chapter twenty-first
THE HAIRLESS
MAN
our route led up a flight of stairs, rubber-covered like every other place I had visited, with the exception of that strange study pervaded with opium fumes.
“The physiological research room,” Dr. Fu Manchu said, “would not interest you. It is very small in this establishment, although Companion Yamamata, who is at present in charge, is engaged upon a highly important experiment in synthetic genesis.”
We entered a long, well lighted corridor, with neat white doors right and left, each bearing a number like those in a hotel. These doors were perfectly plain and possessed neither handles nor keyholes.
“Some of the staff reside here,” my guide explained.
He pressed a button in the wall beside a door numbered eleven, and the door slid noiselessly open. I saw a very neat sitting room, with other rooms opening out of it.
“Temporarily...” the guttural voice continued.
There was a strange interruption.
A sort of quivering note sounded, a gong-like note, more a vibration of the atmosphere than an actual sound. But Dr. Fu Manchu stood rigidly upright, and his extraordinary eyes glanced swiftly left along the corridor.
“Quick!” he said harshly, “inside! And close the door—there is a corresponding button in the wall. One pressure closes the door; two open it. Remain there until you are called, if you value your life....”
His harsh imperious manner had its effect. Some of the secret of this strange man’s power lay in the fact that he never questioned his own authority, or the obedience of those upon whom he laid his orders.
The force behind those orders was uncanny.
With no other glance in my direction he set off along the corridor, moving swiftly, yet with a sort of cat-like dignity.
With his withdrawal, some part of my real self began to clamour for recognition. I hesitated on the threshold of the little room, watching him as he went. And when the tall figure, with never a backward glance, disappeared where the corridor branched right, something like a cold wave of sanity came flooding back to my brain.
This was neither delirium nor death! It was mirage. This place was real enough—the long corridor and the white doors—but the rest was hypnotism; a trick played for what purpose I could not imagine, by a master of that dangerous art!
That the woman called Fah Lo Suee was an adept. Sir Denis had admitted. This was her father, and her master.
Those living-dead men were phantoms, conjured up by his brain and displayed before me as an illusionist displays the seemingly impossible. Those vast forcing houses, the big laboratory, the horrible insects in their glass cases! It was perhaps his method of achieving conquest of my personality, submerging me and then using me.
Very well! I was not conquered yet. I could still fight!
That curious throbbing, as of a muted gong, continued incessantly.
What did it mean? What was the explanation of Dr. Fu Manchu’s sudden change of manner and his hurried departure?
“Close the door...and remain there until you are called, if you value your life!”
These had been his words. He had spoken with apparent sincerity.
And now, as I watched, I saw a strange thing. At the foot of the stairs which we had ascended, I saw a door dropping slowly from the roof. I could feel the slight vibration of the mechanism controlling it.
I glanced swiftly left, along the corridor.
A similar door was descending just where the passage branched off!
They were stone doors, or something very like them, such as are used in seagoing ships. Was this the meaning of that constant vibrating note which now was beginning to tell upon my nerves?
What had happened? Had fire broken out? If so, I might well be trapped between the two doors, for I knew of no other exit. Further reflection assured me that these devices could not be intended for use in such an emergency as fire. What then was their purpose, and what was it that Dr. Fu Manchu had feared?
The answer came, even as the question flashed into my mind.
Heralded by a hoarse, roaring sound, a
It had a huge head set upon huge shoulders. The head was hairless, and the entire face, trunk, and limbs glistened moistly like the skin of an earthworm. The arms were equally massive; but I saw that the hands were misformed, the fingers webbed, and the thumbs scarcely present.
The legs were out of all proportion to that mighty trunk, being stumpy, dwarfed, and terminating in feet of a loathsome pink colour—feet much smaller than the great hands, but also webbed.
From the appalling glistening, naked face, two tiny eyes set close together beside a flattened nose with distended nostrils, glared redly, murderously in my direction.
Uttering a sound which might have proceeded from a wounded buffalo, the creature hurled itself towards me....
chapter twenty-second
HALF-WORLD
I sprang back, looking wildly right and left for the button which controlled the door.
The worm-man was almost upon me, and transcending all fear of a violent death was the horror of contact with those moistly glistening limbs. The control button proved to be on the right. I pressed it.
And the door began to close rapidly and smoothly.
In the very instant of its closing, a loathsome moist mass appeared at the narrowing opening.
My heart leapt and then seemed to stop. I thought that one of those great pink arms was about to be thrust through. Judging the door to be a frail one, I looked in those few instances upon a fate more horrible than any which had befallen man since prehistoric times.
The door closed.
And now came a hollow booming, and a perceptible vibration of the floor upon which I stood.
That unnameable thing was endeavouring to batter a way in! I inhaled deeply, and knew such a sense of relief as I could not have believed possible under the roof of Dr. Fu Manchu.
The door was of metal. Not even the unnatural strength of the monster could prevail against it.
All sounds were curiously muted here; but one harsh bellow of what I took to be frustrated rage reached me very dimly. Then silence fell.
I pressed my ear against the enamelled metal but could hear nothing save a vague murmuring, with which was mingled the rumble of those descending doors.
Thereupon I stood upright; and as I did no, a stifled exclamation brought me sharply about.
Fleurette was in the room just behind me!
She wore a blue-and-white pyjama suit and blue sandals. Her beautiful eyes registered the nearest approach to fear which I had seen in them. She had told me, I remembered, that nothing frightened her, but to-day—or to- night, for I had lost all count of time—something had definitely succeeded in doing so. Her face, which was so like a delicate flower, was pale.
“You!” she whispered, “what are
I swallowed, not without difficulty. I suffered from an intense thirst, and my throat remained very sore by reason of its maltreatment at the hands of the dacoit.
My heart began jumping in quite a ridiculous way.
Yet I suppose the phenomenon was not so ridiculous, for Fleurette was more lovely than I had ever believed a woman could be. Oddly enough, her beauty swamped the last straw of reality upon which I had clutched in the corridor with its rows of white doors and which had remained with me up to the moment that the worm-man had appeared. I sank back again into a sea of doubt, from which, agonisingly, I had been fighting to escape.
