The Island of Fu Manchu

“Where is this—“

I ceased speaking. A faint sound had reached my ears, coming from beyond a half-opened door. Someone was stealing downstairs!

In one bound I reached the door, threw it open, and looked up. Silhouetted against faint light from above, a woman’s figure turned and dashed back! With springs in my heels I followed, leapt into a room a pace behind her, and stood squarely in the doorway.

She had run towards a curtained window, and I saw her in the light of a fire, sole illumination of the room, and that which had shown down the stair. She wore a dark raincoat and a small close-fitting hat from beneath which the glory of her hair cascaded in iridescent waves. Dancing firelight touched her face, more pale than usual, and struck amethyst glints from her lovely eyes. But my heart had already prepared me to meet “the young lady from the firm.”

“It seems I came just in time, Ardatha,” I said, and succeeded in speaking coolly.

She faced me, standing quite still.

“You!” she whispered. “So you are of the police! I thought so!”

“You are wrong; I am not. But this is no time to explain.” I had formed a theory of my own to account for her apparent ignorance of all that had passed between us, and I spoke gently. “I owe you my life, Ardatha, and it belongs to you with all else I have. You said you would try to understand. You must help me to understand, too. What are you doing here?”

She took a step forward, her eyes half fearful, her lips parted.

“I am obeying orders which I must obey. There are things which you can never understand. I believe you mean all you say, and I want to trust you.” Prompted by some swift impulse, she came up to me and rested her hands upon my shoulders, watching me with eyes in which I read a passionate questioning. “God knows how I want to trust you.”

Almost, I succumbed; her charm intoxicated me. As her accepted lover I had the right to those sweet, tremulous lips. But I had read the riddle in my own way, and clenching my teeth I resisted that maddening temptation.

“You may trust me where you cannot trust yourself, Ardatha,” I said quietly. “I am yours here and hereafter. Shake off this horrible slavery. Come with me now. The laws of England are stronger than the laws of Dr. Fu Manchu. You will be safe, Ardatha, and I will teach you to remember all you have forgotten.”

But I kept my hands tightly clenched at my sides; for, once in my arms, all those sane resolutions regarding her would have been swept away, and I knew it.

“Perhaps I want to do so—very much,” she whispered. Perhaps—“ she glanced swiftly up at me and swiftly down again—”this is remembrance. But if such a thing is ever to be, first I must live. If I came with you now I should die within one month—“

“That is nonsense!” I spoke hotly and regretted my violence in the next breath. “Forgive me! I would see that you were safe—even from him”

Ardatha shook her head. The firelight, which momentarily grew brighter, played wantonly in dancing curls.

“It is only with him that I can be safe,” she replied in a low voice. “He is well served because no one of the Si-Fan dare desert him—“

“Why? Whatever do you mean?”

Her hands clutched me nervously: she hid her face.

“There is an injection. It produces a living death—catalepsy. But there is an antidote too, which must be used once each two weeks. I have enough for one month more of life. Then—I should be buried for dead. Perhaps he would dig up my body: he has done such things before. No one else could save me—only Dr. Fu Manchu. And so, you see, with so many others I am just his helpless slave. Now, do you begin to understand?”

Begin to understand? My blood was boiling; yet my heart was cold. I remembered how I had tried to kill the Chinese ghoul, and realized that had I succeeded Ardatha would have been lost to me forever; that she . . . . But sanity forbade my following that train of thought to its dreadful conclusion.

Such a wild yearning overcame me, so mad a desire to hold and protect her from horrors unnameable, that, unwilled, mechanically, my arm went about her shoulders. She trembled slightly, but did not resist.

“You see”—the words were barely audible—”you must let me go. Forget Ardatha. Except by the will of Dr. Fu Manchu I can be nothing to you or to any man: I can only try to prevent him harming you.” She raised her eyes to me. “Please let me go.”

But I stood there, stricken motionless, gripped by anguish such as I had never known. My very faith in a just God was shaken by this revelation, by recognition of the fact that a fiend could use this perfect casket of a human soul as a laboratory experiment, reduce a beautiful woman, meant for love and happiness, to the level of a beast of burden—and escape the wrath of Heaven. I wondered if any lover since the world began had suffered such a moment.

Yet, Fu Manchu was mortal. There must be a way.

“I shall let you go, my dearest. But don’t accept the idea that it is for good. What has been done by one man can be undone by another.” I continued to speak quietly, and as I would have spoken to a frightened child. “Tell me first, why you came here?”

“For Jacob Bohm’s notes that he was making to give to the police,” she answered simply. “I have burned everything. Look—you can see the ashes on the fire.”

As she spoke, I understood why the fire had burned up so brightly. A glance was sufficient to convince me that not a fragment could be recovered.

“And when you leave here, where are you going?”

“It is impossible for me to tell you that. But there are servants of the Si-Fan watching this house.” (I thought of the yellow-faced man whom we had nearly run down.) “Even if you were cruel enough to try, you could not get me away. I think”—she hesitated, glanced swiftly up—”that tonight or in the early morning we leave for America.”

“America!”

“Yes.” She slipped free—for I had kept my arm about her shoulders. “I just could not bear to . . . say good- bye. Please, look away for only a moment—if you really care for my happiness: I beg of you!”

There was abandonment, despair, in her pleading voice. No man could have refused; and after all I was not a police officer.

I looked long and hungrily into those eyes which tonight were like twin amethysts, and walked across to the fire.

“I will try, I will try to see you again—to speak to you.” Only the faintest sound, a light tread on the stair, told me that Ardatha was gone . . . .

CHAPTER X

BARTON’S SECRET

“I don’t blame you, Kerrigan,” said Nayland Smith; “in fact I cannot see what else you could have done.”

“Damn it, nor can I!” growled Barton.

We were back in my flat, after a night of frustration for which, in part, I held myself responsible. Barton had admitted us. He had returned an hour earlier, having borrowed my key. The police had forced a way into the old warehouse; they were still searching it when I rejoined the party. The room, the very bench on which Dr. Oster’s corpse had lain, fragments of twine, they had found, but nothing else. The River was being dragged for the body.

That laboratory which smelt like the Morgue was below water level: it had been flooded. Only by means of elaborate pumping operations could we hope to learn what evidence still remained there of the nature of the Doctor’s mysterious, and merciless, experiments.

“Infernally narrow escape for both of us, Kerrigan,” said Sir Lionel; and crossing to the buffet he replenished his glass. “Good shot, that of yours.” He squirted soda water from a syphon. “I owe my life to you: you owe yours to Ardatha. Gad! there’s a girl! But what an impossible situation!”

Smith stood up, and passing, grasped my shoulder.

“Even worse situations have been dealt with,” he said.“I am wondering, Kerrigan, if you have recognized the