The Bride of Fu Manchu f-6 Read online

  “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 visit-—ing 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 leam 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 Hack stigmata.’ Your bulb hunting has taken you into a few unwholesome places; have you ever come across anything like it?”

  I began to fill by pipe. “Never, doctor,” I replied.

  The sound of a distant gun boomed through the hot silence. A French battleship was entering Villefranche Harbour....

  chapter third

  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 localised. 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 the 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 South 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 gar-^ den—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 to-day,” he added. “I have been thinking about it ever since.”

  Sir Denis Nayland Smith, ex-Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, was one ofPetrie’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 fourth

  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 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 out-, side—I thought from the Comiche 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 sometime 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, clockwise. 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 to-day. 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 to-night.

  I was about to speak of that malignant yellow face when, as we came in sight of the lighted windows of the laboratory:

  “How long has Petrie been in there?” Nayland Smith asked. “All the afternoon. He’s up to his eyes in work on these mysterious cases—about which, perhaps, you know?” “I do,” he replied. “Wait a moment....” He grasped my arm and pulled me up just at the edge of the patch of shadow. He stood still, and I could tell that he was listening intently.

  “Where’s the door?” he asked suddenly.

  “At the farther end.”

  “Right.”

  He set off at a run, and I followed past the lighted window. Petrie was not at the table nor at the bench. I was puzzled to account for this, and already vaguely fearful. A premonition gripped me, a premonition of something horrible. Then, I had my hand on the door and had thrown it open. I entered. Sir Denis close behind me.

  “Good God! Petrie!...Petrie, old man...”

  Nayland Smith had sprung in and was already on his knees beside the doctor.

  Petrie lay in the shadow of his working bench, in fact, half under it, one outstretched hand still convulsively gripping its edge!

  I saw that the apparently rigid fingers grasped a hypodermic syringe. Near to his upraised hand was a vessel containing a small quantity of some milky fluid; and the tube of white powder which he had shown to me lay splintered, broken by his fall, on the floor a foot away.