The Drums of Fu-Manchu (22 page)

“You have observed,” Fu-Manchu continued, “that my daughter is again acting in my interests. She is unaware, however, of her former identity: Fah lo Suee is dead. I have reincarnated her as Korêani, an Oriental dancer whose popularity is useful. This is her punishment…”

The marmoset uttered a whistling sound. It was uncannily derisive.

“Later you will experience this form of amnesia, yourself. The ordeal by fire to which I once submitted Korêani in your presence was salutary, but the furnace contained no fuel. It was one which I had prepared for
you
, Sir Denis. I had designed it as a gateway to your new life in China.”

Mentally I seemed to remain numb. Some of the Chinese doctor’s statements I failed to follow. Others were all too horribly clear. At times there came a note almost of exultation, severely repressed but perceptible, into the speaker’s voice. He had the majesty which belongs to great genius, or, and there was a new horror in the afterthought, to insanity. He was perhaps a brilliant madman!

“I am satisfied to observe,” he continued, “that my new anesthetic, a preparation of
crataegus
, the common hawthorn, serves its purpose so admirably. Anesthesia is immediate and complete. There are no distressing after-symptoms. I foresee that it will supplant my mimosa mixture with which, Sir Denis, you have been familiar in the past.”

Slowly he extended a gaunt hand in the direction of the torture room:

“Medieval devices designed to stimulate reluctant memories.”

He stepped aside and took up a pair of long-handled tongs.

“Forceps used to tear sinews.”

He spoke softly, then dropped those instruments of agony. The clang of their fall made my soul sick.

“Primitive and clumsy. China has done better. No doubt you recall the Seven Gates? However, these forms of questions are no longer necessary. I can learn all that I wish to know by the mere exercise of that neglected implement, the human will. I recently discovered in this way that Ardatha—hitherto a staunch ally—is not to be trusted where Mr Kerrigan is concerned.” I ceased to breathe as he spoke those words…

“Accordingly I have taken steps to ensure her noninterference… You are silent, Sir Denis?”

“Why should I speak?” Smith’s voice was flatly unemotional. “I allowed myself to fall into a trap which a schoolboy would have distrusted. I have nothing to say.”

“You refer to the lotus floor no doubt? Yes, ingenious in its way. That room with others giving access to the cellars and dungeons had been walled up for several generations. I recently had them reopened, but confess I did not foresee it would be for the accommodation of so distinguished a guest. In a dungeon adjoining this I came across two skeletons, those of a man and a woman. Irregularities in certain of the small bones suggested that they had not died happily—”

He turned as if to go.

“I look forward to further conversation in the future, Sir Denis, but now I must leave you. A matter of the gravest urgency demands my attention.”

As he moved towards the door the marmoset sprang from his arm to his shoulder, and turning its tiny head, gibed at us… The light went out… I heard the key turned in the lock—I heard those padding, catlike steps receding in the stone-paved passage…

I was drenched in perspiration.

T
he silence which followed Dr. Fu-Manchu’s departure was broken by that awful moaning as of some lost soul who had died horribly in one of the dungeons. It rose and fell, rose and fell… and faded away.

“Kerrigan!” Smith snapped, and I admired the vigour of his manner. “Was the wind rising out there?”

“Yes, in gusts… What do you think he meant about—”

“The wind was from the sea?”

“Yes. Oh my God! Is she alive?”

Again that awful moaning arose—and now to it was added a ghostly metallic clanking.

“What ever is it, Smith?”

“I have been wondering for some time… Yes, she’s, alive, Kerrigan, but we can’t count on her!… Now that you tell me a breeze has risen, I know what it is. There’s a window or a ventilator outside in the passage. What we hear is wind howling through a narrow opening.”

“But that awful clanking!”

“Irritatingly significant.”

“Why?”

“It was not there before the doctor’s visit! It means that he has left the key in the lock with the other keys attached to it. The draught of air—I can feel it blowing on the top of my head now through these bars—is swinging the attached keys to and fro.”

Across the darkened cell he watched me.

“Among those keys, Kerrigan, in all probability, are the keys to our manacles!”

I thought for some time. A tumult had arisen in my brain. “Surely
he
was never guilty of carelessness. Why should he have left the key?”

“According to my experience”—Smith stared down at his wrist watch—“the yellow-faced horror who attends to my requirements is due in about five minutes. The key was left in the lock for his convenience no doubt. And although Ardatha is alive—oh! I have learned to read Fu-Manchu’s hidden meanings—she will not come to our aid tonight. Someone else is alive also!”

“Adlon!”

“But I fear that his hours are numbered.”

He stood up on the seat of the massive chair and stared out through the bars. Over his shoulder:

“I have carefully examined this passage no less than six times,” he said. “It is no more than three feet wide. The end from which a current of air blows is invisible from here. But that is where the ventilator must be situated. The light is away to my right, the direction from which visitors always approach.”

He stepped down and stood staring at me. His eyes were feverishly bright.

“I was wondering,” he mused. “Could you toss me another cigarette?”

He lighted it, and apparently unconscious of the length of chain attached to his ankles, began to pace up and down the narrow compass of floor allowed to him, drawing on the cigarette with the vigour of a pipe smoker, so that clouds issued from his lips.

Hope began to dawn in my hitherto hopeless mind.

“Oh for the brain of a Houdini!” he murmured. “The problem is this, Kerrigan: The keys are hanging less than a foot below this grating behind me, but two feet wide of it. If you will glance at the position of the door you will see that I am right. It is clearly impossible for me to reach them. By no possible contortion could I get within a foot of the keyhole from which they are hanging. You follow me?”

“Perfectly.”

“Very well. What is urgently required—for my jailer will almost certainly take the keys away—is an idea; namely, how to reach those keys and detach them from the lock. There must be a way!”

Following a long silence interrupted only by the clanking of Nayland Smith’s leg irons, periodical moaning of the wind through that unseen opening and the chink of the pendant keys:

“It is not only how to reach them,” I said, “but how to turn the lock in order to detach them.”

“I agree. Yet there
must
be a way.”

He stood still—in fact, seemed almost to become rigid. I saw where his gaze was set.

The sinew-tearing pincers to which Dr. Fu-Manchu had drawn our attention lay not at the spot from which he had taken them up, but beside the pillar…

“Smith!” I whispered, “can you reach them?”

With never a word or glance he walked forward to the extreme limit of the chain, went down upon his hands and crept forward with
a stoat-like movement. Fully extended, his right hand outstretched to the utmost, he was six inches short of his objective!

Even as I heard him utter a sound like a groan:

“Come back, Smith!”

My voice shook ridiculously. He got back onto his feet, turned and looked at me.

Although robbed of my automatic, my clasp knife and anything else resembling a lethal weapon, a small piece of string no more than a foot long which I had carefully untied from some package recently received and, a habit, had neatly looped and placed in my pocket proved still to be there. I held it up triumphantly.

Nayland Smith’s expression changed.

“May I inquire what earthly use you can suggest for a piece of string?”

“Tie one end to the handle of that metal pitcher on the ledge beside you, then crawl forward again and toss the pitcher into the open arms of the tongs. You can draw them across the floor.”

For a moment Smith’s stare was disconcerting, and then: “Top marks, Kerrigan,” he said quietly. “Toss the string across…”

Many attempts he made which were unsuccessful, but at last he lodged the pitcher between the iron arms of the pincers. Breathlessly I watched him as he began to pull…

The pitcher toppled forward: the pincers did not move.

“We are done,” he panted. “It isn’t going to work!”

And at that moment—as though they had been treading on my heart—I heard footsteps approaching.

T
hose soft footsteps halted outside the door. There followed a provocative rattle of keys, the sound of a lock being turned; then the door opened, light sprang up…

Dr. Fu-Manchu’s daughter came in.

She was dressed as I remembered her in the room with the lotus floor. Her frock was a sheath, clinging to her lithe figure as perfectly as scales to a fish. She wore no jewelry save the Arab necklace. As she entered the cell and looked about her I grasped the fact immediately that she was looking not for me, but for Nayland Smith.

When her long, narrow eyes met my glance their expression conveyed no more than the slightest interest; but as, turning aside, she looked at Smith I saw them open widely. There was a new light in their depths. I thought that they glittered like emeralds.

She stood there watching him. There was something yearning in her expression, yet something almost hopeless. I remembered Dr. Fu-Manchu’s words. I believed that this woman was struggling to revive a buried memory.

“So you are going to join us,” she said.

Fu-Manchu had used a similar expression. There was some mystery here which no doubt Smith would explain, for the devil doctor had said also, “Fah lo Suee is dead. I have reincarnated her as Korêani…”

The spoken English of Korêani was less perfect than that of Ardatha, but she had a medium note in her voice, a soft, caressing note, which to my ears sounded menacing as the purr of one of the great cats—a puma or tigress.

There was no reply.

“I am glad—but please tell me something.”

“What do you want me to tell you?” Nayland Smith’s tones were coldly indifferent. “Of what interest can my life or death be to you?”

She moved more closely to his side, always watching him.

“There is something I must know. Do you remember me?”

“Perfectly.”

“Where did we meet?”

Smith and I had stood up with that, automatic courtesy which prompts a man when a woman enters a room. And now she was so near to him that easily he could have grasped her.

Watching his grim face into which a new expression had come, I wondered what he contemplated.

“It was a long time ago,” he replied quietly.

“But how could it be so long ago? If I remember you how can I have forgotten our meeting?”

“Perhaps you have forgotten your name?”

“That is stupid! My name is Korêani.”

“No, no.” He smiled and shook his head. “Your real name I never knew, but the name given to you in childhood, the name by which I did know you, was Fah lo Suee.”

She drew down her brows in an effort of recollection.

“Fah lo Suee,” she murmured. “But this is a silly name. It means a perfume, a sweet scent. It is childish!”

“You were a child when it was given to you.”

“Ah!” She smiled—and her smile was so alluring that I knew how this woman must have played upon the emotions of those she had lured into the net of Dr. Fu-Manchu. “You have known me a long time? I thought so, but I cannot remember your name.”

For Korêani I had no existence. She had forgotten my presence. I meant no more to her than one of the dreadful furnishings of the place.

“My name has always been Nayland Smith. How long it will remain so I don’t know.”