I WAS being carried along a dimly lighted, tunnel-like place, slung,
sackwise, across the shoulder of a Burman. He was not a big man, but
he supported my considerable weight with apparent ease. A deadly
nausea held me, but the rough handling had served to restore me to
consciousness. My hands and feet were closely lashed. I hung limply
as a wet towel: I felt that this spark of tortured life which had
flickered up in me must ere long finally become extinguished.
A fancy possessed me, in these the first moments of my restoration to
the world of realities, that I had been smuggled into China; and as I
swung head downward I told myself that the huge, puffy things which
strewed the path were a species of giant toadstool, unfamiliar to me
and possibly peculiar to whatever district of China I now was in.
The air was hot, steamy, and loaded with a smell as of rotting
vegetation. I wondered why my bearer so scrupulously avoided touching
any of the unwholesome-looking growths in passing through what seemed a
succession of cellars, but steered a tortuous course among the bloated,
unnatural shapes, lifting his bare brown feet with a catlike delicacy.
He passed under a low arch, dropped me roughly to the ground and ran
back. Half stunned, I lay watching the agile brown body melt into the
distances of the cellars. Their walls and roof seemed to emit a faint,
phosphorescent light.
"Petrie!" came a weak voice from somewhere ahead. . . . "Is that you,
Petrie?"
It was Nayland Smith!
"Smith!" I said, and strove to sit up. But the intense nausea overcame
me, so that I all but swooned.
I heard his voice again, but could attach no meaning to the words which
he uttered. A sound of terrific blows reached my ears, too. The
Burman reappeared, bending under the heavy load which he bore. For, as
he picked his way through the bloated things which grew upon the floors
of the cellars, I realized that he was carrying the inert body of
Inspector Weymouth. And I found time to compare the strength of the
little brown man with that of a Nile beetle, which can raise many times
its own weight. Then, behind him, appeared a second figure, which
immediately claimed the whole of my errant attention.
"Fu-Manchu!" hissed my friend, from the darkness which concealed him.
It was indeed none other than Fu-Manchu--the Fu-Manchu whom we had
thought to be helpless. The deeps of the Chinaman's cunning--the fine
quality of his courage, were forced upon me as amazing facts.
He had assumed the appearance of a drugged opium-smoker so well as to
dupe me--a medical man; so well as to dupe Karamaneh--whose experience
of the noxious habit probably was greater than my own. And, with the
gallows dangling before him, he had waited--played the part of a
lure--whilst a body of police actually surrounded the place!
I have since thought that the room probably was one which he actually
used for opium debauches, and the device of the trap was intended to
protect him during the comatose period.
Now, holding a lantern above his head, the deviser of the trap
whereinto we, mouselike, had blindly entered, came through the cellars,
following the brown man who carried Weymouth. The faint rays of the
lantern (it apparently contained a candle) revealed a veritable forest
of the gigantic fungi--poisonously colored--hideously swollen--climbing
from the floor up the slimy walls--climbing like horrid parasites to
such part of the arched roof as was visible to me.
Fu-Manchu picked his way through the fungi ranks as daintily as though
the distorted, tumid things had been viper-headed.
The resounding blows which I had noted before, and which had never
ceased, culminated in a splintering crash. Dr. Fu-Manchu and his
servant, who carried the apparently insensible detective, passed in
under the arch, Fu-Manchu glancing back once along the passages. The
lantern he extinguished, or concealed; and whilst I waited, my mind
dully surveying memories of all the threats which this uncanny being
had uttered, a distant clamor came to my ears.
Then, abruptly, it ceased. Dr. Fu-Manchu had closed a heavy door; and
to my surprise I perceived that the greater part of it was of glass.
The will-o'-the-wisp glow which played around the fungi rendered the
vista of the cellars faintly luminous, and visible to me from where I
lay. Fu-Manchu spoke softly. His voice, its guttural note alternating
with a sibilance on certain words, betrayed no traces of agitation.
The man's unbroken calm had in it something inhuman. For he had just
perpetrated an act of daring unparalleled in my experience, and, in the
clamor now shut out by the glass door I tardily recognized the entrance
of the police into some barricaded part of the house--the coming of
those who would save us--who would hold the Chinese doctor for the
hangman!
"I have decided," he said deliberately, "that you are more worthy of my
attention than I had formerly supposed. A man who can solve the secret
of the Golden Elixir (I had not solved it; I had merely stolen some)
should be a valuable acquisition to my Council. The extent of the
plans of Mr. Commissioner Nayland Smith and of the English Scotland
Yard it is incumbent upon me to learn. Therefore, gentlemen, you
live--for the present!"
"And you'll swing," came Weymouth's hoarse voice, "in the near future!
You and all your yellow gang!"
"I trust not," was the placid reply. "Most of my people are safe: some
are shipped as lascars upon the liners; others have departed by
different means. Ah!"
That last word was the only one indicative of excitement which had yet
escaped him. A disk of light danced among the brilliant poison hues of
the passages--but no sound reached us; by which I knew that the glass
door must fit almost hermetically. It was much cooler here than in the
place through which we had passed, and the nausea began to leave me, my
brain to grow more clear. Had I known what was to follow I should have
cursed the lucidity of mind which now came to me; I should have prayed
for oblivion--to be spared the sight of that which ensued.
"It's Logan!" cried Inspector Weymouth; and I could tell that he was
struggling to free himself of his bonds. From his voice it was evident
that he, too, was recovering from the effects of the narcotic which had
been administered to us all.
"Logan!" he cried. "Logan! This way--HELP!"
But the cry beat back upon us in that enclosed space and seemed to
carry no farther than the invisible walls of our prison.
"The door fits well," came Fu-Manchu's mocking voice. "It is fortunate
for us all that it is so. This is my observation window, Dr. Petrie,
and you are about to enjoy an unique opportunity of studying fungology.
I have already drawn your attention to the anaesthetic properties of
the lycoperdon, or common puff-ball. You may have recognized the fumes?
The chamber into which you rashly precipitated yourselves was charged
with them. By a process of my own I have greatly enhanced the value of
the puff-ball in this respect. Your friend, Mr. Weymouth, proved the
most obstinate subject; but he succumbed in fifteen seconds."
"Logan! Help! HELP! This way, man!"
Something very like fear sounded in Weymouth's voice now. Indeed, the
situation was so uncanny that it almost seemed unreal. A group of men
had entered the farthermost cellars, led by one who bore an electric
pocket-lamp. The hard, white ray danced from bloated gray fungi to
others of nightmare shape, of dazzling, venomous brilliance. The
mocking, lecture-room voice continued:
"Note the snowy growth upon the roof, Doctor. Do not be deceived by
its size. It is a giant variety of my own culture and is of the order
empusa. You, in England, are familiar with the death of the common
house-fly--which is found attached to the window-pane by a coating of
white mold. I have developed the spores of this mold and have produced
a giant species. Observe the interesting effect of the strong light
upon my orange and blue amanita fungus!"
Hard beside me I heard Nayland Smith groan, Weymouth had become
suddenly silent. For my own part, I could have shrieked in pure
horror. FOR I KNEW WHAT WAS COMING. I realized in one agonized instant
the significance of the dim lantern, of the careful progress through
the subterranean fungi grove, of the care with which Fu-Manchu and his
servant had avoided touching any of the growths. I knew, now, that Dr.
Fu-Manchu was the greatest fungologist the world had ever known; was a
poisoner to whom the Borgias were as children--and I knew that the
detectives blindly were walking into a valley of death.
Then it began--the unnatural scene--the saturnalia of murder.
Like so many bombs the brilliantly colored caps of the huge
toadstool-like things alluded to by the Chinaman exploded, as the white
ray sought them out in the darkness which alone preserved their
existence. A brownish cloud--I could not determine whether liquid or
powdery--arose in the cellar.
I tried to close my eyes--or to turn them away from the reeling forms
of the men who were trapped in that poison-hole. It was useless:
I must look.
The bearer of the lamp had dropped it, but the dim, eerily illuminated
gloom endured scarce a second. A bright light sprang up--doubtless at
the touch of the fiendish being who now resumed speech:
"Observe the symptoms of delirium, Doctor!" Out there, beyond the
glass door, the unhappy victims were laughing--tearing their garments
from their bodies--leaping--waving their arms--were become MANIACS!
"We will now release the ripe spores of giant entpusa," continued the
wicked voice. "The air of the second cellar being super-charged with
oxygen, they immediately germinate. Ah! it is a triumph! That
process is the scientific triumph of my life!"
Like powdered snow the white spores fell from the roof, frosting the
writhing shapes of the already poisoned men. Before my horrified gaze,
THE FUNGUS GREW; it spread from the head to the feet of those it
touched; it enveloped them as in glittering shrouds. . . .
"They die like flies!" screamed Fu-Manchu, with a sudden febrile
excitement; and I felt assured of something I had long suspected: that
that magnificent, perverted brain was the brain of a homicidal
maniac--though Smith would never accept the theory.
"It is my fly-trap!" shrieked the Chinaman. "And I am the god of
destruction!"