The Bride of Fu Manchu

“Did you?”

I thought a while, and then:

“No,” I replied. “I am positive on the point.”

“Good!” he muttered, and began to pace up and down again. “There’s just a chance—just a chance he has overlooked me. Tell me, omitting no detail that you recall, exactly what took place.”

To the best of my ability, I did as he directed.

He interrupted me once only: when I spoke of that sepulchral warning—

“Where was the woman when you heard it?” he rapped.

“Practically in my arms. I had just dragged her back.”

“The voice was impossible to identify?”

“Quite.”

“And you could not swear to the fact that Petrie’s lips moved?”

“No. It was a fleeting impression, no more.”

“It was after this episode that she subjected you to her hypnotic tricks?”

“Hypnotic tricks!”

“Yes—you have narrowly escaped. Sterling.”

“You refer,” I said with some embarrassment for I had been perfectly frank—”to my strange impulses?”

He nodded.

“No. It was the voice which broke the spell.”

He twitched his ear for some moments, then:

“Go on!” he rapped.

And when I had come to the end:

“You got off lightly,” he said. “She is as dangerous as a poised cobra! And now, I have another job for you.”

“I’m ready.”

“Hurry back to Villa Jasmin—and call me up here if all’s well there. Have you a gun?”

“No. I lent mine to the chauffeur.”

Take this.” He drew an automatic from his topcoat pocket.

“Drive like hell and shoot if necessary. You are a marked man.

»

As I hurried out. Dr. Carter hurried in. “Ah!” Nayland Smith exclaimed. “I regret troubling you, doctor; but I want you to examine Petrie very carefully.” “What! there is some change?” “I don’t know. That’s what I want you to find out.”

chapter tenth

GREEN EYES

the two-seater which had been placed at Petrie’s disposal was no beauty, but the engine was fairly reliable, and I set out along the Comiche about as fast as it is safe to travel upon such a tortuous road.

I suppose it had taken me a ridiculously long time to grasp the crowning horror which lay behind this black business. As I swung around the dangerous curves of that route, the parapet broken in many places and the mirror of the Mediterranean lying far below on the right, my brain grew very active.

The discovery of a fly-catching plane near the place where a man had been seized by this frightful infection, coupled with our finding later a similar specimen in Petrie’s laboratory, had suggested pretty pointedly that human agency was at work. Yet, somehow, in spite of the apparition of that grinning yellow face in the kitchen garden of the villa, I had not been able to realize, or not been able to believe, that human agency was actually directing the pestilence.

Sir Denis Nayland Smith had adjusted my perspective. Someone, apparently a shadowy being known as Fu Manchu, was responsible for these outbreaks!

And the woman who had posed as Petrie’s wife, the woman who had tried, and all but succeeded in her attempt to bewitch me, was of the flesh and blood of this fiend. She was Chinese; and her mission had been— what?

To poison Petrie—as Sir Mansion Rorke had been poisoned?

As I swung into the lighted tunnel cut through the rock, I laughed aloud when that seeming absurdity presented itself to my mind.

Anew disease had appeared in the world. Yes; of this, I had had painful evidence. It was possibly due, according to Sir Denis, to the presence in France of an unfamiliar fly—what he had called a genus-hybrid.

So much I was prepared to admit.

But how could any man be responsible for the appearance of such an insect, anywhere and at any time; much less in such widely separated places as those which had been visited by the epidemic?

The Purple Shadow...

I had nearly reached the end of the rock cutting. There was a dangerous comer just ahead; and I had allowed my thoughts to wander rather wide of the job in hand. A big car, a Rolls-Royce, appeared suddenly. The driver— some kind of African, as I saw—was taking so much of the road on the bend that no room was left for me.

Jamming on the brakes, I pulled close in against the wall of the tunnel...and I acted only just in time.

The driver of the Rolls checked slightly and swept right— missing me by six inches or less!

I had a clear, momentary view of the occupants of the car which had so nearly terminated my immediate interest in affairs....

How long I stayed there after the beautiful black-and-silver thing had purred away into the darkness, I don’t know. But I remember turning round and staring over the folded, dusty hood in a vain attempt to read the number.

The car had two occupants.

In regard to one of those occupants I wondered if the wild driving of the Negro chauffeur and my preoccupation with the other had led me to form a false impression. Because, when the Rolls had swept on its lordly way, I realised that my memory retained an image of something not entirely human.

A yellow face buried in the wings of an upturned fur collar I had certainly seen: a keen wind from the Alps made the night bitingly cold. The man wore a fur cap pulled down nearly to his brows, creating a curious mediaeval effect. But this face had a placid, almost godlike immobility, gaunt, dreadful, yet sealed with power like the features of a dead Pharoah.

Some chance trick of the lighting might have produced the illusion (its reality I could not admit); but about the second traveller I had no doubts whatever.

Her charming head framed—as that other skull-like head was framed—in the upturned collar of a fur coat...I saw Fleurette!

And I thought of a moss-rose....

I turned to the wheel again.

Fleurette!

She had not seen me, had not suspected that I was there. Probably, I reflected, it would not have interested her to know.

But her companion? I tested the starter, wondering if it would function after the shock. I was relieved to find that it did. The Rolls was miles away, now, unless the furious driving of the African chauffeur had led to disaster....That yellow face and those glittering green eyes—I asked myself the question: Could this be Mahdi Bey?

Somehow I could not believe the man with Fleurette to be an Egyptian. Yet, I reflected, driving on, there had been that about him which had conjured an image to my mind...the image of Seti the First—that King of Egypt whose majesty had survived three thousand years....

chapter eleventh

AT THE VILLA JASMIN