The Wrath of Fu Manchu and Other Stories (18 page)

* * *

I finished the reading in a cold sweat. The credulous and ghastly legend cast a numbing spell over my brain. Try as I would, I could not evoke the smile of tolerant disbelief in a witch’s tale which the effusion merited.

In the end I was forced to leap out of bed and switch on the lights in the room. Hurriedly dressing, I decided to take a walk in the gardens. I was shaking like a child awake from nightmare. I went to the wash-hand-stand and dashed cold water over my face and neck. I was ashamed to look at my reflection in the mirror and when I did, I saw a livid caricature of myself staring back at me. I saw more. I saw the
contorted face
, as Drurock had described it. In the glass it was reflected beside my own. The horrible apparition to whom it belonged was standing, I judged, just outside my open bedroom door, in the low-lit hall. As I stared, the creature seemed to lose its strength to stand erect, and it sank to the floor, collapsing slowly and clawing at the doorpost as it sank.

I had to straighten up to see the floor in the mirror. No power could have turned me to face the thing direct.

The landing lights were low and remote so the area beyond my door lay in comparative darkness. But there, crawling slowly into the lighted area within my room, progressing serpent-fashion, inch by inch, silently, intently, so that the head, throat and hands were actually across the threshold, came a creature out of hideous nightmare. It had the form of a man and so much of it as I could see was naked. The dreadful head was being pushed slowly across the carpet, held sideways, so that one ear all but touched the floor. Then the face came into the light. But this was not a face—not within the ordinary meaning of the word, although it had the elements of a face and was the fleshy covering of the frontal surface of the skull.

The chin and lower lip seemed to be drawn up to meet the nose, entirely covering the upper lip. The nostrils were distended to an incredible and wholly unnatural degree. The skin had a kind of purple iridescent sheen unlike anything I have ever seen. The effect was grotesque in the truest sense of the word, for the thing was clearly grinning at me, though God knows there was nothing in the situation to provoke that grin.

Nearer it came, and nearer. I could hear the heavy body being drawn across the floor. I could hear the beating of my own heart. At the moment when the awful thing seemed to
coil
for a spring, there suddenly intruded on the ghastly silence the sound of whispered conversation rising from the garden below.

In the same instant, the sound seemed to impinge on the monster’s hearing likewise. The hideous mask became bloated with a grimace that was legibly rage. The protruding eyes twisted in the head. Even in this dreadful moment, a monitor section of my brain registered an outside impression. I identified the source of the whispered conversation in the garden and the whispers—Aubrey and Margery. In that moment I believe I guessed the truth. The thought was but a flash, and then it was gone, dispelled by the necessity for action. By a backward slithering movement the thing which had been in my room was gone and swallowed up in the darkness of the hall. I turned and sprang. I had my nerves fairly in hand again and a fear for those two below galvanised me.

On the landing I paused and listened intently. No sound came up from the darkened stair and when, stepping quietly forward and leaning over the rail, I peered into the hall below, nothing stirred.

Again I heard the whispers in the garden. I crept back to my window and leaned out. Over to my left and on a level with me, a shaft of light shone out from our host’s bedroom. Otherwise there was no light except the ghostly faint one falling from a moon veiled by racing clouds.

Between my window and the. new wing and on a level with my eyes, was the window of Mrs Drurock’s room; and in the bright moonlight I could see her leaning out, her elbows on the ledge. Her bare arms gleamed like marble in the cold light, and she looked statuesquely beautiful. Wales I could not see, for a thick, square-clipped hedge obstructed my view…but I saw something else.

* * *

Lizard fashion, a hideous unclad shape crawled past beneath me amongst the tangle of ivy and low plants. The moonlight touched it for a moment, and then it was gone into denser shadows.

A consciousness of impending disaster came to me, but, because of its very vagueness, found me unprepared. Then suddenly I saw young Wales. He sprang into view above the hedge, against which, I presume, he had been crouching; he leapt high in the air as though from some menace on the ground beneath him. I have never heard a more horrifying scream than that which he uttered.

“My God!” he cried. “Margery! Margery!” and yet again: “Margery! Help!”

Then he was down, still screaming horribly, and calling for aid. The crawling thing made no sound, but the dreadful screams of Wales sank slowly into a sort of sobbing, and then into a significant panting which told of his agony.

I snatched up my kit, raced out of the room and down the stairs. I was held a moment at the door by the heavy and numerous bolts, but fumbled my way to the open at last. I almost fell over Aubrey where he lay inert upon the ground. I wasted no time in futilities, but busied myself with my restoratives at once. I found the wound quickly, having an inkling of where it would be—upon the neck. I got a terrific dose of ammonia down his throat and went about the cauterising. Margery came rushing out of the house over to us.

“Be quiet!” I commanded her. She had started to sob. “What did you see?”

“I don’t know,” she quavered. “What was it?”

I was instantly put at rest on one subject. She had not had time to glimpse the horrible thing which had attacked her lover. “It’s a snake-bite,” I said at random. “He’ll be all right. He’s coming to now,” I told her and gave her no time to collapse. “You must get back to your room at once. People will come. Your husband will have heard. Do you understand?”

For answer, she turned and fled. I breathed relief. I had spoken true. Aubrey was stirring. I would have him out of this, with another stiff dose of the ammonia and a poultice. His life was safe, though he might carry a scar on his neck for the rest of his days. It was Drurock, turning up fully dressed, but dishevelled and red-eyed from sleep, who helped me carry Aubrey to his room. We deposited our six-foot burden on the bed. I faced our host across the unconscious form of my friend.

“I’ll have a few more minutes with him and then he can sleep it off,” I told him, levelly. “That’s fortunate, for I think I could have proved a murder charge.”

He blinked and said nothing.

“When I’m through here,” I said with authority, “I think you and I may as well talk it out. Will you wait for me in the library?”

He nodded imperceptibly and turned to go. I thought it just as well to add:

“I shall be very much on the alert—and armed.”

* * *

“To be specific, Drurock, I mean to maintain that these phenomena are conjured out of the soil beneath this house.”

“Conjured?”

“And I think we know the conjuror,” I retorted, and went on: “What stumps me is your having put so many of the clues in my hands. It’s as if you wanted me to smoke you out.”

“I have still to be convinced that you
have
‘smoked me out’ as you put it,” he said, equably, and then added, on a dote of self-communion: “If the secret
is
out—well, maybe it was time at last.”

“Do I have to prove my reasoning?”

“Well,” he shrugged, “isn’t that the scientific method?”

“If I could stage a demonstration,” I retorted, “would that be more convincing than words?”

He nodded.

“May I have an axe?”

He was taken aback for a moment. Then a slow smile spread over his face.

“Mr McAllister,” he said, “it was due me.”

“Due?”

“That I should finally encounter another man with a brain as good as my own. I shall bring you the axe.”

* * *

Although Drurock had agreed to act exactly as I might direct, he stared in almost comic surprise when he learned the nature of the directions.

Placing two large silk handkerchiefs upon the table, I saturated them with the contents of a bottle which I had brought with me in my kit. I handed my host one of the handkerchiefs.

“Tie that over your mouth and nostrils,” I said. “Whatever happens, don’t remove it unless I tell you.” I significantly tapped the revolver which lay in my pocket. “I’m taking you at your word. It is time for the secret to be out.”

I rose, finally, perspiring from the task I set myself. The hole I had chopped down through parquetry and under-flooring was about a foot in diameter. It was really disgustingly hot. Despite the hour, which was one for dawn breezes to stir and cool the air, the wall thermometer stuck at high level. If anything, the mercury rose. Ensconced in his favourite sprawling pose on the couch against the wall Drurock made no move either to deter or assist me.

I opened windows and doors. A little ventilator near the ceiling worked by a hanging wire caught my eye and I opened, that, too.

“And now,” I explained, when I had finished my preparations, “we have opened all the avenues. The thing can come through the door. It can enter through a window or it may—as I expect it will—ooze up through that hole in the floor—ooze up from the arsenious mass, that buried store of poison beneath our feet. So far, am I right?”

“I am audience,” he purred. “I make no comment. I only applaud.”

An hour passed. I had an impression that Drurock dozed off and on. I read the thermometer. The temperature had not abated a fraction of a point since sunset and, sitting immobile as I was, I found myself bathed in sweat. Despite the open doors and windows, not a breath of air stirred in the place.

Then, of a sudden, I thought I sensed a change in temperature. I shot a glance at the thermometer. It was falling with a rapidity that was visible. The conditions favourable to condensation were at work. My senses became more than ever alert. I glanced across at Henry Drurock. I believe that his eyes were keener organs of vision than the normal human pair. He had come half erect and was staring at the hole in the floor.

I followed his gaze. I was some minutes before I too perceived the very thin miasmic vapour which was rising—rising, ever rising from the aperture.

Now the column rising from the hole became thicker. A credulous observer of the ghostly phenomenon might well have expected it to progress on to some sort of materialisation into ectoplasmic form. Becoming more dense, it rose more rapidly, although it remained from start to finish a vapour not much lighter than air. It rose like a column of oily smoke until it touched the ceiling, where it mushroomed out among the rafters. I saw wisps of it sucked into the little ventilator and drawn away.

I looked to Drurock. He shrugged.

* * *

I thought I heard a door open somewhere overhead. I glanced at my companion but he, apparently, had heard nothing. He made no sign, though I thought he held his head cocked in the position of one intensely expectant of a sound or a sight. Again I thought I heard a movement, was sure some one had stirred. The sound resembled the rustling of silk and I thought it came from the stair. And then, as in a flash, I connected little bits of evidence together and knew what I had done.

“Where does that ventilator lead?” I cried, leaping to close it even as I exclaimed.

“I am under the impression it communicates with my wife’s room,” he said banteringly, through the handkerchief.

And now the sounds upon the stair became plainly audible. Some one was breathing stertorously out there and that some one was coming down on hands and knees or—or—I uttered an oath as I recalled the vision of the horrible thing which had slithered serpent-wise into my room a few hours back. That—and Margery?”

Another sound came from overhead. A second person was moving without concealment. A door slammed. I heard Aubrey’s voice lifted in shrill dismay.

“Margery!” he cried. “What are you doing, Margery?” And then: “My God, Margery, don’t look at me!”

I sprang to the door. Major Henry Drurock, retired, tenth of the Duroque line, was close behind me.

Almost at our feet the vile thing appeared, the head first, slipping, thrusting, crawling, from dark toward light. The ghastly contorted face, one cheek brushing the floor, came into the zone of illumination, the lower lip and chin drawn up as though they were of rubber, touching the tip of the nose. The visible eye glared balefully up at me and the hair hung a dishevelled mass about the face. But the horror was to be more fully revealed. After the face came the body, and what we glimpsed of that alabaster flesh was symmetrically beautiful. If anything, this apparition was more horrible than the last. The contrast of the hideous twisted demoniacal face with the fair body was intolerable.

Suddenly, springing to its feet, the apparition stood, framed in the doorway, a slim figure, seeming like a black silhouette upon a silver background, or a wondrous statue in ebony. Elfin, dishevelled locks crowned the head; the pose of the form was as that of a startled dryad or a young Bacchante poised for a joyous leap.

For an instant, like some exquisite dream of Phidias, the figure stood…then crumpled!

I heard Aubrey’s heavy invalid step upon the stair. He came into view, carrying a flimsy garment.

“I found this in the passage,” he babbled. His face was as white as the bandage around his neck. “What’s wrong? I thought I saw Margery and—oh, my God!”

“Go back!” I shouted at him. “You’re delirious. Go back!”

“No, come on!”

Drurock’s cry rose above my own, wild and imperative, more shriek than cry. “Come on down, you damned, healthy school-boy! Come down and see her. See what you wanted to steal. Do you want her now? Come and take her! All her loveliness—all that rose-white English beauty—that perfection—they’re yours. Look! Look! Look!”

I could not prevent it. Aubrey found use of his legs and was with us before I could stop him. He stooped over the white form on the floor. He had not yet seen the face a second time. He lifted the demented thing tenderly and wrapped her in her discarded robe.