The room in which Van Roon received us was roughly of the shape of an
old-fashioned keyhole; one end of it occupied the base of the tower,
upon which the remainder had evidently been built. In many respects
it was a singular room, but the feature which caused me the greatest
amazement was this:--it had no windows!
In the deep alcove formed by the tower sat Van Roon at a littered table,
upon which stood an oil reading-lamp, green shaded, of the “Victoria”
pattern, to furnish the entire illumination of the apartment. That
bookshelves lined the rectangular portion of this strange study I
divined, although that end of the place was dark as a catacomb. The
walls were wood-paneled, and the ceiling was oaken beamed. A small
bookshelf and tumble-down cabinet stood upon either side of the table,
and the celebrated American author and traveler lay propped up in a long
split-cane chair. He wore smoked glasses, and had a clean-shaven, olive
face, with a profusion of jet black hair. He was garbed in a dirty red
dressing-gown, and a perfect fog of cigar smoke hung in the room. He did
not rise to greet us, but merely extended his right hand, between two
fingers whereof he held Smith’s card.
“You will excuse the seeming discourtesy of an invalid, gentlemen?” he
said; “but I am suffering from undue temerity in the interior of China!”
He waved his hand vaguely, and I saw that two rough deal chairs stood
near the table. Smith and I seated ourselves, and my friend, leaning his
elbow upon the table, looked fixedly at the face of the man whom we
had come from London to visit. Although comparatively unfamiliar to the
British public, the name of Van Roon was well-known in American literary
circles; for he enjoyed in the United States a reputation somewhat
similar to that which had rendered the name of our mutual friend,
Sir Lionel Barton, a household word in England. It was Van Roon who,
following in the footsteps of Madame Blavatsky, had sought out the
haunts of the fabled mahatmas in the Himalayas, and Van Roon who had
essayed to explore the fever swamps of Yucatan in quest of the secret
of lost Atlantis; lastly, it was Van Roon, who, with an overland car
specially built for him by a celebrated American firm, had undertaken
the journey across China.
I studied the olive face with curiosity. Its natural impassivity was
so greatly increased by the presence of the colored spectacles that my
study was as profitless as if I had scrutinized the face of a carven
Buddha. The mulatto had withdrawn, and in an atmosphere of gloom and
tobacco smoke, Smith and I sat staring, perhaps rather rudely, at the
object of our visit to the West Country.
“Mr. Van Roon,” began my friend abruptly, “you will no doubt have seen
this paragraph. It appeared in this morning’s Daily Telegraph.”
He stood up, and taking out the cutting from his notebook, placed it on
the table.
“I have seen this--yes,” said Van Roon, revealing a row of even, white
teeth in a rapid smile. “Is it to this paragraph that I owe the pleasure
of seeing you here?”
“The paragraph appeared in this morning’s issue,” replied Smith. “An
hour from the time of seeing it, my friend, Dr. Petrie, and I were
entrained for Bridgewater.”
“Your visit delights me, gentlemen, and I should be ungrateful to
question its cause; but frankly I am at a loss to understand why you
should have honored me thus. I am a poor host, God knows; for what
with my tortured limb, a legacy from the Chinese devils whose secrets I
surprised, and my semi-blindness, due to the same cause, I am but sorry
company.”
Nayland Smith held up his right hand deprecatingly. Van Roon tendered a
box of cigars and clapped his hands, whereupon the mulatto entered.
“I see that you have a story to tell me, Mr. Smith,” he said; “therefore
I suggest whisky-and-soda--or you might prefer tea, as it is nearly tea
time?”
Smith and I chose the former refreshment, and the soft-footed half-breed
having departed upon his errand, my companion, leaning forward earnestly
across the littered table, outlined for Van Roon the story of Dr.
Fu-Manchu, the great and malign being whose mission in England at that
moment was none other than the stoppage of just such information as our
host was preparing to give to the world.
“There is a giant conspiracy, Mr. Van Roon,” he said, “which had its
birth in this very province of Ho-Nan, from which you were so fortunate
to escape alive; whatever its scope or limitations, a great secret
society is established among the yellow races. It means that China,
which has slumbered for so many generations, now stirs in that age-long
sleep. I need not tell you how much more it means, this seething in the
pot...”
“In a word,” interrupted Van Roon, pushing Smith’s glass across the
table “you would say?--”
“That your life is not worth that!” replied Smith, snapping his fingers
before the other’s face.
A very impressive silence fell. I watched Van Roon curiously as he sat
propped up among his cushions, his smooth face ghastly in the green
light from the lamp-shade. He held the stump of a cigar between his
teeth, but, apparently unnoticed by him, it had long since gone out.
Smith, out of the shadows, was watching him, too. Then:
“Your information is very disturbing,” said the American. “I am the more
disposed to credit your statement because I am all too painfully aware
of the existence of such a group as you mention, in China, but that they
had an agent here in England is something I had never conjectured. In
seeking out this solitary residence I have unwittingly done much to
assist their designs... But--my dear Mr. Smith, I am very remiss! Of
course you will remain tonight, and I trust for some days to come?”
Smith glanced rapidly across at me, then turned again to our host.
“It seems like forcing our company upon you,” he said, “but in your
own interests I think it will be best to do as you are good enough to
suggest. I hope and believe that our arrival here has not been noticed
by the enemy; therefore it will be well if we remain concealed as much
as possible for the present, until we have settled upon some plan.”
“Hagar shall go to the station for your baggage,” said the American
rapidly, and clapped his hands, his usual signal to the mulatto.
Whilst the latter was receiving his orders I noticed Nayland Smith
watching him closely; and when he had departed:
“How long has that man been in your service?” snapped my friend.
Van Roon peered blindly through his smoked glasses.
“For some years,” he replied; “he was with me in India--and in China.”
“Where did you engage him?”
“Actually, in St. Kitts.”
“H’m,” muttered Smith, and automatically he took out and began to fill
his pipe.
“I can offer you no company but my own, gentlemen,” continued Van Roon,
“but unless it interferes with your plans, you may find the surrounding
district of interest and worthy of inspection, between now and dinner
time. By the way, I think I can promise you quite a satisfactory meal,
for Hagar is a model chef.”
“A walk would be enjoyable,” said Smith, “but dangerous.”
“Ah! perhaps you are right. Evidently you apprehend some attempt upon
me?”
“At any moment!”
“To one in my crippled condition, an alarming outlook! However, I place
myself unreservedly in your hands. But really, you must not leave this
interesting district before you have made the acquaintance of some of
its historical spots. To me, steeped as I am in what I may term the lore
of the odd, it is a veritable wonderland, almost as interesting, in
its way, as the caves and jungles of Hindustan depicted by Madame
Blavatsky.”
His high-pitched voice, with a certain labored intonation, not quite
so characteristically American as was his accent, rose even higher; he
spoke with the fire of the enthusiast.
“When I learned that Cragmire Tower was vacant,” he continued, “I leaped
at the chance (excuse the metaphor, from a lame man!). This is a
ghost hunter’s paradise. The tower itself is of unknown origin, though
probably Phoenician, and the house traditionally sheltered Dr. Macleod,
the necromancer, after his flight from the persecution of James of
Scotland. Then, to add to its interest, it borders on Sedgemoor,
the scene of the bloody battle during the Monmouth rising, whereat a
thousand were slain on the field. It is a local legend that the unhappy
Duke and his staff may be seen, on stormy nights, crossing the path
which skirts the mire, after which this building is named, with flaming
torches held aloft.”
“Merely marsh-lights, I take it?” interjected Smith, gripping his pipe
hard between his teeth.
“Your practical mind naturally seeks a practical explanation,” smiled
Van Roon, “but I myself have other theories. Then in addition to the
charms of Sedgemoor--haunted Sedgemoor--on a fine day it is quite
possible to see the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey from here; and
Glastonbury Abbey, as you may know, is closely bound up with the history
of alchemy. It was in the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey that the adept
Kelly, companion of Dr. Dee, discovered, in the reign of Elizabeth, the
famous caskets of St. Dunstan, containing the two tinctures...”
So he ran on, enumerating the odd charms of his residence, charms which
for my part I did not find appealing. Finally:
“We cannot presume further upon your kindness,” said Nayland Smith,
standing up. “No doubt we can amuse ourselves in the neighborhood of the
house until the return of your servant.”
“Look upon Cragmire Tower as your own, gentlemen!” cried Van Roon. “Most
of the rooms are unfurnished, and the garden is a wilderness, but
the structure of the brickwork in the tower may interest you
archaeologically, and the view across the moor is at least as fine as
any in the neighborhood.”
So, with his brilliant smile and a gesture of one thin yellow hand, the
crippled traveler made us free of his odd dwelling. As I passed out from
the room close at Smith’s heels, I glanced back, I cannot say why.
Van Roon already was bending over his papers, in his green shadowed
sanctuary, and the light shining down upon his smoked glasses created
the odd illusion that he was looking over the tops of the lenses and not
down at the table as his attitude suggested. However, it was probably
ascribable to the weird chiaroscuro of the scene, although it gave the
seated figure an oddly malignant appearance, and I passed out through
the utter darkness of the outer room to the front door. Smith opening
it, I was conscious of surprise to find dusk come--to meet darkness
where I had looked for sunlight.
The silver wisps which had raced along the horizon, as we came to
Cragmire Tower, had been harbingers of other and heavier banks. A stormy
sunset smeared crimson streaks across the skyline, where a great range
of clouds, like the oily smoke of a city burning, was banked, mountain
topping mountain, and lighted from below by this angry red. As we came
down the steps and out by the gate, I turned and looked across the moor
behind us. A sort of reflection from this distant blaze encrimsoned the
whole landscape. The inland bay glowed sullenly, as if internal fires
and not reflected light were at work; a scene both wild and majestic.
Nayland Smith was staring up at the cone-like top of the ancient tower
in a curious, speculative fashion. Under the influence of our host’s
conversation I had forgotten the reasonless dread which had touched me
at the moment of our arrival, but now, with the red light blazing over
Sedgemoor, as if in memory of the blood which had been shed there,
and with the tower of unknown origin looming above me, I became very
uncomfortable again, nor did I envy Van Roon his eerie residence. The
proximity of a tower of any kind, at night, makes in some inexplicable
way for awe, and to-night there were other agents, too.
“What’s that?” snapped Smith suddenly, grasping my arm.
He was peering southward, toward the distant hamlet, and, starting
violently at his words and the sudden grasp of his hand, I, too, stared
in that direction.
“We were followed, Petrie,” he almost whispered. “I never got a sight of
our follower, but I’ll swear we were followed. Look! there’s something
moving over yonder!”
Together we stood staring into the dusk; then Smith burst abruptly into
one of his rare laughs, and clapped me upon the shoulder.
“It’s Hagar, the mulatto!” he cried--“and our grips. That extraordinary
American with his tales of witch-lights and haunted abbeys has been
playing the devil with our nerves.”
Together we waited by the gate until the half-caste appeared on the bend
of the path with a grip in either hand. He was a great, muscular fellow
with a stoic face, and, for the purpose of visiting Saul, presumably,
he had doffed his white raiment and now wore a sort of livery, with a
peaked cap.
Smith watched him enter the house. Then:
“I wonder where Van Roon obtains his provisions and so forth,” he
muttered. “It’s odd they knew nothing about the new tenant of Cragmire
Tower at ‘The Wagoners.’”
There came a sort of sudden expectancy into his manner for which I found
myself at a loss to account. He turned his gaze inland and stood there
tugging at his left ear and clicking his teeth together. He stared at
me, and his eyes looked very bright in the dusk, for a sort of red glow
from the sunset touched them; but he spoke no word, merely taking my
arm and leading me off on a rambling walk around and about the house.
Neither of us spoke a word until we stood at the gate of Cragmire Tower
again; then:
“I’ll swear, now, that we were followed here today!” muttered Smith.
The lofty place immediately within the doorway proved, in the light of a
lamp now fixed in an iron bracket, to be a square entrance hall meagerly
furnished. The closed study door faced the entrance, and on the left of
it ascended an open staircase up which the mulatto led the way. We found
ourselves on the floor above, in a corridor traversing the house from
back to front. An apartment on the immediate left was indicated by the
mulatto as that allotted to Smith. It was a room of fair size, furnished
quite simply but boasting a wardrobe cupboard, and Smith’s grip stood
beside the white enameled bed. I glanced around, and then prepared to
follow the man, who had awaited me in the doorway.
He still wore his dark livery, and as I followed the lithe,
broad-shouldered figure along the corridor, I found myself considering
critically his breadth of shoulder and the extraordinary thickness of
his neck.
I have repeatedly spoken of a sort of foreboding, an elusive stirring in
the depths of my being of which I became conscious at certain times
in my dealings with Dr. Fu-Manchu and his murderous servants. This
sensation, or something akin to it, claimed me now, unaccountably, as
I stood looking into the neat bedroom, on the same side of the corridor
but at the extreme end, wherein I was to sleep.
A voiceless warning urged me to return; a kind of childish panic came
fluttering about my heart, a dread of entering the room, of allowing the
mulatto to come behind me.
Doubtless this was no more than a sub-conscious product of my
observations respecting his abnormal breadth of shoulder. But whatever
the origin of the impulse, I found myself unable to disobey it.
Therefore, I merely nodded, turned on my heel and went back to Smith’s
room.
I closed the door, then turned to face Smith, who stood regarding me.
“Smith,” I said, “that man sends cold water trickling down my spine!”
Still regarding me fixedly, my friend nodded his head.
“You are curiously sensitive to this sort of thing,” he replied slowly;
“I have noticed it before as a useful capacity. I don’t like the look of
the man myself. The fact that he has been in Van Roon’s employ for some
years goes for nothing. We are neither of us likely to forget Kwee,
the Chinese servant of Sir Lionel Barton, and it is quite possible that
Fu-Manchu has corrupted this man as he corrupted the other. It is quite
possible...”
His voice trailed off into silence, and he stood looking across the room
with unseeing eyes, meditating deeply. It was quite dark now outside, as
I could see through the uncurtained window, which opened upon the dreary
expanse stretching out to haunted Sedgemoor. Two candles were burning
upon the dressing table; they were but recently lighted, and so intense
was the stillness that I could distinctly hear the spluttering of one of
the wicks, which was damp. Without giving the slightest warning of his
intention, Smith suddenly made two strides forward, stretched out his
long arms, and snuffed the pair of candles in a twinkling.
The room became plunged in impenetrable darkness.
“Not a word, Petrie!” whispered my companion.
I moved cautiously to join him, but as I did so, perceived that he was
moving too. Vaguely, against the window I perceived him silhouetted. He
was looking out across the moor, and:
“See! see!” he hissed.
With my heart thumping furiously in my breast, I bent over him; and for
the second time since our coming to Cragmire Tower, my thoughts flew to
“The Fenman.”
There are shades in the fen; ghosts of women and men
Who have sinned and have died, but are living again.
O’er the waters they tread, with their lanterns of dread,
And they peer in the pools--in the pools of the dead...
A light was dancing out upon the moor, a witchlight that came and went
unaccountably, up and down, in and out, now clearly visible, now masked
in the darkness!
“Lock the door!” snapped my companion--“if there’s a key.”
I crept across the room and fumbled for a moment; then:
“There is no key,” I reported.
“Then wedge the chair under the knob and let no one enter until I
return!” he said, amazingly.
With that he opened the window to its fullest extent, threw his leg over
the sill, and went creeping along a wide concrete ledge, in which ran a
leaded gutter, in the direction of the tower on the right!
Not pausing to follow his instructions respecting the chair, I craned
out of the window, watching his progress, and wondering with what sudden
madness he was bitten. Indeed, I could not credit my senses, could not
believe that I heard and saw aright. Yet there out in the darkness on
the moor moved the will-o’-the-wisp, and ten yards along the gutter
crept my friend, like a great gaunt cat. Unknown to me he must have
prospected the route by daylight, for now I saw his design. The ledge
terminated only where it met the ancient wall of the tower, and it
was possible for an agile climber to step from it to the edge of the
unglazed window some four feet below, and to scramble from that point
to the stone fence and thence on to the path by which we had come from
Saul.
This difficult operation Nayland Smith successfully performed, and, to
my unbounded amazement, went racing into the darkness toward the dancing
light, headlong, like a madman! The night swallowed him up, and between
my wonder and my fear my hands trembled so violently that I could scarce
support myself where I rested, with my full weight upon the sill.
I seemed now to be moving through the fevered phases of a nightmare.
Around and below me Cragmire Tower was profoundly silent, but a faint
odor of cookery was now perceptible. Outside, from the night, came
a faint whispering as of the distant sea, but no moon and no stars
relieved the impenetrable blackness. Only out over the moor the
mysterious light still danced and moved.
One--two--three--four--five minutes passed. The light vanished and
did not appear again. Five more age-long minutes elapsed in absolute
silence, whilst I peered into the darkness of the night and listened,
every nerve in my body tense, for the return of Nayland Smith. Yet two
more minutes, which embraced an agony of suspense, passed in the same
fashion; then a shadowy form grew, phantomesque, out of the gloom; a
moment more, and I distinctly heard the heavy breathing of a man nearly
spent, and saw my friend scrambling up toward the black embrasure in the
tower. His voice came huskily, pantingly:
“Creep along and lend me a hand, Petrie! I am nearly winded.”
I crept through the window, steadied my quivering nerves by an effort
of the will, and reached the end of the ledge in time to take Smith’s
extended hand and to draw him up beside me against the wall of the
tower. He was shaking with his exertions, and must have fallen, I think,
without my assistance. Inside the room again:
“Quick! light the candles!” he breathed hoarsely.
“Did any one come?”
“No one--nothing.”
Having expended several matches in vain, for my fingers twitched
nervously, I ultimately succeeded in relighting the candles.
“Get along to your room!” directed Smith. “Your apprehensions are
unfounded at the moment, but you may as well leave both doors wide
open!”
I looked into his face--it was very drawn and grim, and his brow was wet
with perspiration, but his eyes had the fighting glint, and I knew that
we were upon the eve of strange happenings.