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.
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.