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- Herausgeber: Titan Books
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
Dr. Petrie's expertise is called upon when a deadly plague begins to ravage the French Riveria. Accompanying him on his trip is his friend, the botanist Alan Sterling. As Petrie and Sir Dennis Nayland Smith struggle to contain the horror, Sterling cannot stop thinking of the mysterious Fleurette, unaware that the beautiful girl he chanced upon was raised by the emperor of evil himself, Dr. Fu Manchu.
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“Without Fu-Manchu we wouldn’t have Dr. No, Doctor Doom or Dr. Evil. Sax Rohmer created the first truly great evil mastermind. Devious, inventive, complex, and fascinating. These novels inspired a century of great thrillers!”
Jonathan Maberry, New York Times bestselling author of Assassin’s Code and Patient Zero
“The true king of the pulp mystery is Sax Rohmer—and the shining ruby in his crown is without a doubt his Fu-Manchu stories.”
James Rollins, New York Times bestselling author of The Devil Colony
“Fu-Manchu remains the definitive diabolical mastermind of the 20th Century. Though the arch-villain is ‘the Yellow Peril incarnate,’ Rohmer shows an interest in other cultures and allows his protagonist a complex set of motivations and a code of honor which often make him seem a better man than his Western antagonists. At their best, these books are very superior pulp fiction... at their worst, they’re still gruesomely readable.”
Kim Newman, award-winning author of Anno Dracula
“Sax Rohmer is one of the great thriller writers of all time! Rohmer created in Fu-Manchu the model for the super-villains of James Bond, and his hero Nayland Smith and Dr. Petrie are worthy stand-ins for Holmes and Watson... though Fu-Manchu makes Professor Moriarty seem an under-achiever.”
Max Allan Collins, New York Times bestselling author of The Road to Perdition
“I grew up reading Sax Rohmer’s Fu-Manchu novels, in cheap paperback editions with appropriately lurid covers. They completely entranced me with their vision of a world constantly simmering with intrigue and wildly overheated ambitions. Even without all the exotic detail supplied by Rohmer’s imagination, I knew full well that world wasn’t the same as the one I lived in... For that alone, I’m grateful for all the hours I spent chasing around with Nayland Smith and his stalwart associates, though really my heart was always on their intimidating opponent’s side.”
K. W. Jeter, acclaimed author of Infernal Devices
“A sterling example of the classic adventure story, full of excitement and intrigue. Fu-Manchu is up there with Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, and Zorro—or more precisely with Professor Moriarty, Captain Nemo, Darth Vader, and Lex Luthor—in the imaginations of generations of readers and moviegoers.”
Charles Ardai, award-winning novelist and founder of Hard Case Crime
“I love Fu-Manchu, the way you can only love the really GREAT villains. Though I read these books years ago he is still with me, living somewhere deep down in my guts, between Professor Moriarty and Dracula, plotting some wonderfully hideous revenge against an unsuspecting mankind.”
Mike Mignola, creator of Hellboy
“Fu-Manchu is one of the great villains in pop culture history, insidious and brilliant. Discover him if you dare!”
Christopher Golden, New York Times bestselling co-author of Baltimore: The Plague Ships
“Insidious fun from out of the past. Evil as always, Fu-Manchu reviles as well as thrills us.”
Joe R. Lansdale, recipient of the Horror Writers Association Lifetime Achievement Award
THE COMPLETE FU-MANCHU SERIES BY SAX ROHMER
Available now from Titan Books:
THE MYSTERY OF DR. FU-MANCHU
THE RETURN OF DR. FU-MANCHU
THE HAND OF DR. FU-MANCHU
DAUGHTER OF FU-MANCHU
THE MASK OF FU-MANCHU
Coming soon from Titan Books:
THE TRAIL OF FU-MANCHU
PRESIDENT FU-MANCHU
THE DRUMS OF FU-MANCHU
THE ISLAND OF FU-MANCHU
THE SHADOW OF FU-MANCHU
RE-ENTER FU-MANCHU
EMPEROR FU-MANCHU
THE WRATH OF FU-MANCHU
THE BRIDE OFDR. FU-MANCHU
SAX ROHMER
TITAN BOOKS
THE BRIDE OF FU-MANCHU
Print edition ISBN: 9780857686084
E-book edition ISBN: 9780857686749
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First published as a novel in the UK by William Collins & Co. Ltd, 1931
First published as a novel in the US by Doubleday, Doran, 1932
First Titan Books edition: June 2013
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
The Authors Guild and the Society of Authors assert the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
Copyright © 2013 The Authors Guild and the Society of Authors
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Frontispiece illustration by John Richard Flanagan, detail from an illustration for “The Unsullied Mirror,” first appearing in Collier’s Weekly, June 24 1933. Special thanks to Dr. Lawrence Knapp for the illustrations as they appeared on “The Page of Fu-Manchu” - www.njedge.net/~knapp/FuFrames.htm
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
Contents
Chapter One: Fleurette
Chapter Two: A Purple Cloud
Chapter Three: The Bloodstained Leaves
Chapter Four: Squinting Eyes
Chapter Five: The Black Stigmata
Chapter Six: “654”
Chapter Seven: Ivory Fingers
Chapter Eight: “Beware”
Chapter Nine: Fah Lo Suee
Chapter Ten: Green Eyes
Chapter Eleven: At the Villa Jasmin
Chapter Twelve: Mimosa
Chapter Thirteen: The Formula
Chapter Fourteen: In Monte Carlo
Chapter Fifteen: Fairy Trumpet
Chapter Sixteen: The Dacoit
Chapter Seventeen: The Room of Glass
Chapter Eighteen: Dr. Fu-Manchu
Chapter Nineteen: The Secret Jungle
Chapter Twenty: Dream Creatures
Chapter Twenty-One: The Hairless Man
Chapter Twenty-Two: Half-World
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Jade Pipe
Chapter Twenty-Four: Companion Yamamata
Chapter Twenty-Five: The Life Principle
Chapter Twenty-Six: The Orchid
Chapter Twenty-Seven: In the Galleries
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Evil Incarnate
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Pursuit
Chapter Thirty: Nayland Smith
Chapter Thirty-One: Fu-Manchu’s Army
Chapter Thirty-Two: Recall
Chapter Thirty-Three: I Obey
Chapter Thirty-Four: Derceto
Chapter Thirty-Five: The Section Doors
Chapter Thirty-Six: The Unsullied Mirror
Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Glass Mask
Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Glass Mask (Concluded)
Chapter Thirty-Nine: Search in Ste Claire
Chapter Forty: The Secret Dock
Chapter Forty-One: “I Saw the Sun”
Chapter Forty-Two: The Raid
Chapter Forty-Three: KarâManèH’s Daughter
Chapter Forty-Four: Officer of the Prefét
Chapter Forty-Five: On The Destroyer
Chapter Forty-Six: We Board The Lola
Chapter Forty-Seven: Dr. Petrie
Chapter Forty-Eight: “It Means Extradition”
Chapter Forty-Nine: Maître Foli
Chapter Fifty: “The Work Goes On”
About the Author
Appreciating Doctor Fu-Manchu
“Fah Lo Suee’s slender body seemed to diminish. She sank down until her head touched the carpet.”
CHAPTER ONE
FLEURETTE
All the way around the rugged headland, and beyond, as I sat at the wheel of the easy-running craft, I found myself worrying about Petrie. He was supposed to be looking after me. I thought that somebody should be looking after him. He took his responsibilities with a deadly seriousness; and this strange epidemic which had led the French authorities to call upon his expert knowledge was taxing him to the limit. At luncheon I thought he had looked positively ill; but he had insisted upon returning to his laboratory.
He seemed to imagine that the reputation of the Royal Society was in his keeping...
I had hoped that the rockbound cove which I had noted would afford harbourage for the motorboat. Nevertheless, I was pleasantly surprised when I found that it did.
The little craft made safe, I waded in and began to swim through nearly still water around that smaller promontory beyond which lay the bay and beach of Ste Claire de la Roche. Probably a desire to test my fitness underlay the job; if I could not explore Ste Claire from the land side, I was determined to invade it, nevertheless.
The water was quite warm, and it had that queer odour of stagnation peculiar to this all but tideless sea. I swam around the point, and twenty yards out from the beach my feet touched bottom.
At the same moment I saw her...
She was seated on the smooth sand, her back towards me, and she was combing her hair. As I stumbled, groped, and began to make my way inland, I told myself that this sole inhabitant of Ste Claire was probably one of those fabulous creatures, a mermaid—or, should I say, a siren.
I halted, wading ashore, and watched her.
Her arms, her shoulders, and her back were beautiful. Riviera salt and sun had tanned her to a most delectable shade of brown. Her wavy hair was of a rich red mahogany colour. This was all I could see of the mermaid from my position in the sea.
I made the shore without disturbing her.
It became apparent, then, that she was not a mermaid; a pair of straight, strong, and very shapely brown legs discredited the mermaid theory. She was a human girl with a perfect figure and glorious hair, wearing one of those bathing suits fashionable in Cannes...
What it was, at this moment, which swamped admiration and brought fear—which urged me to go back—to go back—I could not imagine. I fought against this singular revulsion, reminding myself that I was newly convalescent from a dangerous illness. This alone, I argued, accounted for the sudden weird chill which had touched me.
Why, otherwise, should I be afraid of a pretty girl?
I moved forward.
And as I began to walk up the gently sloping beach she heard me and turned.
I found myself staring, almost in a frightened way, at the most perfect face I thought I had ever seen. Those arms and shoulders were so daintily modelled that I had been prepared for disillusionment: instead, I found glamour.
She was bronzed by the sun, and, at the moment, innocent of make-up. She had most exquisitely chiselled features. Her lips were slightly parted showing the whitest little teeth. Big, darkly fringed eyes—and they were blue as the Mediterranean—were opened widely, as if my sudden appearance had alarmed her.
I may have dreamed, as some men do, of flawless beauty, but I had never expected to meet it; when:
“How did you get here?” the vision asked and rolled over onto one elbow, looking up at me.
Her voice had a melodious resonance which suggested training, and her cool acceptance of my appearance helped to put me more at ease.
“I just swam ashore,” I replied. “I hope I didn’t frighten you?”
“Nothing frightens me,” she answered in that cool, low tone, her unflinching eyes—the eyes of a child, but of a very clever and very inquisitive child—fixed upon me. “I was certainly surprised.”
“I’m sorry. I suppose I should have warned you.”
Her steady regard never wavered; it was becoming disconcerting. She was quite young, as the undisguised contours of her body revealed, but about her very beauty there hovered some aura of mysteriousness which her typically nonchalant manner could not dispel. Then, suddenly, I saw, and it greatly relieved me to see, a tiny dimple appear in her firm round chin. She smiled—and her smile made me her slave.
“Please explain,” she said; “this isn’t an accident, is it?”
“No,” I confessed; “it’s a plot.”
She shifted to a more easy position, resting both elbows on the sand and cupping her chin in two hands.
“What do you mean ‘a plot’?” she asked, suddenly serious again.
I sat down, peculiarly conscious of my angular ugliness.
“I wanted to have a look at Ste Claire,” I replied. “It used to be open to inspection and it’s a spot of some historical interest. I found the road barred. And I was told that a certain Mahdi Bey had bought the place and had seen fit to close it to the public. I heard that the enclosed property ran down to the sea, so I explored and saw this little bay.”
“And what were you going to do?” she asked, looking me over in a manner which struck me as almost supercilious.
“Well...” I hesitated, hoping for another smile. “I had planned to climb up to Ste Claire, and if I should be discovered, explain that I had been carried away by the current which works around the headland and been compelled to swim ashore.”
I watched eagerly for the dimple. But no dimple came. Instead, I saw a strange, faraway expression creep over the girl’s face. In some odd manner it transformed her; spiritually, she seemed to have withdrawn—to a great distance, to another land; almost, I thought, to another world. Her youth, her remarkable beauty, were transfigured as though by the occult brush of a dead master. Momentarily, I experienced again that insane desire to run away.
Then she spoke. Her phrases were commonplace enough, but her voice too was far away; her eyes seemed to be looking right through me, to be fixed upon some very distant object.
“You sound enterprising,” she said. “What is your name?”
“Alan Sterling,” I answered, with a start.
I had an uncanny feeling that the question had not come from the girl herself, although her lips framed the words.
“I suppose you live somewhere near here?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Alan Sterling,” she repeated; “isn’t that Scotch?”
“Yes, my father was a Scotsman—Dr. Andrew Sterling—but he settled in the Middle West of America, where I was born.”
The mahogany curls were shaken violently. It was, I thought, an act of rebellion against that fey mood which had claimed her. She rose to her knees, confronting me; her fingers played with the sand. The rebellion had succeeded. She seemed to have drawn near again, to have become human and adorable. Her next words confirmed my uncanny impression that in mind and spirit she had really been far away.
“Did you say you were American?” she asked.
Rather uncomfortably I answered:
“I was born in America. But I took my degree in Edinburgh, so that really I don’t quite know what I am.”
“Don’t you?”
She sank down upon the sand, looking like a lovely idol.
“And now please tell me your name,” I said; “I have told you mine.”
“Fleurette.”
“But Fleurette what?”
“Fleurette nothing. Just Fleurette.”
“But, Mahdi Bey—”
I suppose my thoughts were conveyed without further words, for:
“Mahdi Bey,” Fleurette replied, “is—”
And then she ceased abruptly. Her glance strayed away somewhere over my shoulder. I had a distinct impression that she was listening—listening intently for some distant sound.
“Mahdi Bey,” I prompted.
Fleurette glanced at me swiftly.
“Really, Mr. Sterling,” she said, “I must run. I mustn’t be caught talking to you.”
“Why?” I exclaimed. “I was hoping you would show me over Ste Claire.”
She shook her head almost angrily.
“As you came out of the sea, please go back again. You can’t come with me.”
“I don’t understand why—”
“Because it would be dangerous.”
Composedly she tucked a comb back into a bag which lay upon the sand beside her, picked up a bathing cap, and stood up.
“You don’t seem to bother about the possibility of my being drowned!”
“You have a motorboat just around the headland,” she replied, glancing at me over one golden shoulder. “I heard your engine.” This was a revelation.
“No wonder you weren’t frightened when I came ashore.”
“I am never frightened. In fact, I am rather inhuman, in all sorts of ways. Did you ever hear of Derceto?”
Her abrupt changes of topics, as of moods, were bewildering, but:
“Vaguely,” I answered. “Wasn’t she a sort of fish goddess?”
“Yes. Think of me, not as Fleurette, but as Derceto. Then you may understand.”
The words conveyed nothing at the time, although I was destined often to think about them, later. And what I should have said next I don’t know. But the whole of my thoughts, which were chaotic, became suddenly focused... upon a sound.
To this day I find myself unable to describe it, although, as will presently appear, before a very long time had elapsed I was called upon to do so. It more closely resembled the note of a bell than anything else—yet it was not the note of a bell. It was incredibly high. It seemed at once to come from everywhere and from nowhere. A tiny sound it was, but of almost unendurable sweetness: it might be likened to a fairy trumpet blown close beside one’s ear.
I started violently, looking all around me. And as I did so, Fleurette, giving me no parting word, no glance, darted away!
Amazed beyond words, I watched her slim brown figure bounding up a rocky path, until, at a bend high above, Fleurette became invisible. She never once looked back.
And then—the desire to get away, and as soon as possible, from the beach of Ste Claire de la Roche claimed me again, urgently...
CHAPTER TWO
A PURPLE CLOUD
When presently I climbed on board the motorboat and pushed off, I found myself to be in a state of nervous excitement. But as I headed back for the landing place below Petrie’s tiny villa, I grew more and more irritated by my memories.
Fleurette was not only the most delightful but also the most mysterious creature who had ever crossed my path; and the more I thought about her, reviewing that odd conversation, the nearer I drew to what seemed to be an unavoidable conclusion. Of course, she had been lying to me—acting the whole time. A beautiful girl in the household of a wealthy Egyptian—in what capacity was she there?
Common sense supplied the answer. It was one I hated to accept—but I could see no alternative. The queer sound which had terminated that stolen interview, I preferred not to think about. It didn’t seem to fit in...
As I secured the boat to the ring and started a long, hot climb up to the Villa Jasmin, I found myself wondering if I should ever see Fleurette again, and, more particularly, if she wanted to see me.
I supposed Mme Dubonnet had gone into the village to do her midday shopping, which included an aperitif with one of her cronies outside a certain little café. Petrie I knew would be hard at work in the laboratory at the bottom of the garden.
Mixing myself a cool drink, I sat down on the flower-draped verandah and allowed my glance to stray over the well-stocked little kitchen-garden. Beyond and below were more flower-covered walls and red roofs breaking through the green of palm and vine, and still beyond was a distant prospect of the jewel-like Mediterranean.
I reflected that this was a very pleasant spot in which to recuperate. And then I began to think about Fleurette...
No doubt my swim had overtired me, but stretched out there in a deck-chair, the hot sun making my skin tingle agreeably, I presently fell asleep. And almost immediately, as I suppose, I began to dream.
I dreamed that I lay in just such a deck-chair, under an equally hot sun, on a balcony or platform of an incredibly high building. I have since decided that it was the Empire State Building in New York. I was endowed with telescopic vision. Other great buildings there were, with mile after mile of straight avenues stretching away to the distant sea.
The sky was sapphire blue, and a heat haze danced over the great city which lay at my feet.
Then there came a curious, high sound. It reminded me of something I had heard before—but of something which in my dream I could not place. A cloud appeared, no larger than my hand, on the horizon, miles and miles away—over that blue ocean. It was a purple cloud; and it spread out, fan-wise, and the sections of the fan grew ever larger. So that, presently, half of the sky was shadowed.
And then a tiny glittering point, corresponding, I thought, to the spot where the hinge of this purple shadow-fan should have been, I saw a strange jewel. The fan continued to open, to obscure more and more the sky.
It was advancing towards me, this shadowy thing; and now the jewel took shape.
I saw that it was a dragon, or sea serpent, moving at incredible speed towards me. Upon its awful crested head a man rode. He wore a yellow robe which, in the light focused upon him, for the sun was away to my left as I dreamed, became a golden robe.
His yellow face glittered also, like gold, and he wore a cap surmounted by some kind of gleaming bead. He was, I saw, a Chinaman.
And I thought that his face had the majesty of Satan—that this was the Emperor of the Underworld come to claim a doomed city.
So much I saw, and then I realized that the dragon carried a second rider: a woman, robed in queenly white and wearing a jewelled diadem. Her beauty dazzled me, seeming more than human. But I knew her...
It was Fleurette.
The purple shadow-fan obscured all the sky, and complete darkness came. The darkness reached me, and where there had been sunshine was shadow. I shuddered and opened my eyes, staring up, rather wildly, I suppose.
Dr. Petrie had just stepped on to the verandah. His shadow touched me where I lay.
“Hullo, Sterling,” he said briskly. “What’s wrong? Been overdoing it again?”
I struggled upright. Then, in a moment, I became fully awake. And as I looked up at Petrie, seated on the low wall beside a big wine jar which had been converted into a flower pot, I realized that this was a very sick man.
He wore no hat, and his dark hair, liberally streaked with grey, was untidy—which I knew to be unusual. He was smoking a cigarette and staring at me in that penetrating way which medical men cultivate. But his eyes were unnaturally bright, although deep shadows lay beneath them.
“Been for a swim,” I replied; “Fell asleep and dreamed horribly.”
Dr. Petrie shook his head and knocked ash from his cigarette into the soil in the wine jar.
“Blackwater fever plays hell even with a constitution like yours,” he replied gravely. “Really, Sterling, you mustn’t take liberties for a while.”
In pursuit of my profession, that of an orchid hunter, I had been knocked out by a severe attack of blackwater on the Upper Amazon. My native boys left me where I lay, and I owed my life to a German prospector who, guided by kindly Providence, found me and brought me down to Manaos.
“Liberties be damned, doctor,” I growled, standing up to mix him a drink. “If ever a man took liberties with his health, that man is yourself! You’re worked to death!”
“Listen,” he said, checking me. “Forget me and my health. I’m getting seriously worried.”
“Not another case?”
He nodded.
“Admitted early this morning.”
“Who is it this time?”
“Another open-air worker, Sterling, a jobbing gardener. He was working in a villa, leased by some Americans, as a matter of fact, on the slope just this side of Ste Claire de la Roche—”
“Ste Claire de la Roche?” I echoed.
“Yes—the place you are so keen to explore.”
“D’you think you can save him?”
He frowned doubtfully.
“Cartier and the other French doctors are getting in a perfect panic,” he replied. “If the truth leaks out, the Riviera will be deserted. And they know it! I’m rather pessimistic myself. I lost another patient today.”
“What!”
Petrie ran his fingers through his hair.
“You see,” he went on, “diagnosis is so tremendously difficult. I found trypanasomes in the blood of the first patient I examined here; and although I never saw a tsetse fly in France, I was forced to diagnose sleeping sickness. I risked Bayer’s 205”—he smiled modestly—“with one or two modifications of my own; and by some miracle the patient pulled through.”
“Why a miracle? It’s the accepted treatment, isn’t it?”
He stared at me, and I thought how haggard he looked.
“It’s one of ’em,” he replied, “for sleeping sickness. But this was not sleeping sickness!”
“What!”
“Hence the miracle. You see, I made cultures; and under the microscope they gave me a shock. I discovered that these parasites didn’t really conform to any species so far classified. They were members of the sleeping sickness family, but new members. Then— just before the death of another patient at the hospital—I made a great discovery, on which I have been working ever since—”
“Overworking!”
“Forget it.” He was carried away by his subject. “D’you know what I found, Sterling? I found bacillus pestis adhering to one of the parasites!”
“Bacillus pestis?”
“Plague!”
“Good God!”
“But—here’s the big point: the trypanasomes (the parasites which cause sleeping sickness) were a new variety, as I have mentioned. So was the plague bacillus. It presented obviously new features! Crowning wonder—although you may not appreciate it—parasite and bacillus affiliated and working in perfect harmony!”
“You’ve swamped me, doctor,” I confessed. “But I have a hazy idea that there’s something tremendous behind this.”
“Tremendous? There’s something awful. Nature is upsetting her own laws—as we know them.”
This, from Dr. Petrie, gave me something to think about.
My father had been invited to lecture at Edinburgh—his old university—during Petrie’s first year, and a close friendship had sprung up between the keen student and the visiting lecturer. They had corresponded ever since.
During my own Edinburgh days the doctor was established in practice in Cairo; but I spent part of one vacation as his guest in London. And another fast friendship resulted. He had returned from Egypt on that occasion to receive the medal of the Royal Society for his researches in tropical medicine. I remember how disappointed I had been to learn that his wife, of whose charm I had heard many rumours, was not accompanying him on this flying journey.
His present visit—also intended to be a brief one—had been prolonged at the urgent request of the French authorities. Petrie’s reputation had grown greater with the passage of years, and learning that he was in London, they had begged him to look into this strange epidemic which threatened southern France, placing the Villa Jasmin at his disposal...
Three weeks later I was invalided home from Brazil. Petrie, who had had the news from my father, met the ship at Lisbon and carried me off to the Villa Jasmin to recuperate under his own watchful eye.
I fear I had proved to be a refractory patient.
“You didn’t see the other case, did you?” Petrie asked suddenly.
“No.”
“Well.” He set down his glass. “I wish you would come along to the hospital with me. You must have met with some queer diseases on the Amazon, and you know the Uganda sleeping sickness. There’s this awful grin—proof of some sort of final paroxysm—and particularly what Cartier calls the black stigmata. Your bulb hunting has taken you into a few unwholesome places; have you ever come across anything like it?”
I began to fill my pipe. “Never, doctor,” I replied.
The sound of a distant gun boomed through the hot silence. A French battleship was entering Villefranche Harbour...
CHAPTER THREE
THE BLOODSTAINED LEAVES
“Good God! It’s ghastly! Cover him up again, doctor. I shall dream of that face.”
I found myself wondering why Providence, though apparently beneficent, should permit such horrors to visit poor humanity. The man in the little mortuary—he had been engaged in a local vineyard—had not yet reached middle age when this new and dreadful pestilence had cut him off.
“This,” said Petrie, “is the really singular feature.”
He touched the dead man’s forehead. It was of a dark purple colour from the scalp to the brows. The sun-browned face was set in a grin of dreadful malignancy and the eyes were rolled upward so that only their whites showed.
“What I have come to recognize as the characteristic sign,” Petrie added. “Subcutaneous haemorrhage; but strangely localized. It’s like a purple shadow, isn’t it? And when it reaches the eyes—finish.”
“What a ghastly face! I have seen nothing like it anywhere!”
We came out.
“Nor have I!” Petrie confessed. “The earlier symptoms are closely allied with those of sleeping sickness but extraordinarily rapid in their stages. Glandular swellings always in the armpit. This final stage—the black stigmata, the purple shadow, which I have managed to avert in some of the other cases, is quite beyond my experience. That’s where plague comes in.
“But now for the most mysterious thing of all—in which I am hoping you can really help me...”
If anyone had invited me to name Dr. Petrie’s outstanding characteristic, I should have said “modesty.”
Having run the car into its garage, Petrie led the way down the steep rocky path to a shed a hundred yards from the villa, which he had fitted up as a laboratory.
We entered. The laboratory was really an enlarged gardener’s hut which the absent owner of Villa Jasmin had converted into a small studio. It had a glass window running along the whole of one side. A white-topped table now occupied a great part of the space before it, and there was a working bench in a corner opposite the door. In racks were rows of test tubes, each bearing a neatly written label, and there were files of specimen slides near the big microscope.
I noted the new pane of glass in a section of window which had been cut out one night less than a month ago when some strange burglar had broken in and explored the place. Since that time Petrie had had steel shop-blinds fitted to the interior of the windows, which could be closed and locked at night.
He had never secured any clue to the identity of the intruder or formed any reasonable theory as to what his object could have been.
At that moment, several of the windows were open, and sunlight streamed into the place. There was a constant humming of bees in the garden outside. Petrie took up a little sealed tube, removed the stopper, and shook out the contents of the tube into a glass tray. He turned to me, a strange expression upon his haggard brown face.
“Can you identify this, Sterling?” he asked. “It’s more in your line than in mine.”
I found it to consist of several bruised leaves, originally reddish purple in colour, attached to long stalks. I took up a lens and examined them carefully, the doctor watching me in silence. I saw, now, that there were pollen-like fragments adhering to a sticky substance exuded by the leaves.
There were some curious brown blotches, too, which at first I took to be part of the colouring, but which closer examination showed to be due to a stain.
“It’s drosophyllum,” I murmured, “one of the fly-catching varieties, but a tropical species I have not come across before.”
Petrie did not interrupt me, and:
“There are stains of what looks like dark brown mud,” I went on, “and minute shiny fragments of what might be pollen—”
“It isn’t pollen,” Petrie broke in. “It’s bits of the wing and body of some very hairy insect. But what I’m anxious to know, Sterling, is this—”
I put down the lens and turned to the speaker curiously. His expression was grimly serious.
“Should you expect to find that plant in Europe?”
“No, it isn’t a European variety. It could not possibly grow even as far north as this.”
“Good. That point is settled.”
“How do you account for the stains?”
“I don’t know how to account for them,” Petrie replied slowly, “but I have found out what they are.”
“What are they?”
“Blood!—and what’s more, human blood.”
“Human blood!”
I stopped, at a loss for words.
“I can see I am puzzling you, Sterling. Let me try to explain.” Petrie replaced the fragments in the tube and sealed it down tightly.
“It occurred to me this morning,” he went on, “after you had gone, to investigate the spot where our latest patient had been at work. I thought there might be some peculiar local condition there which would give me a new clue. When I arrived, I found it was a piece of steeply terraced kitchen-garden—not unlike our own, here. It ended in a low wall beyond which was a clear drop into the gorge which connects Ste Claire with the sea.
“He had been at work up to sunset last evening about halfway down, near a water tank. He was taken ill during the night, and this morning developed characteristic symptoms.
“I stood there—it was perfectly still; the people to whom the villa is leased are staying in Monte Carlo at present—and I listened for insects. I had gone prepared to capture any that appeared.”
He pointed to an equipment which lay upon a small table.
“I got several healthy mosquitoes, and other odds and ends. (Later examination showed no trace of parasite in any of them.) I was just coming away when, lying in a little trench where the man had apparently been at work up to the time that he knocked off—I happened to notice that.”
He pointed to the tube containing the purple leaves.
“It was bruised and crushed partly into the soil.”
He paused, then:
“Except for the fragments I have pointed out,” he added, “there was nothing on the leaves. Possibly a passing lizard had licked them... I spent the following hour searching the neighbourhood for the plant on which they grew. I drew blank.”
We were silent for some time.
“Do you think there is some connection,” I asked slowly, “between this plant and the epidemic?”
Petrie nodded.
“Of course,” I admitted, “it’s certainly strange. If I could credit the idea—which I can’t—that such a species could grow wild in Europe, I should be the first to agree with you. Your theory is that the thing possesses the properties of a carrier, or host, of these strange germs; so that anyone plucking a piece and smelling it, for instance, immediately becomes infected?”
“That was not my theory,” Petrie replied thoughtfully. “It isn’t a bad one, nevertheless. But it doesn’t explain the bloodstains.”
He hesitated.
“I had a very queer letter from Nayland Smith today,” he added. “I have been thinking about it ever since.”
Sir Denis Nayland Smith, ex-Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, was one of Petrie’s oldest friends, I knew, but:
“This is rather outside his province, isn’t it?” I suggested.
“You haven’t met him,” Petrie replied, labouring his words as it seemed. “But I think you will. Nayland Smith has one of the few first-class brains in Europe, and nothing is outside his—”
He ceased speaking, staggered and clutched at the table edge. I saw him shudder violently.
“Look here, doctor,” I cried, grasping his shoulders, “you are sickening for ’flu or something. You’re overdoing it. Give the thing a rest, and—”
He shook me off. His manner was wild. He groped his way to a cupboard, prepared a draught with unsteady hands, and drank it. Then from a drawer he took out a tube containing a small quantity of white powder.
“I have called it ‘654,’” he said, his eyes feverishly bright. “I haven’t the pluck to try it on a human patient. But even if Mother Nature has turned topsy-turvy, I believe this may puzzle her!”
Watching him anxiously:
“Strictly speaking, you ought to be in bed,” I said. “Your life is valuable.”
“Get out,” he replied, summoning up the ghost of a smile. “Get out, Sterling. My life’s my own, and while it lasts I have work to do...”
CHAPTER FOUR
SQUINTING EYES
I spent the latter part of the afternoon delving in works of reference which I had not consulted for many months, in an endeavour to identify more exactly the leaves so mysteriously found by Petrie.
To an accompaniment of clattering pans, old Mme Dubonnet was preparing our evening meal in the kitchen and humming some melancholy tune very cheerily.
Petrie was a source of great anxiety. I had considered ‘phoning for Dr. Cartier, but finally had dismissed the idea. That my friend was ill he had been unable to disguise: but he was a Doctor of Medicine and I was not. Furthermore, he was my host.
That he was worried about his wife in Cairo, I knew. Only the day before he had said, “I hope she doesn’t take it into her head to come over—much as I should like to see her.” Now, I shared that hope. His present appearance would shock the woman who loved him.
Fleurette—Fleurette of the dimpled chin—more than once intruded her image between me and the printed page. I tried to push these memories aside.
Fleurette was the mistress of a wealthy Egyptian. Despite her name, she was not French. She was, perhaps, an actress. Why had I not thought of that before? Her beautifully modulated voice—her composure. “Think of me as Derceto...”
“In Byblis gigantea, according to Zopf, insect-catching is merely incipient,” I read.
She could be no older than eighteen—indeed, she might be younger than that...
And so the afternoon wore on.
Faint buzzing of the Kohler engine, and a sudden shaft of light across the slopes below, first drew my attention to approaching dusk. Petrie had turned up the laboratory lamps.
I was deep in a German work which promised information, and now, mechanically, I switched on the table lamp. Hundreds of grasshoppers were chirping in the garden; I could hear the purr of a speedboat. Mme Dubonnet continued to sing. It was a typical Riviera evening.
The shadow of that great crag which almost overhung the Villa Jasmin lay across part of the kitchen-garden visible from my window, and soon would claim all our tiny domain. I continued my studies, jumping from reference to reference and constantly consulting the index. I believed I was at last on the right track.
How long a time elapsed between the moment when I saw the light turned up in the laboratory and the interruption, I found great difficulty in determining afterwards. But the interruption was uncanny.
Mme Dubonnet, working in the kitchen, French fashion, with windows hermetically sealed, noticed nothing.
Already, on this momentous day, I had heard a sound baffling description; and it was written—for the day was one never to be forgotten—that I should hear another.
As I paused to light a fresh cigarette, from somewhere outside—I thought from the Corniche road above—came a cry, very low, but penetrating.
It possessed a quality of fear which chilled me like a sudden menace. It was a sort of mournful wail on three minor notes. But a shot at close quarters could not have been more electrical in its effect.
I dropped my cigarette and jumped up.
What was it?
It was unlike anything I had ever heard. But there was danger in it, creeping peril. I leaned upon the table, staring from the window upward, in the direction from which the cry seemed to have come.
And as I did so, I saw something.
I have explained that a beam of light from the laboratory window cut across the shadow below. On the edge of this light something moved for a moment—for no more than a moment—but instantly drew my glance downward.
I looked...
A pair of sunken, squinting eyes, set in a yellow face so evilly hideous that I was tempted then, and for some time later, to doubt the evidence of my senses, watched me!
Of the body belonging to this head I could see nothing; it was enveloped in shadow. I saw just that evil mask watching me; then— it was gone!
As I stood staring from the window, stupid with a kind of horrified amazement, I heard footsteps racing down the path from the road which led to the door of Villa Jasmin. Turning, I ran out onto the verandah. I reached it at the same moment as the new arrival—a tall, lean man with iron-grey, crisply virile hair, and keen, eager eyes. He had the sort of skin which tells of years spent in the tropics. He wore no hat, but a heavy topcoat was thrown across his shoulders, cloakwise. Above all, he radiated a kind of vital energy which was intensely stimulating.
“Quick,” he said—his mode of address reminded me of a machine gun—“where is Dr. Petrie? My name is Nayland Smith.”
“I’m glad you have come, Sir Denis,” I replied; and indeed I spoke sincerely. “The doctor referred to you only today. My name is Alan Sterling.”
“I know it is,” he said, and shook hands briskly; then:
“Where is Petrie?” he repeated. “Is he with you?”
“He is in the laboratory, Sir Denis. I’ll show you the way.” Sir Denis nodded, and we stepped off the verandah. “Did you hear that awful cry?” I added. He stopped. We had just begun to descend the slope.
“You heard it?” he rapped in his staccato fashion.
“I did. I have never heard anything like it in my life!”
“I have! Let’s hurry.”
There was something very strange in his manner, something which I ascribed to that wailing sound which had electrified me. Definitely, Sir Denis Nayland Smith was not a man susceptible to panic, but some fearful urgency drove him tonight.
I was about to speak of that malignant yellow face when, as we came in sight of the lighted windows of the laboratory:
