe that Smith was right. Smith had maintained for many years that in the case of the Chinese Doctor genius had overstepped the narrow borderland—that Fu-Manchu was insane.

He laughed and turned away. It was an appalling exhibition.

“Do not suppose, Mr. Kerrigan,” he said, “that I waste my words. They can see—they can hear.”

“What!” I exclaimed.

“They cannot move an eyelid. That mongrel, and the man Lou Cabot, who was conveniently stabbed by his mistress in Colon, were prime movers in the conspiracy against me. The woman you know as Korêani—my daughter—seduced him from his vows: he was a man who would sell his soul for a woman. It was she who conceived the idea that by seizing your charming friend, Ardatha, the offensive of Sir Denis Nayland Smith might be checked. I suffered her intrigues against me right up to the meeting at Morne la Selle. And there I gathered to me all the pitiful conspirators. Here is the chief criminal.”

And, in the last of the glass coffins, or the last one illuminated, I saw Korêani!

She stood exactly as I remembered her standing before the door of the Voodoo temple, her arms beside her, her hands clenched; those brilliant eyes, which were so strangely like the eyes of Fu-Manchu, staring straight before her: an ivory goddess. Beginning almost in a whisper Fu-Manchu addressed her. He spoke in Chinese, and as he spoke, his voice rose stage by stage, until again it reached that pitch of wild frenzy; his long fingers twitched, closing upon the air as if he would have strangled this perfect outcome of his union with an unknown mother. Then he turned away.

In obedience to a short command, the Burman pressed a button in the wall at the end of the vault-like corridor. A door opened and I saw an elevator.

“Follow!”

I followed Dr. Fu-Manchu; the yellow man entered last, closed the gates, and the elevator began to descend. This proximity to Fu-Manchu was almost unendurable. He spoke again softly, unemotionally:

“The entrance discovered and used by Christophe, the black king, is unknown. According to an ancient chart in the possession of your inquisitive friend, Sir Lionel Barton, it was masked by the erection of a chapel on a hillside some miles away. My inquiries there did not enable me to find it, but as a precautionary measure, I destroyed the chapel.” The lift continued to drop. “My own entrance—a volcanic fissure in the ravine below the brow of the Citadel—was discovered by accident. This fissure I have effectively blocked, and the shaft by which we are now descending strikes it at a point a hundred and fifty feet east of the entrance. From thence a sort of path exists down the wall of the cavern itself. It is a tedious journey. I avoided it when I had this lift installed by Mr. Perrywell, one of Vickers’ senior engineers, who is with us. It is the second deepest in the world.”

When, after an awe-inspiring descent, the elevator stopped, the door opened and I stepped out, a new amazement claimed me.

I was in a stone-faced corridor brightly lighted; many doors were visible right and left. There were thousands of such corridors in the office buildings of New York.

“We are now,” came the cold voice of Dr. Fu-Manchu, “only thirty feet above sea level, and you are one of that privileged few who have entered the interior of a volcano.”

* * *

In the company of Mr. Perrywell, late of Vickers, a prosaic Manchester man whose presence enhanced the fantastic character of my surroundings, I set out. We walked down a flight of steps, he opened a door and I found myself to be in broad daylight!

I stood on a long, wide quay where coloured gangs were at work unpacking crates and loading the contents, which I thought were machine parts, on to trucks. The still water had a strange black appearance; it resembled ink; and ten or twelve small vessels were dotted about its surface. I supposed myself to be in a small land-locked harbour, for from where I stood I could see right to the other side, formed by a sheer wall of towering black rock.