Dr Fu Manchu stroked the marmoset reflectively.
“Unaided by this line and the strength of my servant, I doubt if I could have crossed to the bank. The crossing seriously exhausted me—and the boat became dislodged no more than a few seconds after I had taken the plunge . . , ,
Nayland Smith neither spoke nor moved. His hands remained clenched, his face expressionless.
“You have observed,” Fu Manchu continued, “that my daughter is again acting in my interests. She is unaware, however, of her former identity: Fah lo Suee is dead. I have reincarnated her as Korean!, an Oriental dancer whose popularity is useful. This is her punishment . . .”
The marmoset uttered a whistling sound. It was uncannily derisive.
“Later you will experience this form of amnesia, yourself. The ordeal by fire to which I once submitted Korean! in your presence was salutary but the furnace contained no fuel. It was one which I had prepared for you, Sir Denis. I had designed it as a gateway to your new life in China.”
Mentally I seemed to remain numb. Some of the Chinese doctor’s statements I failed to follow. Others were all too horribly clear. At times there came a note almost of exultation, severely repressed but perceptible, into the speaker’s voice. He had the majesty which belongs to great genius, or, and there was a new horror in the afterthought, to insanity. He was perhaps a brilliant madman!
“I am satisfied to observe,” he continued, “that my new aesthetic, a preparation of crataegus, the common hawthorn, serves its purpose so admirably. Anaesthesia is immediate and complete. There are no distressing after-symptoms. I foresee that it will supplant my mimosa mixture with which, Sir Denis, you have been familiar in the past.”
Slowly he extended a gaunt hand in the direction of the torture room:
“Medieval devices designed to stimulate reluctant memories.”
He stepped aside and took up a pair of long-handled tongs.
“Forceps used to tear sinews.”
He spoke softly, then dropped those instruments of agony. The clang of their fall made my soul sick.
“Primitive and clumsy. China has done better. No doubt you recall the Seven Gates? However, these forms of questions are no longer necessary. I can learn all that I wish to know by the mere exercise of that neglected implement, the human will. I recently discovered in this way that Ardatha—hitherto a staunch ally—is not to be trusted where Mr. Kerrigan is concerned.”
I ceased to breathe as he spoke those words . . .
“Accordingly I have taken steps to ensure her noninterference . . . You are silent, Sir Denis?”
“Why should I speak?”‘ Smith’s voice was flatly unemotional. “I allowed myself to fall into a trap which a schoolboy would have distrusted. I have nothing to say.”
“You refer to the lotus floor no doubt? Yes, ingenious in its way. That room with others giving access to the cellars and dungeons had been walled up for several generations. I recently had them reopened, but confess I did not foresee it would be for the accommodation of so distinguished a guest. In a dungeon adjoining this I came across two skeletons those of a man and a woman. Irregularities in certain of the small bones suggested that they had not died happily—”
He turned as if to go.
“I look forward to further conversation in the future, Sir Denis, but now I must leave you. A matter of the gravest urgency demands my attention.”
As he moved towards the door the marmoset sprang from his arm to his shoulder, and turning its tiny head, gibed at us . . . The light went out . . . I heard the key turned in the lock—I heard those padding, catlike steps receding in the stone-paved passage . . .
I was drenched in perspiration.
The Tongs
The silence which followed Dr Fu Manchu’s departure was broken by that awful moaning as of some lost soul who had died horribly in one of the dungeons. It rose and fell, rose and fell . . . and faded away.
“Kerrigan!” Smith snapped, and I admired the vigour of his manner. “Was the wind rising out there?”
“Yes, in gusts . . . What do you think he meant about”
“The wind was from the sea?”
“Yes. Oh my God! Is she alive?”
Again that awful moaning arose—and now to it was added a ghostly metallic clanking.
“What ever is it, Smith?”
“I have been wondering for some time . . . Yes, she’s alive, Kerrigan, but we can’t count on her! . . . Now that you tell me a breeze has risen, I know what it is. There’s a window or a ventilator outside in the passage. What we hear is wind howling through a narrow opening.”
“But that awful clanking!”
“Irritatingly significant.”
“Why?”
“It was not there before the doctor’s visit! It means that he has left the key in the lock with the other keys attached to it. The draught of air—I can feel it blowing on the top of my head now through these bars—is swinging the attached keys to and fro.”
Across the darkened cell he watched me.
“Among those keys, Kerrigan, in all probability, are the keys to our manacles!”
I thought for some time. A tumult had arisen in my brain.
“Surely he was never guilty of carelessness. Why should he have left the key?”
“According to my experience”—Smith stared down at his wrist watch—”the yellow-faced horror who attends to my requirements is due in about five minutes. The key was left in the lock for his convenience no doubt. And although Ardatha is alive—oh! I have learned to read Fu Manchu’s hidden meanings—she will not come to our aid tonight. Someone else is alive also!”
“Adion!”
“But I fear that his hours are numbered.”
He stood up on the seat of the massive chair and stared out through the bars. Over his shoulder:
“I have carefully examined this passage no less than six times,” he said. “It is no more than three feet wide. The end from which a current of air blows is invisible from here. But that is where the ventilator must be situated. The light is away to my right, the direction from which visitors always approach.”
He stepped down and stood staring at me. His eyes were feverishly bright.
“I was wondering,” he mused. “Could you toss me another cigarette?”
He lighted it, and apparently unconscious of the length of chain attached to his ankles, began to pace up and down the narrow compass of floor allowed to him, drawing on the cigarette with the vigor of a pipe smoker, so that clouds issued from his lips.
Hope began to dawn in my hitherto hopeless mind.
“Oh for the brain of a Houdini!” he murmured. “The problem is this, Kerrigan: The keys are hanging less than a foot below this grating behind me, but two feet wide of it. If you will glance at the position of the door you will see that I am right. It is clearly impossible for me to reach them. By no possible contortion could I get within a foot of the keyhole from which they are hanging. You follow me?”
“Perfectly”
“Very well. What is urgently required—for my jailer will almost certainly take the keys away—is an idea, namely, how to reach those keys and detach them from the lock. There must be a way!”
Following a long silence interrupted only by the clanking of Nayland Smith’s leg irons, periodical moaning of the wind through that unseen opening and the chink of the pendant keys:
“It is not only how to reach them,” I said, “but how to turn the lock in order to detach them.”
“I agree. Yet there must be a way.”