I suppose she was exceptionally beautiful, this creature who, according to Nayland Smith, should long since have been dust; but the aura surrounding her, my knowledge, now definite, of her murderous work, combined to make her a thing of horror.
She had discarded her wrap; it was draped over her arm. I saw a slenderly perfect figure, small delicately chiseled features. Hers was a beauty so imperious that it awakened a memory which presently came fully to life. She might have posed for that portrait of Queen Nefertiti found in the tomb of Tutankhamen. An Arab necklace of crudely stamped gold heightened the resemblance. I was to learn later of others who had detected this.
But it was her eyes, fixed immovably upon me, which awakened ancient superstitions. The strange word
“Well”—she spoke calmly—”who are you, and why have you followed me?”
Conscious of my disheveled condition, of the fact that I had no backing, I hesitated.
“I followed you,” I said at last, “because it was my duty to follow you.”
“Your duty—why?”
She stood there, removed from me by the length of the room, and the regard of those strange, narrowed eyes never left my face.
“Because you had someone with you.”
“You are wrong; I am alone.”
I watched her, this suave, evil beauty. And for the first time I became aware of a heavy perfume resembling that of hawthorn.
“Where has he gone?”
“To whom do you refer?”
“To Rudolf Adion.”
She laughed. I saw her teeth gleam and thought of a vampire. It was the laugh I had heard down there in the cellars, deep, taunting.
“You dream, my friend—whoever you are—you dream.”
“You know quite well who I am.”
“Oh!” she raised delicate eyebrows mockingly. “You are famous then?”
What should I do? My instinct was to turn and run for it. Something told me that if I did so, I should be trapped.
“If you were advised by me you would go back. You trespass in someone’s house—I do not advise you to be found here.”
“You advise me to go back?”
“Yes. It is kind of me.”
And now although common sense whispered that to go would mean ambush in that echoing tomb which was the Palazzo Mori, I was sorely tempted to chance it. There was something wildly disturbing in this woman’s presence, in the steady glance of her luminous eyes. In short, I was afraid of her—afraid of the silent house about me, of the noisome passages below—of all the bloodthirsty pageant of mediaeval Venice to which her sheath frock, her ivory shoulders, seemed inevitably to belong.
But I wondered why she temporized, why she stood there watching me with that mocking smile. Although I could hear no sound surely it must be a matter of merely raising her voice to summon assistance.
Forcing down this insidious fear which threatened to betray me, I rapidly calculated my chances.
The room was no more than twelve feet long. I could be upon her in three bounds. Better still—why had I forgotten it? I suppose because she was a woman . . .
In a flash I had her covered with my automatic.
She did not stir. There was something uncanny in her coolness, something which again reminded me of the dreadful Dr Fu Manchu. Her lips alone quivered in that slight, contemptuous smile.
“Don’t move your hands!” I said, and the urgency of my case put real menace into the words. “I know this is a desperate game—you know it too. Step forward. I will return as you suggest, but you will go ahead of me.”
“And suppose I refuse to step forward?”
“I shall come and fetch you!”
Still there was no sound save that of our low-pitched voices, nothing to indicate the presence of another human being.
“You would be mad to attempt such a thing. My advice was sincere. You dare not shoot me unless also you propose to commit suicide, and I warn you that one step in my direction will mean your death.”
I watched her intently—although now an attack from the rear was what I feared, having good reason to remember the efficiency of Fu Manchu’s Thugs. Perhaps one of them was creeping up behind me. Yet I dared not glance aside.
“Go back! I shall not warn you again.”
Whereupon, realizing that now or never I must force the issue, I leapt forward . . . That heavy odor of hawthorn became suddenly acute—overpowering—and stifling a scream, I knew too late what had happened.
The woman stood upon the black border, where I, too, had been standing. The whole of the center of the floor was simply an inverted “star trap.”
It opened silently as I stepped upon it, and I fell from life into a sickly void of hawthorn blossom and oblivion . . .
Ancient Tortures
“Glad to see that you are feeling yourself again, Kerrigan.”
I stared about me in stupefaction. This of course was a grotesque dream induced by the drug which had made me unconscious—the drug which smelled like hawthorn blossom. For (a curious fact which even at this moment I appreciated) my memories were sharp-cut, up to the very instant of my fall through that trap in the lotus floor. I knew that I had dropped into some place impregnated with poison gas of an unfamiliar kind. Now came this singularly vivid dream . . .
A dungeon with a low, arched roof: the only light that which came through a barred window in one of the stone walls; and in this place I sat upon a massive chair attached to the paved floor. My hands and arms were free, but my ankles were chained to the front legs of the chair by means of gyves evidently of great age and also of great strength. On my left was a squat pillar some four feet in diameter, and in the shadows behind it I discerned a number of strange and terrifying implements: braziers, tongs and other equipment of a torture chamber.
Almost directly facing me and close beside the barred window, attached to a similar chair, sat Nayland Smith!
This dream my conscious mind told me must be due to thoughts I had been thinking at the moment that unconsciousness came. I had imagined Smith in the power of the Chinese doctor; I had seemed to feel all about me uneasy spirits of men who had suffered and had died in those old palaces which lie along the Grand Canal.
There came a low moaning sound, which rose and fell—rose and fell—and faded away . . .
“I know you think you are dreaming, Kerrigan!” Smith’s voice had lost none of its snap. “I thought so myself, until I found it impossible to wake up. But I assure you we are both here and both awake.”
Tentatively I tried to move the chair. Stooping, I touched the iron bands about my ankles. Then I stared wanly across at my fellow captive . . . I knew I was awake.
“Thank God you’re alive. Smith!”
“Alive, as you say, but not, I fear, for long!”
He laughed. It was not a mirthful laugh. The sound of our voices in that horrible musty place was muted, toneless, as the voices of those who speak in a crypt. I had never seen Smith otherwise than well groomed, but now, growing accustomed to the gloom, I saw that there was stubble on his chin. His hair was of that crisp, wavy sort which never seems to be disordered. But this growth of beard deepened the shadows beneath his cheekbones, and the quick gleam of his small even teeth as he laughed seemed to accentuate the haggardness of his appearance.
“I left in rather a hurry, Kerrigan; I forgot my pipe. It’s been damnable here, waiting for . . . whatever he intends to do to me. You will find that the chains are long enough to enable you to reach that recess on your right, where, very courteously, the designer of this apartment has placed certain toilet facilities for the use of one
