The Bride of Fu-Manchu (25 page)

One of the huge wasps flew straight against my glass mask. I ducked wildly, striking at it—not confident yet in my immunity. The thing flew by—I heard the fading buzz of its passing...

I came to the end of the corridor and looked down the stairs. My wits were far from clear. At all costs I must remember the route. I found as I stood there that I could remember only that by which Dr. Fu-Manchu had first conducted me.

Another way there was, and I had gone by it. The route I remembered would lead me through the bacteriological research room. From thence onward I knew my course.

All the doors were open.

At the entrance to the room where I had seen Sir Frank Narcomb, I pulled up. My knowledge of bacteria was limited; but if the insects were free—so presumably were the germs...

I glanced down at my feet. Large ants, having glittering black bodies, were swarming up over the lashings of my overalls!

Stamping madly, I stooped, brushing the things off with my rubber gloves. I saw a centipede wriggling away from my stamping feet. Panic touched me. I ran through the room and out into a short passage beyond.

In that dimly lighted place, surrounded by windows behind which the insects lived, I saw that the doors of the cases were open. Some of the things still hovered about their nests, but many of the cases were empty.

There was no one in the passage beyond—which was even more dimly lighted; but I stepped upon some wriggling thing and heard the crunch of its body beneath my rubber-shod foot.

The sound sickened me.

I pressed on to the botanical research room. A glance showed that it had been partly stripped. I stared through the observation window into that small house where the strange orchids had been under cultivation. They had disappeared.

Looking about at the shelves, I realized that much of the apparatus had been taken away. The doors leading into the first of the big forcing houses were open.

I passed through, and immediately grasped the explanation of something which had been puzzling me: namely, that the escaped insects were scarcely represented here, whereas the corridors beyond were thick with them, flying and crawling.

A sharp change in the atmosphere offered an explanation.

Windows, as well as doors, were open here, admitting a keen night air borne by a wind from the Alps.

Those things were seeking warmth in the interior of the place. And already, so delicate are such plants, I saw that many of the tropical flowers about me were drooping—would soon be dead.

What did this mean?

It was probably part of a plan to destroy such results of those unique experiments as could not be removed.

With every step I advanced the air grew colder and colder—and destruction among the unique products through which I passed was such that I could find time for a moment of regret in the midst of my own engrossing troubles. The palm house, in common with every other place I had visited, was deserted. The doors leading into Dr. Fu-Manchu’s study were open... I could see light shining out.

Here was the crux of the situation. Here if anywhere I should meet with a check.

Despite the keenness of the air, I was bathed in perspiration, buckled up in my nearly airtight outfit.

I advanced slowly, step by step, until I could look into the study. Then I stood still, staring through the glass mask—which had grown very misty—at a room stripped of its exotic trappings!

The furniture alone remained. This destruction, then, which I had witnessed, was the handiwork of Dr. Fu-Manchu himself—or so I must suppose. For here was clear evidence that he had fled, taking his choicest possessions with him.

I paused there for only a few moments; then I ran out into the great radio research room.

Of the masses of unimaginable mechanisms which had cumbered the room, only the heaviest remained. The instruments had gone from the tables. Many shelves were bare. Three intricate pieces of machinery, including that which I had thought resembled a moving-picture camera, were there, but wrecked—shattered—mere mounds of metallic fragments upon a grey floor!

There were no insects visible in the big room, which was as cold as a cavern. Indeed, as Nayland Smith had pointed out, a cavern, practically, it was. Doors I had not known to exist were open in the glass walls, but I ran the length of the place and sprang up the stairs beyond.

The door did not close behind me. The whole of that intricate mechanism had been locked in some way.

Gaining the top corridor I glanced swiftly to the right.

A cold grey light—the light of dawn—was touching the terrace.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

I
ran forward.

“Hands up!” came swiftly.

And even as I obeyed that order, I groaned, filled with such bitterness of spirit as I had rarely known.

On the very threshold—freedom in sight—I was trapped again! A group of semi-human figures surrounded me in the half-light: creatures goggle-eyed, with shapeless heads, to which were attached trunk-like appendages! I raised my hands, staring helplessly about at the ghoulish party closing in upon me.

“Search him!” came the same voice, staccato, but curiously muffled.

But now, hearing it, I grasped the truth!

The hideous headdresses of the men surrounding me were gas masks!

“Sir Denis!”
I cried, and knew that my own voice was at least as muffled as his.

The leader of the party was Nayland Smith!

Something very like unconsciousness threatened me. I had not fully appreciated how wrought up I was until this moment. Sights and sounds merged into an indistinguishable blur. But presently, out of this haze, I began to apprehend that Nayland Smith was talking to me, his arm about my shoulders.

“Not a soul has left Ste Claire, Sterling; it’s covered from the land and from the sea. When your first message reached me—”

“I sent no message! But what was it?”

“You sent no message?”

“Not a thing! Nevertheless, I think I know who did. What did you take it to mean?”

“According to the system we had arranged, it meant that Petrie was there—but dead. There was a second, much later, which quite defeated me.”

“I don’t know who sent the second. But it’s true that Petrie is here—and, when I saw him last, was alive.”

“Sterling, Sterling! You are sure?”

“I spoke to him. And—by heavens! I had almost forgotten—”

I plunged a rubber-clad hand into the pocket of my overall, and pulled out the creased and folded sheet of paper.

“The formula for ‘654.’”

“Thank God! Good old Petrie! Quick! Give it to me.”

Nayland Smith had discarded his helmet temporarily, and I my glass mask. He dashed away down the steps, leaving me standing there, looking about me.

Six or eight men were by the open door, their heads hidden in gas equipment, and I realized now that they must be French police. I felt very much below par, but the keen night air was restoring me, and after an absence of no more than two or three minutes, Sir Denis came running back.

“I don’t think, Sterling,” he said in his rapid way, “that the doctor’s campaign was ripe to open. It depended, I believe, upon climatic conditions. But in any event, ‘654’ will be in possession of the medical authorities of the world tonight.”

“Petrie’s wish is carried out!”

“I should have raided an hour ago, Sterling, if I had had the foresight to equip the party suitably. We were here before I realized the nature of the death trap into which I might be leading them. I once saw a party of detectives in a Limehouse cellar belonging to Dr. Fu-Manchu die the most dreadful deaths...

“The Chief of Police was at the main gate, and I consulted with him. He quite naturally wanted to waive my objections; but I persisted. The delay was caused by the quest for gas masks, of which there is not a large supply in the neighbourhood. When they were obtained, the men on duty here reported that the door had been opened from the inside but that none had come out. I had rejoined them only a few minutes when you appeared.”

“Yet the place is deserted!”

“What?”

“Part of it is infested with plague flies and other horrors, but there is no trace of a human being anywhere.”

“Come on!” he snapped, and readjusting his helmet. “Are you fit, Sterling?”

“Yes.”

I buttoned myself up in my grim equipment. Followed by the police party, I found myself again in the house of Dr. Fu-Manchu.

Unhesitatingly I began to run towards the green lamp at the end of the corridor which marked the position of Fleurette’s room— when all the lights went out!

“What’s this?” came a muffled exclamation.

The ray of a torch cut the darkness; then many others. Every member of the party was seemingly provided. Someone thrust a light into my hand and I went racing along to the door of Fleurette’s room.

One glance showed me that it was empty.

“I forgive you, Sterling,” came hoarsely, “but you are wasting time.”

The party tore down the stairs, Nayland Smith and I leading.

“Petrie’s room!” came huskily; “that first...”

We dashed across the dismantled radio research laboratory, eerie in torchlight, through the empty study where Dr. Fu-Manchu, wrapped in a strange opium dream, had sat in his throne-chair, and on through those great forcing houses where trees, shrubs, and plants, to which Dame Nature had never given her benediction, wilted in the keen air sweeping through open doors.

Hoarse exclamations told of the astonishment experienced by the police party following us as we dashed through those exotic mysteries. Then, mounting the stair and coming to the corridor with its white, numbered doors, I became aware of a crunching sound beneath my feet.

I paused, and shone the light downward.

The floor was littered with dead and comatose insects, swift victims of this change of temperature! The giant spider had succumbed somewhere, I did not doubt; yet even now I dreaded the horror, dreaded those reasoning eyes.

“We turn right here!” I shouted, my voice muffled by the mask.

I ran along the passage and in at the open door of that room in which I had seen Petrie.

The room was empty!

“They have taken him!” groaned Nayland Smith. “We’re too late. What’s that?”

A sound of excited voices reached me dimly. Then came a cry from the rear. The men under the local Chief of Police had joined us; they had come in by the main entrance.

Yet neither group had discovered a soul on the premises!

“Spread out!” cried Nayland Smith. “Parties of two! There’s some Chinese rathole. A big household doesn’t disappear into thin air. Come on, Sterling! Our route is downward, not up.”

We pressed our way through the throng of men behind us, Nayland Smith and the Chief of Police repeating the orders.

Sir Denis beside me, I raced back along the way we had come; and although every door appeared to be open, there was seemingly none in that range of rooms other than those I knew. We searched the big forcing houses, meeting only other muffled figures engaged upon a similar task.

But apparently the doors leading into Dr. Fu-Manchu’s study and those which communicated with the botanical research room were the only means of entrance or exit!

Out into the big, dismantled laboratory we ran. There were two open doors in the wall opposite our point of entrance.

“This one first!” came in a muffled voice.

Sir Denis and I ran across to an opening in the glass wall.

“The Chinaman who arrived in the speedboat went this way,” he shouted.

Shining our torches ahead, we entered—and found a descending stair. Our light failed to penetrate to the bottom of it.

“Stop, Sir Denis!” I cried.

Wrenching off the suffocating glass mask, I dropped it on the floor, for I saw that in the darkness he had already discarded his gas helmet.

“We must assemble a party—we may be walking into a trap.”

He pulled up and stared at me; his face was haggard.

“You are right,” he rapped. “Get three or four men, and notify Furneaux—he’s in charge of the police—which way we have gone.”

I ran back across the great empty hall from which that curious violet light had gone, and shouted loudly. I soon assembled a party, one of whom I despatched in search of the Chief of Police, and, accompanied by the others, I rejoined Nayland Smith.

We left one man on duty at the door.

Nayland Smith leading, and I close behind him, we began to descend the stairs into the subterranean mystery of Ste Claire.

CHAPTER FORTY