The Island of Fu Manchu

deadly, useless introspection I remained throughout the journey to Haiti. For the time all zest for the battle left me; and then it returned in the form of a cold resolution, If she were alive I would find her again; I would face the dreadful Chinese doctor who held her life in his hands, and accept any price which he exacted from me for her freedom—short of betraying my principles.

Many times I had opened the glass front of the box containing the shrivelled head, and had pressed the red control. It had remained silent. But these notes, actually written some time later, bring me to the occurrence which jolted me sharply back from a sort of fatalistic passivity to active interest in affairs of the moment.

We were quartered in a hotel in Port au Prince; not that in which The Snapping Fingers had appeared. Nayland Smith habitually eschewed official residences, preferring complete freedom of movement. The beauty of Haiti, its flowers and trees arid trailing vines; the gay-plumaged birds and painted butterflies; those sunsets passing from shell pink through every colour appreciated by the human eye into deep purple night: all formed but a gaudy background to my sorrow. For those purple nights, throughout which distant drums beat ceaselessly— remorselessly—to me seemed to be throbbing her name: Ardatha—Ardatha Can I ever forget the dark hours in Haiti?

Following such a spell of restless drum-haunted insomnia, I came downstairs one morning, a morning destined to be memorable.

One side of the dining-room opened upon a pleasant tropical garden in which palms mingled with star apple trees and flowering creepers which formed festoons from branch to branch and trellised the pillars against one of which our table was set. At this season, we had learned from the proprietor, business normally was slack; but as in Cristobal, the hotel was full. In fact, failing instructions sent to the American consul, I doubt if we should have secured accommodation. Even so, our party had been split up; and looking around, whilst making my way across to my friends, I recognized the fact that of the twelve or fifteen people present in the dining-room, there were at least four whom I had seen in Colon!

Taking my place at the table: “Are these spies following us, Smith?” I asked, wearily shaking out my napkin, “or are we following them?”

“The very thing, Kemgan,” said Barton in a whisper audible a hundred yards away, “which I have been asking Smith.”

“Neither,” Smith replied shortly. “But the position of the Allied forces in Europe is so critical that if action is to come from this side of the Atlantic, it must come soon. I don’t suggest that the British Empire is in danger; I mean that any other Power wishing to take a hand in the game must act now or never. The United States is not impregnable on the Carribbean front. At least one belligerent is watching, and possibly a “neutral5. Dr. Fu Manchu is watching all of them.” He pushed his plate aside and lighted a cigarette. “Had a good night, Kerrigan?”

“Not too good. Did you?”

“No. Those infernal drums.”

“Exactly.”

“I thought I was back in Africa,” growled Barton. “Felt that way the first time I landed here.”

“It is Africa,” said Smith shortly. “An African island in the Caribbean. Those drums which beat all through the night, near, and far, on hills and in the valleys—since we arrived, do you know what they have been saying?”

I stared at him perhaps a little vacantly.

“No,” I replied; “the language of African drums is a closed book to me.”

“It used to be to me.” He ceased speaking as a Haitian waiter placed grape fruit before me and withdrew. “But they use drums in Burma, you know—in fact, all over India. In my then capacity—Gad! it seems many years ago—I went out of my way to learn how messages were flashed quicker than the telegraph could work, quick as radio, from one end of the country to another. I picked up the elements, but I can’t claim to be an expert. When you and I were together”—he turned to Barton—”in Egypt, and afterwards on the business of the Mask of the Veiled Prophet, I tried to bring my information up to date, but the language of these negro drums is a different language. Nevertheless, I know what the drums are saying.”

“What?” I exclaimed. “They are notifying someone, somewhere, that we are here.

Every move we make, Kerrigan, is being signalled.”

“To Fu Manchu?” asked Barton.

Smith hesitated for a moment, puffing at his cigarette as though it had been a pipe; then: “I am not sure,” he returned slowly. “I have been here before, remember; my only other visit was a short one. But during the night I used to note the drum beats. And working upon what I knew of drum language I ultimately identified, or think I did, the note which meant myself.”

“Amazing!” exclaimed Barton. “I have a bundle of notes some three hundred pages long on drum language, but I don’t believe I could identify my own name in any of them.”

“I say,” said Smith, still speaking very slowly, “that I am not sure. But I formed the impression at that time, and later events have strengthened it, that the drummers were not speaking to Dr. Fu Manchu. We can roughly identify the Doctor by his deeds. We know, for example, that The Snapping Fingers is operated by Dr. Fu Manchu. We know that the padding footsteps, the Shadow which comes and goes, is controlled by him. It was this Shadow which penetrated to our quarters in Colon and put opium in your whisky. The same Shadow which, unseen by the police officer, substituted a packed of drugged cigarettes for those which temporarily lay upon a ledge beside him. To these phenomena we must add now the Green Hand. But more and more, I find myself thinking about the woman called Queen Mamaloi—”

He paused, laid his cigarette down, and: “Good God!” he exclaimed.

An envelope had appeared upon the table beside his plate. No waiter was near. The next occupied table—for Smith had recognized the presence of a number of agents in the hotel—was well removed from ours.

“It came from the garden path there,” spluttered Barton. “I positively saw it blow up.”

I had merely seen it drop beside the plate. I remained silent, dumbfounded. Smith’s jaw muscles became very prominent, but he hesitated only a moment, and then with a table knife he split the envelope. He read aloud in a perfectly toneless voice:

SECOND NOTICE.

The Council of Seven of the Si-Fan point out that no reply has been received to its First Notice. Two Powers have opened negotiations with the Council relative to a readjustment of naval forces in the Caribbean and Panama waters. A copy of this Second Notice has been sent to Washington. You have three days.

President of the Council.

CHAPTER XXVII

FATHER AMBROSE

Father ambrose, s.j., arrived immediately after breakfast Father Ambrose had been recommended to Smith by Colonel Kennard Wood as one who knew more about Haiti than any other white resident. He was a stout, amiable-looking cleric, wearing glasses and carrying a heavy blackthome. He had a notably musical voice; and his rather sleepy eyes held a profound knowledge of men and their affairs.

The meeting took place in Smith’s room—as this was the largest; and he, having cordially welcomed the priest, broached the real business of the interview with a strange question: “Are you acquainted. Father Ambrose, with the superstition of the Zombie” Dead men who are dug up and restored to a sort of life?”

“Certainly,” the priest replied, in that rich, easy voice, “t is no superstition—it is a fact.”

“You mean that?” Barton challenged.

“I mean it. You see, these dead are not really dead; they are buried alive. These people, I mean the exponents of Voodoo, are acquainted with some kind of poison, or so I read it, which produces catalepsy. In this condition the victims are buried and their identities lost. They are then secretly dug up again and restored in the form of that dreadful creature—a Zombie. Personality has gone; in fact one would say that the soul had gone. They are entirely under the control of the Voodoo doctor.”

“You see, Kerrigan,” snapped Smith, “Dr. Fu Manchu” is not the only man who knows this strange secret.”

“I have heard of Dr. Fu Manchu,” said the priest, “but to my knowledge he has never been in Haiti.”

“That,” said Barton, “e shall make it our business to find out.”