The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other Stories (14 page)

“Then let’s not waste a moment,” Nayland Smith said, getting to his feet. “We may be too late, Inspector, but we’ll have a go at capturing Fu-Manchu. He has an inordinately high opinion of his hypnotic powers and may think himself quite safe. But my guess is that Pat came out of her trance sooner than he intended.”

* * *

As they drove toward Limehouse in a police car, Nayland Smith explained the rest of the story to Pat. “Dr Fu-Manchu had learned that you had a key to this flat, that you knew where the model was hidden. The door in the panelling which only you and Bruce know how to open is closed. But the model has gone. To be sure the plans are locked up in the War Office, but to a man of Fu-Manchu’s genius, the model would be enough. He brought you here from the Mayflower under hypnosis. You opened the panel and were taken to some hideaway where he could examine the model at leisure.”

“I’ll never, forgive myself,” Pat said sadly.

“Nonsense,” Bruce said quickly, “There was nothing you could do about it…”

Their police car raced on through the dark, still streets. Pat remembered the route, began to recognise certain landmarks. A man standing on the corner of a narrow street flashed a light three times as the car approached. “We’re inside the cordon,” Inspector Haredale reported.

And suddenly, “I remember that alleyway!” Pat exclaimed.

“Pull in on the right here,” Haredale directed the driver. “This is where the hard work begins.”

The car swung into a dead-end alley and, as they all got out, a man half hidden in its shadows saluted the inspector.

“Any movement, Elkin?”

“Not a thing, sir. If there was anybody in there, he’s in there now.”

A riverside warehouse, boarded up and marked for demolition, was suspected to be secretly used by Dr Fu-Manchu as a temporary base. One of K Division’s detectives had found a way into it from a neighbouring building.

“We’re in for some climbing, Pat,” Nayland Smith warned grimly. “We need you or I wouldn’t drag you along. Lead the way, Inspector.”

The way was through a building which had an exit on the blind alley. Pat found herself climbing a narrow stair, guided by the beam of a flashlight held by Inspector Haredale. The climb continued until they came to the seventh and final landing. Pat saw an iron ladder leading to a trap in the roof.

“I’ll go first, miss,” the local detective told her. “It’s a darkish night, but I don’t want to show a light.”

He went up, opened the trap, and stretched his hand down. Pat mounted, Bruce following, Nayland Smith and Haredale bringing up the rear. They stood in a narrow gutter, a sloping slate roof on one side and a sheer drop to the street on the other. An iron ladder to the top of a higher building adjoining led to a flat roof. A few yards away, in fleeting moonlight, Pat saw an oblong skylight.

“I must ask for silence now, sir,” Inspector Haredale said. “Elkin, our guide, has managed to open a section of this skylight.”

Elkin hauled a rope-ladder-from its hiding place, raised part of the skylight, hooked the ladder to the frame and climbed down. From below he flashed a light. “I’m holding the ladder fast,” he whispered. “Would you come next, Mr Garfield, and hang on to Miss Merton?”

The ladder was successfully negotiated, and the members of the party found themselves in a stuffy loft impregnated with stifling exotic odours. The warehouse had belonged to a firm of spice importers.

Stairs led down to a series of galleries surrounding a lofty, echoing place where even their cautious footsteps sounded like the tramp of a platoon.

“No use going tiptoe,” snapped Nayland Smith. “If there’s anyone here, he knows we’re here, too. The room you were in was on the ground floor, Pat. So let’s get a move on. A little more light, Sergeant.”

They descended from gallery to gallery until they reached the bottom. Then they stood still, listening. There was no sound. The place had the odour of a perfume bazaar.

“It was your mention of incense, miss,” Inspector Haredale told Pat, “that convinced me you had been here. Now, Elkin, what’s the lay of the land?”

“There’s an inner office, and a main office beyond which opens right on to the street.”

“Stand by for anything,” Nayland Smith directed. “If we’re lucky, Fu-Manchu will be in there. If the door is locked, we’ll break it down.”

The door was not locked. As it swung open, they saw a lighted room.

“Stay with Pat for a moment, Garfield,” Nayland Smith said tersely. “I want to make sure what’s ahead.”

He stepped in, followed by Haredale and Elkin. There was no one in the room. But as Pat strained forward to peer in, she saw a long couch illuminated by a tall pedestal lamp which shed a peculiar green light. “This is the room I was in!” she cried out.

She and Bruce joined Nayland Smith and, “Good God!” Bruce spoke almost in a whisper. “Can it be true?”

On a table beside the couch a curious object lay gleaming in the rays of the lamp. It was composed of some silver-like metal moulded in the form of two saucers, one inverted above the other and upheld by four squat columns apparently of vulcanite.

“My model!” Bruce shouted, and sprang forward.

“One moment, sir!” Inspector Haredale grasped his arm. “It may be booby-trapped. Elkin, make sure there’s no wiring under the table.”

As the detective dropped to his knees and began searching, Nayland Smith stepped to the door of the main office. It was locked.

“No wires, sir,” Elkin reported. “All clear.”

And almost before he had got to his feet Bruce had snatched up the model and was examining it.

“Bruce!” Pat spoke breathless. “Has it been tampered with?”

“I assure you, Miss Merton, it has not!” a sibilant, mocking voice replied.

“Fu-Manchu!”
Nayland Smith snapped. “He’s in the next room. Come on, Haredale. We have him!” He fired three revolver shots in quick order. It was the signal for the raid.

There came a quiet laugh. “Ah, there you are Sir Denis Nayland Smith. Before you start the raiding party, I have a few words to say. I assume that you are there, Mr Garfield? I could not resist the temptation of telling you myself that you have far to go in the field of gravity. After inspecting your model, I saw no harm in sharing a few facts. So I laid a trail, with the assistance of your charming friend, Miss Merton, which I felt sure you could easily follow.”

Bruce, feeling like a man in a dream, said, “Very good of you!”

The wail of police whistles sounded, the roar of a racing engine, the screech as brakes were jammed on in the near-by street.

“Your model, Mr Garfield, is elementary,” the strangely sinister voice went on. “But I was interested to examine it. You have advanced only a short way in the science of anti-gravity. But you are on the right route. Listen.” The sibilant voice droned on as Dr Fu-Manchu became more explicit. Bruce listened, fascinated and rapidly made notes. Finally the voice concluded with this astonishing revelation.

“You may recall the sensation once created by the appearance of so-called flying saucers? Some of these—but not all—were test flights of my anti-gravity machine, which I have since perfected. The others, I assume, were from distant planets.”

The door of the outer office was being battered down. A voice shouted, “Inspector Haredale! Are you there?”

“You may call off your raiders,” the calm voice continued. “As I know you have already realised—I am not in the other office. I am fifty miles away. When you opened the door of the room in which you stand, you connected me with an amplifying device on a shortwave receiver, which, if you are patient, you may find in the main office. I installed it some time ago to enable me to give orders to subordinates assembled there.”

A crash announced the collapse of the street door. Men could be heard running down the stairs from the entrance on the roof. Pat was trembling. There were tears in her voice when she turned to Bruce, who was holding the model. “Bruce, darling, is it true? Have you failed?”

Bruce put the model down, hugged Pat—and laughed. “This is the first model I ever made, and I should have hated to lose it. I suppose I feel about it the way a sculptor feels about a rough clay study for a statue. But it doesn’t tell Fu-Manchu a thing. What’s more, his boastfulness has made him tell
me
more than I think he meant to. But no one—not even you Pat—knows how far I have gone since that first model. Dr Fu-Manchu isn’t the only man who has solved the riddle of gravity. The other saucers he mentioned don’t come from outer space. And so he’s in for a surprise. One of the greatest firms in the world has financed, and is now flight-testing, my own anti-gravity machine. That is the real secret of the flying saucers!”

“That’s Low Fennel, sir.”

My guide clambered out of the ditch, the withdrawing of his boots from the soupy mire involving an effort marked by successive reports like muffled pistol shots. Old Ord, my expert in the topography and lore of this uninviting stretch of Cornish lowland, reached me a gnarled paw and assisted me to the top of the small weedy hummock which gave us something more solid underfoot than the mud-porridge through which we had been wading for the last hour.

He pointed out an agglomeration of roofs, visible beyond the deep notch in the skyline made by the sides of the broad gully in which we were standing. I saw the heavy turrets of a Norman structure which seemed to constitute a left wing of a straggling house, and the more graceful corniced roof of a lower structure of later and more livable style (Jacobean, I judged) and this distant and restricted view of the House of the Drurocks was cut off here. There is a further wing of the place, modern brick enclosing plumbing and wiring of our century, but this part of the abode I came to know only later, when we got to the heart of that horror which hung in the air of those rooms, and most particularly the apartments of Margery, wife of Henry Drurock, major of the Cornish Guards, retired.

I looked and waited for John Ord’s inevitable gloomy tale. The old fellow had some fearsome legend to fit every landmark, and his manner in pointing out the house in Low Fennel warned me that I was in for another number from my dour companion’s repertory of the grey and grisly local lore.

“When the Drurocks die, their bodies don’t die like other men’s,” began old Ord, and waited for me to react to the staggering and fanciful statement, which I did with the proper grimace of interest and awe.

“It’s true,” protested the old peasant. He lowered his voice. “Four generations of ‘em were dug up when they sold the slope south of the church and those that saw them while they were above ground tell that they were as whole as when they were buried.”

“And how is the phenomenon explained?” I asked, keeping levity out of my tone.

Old Ord looked at me sharply, but was either reassured by my blank expression or so well launched upon his tale that he could not stop.

“The brimstone preserves ’em,” he said, hollowly. “Their house is built over a hole that goes straight down, forever and forever, and they breathe the fumes, sleeping and waking, all their lives.”

“In short,” I commented, “they’re just devils without tails and they have their own private stairway down to Hades.”

“Don’t laugh,” beseeched the credulous old gossip.

I scolded him mildly.

“After all, you live off the Drurocks one way or another, every blessed soul of you around here. It isn’t good form or good policy for you to be telling a stranger that your landlord is—what? A ghoul sitting on the mouth of a chimney of the inferno, I gather.”

Ord shook his head. “Nevertheless, if you meet him sir, if you go into his house and eat at his table, let me tell you, don’t face him when you talk to him. Stay at his side and don’t let him breathe on you.”

Idly, I plied the gaffer with further questions, but some flavour of irreverence about my response to his tale shut him up. He became obstinately dumb, and finally set me in my place by setting himself in his—a paid guide to a foolish scientific Londoner whose incredible hobby was the uncomfortable and unhealthy one of exploring the ditches of the region, day after day, and assembling, in accumulating jars and vials, the ill-smelling fauna and flora of these stagnant pools.

In the comatose village of Upper Fennel, the inn stood at the head of a single village street, customarily so devoid of any signs of life that it was a distinct shock to find the widow Crowley’s boy clattering toward us as we came out of the fields onto the road. My landlady’s son was running toward us for all he was worth, waving a bit of paper and piping my name. I recognised the fold of a telegraph blank before it was handed to me.

“The telegram got here before the gentleman,” gasped the boy.

“What gentleman?” I asked, pausing in the act of opening the message.

“Him which sent the telegram,” panted the messenger. “He’s in your room now.”

The explanation scarcely made sense, and I was about to identify what I gathered was a visitor down from London by the simple expedient of opening the telegram when I was saved the trouble by Aubrey Wales himself.

Though I had not seen my schoolmate in five years, I recognised his voice at once as it called my name. I looked up to see him waving to me from the balcony of the inn. He had not changed much. Aubrey was still the fellow he had been at that period, the patrician among us studious clods, the Greek among us barbarians-—a darling of the gods who carried his gifts so graciously that he inspired no envy. I know of nobody who begrudged him his money; his beauty, his good temper and his luck with women. We were all under his sway as undergraduates and I promptly fell under it again now, as I joined him in the low-ceilinged inn room and opened a bottle of the harsh local ale by way of making him welcome.