The Island of Fu Manchu

“I personally visited the neighbourhood. It was then that Police Commissioner Nayland Smith (now Sir Denis) first crossed my path. The incidence was particularly marked in the zayats, or rest houses, along this route. It was near one of them that I found my first specimen. These were the creatures responsible.”

He moved on.

I knew, as I followed the high-shouldered figure, and his yellow guard followed me, that I was in the company of a scientist greater than any whose fame fills whole pages of encyclopedias. He had the intellect of a Shakespeare and the soul of Satan. When he paused again I grew physically sick. He scratched with his long nails upon the front of a case littered with birds’ feathers and fragments of limbs and claws.

From a sort of clay nest there sprang out the most gigantic black spider I had ever seen: Indeed, I had not supposed such a spider to exist. Its hairy legs were as thick as a man’s finger; its body was at large as an orange. I could see the eyes of this horror—watching me.

“The Soldier Spider, found in Sumatra. He instantly attacks any intruder; and his bite is fatal in thirty-five seconds. There is a female in the nest. I have succeeded in isolating the neurotoxin which distinguishes this insect’s venom: it is new to science.”

He turned from the glass cases and walked to a low wall which surrounded a pit in the centre of the place. In obedience to a guttural command, the Burman switched on a group of suspended lights. I became aware of a miasmatic smell, and I looked down into a miniature swamp. The interior walls were smoothly polished. I saw unfamiliar aquatic plants and a surface of green slime.

“Particularly note the fem-like grass growing on the margins. Some of this was introduced among the roses which decorated Colonel Kennard Wood’s apartment at the Prado in New York. Hoemadipsa zeylanica has an affinity for this grass, from which it is not readily distinguishable. Before feeding, this creature resembles a fragment of string or a bristle from a brush. These examples actually come from a swampy area south of Port au Prince and are much larger, more active and voracious than any I have examined.”

He gave an abrupt order. From a sort of cupboard the Burman took out the body of a newly-slain kid and attached it to the hook of a tackle fitted over the pit. He lowered the kid to a point some six feet above the scum and marginal plants, when it began to spin slowly.

“Hoemadipsa works in the dark,” mutteredDr. Fu Manchu. All the lights went out. “Listen!”

Scarcely had he hissed the word when I heard again that evil thing—The Snapping Fingers!

“Now watch, and you will see them.”

Lights sprang up; and I saw a strange, a revolting sight.One has seen caterpillars arch their bodies in moving forward; now, I saw a number of pale, slender things some two inches in length arching their threadlike bodies all over the suspended carcase. But in this case the movement served a different purpose. One by one they sprang back to the long feather grass, each spring creating a sound almost exactly like that of snapping fingers!

“They shun light. Even when feeding, they drop off if light disturbs the feast. The largest land-leech known to me, Mr. Kerrigan. When sated, they can, nevertheless, compress themselves in such a way that they can pass through very narrow apertures—such as between the slats of a shutter . . . .”

He proceeded to details so nauseating that once more I became fighting mad and turned on him, fists clenched. I met a glance from full-opened green eyes which checked me like a blow.

“Anticipating a further display of Celtic berserker, ordered a guard to attend me.One more attempted assault, and I shall order him to throw you into the pit, and to extinguish the lights.”

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE SUBTERRANEAN HARBOUR

I looked along a stone passage, or tunnel, which was patently illuminated: I mean that the effect was of a badly-lighted arcade. An insidious acceptance of fatality, of the hopelessness of this fight, was beginning to prevail. Smith had told me many things about the power behind Dr. Fu Manchu, of the resources of the Si-Fan; but I had not properly appreciated his words. Here, in this veritable town concealed behind the sisal factory, I grasped some part of their significance.

“You may wonder—indeed, you are wondering—why I take you so closely into my confidence,” said Dr. Fu Manchu. “This will be made clear, later. No doubt you have appreciated the fact that my daughter, known as Korean!, a second time, under certain influence, has presumed to challenge me. Her part, as the Queen Mamaloi, she has successfully played for nearly two years, and has enslaved the Voodoo elements of the Republic. She has, naturally, access to the higher secrets of the creed and therefore control of its devotees. Follow.”

But I had followed no more than three paces, when I paused.

The luminous patches which I have mentioned were due to the presence of a series of crystal coffins (I cannot otherwise describe them) each having a shaded light directed upon it. In these, bolt upright, their glassy eyes staring dreadfully before them, I saw men and women—some of whom I remembered to have seen “smelt out” by the Sword Bearer at the Voodoo temple!

“Follow,” Fu Manchu rasped.

I had been standing astounded before the figure of the handsome Negro who had passed Smith and myself on the mountain road. Unashamed, in statuesque nakedness he glared out at me from his glass sarcophagus.

“They are all—dead.”

“On the contrary, Mr. Kerrigan, they are all alive.”

Before one sarcophagus containing the rigid form of a mulatto, a young man with a fine head and intellectual brow, Dr. Fu Manchu raised his claw-like hands and shook them frienziedly before the glass. He poured out a torrent of vituperation in the Haitian dialect, his voice rising shrilly, demoniacally, as once I had heard it raised before. These outbursts from one normally more imperturbable than any man I had known, inclined me to believe that Smith was right. Smith had maintained for many years that in the case of the Chinese Doctor genius had overstepped the narrow borderland—that Fu Manchu was insane.

He laughed and turned away. It was an appalling exhibition.

“Do not suppose, Mr. Kerrigan,” he said, “that I waste my words. They can see—they can hear.”

“What!” I exclaimed.

“They cannot move an eyelid. That mongrel, and the man Lou Cabot, who was conveniently stabbed by his mistress in Colon, were prime movers in the conspiracy against me. The woman you know as Koreani—my daughter—seduced him from his vows: he was a man who would sell his soul for a woman. It was she who conceived the idea that by seizing your charming friend, Ardatha, the offensive of Sir Denis Nayland Smith might be checked. I suffered her intrigues against me right up to the meeting at Morne la Selle. And there I gathered to me all the pitiful conspirators. Here is the chief criminal.”

And, in the last of the glass coffins, or the last one illuminated, I saw Koreani!

She stood exactly as I remembered her standing before the door of the Voodoo temple, her arms beside her, her hands clenched; those brilliant eyes, which were so strangely like the eyes of Fu Manchu, staring straight before her: an ivory goddess. Beginning almost in a whisper Fu Manchu addressed her. He spoke in Chinese, and as he spoke, his voice rose stage by stage, until again it reached that pitch of wild frenzy; his long fingers twitched, closing upon the air as if he would have strangled this perfect outcome of his union with an unknown mother. Then he turned away.

In obedience to a short command, the Burman pressed a button in the wall at the end of the vault-like corridor. A door opened and I saw an elevator.

“Follow!”

I followed Dr. Fu Manchu; the yellow man entered last, closed the gates, and the elevator began to descend. This proximity to Fu Manchu was almost unendurable. He spoke again softly, unemotionally: “The entrance discovered and used by Christophe, the black king, is unknown. According to an ancient chart in the possession of your inquisitive friend. Sir Lionel Barton, it was masked by the erection of a chapel on a hillside some miles away. My inquiries there did not enable me to find it, but as a precautionary measure, I destroyed me chapel.” The lift continued to drop. “My own entrance—a volcanic fissure in the ravine below the brow of the Citadel—was discovered by accident. This fissure I have effectively blocked, and the shaft by which we are now descending strikes it at a point a hundred and fifty feet east of the original entrance. From thence a sort of path exists down the wall of the cavern itself. It is a tedious journey. I avoided it when I had this lift installed by Mr. Perrywell, one of