The Drums of Fu Manchu

“At last!” Smith’s eyes glinted. “That’s where he is hiding!”

Before I could restrain him he had darted up the ladder, shining the light of a flashlamp ahead. Gallaho followed and I came next.

We found ourselves under the sloping roof in an attic containing several large tanks, unventilated, and oppressively stuffy.

There was no one there.

“Doctor Fu Manchu is a man of genius,” said Smith, “but not a spirit. He must be somewhere in this building.”

“Not so certain, sir!” came a cry.

One of the Scotland Yard men was directing light upon lath and plaster at that side of the attic furthest from the door. It revealed a ragged hole—and now we all detected a smell of charred wood.

“What’s beyond there?” Gallaho demanded.

“The adjoining house, at the moment in the hands of renovators. It is being converted into modern flats.”

But already Smith, stooping, was making his way through the aperture—and we all followed.

We found ourselves in an attic similar to that which we had quitted. We crossed it and climbed down a ladder. At the bottom was a room smelling strongly of fresh paint, cluttered up with decorators’ materials, in fact almost impassable. We forced a way through onto the landing, to discover planks stretched across a staircase, scaffolding, buckets of whitewash . . .

Nayland Smith ran down the stairs like a man demented, and even now in memory I can recapture the thud of our hammering feet as we followed him. It drummed around that empty, echoing house; the lights of our lamps danced weirdly on stripped walls, bare boards and half-painted woodwork. We came to the lobby. Smith flung open the front door.

It opened not on Bayswater Road as in the case of the adjoining house, but upon a side street, Porchester Terrace. He raced down three steps and stood there looking to right and to left.

Dr Fu Manchu had escaped . . .

* * *

“The biggest failure of my life, Kerrigan.”

Nayland Smith was pacing up and down my study; he had even forgotten to light his pipe. His face was wan —lined.

“I don’t think I follow, Smith. It’s amazing that you arrived here in the nick of time. His escape is something no one could have anticipated. He has supernormal equipment. This disintegrating ray which he carried defeats locks, bolts and bars. How could any man have foreseen it?”

“Yet I should have foreseen it,” he snapped angrily. “My arrival in the nick of time had been planned.”

“What!”

“Oh, I didn’t know Ardatha was coming. For this I had not provided. But my visit to you earlier in the evening, my leaving here, or pretending to leave, the most vital piece of evidence on which I have ever laid my hands, was a leaf torn from Doctor Fu Manchu’s own book!”

“What do you mean?”

“I was laying a trail. I was doing what he has done so often. He knew that I had those incriminating signatures, he knew that failing their recovery, the break-up of the Council of Seven was at least in sight. You are aware of how closely I was covered, how narrowly I escaped death. What I didn’t tell you at the time was this: In spite of my disguise, I had been followed from Sloane Street right to the door of your flat.”

“Are you sure?”

“I made sure. I intended to be followed.”

“Good heavens!”

“I had not hoped, I confess, for so big a fish as the doctor in person, but that you would be raided by important members of the Si-Fan shortly after my departure was moderately certain. They were watching. I saw them as I left in the Yard car. I gave them every opportunity to note that although I had arrived with a bulky portfolio, I was leaving without it!”

“But, Smith, you might have given me your confidence!”

Anger, mortification, both were in my tones, but instantly Nayland Smith had his hands on my shoulders. His steady eyes sobered me.

“Remember the Green Death, Kerrigan. Oh, I’m not reproaching you! But Doctor Fu Manchu can read a man’s soul as you and I read a newspaper. I had men posted in the park (closed at that time), and I had a key of your front door—”

“Smith!”

“You were well protected. The arrival of Ardatha presented a new problem. I had not counted on Ardatha —”

“Nor had I!”

“But when no fewer than seven suspicious characters were massed in front of the house, and a tall thin man wearing a cloak was reported as having entered—(your front door, apparently being open)—I gave the signal. You know what followed.”

“I understand now, Smith, how crushing the disappointment must be.”

“Crushing indeed! I had King Shark in my net—and he bit his way out of it!”

“But the Ericksen Ray?”

“He has held the secret of the Ericksen Ray for many years. Doctor Ericksen, its inventor, died or is reported to have died in 1914. As a matter of fact, he (with God knows how many other men of genius) has been working in Doctor Fu Manchu’s laboratories probably up to the present moment!”

“But this is incredible! You have hinted at it before, but I have never been able to follow your meaning.”

Automatically Nayland Smith’s hand went to the pocket of his dilapidated coat and out came the briar and the big pouch.

“He can induce synthetic catalepsy, Kerrigan. I was afraid when I found you in Whitehall the other day that for some reason he had practised this art upon you. Except in cases where I have been notified, these wretched victims have been buried alive.”

“Good God!”

“Later, at leisure, his experts disinter them, and they are smuggled away to work for the Si-Fan!”

“And to where are they smuggled?”

“I have no idea. Once his base was in Honan. It is no longer there. He has had others, some as near home as the French Riviera. His present headquarters are unknown to me. His genius lies not only in his own phenomenal brain, but in his astonishing plan of accumulating great intellects and making them his slaves. This is the source of his power. He wastes nothing. You see already, as General Diesler’s death proves, he is employing the Jasper vacuum charger. I think we both know the name of the man who invented the television apparatus which you have seen in action. But probably we don’t want to talk about it . . .”

Up and down the carpet he paced, up and down, restless, over-tensed, and stared out of the window.

“There lies London,” he said, “in darkness, unsuspecting the presence in its midst of a man more than humanly equipped, a man who is almost a phantom—who is served by phantoms!”

A second later I sprang madly to his side.

Heralded by no other sound, there came a staccato crash of glass . . . then I was drenched in fragments of plaster!

A bullet had come through the window and had buried itself in the wall . . .

“Smith! Smith!”

He had not moved, but he turned now and looked at me. I saw blood and was overcome by a sudden, dreadful nausea. I suppose I grew pale, for he shook his head and grasped my shoulder.

“No, Kerrigan. It was the tip of my ear. Good shooting. The whizz of the bullet was deafening.”

“But there was no sound of a shot!”

He moved away from the window.

“Diesler was killed at a range of three thousand odd yards,” he said. “You remember we were talking about