Of the events intervening between this moment and that when death called
to us out of the night, I have the haziest recollections. An excellent
dinner was served in the bleak and gloomy dining-room by the mulatto,
and the crippled author was carried to the head of the table by this
same Herculean attendant, as lightly as though he had but the weight of
a child.
Van Roon talked continuously, revealing a deep knowledge of all sorts of
obscure matters; and in the brief intervals, Nayland Smith talked also,
with almost feverish rapidity. Plans for the future were discussed. I
can recall no one of them.
I could not stifle my queer sentiments in regard to the mulatto, and
every time I found him behind my chair I was hard put to repress
a shudder. In this fashion the strange evening passed; and to the
accompaniment of distant, muttering thunder, we two guests retired
to our chambers in Cragmire Tower. Smith had contrived to give me my
instructions in a whisper, and five minutes after entering my own room,
I had snuffed the candles, slipped a wedge, which he had given me, under
the door, crept out through the window onto the guttered ledge, and
joined Smith in his room. He, too, had extinguished his candles, and the
place was in darkness. As I climbed in, he grasped my wrist to silence
me, and turned me forcibly toward the window.
“Listen!” he said.
I turned and looked out upon a prospect which had been a fit setting for
the witch scene in Macbeth. Thunder clouds hung low over the moor, but
through them ran a sort of chasm, or rift, allowing a bar of lurid light
to stretch across the drear, from east to west--a sort of lane walled by
darkness. There came a remote murmuring, as of a troubled sea--a hushed
and distant chorus; and sometimes in upon it broke the drums of heaven.
In the west lightning flickered, though but faintly, intermittently.
Then came the call.
Out of the blackness of the moor it came, wild and distant--“Help!
help!”
“Smith!” I whispered--“what is it? What...”
“Mr. Smith!” came the agonized cry... “Nayland Smith, help! for God’s
sake....”
“Quick, Smith!” I cried, “quick, man! It’s Van Roon--he’s been dragged
out... they are murdering him...”
Nayland Smith held me in a vise-like grip, silent, unmoved!
Louder and more agonized came the cry for aid, and I became more than
ever certain that it was poor Van Roon who uttered it.
“Mr. Smith! Dr. Petrie! for God’s sake come... or... it will be ...
too... late...”
“Smith!” I said, turning furiously upon my friend, “if you are going to
remain here whilst murder is done, I am not!”
My blood boiled now with hot resentment. It was incredible, inhuman,
that we should remain there inert whilst a fellow man, and our host to
boot, was being done to death out there in the darkness. I exerted all
my strength to break away; but although my efforts told upon him, as his
loud breathing revealed, Nayland Smith clung to me tenaciously. Had my
hands been free, in my fury, I could have struck him, for the pitiable
cries, growing fainter, now, told their own tale. Then Smith spoke
shortly and angrily--breathing hard between the words.
“Be quiet, you fool!” he snapped; “it’s little less than an insult,
Petrie, to think me capable of refusing help where help is needed!”
Like a cold douche his words acted; in that instant I knew myself a
fool.
“You remember the Call of Siva?” he said, thrusting me away irritably,
“--two years ago, and what it meant to those who obeyed it?”
“You might have told me...”
“Told you! You would have been through the window before I had uttered
two words!”
I realized the truth of his assertion, and the justness of his anger.
“Forgive me, old man,” I said, very crestfallen, “but my impulse was a
natural one, you’ll admit. You must remember that I have been trained
never to refuse aid when aid is asked.”
“Shut up, Petrie!” he growled; “forget it.”
The cries had ceased now, entirely, and a peal of thunder, louder than
any yet, echoed over distant Sedgemoor. The chasm of light splitting the
heavens closed in, leaving the night wholly black.
“Don’t talk!” rapped Smith; “act! You wedged your door?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Get into that cupboard, have your Browning ready, and keep the
door very slightly ajar.”
He was in that mood of repressed fever which I knew and which always
communicated itself to me. I spoke no further word, but stepped into
the wardrobe indicated and drew the door nearly shut. The recess just
accommodated me, and through the aperture I could see the bed, vaguely,
the open window, and part of the opposite wall. I saw Smith cross the
floor, as a mighty clap of thunder boomed over the house.
A gleam of lightning flickered through the gloom.
I saw the bed for a moment, distinctly, and it appeared to me that Smith
lay therein, with the sheets pulled up over his head. The light was
gone, and I could hear big drops of rain pattering upon the leaden
gutter below the open window.
My mood was strange, detached, and characterized by vagueness. That Van
Roon lay dead upon the moor I was convinced; and--although I recognized
that it must be a sufficient one--I could not even dimly divine the
reason why we had refrained from lending him aid. To have failed to save
him, knowing his peril, would have been bad enough; to have refused, I
thought was shameful. Better to have shared his fate--yet...
The downpour was increasing, and beating now a regular tattoo upon the
gutterway. Then, splitting the oblong of greater blackness which marked
the casement, quivered dazzlingly another flash of lightning in which
I saw the bed again, with that impression of Smith curled up in it. The
blinding light died out; came the crash of thunder, harsh and fearsome,
more imminently above the tower than ever. The building seemed to shake.
Coming as they did, horror and the wrath of heaven together, suddenly,
crashingly, black and angry after the fairness of the day, these
happenings and their setting must have terrorized the stoutest heart;
but somehow I seemed detached, as I have said, and set apart from the
whirl of events; a spectator. Even when a vague yellow light crept
across the room from the direction of the door, and flickered unsteadily
on the bed, I remained unmoved to a certain degree, although passively
alive to the significance of the incident. I realized that the ultimate
issue was at hand, but either because I was emotionally exhausted, or
from some other cause, the pending climax failed to disturb me.
Going on tiptoe, in stockinged feet, across my field of vision, passed
Kegan Van Roon! He was in his shirt-sleeves and held a lighted candle in
one hand whilst with the other he shaded it against the draught from
the window. He was a cripple no longer, and the smoked glasses were
discarded; most of the light, at the moment when first I saw him, shone
upon his thin, olive face, and at sight of his eyes much of the mystery
of Cragmire Tower was resolved. For they were oblique, very slightly,
but nevertheless unmistakably oblique. Though highly educated, and
possibly an American citizen, Van Roon was a Chinaman!
Upon the picture of his face as I saw it then, I do not care to
dwell. It lacked the unique horror of Dr. Fu-Manchu’s unforgettable
countenance, but possessed a sort of animal malignancy which the
latter lacked... He approached within three or four feet of the bed,
peering--peering. Then, with a timidity which spoke well for Nayland
Smith’s reputation, paused and beckoned to some one who evidently stood
in the doorway behind him. As he did so I noted that the legs of his
trousers were caked with greenish brown mud nearly up to the knees.
The huge mulatto, silent-footed, crossed to the bed in three strides.
He was stripped to the waist, and, excepting some few professional
athletes, I had never seen a torso to compare with that which, brown and
glistening, now bent over Nayland Smith. The muscular development was
simply enormous; the man had a neck like a column, and the thews around
his back and shoulders were like ivy tentacles wreathing some gnarled
oak.
Whilst Van Roon, his evil gaze upon the bed, held the candle aloft,
the mulatto, with a curious preparatory writhing movement of the mighty
shoulders, lowered his outstretched fingers to the disordered bed
linen...
I pushed open the cupboard door and thrust out the Browning. As I did
so a dramatic thing happened. A tall, gaunt figure shot suddenly upright
from beyond the bed. It was Nayland Smith!
Upraised in his hand he held a heavy walking cane. I knew the handle to
be leaded, and I could judge of the force with which he wielded it by
the fact that it cut the air with a keen swishing sound. It descended
upon the back of the mulatto’s skull with a sickening thud, and the
great brown body dropped inert upon the padded bed--in which not Smith,
but his grip, reposed. There was no word, no cry. Then:
“Shoot, Petrie! Shoot the fiend! Shoot...”
Van Roon, dropping the candle, in the falling gleam of which I saw the
whites of the oblique eyes turned and leaped from the room with the
agility of a wild cat. The ensuing darkness was split by a streak of
lightning... and there was Nayland Smith scrambling around the foot of
the bed and making for the door in hot pursuit.
We gained it almost together. Smith had dropped the cane, and now
held his pistol in his hand. Together we fired into the chasm of the
corridor, and in the flash, saw Van Roon hurling himself down the
stairs. He went silently in his stockinged feet, and our own clatter
was drowned by the awful booming of the thunder which now burst over us
again.
Crack!--crack!--crack! Three times our pistols spat venomously after
the flying figure... then we had crossed the hall below and were in
the wilderness of the night with the rain descending upon us in sheets.
Vaguely I saw the white shirt-sleeves of the fugitive near the corner
of the stone fence. A moment he hesitated, then darted away inland, not
toward Saul, but toward the moor and the cup of the inland bay.
“Steady, Petrie! steady!” cried Nayland Smith. He ran, panting, beside
me. “It is the path to the mire.” He breathed sibilantly between every
few words. “It was out there... that he hoped to lure us... with the cry
for help.”
A great blaze of lightning illuminated the landscape as far as the eye
could see. Ahead of us a flying shape, hair lank and glistening in the
downpour, followed a faint path skirting that green tongue of morass
which we had noted from the upland. It was Kegan Van Roon. He glanced
over his shoulder, showing a yellow, terror-stricken face. We were
gaining upon him. Darkness fell, and the thunder cracked and boomed as
though the very moor were splitting about us.
“Another fifty yards, Petrie,” breathed Nayland Smith, “and after that
it’s unchartered ground.”
On we went through the rain and the darkness; then:
“Slow up! slow up!” cried Smith. “It feels soft!”
Indeed, already I had made one false step--and the hungry mire had
fastened upon my foot, almost tripping me.
“Lost the path!”
We stopped dead. The falling rain walled us in. I dared not move, for I
knew that the mire, the devouring mire, stretched, eager, close about
my feet. We were both waiting for the next flash of lightning, I think,
but, before it came, out of the darkness ahead of us rose a cry that
sometimes rings in my ears to this hour. Yet it was no more than a
repetition of that which had called to us, deathfully, awhile before.
“Help! help! for God’s sake help! Quick! I am sinking...”
Nayland Smith grasped my arm furiously.
“We dare not move, Petrie--we dare not move!” he breathed. “It’s God’s
justice--visible for once.”
Then came the lightning; and--ignoring a splitting crash behind us--we
both looked ahead, over the mire.
Just on the edge of the venomous green path, not thirty yards away, I
saw the head and shoulders and upstretched, appealing arms of Van Roon.
Even as the lightning flickered and we saw him, he was gone; with one
last, long, drawn-out cry, horribly like the mournful wail of a sea
gull, he was gone!
That eerie light died, and in the instant before the sound of the
thunder came shatteringly, we turned about... in time to see Cragmire
Tower, a blacker silhouette against the night, topple and fall! A
red glow began to be perceptible above the building. The thunder came
booming through the caverns of space. Nayland Smith lowered his wet face
close to mine and shouted in my ear:
“Kegan Van Roon never returned from China. It was a trap. Those were two
creatures of Dr. Fu-Manchu...”
The thunder died away, hollowly, echoing over the distant sea...
“That light on the moor to-night?”
“You have not learned the Morse Code, Petrie. It was a signal, and it
read:--S M I T H... SOS.”
“Well?”
“I took the chance, as you know. And it was Karamaneh! She knew of the
plot to bury us in the mire. She had followed from London, but could do
nothing until dusk. God forgive me if I’ve misjudged her--for we owe her
our lives to-night.”
Flames were bursting up from the building beside the ruin of the ancient
tower which had faced the storms of countless ages only to succumb at
last. The lightning literally had cloven it in twain.
“The mulatto?...”
Again the lightning flashed, and we saw the path and began to retrace
our steps. Nayland Smith turned to me; his face was very grim in that
unearthly light, and his eyes shone like steel.
“I killed him, Petrie... as I meant to do.”
From out over Sedgemoor it came, cracking and rolling and booming toward
us, swelling in volume to a stupendous climax, that awful laughter of
Jove the destroyer of Cragmire Tower.