“Look!—this is China.”
I saw a swamp, a vast morass wherein no human thing could dwell, a limitless and vile corruption . . . I saw guns buried in the mud; in pools I saw floating corpses: the fetid air was full of carrion, and all about me I heard wailing and lamentations. So desolate was the scene that I turned my head aside until the Voice spoke again:
“Look! It is Spain.”
I saw a waste which once had been a beautiful village: the shell of an old church; ruins of a house upon whose scarred walls bougainvillea bloomed gaily. People, among them women and children, were searching in the ruins. I wondered for what they were searching. But out of the darkness the Voice came again:
“Look! This is London.”
From my magic carpet I looked down upon Whitehall. Almost that spectacle conquered the magic of the Voice. I fought against mirage, but the mood of rebellion passed . . . I saw the cenotaph partly demolished. I heard crashes all around me, muted but awful. Where I thought familiar buildings should be there were gaping caverns. Strange figures, antlike as I looked down upon them, ran in all directions.
“Your world!” said the Voice. “Come, now, into mine . . ,”
And Ardatha was beside me!
It was a rose garden, the scent of the flowers intoxicating. Below where the roses grew I saw steps leading down to a marble pool upon the cool surface of which lotus blossoms floated. Bees droned amid the roses, and gaily plumaged birds darted from tree to tree. An exquisite sense of well being overcame me. I turned to Ardatha—and her lips were irresistible.
“Why did you ever doubt what I told you?” she whispered.
“Only because I was a fool.”
I lost myself in a kiss which realized all the raptures of which I had ever dreamed . . .
Ardatha melted from my arms . . . I sought her, called her name—”Ardatha! Ardatha!” But the rose garden had vanished: I was in darkness—alone, helpless, though none constrained me . . .
Flat on the carpet of Nayland Smith’s apartment, as I had fallen back from the ottoman, I lay!—fully alive to my environment, but unable to speak—to move!
Living Death
The screen, the magical screen, was black. Faint light came through the windows. Something—some damnable thing—had happened. I had gone mad—or been bewitched. That power, suspected but now experienced, of the dreadful Chinese doctor had swept me up.
With what purpose?
There seemed to be nothing different about the room—but how long had I been unaware of what was going on? Most accursed thing of all, I could think, but I couldn’t move! I lay there flat on my back, helpless as one dead. My keen mental activity in this condition was a double agony.
As I lay I could see right into the lobby—and now I became aware of the fact that I was not alone!
A small, dark man had opened the outer door quietly, glanced in my direction, and then set down a small handbag which he had seemed to carry with great care. He wore thick-rimmed glasses. He opened the bag, and I saw him doing something to the telephone.
I tried to command nerve and muscle—I tried to move. It was futile.
My body was dead: my brain alone lived . . .
I saw the man go. Even in that moment of mental torment I must watch passively, for I could not close my eyes!
Here I lay at the point from which my journeys to China to Spain, to an enchanted rose garden had begun, and so lying, unable to move a muscle, again I heard a key inserted in the door . . . The door opened and Nayland Smith dashed into the room. He looked down at me.
“Good God!” he exclaimed, and bent over me.
My eyes remained fixed: they continued to stare towards the lobby.
“Kerrigan! Kerrigan! Speak, old man! What happened?”
Speak! I could not stir . . .
He placed his ear to my chest, tested my pulse, stood up and seemed to hesitate for a moment. I heard and partly saw him going from room to room, searching. Then he came back and again fully into view. He stared down at me critically. He had switched up all the lights as he had entered. He walked across to the lobby, and I knew that he was about to take up the telephone!
His intentions were obvious. He was going to call a doctor.
A scream of the spirit implored me to awake, to warn him not to touch that telephone. This was the supreme moment of torture . . .
I heard the faint tinkling of the bell as Nayland Smith raised the receiver.
* * *
I became obsessed with the horrible idea that Dr Fu Manchu had in some way induced a state of catalepsy! I should be buried alive! But not even the terror caused by this ghastly possibility would make me forget that small, sinister figure engaged in doing something to the telephone.
That it was something which meant death, every instinct told me.
Yet I lay there, myself already in a state of living death!
Smith stood, the receiver in his hand, and I could see and hear him dialing a number.
But it was not to be . . .
A crashing explosion shook the entire building! It shattered several panes of glass in one window, and it accomplished that which my own brain had failed to accomplish. It provided a shock against which the will of Dr Fu Manchu was powerless.
I experienced a sensation exactly as that of some tiny but tough thread which had held the cells of my brain immured in inertia being snapped. It was a terrifying sensation—but its terrors were forgotten in the instant when I realized that I was my own master again!
“Smith!” I cried and my voice had a queer, hysterical ring—”Smith! Don’t touch that telephone!”
Perhaps the warning was unnecessary. He had replaced the receiver on the hook and was staring blankly across the apartment in the direction of the shattered window.
“Kerrigan!”
He sprang forward as I scrambled to my feet.
“I can’t explain yet,” I muttered (the back of my head began to ache madly) “except that you must not touch that telephone.”
He grabbed me by the shoulders, stared into my eyes.
“Thank God you’re all right, Kerrigan! I can’t tell you what I feared—but will tell you later. Somewhere down the river there has been a catastrophe.”
“It has saved us from a catastrophe far greater.”
Smith turned, threw a window open (I saw now that he had been deeply moved) and craned out. Away downstream black smoke was rising over a sullen red glow.
Police whistles shrieked and I heard the distant clangor of a fire engine . . . Later we learned—and the tragedy was front-page news in the morning—of that disastrous explosion on a munition barge in which twelve lives were lost. At the moment, I remember, we were less concerned with the cause of the explosion than with its effect.
Smith turned from the window and stared at me fixedly.
“How did you get in, Kerrigan? Where is Fey?”
“Fey let me in, then he was called up by Inspector Gallaho from Scotland Yard to meet you there.”
“I have not been there—and I have reason to know that Gallaho is not in London. However, go on.”
“Fey evidently had no doubt that Gallaho was the speaker. He gave me a drink, told me that you would return directly he, Fey, reached Scotland Yard, and went out.”
“What happened then?”
“Then the incredible happened.”
“You are sure that you feel perfectly restored?”
“Certain.”
Smith pushed me down into an armchair and crossed to the buffet.
“Go on,” he said quietly.
“The television screen lighted up. Doctor Fu Manchu appeared.”
“What!”
He turned, his hand on a syphon and his expression very grim.
“Yes! You wondered for what purpose he had caused the thing to be installed here, Smith. I can give you an example of one use he made of it! Perhaps I am particularly susceptible to the influence of this man. I think you believe I am, for you observed on a former occasion that I was behaving strangely as I watched those awful eyes. Well this time I succumbed altogether. I had a series of extraordinary visions, almost certainly emanations from the brain of Doctor Fu Manchu. And then I became fully conscious but quite incapable of movement!”