THE COUGHING HORROR
I leapt up in bed with a great start.
My sleep was troubled often enough in those days which immediately
followed our almost miraculous escape from the den of Fu-Manchu; and
now, as I crouched there, nerves aquiver--listening--listening--I
could not be sure if this dank panic which possessed me had its origin
in nightmare or in something else.
Surely a scream, a choking cry for help, had reached my ears; but now,
almost holding my breath in that sort of nervous tensity peculiar to
one aroused thus, I listened, and the silence seemed complete. Perhaps
I had been dreaming....
"Help! Petrie! _Help_!..."
It was Nayland Smith in the room above me!
My doubts were resolved; this was no trick of an imagination
disordered. Some dreadful menace threatened my friend. Not delaying
even to snatch my dressing-gown, I rushed out on to the landing, up
the stairs, bare-footed as I was, threw open the door of Smith's room
and literally hurled myself in.
Those cries had been the cries of one assailed, had been uttered, I
judged, in the brief interval of a life and death struggle; had been
choked off....
A certain amount of moonlight found access to the room, without
spreading so far as the bed in which my friend lay. But at the moment
of my headlong entrance, and before I had switched on the light, my
gaze automatically was directed to the pale moonbeam streaming through
the window and down on to one corner of the sheep skin rug beside the
bed.
There came a sound of faint and muffled coughing,
What with my recent awakening and the panic at my heart, I could not
claim that my vision was true; but across this moonbeam passed a sort
of grey streak, for all the world as though some long thin shape had
been withdrawn, snakelike, from the room, through the open window....
From somewhere outside the house, and below, I heard the cough again,
followed by a sharp cracking sound like the lashing of a whip.
I depressed the switch, flooding the room with light, and as I leapt
forward to the bed a word picture of what I had seen formed in my
mind; and I found that I was thinking of a grey feather boa.
"Smith!" I cried (my voice seemed to pitch itself, unwilled, in a very
high key), "Smith, old man!"
He made no reply, and a sudden, sorrowful fear clutched at my
heart-strings. He was lying half out of bed flat upon his back, his
head at a dreadful angle with his body. As I bent over him and seized
him by the shoulders, I could see the whites of his eyes. His arms
hung limply, and his fingers touched the carpet.
"My God!" I whispered, "what has happened?"
I heaved him back on to the pillow, and looked anxiously into his
face. Habitually gaunt, the flesh so refined away by the consuming
nervous energy of the man as to reveal the cheekbones in sharp
prominence, he now looked truly ghastly. His skin was so sun-baked as
to have changed constitutionally; nothing could ever eradicate that
tan. But to-night a fearful greyness was mingled with the brown, his
lips were purple ... and there were marks of strangulation upon the
lean throat--ever darkening weals of clutching fingers.
He began to breathe stertorously and convulsively, inhalation being
accompanied by a significant gurgle in the throat. But now my calm was
restored in face of a situation which called for professional
attention.
I aided my friend's laboured respirations by the usual means, setting
to work vigorously; so that presently he began to clutch at his
inflamed throat which that murderous pressure had threatened to close.
I could hear sounds of movements about the house, showing that not I
alone had been awakened by those hoarse screams.
"It's all right, old man," I said, bending over him: "brace up!"
He opened his eyes--they looked bleared and bloodshot--and gave me a
quick glance of recognition.
"It's all right, Smith!" I said--"no! don't sit up; lie there for a
moment."
I ran across to the dressing-table, whereon I perceived his flask to
lie, and mixed him a weak stimulant with which I returned to the bed.
As I bent over him again, my housekeeper appeared in the doorway, pale
and wide-eyed.
"There is no occasion for alarm," I said over my shoulder; "Mr.
Smith's nerves are overwrought and he was awakened by some disturbing
dream. You can return to bed, Mrs. Newsome."
Nayland Smith seemed to experience much difficulty in swallowing the
contents of the tumbler which I held to his lips; and, from the way in
which he fingered the swollen glands, I could see that his throat,
which I had vigorously massaged, was occasioning him great pain. But
the danger was past, and already that glassy look was disappearing
from his eyes, nor did they protrude so unnaturally.
"God, Petrie!" he whispered, "that was a near shave! I haven't the
strength of a kitten!"
"The weakness will pass off," I replied; "there will be no collapse,
now. A little more fresh air...."
I stood up, glancing at the windows, then back at Smith, who forced a
wry smile in answer to my look.
"Couldn't be done, Petrie," he said huskily.
His words referred to the state of the windows. Although the night was
oppressively hot, these were only opened some four inches at top and
bottom. Farther opening was impossible because of iron brackets
screwed firmly into the casements, which prevented the windows being
raised or lowered farther.
It was a precaution adopted after long experience of the servants of
Dr. Fu-Manchu.
Now, as I stood looking from the half-strangled man upon the bed to
those screwed-up windows, the fact came home to my mind that this
precaution had proved futile. I thought of the thing which I had
likened to a feather boa; and I looked at the swollen weals made by
clutching fingers upon the throat of Nayland Smith.
The bed stood fully four feet from the nearest window.
I suppose the question was written in my face; for, as I turned again
to Smith, who, having struggled upright, was still fingering his
injured throat ruefully--"God only knows, Petrie!" he said; "no human
arm could have reached me...."
For us, the night was ended so far as sleep was concerned. Arrayed in
his dressing-gown, Smith sat in the white cane chair in my study with
a glass of brandy and water beside him, and (despite my official
prohibition) with the cracked briar, which had sent up its incense in
many strange and dark places of the East and which yet survived to
perfume these prosy rooms in suburban London, between his teeth. I
stood with my elbow resting upon the mantelpiece looking down at him
where he sat.
"By God! Petrie," he said, yet again, with his fingers straying gently
over the surface of his throat, "that was a narrow shave--a damned
narrow shave!"
"Narrower than perhaps you appreciate, old man," I replied. "You were
a most unusual shade of blue when I found you...."
"I managed," said Smith evenly, "to tear those clutching fingers away
for a moment and to give a cry for help. It was only for a moment,
though. Petrie! they were fingers of steel--of steel!"
"The bed...." I began.
"I know that," rapped Smith. "I shouldn't have been sleeping in it,
had it been within reach of the window; but, knowing that the Doctor
avoids noisy methods, I had thought myself fairly safe so long as I
made it impossible for any one actually to enter the room...."
"I have always insisted, Smith," I cried, "that there was danger! What
of poisoned darts? What of the damnable reptiles and insects which
form part of the armoury of Fu-Manchu?"
"Familiarity breeds contempt, I suppose," he replied. "But as it
happened, none of those agents was employed. The very menace that I
sought to avoid reached me somehow. It would almost seem that Dr.
Fu-Manchu deliberately accepted the challenge of those screwed up
windows! Hang it all, Petrie! one cannot sleep in a room hermetically
sealed in weather like this! It's positively Burmese; and although I
can stand tropical heat, curiously enough the heat of London gets me
down almost immediately."
"The humidity; that's easily understood. But you'll have to put up
with it in the future. After nightfall our windows must be closed
entirely, Smith."
Nayland Smith knocked out his pipe upon the side of the fireplace. The
bowl sizzled furiously, but without delay he stuffed broad-cut mixture
into the hot pipe, dropping a liberal quantity upon the carpet during
the process. He raised his eyes to me, and his face was very grim.
"Petrie," he said, striking a match on the heel of his slipper, "the
resources of Dr. Fu-Manchu are by no means exhausted. Before we quit
this room it is up to us to come to a decision upon a certain point."
He got his pipe well alight. "What kind of thing, what unnatural,
distorted creature, laid hands upon my throat to-night? I owe my life,
primarily, to you, old man, but secondarily, to the fact that I was
awakened, just before the attack, by the creature's _coughing_--by its
vile, high pitched _coughing_...."
I glanced around at the books upon my shelves. Often enough, following
some outrage by the brilliant, Chinese doctor whose genius was
directed to the discovery of new and unique death agents, we had
obtained a clue in those works of a scientific nature which bulk
largely in the library of a medical man. There are creatures, there
are drugs, which, ordinarily innocuous, may be so employed as to
become inimical to human life; and in the distorting of nature, in the
disturbing of balances and the diverting of beneficent forces into
strange and dangerous channels, Dr. Fu-Manchu excelled. I had known
him to enlarge, by artificial culture, a minute species of fungus so
as to render it a powerful agent capable of attacking man; his
knowledge of venomous insects has probably never been paralleled in
the history of the world; whilst, in the sphere of pure toxicology, he
had, and has, no rival: the Borgias were children by comparison. But,
look where I would, think how I might, no adequate explanation of this
latest outrage seemed possible along normal lines.
"There's the clue," said Nayland Smith, pointing to a little ash-tray
upon the table near by. "Follow it if you can."
But I could not.
"As I have explained," continued my friend, "I was awakened by a sound
of coughing; then came a death grip on my throat, and instinctively my
hands shot out in search of my attacker. I could not reach him; my
hands came in contact with nothing palpable. Therefore I clutched at
the fingers which were dug into my windpipe, and found them to be
small--as the marks show--and _hairy_. I managed to give that first
cry for help, and with all my strength I tried to unfasten the grip
that was throttling the life out of me. At last I contrived to move
one of the hands, and I called out again, though not so loudly. Then
both the hands were back again; I was weakening; but I clawed like a
madman at the thin, hairy arms of the strangling thing, and with a
blood-red mist dancing before my eyes, I seemed to be whirling madly
round and round until all became a blank. Evidently I used my nails
pretty freely--and there's the trophy."
For the twentieth time, I should think, I raised the ash-tray in my
hand and held it immediately under the table lamp in order to examine
its contents. In the little brass bowl lay a blood-stained fragment of
greyish hair attached to a tatter of skin. This fragment of epidermis
had an odd bluish tinge, and the attached hair was much darker at the
roots than elsewhere. Saving its singular colour, it might have been
torn from the forearm of a very hirsute human; but although my
thoughts wandered, unfettered, north, south, east and west; although,
knowing the resources of Fu-Manchu, I considered all the recognized
Mongolian types, and, in quest of hirsute mankind, even roamed, far
north among the blubber-eating Esquimaux; although I glanced at
Australasia, at Central Africa, and passed in mental review the dark
places of the Congo, nowhere in the known world, nowhere in the
history of the human species, could I come upon a type of man
answering to the description suggested by our strange clue.
Nayland Smith was watching me curiously as I bent over the little
brass ash-tray.
"You are puzzled," he rapped in his short way. "So am I--utterly
puzzled. Fu-Manchu's gallery of monstrosities clearly has become
reinforced; for even if we identified the type, we should not be in
sight of our explanation."
"You mean--" I began.
"Fully four feet from the window, Petrie, and that window but a few
inches open! Look"--he bent forward, resting his chest against the
table, and stretched out his hand towards me--"you have a rule there;
just measure."
Setting down the ash-tray, I opened out the rule and measured the
distance from the farther edge of the table to the tips of Smith's
fingers.
"Twenty-eight inches--and _I_ have a long reach!" snapped Smith,
withdrawing his arm and striking a match to relight his pipe. "There's
one thing, Petrie, often proposed before, which now we must do without
delay. The ivy must be stripped from the walls at the back. It's a
pity, but we cannot afford to sacrifice our lives to our sense of the
æsthetic. What do you make of the sound like the cracking of a whip?"
"I make nothing of it, Smith," I replied wearily. "It might have been
a thick branch of ivy breaking beneath the weight of a climber."
"Did it sound like it?"
"I must confess that the explanation does not convince me, but I have
no better one."
Smith, permitting his pipe to go out, sat staring straightly before
him, and tugging at the lobe of his left ear.
"The old bewilderment is seizing me," I continued. "At first, when I
realized that Dr. Fu-Manchu was back in England, when I realized that
an elaborate murder-machine was set up somewhere in London, it seemed
unreal, fantastical. Then I met--Kâramanèh! She, whom we thought to be
his victim, showed herself again to be his slave. Now, with Weymouth
and Scotland Yard at work, the old secret evil is established again in
our midst, unaccountably--our lives are menaced--sleep is a
danger--every shadow threatens death ... oh! it is awful."
Smith remained silent; he did not seem to have heard my words. I knew
these moods and had learnt that it was useless to seek to interrupt
them. With his brows drawn down, and his deep-set eyes staring into
space, he sat there gripping his cold pipe so tightly that my own jaw
muscles ached sympathetically. No man was better equipped than this
gaunt British Commissioner to stand between society and the menace of
the Yellow Doctor; I respected his meditations, for, unlike my own,
they were informed by an intimate knowledge of the dark and secret
things of the East, of that mysterious East out of which Fu-Manchu
came, of that jungle of noxious things whose miasma had been wafted
Westward with the implacable Chinaman.
I walked quietly from the room, occupied with my own bitter
reflections.